I Can See My Future Through the Haze of My Grief

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Kiah Holliman’s car accident happened on the last icy day of February 2022. The following morning, clear blue sky lit my journey from Detroit to Grand Rapids, melting any remaining ice from the night before. The earth seemed to smile, soaking in the long-missed sunshine. As the world inhaled the first hint of spring, my lungs collapsed inside of themselves, refusing to let the sunlight touch the freshly wounded parts of me. The natural movement of the world felt absurd. How could the sun rise, the land smile, the breeze move, as if this was any other day? The sun shone yellow, almost joyful overtones. My dreamlike denial came easy. The closing distance between myself and my mother’s house in Grand Rapids cemented a newly gleaned truth: hell was recognizable; hell still had sunshine. 

A week later the February sky returns to its characteristic gray,  dressing the world in the somber mood most appropriate for a funeral. The condolences I receive come with a mix of recognition and confusion. From the mourners who know me, I am offered firm hugs, and declarations of love and sadness. To everyone else, the question of who I am to Kiah is written on their faces.  Their eyes look for a similarly feminine version of the woman lying in the casket: a short, light skinned afro-latine woman in her mid-twenties, with dark eyes and long hair. 

I am not a full year into my medical transition. The changes in my body are subtle, even to me. Standing by my sister’s casket, I  face the stark reality of how different we had become. Kiah and I had been a complimentary set throughout our lives. She was delicate, feminine, and graceful; I, a culmination of all the  uncouth, rough edges of our dna. Our similarities were our laugh, our yell, our mannerisms, all hand me downs from our mother and grandmother. Our modes of self-expression, and the maladaptive coping mechanisms we both inherited, were our visible signs of kinship. Now, to the room overflowing with mourners, and to myself, I no longer feel recognizable as Kiah’s little sister. I do not recognize myself as who I am now—someone who has outlived their sister. 

I do not recognize myself as who I am now—someone who has outlived their sister. 

My funeral outfit, much like the funeral itself, is a haphazard collection held together with love by family. I wear a small men’s black dress shirt that was hastily bought the night before at a grocery store, with assistance from mí tío. We had tried to find a full men’s look but there was not much befitting my diminutive frame.  The black dress pants I wear have been uncovered from my mothers closet, as graciously offered hand-me downs from my step father would not fit around my hips. The surgical mask I wear covers any semblance of the budding mustache on my upper lip. My blue durag covers my overgrown hair, and atop that sits a black and pink harley hat recovered from Kiah’s car after the accident. It feels like a memory, and I haven’t removed it from my head since it was found. 

No one expects you to look well dressed at a sudden funeral. I don’t expect to be seen—I am not the guest of honor after all—yet I feel more exposed and fragile than ever.  My grief is obvious in my chaotic dress, the shards of my life that have randomly imploded, collected together in one dysphoric, unflattering outfit. 

The visual juxtaposition of our genders is not new. In high school, Kiah and I looked like a young stud/femme couple to those unaware that we were siblings. For me, wearing feminine clothes ended when my mother stopped putting us in matching outfits in elementary school.  In our adolescence, we grew into our own individual selves and further from one another. This is natural and would have been fine, had it not been for the rift that widened in our misguided attempts to understand each other. 

In my exploration of transness and queerness, there are points in history where I’ve looked weird, quirky, downright ugly in some aspects. I rejected the traditional norms of femininity that I knew I couldn’t stuff myself into. I stopped shaving my body hair freshman year, while simultaneously shaving different parts of my head  whenever I could. I never wore a skirt, and I was unattractive, often downright volatile to the male gaze.  Kiah’s gender expression was hardfought as well. Our practical capricorn mother was not one to place emphasis on fashion trends, so all of Kiah’s beauty skills were self-taught. After a brief emo phase and some youthful blunders, she found her stride, spending hours on her makeup and hair, curating her clothes to emphasize the changes in her petite frame. Her efforts, however, did not bring up concerns of mental illness or questions of her emotional well being. At times I wanted to learn from her, asking how to apply eye liner or put extensions in, things I saw her doing. These misguided attempts had me looking ghoulish, and I can imagine her reluctance to waste  her coveted makeup collection on a clown’s appearance, as she often refused. 

But in her kinder moments, she never had me leaving the house looking like a fool. Although she couldn’t style me in the way that she utilized femininity for herself, she dressed me in outfits that accentuated my natural personality and features. She was the first in the family to buy me mens shoes, shirts, and pants, before the words nonbinary or transgender had been spoken between any of us. Through many Christmases and birthdays receiving clothing that was obviously intended for the person my family wanted me to be, Kiah gave me gifts reflecting who she saw that I was, who she wanted to help me become.   

Kiah gave me gifts reflecting who she saw that I was, who she wanted to help me become.

I cannot recall the first time I came out to Kiah, but I remember one of the rifts that had occurred after being out to her and only her for a year. We were in our late teens, and had gone down to Texas to vacation with our tío and tía’s family. Mi tio and tía had been very close with my mother growing up, but the physical distance  limited the time for the extended family to know our personalities from more than the pictures my mother had been sending them. It was night one of the vacation, and we were arguing in hushed tones. “Can’t you just keep your hairy armpits hidden?” Kiah questioned. “Do you have to be so vocal about feminism?” “Can you please, just while we are here, tone it down?” 

I pushed back. “Why is it okay for me to behave like myself when we don’t put a name to it? Why is it not okay for them to see me as I am too?  It’s hard enough having to be misgendered while we are here, in all the spaces that I’m in, can’t you at least respect me when we are alone?”

“I just don’t get you,” Kiah responded in frustration, “I don’t understand what happened to my sister.”

We ended the conversation both in tears, both trying to see each other, both trying to express our frustrations without waking up the whole house. I don’t understand what happened to her sister either, for all I knew her sister was still there, still in this body, still trying to be a good sidekick, while also trying to survive.

Three weeks after the funeral, I go into Kiah’s bedroom and gather what will be my last hand-me-downs. I am surprised when a pair of green sweatpants fits me. She had always been flaca afterall. Among the items I collect are some pairs of shoes that I manage to squeeze my feet into, an overshirt with the tags still attached to it, a small plastic bejeweled ring that was recovered from the accident, a hello kitty baseball cap and a large stuffed snorlax that took the most space among her growing plush collection. I feel a semblance of familiar joy as I think of all the times we went through the other’s room borrowing items, and  never asking. As I feel her clothes on my body, I think, What will happen when my body changes in a year from now? Or Two years from now? Should I stop taking testosterone so that I can still hear her voice in my own? 

Even throughout the emotional distance of our adulthood, I always held a sliver of hope that the closeness of our childhood would return. We had been working to mend that bridge with a sibling weekend that would now never come. I had planned to bring her to Detroit in March, to show her the places where I went dancing, or enjoyed art and music. I wanted to introduce her to my new friends and show her the wonderful life I had created. Through my transition, I was growing into someone that I wanted Kiah to meet. Instead of all that hope, I begin to fear losing the person that she helped to raise. On my way out of Grand Rapids, I am head-to-toe in Kiah-regalia. 

