In response to the ongoing public criticism, targeted harassment, and impugning of my character that I endured during my tenure on the White House Infestation Response Team, I feel it is time for me to tell my side of the story. Not just for myself, but to ensure that history is recorded accurately. First, let me just say that I heard your very loud and very vocal complaints during the crisis. While I disagree that I am the buffoon partisan the media made me out to be, I empathize with, and share, your profound disappointment with the governmental response overall. We have all lost so much collectively, but this doesn’t make our grief any less, individually. That said, I believe corrections to the permanent record must be made: it’s not my “fault” a horde of killer beetles slowly murdered (almost!) everyone.
First: contrary to the conspiracy theories, I am not a physician nor some sort of “mad scientist” who created the killer bugs in a lab, as some pundits implied. The “Dr.” in my title refers to my degree in Sociology, earned by the submission of my dissertation, “Mass Denialism in the USA.” Before inexplicably being made a scapegoat and fodder for conspiracies, I was initially brought on for a brief stint as a public-facing advisor at the National Institutes of Health because what I am is an expert on what you do: nihilistically ignoring reality.
Second: for the record, my name and title are Dr. Anthony Dumas, not “Dr. Dumbass,” contrary to those t-shirts you made (ha, ha, witty!). Ironically, the opposite was true. You were the dumbasses. That’s right. The whole time, it was you. Please allow me to explain.
Could we have stopped them before they bred into an army and grew larger than grizzly bears? Obviously, yes! But sadly, I failed in my effort to get many of you to accept that this “impossible” and “absurd” threat of “death by ladybug” was real—on that we can agree. I confess, I did not foresee that many of you would be obstinate enough to cling to your denial right up until you were in one’s digestive tract. Admittedly, I never even dreamed people would leave their homes during the lockdown because, as one half-eaten person managed to whisper before the venom kicked in, “Holy shit, I was so fucking bored.” In hindsight, clearly, this was a failure of imagination, on my part. Specifically, to grasp the capacity for nihilistic denialism, on yours.
In the earliest stages of their arrival, those innocent days when the first shaky, gory videos of people screaming as they were eaten alive began appearing across social media, I must admit that I actually found it fascinating (the phenomenon, not the bloodcurdling screams). I even began a scholarly paper on the subject. My thesis: We, contemporary Americans, are citizens of a nation that only experienced war as an invader. Off in the distance, filtered through competing partisan narratives, we could decide our military shit shows were going “swimmingly” just by squinting our eyes, with little to no effect on the majority of Americans’ lives. Sort of like how white Americans have always dealt with our society’s overwhelming evidence of systemic racism. Over time, we began to believe nothing could affect us if we simply chose to ignore it. Not famine. Not war. Not growing inequality. And certainly not an alien invasion of 300-pound bulletproof beetles with razor-sharp wings and microwave eyes.
My sole motivation on the Response Team was to convince you, the public, that you simply can’t ignore a human-eating predator that can detect carbon dioxide exhalation from three miles away. Also—and let this be my third point—”carbon dioxide exhalation” is not a “myth meant to suppress our freedoms” as the very ill-fated Mouth Breathers movement theorized.
When our former POTUS chose this precarious historical moment to give a public address to a packed crowd live at Fenway Park, was it not I who broke the chain of command to warn you? After that ended predictably in a writhing crimson sea of ripped flesh, I’d hoped the “Boston Buffet” would be a turning point. But, no. “False flag!” partisan networks decried, even as the familiar sounds of machine gun fire and screams could be heard off camera.
Alas, I accept that here I preach to the converted. Because if you’re still reading this letter, I know this about you: you already agree with me. Those who don’t stopped reading in the first paragraph, lest their bubble be pierced like their bodies will soon be. But I need you, the ones I fought for (as opposed to those other troglodytes), to know how hard I am still working. How hard it was for me to find a functioning computer, printer, and photocopier, and then carry these letters for miles, blanketing the streets with copies identical to this one.
Please take heart, my fellow devotees of reality. In the end, we finally beat climate change, xenophobia, inequality, mass incarceration, and that looming theocratic ethnonationalism we were all so worried about. So, in that regard, I guess you could say we kinda won, right? And we did it all without fully acknowledging the existence of any of that, as is the way of our people. Ultimately, the only cost was everything.
“Far below, where the secret rivers of the world flow, appeared a word that stank of death, shit, semen prostitution, the night, the cold, bribery, blood and jail, of misery and neglect. A word sharp as a knife, grime-encrusted and wounded. A word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty, of the acts that made us legendary, of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities.”
—From “Author’s Note: The Word Travesti” in Bad Girls
Profoundly influenced by science fiction, magical realism and the absurd, Bad Girls (published by Other Press and translated by Kit Maude) narrates the stories of a group of travestis working the night at the Sarmiento Park to earn their coins. After being rejected by her parents and barred from her small town, our narrator, Camila, arrives in Córdoba to study at a University. One night she shyly approaches the group of imposing travestis working the Sarmiento Park and is immediately welcomed to the herd of luminous night creatures.
Led by Tía Encarna—a spectacular Spanish travesti, 178 years old, who finds a baby in a ditch and immediately adopts him as her own singing lullabies and attaching him to her breasts—Bad Girls explores the lives of these herd of dazzling travestis as they meet the world’s unforgiving violence one stiletto at a time.
To say that I was obsessed with Bad Girls from day uno when I first read it back in 2021 in its original Spanish is a major understatement. As it is also an understatement to describe Sosa Villada’s prose as mesmerizing, raw and brilliant. The fierceness of this book is in its unapologetic embrace of travesti poetics. By which I mean, an aesthetic that drips of the oral rhythms swept up from the dark streets of Córdoba into perfect streams of poetic prose. Sosa Villada’s storytelling is guttural, tender, humorous and punk. It explores what she calls, “travesti grammar”: a crossing of tenses, a riveting self-absorption, a shift in point of view that falls into a fairytale voice.
Julián Delgado Lopera: In the author’s note that opens the book, which is also a gorgeous poetic rumination on the word “travesti,” you talk about how “travesti” has been stripped away from its chaos, “hygienized” with words like “trans woman.” How this imposing of Western queer theory has no relevance to poor Latin American travestis working the streets. The note which appears in the English translation doesn’t appear in the original book in Spanish. Why?
Camila Sosa Villada: Other Press specifically asked for that clarification. I guess because of the political correctness that exists in the U.S and the lack of knowledge about this word that sounds derogatory. Also, when editions of the book were published in other Latin American countries I was asked to change “travesti” for “trans.” So, from my illiteracy, I wrote a short note on what I think that word implies inside Bad Girls, but also during a time in which travestis are disappearing.
JDL: How did you feel about having to include the author note?
CSV: It gave me the opportunity to write something that I had already been saying in some interviews and that I had been clarifying to activists here in Argentina and in other places in the world. The fact that I think using the conjunction “trans-woman” says way less than the word “travesti” in economic and historic terms in Latin America.
JDL: Tía Encarna is really loved by readers and calls a lot of attention on the page. I love that she is this imposing matron beating up johns in stilettos, scolding the girls and teaching them the realness of being a travesti. Her house is this heaven to the travestis from the park. Can you talk about this “mother” trope of Tía Encarna in the book?
CSV: The narrator does say many times “our mother” referring to Tía Encarna. “Mother” is a word that activates something really quick in the reader’s imaginary. To call Tía Encarna “mother” and speak about a “travesti family” is something that triggers, que prende. It’s an easy answer to a very complex organization that these travestis have at this time, specially because most of them are orphans or are really far away from their own mothers. So yes, Tía Encarna works as a maternal anchor. Pero fíjate that when the baby arrives she distances herself from all the travestis and she wants to live solely for that kid.
That organization of travestis is more like the organization of a mafia cell joining forces when they have enemies in common after them: the police or violent clients or the freezing night or, in this case, the occasion of finding a lost baby in the Sarmiento park. Una alianza. A herd. I think the word “family” falls short because they can betray each other, they can leave, they can come back. Calling Tía Encarna a “mother” is to reduce her complexity because it is not with a motherly vocation that Tía Encarna helps other travestis that are in greater need that her… because it is not only mothers that are able to feel piety, generosity, when others have fallen in disgrace.
JDL: It is also an organization not formed through biological ties, which is usually how these strong “familial” connections happen, but attachments through a shared experience and the circumstances in which they find themselves.
CSV: It is something that also has to do with the time period in which the Tía Encarna’s story is being told, the year 2000. During this time, there was no other way of having attachments other than in that style of connection. All of the travestis I met didn’t have families. They were thrown out or banished from their homes, or their families were very far away in other countries or provinces, so it is the only possible connection that we had. We were all daughters of no one.
JDL: Our narrator, Camila, sees the world’s dark secrets revealed by the night. You’ve spoken before about the “privilege” of Camila’s point of view, her eye on the world’s truth and nakedness. Can you talk about that specific point of view on the world that Camila has?
CSV: Something inherited from science-fiction. An intuitive power that Camila has that allows her to see people as they really are and that others don’t have so they get lost. I understood that the title “Bad Girls” left something very evident regarding a question I was always asking myself, “who are the bad girls?”
We were all daughters of no one.
One day after three years of working very closely with a colleague at the Difunta Correa Cabaret, he distanced himself from me saying that I was “bad.” So while I was writing this book I kept coming back to this question, “what does it mean to be bad?” because I had heard that many times: travestis are bad. It is true that the travestis I met had less patience, were angry at times, held grudges that they couldn’t resolve, many were dangerous, of course, and you couldn’t get close to them. It reminded me when in science fiction movies people that tame the dragons need to understand the protocol to approach the dragon, where to look, the body language, what not to look, some of that was present when I was young and hanged around travestis on the street.
Travestis are seen in a very specific “bad girls” way but once you go into that travesti world you realize there’s abundance of gentleness, solidarity, complicity that “good people” don’t have. “Good people” are seen as those who get married, have families, and then you find out that 80% of abused children in Latin America are abused inside their homes. That the ones that are murdering their wives are married men with children, are the so called “good people”. Nobody would dare say that a man who wakes up at 6am to go work at a factory, a man that has a few drinks with his friends and comes home to his wife, nobody would dare say is a “bad person.” People say a “faggot” is a bad person. The faggot that wakes up at 3pm to go mess around and hook up with men at a dark park in the middle of the night. When I decided the title “Bad Girls” I needed to show what do these bad girls see? Why are they bad? Why are they stealing from their johns? Why are they fighting each other with so much violence? And this is the power that Camila, the narrator, has to undress those that are always perceived as the “good ones.” The good sons of good families that play sports every weekend, how can those good boys be bad?
JDL: Why does the book take place primarily at night?
CSV: It’s connected to Camila’s eye and her ability to see people as they are. The worse killings and hunting in nature happen at night. It is rare that killings happen during the day. These travestis are awake when everyone is asleep, so they see things, they see exactly how people are. Because most everyone is asleep and those who are out at night are in search of their preys. The day doesn’t admit those nightly creatures.
JDL: Throughout the novel we see a carousel of travestis entering the narrative for a brief moment, a few pages, and then disappearing. Like an archive of the Sarmiento park. A few characters remain with us from start to finish like Tía Encarna and María the Mute, the characters that are part of Tía Encarna’s house, but most of the characters are with us for only a brief period of a few pages.
