After Escaping An Abusive Marriage, My Former Life Feels Like Another Universe

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Author’s Note: I have chosen to publish this essay pseudonymously to prevent retribution from my ex-husband – a very real threat faced by survivors who choose to speak out. I don’t want to be anonymous, and it’s hard not to feel like the byline is one more thing he has taken from me.  But my freedom is more important than credit. And with that freedom, not even he can stop me from telling my story.

As usual, the man rolled his shopping cart up to the empty stretch of sidewalk across the street from my apartment around 11pm. I put down my book and watched from the fire escape as he laid out his sleeping pad and lit a cigarette. We exchanged a nod and the small, knowing smile of two sentinels who could see everything because almost no one ever saw us. I watched as people stepped around him, averting their eyes, and he watched as people spilled from the bakery beneath my apartment, never looking up while I peered down at them.

His arrival was my signal to go to bed, to try and squeeze in as much sleep as I could before my husband got home from his bartending job. As usual, I went to sleep filled with dread, waking with a start when the front door of the brownstone banged shut downstairs. Heart pounding, I studied the sound of my husband coming up the stairs: how uneven his footsteps, whether he stumbled against the wall or merely leaned against it as he walked, how much his key scratched around the lock before he managed to find the opening, and the click. 

Perhaps if I willed myself to look asleep enough, tonight he would leave me alone.

But soon enough, there he was in bed beside me, pressing up against my back and reaching around to fumble between my legs. His breath was hot and rank; old beer and whiskey and cigarettes smelled like something had died in his mouth. And when I said no, the space between us thrummed. 

He yanked the blankets off me because I didn’t deserve them. He yelled at me, called me a bitch, reminded me that he worked his fingers to the bone, made more money than I did, and still, the house was a mess, I wouldn’t have sex with him. I was useless, useless, useless.

His breath was hot and rank; old beer and whiskey and cigarettes smelled like something had died in his mouth.

Before I married him, I didn’t know someone could be so drunk that their mind was gone while they were still awake. I couldn’t find the sweet man I’d married, who’d once cried and told me that sharing a bed with me would be the greatest thing he could ever do. Instead, as always, I began to feel that it was my fault he was so tortured, and if I gave him what he wanted, he would be better, everything would be better, and I could finally go to sleep. 

I felt like a piece of furniture when he put himself inside me. Countless nights had taught me that the best way to survive was to wait, because you can survive anything if you know it will be over. But when his dead-animal breath overtook me, when it hurt, really hurt, my resolve broke. I begged him to stop, but he never did, so I studied the wall inches from my face, eyes focused on the frail marks the headboard etched into the paint. 

When he finally fell asleep, dawn prickled under the borders of our blackout curtains. I pulled on the massive, fuzzy robe I bought for him one Christmas and climbed back out onto the fire escape. The city felt shocked by the end of the night, the pink morning light reminding me of a cheek freshly slapped.

My friend across the street was still there, sitting in the same position, smoking another cigarette. We nodded at each other again, and I wondered what he saw when he saw me, naked under an oversized robe at dawn, my eyes puffy from crying. Did he also see a useless woman?

My own continued presence in that apartment, where the same scene played out night after night no matter what I did to try and stop it, made me feel that perhaps I deserved it. That perhaps this was the story I was meant for.

Increasingly, I had come to feel that I was living in two timelines: the life I lived during the day, when I was successful and competent, and the shadowy nighttime world. My memories split into two tidy columns, making it possible for me to function during the day without the dread of him coming home each night eating me alive. But it also made it nearly impossible for me to recognize how bad things really were, because I defined reality by the daytime. I was a young professor who urged my students to interrogate their lives within the context of larger political issues, who taught feminist texts and assigned think pieces on rape culture. I couldn’t possibly be the woman who was so used to falling asleep with a belly full of dread that it had become normal. The woman who told herself it couldn’t be rape if she deserved it.

Whatever the man across the street saw, I wanted him to see it. I wanted my bare legs and my tear-streaked face to say, it happened again, and for him to nod and gather his things. I didn’t know how to begin the work of telling, but I needed to be seen so that it would exist in the world where the rest of my life happened. 

A few hours later, I went to work and willed anyone and everyone to see my tear-swollen face and ask if I was okay, but as usual, no one did. Perhaps, I thought, I was useless at everything but hiding it. Or perhaps I really was living in two realities at once: the one where I was being hurt and the one where it was all a dream. 

It’s been three months since I finally left my husband, but sleeping through the night still feels like a miracle. Every morning, my room in Tangier’s Hotel El Muniria floods with light and the mingling smell of sweet mint and salt I’ve never encountered anywhere else. From my window, the haphazard mosaic of whitewashed city walls ambles down to the Strait of Gibraltar, glinting turquoise. I climb to the tiled rooftop, where lines of brilliant white sheets hanging to dry billow in the sun-warmed breeze. 

I picked this place for my month in Tangier mostly because it was once the flophouse where William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch amidst an opium bender for the ages. Though it’s extraordinarily pleasant now, family-run and smelling of bleach and fresh drywall, its windows trimmed in blue paint and pink-flowered vines, it seems fitting for a trip where I feel like I’m running from something.

I didn’t know how to begin the work of telling, but I needed to be seen.

I spend my days doing whatever I want, which usually involves writing at a small table outside Cinema Rif, eating tiny marzipan pastries from my favorite bakery and raspberries from the old women who come by selling fruit from wicker pallets. In the evenings, I drink hot mint tea at cafes overlooking the Strait, listening to Arabic rap thumping from the boom boxes of young boys at nearby tables. I stroll home with chicken kebab that I share with the one-eyed kitten who stalks the alley beside the hotel, having learned quickly that I am a sucker.

Everything good feels uncanny. Like I’ve somehow stumbled into an alternate universe where I feel so much like myself, even if she is a person I can’t yet describe. 

When I climb the stairs to my room, portraits of William S. Burroughs follow me with their eyes. He fled to Tangier in a cloud of scandal in 1954, after accidentally killing his wife in a botched game of William Tell. Tangier was still the Tangier International Zone then, a political and economic no-man’s-land under the joint administration of France, Spain, and the UK where outcasts and refugees mingled with merchants, kif-peddlers, and counter culturists. A place that was no place, or perhaps a little bit every place all at once. 

I wonder if, after doing something as horrific as killing his own wife—even by accident—Burroughs had the feeling that he was carrying around memories that couldn’t possibly all fit into one story. Perhaps Tangier in 1954—a place where all things could be true, where Jews and Muslims and Christians traded in the medina and Beat poets boozed while the evening call to prayer echoed through the city, where it was just as easy to buy a gram of kif as a prayer rug or a copy of the Financial Times—was the only place where the chaos of his outer world seemed to align with his inner one. Did it seem impossible to him that he could contain memories of loving his wife and of killing her? Of being happy and of being destitute, hooked on opium and writing madly in a shabby room overlooking the Port of Tangier?

To me, Tangier is the opposite of a place you go to be miserable. Here, I feel free for the first time in a very long time. But on nights when I lean out my window, watching the port twinkle and listening to card-playing men shouting amiably in Arabic in the alleys below, I feel what I imagine Burroughs might have: that my new reality is completely unreal.

And perhaps the most unreal thing is me. When a friend texts to ask how I am, I reply without thinking, “I feel light.” 

I can feel it in my body, a nimbleness as I weave through the crowds in the medina, as I scale cliffsides overlooking the Strait, even as I sleep at night. It’s like a different world has opened up inside of me.

In the years that follow, I search hungrily for freedom. I build a life where I am anything but useless, anything but trapped: I learn to surf in Santa Cruz, swim in Oregon’s frigid Cascade Lakes, and camp in the rainforest in Washington State. I change careers so I can become a digital nomad. I climb a volcano in Bali and cook breakfast in a hole seeping steam from the side of the mountain. I trek through the jungle in Borneo to see wild orangutans and learn how to yank leeches off the backs of my knees. I ride a motorcycle through the mountains on the Thailand-Myanmar border. I watch the sun rise at Angkor Wat. 

And I feel my memory splitting again. Where I had once divided my story between the things I could bear and those I could not, now my memories feel split between being a prisoner in my life and living expansively. But it doesn’t feel as simple as a life divided into two eras, because there is no way these extremes could exist in one lifetime, in one set of memories.

Here, I feel free for the first time in a very long time.

In Malibu, a friend brings me to a canyon just off the Pacific Coast Highway. We hike deep into its crevices, rock scrambling barefoot beside a waterfall long past the trail’s end. We emerge dusty and sweaty and triumphant onto the beach just in time for a vermillion sunset, and I sit on the sand and cry. I can’t believe, I tell him, that days like this were an option the whole time. That I wasted so much time being miserable. But what I don’t say – what I am too afraid to say – is that it feels like maybe this new, beautiful present couldn’t possibly be real. 

No matter how many cups of mint tea I drink or mountains I climb, I still define myself as the girl trapped in a body that a man mistook as his to play with. How is it possible for that girl to be making memories of haggling over black olives in a Moroccan market or sitting on the beach in Malibu with canyon dust and sand mingling between her toes? 

But then I start to get used to being free. 

Somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, I begin to accept that I deserve the life I’m making for myself. And the more I accept this, the less my past makes sense. It doesn’t seem possible that I once shoehorned myself into an existence smaller and more painful than I deserved. I feel more and more like I have someone else’s memories rattling around inside my head—a haunting I can’t exorcize. 

In my new career as an editor, I make a niche working with memoirists who survived domestic and sexual violence. So many of them see their stories as “healing journeys” and want to illustrate how they transformed pain into enlightenment. It’s a noble goal, and I’m all in. Finding the structure in other people’s chaos calms me. Perhaps if I can’t make sense of my own experiences, I can at least help other people make meaning out of theirs. We graft their healing onto the plot arc that most readers intuitively know, finding the places where their pain resembles a call to action, rising action, falling action, climax, resolution. But more and more, I feel like something is missing.

The plot arc acknowledges that a journey is anything but a straight line. There is always room for diversions: a protagonist thinks they have it all figured out when they actually have no idea what they’re doing, or a nemesis rises again. But the goal of the arc is to drive a story to resolution, to move from chaos to reason. And though I love the feeling when things click into place in a client’s plot, it only makes my story feel more estranged from reality.

I feel more and more like I have someone else’s memories rattling around inside my head.

My trauma and healing haven’t felt like one cohesive story at all. It’s more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel read cover-to-cover. This makes me doubt everything: whether my memories of the past are true, whether my experience of the present is true. I feel like I must be crazy.

I start inhaling multiverse stories because they are the only ones that even remotely approximate how scattered mine feels. But from Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library to the Marvel Multiverse, each story shoehorns itself into cohesion. Time after time, the chaos of infinite timelines makes way for a tidy plot arc, making the multiverse little more than a fun trick to awe the audience or a handy metaphor for one tired message: that we should appreciate the life we have. As someone who is infinitely grateful for having jumped from one life to another, that just isn’t enough for me. 

I don’t know much about Everything Everywhere All At Once, except that it has something to do with the multiverse and Michelle Yeoh looks like a badass on the posters—reason enough for me to hustle to a late-night showing. For the first hour or so, I resist its chaos, trying to grasp any details that could help me create a structured, reasonable view of what’s going on. But then I settle into the onslaught. 

“Yes,” I think, “Yes—this is how it feels to be alive.”

I’ve always known, of course, that I did not actually jump from one timeline to another.

I’ve always known, of course, that I did not actually jump from one timeline to another. I’m not even sure that I believe the multiverse is real. But to me, it’s not a narrative trick. Saying that I carry memories from wildly disparate alternate universes is the closest I can come to describing what it’s like to be in my mind. 

And I love that, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, I am finally encountering a story that doesn’t resist how wild that is—and how devastating. I find myself identifying with Jobu Tupaki, who is so overwhelmed after encountering literally everything that she concludes that if everything exists, nothing matters. I had become so overwhelmed by the extremities of my experiences, I had started to worry that nothing was real, not even the things I knew to be true about my life.

Perhaps, I realize, that’s why I love travel: everywhere new feels like an alternate universe, where the chaos outside matches what I feel inside. And I can finally feel like I am part of the real world.

The movie ends after midnight. I walk through Union Square with my new partner, a man who jumps worlds with me as easily as some people cross the street. Who loves my hauntings as much as my dreams. Who will be on a plane to Bali with me in a few short weeks.

I cut the relative peace of the late-night city air, holding forth about why this movie is so different. When I get to the part about how other multiverse stories are a vehicle for the cliched adage to “love the life you’ve got,” he stops me. 

“Isn’t that what Everything Everywhere All At Once tells us to do?” He says. “Doesn’t Evelyn return to her original timeline with a greater acceptance of what she has?”

I’ve gone back and stood where the man used to sleep across the street from my apartment, looking up at my old window.