Through my transition, I was growing into someone that I wanted Kiah to meet.

In my opinion, Kiah doesn’t look her best at the funeral. In life, Kiah ranged from soft  to dramatic, with baby pinks or dark purples and blacks, spending hours on her makeup at times. This time, she lacks her lifely glimmer and shine. Her arms rest over the bottom half of her torso, and her palms are held together in a little heart, loosely collecting the letters people had written to her throughout the funeral. Her nails are bare, and nude. When my grandmother Lila walks into the room during family visitation hours, the first thing she cries out is, “Where are her nails??” Kiah’s coffin shaped nails were her signature look, rotating colors to match with the season, or the outfit. Kiah and I were different versions of ourselves, existing there together in our not-our-best-but-the-best-that-we-could-do looks. 

There are family members in attendance who I’ve not seen since I was a toddler. I assume the same was true for Kiah. Our reconnection with our estranged father’s family had caused tension between Kiah and I in recent years. January 2022, on a rare FaceTime between us, I finally heard her why. “I just want to know where we come from,” she said. She was straightening her hair, and wouldn’t look directly into the camera. “I found out about our great grandmother passing before we got a chance to meet her, and I just want to learn about them before time runs out”.  Now these family members—strangers—and I gaze at each other across years of disconnect, very likely asking the same question. “Who am I meeting because I’m grieving Kiah Holliman?”

What to say about someone who was just starting to live? 

I was tasked with writing the obituary. 25 years surmised into 161 words. Debating how to honor her just when we were reconnecting as adults, was difficult. I pause at the point in the obituary where I am to write the names of who survives her. I had just legally changed my name the summer before. Kiah and I were the only Hollimans in our household growing up because we were raised by our mother, Karina Alvarez, and had no relationship with our father—or his side of the family, the Hollimans. In choosing my own last name, I wanted to start my own lineage, claim myself as founder and creation. I wanted to honor the ever-lasting transition that I would always find myself in. I chose Jueves to honor my mother, and her mother’s native tongue (Spanish), and to honor myself, having been born on a Thursday. 

Pausing at how to address myself in her obituary, I longed to be a Holliman again. If there was only one other Holliman I would deeply know and love, it was my sister. At that moment I regretted the decision I’d made. I would go back to my maiden name in a heartbeat to be a Holliman again with her, to have that automatic sign of kinship. This was an unexpected consequence of this severance from who I once was, a “Holliman Sister.” I type my chosen name, Alizae Jueves into the obituary. I feel a chasm of separation and loss where months ago, I’d felt the bounty of euphoria. 

My paternal grandmother, Cynthia Patterson, walks in with my father’s family at the start of the funeral. They bring their own funeral programs, and a beautiful portrait of Kiah painted by my uncle Coy. Cynthia approaches me with kind, concerned eyes.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks.  

“No.” Normally I would feel shame or embarrassment. I know to assume that we are family, and obviously she knows who I am. But the grief interwoven with the shrooms I had consumed before the funeral numbs my social graces. 

“I’m your grandmother, Cynthia,” she says, matter of factly. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I know about you and your transition from Kiah’s Facebook. I know I can’t understand your grief, but know that I love you fiercely, I have always loved you, and I want to get to know you. It will take a while to build our relationship, and I am willing to wait as long as it takes for you to come to me.” She looks me in the eye with an intensity. I let my body be hugged, imagining what Kiah would feel if she had been able to receive this. I am blessed beyond measure, receiving affirmations of my transness, and love, from family I am meeting for the first time. I feel damned beyond measure not being able to experience this with her. 

I am, however, blessed on both sides. Not many people can say that both grandmothers receive their transness with grace. In December of 2021 I came out to my maternal grandmother, Lila, while walking her home. The short two and a half block walk contained a transgender lowdown, explaining to my 60 something year old Salvadoran grandmother what nonbinary meant, a brief overview of pronouns, how my gender is in constant flux, and why my little sisters call me by my buddhist name “brother Mushim” rather than my given birth name. We ended the night with a hug on her doorstep, and the affirmations, “I will always love you.”

This was a blessing that I was not able to relay to Kiah, the first person in my family to whom I had come out, years prior. Kiah and I last saw each other in January of 2022. I was in town for the last weekend of the month, visiting friends and family, handing out delayed Christmas presents. Kiah was my final visit before making my way back to Detroit. I had brought over iced coffee and baked goods for her and my grandmother. They were dubbed “the roommates” by my mother since Kiah had moved back into our childhood home. We walked around the block with my dog Ruby. We had tense, reactive conversations, both leaning on each other for support but not knowing how to express it explicitly. I remember telling her about the joys that I had in my life, and navigating exciting crushes that I had on other Black Trans folk. Detroit had been a refreshing bounty of Black Trans community with a thriving arts and creative scene that I wanted to share with her. She was telling me about the moves that she was making in her life, leaving her on again, off again relationship and wanting more for herself. I scoffed, giving a terse “I told you so.” I had been wanting more for her for years. I apologized and reframed, but the damage had been done. “I’m happy for you that you are seeing your worth,” I said. We were turning back around now, and the rest of the way we made lighthearted jokes, laughing, trying to connect through goofy banter. 

I said goodbye to Kiah for the last time at my grandmother’s back doorstep. I gave both my grandmother and my sister a hug. My grandmother boasted about how responsible Kiah had become, and Kiah gave a self-satisfied nod. “Be like your sister,” my grandmother said to me. I looked up the back steps at these women I’d spent my life with. 

I speak about how I loved growing up with her, how grateful I am that I spent so much time with her.

“She’ll be good,” Kiah said. She grinned smugly at me. She was protecting me, not wanting to out me to our grandmother. In that moment I realized it had slipped my mind to tell her about the magic of having been received by our grandmother, and how much it meant to me to be out to all of the family now. All of this good news I planned  to tell her at another time. I gave Kiah a loving eyeroll and a smile, told them both I loved them, and that I would see them again soon. 

I only remember one line of my speech from Kiah’s funeral. “Kiah lived her life off the cuff, and that’s why I chose not to write anything.” 

Everything that comes after is a blur of memories, merely a semblance of how much she meant to me, and our family. I speak about how I loved growing up with her, how grateful I am that I spent so much time with her, more time than anyone else who got the chance to know her. The grief, shrooms, and overstimulation might be a barrier to these memories, or perhaps the virgo in me does not want to recall the unscripted. But I speak from the heart, and lead for my mother, friends and family so they can speak freely and share their love for Kiah.