Travestis are seen in a specific ‘bad girl’ way but once you go into that world there’s abundance of gentleness, solidarity, that ‘good people’ don’t have.
CSV: I was very attentive to what I remember regarding the instability of travestis in the world: you could see her for a whole month every night and then boom she would disappear, and you’d find out that she was dead or was in Italy. From one day to the next. It was like that. There were some travestis that survived and were in the park for much longer. But the others would enter the park world with the logic of a show: perform their number as part of this travesti world. They would appear, would make a big mistake—beating someone up, stealing—and then they would disappear. I also do that: appear with the logic of a bank robbery or of a spontaneous choreography on the street.
JDL: How do you live writing?
CSV: With plenty of solitude. That is the reason why I have been living alone for the past 23 years. I don’t explain myself to no one. I can wake up at 3 am, make myself café con leche and start writing. I can write anywhere, I don’t have to be in a specific place. Writing is something you can’t share with anyone. Almost all professions serve to flirt, to meet people for a conversation in an airplane or a coffee shop or a date. But what are you going to say? “Oh I’m writing a story about a travesti that finds a baby in a ditch and she takes him to live with her in a house full of travestis”. Come on. Eso no se puede contar!
JDL: How do you feel about the book’s incredible success?
CSV: I feel great in economic terms. The success is economic. Specially for a girl like me, the success is always economic. I am not interested in the symbolic, all that can be lost in one moment. Money you can smell it, you can turn it into something else… there’s nothing more science fiction than money.
JDL: How has been the book received by other travestis?
CSV: With so much love and pride. It is deeply moving. They always have warm words for me and I really do not know how to give back all that love. They connect immediately and tell me, “it was exactly like that!” or “how lucky that there’s someone being able to speak it”. And I understand the deal about history always written by those who win, so that there is some peace that it is one of us, one of the travestis, who is writing about how we lived those 20 years ago. It also worries me. Because I have to be lucid when I talk, trying always to be clear about my position of privilege. There’s a sense of responsibility and I never wanted to be in this position of having to be “correct,” not politically correct, but correct with myself and the travestis. Specially with a particular type of travesti, not with the whole LGBT community, but with the travestis that I describe in the author’s note, with that type of travesti experience that has nothing to do with identity. It is not something that is built through language but that is constructed through experience. The travestis are always present when I have to respond.
JDL: I want to go back to this idea of the “hygienization” of trans representation in all the media, including literature. You and I have talked extensively about the stripping away of the chaos, the grime, stripping away a very specific experiential story from the “travesti” and the “trans” and homogenizing it, packaging it in a way that’s more palatable. I know you really love movies like “Tangerine” and T.V. shows like “La Veneno” precisely because that travesti chaos is embraced but they remain a niche and not the generally “accepted” trans narrative. Why?
Travestis are not be theorized about or investigated, travestis are to be invented, dreamed of.
CSV: There’s something that I still don’t understand: travestis were here before. We were here before the Spanish conquest. I don’t understand why now we have to ask for permission to exist, to name our truth, to go into a restaurant, a library, a movie theatre. When did travestis lose our sense of ancestry? In my newly published short story collection “Soy Una Tonta Por Quererte” (I’m a Fool to Want You) there’s a story about Cotita de la Encarnación which we’re told is one of the first travestis burned at the stake by the Spanish inquisition in Mexico. So I’m in awe that we still have to be asking for permission to talk about ourselves however we want when we have the proof of our existence written in the Treaty of the Indies. It really blows my mind. We were here before.
JDL: Why do you think that most of the English coverage of your book has centered around “Trans activism”, the contribution of the book to the “trans movement” instead of focusing on the literary quality, the storytelling masterpiece, you have created?
CSV: With my very limited English I could tell that’s how people in the U.S. have been covering Bad Girls. It speaks to the transphobia of an entire society. Not providing a space to the writing of a travesti. As if my obligation is limited to giving testimony and militant activism. It’s a price that I am not here to pay. While the money is coming in they can say whatever they want but people cannot forget that there is an internalized transphobia in the entire society, in all the structures of U.S culture, that presupposes that travestis can only give testimony of our experience, that we don’t have the right to write fiction.
JDL: A few times in the novel Camila points us to the unknown saying things like “that which cannot be explained’ in reference to the travesti existence. Can you speak to this unknown and “that which cannot be explained”?
CSV: There’s no language to explain the travesti experience. The white and European queer theorists have created this “trans” language, but it is something that cannot be explained. How can we discuss an experience? To explain what a travesti is we would have to tell the story of every single travesti born in this world throughout time. Because there is no other way of explaining it but through experience. What it meant to live in a country in which you were perceived as a very dangerous man dressed as a woman, a vector of sexually transmitted diseases, earning your coin in exchange for sex. The only way to explain this is through story. And then million other words appear around this experience such as class, skin color, what does each travesti have to lose, what things did I have to lose. It is rare that travestis have something to earn, we didn’t have anything to win back then. It was all loss. We left our homes, we didn’t see our parents, our parents hated us, we weren’t allowed in certain places, we walked the streets in fear, we were constantly arrested, etc, etc, what did we gain in all that? Nothing. All of that cannot be explained. The only way of explaining it is by telling the story. It wasn’t an issue of identity. I think “identity” is such a overused topic.
In the cover of the Spanish version of Bad Girls two travestis ride a horse. That photo belongs to the archive of trans memory here in Argentina. That archive of trans memory collects photos of travestis since the beginning of photography until today. I believe that it is one of the most stunning visual projects at this time. During an exhibition the folks from the trans archives said, the photos that appear inside of homes were taken in Argentina. The ones in plazas, in beaches, in forests are in Europe because here in Argentina travestis couldn’t be outside during the daytime. Inevitably after hearing something like this you start building a story in your head, one that is not narrated by a queer theorist. You are not thinking, trans are those who do this and that… one that is not comfortable with their gender, etc, etc.. That is a total oversimplification of a much more complex equation that does not admit language. That is why it has been so challenging for political and cultural forces to grapple with us, understand us. Until they didn’t succeed in this hygienization of our experience calling us “trans women” they couldn’t do much else with us but consume our bodies. We are a dimension that does not participate in language, that is deprived of language in the way that we understand language. So I can write a story, but that writing has to be understood as a narration of experience not of identity.
There are not a lot of travestis left, the older ones are dying. I am part of the generation that had to go through that awful world, a world without a god. Which is why in Bad Girls I vindicate that it is fiction and that it is my right to speak using the terms I use. I write fiction because there is no other way to speak about the travesti experience. There’s this María Felix quote that goes something like this “you cannot investigate an actress, you invent an actress, an actress is a dream” and that is how travestis are: travestis are not be theorized about or investigated, travestis are to be invented, dreamed of.
My mother has read hundreds of books aloud to me.The titles changed over the course of my childhood—as my brother and I graduated from picture books to doorstopper paperbacks, fantasy to historical fiction, middle grade to angsty young adult novels—but we could always count on our mom to do one thing: cry if a fictional mother went missing. If she began to suspect that a mother was going to die, disappear, or otherwise become separated from her children, she would choke up, stop reading, and flip to the back of the book to see if the characters would be reunited in the end.
The crying drove me and my brother absolutely nuts. “It’s just a story,” we would inform our mother impatiently. We made faces and covered our eyes and sometimes rolled on the ground to indicate the scorn we felt for behavior this corny. If the insult cheugy had existed in the early 2000s, we would have leveled it at her.
This scene played out in my bedroom many, many times because many, many books for young readers rely on a mother’s disappearance to kickstart the plot. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, whose conventions inform so much of modern literature, often contrast an absent, kind mother with a present, evil stepmother. In Harry Potter, the Chosen One’s mother (and, in all fairness, his father) die within paragraphs of the series’ beginning. The Dear America novels, a beloved series of fictional journals “authored” by teenage girls from different historical eras, sentence mothers to occasionally cartoonish fates: In Seeds of Hope, a rogue wave literally drags the protagonist’s mother off the deck of a ship while mysteriously sparing the rest of the family. Even “feminist” alternatives to traditional fairy tales, like Ella Enchanted, frequently dispatch mothers so that child protagonists can get on with their adventures unimpeded.
Mothers, these stories tell us, are not particularly important. In fact, they say, it’s much easier for a plucky young heroine to achieve independence, embark on a journey of self-discovery, and meet the inevitable prince without a mother nagging them to wear a jacket or get home for dinner. For girls especially, these stories suggest that their value as protagonists has a time limit. If Cinderella’s rags-to-riches tale is made possible by her mother’s death, what will happen to her once she has her own children?
The literary obsession with missing mothers made little sense in the context of my own life: I was so fully secure in my mother’s presence that I could blithely make fun of her for taking fictional tragedies seriously,and yet somehow, I was still growing up, taking charge of my life, navigating my own modest adventures. But no matter how much I insisted that these stories were “just” fiction, I was absorbing their lessons. In my first fumbling short stories, the protagonists were, as a matter of course, motherless.
I thought back to these children’s books while reading Molly Lynch’s debut novel, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman. The novel follows Ada, a young mother existentially preoccupied with the climate crisis and the dangers it poses to her son’s future. One night, Ada goes missing without a trace; her family soon learns that mothers around the world, many with the same concerns as Ada, have vanished from their homes. Part of a small vanguard of novels interrogating the missing mother trope, Forbidden Territory treats its missing mother not as an accessory to another person’s story, but as a literary symptom of the broader problem of parenting during a period of social and ecological decay. By chronicling Ada’s disappearance and return, Lynch invites readers to imagine the stories we could tell if we weren’t so bound to the missing mother.
Lynch invites readers to imagine the stories we could tell if we weren’t so bound to the missing mother.
The missing mother trope predates the literature of my childhood, and the era of the Brothers Grimm, by a long shot. The Chinese folktale “Ye Xian,” which dates back to the ninth century, tells a “Cinderella”-like story in which a young heroine has to make her way in the world without her mother. In the Western tradition, novels like The History of Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, and Oliver Twist rely on dead or absent mothers. Missing mothers are common in other mediums, as well: In TheAtlantic, Sarah Boxer cataloged animated movies that kill off their protagonists’ mothers in order to make way for father-child adventure stories. (Spoiler: It’s basically all of them.)
There are many possible reasons for the missing mother’s enduring power. Folklore scholar Marina Warner suggests that for much of history, the trope was at least partly grounded in reality, given that high maternal mortality rates meant that many children grew up without mothers. Others have offered more Freudian justifications. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the fairy tale convention of juxtaposing a “good” mother and “wicked” stepmother both preserves the idea of an “all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good,” and “permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother.” If a mother is absent, in other words, her inevitable flaws can’t jeopardize our myths about ideal motherhood.
That said, if we are first encountering these myths in children’s literature, writers are increasingly subverting them in the territory of adult fiction. The past decade has seen a proliferation of novels about about “bad” mothers. Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery, Yüko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, and pretty much every sentence Elena Ferrante has ever written focus on the pressures of parenting in societies that fetishize motherhood without guaranteeing actual mothers dignity or support. Yet fewer novels confront the missing mother trope head on, among them Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere and Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works, and in imagining what would happen if mothers went missing en masse, Forbidden Territory feels entirely fresh.