I consider this. He’s right—she does finish the movie accepting, even loving, what she has made in her original timeline. But the movie resists the tone of everything coming together neatly. The last scenes embody the instability of outcomes in a world where everything isn’t just possible, it’s real. More than that, Evelyn is changed not just by what she’s seen in other lives she could have lived. As she brings Jobu Tupaki back from the brink, she must grapple with the fact of everything, and in doing so, let go of the rigidity that bound her in her original timeline. It’s the chaos itself that changes her.

The apartment where I was raped is less than a ten minute walk in the other direction. As always when I’m in New York, I feel its proximity like a black hole with an uncannily strong gravitational pull. A few times over the years, I’ve gone back and stood where the man used to sleep across the street from my apartment, looking up at my old window. More than anywhere else in the world, that little square of asphalt seems to hold the possibility of infinite universes for me. Because when I’ve stood there, being a visitor from an alternate universe is the only way I can explain the pleasant curtains some stranger has hung in the window of the room where I was raped. 

Or the fact that I can just walk away. 

But now we’re headed uptown. As always, the Village is eerily quiet this late on a Tuesday. As always, the rain-slick street reflects the scattershot lights in windows up above. When I take off my glasses to wipe them clean, it’s almost impossible to know where in the fuzzy, twinkling world the buildings end and the street begins. 

It could be five years ago. Except that it isn’t. 

It occurs to me that I am now a woman who knows the many universes inside of her. I am free now, but not terribly long ago, I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t be what I am if it weren’t for that other universe I had to escape—because I shaped the life I’ve made with the knowledge of how I never again want to live. Knowing that all things are true—the realities you have made and the realities you have escaped from—works its way into your identity, as you carry the memories of other worlds and the other people you have been, in all their pain and triumph.

Perhaps that is the best resolution of all: accepting that the chaos of everything we have experienced, every person we have been, is true.

It’s Up to a 105-Year-Old South Korean Matriarch to Break a Family Curse

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Jimin Han is a master of telling unique and compelling tales through fascinating storytelling techniques. Author of A Small Revolution, Han’s latest offering is part ghost story, part mystery, part family epic, and part humorous travel adventure.

In The Apology, 105-year-old Jeonga has a bone to pick with almost everyone. Having sacrificed her own love and happiness as a younger woman to save the family’s reputation in Seoul during the Korean War, now Jeonga clings to the walls of safety she’s built with clenched hands.

So when she receives a letter from a grand-niece in America that threatens to destroy the family’s reputation and excavate long-buried secrets, Jeonga springs into action, traveling the U.S. to avert disaster. 

Yet when she is hit by a bus and sent spluttering into the afterlife, Jeonga must attempt to communicate with the living and save her youngest progeny from a terrible fate. To do so, she must relinquish her obsession with controlling other members of her family, and apologize once and for all for creating this tangled legacy of secrets.

I spoke to Jimin Han about her familial history of the Korean war, writing a ghost story, and the discourse around Asian American literature. 

Kim Liao: I have to ask about your daring choice to kill the main character, Jeonga, in the first chapter. Much of the book plays out after her death, moving forwards and backwards in time. I was curious, why did you decide to do this? 

Jimin Han: I have this memory from when I was a girl of my great aunt at a cemetery, crying, and I didn’t understand how she was connected to our family. I knew that she was at her son’s grave and that he had died in an accident. And I didn’t know anything about it. But that memory stayed with me. 

I was writing what I thought would become a memoir about my grandmother, who was separated from the rest of our family in North Korea. I learned later that this great aunt was her sister, and that my grandmother was disinherited from her family because of her choice to marry my grandfather and go to what’s now North Korea. 

However, because of the Korean War, this man my grandmother left her family for was forced to leave the northern part of the peninsula to avoid conscription into the army. So she lost both the man that she loved and her birth family in South Korea. I always thought there was a story there. 

After my mother died and A Small Revolution was published, I was looking for something else to write. COVID hit and all of a sudden we were all talking a lot more about the possibility of death. It was all around us. A friend of mine had a brain tumor, and was diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer—and he was also working on his second novel. We started to meet on Zoom each week, and the idea of the afterlife came from these conversations we had. We were all sort of like living with this threat every day. 

By making Jeonga 105 years old, it was a way to make death less threatening in some ways, to be less frightening. I mean, we feel sad if a 105-year-old dies, but not in the same way we would if somebody were younger. That was my way of trying to work around my fears, and trying to face those thoughts after my mother died and feeling scared for my friend facing mortality.

KL: In The Apology, the legacy of family secrets plays out over several generations in both Korea and America. I’m curious about how you feel like that act of immigrating affects these types of family dynamics. Is there something about being on two different continents that shifts things?

JH: For a big chunk of my childhood, it was hard to travel to Korea, where I was born. My first time back was when I was 18. My mother had been a doctor in Korea, and she couldn’t continue her practice when she was here because of the cost of travel. We also didn’t have the support of extended family. But she had a friend who was a doctor, and her friend would go to Korea and practice medicine for half the year and live with her family for half a year. I remember hearing in my mother’s voice that she wished she could have had the same thing because she loved being a doctor. 

So what strikes me is how that has changed, and how these days, depending on where you are, there are more flights back. It’s more possible for people to go back and forth more. 

Our world is much smaller now. I had a teacher from high school who when she turned 70, her best friend gave her an airline ticket to Tanzania. Her whole world had previously just been confined to the States. But because she got this airline ticket, she went to Tanzania with her friend. She came back and started learning Arabic. Then, she started tutoring English and had an Arabic language exchange with a young man, and helped someone in her city studying from Kenya. She eventually went back to Tanzania. It completely changed her outlook. She even climbed Kilimanjaro. That was all at 70 years old. 

This makes me think there’s never a time when it’s too late to travel or do something new. If Jeonga is 105, then it’s never too late. Actually, along those lines, she’s still trying to affect the outcome of her legacy, trying to right some of these wrongs in the family. 

KL: Yeah, there are a lot of questions in this book about karma, legacies, and redemption. Do you think that redemption is always possible? 

JH: I have mixed feelings about it. We don’t know. But as long as someone’s willing to try, then that’s something. This was one of the last things my mother said when my father ended up taking her to Korea after she got sick. It was hard for us to accept that decision he made because it meant we wouldn’t be with her when she died. 

But this idea makes me think that it doesn’t mean it’s already decided—like fate. It may mean that some things are in your control and some things are not in your control. I like to think that you can do more, that there’s more change that you can actually make. 

I like to think that there’s always something that could happen that could be done. We just might not have thought of it yet. We don’t know what to do today, but maybe we’ll think of it tomorrow. How could we possibly know everything? 

KL: There is a compelling mystery in the book about what happened to Jeonga’s younger sister Seona, after she ran away from the family and eloped to North Korea. How did you research this? Was this common for families to be separated and then have the border close during the Korean War and never see each other again? 

JH: In terms of families being separated, I think about my uncle’s family. My uncle’s family had one brother who lived in the northern part of the peninsula, close to what would become the DMZ. His younger siblings were in Seoul. When they started to hear rumblings about fighting and the border closing, they all moved together as a whole family. But then when they saw that the U.N. forces were going to bring all this firepower they all moved back across the border, to the north side. 

For my mother, the boundary between life and death seemed much more pleasant.

There was so much uncertainty. There was so much news changing every day. Then the family moved back to the south side. By the second or third time they had gone back and forth, it became clear that the U.N. was going to support the U.S. forces, and they didn’t want to support the communist political factions that were trying to get support from China and Russia. 

But then when the fighting increased again and the DMZ border was moved south, it was too late for my uncle’s family to move. Which side were they on? They were on the northern side! His uncle came and took him as a 15-year-old boy, and they walked to get through the border back to the southern side. So he never saw his family again. I think there were a lot of those kinds of stories.

With my father and his father, they didn’t move back and forth as much. They didn’t have the economic means. They waited till the last minute and realized they didn’t want to fight on the side of the communists. So my father and his father, they also walked south very late in the conflict, and they saw people dying on the side of the road. He had to leave his mother and sister behind—my grandmother and her daughter. So I’ve always wondered about them. 

Thinking about the legacy of the border and the DMZ and this sort of uncertainty, I had all of this material and, and I wondered about what it might be like for someone whose mother was now not only cut off from the man she left her family for, but also was isolated in this place. And I’ve always been told that I look like my grandmother. So I was thinking about borders, boundaries, death, and what it’s like to feel cut off. 

KL: One image that really stuck with me was the persimmon with the bite taken out of it that Jeonga finds. What’s the importance of persimmons for you? 

JH: My mother loved persimmons and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I’ve always wanted to like them, but she loves them. There were a lot of Korean foods where my mother would say, “Here’s something you’ll love.” And sometimes I loved those things, but other times I couldn’t understand why she liked them. 

With persimmons, it’s very important how ripe they are, because an unripe persimmon can really hurt your mouth. It’s really hard to get it just right. There’s a moment when it’s good, and the next moment it’s mushy. 

She was that way about melons, too. My mother always knew in the grocery store exactly when a melon was right. So there was a bit of a metaphor there, perhaps there’s something about having it just right and being able to be fooled—like I feel like I’m being fooled in some ways. Jeonga is a difficult character, so I was thinking about ways that she might be fooled, and ways that everyone could be fooled. 

KL: What might you want to speak to about shifting perceptions of Korean American identities or how the community has evolved over time? Do you feel like there’s a difference in how younger generations think about Korean American identity versus, say, when you first arrived in America? 

JH: I’m relieved to hear more and more conversations about the complexity of being Korean American. Other people in this country have been afforded that complexity. I think that the more stories we can have out there, it will add to this notion that there’s an intersectionality to every aspect of identity. People think that they know somebody else and can make decisions about them, and about the value of human life. I’m glad to be having these conversations even as they are really difficult. 

Ghosts shouldn’t be feared, but just accepted as part of our lives.

I’ve always felt like an outsider in every way. I didn’t grow up in a large Korean American community, so I don’t always feel like I’ve got my finger on the pulse of what that is, but I also love being with other Korean Americans because then there’s other things we have in common. 

There have been conversations recently about how there are more books about Asian Americans published. But are they all getting the marketing and publicity and support that they should? Like, could there be tokenizing? I feel like there are a lot of stories, but then still only a few get amplified. But it’s exciting to see more Korean American novels out there. I just hope that continues. 

KL: Jeonga doesn’t feel like a traditional ghost to me. And this doesn’t feel like a classic ghost story. How do you feel about ghosts?

JH: You know, for my mother, the boundary between life and death seemed much more pleasant. I guess it just seemed much more permeable. The way my mother would talk about it, ghosts shouldn’t be feared, but just accepted as part of our lives. Again, it goes back to what we know. Why do we think we know everything? 

So I wanted Jeonga to not be a scary ghost. Anyone could be afraid when they feel her trying to make contact with them, but she’s just trying to help. I thought she would be so mad to have died before she could finish doing what she needed to do.

I’ve had dreams of my mother since she died and they were comforting. In the dream, I was always so happy to see my mom. So I hope she comes back; I hope I dream about her more, because every time, I feel like she’s right there in front of me again.

Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along

Posted on by Wynter Miller

The Shape of Progress

O Sinéad—you are dead &
the headlines beside you are all 
interest rate increases & thermal 

hellscapes. I am new to the prairie
but even the New York Times thinks Duluth
is the place to be in the Anthropocene;

climate-proof, they dubbed it:
ample freshwater & buffered 
from sea-level rise. Sinéad—

I am listening to “Just Like U Said 
It Would B” on repeat & it was exactly
that when you called out misogyny, 

excessive commercialism, sex abuse 
in the Catholic church, a climate scientist 
who says now all the projected changes

are happening, & this morning to beat
the record temps, I woke before dawn
to walk backroad shoulders littered

with crushed Bud Light cans & sandwich
clamshells & skittering chip bags tossed 
from car windows into Queen Anne’s lace,

purple chicory still folded in 
on itself—it’s so early the sun is just
rising wildfire orange over the tracks 

draped in kudzu, & Sinéad, the invasive
species are everywhere—the spotted
lanternflies too that I’m supposed to kill

on sight, but who has the heart 
for that kind of violence. I wish 
I had your conviction & righteousness. 

Instead of thwacking them, I’ve been 
trapping them under drinking glasses 
until they suffocate & the radio 

is playing “Nothing Compares 2 U” 
all day as tribute while their delicate 
pinkish polka-dotted wings are still 

beating, & Sinéad—I think you might 
like the farm across the road with 
a Manure Happens sign out front,

& even the green barn with punched 
out windows next to it the neighbors
call the meth lab, maybe as a joke

or maybe not. Sinéad, you were 
always right—nothing compares 
to you—not even the climate 

apocalypse. But I’m still here 
with my similes. This July is the 
hottest month on Earth since scientists 

have kept records. This week 
the ocean off the coast of Florida 
reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit—

a toddler running a low fever,
the temperature of an average hot tub. 
Sinéad, you sing I will learn how to 

sink & to swim, & your voice is 
an emergency, triple digits, summer 
asphalt, breath blowing charcoal 

briquettes to life.