I am never more than a few feet from the casket. My body remembers proximity to Kiah as a place of rest. I recall our childhood bedroom, our safe haven, a home within a home, where our twin mattresses lay no more than a yard apart from each other, and how in that space we discovered how to move through the world together. I left the funeral home that day knowing that I was to move and grow into the world on my own now.

Drawing had been one of the things that anchored Kiah and I in our childhood. Hours were spent in our grandmother’s living room, sitting cross legged on the couch sketching, drawing, and trading comics with each other. I had been avoiding drawing because I did not want to put the hard truth of Kiah’s death onto paper. Sitting at my mother’s dining room table, drawing with my little sisters in the hours after the funeral, a whimsical amalgamation breaks my hiatus. With a mix of crayon, pen, loose lines and scribbles, I depict the childhood table where we had tea. Different iterations of our faces cross the page. I write the first poem I’ve written in a while. 

No One Told me Hell had sunshine 

Warm Weather

And Deep,

Long 

Belly Laughs

If Hell is a place without my sister, it’s also a place where I hear my mother laugh louder than I’ve ever heard before. On a family hike a couple days after Kiah’s death, mí tío falls down a snowy path. My mother has no choice but to double over in laughter. Hell is a place where I meet love in different forms, find myself in different ways, discover how to move in the world carrying my old self and healing into someone new. Hell is a place where my sister’s travel sized urn is well worn from the adventures I take her on, adventures she would have adamantly said no to if she were still alive. Together, earthside and spiritside, we spend the summer of 2022 exploring the midwest; kayaking, hiking, biking, and laughing in places that would have felt out of reach for us only a handful of years ago. 

 Hell is a place where a year to the day of my sister’s passing, I wear the funeral dress shirt to go out dancing with friends. I walk into the club with braids done, tattoos out; alize consumed, good friends by my side. An homage to my sister, redeeming our not-our-best-but-the-best-that-we-could-do funeral looks with a sexy-while-healing look. The funeral shirt is unbuttoned, chest tattoos on display, binder safely tucked underneath to keep dysphoria at bay and be the firm container from which the plant of my spirit blooms. Found family, friends old, new and newer move throughout the club. Black trans performers take center stage, dazzling the crowd with a live band performance. I dance and experience a joy that I would have wanted to experience with Kiah earthside, but I know that her spirit accompanies me everywhere I go. Before my eyes I am confronted with the consequences of living a life of tenderness, vulnerability, authentic crumbling and regrowth. My voice is hoarse from laughing and shouting in joy. At the end of the night the shirt is sweaty and lightly stained. A promising redemption, in my opinion, to an outfit that was so dysphoric only a year before. A year to the day of transmuting grief and despair into joy and exuberance. If Hell is a place without my sister physically existing, this reality is a place where my sister’s joy is conjured and sustained through dancing, exploration, and deep, long belly laughs. 

7 Short Story Collections That Draw From Setting to Build Characters 

Posted on by EL Assistant2

One of my favorite short story writers, Eudora Welty, once said: “Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tired. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.”

Place, or setting, is something I thought a lot about while writing my first book, The Sorrows of Others, and something I started to notice more keenly in other short story collections while I was writing. Setting seems to recede to the background of most of our craft conversations, and yet stories are rarely placeless.

In each of these short story collections, special attention is paid to setting, resulting not only in satisfying descriptions of the physical world but in unforgettable characters who define themselves within the constraints of where they are. Settings range from New York to Nigeria, from Jamaica to China to the England coast—places that come alive thanks to the author’s vision, a particular way of seeing, revealed through the characters in each story. 

An achievement of these collections is that over time, they’ve become their own destinations in my mind, places I can return to and that occupy emotional territory in my heart. I recall them the same way I recall the real places I have lived: with feeling. 

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana 

The linked stories in Fofana’s debut are set in and around Banneker Terrace, a building in Harlem that comes under the crossfires of gentrification. When new ownership takes over, the threat of eviction looms, and the lives of long-term residents are thrown into question. 

We meet an aspiring gymnast in 21J; a hairdresser with a penchant for luxury in 14D; in 24M, a boy who dances on trains. Fofana creates a mosaic out of these apartments, an image of Harlem that is beautiful despite its cracks, sacred for no other reason besides that it is home to this unlikely community. Fofana’s characters must pay the rent to survive, but that doesn’t keep them from seeking their own pleasures; it doesn’t stop them from wanting to live. 

Other People’s Love Affairs by D. Wystan Owen

Set in a village on the coast of England, Owen’s collection unfolds patiently, like a dress out of a box, each story a crease in the larger story of Glass itself.

A close reading reveals motifs that recur across stories, markers of setting that string the book, and these lives, together. An old ribbon shop. A movie theater called The Gem. Shops and cafes. The promenade and the sea. One gets the sense that time might sweep this small village away completely one day, and it’s this urgency, the way time marches forward, that contrasts with the slowness of life in Glass and with the quiet intensity with which these characters pursue or refuse to pursue their longings. 

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs 

Arthurs approaches setting from different points of view in this heartbreaking, heartwarming, and often hilarious collection of stories exploring the lives of Jamaican people, both stateside and in their native country. The various configurations include leaving Jamaica, returning to Jamaica (for a grandmother’s death in “Mermaid River”), visiting (with friends who are not Jamaican in “Island”), and never leaving but hearing stories of those who did and vice versa for immigrants in the US. The dotted line between Jamaica and America can be felt in all the stories, family members and friends who must speak across that distance if they’re to speak at all, home for the diaspora being both here and far away. 

Arthurs shows how our feelings toward a place can change as we change, and the opposite: how where we have been can change who we are. 

A House is a Body by Shruti Swamy 

What is so interesting about this book is its spareness when it comes to physical description. And yet, or perhaps because they are rare, the details of setting that we do get flood the stories with feeling. I’m not sure how Swamy pulls this off, but I suspect it has to do with her sentences, which are as hardworking as they are mesmerizing, revealing the interior lives of wives, husbands, mothers, artists—people from our world and worlds that are like ours but different.  

No matter where these twelve stories are set—India, San Francisco, a place out of ancient myth—they all share an ethereal quality, and it’s this, to me, that makes this collection unlike any other. A book that dwells in liminal spaces, posing the question of what’s real and not real and whether it matters. 

God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu 

Contemporary Nigeria comes to life in this stunning and brave debut about queer love. Set in rural and urban environments, Ifeakandu’s characters meet in hotel rooms and dorm rooms and other illicit places, carving out private worlds to escape the harsh and frequently violent gaze of their larger society, in which being queer is a punishable crime. Those forced to exist in the margins have a unique way of seeing, and I was shocked in this book by how beauty and ugliness live side by side, and by how much love these characters have for a place that fails to protect them. 

A book that asks: Is love worth its pain? These ten stories answer in chorus: Yes. 