Ada, the novel’s protagonist, lives in Ann Arbor with her history professor husband Danny, and six-year-old son Gilles. A writer and teacher, Ada holds a deep reverence for the natural world, collecting “special rocks” and stitching owl feathers into her son’s clothes as protective talismans. By most metrics, she lives a comfortable life: She has a loving family, a safe home, and a steady job in academia.
The past decade has seen a proliferation of novels about about ‘bad’ mothers.
Still, Ada spends her days in a fog of anxiety. A compulsive newshound, she gravitates toward ominous stories about deteriorating civil society, far-right extremism, and, especially, climate change. News of “garbage islands” and polluted air make it impossible for her to envision a safe future for Gilles: In her worst moments, she imagines him struggling to survive in an apocalyptic landscape of “burning forests” and “filthy” seas. As she puts her son to bed, she wonders if her instinct to comfort him is misguided and thinks to herself, “Shouldn’t she say, The water is poisoned. The forests are on fire. Genocide and torture are normal. When you grow up you might need to wear an oxygen mask.” When she’s unable to process the onslaught of drastic stories, she comforts herself with a visit to the only patch of unviolated nature available to her, a small strip of forest behind Gilles’ school.
Then, on the radio, Ada starts to hear stories about local mothers disappearing, walking out of their lives without leaving a trace of their whereabouts. Just as she begins to suspect that the disappearances are connected, she vanishes as well, leaving Gilles searching the house and Danny calling friends in a futile attempt to track her down.
If Forbidden Territory adhered to the conventions of the novels I grew up reading, Ada’s disappearance might have cleared the way for Danny and Gilles to set off on their own adventure or execute a daring rescue mission. Instead, family life grinds to a halt in Ada’s absence: Danny can barely eat or mark the passing days, and Gilles asks the same questions about his mother’s whereabouts over and over again. Combing through Ada’s computer search history and contacting the families of other missing mothers, Danny attempts to aid the police with his own sleuthing. But neither he nor the cops make any useful discoveries.
Moreover, Ada’s disappearance is not an isolated incident but rather part of a larger trend. By the time Ada goes missing, enough mothers have met the same fate that the FBI is investigating the “crisis” in motherhood. And while Danny is unable to do much for his wife, he does notice that many of the disappearing women shared Ada’s deep anxiety about the future. The husband of a mother who went missing shortly before Ada, for example, tells Danny that his wife could not stop talking about “the cruelties of the world.”
While Lynch never reveals where the mothers go or how they get there, she hints at the cause of the disappearances by way of the public response to the crisis. Through the historians who quickly posit connections between the missing mothers and mass disappearances during other periods of extreme social transformation, like the Industrial Revolution, she suggests that, like Ada, the other mothers have walked out of the known world because they cannot imagine how their children will inhabit it. Meanwhile, predictably misogynist backlash ensues. A senator calls on the public to fight “the ideologies that he said were causing women to betray their children.” In some countries, groups of vigilante men begin to accost women walking alone, intimidating them in the name of keeping them in their rightful places at home. Given that missing mothers in literature are so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, the rancor that so quickly develops over these “real” disappearances reads like an authorial nudge. Perhaps these men, who have presumably enjoyed their fair share of fairytales and movies about bootstrapping orphans, are angry because the women in their own lives seem to be disappearing not in service of someone else’s story but for their own inscrutable reasons.
Eventually, Lynch unveils another—the biggest—difference between Ada and the missing literary mothers who precede her. When Ada returns home of her own accord, she has no idea where she’s been. The only thing she can recall from her weeks-long absence is a mysterious and unexpectedly pleasant sensation of merging with the trees, as if she’d become one with the forest that so beguiled her. Ada’s belief that she enjoyed herself while her family went frantic with worry feels so socially unacceptable that she can barely express it to Danny. And that confused happiness is what makes Forbidden Territory so subversive: By understanding her disappearance as a kind of necessary retreat, rather than a banishment, Ada escapes not only her frightening world but the conventions of the stories long told about women like her. The question this novel asks is not how children can get along without their mothers, but what mothers can do when the project of parenting seems impossible. The answer Lynch provides? They can walk away—at least for a little while.
Now that I am a grown woman who cries during especially moving chewing gum commercials, I have more sympathy than I once did for my mother’s reading preferences. And I can also see that she was teaching me something by crying over all those literary mothers. Just as Ada cannot harden herself to the news around her, my mother was surprised each time a woman in one of my chapter books was separated from her children. Though she is nothing like Ada (and would consider the collecting of owl feathers an excellent way to contract avian flu), she refused to become inured to what others might dismiss as an unimportant but unalterable literary convention. I couldn’t have put that lesson into words at the time—partly because I was a child unacquainted with feminist literary criticism, and partly because we need new texts to imagine alternatives to the stories we take for granted—but all the same, it was an important one.If Forbidden Territory carries the fear of a world changing beyond repair, it also teaches us to question what came before.
In the novel’s final pages, Ada is driving home from a meeting with the FBI agent assigned to her case. She still doesn’t know what happened to her, but she has recovered enough to start talking about it. Speeding through the outskirts of Detroit, she encounters a twenty-first-century Valley of Ashes: a smoking, stinking landfill overflowing with rubbish. The dump is a literal manifestation of Ada’s fears about the future, and for a moment, she feels overwhelmed by the “layers of waste, plastics and greases, chemicals and particles of diapers” she imagines churning within the pit.
“For a brief moment she inhabited that heart,” Lynch writes, “and then she returned to her body, driving.” Ada ends the book laughing. One could read these last paragraphs cynically, as evidence that Ada has simply given up worrying about a future she can do little to change. But I like to think that her disappearance has taught her to confront her fears without letting them destroy her, to move through her days in this world without hardening herself to its flaws. I don’t know what that feels like. Perhaps I’d have to walk away from my life to find out.
In the climactic moment of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Toto the terrier moves aside the Technicolor-green curtain to reveal that the Wizard is a mere mortal, pulling and twisting at levers to create the illusion of a great, smoke-puffing god. Even before the big reveal, though, Dorothy and her friends are already disappointed with the Wizard. He had promised he’d get Dorothy back home, to Kansas, if she liquified the Wicked Witch of the West, and now he’s dawdling—yeah, maybe tomorrow, come back later, he says. Dorothy calls him out on his BS: “If you were really great and powerful,” she says, “you’d keep your promises.”
As a kid, I remember registering that the characterization of the exposed Wizard was complicated by him proceeding to explain his story, why he does what he does, why he’s a fraud. It was not the swift and simple unmasking of a villain as observed in Scooby-Doo—another bit of pop culture that young-me devoured. The story of the genius-villain in Oz was more adult-like because it gave him a motive, and was made complicated by the reasons he provided for what on its face was despicable behavior. I could see his point: that his lies kept a whole population happy. It involved ethics and all the stuff that seemed intriguing and like an introduction to thinking about others and the world in an exciting—because nuanced—way.
In my novel Big Shadow, a young and isolated woman starts paying visits to a man she views as an “established and professional artist,” at his East Village apartment. The narrator convinces herself that she stands a chance at becoming part of his world, that they’re equals. Maurice is a poet, a fixture of the former punk scene that flowered in New York in the mid-1970s. Now nearing 50, this villain-genius is not as grand and flame-throwing as the Wizard. He is not even overtly villainous, and definitely not a genius (though the descriptor is bandied about). As with Oz, it’s complicated. Judy, our inexperienced narrator, chooses to see the better parts of Maurice and their relationship.
What if Dorothy wanted to return to Kansas so badly, she drew the green curtain shut again, pushed what Toto had shown her out of her mind, and continued to wait at the foot of the floating green head of the Wizard until he delivered on his promise? “Since you’re really great and powerful, you’ll keep your promises” is a line of thought she could’ve comforted herself with. But I think an attendant thought would inevitably follow: how long can one cruise in a mode of self-deception, and is the cost of doing so worth the tenuous reward?
This reading list features a crew of questionable geniuses, part saviors, part villains, all due for exposure. The common thread is that they keep the wool over someone else’s eyes, and the smoke and mirrors of their genius-status has the power to greatly affect others. Sometimes that someone is our protagonist, sometimes that someone is us, the readers.
The Weak Spot follows a woman who arrives at a small, isolated town to start an apprenticeship at a pharmacy. From her first moments in the peculiar, fable-like locale, it becomes evident that her employer, the pharmacist August Malone, is a revered and elevated local god. The pharmacy employees and the whole town buzz around Malone. Townspeople seek his counsel; he has a Delphic oracle quality, it appears, and people spill their beans to him “as if at confession.” And yet when he runs for mayor, armed with the secrets of his constituents, a different side of him becomes apparent to the narrator. The Weak Spot is a portrait of power and manipulation rendered in a style so dreamy and suffused in moodiness that the story’s sinister elements might elude you on a first read, as if you’ve fallen victim to the soothing powers of that trickster genius yourself.
Wolff’s novel has a three-part, three-narrator structure with a central object that links the lives of the disparate narrators: the destruction of the sole existing copy of a literary genius’s manuscript. The first narrator is a woman who goes on a date with a literary critic. At the end of their rendezvous, she burns said manuscript, which the critic had in his possession for the purposes of writing a review. “Genius” is not a term I’ve imported into the plot. Max Lamas, the author of the lost manuscript, is unabashedly referred to as the genius of his age. The satirical notes are discernable. The novel brings up Michel Houellebecq in various contexts, sometimes as a competitor to Max, though Max is obsessed with the controversial French writer as well. The second narrator is Max himself, which grants us closer, and more horrific, insight into who he is. The final narrator is the granddaughter of one of Max’s lovers. She offers yet another lens through which to view—and judge—the super-revered man at the center of it all: Max, or is it Houellebecq, or perhaps it’s more generally the Male Genius Literary Writer who has held an annoyingly long tenure in the industry in which Wolff makes her art.
Indelicacy reads like a dark yet hopeful fable. From the start we get the sense that we are untethered to place or time; there’s no need for those sorts of details. The narrator is a cleaning woman at an art gallery, leading an austere life. With the beautifully uncomplicated unfolding of a fairy tale or magic illusion, she meets a man at the gallery and is suddenly married, Cinderella-like, coming to live at her new husband’s grand homestead, complete with a maid and a seeming freedom born from financial security. Yet very quickly we question this savior. Who is this prince who can whisk a poor woman into a new life from one page to the next? Tension arises from growing, subtle disappointments, the biggest being the narrator’s feelings that she is hindered from pursuing her dream of writing. The prince-husband is perhaps more of a Bluebeard—the anti-savior-supreme. Things in the castle are not as they seem, and for a long time the narrator doesn’t fully understand the extent of what is going on within the walls she inhabits. Indelicacy is a striking meditation on dreams, life’s callings, art, independence, and freedom. It is a novel uniquely conceived and captured.