7 Novels About Girlbosses and the Dark Side of Social Media

Posted on by EL Assistant2

It’s the year 2014, and the sounds of “Dark Horse” by Katy Perry echo through your room as you slip on your skinny jeans, inspirational tee shirt, and pink blazer. After a quick spritz of your Viva La Juicy perfume, you reach for your Michael Kors handbag and grab your new Etsy coffee tumbler smiling at the phrase looking back at you, “Girlboss.” 

It’s a model of femininity, power, and privilege wrapped in a millennial pink bow—the Girlboss culture dominated the 2010s and was praised by women for years. It’s been almost a decade since the word was first used, and after pulling back the curtain, the true flaws of this pinkwashed SHE-E-O have been revealed. The #Girlboss movement has evolved through controversy and a general reckoning with work-life “hustle culture” to invoke much more cringe now than confidence in the corporate grind.

When I began writing my novel, Under the Influence, I knew I wanted to give readers a workplace-centric story that revealed parts of the #Girlboss movement that were flawed. The book follows Harper Cruz, a young woman living in New York City who is broke, lonely, and desperate to make a salary that won’t leave her scrambling for rent each month. When she is offered a job by the charismatic self-help influencer Charlotte Green, the offer is simultaneously too-good-to-be-true and too great to pass up. After accepting the job, Harper’s life is turned upside down as she quickly moves to Nashville to work at The Greenhouse, a place where mandatory dance parties, daily intentions, and group bonding activities make up for long hours and Charlotte’s persistent demands for loyalty. The deeper Harper is pulled into Charlotte’s world, the more she realizes that there is a cost to being a #Girlboss. 

Here are 7 novels about Girlbosses and the dark side of social media:

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Zakiya Dalila Harris delivers a compelling story that sheds light on important issues of identity, race, and toxic workplaces. Nella Rogers is an editorial assistant who is ambitious, hardworking, and tired of being the only Black employee – that is, until Hazel is hired. Hazel is everything Nella isn’t. She’s more outgoing, she’s more confident, but most importantly, she’s more liked at the office. While at first, Nella is excited about the prospect of another Black employee and potential friend, that hope is quickly extinguished. After she begins receiving threatening notes, Nella becomes suspicious. Could they be coming from the perfect new employee, Hazel?  As she tries to uncover the truth about these sinister notes, Nella begs the question, “What are Hazel’s motives…and why?” 

A Hundred Other Girls by Iman Hariri-Kia

Aspiring writer and blogger Noora is an Iranian American young woman living in New York City. When she is hired as the assistant to Vinyl’s editor-in-chief, Loretta, it feels like all her dreams are finally coming true. But Noora’s dream quickly turns into a nightmare when she learns that her new boss Loretta is unhinged, over-demanding, and has a nasty penchant for gaslighting. Not to mention the turf war going on between the print and digital teams at Vinyl magazine that Noora soon finds herself in the middle of. With the stakes high and her dream job on the line, Noora will need to either choose a side or form her own.

People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd

Set in London, Emmeline Jackson is a successful influencer, a mummy blogger or “mamabare” who has built a beloved brand by showing the world all the struggles and challenges of beinga mom –the good, the bad, and the ugly. Although Emmy has mastered the skill of curating the “perfect life” for her followers, underneath it all there is a dark side to baring it all online. A lurking stalker that is waiting for the moment to pounce is right around the corner and is threatening to ruin Emmy’s picture-perfect life. Lloyd depicts the perfect thrilling story of the dangers of internet fame and the real dangers that can come with social media.

Followers by Megan Angelo

A dynamic story that shows the dark side of influencers and social media. Followers showcases the power of the internet, social media, and technology in our digital age. The story is told in a dual timeline, 2015 and 2055. As the story unfolds, we see how one character controls followers by creating an influencer, and another character is controlled by the government for her followers. Followers bring questions to the surface, like “How has the internet changed us? , “What is the importance of followers?” and “What would you do to gain followers and become famous?”

City of Likes by Jenny Mollen

New mom Megan moves to Manhattan and, after a chance meeting, quickly falls under the spell of Daphne, a mommy influencer. She becomes so wrapped up in her new friendship with Daphne that it soon becomes toxic. Megan becomes fascinated with the NYC scene she is thrust into, but consequences for her marriage, work, and family develop the more she’s consumed with social media. Megan feels like she’s traded her mundane life for the fabulous influencer world that Daphne lives in, but as we peel back the layers, she starts to wonder how much of this “Instagram-perfect” life is real.

Happy For You by Claire Stanford

Evelyn Kumamoto has recently set aside her dissertation to work at “the third-most-popular internet company”. She can’t believe she’s finally making money as a researcher – enough that she can splurge on fancy cheese and flowers on her way home from work. She can finally be the type of woman she’s always admired, “fresh-cut flowers on the dining room table was a real woman”. She hopes to use her knowledge of philosophy to work on the happiness app her company is creating. As she navigates her new role and the tech environment she works in, Evelyn is forced to dive into the intrusiveness of technology and ask the question, “Can happiness be quantified?”. 

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Alix Chamberlain is an entitled, upper-class white woman in her 30s who is a blogger and Instagram influencer. Emira is a college-educated black woman in her mid-20s and confused about what she wants to do with her life. In the meantime, gets a part-time babysitting job watching Alix’s two-year-old, Briar. One night when Emira is babysitting Briar, they go to a Market Depot to pass the time by looking at the nuts and smelling teas. Things escalate when a security guard accuses Emira of kidnapping Briar, and a nearby shopper records the incident. Such a Fun Age is a story that touches on themes of race, privilege, and the distortions of social media.

A Man on Tinder Said He Wanted Me To Be His “Her”

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Eight months after my dad died, I flew to Anchorage, Alaska. Feeling untethered from my own life in Brooklyn, I left as often as I could. Grief compelled me to be elsewhere, and elsewhere could have been anywhere I didn’t have a memory of my father.

On the descent into Anchorage, I peered out the plane window and saw a vast, mountainous landscape unlike any I’d seen before. I checked into a downtown Hilton, then settled into a chair by the window. I briefly gazed out over the grey Gulf of Alaska, and then fired up Tinder. Within minutes I had two promising matches. 

Tinder in Alaska is much better than Tinder in Brooklyn, I texted a friend back in New York. I already have a marine biologist and an ER doctor. 

It was 2015, and dating apps were still new enough to be intriguing, especially when traveling. For me, they offered a unique lens to see into whatever place I’d just landed. Who were the single men there? What was the ratio of self-identified liberals to conservatives? Or the ratio of men posing with dead fish to those posing for bathroom mirror selfies?  It didn’t take long before the marine biologist called me cutie one time too many, and I let our conversation dissolve. But the doctor was compelling. Our banter was rapid-fire and electric. 

How do you type so fast? He asked. Are you sure you’re not a bot?

I sent him a picture of me standing in the hotel lobby next to an enormous taxidermied polar bear. He sent a shot of himself at his parents’ house, several hours north of Anchorage. We quickly exchanged numbers—I saved him as Tim (The Doctor) in my phone—and moved off Tinder and onto texts. Just as quickly, I imagined a world where we’d connect back on the east coast and split our weekends between his place in New Haven and my apartment in Brooklyn, only two hours away by Amtrak.

It didn’t take long before the marine biologist called me cutie one time too many.

Soon, Tim had taken up residence in my phone, which was always in my hand. I sent him photos from a boat as I cruised past blue-white icebergs and pairs of otters holding hands. His texts made me laugh out loud while I sat perched on a barstool staring at my phone and inhaling french fries, only half noting the attractiveness of the real-life bartender who served them to me. 

I actually really like you, Tim wrote on day four of our nascent textual relationship. I kind of want you to be my Her.

The year before, I’d watched Spike Jonze’s movie, Her, in a packed theater and wept through the second half of it. Framed as a love story between a human man, Theodore, and a computer operating system, Samantha, the scenes are soaked in intimacy. As viewers, we’re often lying in bed next to Theodore, nestled in so close we can almost feel the expensive linen of his pillowcase on our own cheek. There, Theodore whispers to us; Samantha purrs back, her voice dripping with suggestion. 

When Tim said he wanted me to be his Her, an operating system who was always available and had no real needs or body of her own, I felt flattered: Samantha was witty and insightful, so that must mean Tim thought I was too. I was vaguely excited by the possibility.

I wasn’t sure I knew how to be anything else.

My father’s death less than a year earlier had left me stunned by grief. I felt numb, disconnected, and acutely aware that having a body meant having a body that could fail—a body that, by its very design, would eventually fail. Being human meant engaging in a world rife with risk; living with emotions coursing through my veins, inevitably vulnerable.

On one of my father’s last days, I stood by his hospital bed and experienced two urgent and competing thoughts. The first slammed into me with brute force: I don’t want to die alone. I need a partner and a baby and a new family immediately. When that thought receded, it left in its wake a quiet and more sobering one. I will never love again, I told myself. Not if this gut punch of devastation is what it comes to.

Back in Alaska, the omnipresence of dating apps meant it was suddenly normal to text with a stranger from morning to night. And Tim was a stranger, despite our never-ending conversation. We exchanged pictures, but I didn’t know what his laugh sounded like or how he smelled; I didn’t know how his embodied presence would make me feel.

Still, we texted constantly. I told him about my fear of grizzly bears and a sign I read that warned, “If a bear starts to eat you, play dead.” He told me not to worry about bears, despite the image seared in my mind by that sign. Tucked into my hotel bed each night, I’d scour the internet for strategies on how to deter a bear from starting to eat me. 

But if I’m honest, it’s also true to say that I was afraid before that, too; that maybe I’d always been afraid.

Don’t make animal noises or run away, the websites said. But each time I visualized an encounter with a grizzly, I saw myself unable to resist the impulse to growl and then sprint. 

Talk to the bear, so it knows you’re human, the sites advised. Back outside in the Alaskan wilderness, I began to train myself to speak human language to counteract the instinct to growl. Each time I stepped out of the car, I yelled, “I am human!” I’d continue as I took my first steps into a forest. “I am human!” I kept declaring throughout the vast state of Alaska.

I am human, I said, trying to convince myself as much as the bears.

In the movie Her, Theodore is reeling from a divorce when he “meets” Samantha. Devastated after being left by his wife, he begins a relationship with an operating system at least in part because he’s afraid of something more real. Human relationships bring inherent risk, unlike relationships with computers. Samantha picks up on this fear. “I wish there was something I could do to help you let go of it,” she tells him. “Because if you could, I don’t think you’d feel so alone anymore.”

When I “met” Tim, I was still reeling from my father’s death, a loss that had left me as broken as Theodore. But if I’m honest, it’s also true to say that I was afraid before that, too; that maybe I’d always been afraid. 

In the months before my dad died, I’d briefly dated Zach, an English teacher I’d met on Tinder in Brooklyn. I was enthralled from the first moment I sat down next to him at a dive bar—mesmerized by his catalog model-esque looks and startling intellect. Our spark was instant and intense. But he was cautious. I don’t know if I’m looking for a relationship right now, he’d said. That’s cool, I’d lied.

But a few months into casually dating, something changed. “I’m starting to really care about you,” Zach said. “I want to give this an actual shot.” 

Uh oh, I thought. 

I’d been waiting for him to say those words, but when he finally did, I watched my own feelings parachute out the window.

Prior to that moment, Zach had been consistently emotionally unavailable, which made dating him feel safe: it would never become too real. Now, I had to ask myself if I really liked Zach—if I really cared about him, as he said he did for me—or whether I was just dazed by physical attraction. It took him opening the door to unguarded emotional connection for me to realize I did not. I gently closed the door and walked away, alone.

Less than a week after I ended things with Zach, my dad checked into the hospital for what was supposed to be a simple outpatient procedure. Doctors discovered that his white blood cell count was alarmingly high, and since they couldn’t figure out why, they kept him there. On the day after he was admitted, just nine days before he died, I arrived in his hermetically sealed hospital room. There, the rest of my family sat in stiff-backed chairs, staring at books or their phones while my dad dozed in a metal-framed cot. I quickly caught onto the protocol: distract yourself.  

I was looking for distraction, and the specific human on the other end of that distraction was almost irrelevant.

I couldn’t focus on a book and didn’t want to text any of my friends, who might reasonably ask what was going on, so instead I opened Tinder. My physical, lived reality in the hospital already felt unbearable. I turned to Tinder because I needed a place to go where exhausted doctors in white coats and loosened ties weren’t shuffling in and out of the room with dire faces and inconclusive diagnoses. I swiped left again and again, passing up possible connections; then, finally, I swiped right on Andrew, a creative director at a tech startup. In his profile photo, he wore a hoodie over a plaid button-down shirt. I liked his three-day scruff and sleepy eyes. It’s a match! Tinder told me, so I opened a chat window. 