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin 

This astonishing linked collection proves what Eudora Welty says about place and vision. The stories all center around a farm on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, but in each story the farm appears new, depending on who is telling the story. Some stories are from the point of view of servants and managers, people who depend on the once formidable K.K. Harouni for their livelihoods. Other stories are from the point of view of Harouni’s political ties and family members who operate from seats of privilege and power. The landowner’s old age is a subtle throughline in the collection, creating tension as everyone from above and below in the feudal order wonders what will happen to them when the farm turns over.

Mueenuddin demonstrates an essential truth about storytelling: that what we say can never be conclusive. We have only our vision, but that can enough to create something new if we’re willing to look closely. 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

It would be easy to label Li’s second collection as being about contemporary China, but what’s truly remarkable about Li’s work is how she balances the precariousness of an emerging country with the even more precarious matter of human life. These are strange, unexpected stories about people who resist change, who are all in some way clinging to something, whether it’s an old soviet apartment building in “Number Three, Garden Road” or solitude in “Kindness,” the opening novella. 

Place is subject only to time, and in that way our settings can move only in one direction, toward the future, whereas our memories, which can grow more potent over time, grant us passage to the past. What does the world look like, filtered through memory? And can the future ever really feel new after something privately extraordinary has been lived through?

The Toughest Fish in the Barrel

Posted on by Wynter Miller

The Old World

Sunrise Foods, just a few blocks from my house, is marked by a glossy freestanding sign, a cheery egg-yolk yellow against an often gray, wintering Toronto sky. Back in December, just before I turned 14, Tracey “with an e” recruited a bunch of us from the school lunch table to work here in her uncle’s new bagel and smoked fish store. Now, six months on, all my peers are gone. But I have learned to tell whitefish chubs with their oily, golden hue from goldeye that wrinkles away from the skin. I’ve learned how to sheath my arm in a plastic bag and plunge it into a barrel of gutted herring, floating in their vegetable oil pond. How to act like I wasn’t afraid to touch the fish until I wasn’t afraid to touch the fish.

At the barrel I re-tie my white apron over the green Roots Athletics T-shirt I bought with my first paycheck, protecting it from oil splashes that never wash out. My dirty-blonde waves are pinned on top of my head with a clip of faux pearls. A berry-scented hair spray from a purple bottle helps disguise the fish smell.

I’d had an argument with my mother just before I was hired at Sunrise. She was annoyed that the sleeves of my winter coat no longer reached my wrists, that I was yanking my shirt sleeves down to my mittens to cover the gap. My growing body and its expense had slipped her mind. I had to agree to chip in my birthday money, but I got to choose the store and the new coat. Then it hit me: birthday cards only come once a year. I really needed a job.

The customer’s eyes follow my arm as it disappears into the dark oil. I reach around blindly. Even in a barrel, the fish resist being caught.

I’ve seen my mother eat herring from a little glass jar, lifting scraps of the silvery sliced fish onto a Triscuit with her fork or sometimes her fingers, and sliding the cracker onto her tongue like it’s a delicacy. Her family served it at all kinds of holidays when she was growing up.

At the Sunrise counter, though, you can buy herring sliced in oil, in cream sauce, or in wine vinegar with red onion and black peppercorns. But barrel herring is high-drama herring. “Time for herring theater,” I whisper to Hymie, who speaks Yiddish with the uniformly geriatric customers, and makes our best-selling tuna salad with a secret ingredient (chicken bouillon powder).

The old folks are picky about the exact herring they want—or pretend to be, so they can watch me do it again. This gives them something to get excited about in their day. “Once I’ve put it back, I can’t get it again,” I say to a little old lady, plastic shopping bags dangling from her wrists.

Held dripping over the barrel, the herring looks back at me with its black eyes, immobile tail, and a seam on its belly where the insides were cleaned out. “This is a really healthy one,” I say to the little old lady. I’ve learned this is what every customer wants to hear.

When she leans in to approve her herring, I instruct myself not to stare at her thin forearms peeking out from her sleeves. The chain of blurred numbers inked into them. The miracle of survival. Of anyone’s, of mine. Then, like a magician, I briskly turn the bag inside out over my hand and let the fish flop into the bottom of the clear bag. The little old lady looks up at me from behind enormous macular-degeneration sunglasses and gasps, then claps.

7 Books About Friendships in Your 20s

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I am 33-years-old, just young enough that I feel like I can still reach out and touch my 20s. The early years of adulthood were full of discovery, joy, and energy (you really can drink an entire bottle of wine at dinner and then go to work the next day with nothing more than some water and an Advil!) But I also remember the startling pain of growth, the unease of trying to navigate the years as the realization sets in that life might not be at all what you expected or hoped. 

Friends are a formative part of being in your 20s, together experiencing the same advent calendar of thrilling and unsettling realities. As the prospect of turning 30 darkens your doorstep, you realize that traits that might’ve been tolerable or easy to ignore in yourself and in them are starting to calcify—you begin to see the outlines of your lives in the decades to come. I have friends who realized they were alcoholics, who got married only to find themselves ill-suited for their spouse, or who began to accept that their dream job might not love them back. 

In You Can’t Stay Here Forever, I was interested in plumbing the depths of friendship in your 20s—how it evolves (or doesn’t) as people find their footing in the precarious time of becoming an adult. The best friends in my book, Ellie and Mable, have been close since college and now find themselves trying to figure out how to be adults, all while comparing themselves to each other. Like many longtime friends, Ellie and Mable have fragile, thorny relationship with each other—there are equal amounts of love and loyalty as there are competition and jealousy. They’re also the greatest influences in each other’s lives, for better or worse. 

While writing, my North Stars were books that recognized the power, significance, and influence of friendships in your 20s. The below books have friendships that, even if begun in childhood, remained significant in the early years of adulthood. The books remind me of my own friendships in my 20s, the ways we did right by each other, and the ways we let each other down. They remind me of racing to happy hour, finding your friend already waiting for you at the bar, and then spending the rest of the night talking about the person you hope to be. They remind me of growing up.     

Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

In this wickedly funny, electric debut, the protagonist Vivian and her best friend Jane meet in law school after Jane witnesses Vivian calling out an offensive, leering man at a party. Johnson writes deftly about the magical feeling of when you meet someone and know, in the white-hot center of your soul, that they’re going to be your friend: “Jane’s words felt like a benediction, offering an excuse, a reason, and a plan all in one, some kind of loophole against embarrassment, shame, and self-recrimination, after which [Vivian would] be forever changed.” Jane eventually drops out of law school but Vivian and Jane maintain their closeness as Vivian attempts to survive as a Black Latinx woman who is dealing with a staggeringly difficult job as a lawyer for mentally ill patients in a New York City psychiatric hospital, and an impossible family life that wants to swallow her whole. Post-Traumatic is singular, incisive, and unlike anything you’ve read before.