But what if it is the first-person narrator herself who is convinced of her genius-status, in full-on megalomaniacal—and wholly unreliable—glory? In Cottrell’s darkly humorous, unexpectedly devastating novel, Helen, our narrator leaves New York City to visit her midwestern hometown to attend her brother’s funeral, announced suddenly after he takes his own life. Helen’s mind is peculiar—sometimes veering on absurd, her adoptive parents’ behavior so extreme and disturbing, a lot of the fun of the novel is trying to get a grip on reality, and better yet: letting go of that impulse and committing fully to Helen’s lens. As is often the case with people who have a weak grasp of the world, a lot of Helen’s attention is devoted to presenting her picture of herself to us, to control the image of herself, and this is tied to her occupation as a counsellor of troubled youth. Helen’s idea of her success as a shaper of young minds makes up some of the more amusing and disturbing moments in the novel. The dramatic irony hits peak-levels as Helen—who in her own mind is a savior to her students, the type of genius-pedagogue that has films made about them à la Dead Poets Society—recounts moments at work, in the classroom, where the reader can see the horrifying truth of the situation. And witnessing this allows the reader to meditate further on what the narrator’s disconnect from truth means in regard to other aspects of her life and upbringing.
The Shame follows Alma, a woman who decides to leave her family and home in Vermont and pursue a barely planned, tenuous new life in Brooklyn. The magnetic mountain to which the narrator is drawn is Celeste, whose life Alma has glimpsed through her social media posts (the platform is not named, though the posts have an Instagram-like feel). A significant part of the novel is focused on Alma’s growing immersion in Celeste’s life in her picture-perfect apartment—or rather “life” in quotation marks, as it is of course merely the life Celeste presents through the funhouse mirror that is social media. In the narrator’s mind, the woman is elevated to an ideal, a god, a new religion. Celeste’s mythology is sufficiently believable that Alma is able to leave behind her young children just to be with her—or, more likely, to be like her. The drive to New York, which encompasses the “present moment” of the novel, and the narrator’s time in the city, as she seeks to find and finally meet her savior, is full of tension. What will the meeting result in? What can a meeting with an ideal result in? Is Celeste a worthwhile savior? The novel leaves us asking why we idealize others when all signs point to there being reasons to suspect our impulse—what this says about us and our own condition.
My Heart Hemmed In is a mystery—not the genre of mystery, but a story seemingly oblivious to the need to explain anything to its reader. The idea that this can’t go on is propulsive, and conducive to paranoia. The unknowns become suffocating in the most pleasant of ways, and we read on for the hope of release, some air to be let in. The novel follows a woman living in Bordeaux who attempts to understand why others have suddenly come to despise her and her husband. The antagonism is so severe that the couple is effectively ostracized. In the opening page, the husband has been stabbed; he may be dying. One of the many unexplained phenomena is the presence of a neighbor, Richard Noget, who unilaterally moves into the couple’s apartment to act as a nurse. His aggressive presence, marked by absurd actions, adds another level of oppression for the narrator: she cannot understand it. And what truly fuels her (and so, our) flame is that while she’s convinced Noget is sinister, he is a famous and revered figure in France. Noget’s status as beloved is a repeating, painful blow, as the narrator’s whole consciousness has turned to the question of why she is despised and unloved. While Noget is only one of the few terrifying elements that challenge the notion of realism in this novel, he is a central symbol that haunts the narrator until the very final scenes.
In Drnaso’s graphic novel, a motley crew of outsiders ridden by all shades of past and present problems attend an acting class taught at a community center by the enigmatic John Smith. Smith is no Gene Cousineau from HBO’s Barry. His ambiguously flat yet demanding pedagogical approach lends the story a tense, uncomfortable tone, and he is ultimately unlikeable, with a slight whiff of cult leader. Acting in Smith’s acting class is not a route to scoring a part in a film or TV show. It instead entails a role-playing that leads to accessing memories and fantasies. As students enter imagined (or procured) scenarios, the result is a blurring of the boundaries between real and not-real. Smith’s students quickly come to depend on his versions of reality, though it is unclear whether healthy progress is being made and whether the students are benefitting from the so-called acting lessons. The story culminates in a trip to the teacher’s isolated home and leaves a dangling question of whether this group should have placed so much of their inner lives in the hands of a reticent guru.
After indulging my misery for two weeks, LB made me download a dating app. We were in her loft at Dolly’s, a West Oakland co-op converted from a former packing warehouse for Dolly’s Sweets, a now-defunct cookie company—the members called themselves Dolls in tribute. LB’s place was on the fourth and topmost floor, its high ceilings traversed by pipes from which she’d hung ferns and streaming pothos. An expansive grid of windows faced the street, the panes cranked open over a mattress raised on shipping pallets. Aside from the bathroom, the space was completely open.
We were each nursing our fifth Aperol Spritz, lying in opposite directions on the couch, our ankles knitted together. With LB, touch came naturally; we’d spent so much of our childhood jostling each other, scrambling to turn the pages of trashy teen magazines and rub our wrists against the perfume samples, or pinching each other’s pores to eject globules of sebum. The ease I had with her didn’t translate to other people. Oren had had to coax me into creating our own language, a calligraphic system of strokes and caresses. The first time he’d kissed the back of my neck—I’d been bowed over a textbook—I’d yipped with nervous laughter.
LB sprung up from her side to snatch the phone out of my hand and started scrolling through photos to add to my profile.
“How does every single picture of you have Oren in it?” she said, slouched low against a pillow so that her chin flattened against her chest.
“All the good pictures of me are on his phone.”
“You don’t take selfies? Oh, hey, it’s me! Aw, I remember that day.” She flipped the screen around to show me the picture. It’d been taken a year ago at the county fair. We were squatting next to a pygmy goat at the petting zoo, its bristly face cocked at the camera; LB’s baseball cap was crooked, and she was making the metal horns sign with her hand. “I’ve got one hand on a go-at,” she sang in the strained, spiraling voice of Alanis Morissette, “and the other one’s giving a metal sign.”
She raised her glass from where she’d placed it on the concrete floor and slurped from her luminous drink.
“Whoops, that’s a nude. What angelic tits you have, Kath, seriously. But shouldn’t you keep these in a separate folder?” She tsked. “Oh my God, you only take selfies with dogs. Whose dogs are these, even?”
Later, when she’d finally cobbled something together, we huddled next to each other and thumbed through hundreds of faces. Men in plaid flannels held their prize fish up to the camera; men flexed in front of mirrors at the gym. They loved to travel, and held dear the notion of pineapple on pizza, and would only trust you if their dog liked you. They were GGG and ethically nonmonogamous, and punctuated their wholesome portraits with a snapshot of themselves in Burning Man regalia, rosy and powdered with desert dust at sunrise.
“He’s cute, sorta,” said LB, pausing.
I hummed an indecisive tone. “Oh, no, he’s a moderate.”
She swiped his photo away, condemning him to the digital abyss. “Not gonna lie, this is rough. Guess we can’t all inherit our best friend’s exes.”
I had always been grateful to LB for preserving our friendship through her candor and optimism, her disarmingly vulnerable way of saying things like “Kath, I wouldn’t go down this road if I didn’t feel like there was a real chance at happiness at the end of it” when she’d first started dating Andrew. “I really need your blessing.” She was the sort of person who sought blessings, who looked out for signs of goodwill from the universe—a ring of mushrooms parting the grass, an exquisite rock plucked from the riverbed—and made you a believer, too.
An ad popped up next. Need a hug? Cozy up to cuddle therapy, it read, accompanied by a photo of a couple snuggling by a campfire, a blanket draped over their shoulders. We snickered at its cheesiness.
“I’m sorry, come again?” I said. My glass collided with my teeth and I repositioned it, tipping the drink into my mouth and gesturing for LB to click through.
The website that loaded was for Midas Touch, a self- proclaimed cuddle clinic with locations in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, and (coming soon) Austin. Hygienic photos of people spooning in bed or curled up on the couch ran alongside a friendly, sans serif font. Whoever had art-directed the photoshoot had been scrupulous about representation, as though they’d had a checkmark beside every race, gender, age, and size.
“This is so creepy,” said LB.
“Is this a cult?”
“It’s either a cult or a millennial sock brand.” I clicked on the About Us page.
Take a hands-on approach to happiness. Studies have shown that a kind touch lowers stress, boosts your immune system, and releases oxytocin—you know, the hormone that gives you the warm and fuzzies. It’s time to get back to basics: unplug and unwind with a wellness consultation with one of our trained cuddle providers.
“What on God’s green earth,” LB breathed. “The founder’s a babe, though.”
The creator of Midas Touch was Abigail Brown, a woman with a spiraling mass of red hair, whose thin lips were tilted in a knowing half smile. “‘The seed for the cuddle clinic was planted during her one-y ear solo trip around the world, when she made so many meaningful connections—but still craved the simple, soothing comfort of touch,’” read LB bombastically. “‘Over the past two years, Abigail has consulted with experts in touch therapy to develop the Midas Method, a code of ethics and cuddling manual.’” She widened her eyes at the screen. “This is wild. Is this based on any science at all?”
“To be fair,” I said, “there is this thing in social psychology called the Midas touch. Like, if a waitress touches you at a restaurant somehow, puts her hand on your shoulder or something, you tip more. And students participate more in class if they’re touched by the teacher—no, not in a molesty way—and basketball players score more points if they high five or hug each other.”
“Ew!” she shrieked. “Of course you would know that. Look,” she said, tapping on the START CUDDLING button, “they need brains like yours. ‘Become a certified cuddle provider and earn up to $100 an hour.’ I’m signing you up.”
“No!” I grabbed for the phone, but LB twisted away. “I’m going to get so many spam emails.”
“Hey, I’m doing you a favor,” LB said. “This is a job. One that pays four times as much as I’m making.”
I tried to imagine what it would feel like, holding a stranger, but instead my brain substituted Oren, the stubble I grazed when I sought his lips in the dark. A slow sadness, like cold mud, saturated my body, and my eyes welled. I was always within reach of pain; it could assault me at any time.
A slow sadness, like cold mud, saturated my body, and my eyes welled.
“Sent!” LB dropped the phone and noticed my tears. “Oh, no.” She confiscated my glass and looped her arms around my neck, pulling me close. “See? I’m healing you with the incredible power of touch.”
I laughed through a shudder. “Thanks.” I blinked against the dark of her shoulder for a while and then pulled back, wiping my nose with the inside of my collar.
“Have you, like, tried being angry?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m angry,” I said indignantly. I regularly cycled through my list of grievances: that Oren had kept his unhappiness from me, that he’d unilaterally decided the relationship was past saving. That he hadn’t been present to support me through school because he was too busy excelling, that he hadn’t admitted that he found my lack of motivation unattractive. It was a dark pleasure, seething about these things, flattening him into something easier to discard.
“Have you been so angry you’ve broken something?”
A pause. “What are you trying to get me to do right now?”
“Come on!” she exclaimed, flinging her hands up, looking around her space. The light cascading from the warehouse windows sharpened the knolls of the mussed sheets on her bed, revealing the whirligigging dander in the air. She launched herself toward a long dresser, its surface a tableaux of books, candlesticks, and pert-eared plants, and brought back a mug. It was white with a teddy bear pattern running around it.
“I’m not going to break your mug,” I protested.