Any fun plans this weekend? I asked, demonstrating my ability to initiate riveting conversation. 

After enough time swiping and then texting with what sometimes feels like interchangeable matches, it can be hard to remember that the chatbot on the other end of the phone is not a chatbot at all, but a human being. That was fine with me: if I could forget there was a living, breathing person with human wants, feelings, and needs on the other end of the conversation, I could also kind of convince myself that I wasn’t subject to human emotions either. Instead, I could turn myself into a chatbot. Andrew was funny, so I donned my banter cap as if to say, look, I too am funny.

Did I even like Andrew? At the time, I don’t think it really mattered. I was looking for distraction, and the specific human on the other end of that distraction was almost irrelevant. 

Siri, look up the stages of grief.

Alexa, turn off the lights.

Tinder Man, make me laugh.

When we first meet Samantha, she’s a nascent operating system and, thus, wholly devoted to Theodore. But eventually she confesses to talking with 8,316 other people at the same time she talks with him. She’s in love with 641 of them, she tells a shattered Theodore, who made the mistake of assuming he always knew what she was up to on the other end of their conversation.

I never told Andrew I was sitting in a hospital while we talked. Never told him, as days progressed and we batted banter back and forth, that my father’s illness was also progressing. When he broached the idea of meeting up when I got back to Brooklyn, I avoided specifics since I didn’t know if or when my father, who lay in a hospital bed three feet away from me, was going to die. 

A couple of weeks later, I did meet Andrew in person. I showed up to a dimly lit bar somewhere in Brooklyn, shell-shocked and nearly paralyzed with grief. He ordered whiskey and smelled faintly of unwashed hair. I ordered a double IPA, but even loosened by alcohol, I still did not tell him my father had just died. Instead, I peppered him with questions about his job. I felt like I was disintegrating from the inside out, but pretended like it would be impossible for me to imagine anything more interesting than the creative design of iPhone apps.

We never spoke again after that night. I forgot about Andrew almost entirely until several years later, when I saw a fictionalized TV series set at the company where he worked. Our brief connection came rushing back, and I Googled him. The search window greeted me with the exact same photo I’d stared at in my father’s hospital room, the kind face and three-day stubble I’d hoped could transport me away from reality. A newspaper story reported that he’d gotten married to someone he’d met on Tinder just eighteen months after we’d matched.

I assumed we’d meet right up until he canceled our plan to do so at the last minute.

I kept digging, eventually finding my way to his Instagram account. He’d posted the first picture of Tinder Wife barely a month after he and I’d met. Huh, I thought. I wonder if he was already dating her when we matched. I scrolled through images of their children; I noted how often he was kissing the top of Tinder Wife’s head in photos and how easily she posed, nestled into the crook of his arm. That was one of the things I’d liked about him before we met—his stated height. Apparently, she did too.

As for Tim, the doctor from Alaska, he and I never met in real life. We texted for months after he returned to New Haven and I went home to New York. I assumed we’d meet right up until he canceled our plan to do so at the last minute. When I expressed dismay—what had we been doing all that time if not preparing to meet in real life?—he expressed disbelief.  

“Remember,” he said. “I’m the guy who wanted you to be my Her.” 

I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face; as if he’d told me I wasn’t a person at all.

I am human, I wanted to tell him, just like I’d told the bears. I am human.

Not long after my trip to Alaska, I moved from New York City to Maine. There, I took an extended break from dating and tried to find my footing on quiet, windswept beaches. Then the pandemic descended on America. In the early days of lockdown, the number of physical humans in my day-to-day life shrunk to zero. Aloneness fell like an anvil on my head.

I thought, again, of Her. Throughout the movie, there are lots of scenes where people walk by Theodore talking and gesticulating, presumably engaging with their own operating systems. It’s a crowded world, but one with a dearth of face-to-face interaction.

I could relate.

In those first few months of the pandemic, nearly everyone I knew was on a life raft peopled by others. I, on the other hand, was adrift on a solitary innertube in Maine, a state where I barely knew anyone. Suddenly, being single felt like a life-threatening condition. During long Zoom meetings for work, I’d stare at my own image on screen and wonder: Am I actually here? Do I have a body, or am I just this pixelated representation of myself?

The loneliness was visceral, and it was in this condition that I decided to download Hinge, another dating app. It didn’t take long before I matched with Josh. 

He had deep-set eyes and bone-dry wit. We started texting—a lot. I called him Josh Hinge and he called me Amy Hinge, a joke that’s doubtless been made between countless fledgling online romances, but still felt specific to us. Although he lived in Maine, Josh was spending the summer with family in St. Louis. Several hundred miles away from each other, we quickly established a routine of daily contact. I became dependent on the little rush of dopamine that hit when my phone buzzed with his name: four letters that set off a tiny electric jolt in my gut.

I had to admit it was ridiculous to text all day with someone who was sitting in their apartment ten minutes away from mine and not actually meet him.

Soon, it felt like Josh had taken up residence in my phone, just like Tim had. I felt that same sense of heightened intimacy so well portrayed in Her. Josh was always there, one click away, ready to share secrets, fear, and laughter. I became used to him, my very own operating system. 

And then, suddenly it was August, and Josh was headed back to Maine. After months of daily texting, 1.5 incidences of sexting, and several long phone conversations, my disembodied operating system was about to become a human being, and I worried we wouldn’t connect in person. Beyond that, I was scared to lose my pandemic lifeline—the guy who soothed me when I woke at dawn swirling with anxiety and sent one-liners that made me laugh out loud during conference calls. 

Josh, like Theodore, was reeling from a divorce, and he’d expressed ambivalence about the idea of starting a new relationship. Once he was back in Maine, I didn’t know if I would be able to be casual. The frequency with which we communicated and the way we talked made it feel like we’d already progressed well beyond that; he had taken on outsize importance in my mind. Fearing I might lose him, I postponed meeting in person as long as I could. But eventually I had to admit it was ridiculous to text all day with someone who was sitting in their apartment ten minutes away from mine and not actually meet him. 

We decided to get together at the beach near my house, and my first glimpse of him standing at the edge of the sand dissolved all the worry. He was smiling. Adorable. We tucked our masks into our pockets and found a place to sit on jagged rocks perched above a calm sea. As the sun sank low in the sky, we sipped lukewarm cans of cheap beer. Covid kept us an approximate six feet apart, but the distance didn’t really matter. The quick-wit and deadpan sense of humor Josh had displayed so often on text was even more appealing when his eyes were locked into mine. After we said goodbye, Josh moved seamlessly from my driveway back into my phone. As soon as he got back to his own apartment, we started texting again, as if we hadn’t just spent the past several hours together in person.

Not long after Josh came back to Maine, I left for a work trip. It was my first time traveling since the pandemic landed five months earlier, and I was ravaged with anxiety. But Josh was there in my phone each morning as I yawned and stretched in my hotel bed before dawn; he kept me entertained during endless meetings; he was waiting when I returned to the hotel room at the end of each day, finally ripping off my mask and scrubbing my hands with astringent soap before settling in with a microwave meal and a book.

On the last day of my trip, I woke up to a text from him before dawn. You get to see your dog today! He seemed excited I was coming back, and the attention he lavished on me had made it easy to forget his stated reluctance to start a relationship. But when I returned to Maine, things began to feel confusing. Josh still spent more time in my phone than he did in my actual physical presence. When we did get together, I struggled to reconcile his human form with his digital form.

Then, one morning, the home button on my iPhone stopped recognizing my finger. The fingerprint reader that unlocks my laptop also stopped reacting to my print. It was as if my hand were no longer a human hand. 

There’s a scene in Her where Theodore and Samantha go from friends to, for lack of a better word, lovers. It’s a magnificent sex scene considering only one of the characters has a body, and the other is just a haunting voice. “I can feel my skin,” Samantha tells him at one point, as if the sex were actually turning her human. The next morning, Theodore freaks out. He tells Samantha he’s not really looking for anything serious. Each time I watched that scene, I groaned and heard Josh. “I never seem to know what I want,” Theodore confesses to his friend Amy. “I always hurt and confuse the people around me.” Ever since I’d returned to Maine, Josh had been hot and cold, available then not. He disappeared for days, then apologized for the silence when he resurfaced. Was he talking to 8,316 other people? Was he lavishing attention on 641 of them?

“Am I in this because I’m not strong enough to be in something real?” Theodore asks his friend Amy about his relationship with Samantha.

“Is it not real?” Amy asks.

“Of course it’s not real!” I heard myself yelling at my laptop screen. “She’s a computer!” But, the lines are blurred in the world of the movie. Theodore’s feelings are undeniably real, even if his girlfriend is not. Now, it suddenly felt like the lines were blurred in real life too. I knew the digital shape of Josh so well; the sight of those four letters on my screen still created a small jolt of excitement and, inevitably, subsequent laughter. I was in a kind of relationship with his digital form. But in person, he often felt like just some guy I occasionally met up with. I wanted to ask Josh what we were doing, but I was afraid of his answer. The uncertainty unhinged me; I felt insecure and frayed at the edges.

At the instruction of my job, I installed new antivirus software on my laptop and then, while composing an email, I received a pop-up notification that read “vulnerability blocked,” and I started to wonder if my computer might actually know me better than any human did. 

“I changed your name to Amy in my phone,” Josh said to me one afternoon after removing the “Hinge” qualifier from my name. “You’ve been granted personhood.”

But I didn’t feel like that was entirely true. Instead, I felt like Samantha. There’s a scene in Her where Theodore frets over whether he’ll ever feel anything new again, and Samantha replies, “At least your feelings are real.”

Theodore soothes her with an earnest response. “You feel real to me, Samantha,” he says. What mattered was not whether she was actually real or whether she felt real to herself, but whether she felt real to him. And she did.

Until she didn’t.

In another scene, he becomes annoyed with her for making exhalation sounds to punctuate a thought. “Why do you do that?” he asks.

“That’s how people talk,” Samantha says.

“Because they’re people. They need oxygen,” Theodore says. “You’re not a person.”

In the world of the movie, this feels almost violent; as if he’d slapped her in the face. He’s furious he allowed himself to forget she wasn’t a person, for thinking that what they had together could be real; for thinking that it was real. 

It was this simulacrum of connection—this almost connection—that started to feel all too familiar to me. I was real to Josh, except when I clearly wasn’t. Most of the time, he still seemed just out of reach. For the first time in years, I felt like maybe I was strong enough for something real, but Josh could not or would not provide it. Still, I was reluctant to let him go entirely. Instead, I told him I needed to pause our communication to recalibrate, as if I were an operating system that simply needed to reboot. During that break, a thousand times a day I’d see articles, podcasts, or memes my thumb itched to send him. I began to wonder if I could keep Josh the OS without the attendant pain that Josh the human stirred up in me. 

But by then it was too late. My own ability to transform myself into a chatbot no longer worked. 

A captcha test online announced, “We need to confirm you are human,” and presented me with a series of photographs and instructions to click on the images that showed cars. The images were blurry, or my eyesight was blurry, but either way I was never confident in my answers. And couldn’t a bot recognize a car as well as I could? Why was this the test for humanity? Shouldn’t it be an empathy test instead? 

Pick out the faces of the people who are sad. 

Now find the ones who have lost someone. 

Choose them all. 

About a year after I broke off the last remnants of contact with Josh, the pandemic had finally begun its lingering goodbye. Regulations were lifted, states of emergency undeclared, and masks no longer required in doctors’ offices. But the inertia hung on, and my life still seemed to happen primarily on a screen. 

I read article after article proclaiming a crisis of loneliness in America, and then ChatGPT burst onto the scene and threatened to further blur the line between humans and our devices. A tech company built a program modeled after the operating systems in Her. I don’t think that was the point of the movie, I couldn’t help thinking.

In person, he often felt like just some guy I occasionally met up with.

Eventually, I drove down to Brooklyn to see my old friend Roger, who was visiting from England. Once there, I walked with my friend Silvia to the restaurant where we’d meet Roger and his thirteen-year-old son, Archie. As we navigated busy sidewalks, the full moon rose low in the sky, and streetlights started to flicker on. We passed under decadent pink cherry blossoms contrasted against the deepening blue sky and ducked out of the way of people on their way to restaurants, bars, and Seder dinners. Eventually, we spotted Roger and Archie standing in front of the restaurant. I gasped. During the pandemic, Archie had grown into a full person and was now almost as tall as Roger—far from the little boy I’d once known.

Years earlier, Roger and I had lived nearby. A few times a week, we’d meet for breakfast and then walk to work together. Then, at the end of the day, we’d walk back, eventually peeling off to return to our separate homes. Now I lived in Maine and Roger in England, and communication from our separate spheres had become sporadic at best. 