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Ho’s book is a glittering collection of stories that follow two best friends, Fiona and Jane, from when they first meet as children after Fiona immigrates to America from Taiwan with her mother, through early adulthood when Jane is living in LA and Fiona is in Manhattan. Alternating in perspective, the stories navigate the women’s complicated relationships with their parents, their partners, each other, and themselves. As they drift in and out of each other’s lives they serve as each other’s touchstones as time reveals itself in the terrifying, marvelous way that it does during early adulthood. Most of all, there is the fierce, hard-won loyalty of two friends who see each other for who they really are.

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

Truth and Beauty is a memoir, and like all things written by Patchett, it is exceptional. Patchett writes about one of the most defining relationships of her life: her friendship with Lucy Grealy, whom she becomes close to after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Grealy, who wrote Autobiography of a Face, is a poet and essayist whose childhood cancer led to the partial removal of her jawbone. My favorite parts of this story are when Patchett and Grealy are in their twenties, trying to figure out who they are, who they want to be. It’s been two years since I read this book and I think about it all the time. 

Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

Stay True, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is heart-wrenching, brilliant, unforgettable. Hua Hsu writes about his unlikely friendship with Ken, whom he met as an undergraduate student at Berkeley. Hsu values obscurity, measures himself in defiance to popular culture and the mainstream. Ken is in a fraternity and once made Hsu wait with him at a mall for an Abercrombie and Fitch store to open so he could snag a jacket that was sold out everywhere else. Although Ken dies unbearably young, at twenty, Ken leaves an indelible mark on Hsu’s life—the kind made only possible by those rare friendships that shape your outlook on the world.

Stay True is a beautiful portrayal of coming of age, of a time where you were both overconfident and insecure, exploding with cynicism and hope, moving through the world under the spell that, maybe, unlike the generations before, you and your friends will figure it all out. 

The Dead Are Gods by Eirinie Carson

In The Dead Are Gods, Carson writes about her friendship with her goddess-of-a-friend Larissa, who dies unexpectedly at 32. Best friends since childhood, they spend their explosive twenties by each other’s side, two strikingly beautiful models and roommates who were maybe, perhaps, behind on rent but could go out and stun any man in London into buying them dinner and drinks. Carson’s writing is spectacular and piercing, and The Dead Are Gods is a powerful meditation on agonizing, excruciating grief, an honest portrayal of the lives that are left behind when a friend suddenly dies. 

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Frances Cha’s outstanding debut follows Kyuri, Miho, Ara, Wonna, and Sujin, five women living in the same apartment complex in Seoul. While each is struggling with individual dilemmas amidst crushing wealth inequality, the wreckages of their childhood—and most of all, the impossible beauty and femininity standards that are inextricably tangled with life as a modern Korean woman—their friendships with each other emerge as the greatest source of comfort and influence in their lives. If I Had Your Face asks urgent, aching questions about beauty: its price, its power, its suffering. It is also a testament to the power and importance of friendship in the early years of adulthood.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about Sam and Sadie, who meet as children, become friends, fall out, and then find their way back to each other in college. They make a video game together, achieve life-changing success, and all the while their decades-long friendship is both treasured and tested. For both of them, the most influential relationship in their lives is their friendship with each other––such is the power of bonds reforged in the fire of early adulthood. As I read, I seesawed between sympathy for Sam or Sadie during the stormy seasons of their relationships, and rejoiced for them when they found equal footing. Most of all though, I was moved and inspired by Zevin’s portrayal of an authentic and transcendent friendship.

Poets Can’t Write Novels, and Other Baseless Fears

Posted on by Wynter Miller

I wake early each morning, before the kids, to write and see the real city—my private Brooklyn curving in on itself, the prose poem of citywide snow removal and garbage pick-ups, geese migrating over Kings County rooftops in V-formation. The humor, the horror, the wonder. How to chronicle it all? I don’t feel like it’s actual writing unless I burn out my computer, smoke puffing from its mechanical gills, in the same liminal state of system overdrive I find myself in daily. So I sit behind my smoking MacBook Air, a woman with a story to tell.

I touch my phone to life to find endless emails, updates from the virtual life I’m trying to run parallel to my own, one in which I’m just generally sparklier. Two emails I sent myself at 3:17 AM when I couldn’t sleep: one says, “Finish the novel!” and the other simply says, “Sandwich.” No idea what that’s about. Then the third email this week from someone’s daughter’s friend’s dental hygienist’s father-in-law asking whether I can read their three thousand-page novel by tomorrow and ensure immediate publication along with a place on The New York Times Fiction Best Seller List. I wonder if he knows I must set an alarm each day to find time to shower, or that my books are poetic, published by small presses, and largely employed as bar napkins.

I initially stumbled into poetry as a dyslexic child who struggled with the rules of language. For once, I didn’t have to worry about my grammar and syntax being “correct.” Instead, poetry opened a literary geography of sentence fragments and dangling participles. My early linguistic challenges and consequent turn to poetry caused me to focus on innovation, and I developed an instinct to play fast and loose with the trappings of various genres, inventing new ones or, in the case of my poet’s novel years later, coming at one genre with the tools of another.

When I started working on my forthcoming novel, Filthy Creation, it was the first time I was really trying to adhere on any level to the genre known as fiction. Although I’d technically written one work of fiction before, it was really more of a poetic set of monologues. But in thinking about what it was for me to write poetry, and what it was for me to write fiction, I had to figure out what those two things were—and then what happened when I tried to do one with the gadgets of the other.

This writing journey has prompted me to ask certain questions, such as: what are the particular qualities, formal innovations, and associative leaps that a poet brings to prose? What separates, distinguishes, or defines the poet’s novel (outside of its being written by a writer who is known as a poet)—and should it even be pushed into the rigid categories inherent in any act of definition? As I worked on my novel, I couldn’t seem to make my language work in the exact way novelists typically write. Even as I learned new techniques of pacing and plotting, there stuck to my words something of the land of poetry.

Instead of the snappy odes to Freytag’s Pyramid my then-agent recommended I adopt in order to sell Filthy Creation, I started reading writers who also got abducted by their own thought processes. Kate Zambreno: “The publishing people told me that I was writing a novel, but I was unsure. What I didn’t tell them is that what I longed to write was a small book of wanderings, animals.”

The agent asked me to take out all of the poetic bits in my novel.

The agent asked me to take out all of the poetic bits in my novel. Trouble is, I always lapse into poetry despite my attempts at perfectly sterile-smelling prose that says: you can buy my book; it won’t bite; I’m a winner. But what I really want is to write a book where I glow in a strange way that seems mystical at first, but really indicates I’m about to burst into flames. And then I do.

My agent was in the sunset of his life and one day I called him to check in on the book submission process and he didn’t remember who I was. It was a great metaphor for my literary career to date. And then, after my book obviously didn’t sell with the agent, the independent press editor who did eventually take it asked me if I could go back and put in all the poetic bits that had been cut for supposed commercial consumption. If that’s not a publishing parable, I don’t know what is.