“Just try it,” she said, shaking it at me. “It might be satisfying. I hate this mug. This mug is cursed. I accidentally stole it from the kitchen at work and now this woman named Cheryl is asking everyone for it, and it’s too awkward to put it back now. It must be destroyed.”
“How? Where?” I grasped the handle.
“On the floor! We’ll sweep it up! I mean, you’ll sweep it up.”
I walked a few paces into the center of the room and conjured my apartment in Baltimore, how empty it had seemed after Oren had gone, how utterly airless, and I hurled the mug against the floor, where it petaled into several pieces. The sound came hot and bright.
“How did it feel?” asked LB.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Good.” I started gathering the shards with my shoe. “That felt good.”
The next day I had an email from Midas Touch: Little spoon or big spoon? Let’s get to know each other. It opened with a testimonial from a cuddle provider named Drishti, age thirty-six, in San Francisco: Seeing my cuddle clients is the absolute highlight of my week. Midas Touch takes care of the scheduling and payment processing, so all I have to do is show up and snuggle. I always leave feeling like I’ve made a difference.
I told myself I was reading it ironically, but something compelled me forward. I didn’t believe in the sanitary veneer Midas Touch presented, but that only made it more alluring. Here was research of the flesh, so far from the hermetic experiments of school. So many relationships and flings had made me suspect that I was less fluent in touch than other people: I marveled at how easily other bodies warmed to mine, yielding like butter whenever my hand grazed the back of a neck, the slope of a thigh. I tensed when they kissed me in public as though it would help to fortify the borders of my body. Oren had had to encourage me toward him, saying when I pressed my lips to his bare shoulder once, “I like that. You never do that.” But it was less complicated with strangers. I was only afraid to reach for someone I was scared of losing.
The next steps to becoming a certified cuddle provider, the email explained, were to complete a background check, take an online training course in the Midas Method, and pass an in-person Cuddle Aptitude Test. After that, I would be added to the directory for clients to book within my available days and time frames.
At worst, I reasoned, my nerves swimming with a strange electricity, it would be a good story to tell; I could already imagine LB’s eyes inflating with shock and glee. I clicked on the button—GET STARTED—marveling how even the most innocuous copywriting could feel like a benefaction to someone like me.
Midas Touch was in downtown Oakland, occupying the sixth and seventh floors of a building that had once been coworking offices. Long ago, in high school, I’d peed in the front courtyard out of desperation after leaving a show on Telegraph Avenue, squatting behind a concrete planter while my friends stood as lookouts. Now, the elevator doors opened to a landing of dark tile and mirrors. Glass doors bearing the company’s logo, a golden palm radiating lines of energy, slid open as I approached, beckoning me to the front desk.
“Hi,” I said to the woman at the computer. “I’m here for my Cuddle Aptitude Test?” She was intimidatingly put together, like a gift, presentable, with her dun blond bangs in a crisp line across her forehead and small gold hoops pinned to her ears.
“Great, just one sec,” she said, swiveling to the monitor. As she searched for me in the system, I ogled the open office behind her. Everything was unsettlingly neat: there were rows of standing desks lined with marigold felt dividers and white orb pendants hanging above the employees, headphones clamped over their ears. Fiddle-leaf figs and voluminous palms grew lustily out of burlap-sack planters.
“Kathleen Cheng?” asked the woman.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Perfect. I have you all checked in. If you’ll have a seat in the waiting room, someone will call your name in a couple of minutes.”
“Thanks.” I walked in the direction she pointed. The walls were gallery white, hung with blown-up photographic prints of nuzzling bodies, composed to abstract the joist of a collarbone or the swell of a stomach.
I was both impressed and distressed with how seamless it all felt, as though I’d stepped through the app into a physical manifestation of the brand. Everything about the startup was studiously youthful, friendly, conscientious, cool. During the online training, after every video segment a quiz would slide onto the screen. Your male- bodied client becomes physicallyaroused during the session, it asked. How do you handle the situation? I’d tapped on Take a break from cuddling and assess how you’re both feeling, and a flare of confetti had showered the screen.
The waiting room was wrapped in a hushed taupe felt, and a curvaceous built-in wooden bench wrapped around three sides, accented with circular cushions. There were knotty wooden blocks dispersed as side tables, adorned with dried flowers and eucalyptus. Ambient music bled softly into the room. I sat down on a cushion and studied the large canvas on the opposite wall, its blotches of sienna and fern green.
Soon, someone walked in and I straightened, but it didn’t seem like he was there for me. We glanced at each other—he, a forty-something white man in a checkered button-down; I, a visibly tense woman in a black T—and decided not to disturb our private spheres. He took a seat on the bench and pulled out his phone. A client, I realized. I imagined gathering him into my arms, feeling the shifting of his spine and smelling the faint tang of coffee on his breath, and my nerves flared again, both in agitation and with an odd longing. I felt protective of this human creature.
I imagined gathering him into my arms, feeling the shifting of his spine and smelling the faint tang of coffee on his breath, and my nerves flared again.
I sat examining this feeling until a woman around my age entered the room. She was tall and plump, with shining cheeks and a gap-toothed smile. “Kathleen? Thanks for waiting. If you’re ready, I’ll take you to our therapy rooms.” She glanced at the man waiting.
“Wayne, let me know if you need anything.”
“I’m great, thank you,” said Wayne, holding up the phone as though it was proof.
She introduced herself as Nadia—“senior cuddler and community liaison”—as she led me out of the waiting room and up a carpeted stairwell. “Do you have any experience as a professional cuddler?” she asked.
“No, not professionally.”
“Most of our cuddle providers don’t have formal experience, but that’s not a problem,” she said, her high-pitched voice ringing with a slight echo. “I’ve been at it for four years now, so let me know if you have any questions. At first I was doing it on my own, but then I found Midas—or, more accurately, they found me. I helped beta test the whole thing, smoothed out the kinks. And here we are: the bathrooms—there’re changing stalls if you need to get into something comfier—and the therapy rooms.” We’d emerged on the next floor, where a long hallway connected meeting rooms encased in frosted glass. I could see dim silhouettes in the occupied spaces; a touch screen at the door closest to us counted down the minutes left in the session. She took in my silence. “Not what you were expecting?”
I couldn’t put it into words—the eeriness of commodifying intimacy, the company’s willfully cheerful answer to the urgent and pervasive loneliness of existence. Studies on the physiological benefits of touch were sparse, and questions around ethics stayed the hands of caretakers, doctors, and therapists. Midas Touch seemed poised to satisfy a primal need, but what about the ethics of privatizing touch at all? In the end, profit would be the only metric that mattered. “It’s very regulated,” I finally said lamely.
“Oh, absolutely. Everything’s been streamlined to feel as safe and comfortable as possible.” Nadia unlocked a door with a string of numbers and held it open to let me pass.
Here, a low platform bed took up most of the space, draped with a fringed coverlet, and a slim leather couch hugged one wall. A wooden coffee table held a brass tray of melted candles and a singed nub of palo santo in a marble bowl.
“Go ahead, have a seat,” said Nadia. She took her place on the couch, then leaned over to wedge a finger into the back of her sneakers. “We just ask that shoes stay off the furniture.”
Unsettled by the sudden familiarity in the room, I stepped out of my flats and sat beside her, maintaining a cushion’s width of distance.
“So the first thing I want to point out,” said Nadia, “is that there’s a camera in every room that monitors the session. This is just to ensure that everyone is complying with the Midas Method, which, as you know, includes cuddling, conversation, and companionship, but is completely nonsexual.” She gestured to the white camera mounted in a corner. “If you feel uncomfortable in any way, it’s your right to terminate the session, and that’ll flag the user in our system for a follow-up with the safety team. Nine times out of ten, that will result in them being permanently banned. Not that it happens very often—less than one percent of the time, to be exact.” She flashed a reassuring smile. “Do you have any questions before we begin?”
The misgivings I had were jumbled in an impossible knot. I shook my head.
“Okay, feel free to let me know if anything pops up. Otherwise, how about we start with you showing me The Armchair?”
The Midas Method included a guide to cuddling positions that ranged from basic poses, like spooning, to more elaborate choreography. Start with something simple, the training had advised, and let the rest come naturally. Feel free to incorporate stimulating movement, like back rubs and head scratches, with the consent of the client, checking in periodically to make sure you’re both comfortable and relaxed. I’d studied the illustration for The Armchair, recognizing it as the way Oren would often hold me: he lying on his side with his knees bent at a right angle, me resting on my back with my legs hooked over his, as though in a seat. I guided Nadia to the bed and into the pose, suppressing a laugh at the strangeness of our bodies connecting so unceremoniously, as though we were models performing for a camera. My arms encircled her shoulders as she settled into my lap, and I could feel the warmth and give where her breasts began, and I smelled coconut shampoo.
“Are you comfy?” I asked, hoping that she couldn’t feel my sputtering heart.
“Mhm. This is nice. Are you?”
“Yup.” I cleared my throat to stifle a cough. I waited for further instruction, but it did not come. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. I marinated in my own self-consciousness until it deepened and metastasized into a kind of horror. To disperse the feeling, I tried to think about the science of what was happening: the unmyelinated C-tactile fibers in the skin responding to tenderness, the insular cortex of the brain processing sweetness. While I labored, Nadia was breathing deeply, letting the air graze the back of her throat so that she emitted a light snore, and I wondered if she were falling asleep.
I closed my eyes. I focused on the rise and fall of her body pressing into mine. Gradually, my thoughts lost their rigidity, began to drift. I became less aware of time and more aware of the heat coalescing between us, my consciousness sinking until it was a small, eyeless seed within a broadening galaxy of flesh, bone, blood, nerve, steady and alive. It felt like a meditation, a color dawning inside my head. Apparitions of sound and image ballooned and dissolved, forming a diaphanous tunnel that transported me back: the tick of a car signal, windshield wipers clearing a swirl of snow. Oren’s hands climbing over the wheel as we cruised left. The tires dragging through slush on the road. I was telling him about Brian, how flushed my mother sounded on the phone; maybe they were taking things too fast.
He glanced at the directions, the blue line charting our path. “I think I turned too soon.”
“That’s okay, we’re close, I think.” I cleared a patch of fog on the window and watched it regain its milky opacity. “Did you hear me?” I’m worried she’s going to get hurt.”
“Have there been any red flags?”
“Other than an alien abducting my mother and replacing her with a freaky clone? No. Can you imagine Marissa running?”
“What’s so bad about her wanting to be more active?”
“It’s not bad, it’s just . . .” I arced against the seat, stretching my back. “It’s alarming. It’s like everything she went through—that we went through, really—didn’t count or matter. All she needed was to meet some dude?”
He patted my thigh. “I’m sure it’s jarring, but if she’s happy, what’s the point in overthinking it?”
Comfort, encouragement—Oren offered them readily, but he had a hard time acknowledging when things were off. He did this when I talked about Marissa, about school, about us, as though the troubles of my life could seep into and taint his. It was because he saw my life fundamentally as a reflection of his own, a shadow that couldn’t survive without its counterpart. It was lonely to trudge through my doubts, though at the time I’d dismissed them as my own insecurity and anxiety.