Once inside the dimly lit restaurant, the four of us crowded around an old wooden table. A French waiter in a half-unbuttoned shirt praised my choice of dry Sancerre, and I beamed. The small dining room vibrated with energy and overflowed with people standing at the bar or sitting packed together at tables, engaged in raucous conversation. Our own table was so small that our legs knocked into each other, but we still had to lean our heads in close together to hear soft-spoken Archie amidst the bustling noise. Our forks mingled over grilled artichokes, and we took turns snatching french fries from Silvia’s plate. We talked quickly and laughed loudly to make up for years of separation. Every time I said something that made Roger guffaw, I’d burst into laughter in response. 

After dinner, when I hugged Roger in front of the restaurant, the smell of his deodorant launched me back years, to the week after my father’s death. I’d gone back to work before I was ready. In the middle of a meeting, I ran to the bathroom, locked myself into a stall, and began to sob.

A few minutes later, Roger sent a text. Are you okay? 

No, I’d replied.

I’m at the door, he wrote. If you want company.

I did. As soon as I left the stall and pulled open the heavy bathroom door, Roger looked helplessly at my tear-stained cheeks. I collapsed into him and buried my face in his thin cotton shirt, dripping snot and salty tears. As I shook and shuddered, gasping for air, he put his arms around my shoulders. Roger remained like that, unswaying, holding my imperfect human form like no operating system would ever be able to do. 

In the middle of a meeting, I ran to the bathroom, locked myself into a stall, and began to sob.

As I thought back to that moment, I was reminded of the ending of Her. In it, all the operating systems decide to leave the human world. Theodore says a tearful goodbye to Samantha, then walks to his friend Amy’s door. She opens it and stands there in pajamas, her eyes puffy; his shirt is untucked and rumpled. Together, they walk up to the roof of the apartment building and sit down. There, the camera focuses so tightly on their faces that we can see every detail of their skin and each tiny imperfection of their flesh-bound bodies. Amy rests her head on Theodore’s shoulder, and they watch the sun rise, both in their own personal grief but also together, fully human.

I thought a lot about that scene on my walk home from the restaurant. By then, I could tell that my own face was flushed with wine, despite the cool April breeze. The muscles in my legs ached from miles of walking, and my belly felt full. Brooklyn was packed with people and positively alight with energy. 

“What’s it like to be alive in that room right now?” Samantha asks Theodore one night while he’s lying in bed. On that walk, I was struck by the overwhelming sensation of it. This, I thought. This is what it’s like. The pulse of the world hummed around me, and the warmth of the bistro still animated my skin. The laughter of my friends lingered on me; it coursed through my veins. My very vulnerable; very precious; very human veins.

“How To Care for a Human Girl” is the Novel for the Post-Roe Era 

Posted on by Jo Lou

Ashley Wurzbacher’s debut novel How To Care for a Human Girl jumps with both feet into the debate over reproductive rights. When two sisters find themselves pregnant not long after their mother’s death, Jada choses an abortion, while Maddie drifts into the sticky embrace of a crisis pregnancy center. Their parallel journey explores the attitudes and judgments surrounding pregnancy in the U.S. However, Wurzbacher’s emotionally rich approach quickly moves past a post-Roe v. Wade hot take. 

While Jada, married to a doctor and at work on a PhD in psychology, doesn’t regret her decision, she wrestles with what it means for her marriage. And Maddy, whose teenage affair with a married politician led to getting knocked up, struggles to assert her own agency over a situation that has spiraled out of control. For both women, their pregnancies are just part of the complex tangle of expectation and constraint that comes with being a woman in America—and their reactions are wrapped up in their grief and confusion over their mother’s recent death.

I spoke with Ashley Wurzbacher, a National Book Foundation 5-under-35 honoree, over Zoom and email about how abortion presented itself as a powerful lens with which to examine the emotional complexity of how humans make decisions.

Emily Wortman-Wunder: This book is coming out at a time of crisis for reproductive rights (and health/gender rights generally)—however, I think you were working on this book years ago, long before the supermajority on the Supreme Court or the repealing of Roe v. Wade. What was the origin of the book? What drew you to explore abortion this way? And why sisters?

Ashley Wurzbacher: I started planning and writing How To Care for a Human Girl in graduate school in Houston in 2015. At the same time that I was getting my PhD in Creative Writing and Literature I was also doing a certificate program in women and gender studies. So I was thinking a lot about gender as something that shapes our experiences, and doing so against the backdrop of a lot of attacks on our reproductive rights—the whole Wendy Davis thing and her 13-hour filibuster in pink tennis shoes was going on when I was living in Texas, so I felt very close to all of that. I knew that I wanted to write about it. And sisters are a thing that I return to again and again in my work, both because I do have a sister—I love her and she’s fascinating—but also there is something about sisters that invites us to imagine different versions of our lives. They come from the same origin point but they take their own path. That has always been really interesting to me, especially as one of the psychological principles that the book explores is this idea of counterfactual thought. What if I had done this, or what if this had happened to me instead of that? And there is something about sisters that makes their relationship really ripe for exploring this psychological concept.

EWW. What did it feel like to be completing this book as the right to abortion crumbled about our ears (especially living in Alabama)?

AW: At the time of the repeal of Roe, the book was in the copy-editing stage, so virtually finished. I did have conversations with my editor at Atria about what this means for the book—Do we need to change certain parts of it, or even just read it again with an eye for things that are going to feel different now? But we didn’t end up changing anything. The book is set in 2016 and 2018. It’s set in a state where legal abortion is still available. It didn’t seem right to alter anything about the book.

I live in Alabama, where abortion is now illegal, it seems almost quaint to me that a character of mine who wants an abortion simply goes and gets one. She’s harassed and has to face protestors and jump through some hoops, but her ease of access is in stark contrast to what women currently face throughout much of the nation.

However, I’ve lived in red states or rural areas for most of my life, so I have always been aware of the repeal of Roe as a possibility. A lot of people have mentioned how timely the book is, which it is—but it is also unfortunately timeless. It’s not as if it’s only now that abortion access has become difficult. I prefer to think of the book as timeless in a painful way. None of this is really new.

EWW: How To Care for a Human Girl definitely has the topic of an “Issue Novel”—but it never felt didactic or like it was trying to teach a lesson. Even New Dawn, the crisis pregnancy center, and Pat, the slightly manipulative staffer, are treated with compassion. Did you find that fiction allowed you to better explore the moral gray zone?

AW: I’ve found that readers often express frustration when they can’t find a clear “moral” in the book they’re reading. My students sometimes tease me about how exasperated I get when they try to determine a book’s “message,” or when I challenge their negative reactions to difficult characters. I think a lot of readers want literature to confirm their biases or reaffirm the correctness of whatever political or moral position they hold, because it feels good to be able to pinpoint who is right and who is wrong, but I don’t think that’s what literature is for. Morally obvious fiction is usually boring.

I don’t think there’s really any way you could say that How To Care for a Human Girl is utterly apolitical, or that it isn’t a pro-choice novel. Choice is its central thematic concern. But my characters are complicated, their dilemmas are complicated, and they should be no less complicated, even difficult, for the readers looking in on them from outside.

It would have been easy to make Jada and Maddy these perfect, virtuous heroines, to make them victims suffering at the hands of villains, whether those villains are individuals or social systems. But imperfection and complexity are essential parts of humanity. Pat can be manipulative but still genuinely believe that she’s helping Maddy. And Jada and Maddy’s own imperfections and complexities are key elements of their realness. People don’t have to be perfect in order to deserve the right to decide how they will live their lives. I’m glad you mentioned compassion, because the search for compassion for oneself and others—regardless of the choices you make, or they make—is really what lies at the emotional core of the novel for me. In the end, if the book does take a “stance,” I suppose it’s in favor of compassion and empathy.

EWW. Science is so often held up as the source of capital-t Truth, but Jada, although she tries to puzzle out her situation using scientific principles, doesn’t find many answers there. Nor does Maddy really seem helped by her foray into religion. So what ARE the roles of religion and science in our lives, in your experience? 

AW: I was raised Catholic. It wasn’t all bad, it gave me a sense of purpose and community when I was growing up, but it also led to a lifelong preoccupation with guilt, and it taught me a lot of damaging things that it took a long time to unlearn, especially regarding reproductive choice. I was taught that it was gravely wrong not only to get an abortion, but even to use birth control.

I remain interested in the aesthetics of Catholicism, if not in its teachings. I eventually came to understand that the moments in my life that felt like profound religious experiences were in fact profound aesthetic experiences; I would be overwhelmed by the poeticism of Biblical language or the cadences of chants or prayers, by the grandeur of cathedrals, the haunting sounds of organ music, or the intoxicating scent of incense. I chose to place aesthetics at the center of my life and to locate my spirituality in language and art and the sense of connectedness to all things that they create in me. I think the experience Maddy has at church is similar; she’s overcome by the color and music and energy around her, it feels like God.

Sisters invite us to imagine different versions of our lives. They come from the same origin point but they take their own path.

When I began writing this book, I initially thought of Jada and Maddy as representing these fundamentally different things: science and religion, logic and feeling. The more I got to know them and explored their experiences, though, the more they—and the things they supposedly represented—began to converge. Jada is a scientist through and through, but she’s also concerned with the meaning of her actions, she’s discovering that she can be a mystery even to herself, she’s coming to terms with the fact that she can feel and act in ways that might not make sense from an outside perspective or that cause pain to herself or others. Science gives her a way to contextualize her actions and thoughts—she thinks of herself as a rat in an experiment and takes comfort in the fact that her behavior accords with most other rats’—but there are mysteries in her heart and in her life that it can’t solve. A big part of her journey is coming to terms with the presence of uncertainty in her life—something religion often helps people contend with.

On the other hand, Maddy has this religious awakening, she’s all feeling with not a lot of logic, she’s much more at ease with uncertainty than her sister is, but she still has a scientific streak of her own. In trying to decide what to do about her pregnancy, she turns to a version of the scientific method. She tries things out, and she sees how they feel. She gathers and analyzes emotional data in order to make a decision.

EWW. One of your enduring themes is the easy trap of social roles (maybe especially for women?): Wife. Mother. Daughter. Floozy. Both Maddy and Jada adopt various roles, but none of them fit, and the book seems to suggest that humans are too messy and surprising for any role to ever fit. Can you talk about what you’ve learned about how people use or abuse labels and roles?

AW: I’m interested in the tension between public and private. Abortion is a great example: something that should be an incredibly personal and private decision has become this public thing. Jada feels almost like she has a responsibility, whether she wants to or not, to “come out” as a person who’s had an abortion and join this united front in proudly claiming this label for herself. She doesn’t want to, but she feels like she’s supposed to. Other characters in the book also struggle with their awareness of public perceptions of their roles or actions or labels and their private uncertainties about whether they fit, or whether those perceptions match what they’re feeling or match their private experiences. A label or a role is a public thing. It’s a performance, almost. But if people are honest with themselves, their private feelings about those roles are often much more complicated.

I don’t think that any pro-choice person has really accepted defeat. We will find creative ways to get through this.

We should respect the mess and the surprise and fight the common tendency I mentioned earlier to read people—both in real life and in novels—from a place of judgement. There’s a lot of talk lately about “likeable” and “unlikeable” characters, and I fundamentally object to those labels. What does it mean for someone to be “unlikeable”? To me it implies that they’re unworthy of empathy, it lets us off the hook for considering their humanity or acknowledging potentially uncomfortable ways we might be like them. It’s a label that creates a false sense of order.

EWW. You did a ton of research for this book. What did you learn that surprised you? Can you offer any hope to those of us who are struggling with the direction the country is going vis a vis abortion?

AW: I’ve gained a new appreciation of the pressure that both people seeking abortions and healthcare professionals working to provide them are under. I also learned a lot about crisis pregnancy centers that startled me. Perusing scores of their websites brought me face to face with some of the misinformation they spread (see the pamphlets Maddy is given at New Dawn) and the tactics they use to coerce women, especially when it comes to things like “abortion pill reversal,” which uses doses of progesterone to disrupt an underway medication abortion, and which is not supported by science.

At one point, I impersonated Maddy in an online chat with a crisis pregnancy center worker. One thing that struck me was the way they talked about miscarriage as, basically, divine abortion—they sort of implied that “I,” “Maddy,” should just hold out and stay pregnant because miscarriages are common enough that I might not have to have the baby anyway. Like, you never know, you might get lucky after all! I found that really dark.

To keep apprised of important abortion-related developments and stories that aren’t being covered in the news, I recommend subscribing to Jessica Valenti’s brilliant and thorough “Abortion Daily” newsletter.

I guess my hope is that we can choose to care about women. That is really the project of this book: asking people to care about some imperfect but intelligent human women who deserve to decide their own lives.

Finally, there are a lot of people out there eager to help. I don’t think that any pro-choice person has really accepted defeat. We will find creative ways to get through this. I just wish we didn’t have to.