“James Joyce Dies; Wrote ‘Ulysses’” is how The New York Times summed up Joyce’s life in his obituary headline—because it was just that big of a deal. It certainly was to me. After setting out to write Filthy Creation, I started trying to find some epic structure I worshipped to riff on: Ulysses and then also The Odyssey? A feminist rewrite? A feminist drive-by? But then wasn’t I just being insufferably pretentious, and filtering whatever I had to say through two sets of man doors, and wasn’t it time I find my own fiction language? But how on earth do that?  Especially when I’m no James Joyce.

I started to imagine the arc Filthy Creation “should” have, the realizations and consequent transformations—but then no. I decided that maybe my book needed to be about how to unbuild the arc and rebuild something else entirely, about different ways of seeing. I wanted to tell my students so concerned about literary propriety: there are other narrative shapes and possibilities. You can replace that wizened pyramid with a structure that better reflects the authentic mess that is your life; it can be built entirely out of Barbie Band-Aids, dusty books, SpongeBob figurines and chicken fingers. But, unlike Joyce, I’m no maker of epics. If anything, I suffer from the very modern disease of being a Medieval miniaturist, or poet, in a world that values only literary maximalism. If it values literature at all.

It was at this point that I picked up poet Ben Lerner’s 10:04. Lerner opens his novel with his poet-protagonist walking the High Line after eating baby octopuses. In a move that previews the cerebral fireworks to come, he considers the complexity of octopus life, and as he does, he senses an extraterrestrial consciousness, a sensibility that isn’t his alone—octopus death and life, and through it, a different way of encountering human life. He tells his literary agent this and they laugh it off. The agent wants him to convert one of his New Yorker pieces into a novel. But when she asks how he’ll do it, he says: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously . . . I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.” Reading Lerner, I realized that at least part of what the supposed “poet’s novel” does is play with notions of time and space.

I wanted to tell my students so concerned about literary propriety: there are other narrative shapes and possibilities.

Like Lerner, like me, both “would-be Whitman[s],” wannabe Whitmans, Whitman himself felt moved to alter time and space via poetic forms: “possess’d at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction . . . a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America.” This impulse resulted in Leaves of Grass.

Even Whitman, that writer who has become synonymous with poetry, penned two novels, and pondered writing Leaves of Grass in other genres, including fiction. He fantasized in his journal about mixing forms so that the stage directions of his imagined play could appear as poetry. His musings reflect the plight of all writers: dreaming of transcending language altogether, giving readers an experience so complete it’s not of words at all, much less limited by any one genre. Admittedly, this is an impossible dream. But I suspect the best version of the poet’s novel takes a new step along the path toward expanding the concept of genre, forging a new form altogether.

The poet Russell Lowell wrote Whitman off as “a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of cab drivers!”—begging the question: how is that at all an insult? Please only call me a friend of cab drivers. But this grittiness reflected Whitman’s connection to an actual city that many highfalutin writers couldn’t really access. As Henry Miller wrote, “in the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”

No matter how overcrowded and malodorous, I cherish Miller’s idea of “street” knowledge— starting with my daily commute, that morning rush of being over-caffeinated and feeling my brain start to flicker. On one particular day, a parrot on a guy’s shoulder on the F train tells me to go check myself, so it’s already a very Brooklyn experience. I stand up, winding my body around the subway pole as I attempt, with shaking hands, to write five new pages of Filthy Creation in the notes section of my iPhone. Here I am on the subway to work again, emitting poetry from my pores, shooting it out of embarrassing orifices, seeking to shape that amber liquid into something legible to my fellow straphangers, i.e., prose. The trouble is, I don’t have the faintest idea how to structure my novel. But since it came from my body, I decide to give it tendons instead of grammar. I pull out Lerner’s 10:04, which I believe can help me find my way into the fiction form as a poet.

As I am of my city, that “friend of cab drivers” Whitman was also a fanboy when it came to Brooklyn. He made no secret of his love for the borough. Here’s Whitman nailing the Brooklyn writer forever mood: “I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine, / I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it, / I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, / In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me.”

I know nothing of prairies, but the urban sublime is that instant when we break out of the tunnels and are briefly sun-blinded. It’s everything. Times are bleak but at least the subway pulls out of the ground long enough for a quickie epiphany.

As we break into the light at 4th Avenue and 9th, a little girl tracing the train window with her lollipop is illuminated in a flash. How the parent in me feels I should tell her not to put it back in her mouth, as it’s now soot-covered (her own father does so), but another part of me wants to say, “Take this magic wand and write in whatever genre you please on the window, then crack it, and run away; they’ll only domesticate you.” I don’t say it, but I do grin too widely at her in a manner that must look pretty frightening because she hides behind her dad until Jay Street Metrotech.

People cleverer than I have written about that literary twist where the city turns out to be the book’s main character—and they’re not wrong. New York, you’ve been everything to me, your trains and subway tracks my only way of making sense of the world. I have sometimes even caught myself imagining my own insides according to your radical structures, especially since car metaphors are lost on me. Even my use of language feels stolen from the rhythms of its twisting, often broken, subway cars flashing through darkened uncharted lands.

New York, you’ve been everything to me, your trains and subway tracks my only way of making sense of the world.

You may have to run for the G train every time (why?! citywide prank? behavioral experiment?), but the view when you rise over the Gowanus Canal and glimpse that Statue of Liberty makes it all worth it. There’s always construction. What have they been building there all this time?! Another Gowanus Canal under the current one? Is it to have a doppelgänger? A friend? And if so—how do I visit it? What else could it be? What sort of structure involves infinite becoming? (If I ever discover what they’re making, I’ll let you know. Unless it’s condominiums.)

In the midst of all this chatter—internal and of the city—I kid you not, as I pondered Lerner as a Whitman of the vulnerable grid, there he suddenly was, with his kid. That’s the thing about living in Brooklyn. I’m reading 10:04, trying to figure out if Lerner can be the poetry ghost that haunts me long enough to help me understand my way into fiction. Then, poof, there he is, sitting across from me, as if I’ve manifested him by crushing so hard on his book. A father reading to his child on the train. I picture subways zooming through our shared brain networks, and everything that goes on there as a form of writing, or thought. It’s a pretty memorable moment for me. And is it just my imagination, or does he catch sight of 10:04 in my hand, resulting in one brief, blushing instant of recognition?

As I wrote Filthy Creation, I often found my fiction making certain poetic associative leaps that ask the reader to find some of the meaning inside themselves. But I also had the sense that I could just barely fit the body of my words inside the prose door. Which is all to say that maybe calling it a “poet’s novel” is too limiting. Maybe when poets write novels, they are creating something entirely new, which reflects a monstrous coming together, as when woman and fish make a mermaid. At the very least, this creature should really have its own fun name—Noem? Povel? Novem? Suggestions welcome.