The truth was, my body had sensed the relationship straining before the breakup. Oren and I had stopped touching each other. The sex was still there, but not the palm caressing my lower back as he passed me in the kitchen, not the sardine squeeze of our bodies stretched across the couch. We fell asleep with just our ankles intertwined, and I would wake up huddled on one side with the covers while he lay exposed in the dark. These were inches that felt like miles, the negative space between us like runes we’d refused to decipher.
Nadia sighed and shifted, and I miraculously moved with her, and we nestled facing each other with my chin buried in her hair. I felt as though I’d landed a dazzling gymnastic maneuver, but it had come naturally. My body had known what to do.
I was a teenager before I learned my father’s real name. During a trip back to Vietnam in my twenties, I discovered he had more children after me, half-siblings I’d never met. It wasn’t until my thirties that I learned how my parents fell in love—over books—and how their story ended, with an unanswered letter my mother sent across the world. I often imagined my father as Bluebeard with his hidden trunk, and thought that if I could ask the right questions—find the right key—he would reveal himself to me. He never did, not really, but I still couldn’t stop searching.
This is all to say that I know something about family secrets, the kind that burrow under all the other stories we hold up to the light. These secrets reveal not only the difficult facts of the past, but how we’ve evolved into the people we are today. They tell the messier stories of human nature, bringing us closer to rage, despair, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness.
When I set out to write my novel, Banyan Moon, I knew that family secrets would be a central theme. In the book, Ann Tran inherits a crumbling old house in the swamplands of Florida from her deceased grandmother, Minh, a survivor of the Vietnam War. Ann and her estranged mother, Hương, spend months sorting through Minh’s hoarded burdens: walls of creepy dolls, yellowing linen tablecloths, piles of unread magazines. One day, in the musty old attic, Ann comes across a locked trunk that holds the greatest burden of all, a secret that will change the way each of the Tran women interpret their stories—and how they see each other.
The books that captivate me are the ones that explore the dark spaces between families—all that’s unsaid. Often, that’s where we can find humanity and love, no matter how warped. In the end, despite my investigative tendencies, the revelation of the family secret hardly seems the point. The point lies in our desire to search for that darkness, all for a chance to grasp at the truths that bind us.
In 2016, on a whim, reporter Shapiro sends in a sample of her DNA to a genealogy website. To her shock, she discovers that the man who raised her isn’t, in fact, her biological father. Deeply unsettled by this revelation, she grapples with questions about what her parents chose to hide from her, and why. With the help of her husband (also a reporter), Shapiro follows a series of winding threads that take her across the country, where she must navigate the impacts of science, technology, and record-keeping on her own life. In the end, she must determine what constitutes identity, and the extent to which we’ll go to open the closed doors of the past.
Phong Nguyễn, a Vietnamese Amerasian who is Black, is trying to immigrate to America with his family for a better life. However, government officials decide to halt the visa process until he can find concrete evidence that he is the product of a union between a Vietnamese woman and an American G.I., as he’s always been told. This sends him into a frustrating quest with many dead ends and faulty assumptions. Meanwhile, former helicopter pilot Dan returns with his wife Linda to Vietnam in order to try to heal from past trauma as a soldier. But what Dan doesn’t tell his wife is that his secret mission is to find Kim, a Vietnamese mistress he’d kept from Linda during the war. In another timeline, we learn about sisters Trang and Quỳnh, who escape to Saigon in the 1970s to work as bar girls whose job is to entertain American soldiers. All three stories intersect in surprising and touching ways that continue to remind us of the impacts of the war on the Vietnamese people.
In Georgia, Ailey Pearl Garfield navigates her life between Atlanta and Chicasetta, her rural hometown where her family still lives. Ailey’s thirst for education takes her from her predominantly white high school to Routledge, a historically Black college where her beloved Uncle Root teaches. She wants to be a historian, which prompts her to look back into the history of her family. What she discovers is a more tangled story than she could have ever imagined, illuminating themes of class, colorism, inheritance, and deep ancestral trauma. This epic book is a riveting, unforgettable story of the American South, both past and present.
This essay collection gathers fifteen of the most celebrated voices in contemporary literature—Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, to name a few—to write about the silences between mothers and their children. Here, each author explores seminal experiences from their childhood, such as what it was like to have a deaf mother; whether one can share too much with one’s psychotherapist mother; how to have a relationship with a mother without mediation from a controlling father. Full of heartbreak and hope, this collection articulates the nuanced love we hold for our mothers, well into adulthood.
Four generations of Montrose women all have one thing in common: the mysterious curse that dooms the people they fall in love with to die sudden deaths. Little is known about this curse, except that it originated in New Orleans nearly half a century ago, in a world of powerful hoodoo. In present-day California, Willow and Victoria live in peace with Victoria’s daughter Nickie, until the day Nickie brings a young man home for dinner. This unleashes a series of events that shakes the core of the family, scattering all three women across the country, toward their destinies. Their only hope of reunification is to break the curse, but that means unlocking their silent matriarch Augusta’s past—a near impossible task.
In this memoir, Chung deftly weaves an important story about her experience as a transracial adoptee, and how she came to find her birth family. Growing up, she’d been told the myth that her birth parents sacrificed for a better life. In reality, the story was far more complicated. When Chung became pregnant with her own daughter, she decided to reopen the tidy narratives of her past in order to search for the truth. By transposing her own story with that of her birth sister, Cindy’s, readers are able to follow Chung’s journey to unveiling secrets that transform her relationships—and her own identity as a Korean American woman.
In 2019, Kate is running from an abusive relationship that has taken everything from her. With nowhere to go, she flees to ramshackle Weyward Cottage, bequeathed to her by a great-aunt she hardly remembers. There, among her great-aunt’s belongings, she discovers hints of a centuries-old secret that whispers of magic and violence. Meanwhile, during the second world war, rebellious Violet seeks a way to free herself from the life of convention her father expects of her. As she comes into her own gifts, she begins to ask probing questions about her mother, who died of sudden and mysterious circumstances when she was a child. Her father’s refusal to answer only stokes Violet’s curiosity and determination. In the third timeline, Altha is on trial for witchcraft in the 17th century. She’s been accused of murdering a neighbor, and the final verdict is all too clear to her. These women must fight the desperation of their own circumstances to find their way to freedom—and maybe even joy. Together, their stories paint a compelling portrait of resilience, a trait passed down through the centuries in the Weyward clan, along with the secrets of the past.
An epic recounting the history of the Electric Slide that can also be sung to the tune of The Electric Slide.
I Dream’d A Dream
A stream of consciousness narrative from someone who chose the iconic Les Mis tune at karaoke and now suddenly realizes they absolutely do not have the vocal capacity to sustain the entire song, also it’s really killing the mood.
I Hear America Singing
The judges of X-Factor come together to spill their behind-the-scenes secrets and most cringey audition moments…but in the form of an acrostic.
The Untold Want
A villanelle where a woman secretly hopes her boyfriend will offer to go grocery shopping so that she can watch the Vanderpump Rules finale.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A tense sonnet of a woman who saw a spider in her apartment but then it disappeared a moment later, so now she lives in agony every second hoping that it doesn’t crawl into her mouth while she’s sleeping.
I Saw In Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing
A soothing composition about all the different types of trees the narrator saw in Louisiana and fun facts about them. Essentially a transcript of a David Attenborough show.
The Sleepers
A ballad about a precious little angel baby whose gentle breathing is the beat of the most calming song known to man. The leitmotif is the delicate beauty of the human experience.
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
A punchy cinquain about an awful little demon baby who somehow has the lung capacity of an opera singer and is able to scream for hours on end for no apparent reason. The leitmotif is the endless pain of the human experience.
Delicate Cluster
An ode to eating one of those Nature Valley granola bars where the entire thing collapses without warning and you are left finding oats crumbles in the folds of your clothing days, or even weeks later.
O, Captain! My Captain
A juicy sestina tell-all from the cast of Dead Poets Society detailing who secretly hooked up, who had big blowout fights, and who accidentally fell off their desk once or twice during the seminal goodbye scene.
Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries
A free verse poem where a misfit group of ragtag librarians team up to save their libraries from budget cuts and evil PTA boards trying to ban classic young adult novels. Kind of like Ocean’s 8 but there’s a big section about the dewey decimal system and an army of children armed with Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret storming a school board meeting.
To the obsessed, only one thing in the world has luster: the subject of their obsession. The person or thing we are obsessed with is our only answer to incredible longing. Questions like What is my life about? What is worthwhile and what is not? are easy. The answer is her, him, them, it.
My novel, The Adult, follows Natalie, a first-year university student at the University of Toronto, who has moved to the city from Temagami, a small town in northern Ontario. Deeply uncertain, and lonely, Natalie meets Nora, a 38 year old woman whose unexpected interest gives Natalie a sense of clarity and purpose she has always lacked. The book explores the nature of obsessive romantic love. It asks what we take from one another by loving, it asks what we give, and it asks eventually, what can be salvaged.
The books on the list below encase the intensity of obsessive love. They are at times, devotions to a beloved, they are relics of love’s overwhelm, they are attempts by lovers to stop loving, to remember a different answer to the always-there question— how should life be?
“There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.”
Elizabeth Smart’s work of prose poetry expertly captures the rapturous, all-consuming experience of love, beside which all other experiences pale. Set during World War II, on a journey throughout various states and provinces, Smart shows the ability of tremendous love to make everything around it banal by comparison. The palpable longing in each of her sentences distills the surrounding world, and makes her suffering, her desperation, her love, the only important thing we can think of.
They Say Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard, translated by Adriana Hunter
Pauline Delabroy-Allard tells the story of a teacher in Paris who is swept up in a love affair with Sarah, a violinist. The book is brief and chaotic, as it oscillates between deep loneliness, desire, fear, pleasure, and despair. The emotional intensity of the protagonist shows how responsive life becomes to the beloved. There is no small gesture, no feeling left unfelt. Delabroy-Allard evokes a love in which everything else in life—work, friends, family—fades. She shows how pleasurable this sensation can be, despite the ruinous effects it can have.
Zaina Arafat follows her unnamed protagonist, a young, bisexual woman, through a series of vignettes that take place in the United States and the Middle East. She is riddled with desire, and these longings evolve into reckless romantic affairs and obsessions, and eventually take her to The Ledge, a treatment centre that diagnoses her with “love addiction.” Arafat explores obsession through the lens of self-destruction and introspection; love can be an affliction of the lover and, in this case, her cultural and familial wounds, rather than an obsession with a desired.
Told through a series of couplets, Couplets follows a woman who lives in Brooklyn, with her boyfriend and their cat, who has dreams that rotate around desire and seduction. These dreams become real as she has an affair with a woman she meets at a bar, and enters into new communities—both queer and BDSM—and new forms of desire. Maggie Millner writes of the narrator’s “second first love,” the love that comes after coming out, and the ways that this discovery can feel like a new adolescence, with all of its obsession and sentimentality. While this desire brings about chaos and heartbreak, it also brings about a deeper and more in tune sense of self. As Millner’s narrator says, “For any fierce, untrammeled feeling, / now I know I’d give up almost anything.”