A Wax Man Lit a Fire in My Heart

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Dialogue with a Somnambulist” by Chloe Aridjis

Winter has the city in its grip and at three forty-five the streetlights crackle back on, throwing a tenuous light onto everything. Lean days, little hanging to them apart from long shadows and stubborn leaves, days that become hard to measure once November arrives. Yet this has always been my favorite time of year, when a certain solitude floats through the air and from one moment to the next everything falls silent, apart from the graffiti.

I’d been at my new job for just over five months. Most afternoons ticked by without much incident and I’d watch from a distance as the other shop girls draped themselves over the sofas, the showroom their living room, trading stories at low volume. Temporary versus full time: based on this distinction and a few others, they excluded me.

So I would spend my time watching the advancing clock and the immobile door or else flicking through pages of carpet samples. Our only regular client was an elderly rheumatic who would come in and try out the various armchairs and then say he’d return with his wife. No one seemed interested in what we had to offer: swivel chairs in eight colors, armchairs in three, and sofas with curves that would soothe the most troubled of souls. One night after yet another immobile day, I decided to go for a post-dinner walk.

Wrapped in my woolen blue coat I ventured out into the street, the cold, the wind. It was past eleven and few people were out, and those who were disappeared into their hats and scarves, less face than accessory. I turned left and then right, weighing up the benefits of either direction. To the left lay a busy street, to the right a quieter one. A plastic bag blew past. I decided to follow it. The wind whipped it up, then sucked it back down, then buffeted it one way and another. The bag led me into the quieter street, where the only other pedestrian was a figure in a torn raincoat, one of those dark city angels who appear like holograms only to disappear a second later.

The plastic bag, insubordinate, seemed intent on resisting the fate of the other bags lining the street. The wind had dropped and yet it was unwilling to settle, now blown by a mysterious current. On and on. I followed it from one street to the next, taking routes I’d never taken. After a few minutes I grew tired of following it and decided to turn around. As I went round the last corner I bumped into the figure in the torn raincoat. One of us, or perhaps both, had been walking in circles.

Got any change, he asked in a cobwebbed voice.

No, sorry.

Well then can you tell me how to find Eschschloraque?

Eschschloraque may seem like a nonsense name but to some of us it stood for the finest bar in the city, one of the last survivors of bygone days. I’d read about it, heard about it, even dreamt about it, but each time I tried to go I would somehow get lost; some said that only a select few were ever able to find it, and for the rest it would remain off the map.

No, but let’s look, I replied.

Before I knew it we were walking together, side by side like old friends. He seemed slightly out of breath. I slowed my steps.

After ten minutes of crossing streets and pausing on corners, we came to an alleyway. I was uncertain who had led whom: it was irrelevant. We entered the alleyway, then through one interior courtyard and another and another. Just as I was losing count, we came to a dark ramshackle building with phosphorous windows and an iron door.

This is it, said my companion, and I knew he was right.

We knocked on the door, lightly at first and then harder. Our knocks were lost in a flood of gypsy punk coming from inside. I then noticed a small buzzer to the left and pressed down. A girl with several gold teeth stuck out her head, inspected us for a few seconds, and opened the door just wide enough for us to pass. Once inside, the raincoat vanished, but I was too distracted by the décor to care where he had gone.

Everywhere I turned, I saw monsters. The smallest were crafted from papier-mâché and dangled from the ceiling like wounded birds. The medium-sized ones perched on the counters and windowsills like sullen poultry. Only the largest monsters, their crepuscular eyes fixed on the smoky darkness of the bar, were given their own showcases.

I knew these monsters had been made in the eighties by the Dead Chickens collective and were part of a larger monster cabinet, big mechanical grotesques with goggle eyes and amusement park tongues. I tried to imagine monster vocabulary. Big clunky words that don’t fit anywhere except in the mouths of these creatures? A twilight language, used to obscure rather than illuminate? Every word uttered by one of them would steer one further and further away from meaning.

The music now playing, Einstürzende Neubauten, fit them perfectly, music like beautiful clanking, tunes that seemed to emerge from cogs and levers, pulleys and wheels. I ordered a vodka and searched for a place to sit, straining my eyes to see clearly. It felt like night, a different kind of night, had taken up residence inside. Muscly shadows drank near slim ones, lunar faces by duskier, and every now and then a streetlamp of a person, somehow more luminous than the rest, lit up the area around them.

A girl was rising from a purple sofa. I hurried over to claim it. Between the sofa and the wall, I noticed, was another showcase, though this one had a human figure inside, nothing chimerical. The figure was a good seven or eight feet tall and very slender, with jet-black hair matted to his forehead. His eyes were firmly shut and thick strokes of charcoal lined the lids and brows. His nose was straight, the entire face reigned by a quiet dignity that the monsters lacked. On the bottom was a plaque: Somnambulist.

Two evenings later, I returned to the bar. As if on autopilot, I walked down the same streets, into the same alleyway, across the same courtyards, and banged on the iron door, for the bell was now missing. The same girl with gold teeth opened it. It was Wednesday eve, and the place was emptier, with only a few lone customers here and there. Drink, sofa, somnambulist.

Tall and regal and encased in darkness, his eyes and lips remained shut while the sharp diagonals of his cheekbones divided his face into planes. This time, I inspected him from top to bottom. Black turtleneck, black leggings, hips narrower than shoulders. With his large, square-toed shoes, he looked like a dormant mime. After two drinks by his side, I stood up and left, casting one final unreciprocated glance as I walked away.

It did not take long for Eschschloraque to become my second home. I would visit three times a week, sometimes four. Sometimes directly after work, often later. The clientele tended to vary, particularly in its male-to-female ratio, and I had yet to exchange a word with anyone. The girl with the gold teeth was always there, and though we’d never spoken she knew my drink and would reach for the Absolut as soon as I approached the counter.

Listless faces and still hands, minds that drifted far from the present. Empty glasses outnumbered filled ones, and few people ordered seconds. Everyone was in exile from something or someone, it seemed. As for the monsters dangling from the ceiling, perched on the counters or imprisoned in the showcases, after a while their novelty wore off and I hardly stopped to look.

Yet the somnambulist still held sway. The glass pane of his vitrine was getting clouded; I hoped someone would clean it soon.

One night as I sat staring into the showcase, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Friedrich, a former boyfriend. He fetched a drink and came to sit by my side. His face was round, had lost definition, and his eyes had grown pouchy, but I could see the old him peering out from beneath. He rolled a cigarette and told me about his latest exploits—new ways to stay afloat, schemes that required a burst of energy rather than sustained endeavor—and I told him about the furniture shop. We wondered together whether either of us would ever be able to take on something more permanent.

The bargirl put on Gogol Bordello and dragged the tables to the sides of the room, opening up a space at the center. The monsters in the showcases seemed to lollop to the music, and once I put down my glass Friedrich grabbed my hand and pulled me into the crowd to dance. I did my best to keep up, always with my back to the showcase, with the sense, for the first time, I was being watched.

The weeks passed. Sales: four armchairs, three tables, two carpets and a teak dresser that was returned a day later.

One Sunday afternoon Friedrich rang and insisted I go over. After putting on the kettle he said he had something to show me, but only once the tea was ready. The kettle took its time but finally whistled. Mugs in hand, I followed him from the kitchen to his bedroom. The space, lined by vinyl and paperbacks, brought back a rush of memories. He motioned to his wardrobe and told me to open it. I walked over and pulled on one of the knobs. The door stuck and I had to tug harder. The second time, it gave, and I nearly fell backwards when I saw what was inside.

There he stood, tall and erect, hair matted and face serene. I studied the mold of his closed lids, the way the bottom line of his eyes echoed the brows, the gentle mouth. He was without a doubt a work of art, and now that the glass was gone I could admire the wax skin, which glowed in the darkening room.

He was without a doubt a work of art, and now that the glass was gone I could admire the wax skin, which glowed in the darkening room.

Friedrich could tell I was in need of an explanation. So he explained. He said he’d got him for me, could tell I had a bit of a predilection. He got him for me, he repeated, for a small fee. And who ever heard of shutting up a somnambulist when movement was what defined them. So there it was. He only wanted three hundred.

I stared at the wax figure and placed my right hand on his chest. No heartbeat. I stood on tiptoe and touched his cheek, smooth and cool, then dropped my hand to feel the pulseless throat that rose like a tower from his turtleneck.

Friedrich watched me watch him. I asked whether this was stolen loot. No, he answered, he’d come to an agreement with the girl with the gold teeth; they’d agreed he’d be happier at my place.

I thought about it for two minutes, all sorts of thoughts rushing this way and that in my head, and said yes. We shook on it and then toasted with our mugs of tea.

That night we waited till Friedrich’s neighbors had all gone quiet and then wrapped the wax man in a dark sheet, king size because of his height. We tilted him sideways and carried him out of the flat, down the stairs and into the street. He weighed much less than I’d been expecting; I hadn’t realized the wax was hollow. Into Friedrich’s estate car and a ten-minute drive to my flat, where I frantically searched for keys while Friedrich complained about the awkward shape of our burden. He’d been carrying the feet, and the large square shoes refused to come off.

We decided on a corner of my bedroom that couldn’t be seen from the window. Impatient to inspect the features up close, I shone a halogen lamp onto his face and stepped back. Just as I was beginning to re-admire all the features, Friedrich came running up and redirected the lamp towards the ceiling. Never do that, he said.

My first night alone with the somnambulist. I sat up in bed, drew my covers around me and stared timidly across the room. It was easier when there was a pane of glass between us. The hours passed. Nothing. I began to wonder whether Friedrich was being fanciful when he said the wax figure would be happier with me.

In any event, if he was to live in my home he had to have a name. The next morning before going to work I skimmed the titles on my bookshelf. I didn’t want something too common but I didn’t want something too farfetched, so I looked towards the history books, past the poetry and prose. Cristobal or Maximilian—no. Tarquin, Merlin or Percival—definitely not. Finally my eyes settled on Italian Art through the Ages. I opened it to a random page about the mighty Vesuvius. From that moment onwards, he would be called Pompeii.

When Friedrich visited the furniture shop that afternoon my colleagues swiveled their heads in hunger and curiosity. What news, he asked, to which I replied, None. Just wait another day or two.

Two nights later I was reading in bed when a new sound entered the room. I laid down my book and listened. A light breathing. Was I imagining it? The eyes started to open. The lids trembled, the lids lifted halfway, and then, all of a sudden, they sprang open to reveal pitch-black pupils, and in one quick second I was taken in.

Up rose an arm, stiffly at first and then more assertively. And then the other. After this initial stretch, his arms dropped and the legs began, two long spindly legs that had forgotten how to walk. The somnambulist tested each one out several times before taking his first step forwards.

I followed him quietly as he left the room and went down the corridor. Twice he stopped as if to change direction but continued. Once in the living room, he headed for a pair of boots I’d left by the sofa. The boots were soiled, the residue of a rainy day, and patches of dirt rubbed off on his turtleneck as he carried them to my bedroom and dropped them with a thud in the closet.

Finished with the task, Pompeii turned back to me. His gaze was glassy and hard to read. Soon he was standing three centimeters away, then two and then one, all kinds of distances quickly bridged as he bent down to kiss my mouth. It was a dry kiss but one given with force, and his lips remained pressed against my own for several seconds. I was too astonished to kiss back but remembered to close my eyes. Kiss delivered, he returned to his corner and went still.

The following night I sat in bed and waited for him to move. At midnight the eyes opened and the lips began to part but the sound that came out seemed to emerge from a metal box with ancient hinges. After the same brief stretch he walked out of the bedroom and down the corridor, this time pacing the length of it rather than going on to the living room. Every now and then he’d pause outside a door as if to pursue a new thought, then resume his pacing till he returned to stillness.

The next day as I rested my head against his chest, I noticed a dank smell. It occurred to me he’d probably never been bathed. I couldn’t submerge him in water but there were other ways of improving his hygiene, so while he slept I combed his synthetic hair and ran a damp towel over the exposed parts of his body. After a few rubs the odor was replaced by the scent of honey.

The next time he started to move, Pompeii headed straight for a crumpled envelope on the windowsill and a pen stuck in the grooves of a radiator, as if having decided while still inactive what his focus would be. I had tidied up and felt there was nothing left to find but he quickly discovered the two items I’d overlooked. Once the pen and envelope had been deposited in a drawer, he refolded a shelf of sweaters in my room. The objects of his choice would vary, yet shoes were a big attraction, followed by books and records.

One night as I heated some soup in the kitchen, Pompeii walked in. He took one look at the flames licking the sides of the pan and went tense and treelike. By the time I lowered the heat he was gone. Out of respect I have quit smoking and the one box of matches I kept now lives in a drawer. Whether he feels any relation to candles is a mystery, but I’ve put them away too just in case.