Turning Small Rebellions Into a Large Literary Revolution

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Kenan Orhan’s debut, I Am My Country, feels like much more than just a book of imaginative short stories set in and around the author’s ancestral homeland of Turkey. The powerful collection could be said to comprise a series of real “small rebellions”—enacted by its characters, prose, and the political implications of writing the book itself—which each add up and culminate into one large, literary revolution. 

Orhan’s characters — ranging from a woman, who uses her magical attic to house Istanbul’s discarded and forbidden musicians, to a teenager in Soma who dreams of escaping his predetermined future in a small mining town, to a muezzin who spies on a Turkish baker and her adulterous husband while the city floods with apocalyptic rain — pleasurably (and at times hostilely) invite readers to interpret for themselves what reality means and how to combat it when history isn’t on your side. 

Inspired by Italo Calvino, Jim Shephard, and Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Orhan’s fiction infuses melody, charm, and wonder effortlessly while excavating the real repercussions of an authoritarian regime. The last story, “The Birdkeeper’s Moral,” almost reads like a Gabriel García Márquez novel, complete with magical realism and a timeless decade-spanning, gut-wrenching romance, but instead of love being compared to a contagious plague, it is likened to a tragic pogrom, and instead of existing in a late 19th-century Cartagena, it belongs in Istanbul and to Turkish characters who have lost their voice and memories to a blanketed history. All in all, Orhan’s stories conjure that enchanted longing evident in García Márquez’s Spanish classic, though perhaps more aptly capture “Art in the Time of Repression” in this unique and dazzling collection. 

Throughout our interview, Orhan and I spoke about how geographical landscapes affect one’s identity, the risks of writing about Turkey’s government, and the convenience of a country’s selective memory.

Kyla Walker: Could you explain your relationship to Turkey and how it has possibly evolved in the past decade?

Kenan Orhan: We grew up, me and my brothers, in a half-Turkish household. But it was my mom’s side of the family that’s Turkish, and the stay-at-home parent was my father. We knew all of our maternal relatives were Turkish, but we didn’t grow up speaking Turkish. So when we went, which was just about every summer to visit relatives, it was this kind of weird, familial and familiar place that we were still kind of kept out of a little bit. And that also was exacerbated by being tourists, but like local tourists to a place. So you’re going to the local hangouts, the local restaurants, your tour guides are locals, but you’re still hitting Kapalı Çarşı, Sultan Ahmet Camii—all these, you know, famous places. And so you get a weird tour guide relationship, but it’s always from the relationship of the personal. So my answer would be like, “This is where we got mugged the other day, and this is where has the best marzipan.”

But that coupled with having to teach ourselves Turkish later in life and taking an interest in Turkey later in life, which has made it this sort of strange and precious thing and probably a little too precious at times because over the last decade, I actually haven’t been, we stopped going after the 2013 Gezi Park protests. I was young, so I couldn’t just go. And then as I grew up, and was able to afford my own ticket, my parents and relatives there were like, “No, you’ve started writing about it, so it’s not safe.” I don’t know how true that is. But it’s been this kind of weird attempt to hold on to a part of me that has always felt unstable. 

KW: I loved the Beyoğlu story, which was so magical and enchanting, but also politically relevant in terms of censorship and the limits of artistic expression that’s currently on the rise in Turkey. While I was reading the collection, something very jarring to me was seeing Erdoğan’s name in print in contemporary fiction. That’s something I don’t think I’d ever seen before. But, it makes all of the stories feel urgent and important and speaks to our generation today more than I think anything else I’ve read about Turkey. So, I’m curious, did you consider leaving Erdoğan’s name out of the stories or changing it in your fiction? And was this a tough decision to make or more of a natural one to involve the current politics of Turkey in this collection?

KO: It was kind of a gut instinct. And I don’t know if I ever considered not including his name in a lot of the current policies just because in as much as these stories are a way for me to explore and hold on to an aspect of myself, it was also a way for me to explore and get to know Turkish identity, what it is to be the country Turkey right now, what that “republic” means. And he’s been in power for 20 years, so it feels impossible to write a story about contemporary Turkey that doesn’t have him appear in some way, whether it’s his policies and he doesn’t stay named, or the AKP, his political party, it just feels impossible not to talk about it. One, because I feel like the Turkish people are generally very politically aware as a population. I won’t say the most politically aware, I’m trying to avoid generalizations, but there’s a history of rebellion and revolution and coups and all that in Turkey, and that’s for a reason. It’s a very politically minded country. And so to accurately represent that I feel like he would have to be there. 

As much as these stories are a way for me to explore and hold on to an aspect of myself, it was also a way for me to explore and get to know Turkish identity.

But it’s interesting you say that you haven’t seen his name. I didn’t really think about that until just now. But yeah, for the most part, I only see his name in news stories. And part of that, I would imagine, is because Turkish writers can’t really put his name in there for fear of reprisal. And American writers probably just don’t care. Which is unfortunate. And I hope that’s what this collection can kind of do a little bit, is both bring attention to Turkey’s unique political situation, but also a little bit lampoon the rule of one man nationalist populism that’s on the rise there and in other countries like Poland and Hungary and elsewhere. But yeah, he was very much a target for me. I set out to write a couple of these stories very much because I was very upset with his policies. “Soma” being the main one. I mean, it’s a national tragedy, really, that mine explosion. And they keep happening. There was another mine explosion recently.

KW: Yeah. I wanted to ask about that too, to provide some background for readers—on May 13th, 2014, the worst mine disaster in Turkish history occurred at Eynez coal mine in Soma, causing an underground fire that lasted two days and in total killed 301 people. And most recently, in October of 2022, a mine explosion occurred again in Soma and caused 40 deaths. So obviously, these are very tragic events and are very hard to write about. It seems like a fragile line to go into these perspectives of the residents there and to share them with the world, while also being respectful, not to misrepresent the facts and the trauma of an event like that. Did you feel more liberty and flexibility in fiction to add to these narratives that we hear in the news, or did you feel constricted in some ways to talk about something so serious and personal that actually occurred?

KO: I think fiction is liberating both for the writers and the readers. But you tread a very fine line. You’re balancing essentially taking advantage of a tragedy as well, or catastrophe porn, essentially, where it feels like you’re making light of a situation in which 301 people died. And so it’s a lot of revision is what that is. And you have to find the way into the story. If you just sort of sit down and say, “I’m going to write a story about a mining disaster,” it’s not going to go well because for the most part you’re essentially doing a fictionalized account of a journalistic thing.

I think fiction is liberating both for the writers and the readers.