Jeannette Winterson’s nameless and genderless narrator asks, “You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.” The book depicts an affair between the narrator and the beloved, Louise, a married woman.
Winterson depicts a love affair based on particularities: in Written on the Body, love is specific. It has a subject, a beloved. Winterson describes parts of her beloved’s body against the anatomical definitions of these parts, for example, drawing into focus the separation between a general understanding of a clavicle, and Louise’s collarbone in particular. This particularity is what makes losing love so painful—as Winterson’s narrator states, “[t]his hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it.”
Esther Yi, conversely, explores the other side of obsessive love: love whose subject is never fully known or understood, despite the intensity of feeling the lover has for them. Y/N follows an unnamed narrator through her obsession with Moon, a member of a k-pop group. The narrator begins writing self-insert fanfiction, in which the reader inserts their name (your/name) and is the main character of a relationship with Moon. When Moon retires, the narrator flies to Korea to search for him, while Y/N journeys towards Moon in their own story. Yi explores our culture’s relationship to celebrity and the kind of love that we feel for people we do not know. Love can, in fact, be a process through which we relate to ourselves, above all. As the narrator’s therapist notes, “[t]he best way to fall out of love is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall.”
Simple Passionby Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie
“I had no future other than the telephone call fixing our next appointment. I would try to leave the house as little as possible—forever fearing that he might call during my absence.”
Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, Simple Passion is an incisive reflection on a two-year affair with a married man named “A.” Ernaux describes how life transforms itself to accommodate and sustain the affair with “A”, composing an intimate revelation of obsession and passion. Though Ernaux’s novella revolves around “A”, there is a great sense in which her work is not about “A” as an object of love, but rather about the current of feelings experienced by the one who loves. Ernaux gives attention to obsession and love not only as feelings to describe but as ideas to think about. This is a brief and forceful look at a person consumed.
Stories are built on journeys. The best characters start in one place and end in another. They face obstacles, experience setbacks. Sometimes they lose hope. But, in the end, they reach somewhere new. This is the hero’s journey. As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and watching people navigate change—and move forward despite it—is at the heart of all storytelling.
Alejandra Oliva’s new book, Rivermouth, tells the story of multiple journeys, of asylum seekers fleeing political instability in the Global South (made possible by Northern imperialism) only to find cruelty and bureaucratic violence at the U.S border, of her family flowing, like the Rio Grande, between Texas and Mexico, and finding paradise in unexpected places. At its core, Rivermouth is about accompaniment. Oliva grabs her readers firmly by the hand and marches them through the byzantine (often impossible) process of seeking asylum. As we walk with her, she chronicles the societal costs of an immigration system that separates and imprisons families, narrates everything from biblical epics to small moments of care among border communities in Tijuana, and considers how something so fundamentally human—the pursuit of life and protection—became a crime.
nia t. evans: Rivermouth as a title of a story about migration works on so many levels. Can you unpack its meaning for me? How did you come to see rivers as a central theme of the book?
Alejandra Oliva: Rivermouth alludes to a few things. A huge part of the US-Mexico land border is made up of the Rio Grande. My grandmother was born in Brownsville, Texas, which is right at the mouth of the Rio Grande, where the land meets the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s also this idea of the “river mouth,” a place where the fresh water of the river meets the salty water of the ocean. It’s its own ecosystem, a place that’s not quite the river and not quite the ocean. That feels a lot like border cultures and languages. There’s also this idea that a river doesn’t have a singular source. Sometimes a river is a navigation path; sometimes it’s a barrier or a border that you have to cross. It all depends on who you are and where you’re trying to go. That all felt like the right metaphor to be thinking about while writing this book.
nte: This book is about the migration of language as much as it is about people. Can you talk a bit about your experience of translating for asylum seekers at the border. What is lost, gained, and revealed through those kinds of translations? And what principles and allegiances do you hold as a translator?
Sometimes a river is a navigation path; sometimes it’s a barrier or a border that you have to cross. It all depends on who you are and where you’re trying to go.
AO: What is lost is agency. Stories of violence and harm are deeply personal. Violence often strips people of agency. Telling your story, choosing how and whether to talk about it, can be a way of reclaiming power. But when we ask people to disclose these stories for asylum, we are essentially removing that agency from them. We’re saying, “you need to prove that these terrible things have happened to you, that you have suffered very specific forms of violence. And we need you to tell that story in as much detail as you can, regardless of how it impacts you.” As a translator, you can try to make this process as easy as possible. You can find a private, quiet environment. You can give them as much time as they need. But, in the end, you’re still saying “if you want to stay here, I need this story, and you have very little agency in whether you want to share it or not.” And that’s incredibly violent in and of itself.
In the context of asylum work, my allegiance is to the form, to filling it out as correctly as possible. I want to make the process as comfortable as possible, but with the goal of filling out the form as well as I can. You kind of feel the government or whatever forces created this forum and do not care about people’s recovery or healing pressing down on you. You can feel yourself become the instrument of that. It’s painful and difficult sometimes, and you’re doing it to enter people into this system that is deeply violent and dehumanizing. And so, as the interpreter, you’re sometimes stuck in the middle of wanting to do as much justice to this person as possible, but also trying to move them forward and through this system.
nte: You write “asylum seekers and immigrants in detention centers are political prisoners. They are held against their wills for a political belief manifested into action: that they deserve life.” Can you talk about how you came to that realization?
AO: This is true of wherever people are coming to the States to seek asylum from, but I’m going to talk about it in the Central American context, because that’s what people are most familiar with. In Central America, gangs are incredibly prevalent and violent. They’re not controlled by governments in any meaningful way. Many of the people I have talked to left because their families were facing active threats. Children recruited by gangs; women threatened by sexual violence. And with each story they were essentially saying “I deserve a life where my family and I can live without the threat of violence.” That is a political belief. It’s a personal and individual desire for safety but it’s also a political belief that I should have the right to live in a society where I don’t have violence hanging over my head.
You see this in other movements too, abolitionist movements in particular, the assertion that we deserve to live. When people migrate, they do so to make that desire real. They see the United States, for better or worse, as a place where active, pervasive violence will not be hanging over their heads in the same way. They see it as a country where the rule of law is followed. And when they come here, they come here following the laws of this country because you do have a right to claim asylum. They come here and exert that right. But instead of saying, yes you have that right, let’s move you through the system, and find a way to make this work, we put people in jail. We submit them to medical neglect and horrifying conditions.
nte: This is a memoir of “language, faith, and migration.” When most people think about faith within the context of migration, they think of Christ as a refugee. But you write about the Israelites escaping Egypt, the Tower of Babel, the Book of Job, and so much more. Can you talk about the role of divinity, faith, and religion in Rivermouth?
We take these people who have fought incredibly hard for all these values we claim to value as a nation, like freedom and safety, and we put them in jail.
AO: So much of the Bible is people moving from one place to another. You have the Israelites traveling through the desert to get to the promised land, Christ as a refugee, traveling for 40 days and 40 nights. The Bible is full of migration, of different peoples coming together dealing with conflict and translation. A lot of translation theory, which is intimately connected to questions of migration and language, is biblical theory. The very first translators of the Bible were asking “if this text is the word of God, if I translate it, is it still the word of God? How do we preserve that? What is the fairest or best way to preserve this as we move it from one language to another?” In the Reformation, you have all these people trying to translate biblical texts into modern languages, like English, German, Spanish, and French, being treated like heretics because the this was supposed to be language that was inaccessible. It was meant for educated people. And this idea, that some things should be reserved for select groups of people, like say U.S. citizenship or being able to understand this country’s immigration system, is still with us. There is so much elite knowledge that is hoarded for select groups of people, even as it shapes people’s daily lives.
I also think today’s immigrant rights movement is rooted in religiosity and spirituality. You have the sanctuary movement, which uses churches as a place where people who may have deportation orders can stay safe. I spent some time working with the New Sanctuary Coalition, a New York-based immigrant justice organization based out of Judson Memorial Church. There are groups like Never Again Action, a Jewish group that has done some interesting actions around immigration detention and highlighted its similarities to concentration camps during World War II. This isn’t just rhetoric; it’s a moral foundation a lot of people are oriented around.
nia t. evans: You tell horrifying stories about the conditions within ICE detention centers. Just earlier today, border officials confirmed that an 8-year-old girl died in their custody. What is happening in these prisons? And what are the consequences of allowing this mass incarceration to continue?
AO: In that story you can see pervasive anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Customs and Border Protection not recognizing immigrants as people on a fundamental level. It’s the same tone as that horrific audio clip of Border Patrol agents talking to children who had been separated from their parents, saying “oh we’ve got a real orchestra here.” Of course, these children are crying, they were just separated from their parents after a long and difficult journey. We take these people who have fought incredibly hard for all these values we claim to value as a nation, like freedom and safety, and we put them in jail. We disbelieve and mistrust them. What else is that but political prisonership?
It’s also important to note there are two types of detention. One of them is called hieleras or ice boxes, and those are run not actually by ICE but by Customs and Border Protection. And those are supposed to be places where you stay for a maximum of 72 hours. It’s supposed to be a quick, short-term stay, but in many cases it’s not. These places aren’t set up for long term stays and they are rife with human rights abuses, like what happened to that young girl. There’s also the wider immigration detention system, which is not just for people who have recently crossed the border. It’s for anyone who has been picked up by ICE. There’s usually a mix of people, some have just arrived, some have been picked up by ICE randomly or as a result of contact with the criminal legal system. So, if you get caught shoplifting or in possession of drugs, anything big or small, you go through the criminal legal system. You may end up serving time. And as soon as you finish serving time, ICE will usually be there to pick you up and take you to immigration detention. You essentially serve two sentences, the second of which is sometimes longer than the first.
If you are in immigration detention because of a criminal legal issue, you can’t get bonded out, which is crazy. Those places can be private detention centers like the one I visited in Mississippi, a big jail you would see in Orange is the New Black. Huge dorms, very regimented. Local and county jails also have contracts with the federal government to house ICE detainees as well. And they have the same problems you’d see at any prison: horrific mistreatment, medical neglect, a lack of privacy, dehumanization. There’s also not adequate care taken to ensure staff speak the same common languages as the people detained there, so you have a general lack of communication between staff and people. Theoretically, there’s a person from ICE who comes in once a week and listens to complaints, but as with any bureaucracy that process can get messed up. Immigration detention is unique in that they have family detention centers. Sometimes one parent and their children. Sometimes one parent will be sent to regular detention and the other will be put in family detention with their children. Whole families are put into prison together.
nte: Shifting to a lighter or maybe more complicated note, what was your experience of diving into your family’s history for this book? Did anything surprise you?
AO: I knew a fair amount of our story going in. My great-grandparents felt really alive to me, even though my great-grandfather passed away before I was born, and my great-grandmother passed away when I was probably four or so. My grandmother talks about them all the time. They’re still very vivid people. We still visit the hotel my grandmother grew up at in the mountains in Mexico. In a very magical place, even now. So, there were things I knew, but looking at our story through the lens of immigration was complicated and interesting.