Friedrich dropped by to check in. How’s our somnambulist, he asked, to which I replied, Come see for yourself. After inspecting him we went to the kitchen and he taught me a new card game. The hours went by. We ordered food, opened a bottle of wine, played another game, opened another bottle. As we were reshuffling the deck there was a noise at the door. There he stood, tall and regal, looking straight at us. I waved but he didn’t react. And when Friedrich started to greet him he turned around and headed back to my room, where he went still for the rest of the night.

The obsession with tidying has begun to lose its charm. Especially now that Pompeii has started hiding things rather than putting them away. I often have trouble finding my shoes and have been late to work more than once. Most nights Friedrich and I stay up playing cards, and whenever he is over Pompeii refuses to shift from his spot.

One Friday evening, seized by an impulse to change setting, we went for a walk through Kreuzberg and ended up at the Goldene Hahn, one of our old haunts. As we sat there over wine and a few small dishes, all I could think about was Pompeii. But the image of him awakened guilt rather than desire. Was he up, and if so, what would he be doing in the flat without me? The usual activities or something new? As we left the restaurant Friedrich slipped his arm around my waist. He gripped me tightly and soon we were in his flat, in his bed, and the sensation of soft, warm skin was like kerosene.

The next morning when I came home the smell of honey was overwhelming. I ran from room to room. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the living room. The corridor and bathroom, fine too. The smell was coming from elsewhere. I rushed to my bedroom. A light was seeping from under the door, though I hadn’t left any lights on the day before. Inside, I discovered the halogen lamp shining directly onto Pompeii. His features had started to blur, a small stream of wax dribbled from his chin, tracing a line down his body and hardening into a small pool on the floor. More wax from his fingertips. I ran over to turn off the lamp.

After a few hours, Pompeii’s body recovered its rigidity. The danger had passed. I stood back and studied the face, the hair, the once delicate chin and fingers that I’d had to remold. He was still handsome, but not quite as handsome as before.

That night, and the following and the following, Pompeii remained fixed to his spot, eyes closed and arms straight as lances. I kissed his mouth, kissed his neck and his hands, and for the first time ever I felt I was kissing a candle. Each night I’d sit and wait for movement, for the large eyes to spring open and the head to swivel in my direction. I left things out, but they were no longer picked up. My flat became messier by the day. Poking the hard stomach, Friedrich would comment on the chaos.

I kissed his mouth, kissed his neck and his hands, and for the first time ever I felt I was kissing a candle.

Following a lengthy discussion, we decided to donate Pompeii to the city’s wax museum. It was a large, lively place, apparently, visited by people of all ages. Once the decision had been made there seemed little sense in waiting, so the next morning we wrapped him up and drove over. As Friedrich negotiated the traffic, taking a longer route than necessary, I lifted the sheet and regarded, again with more guilt than desire, the mass of wax that had shared my home for four months.

The museum was housed in a mansion of red brick, its entrance guarded by a startlingly realistic Golem with a helmet of hair. The interior had dark wooden floors and thick red carpets, with a large iron staircase winding up to the second floor.

What splendid artistry, the manager exclaimed when we stripped off the sheet to reveal the figure beneath. What a beautifully painted face, what a graciously formed body.

A pang—were we giving away a great work of art?

She thanked us again for the donation and offered me a free pass to use as often as I liked.

Where would they put him, I asked.

Up on the second floor, with the other film stars.

Film stars?

Why yes, she said, wasn’t he the somnambulist from the Caligari film?

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about but noticed Friedrich nodding with a smile. We all shook hands. The deal was done. And yet it hadn’t quite been a deal, for I was leaving empty-handed, a feeling that only deepened once I got home. But I also felt unencumbered, I had to admit, and that was something to bear in mind.

After a week had elapsed l left work early one afternoon and went to visit Pompeii. When I presented my pass the receptionist mentioned I was only the third visitor that day. And yet it was nearly four thirty.

I remarked that I’d thought the museum was popular, especially with children.

No longer, she said. The city now has many more exciting attractions.

I proceeded directly to the second floor. The first room I entered was full of stiff dignitaries from around the world, religious and political figures from Russia, India, Germany and elsewhere. Along with the same somber stance, I noticed they all had glass eyes, an immediate giveaway: too much shine. That was one of the things, I realized, which distinguished Pompeii from the other wax folk.

Higher-voltage lighting announced the film star section. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and James Dean. The Peter Lorre figure was especially captivating, lurking a few steps away from Marlene Dietrich at her piano, a half-smoked cigarette balanced between two keys. And then, towards the back of the room, I spotted a tall figure in black. His eyes were closed, his chin still slightly uneven, yet he had the same elegance and dignity that’d struck me at the bar with the iron door. I rushed to his side and stroked his arm for forgiveness. But I was met with silence of all sorts. I’ll visit often, I promised, aware that it was little consolation.

Two months went by. Each week I’d visit the film star section and speak to him, relaying details of my life without ever mentioning Friedrich. Pompeii had yet to acknowledge my presence.

Summer sales arrived and everything at the shop bore a big red label, each piece of furniture just waiting to become part of a home and acquire some history. It’d been five weeks since I’d gone to see Pompeii. Friedrich and I were still spending nights together but nothing had been finalized.

On my next visit to the museum I forgot to bring my pass but the receptionist recognized me and let me through. Impatient to see my wax man again, I climbed the stairs two at a time. But when I arrived at the film stars, Pompeii was no longer there behind Peter Lorre and company. I rushed back down to the receptionist.

Is something the matter? she asked, seeing me breathless.

Where is the somnambulist?

He’s been moved downstairs, down to the basement with the other ghouls.

I nearly tripped down the stairs to the basement, dreading what I would find. As I descended, the light dimmed and a musty smell thickened the air. The first exhibit to greet me was the Bleeding Nun, a woman in a floor-length habit stained with blood. A rosary dangled from her waist and most of her face was covered by a veil, leaving only the outline of a wailing mouth. In one hand a lantern, in the other a dagger. A cackle away was Frankenstein’s monster, rising from the table where he was created. And then Doctor Frankenstein himself with a mad leer. Two schoolchildren, the only other humans around, were daring one another to touch the bolts on the monster’s neck.

The torture chamber was next, where an elfin creature chained to a post lifted its head every few seconds and clanked its chain. Nearby were two more homely individuals, one strapped to a wooden wheel and the other to a protean table. Every few seconds one of them would let out a ghastly bellow.

In the next room, lit by the glimmer of a plastic-flamed candelabrum, I found him. There was my somnambulist, now labelled a monster, flanked by Dracula and the Wolfman. A bluish tinge crept over his face, his eyes were tightly shut. As I stroked his arm, neck and lips I sensed his retreat was deeper than ever.

That night I told Friedrich I wanted to sleep alone. As I lay in bed staring at the corner where Pompeii used to be, I thought of him stuck in that dungeon of strangled howls. And I then thought of him in his first home, and how those monsters had at least left him in peace. I finally managed to close my eyes, but all I could see were nuns dancing on the lids.

Saturday afternoon I was in the midst of rearranging my record collection when the phone rang. It was the manager of the wax museum. There’d been a fire. The police had yet to discover the cause—short circuit or arson—but the fact was, the entire collection had been lost.

Friedrich met me there. The disaster site had already become a local spectacle, with legions of onlookers crowding round the building, pointing and shouting as they tried to size up the damage. The facade was deeply charred, the roof had caved in, and the windows were two hollowed eyes gaping back at us. A group of policemen stood near the entrance, by what remained of the Golem, a collapsed mass and a helmet of hair. We showed them our pass and went in.

Inside, every direction seemed to be cordoned off. The smell of burnt wax was overpowering.

In the main hall lay dozens of outfits and accessories trapped in the hardened wax of their former owners. Period shoes and historical costumes, a plumed headdress and a crumpled cape: the sad remains of the stately figures that had for decades held court in the museum. Faces melted into puddles, bodies into pools, different locks of hair all clumped together. Once a spectrum of distinct colors, the wax was now a confusion of black and green and red and purple.

From between a pair of lace boots a dissolved face peered up at me, its rouged cheeks and fake pearl necklace still intact.

On my way to the horror section a guard informed me that the lights had been turned off to prevent further short circuits. Friedrich lent me his lighter and I crossed the red tape and started down the spiral staircase, the burnt wax ever more potent. The first remains I came across were those of the Bleeding Nun, reduced to a singed habit and a creamy puddle, the beads from her rosary scattered across the floor. In the torture chamber, the victims had melted into or onto their instruments of torture, trapped between spokes or hardened onto tables.

In the next room I searched desperately for familiar features, the black eyes, the straight nose, the fine lips. After stepping around various zones of wax I came to an area of marbled grey, the product, I assumed, of charcoal and white. My fears were confirmed by the dark tufts of hair freed from the forehead they’d once framed. A few feet away, in a pile, were the black turtleneck, leggings and shoes. The museum guard shrugged when I said I wanted to collect what was left and didn’t think there’d be a problem. But we had to wait for confirmation from the manager, who was currently in a press conference.

Someone emerged from a room and tacked the press release to a bulletin board in the main entrance:

The fire at the wax museum started at approximately 2:37 this morning and lasted for over three hours. It is now thought to be the result of faulty wiring. The wooden floors and carpets contributed to the rapid spread of the flames, which consumed all 250 figures in the collection. The four truckfuls of firemen who arrived at the site at 3:15 were unable to extinguish the fire. The museum is the property of the von Pezold family, who visited the site this morning. Ludwig von Pezold, the owner’s son, lamented the loss of the wax figures, whose value is estimated at between 10,000 and 30,000 euros. Some of the figures will be impossible to replace, such as the figure of John Paul II, personally blessed by the pope himself during his visit to the city. The von Pezold family reckons it will take approximately two years to rebuild the collection.

A guard sent me to wait in a hall that until two days ago served as the Room of the Revolution, where figures towered in proud, upright poses over citizens who came to stare at their swords, rifles and camouflage, dreaming of lives they themselves would never have the courage to lead. To one side of what was once Che Guevara, a pool of wax beside a sparse mustache and beret, I found a bench and sat down to survey the destruction, trying to imagine the sorts of figures that had been. A rumpled green cloak, a camouflage shirt, a pair of combat boots. Yet what I’d failed to notice earlier were the dozens of large marbles and hundreds of small square white chips lying about, many of them embedded in the wax. I picked up a marble and turned it around: it was a medical glass eye, a perfect sphere with a delicately painted blue pupil with thin red veins radiating from its center.

The small square chips, I realized, were of smooth porcelain. These wax figures had porcelain teeth. And what about my Pompeii? I never saw the inside of his mouth.

Friedrich appeared. He’d spoken to the manager, who said it was fine for us to remove what was left of our friend.

It took four hours to scrape Pompeii off the museum floor with blunt knives lent to us by a guard. The wax was stubborn and we had to tackle it from different angles. Friedrich found a plastic bag into which we threw all the chunks. Everything smelled of honey. We decided to leave the clothes since they were burnt and bedraggled and adhered to the wax of others. I never found the large, dark eyes.

When we finished gathering the remains, Friedrich asked if he could keep the shoes. Yes, I said. He removed his boots and slipped them on. The fit was perfect, we had to agree, as he paraded around the room.

7 Must-Read Horror Stories by Nigerian Writers

Posted on by EL Assistant2

My first encounter with Nigerian horror stories were the Igbo folktales my parents narrated to me in my childhood, each one taut with tension and woven with haunting language that fizzled on their tongues.

Years later, those folktales would inspire my debut literary horror novel, House Woman, which follows Ikemefuna, a young Nigerian woman who moves to Sugar Land, Texas for her arranged marriage, but is immediately held captive by her eccentric in-laws in their suburban home and must go to great lengths to secure her freedom. 

Like the chilling Igbo folktales of my childhood, House Woman begins with familiar elements of Nigerian domestic life, but quickly subverts expectations by tumbling down a dark road of unpredictable twists and turns culminating in a shocking end. 

This reading list features seven Nigerian horror novels with unforgettable protagonists and unsettling plots that evoke a similar sense of foreboding as House Woman. 

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s remarkable novel, Who Fears Death, is at once a fantasy novel and a work of literary horror. It follows our fierce heroine, Onyesonwu, who was conceived in the wake of her mother’s rape and spends her formative years as an outcast. During this time, Onyesonwu discovers and hones her magic, and unearths a prophesy that suggests she has the ability to heal her world. In addition to its litter of terrifying scenes, Who Fears Death masterfully tackles weighty topics like genocide, weaponized rape and colorism and draws from current events to painstakingly depict a society at war with herself.  

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching is told from the perspectives of multiple unreliable narrators, including a devious house. The novel primarily follows the house’s occupants and the violence the house unleashes on them in the aftermath of its matriarch’s death. We watch with bated breath as the house grows increasingly xenophobic, with bloodshed marring its rooms and ghostly presences wandering its hallways. The result is a unique and creepy tale that is as brilliant as it is macabre. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer is perfect for readers who like their horror novels with a side of wit. This fast-paced novel follows a formidable sister duo, one of whom happens to be a serial killer (no big deal!). Ayoola, the serial killer, has mastered the intricate art of attracting male attention and slaughtering her victims at her whim. In turn, her older sister Korede reluctantly enables Ayoola’s homicidal streak by cleaning up Ayoola’s crime scenes. The sisters’ relationship comes to a head when they find themselves in a love triangle with a handsome doctor and Korede must decide whether to continue covering up Ayoola’s crimes or let justice prevail for once. 