I started looking further back, particularly in my great-grandfather’s history. His last name was Pue, which is a Welsh name. You can trace it back to colonial Maryland, which is where things start getting ugly. I found out that some of my family were slaveowners. It wasn’t a part of history I thought my family would be a part of. But you’re on ancestry.com, 20 generations deep, and suddenly there’s a manifest of their holdings and it includes people. It was shocking. There was some genealogy research that didn’t make it into the book that was surprising to me and made me realized my family’s history goes deep into the roots of this country and Mexican history. It’s complicated and messy.
nte: You recently wrote about the Biden administration’s new asylum laws and the end of Title 42. What are asylum seekers up against now? What? What do you want your readers to know about current policy and how it’s evolved or not evolved?
AO: It’s bad. I’m not an attorney but I’ve worked with many attorneys over the last couple of years. I know how to read these documents and understand what these policies mean for individual people. And I can still barely wrap my arms around this new policy. There are basically two tracks right now. One is for asylum seekers. If you arrive at the U.S. border to seek asylum, you need to have already requested and been denied asylum from any country you passed through in order to apply for asylum successfully in the United States. For a lot of people that means Mexico, a country whose asylum system is as bogged down or more than ours. So, you’re looking at 5-10 years in Mexico trying to adjudicate that process before even having a chance at our border.
Or you can, before leaving your home country, secure yourself a passport, a plane ticket, and a financial sponsor and be awarded something called “parole.” I’m unclear on how or whether parole can lead to a work permit or being able to apply for asylum, but the bar to access parole is purposefully unattainable. This is a program that was rolled out and piloted on Ukrainian refugees who came over last year during the onset of the war with Ukraine and Russia. The difference is that there is a settled and established Ukrainian community here in the United States. There are very few, relatively speaking, Venezuelans living in the United States in a settled way with strong connections to people back home. People who could afford to buy plane tickets and be financial sponsors. The program is not only financially difficult to enter; it’s also logistically and relationally difficult to navigate. It’s also important to note that the Trump administration already tried to do this, and a judge struck it down as illegal. There’s this rehash of rules that have already been tried by an administration by an administration that said they were better than on these issues. These have already been shown to be bad and illegal policies. And all of this was passed not by Congress but by memos and executive orders. They ignored public comments on the federal register begging them not to do this. It feels like there’s no real way to register your displeasure on a policymaking level, which feels infuriating and undemocratic.
Greg Marshall’s memoir Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It is a brave and hilarious tour de force, taking us through his journey of self-acceptance as he grapples with cerebral palsy, queerness, and the early death of a parent.
By offering us a front seat to the uproarious antics of his quirky and loving family, and sharing with us his sharp and honest observations of past romantic and sexual encounters, he invites us to look back on the more embarrassing and uncomfortable moments of our own lives, and to recognize how these moments have fundamentally shaped us. Vulnerability is a trait that many writers struggle to achieve, and it’s a role that Marshall bravely takes on in his writing, showing how the mere act of acknowledging our physical and emotional vulnerabilities can lead us toward a braver and truer understanding of ourselves.
Greg Marshall and I were newly admitted fellows at the Michener Center for Writers when we first met in 2010. Over zoom, Marshall and I talked about making the leap from fiction to memoir, the role of truth in storytelling, listening to one’s body and its spectrum of differences, and how the queer sensibility can give us the audaciousness to take creative risks.
Monica Macansantos:I know a lot of fiction writers who struggle with the nonfiction form, but you seem very comfortable with it. I was wondering if you could tell us more about that.
Greg Marshall: My writing has always come from a place of humor and, you could say, quirky observation. But when I was willing to write about disability, to closely observe my brain and body, I started showing up on the page in new ways. I knew right away I wasn’t chronicling the misadventures of a fictional character. These were my experiences. They belonged to me. So it became about using the same craft toolkit I’d picked up in grad school—setting, plot, style—to explore my own life. I was using the same voice that I was using in fiction, but nonfiction had much stricter goalposts, which was a good exercise for me. It let me contain what I was trying to do and give it borders and definition, because my fiction, which I love and really want to get back into, was so beyond imaginative—and I don’t mean that in a good way. My last story in grad school was about a father-son duo who have the heads of falcons and the bodies of men, and they run a grocery store in Idaho. Hyper-imaginative stories are great if you can pull them off, but I think that I was exercising those outlandish, imaginative muscles too much.
MM: Your book made me think more deeply about being born with a clubfoot and how I’ve completely forgotten about it because I had corrective surgery as a baby. But then it reminds me at unexpected moments that it’s there, like when I’m running and I trip on it. Maybe that’s one of the purposes of memoir that isn’t often discussed, how it brings out the most vulnerable parts of the reader’s self as well as the writer’s self.
GM: Memoir brings up so many things you might never get around to talking about with a friend, like my leg or your foot. That’s what is delicious about it: you go into the confessional booth and have the most meaningful, deepest, funniest, silliest, strangest conversations that you’ve ever had with another person, because all the niceties are taken away and all of the dead air is taken away. And it’s just the best parts of a person’s story, however you define best: most interesting, most vulnerable, most intriguing.
MM: What I loved about your book is that it’s so embodied. You really took to heart what our teacher, Elizabeth McCracken, told us: that our writing must be embodied because our characters have bodies. In a sense, a lot of your writing ties in with muscle memory. Sometimes you have to listen to your body to make sense of what didn’t make sense in your head.
GM: Elizabeth’s advice was so seminal to Leg! It’s amazing the amount of specificity and feeling and narrative propulsion that you can create just from observing your own body. The most vivid example is, you know, in terms of sex and romance. What does your body do? What is it capable of in terms of pleasure, and does it feel limitations? What hurts, what doesn’t? Having a lover’s conversation with your own body can be really powerful when you want to add specificity to your work, whether you identify as disabled or not.
MM: I guess this ties in with something I said in one of our previous conversations about these parts of ourselves that mark us as disabled. It could be cerebral palsy or club footedness. In your book, you talk about how your parents decided not to tell you about your cerebral palsy in hopes that you would grow up to be this person who didn’t have to shoulder what they imagined to be its burden, or the limitations it would impose on you. Your book proposes that we change that narrative and talk about disability in terms of diversity, rather than as difference.
GM: Yeah, or even just as a spectrum. Disability is a universal experience that can happen over the course of a day or a year. You might experience an injury, you might be in an accident, you might have a new diagnosis. Being disabled is just part of the human continuum. Why shouldn’t it be part of our literature? And by making it part of our literature, we can start to decompartmentalize our conditions. Stories do weird work: by delving into those trashy details we talked about, our personal narratives become more relatable, more universal, more whole. We can accommodate the foibles of our bodies and we can make allowances for them, but we’re really making allowances for our humanity, not just for one specific part of ourselves. That’s the wink and nudge of the title. Nothing to see here, it’s just a leg. And then the book goes in a million different directions.
MM: Your book participates in many conversations simultaneously: there’s disability in here, but also queerness and how these two are intertwined in your life.
GM: Like a lot of gay men, and children of the ‘90s in general, I was fascinated and terrified of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. My obsession started with an Afterschool Special we watched in my seventh-grade science class and culminated, in a terrible way, with the death of my boyfriend Corey at the start of my time as a Michener in the fall of 2010.
Being disabled is just part of the human continuum.
Experiencing a life-changing event like that as I was beginning to study fiction in a serious way—as we were reading Before Night Falls in our first-year seminar with Cristina Garcia—shaped my voice and subject matter as a writer. Chroniclers of the plague like Allan Gurganus, Alexander Chee, and Paul Monette gave me a blueprint for how to write through dark periods with humor, panache, and a sense of resilience.
For as different as they are stylistically, what these writers have in common is that they are willing to go there. They write about everything: the disabled body, illness, sex, family, money, religion, dildos. It’s like they’re laughing in the face of death, flipping death the middle finger, maybe even making love to death—pick your metaphor. The ability to do that seemed intoxicating, to pair outrageously funny with outrageously serious. Like, what could be stranger and more powerful than bottoming for the grim reaper?
I believe it was the poet James Merrill who said that being gay isn’t just a sexual preference. It’s an artistic sensibility, a way of seeing the world. I think there’s something to that: a mix of high and low, innuendo, camp, puns, and a certain neurotic lust for life. I’m not saying only gay people have this sensibility, or that all gay people do, just that it’s a comedy lineage that spoke to me as I wrote Leg. I decided to use my body. I decided to go there.
MM: While reading your memoir, I felt that gayness as a sensibility was instrumental in navigating these experiences of marginalization, and that humor was an intrinsic part of that sensibility. In general, humor helps us cut through the deceptions that we tell ourselves, by making us somewhat more comfortable about these truths that we’d rather not live with.
GM: Comedy does have a way of exposing the truth. Sometimes even a knock-knock joke can contain jaw-dropping honesty just by being literal, and that’s what is outrageous about it. That it just announces the truth in our world full of subterfuge and avoidance.
What I’ve noticed is that the queer sensibility is willing to go there a bit more, to take a deeper cut, to take a more audacious creative risk. To be heard, we’ve had to be louder, and to be understood, we’ve had to be more daring. It helps you go to the embarrassing places, which can be rich fodder for vulnerability and honesty and exploration and help you find a little corner of the human experience that hasn’t been written about a million times.
MM: I feel like kids growing up in Utah won’t feel as timid about writing about their experiences of queerness or disability after reading your book. Once you set an example, people coming from similar backgrounds and experiences feel braver to tell their stories.
GM: I hope that’s true. Once you have a template, you can break it. If you use a canonical coming-of-age story like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life as a starting point, you can start to filter your own experience through it, like literary cheesecloth, and see what sticks around. Those can be really interesting narrative curds to munch. Are there places Tobias Wolff didn’t go? I’m pretty sure that in the 1950s, he didn’t have his mom’s Brookstone back massager to discover himself. So hey, that’s something new I can write about puberty.
MM: I’m thinking of my own experiences as a memoirist and how a lot of it again ties in with this act of performance that you write about so well in the book. We often think of performance in terms of masking something that should be hidden. But in your case, you write about performance both as a child actor in the book and as a writer and memoirist, as being something that allows you to embrace these difficult truths and to bring everything out there.
To be heard, we’ve had to be louder, and to be understood, we’ve had to be more daring.
GM: Performance is a way of holding space and having a spotlight shone on your own experience, whether you want the spotlight there or not. It has this ability to make things so artificial and heightened you can’t ignore them, like the fashion on a runway. Or a closeted kid making jazz hands and singing his heart out to the Beach Boys.
MM: And by giving your own performance, you make your own rules.
GM: There’s power in a pratfall, well-told. You deliver the punchline versus being the punchline.
MM: You’re also freer when you exist outside conventions.
GM: Exactly! It’s not like there are no risks or blowback or hurt feelings when you break conventions. I just knew that to say something worthy of the conversation, I had to bring my entire self to the page and not hold anything back. There’s an argument to be made, on a human level, that you shouldn’t do that. But artistically, I had a bit of a Joan Didion Spidey-Sense that this was the moment for Leg. There’s an element of exposure, of personal risk, of upsetting the norm of your culture or family when you write a memoir, but isn’t that kind of the point? Because hopefully you’re not just publishing a book. You’re expanding what’s possible for your contemporaries and the people who come after you.
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