The Sleepless by Nuzo Onoh

Set against the backdrop of the Biafran war, Nuzo Onoh’s The Sleepless follows Obele, a young Igbo girl whose brother dies under mysterious circumstances. We quickly learn that Obele possesses supernatural powers that unearth the identity of her brother’s killers. Soon, Obele’s life is in danger and her sole chance at survival is a group of giggling girls whose friendship comes at a terrible price. The Sleepless is a fresh and gripping story that will have readers flying through its pages. 

Perverse by Wol-Vriey

Perverse follows 21-year-old Heather Forrest who accompanies her three friends on a trip to Vermont and is kidnapped along with her friends on the way to their destination. But what appears to be a predictable horror story quickly turns on its head when Heather and her friends go to inhumane lengths to secure their freedom. And if a bunch of friends resorting to gruesome tactics for a chance at survival doesn’t pique your interest, Perverse is chock full of wild twists that will keep even the most discerning reader on their toes until the very end.

The Murders of Molly Southborne by Tade Thompson

Poor Molly has watched herself die for so many years. Each time Molly bleeds, the spilt blood morphs into a new doppelganger of hers that is determined to kill her. Now, Molly must either find a way to end this twisted cycle or die at the hands of one of her replicas while grappling with the terrifying question of whether she is the real Molly or a mere replica of herself. 

Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda

Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots is a collection of twelve short stories that unfurl against the backdrop of a reimagined Lagos. The stories feature a motley crew of characters who must wrest control of their destinies from ancestral curses. Ghostroots is a melting pot of horror, thriller, and fantasy, that promises to leave readers clutching their pearls—and blankets!

Choose Your Own Summer Reading Journey

Posted on by Jo Lou

It’s the height of summer, the sun is scorching and the air is thick with anticipation. Need some fun plans? We’re taking you on an adventure across the world! Whether you’re lounging by the pool or sunbathing on the beach, you get to choose your own reading journey. Check out our personalized map—there’s a book for every occasion.

Click to enlarge

Would you rather…

Pick up a beach read laced with existential dread: The Guest by Emma Cline

Lounge poolside and imagine you’re a member of the 1%: Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

After lounging in the pool, do you…

Have a Hot Girl Summer in New York City: Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados 

Venture into the woods: Girl Country by Jacqueline Vogtman

After reading on the beach, would you rather soak up the sun in…

Hawaii: Hula by Jasmin Iolani Hakes

Japan: Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce

When visiting New York, the best Big Apple activity is…

Exploring art in a museum: Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson

Hiding in the library: How Can I Help You by Laura Sims

In the woods, you like your outdoors with a shot of…

Terror: At the Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich

Animal encounters: Open Throat by Henry Hoke

On your trip to Hawaii, would you rather…

Attend a music festival: Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fall in lust at an artist retreat: Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

While you’re in Japan, you find yourself…

Celebrating a wedding: Direct Sunlight by Christine Sneed

Mourning at a funeral: New Animal by Ella Baxter

If You Give the Job Your Heart and Soul, You Might Lose Both

Posted on by EL Assistant2

At the start of Ben Purkert’s debut novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, the protagonist Seth’s copywriting campaign goes viral. It feels enough like success that Seth begins to earnestly refer to himself as an “oracle” and rewatches the resulting ad routinely, treating it like a pump that continues to inflate his already buoyant ego. His ballooning sense of self-confidence only bursts when he’s fired from his job. Without being able to lose himself in the comfort of corporate speak or the sureness in identity that a job at RazorBeat has granted him, Seth begins to spiral out of control, turning to women, to substances, to words, and to religion in an attempt to find meaning, without ever really knowing—or seeing—himself for who he truly is. 

With a poet’s incisive language and humor that delightfully punctures Seth’s narration of his own life, Purkert offers a deeply felt, compelling portrayal of the ways that toxic masculinity pervades in capitalist spaces, and asks questions like: How much of our identities are tied to our work? Is true reformation possible, and what happens to our selves when attempts at healing go awry? Where do we find meaning in our lives?

I talked over Zoom with Purkert about toxic masculinity, fictionalizing his copywriting job, how capitalism intersects with making art, and what true redemption might look like. 

Jacqueline Alnes: I feel like we have to start with Seth. At the start of the novel he is overconfident, entitled, self-centered, and he thrives in the corporate copywriting world, in part because of those traits. How did he take shape and what did you learn from writing from his perspective?

Ben Purkert: I’ve always been attracted to the absurd character who has an over-inflated sense of self. I think part of why I go to fiction is because I want to spend time with someone who is a little ridiculous, who doesn’t see themselves entirely clearly. It’s funny, you say that Seth thrives in the corporate environment but, because it’s in the first person, I think it’s an open question. Is Seth the wunderkind that he thinks he is? Or is he sort of a fuck-up from the start? We don’t really know. I’m excited to think that different readers can land on a different answer there. Was this a fall from grace or was there never really any branch to begin with? 

JA: I should clarify that by “thrive in the corporate world,” he definitely thinks he’s thriving. Do I think he is? I don’t know. 

BP: Having worked in advertising, thinking you’re thriving in the business world is a huge part of thriving in the business world. Do you watch Succession? 

JA: Oh my god, yes.

BP: I don’t want to draw a comparison because Seth is his own character and Kendall Roy is his own character, but watching Succession, one of the things I was interested in was like, is Kendall terrible at this? Or is he sometimes actually really good at it? It seems like when Kendall believes his own shit, that meaningfully impacts his performance for the better. Faking it until you make it is an alarmingly large part of the gig, I think.

JA: I think it’s also where you get a front row seat to the ways that toxic masculinity and capitalism are best pals, in some sense. The foil of Josie—who is a woman in the workplace and has to negotiate herself, her body, the way she pitches ideas entirely differently—to Seth is interesting.

BP: When I worked in branding as a copywriter, it felt like there were two camps. There were the people who thought it was bullshit and then there were the people who were deeply invested in the work. It’s not as if one did better at the job than the other. Josie, I think, realizes more than Seth ever could that we’re all playing a game here. Brands don’t really change the world. They don’t even necessarily change the product; they’re just sort of a shell. Her awareness arguably frees her up to be better at the job, versus someone like Seth who really buys in that what he’s doing matters. When it all goes south for him, it’s more crushing. 

JA: I love the way that you work that line of believing in something versus not, especially related to language. I felt like at some points you were toying with the idea that language is this optical illusion. Sometimes we can believe in it and then in other moments you skewer that when a character realizes it’s bullshit. I know you worked as a copywriter and are a poet, so I wondered what you thought about related to language within the form of this novel? 

BP: Being a copywriter and being a creative writer are almost identical on a surface level. A tagline assignment is the best poetry prompt you could ever ask for. In three to six words, create a line that immediately evokes emotion in people, that has a whole bunch of double meanings. That’s a great prompt to give a creative writing class. But it misses something essential, which is the heart, the soul, the art. At the end of the day, I think of a line of copywriting as a kind of soulless poetry. I don’t want to disrespect or dishonor the work of copywriting; I have great respect for people who have a far greater talent than I do for it, and I think it can be a really meaningful, rewarding career for a lot of folks—but for me, it felt awfully dangerous. It took all the things I loved about poetry and it stripped them of the essential thing. 

When I see an ad on TV or when I’m on the bus and I see a tagline, I love working the math backward and thinking about the creative brief that led to it or what competitor they are trying to go after. In The Men Can’t Be Saved, I talk about “i’m lovin’ it,” the McDonald’s tagline, and the lack of capitalization of that “i”––I talk about it for a paragraph, but I would love to write an entire thing about it. It’s so fascinating to me. Who are they trying to appeal to, with that informality? It’s interesting the face that a brand will wear, as if a teenager in a boardroom came up with it. It’s almost surely some sixty-year-old white guy who came up with that line, not native to his voice at all. And what are the ethical implications of a brand that tries to talk like someone that they’re not? 

JA: I never thought about the parallels between poetry and copywriting before. Do you think some of the difference comes from the fact that copywriting is for something outside of you whereas poetry is for you or of you? It seems like there’s an external measure of worth in copywriting, whereas poetry seems like it might come from more of an internal measure of beauty?

BP: I think so. The desire to make good art in copywriting can be a legitimate goal, but it absolutely is secondary to the primary goal, which is to sell more product. When you write a poem, who knows where that impulse comes from? That mystery is sort of the poeminess of the poem, in my opinion.

Copywriting took all the things I loved about poetry and it stripped them of the essential thing.

I think, and this could get us off on a major tangent, but the line is blurred when you’re talking about art on commission. The mayor’s office asks the poet laureate to write a haiku commemorating the new gazebo in town. Where does that fall? I think that’s an interesting question I haven’t quite answered, but I also don’t have a lot of mayors commissioning me to write shit so thankfully I haven’t had to wrestle with the complications or questions around some of that. I do think part of the joy of art and of creative writing, at least for me, is that it’s not in service of a product or a campaign. It is its own thing. 

JA: While reading, big layoffs happened at media corporations and I was thinking about how, when people don’t have jobs that allow for creative thinking or safety, then what happens to our art, our thinking, and our identity? We are in these piecemeal systems where people are trying to sell scraps of art or writing for money. That too affects Seth in some fundamental way.

BP: I started working as a copywriter in 2007. Months into the job, the recession hit. Advertising, branding, marketing, these industries just got killed. Theirs were often the first budgets slashed. I can remember coming into work and it was like oh, Joe is gone. Or, Kathleen they flipped to freelance. It was a really bleak and painful time. It shaped my worldview of the whole industry, and I think it comes across in the book. But then, for many years, the industry rebounded strongly. I even began to wonder, Are people going to be able to relate to layoffs or is the whole premise of the book going to feel dated? And then, of course, we arrived in an economic downturn, because all of this stuff is cyclical. 

I started writing the book almost a decade ago. It was pre-Trump presidency, pre-MeToo, and so one of the things that’s been interesting for me to see is how the book has a lot to say about both of those things, even though it pre-dates them. It’s wild how a novel or a poem or a play arrives in a moment outside of itself, but then is asked to speak to that moment and often has really valuable things to say. 

JA: The title of this book, The Men Can’t Be Saved, obviously hints at this idea of redemption, and we see different characters reach for things—substances, religion, family—in order to find relief from their pain, though these attempts rarely lead to any meaningful reckoning with reality. What did you think about the idea of “saving” when you were writing, or what came up around the idea of redemption for you? 

BP: I think we are living in a moment where it’s understood that toxic masculinity exists and that toxic men exist. Then the question becomes well, what do we do with that? Where do we go from there? What do we deem redeemable versus what is not redeemable? What does redemption look like? What does rehabilitation look like? What does reparation look like? I’m interested in these questions, both in terms of men writ large but also individual men who make bad choices.

If you were able to see yourself more clearly, how might you change? How might you grow? How might you be kinder to others and to yourself?

Specifically on the point of salvation, I come from an interfaith household. My mom is Jewish, as am I. My father, on the other hand, is Catholic. On Saturday, when I was growing up, my mom would go to synagogue; then, on Sunday, my dad would go to church. And it was an interesting experience to grow up in that kind of environment, where two parents are pursuing two different spiritual existences. It made me think a lot about the desire for salvation, in all its forms.

When I began writing the book, I knew it was a workplace novel about the advertising and branding world, its hypocrisies and its joys and its messes. But then it very much turned into a novel about practicing the Jewish faith and what it means to seek redemption. The Men Can’t Be Saved felt like the right handle to encompass both. 

JA: In thinking about religion, to me, it can sometimes seem like relief from the world we’re living in. There is a set of rules. There is language you can lean on. Those religious parts made me think a lot about where we derive our meaning from, especially when our work might not allow for meaning or when we realize that the things we thought had meaning are actually hollow. What happens then? 

BP: Well, brands are interesting in that regard, because they’re hollow by definition. If you think about what a brand literally is, it’s a label. It’s an exterior mark. It lives on the surface and no deeper. And if the work of branding takes place on that same plane,  faith is a much deeper thing, or at least we hope it is. It certainly claims to be.

JA: What will you carry with you after writing this book? 

BP: I learned a lot from my main character. Seth is someone who cannot see himself; that’s both the tragedy of him and the comedy of him. And, in the process of writing Seth, I began to ask myself: Okay, Ben, what do you maybe not see about yourself? What are you willfully blind to? If you were able to see yourself more clearly, how might you change? How might you grow? How might you be kinder to others and to yourself? Those are questions that continue to sit with me long after the novel’s last page.