But when you can find the human aspect of it, when you can, in the midst of chaos, find those small moments of humanity… Anyone can relate to somebody who desires something or who is going through grief or loss or probably not quite the scale of the catastrophes, although catastrophe is global. But you can sort of find your way in generally with a peripheral character. And that’s how that works for “Soma.” The narrator is peripheral to the disaster, mostly because it felt borderline disrespectful to try and get in at Ground Zero. And I hope I did it well enough because you don’t know. You try. There’s a lot of different ways contemporary publishing tries to set up situations so that they go well, whether it’s sensitivity readers or making sure that people get to tell their own stories rather than having those stories taken out of their mouths and told by other people. I struggle with that still, as someone who’s away from Turkey, someone who’s not living those disasters, I don’t know, with 100% confidence that I have any right to tell these stories. But I also know that their not being told in the States is kind of a shame. And if no one else here is going to write them, I guess I will.

And you also have to then say, can they tell these stories in Turkey? I’m in a very privileged position. I’m away from the problems and I’m also away from them. And so I’m trying to give voice to people who can’t write.

KW: Do you feel a sense of pressure or obligation to do that? And would you say that your stories are more geared towards Turkish audiences or American?

KO: I think my stories are very much geared towards people who know something about Turkey. During the editing process, when the collection is coming together, fortunately my editor helped me with this, but I had to be significantly more aware of people who have no exposure to Turkey. But I also didn’t want to sit down and write a story about Istanbul and pass perhaps the Grand Bazaar, right? And they say, “Oh, the Grand Bazaar, which has been here since…” It’s hundreds of years old. And it’s this icon of Istanbul identity. But you don’t have to say all of this stuff. And sometimes people can just walk by things. You don’t even have to reference them all the time. 

We’re learning which trains get you where, but it doesn’t really matter, especially for those of us like me who don’t live in New York City. It doesn’t mean anything.

And a problem I have right now with a lot of American fiction, especially set in New York City, is that we’re learning all about the subways in New York City, we’re learning which trains get you where, but it doesn’t really matter, especially for those of us like me who don’t live in New York City. It doesn’t mean anything. And so you’re constantly trying to figure out how much information is necessary so they have political awareness of the situation and how much information is too much to which someone who is in the know would be eye rolling. And it’s any time anybody who does stories of elsewhere or stories of something that isn’t common knowledge and you’re bringing an audience with you, hopefully. And I’ve always kind of thought of it like that, rather than having an audience in mind or trying to exclude people. I want these stories to be easy to get on board with, but not necessarily too cliche.

KW: Yeah, I agree. Do you hope for this collection to be translated into Turkish?

KO: I would be thrilled. I mean, that would be incredible. There are elections coming up and Erdoğan might be out this May, really as early as, I think, three weeks from now. But he might win or stay in power even if he doesn’t. And I think if anybody tried to translate and publish this with him in charge, it would not go well. I think they’d probably face jail time. I mean, he’s a very soft-skinned dictator. And I frequently have characters call for violence against him or express discontent. But many of these stories are very much against, if not the regime, the horrors Turkey has committed, maybe not as a country, but as its state, its rulers have committed. And that goes all the way back to the ‘50s. I have a story set during the Istanbul pogrom, which was an attempt to essentially just kill all the city’s Jews, Greeks, and Armenians. And I didn’t know about this at all. My grandmother and grandfather lived through it. Nobody talked about it. I had figured it out in 2015, 2016 maybe. And that’s a little bit on me, I’m not politically aware, but it’s not something Turks like to talk about. But that feels insincere to criticize the current government and not think about how we got here.

The Perfect Beach Weather for Every Gender

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Daisies” by Marne Litfin

Neither of my girlfriends would take me to the beach. When I told Miller, they yelped into the phone like they’d broken a toe: But it’s summer! That’s what summer is for! And you live so close! Their voice cracked, on summer and summer and close. I heard them bend down and whisper to one of their chihuahuas: can you believe that? The chihuahua tippy-tapped back. Two days later, they put the dogs in daycare then drove three hours down from Binghamton.

I watched from a window while they parked their dead grandma’s Camry in front of a fire hydrant. They strolled up my porch steps already grinning, already giddy, already preparing to sell my town a boatload of invisible musical instruments. Well well well, I said, flinging open the screen. Their mustache wriggled. Picture the underside of a caterpillar, dancing.

We hugged. I laughed, too. How could I not? Miller and I are always thinking the same thing: I’m so glad you found me. It’s ridiculous that we were born on opposite coasts. It’s ridiculous that we only met three years ago at a feminist podcasting conference—I’ve never recorded a podcast in my life. We’re both skeptical of mass gatherings; I’m not really a woman anymore and Miller hasn’t been one since way back. Life is a stupid, beautiful miracle. It’s rude and homophobic that we didn’t get into any of the same grad schools and have half a mountain range between us now. We should’ve been brothers. We would’ve made great small dogs.

Hey buddy, they said. You gotta learn to fuckin drive. Their arms soft pretzeled around me and the words were warm and muffled in my shoulder. I don’t like touching my friends, Miller especially (it’s like touching one of my actual siblings; a little too close) but we hadn’t seen each other in six months.

I’m leaving! I yelled upstairs. Someone, either my girlfriend or her wife, shouted down drive safe. We were already sprinting to the car.

The trunk was crammed with a boogie board, pool noodles, two-liters of Mountain Dew, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beach blanket. I pointed to the blanket when I popped my bag in. You are twenty-nine human years old, I said. I know, said Miller. Isn’t it great?! In the front seat, they handed me an open bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Hold these. Ambient techno shit exploded against the glass. Absolutely not, I said. I set the Cheetos down by my feet to reach for the stereo. Do not forsake our holy snack! Miller shouted, batting my hand away. I made us a playlist. They pulled out their phone and the noise evaporated. I was just waiting for you so we could start from the beginning.

 I picked up the Cheetos. I am ready. See? Play me my playlist.

Good, they said. I sat obediently while they programmed the GPS, and then “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” by The Beach Boys clinked on. Brian Wilson, as we pulled away from the curb, thought it would be nice if we were older. Then we could live together in the kind of world where we belonged. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think it would. Brian Wilson, very sadly, was never a gay transsexual.

I hummed along. I liked watching Miller drive. Driving is a private act. Watching someone drive is like watching them groom their genitals. They’re vulnerable. They can’t make eye contact. You need to give them total concentration. Also, I don’t drive.

I thought about Miller pointing their car towards me that morning, winding through the Poconos, watching the fog burn off. I imagined them writing weird little poems in traffic, texting their wife good morning from a gas station, chugging vanilla draft lattes by the can. Three empties rattled in the cupholders, which I interpreted as love notes for me: I’m here. I am with you. I am ready for anything because I am extremely caffeinated.

How’s the murder? Miller asked. We sat in traffic on 76. Same same?

They’re fine, I said. They both want to quit their jobs. Miller waited, giving space for me to say more. I wanted to unload—we never got to see each other during the semesters—but it was complicated. My girlfriend had gotten obsessed with miniatures and was wasting her evenings hunting down collectible toys, mostly Funko Pops. She stalked eBay auctions at night, fell asleep in front of digital estate sales alone in our shared office. A month ago, she had, without telling me or her wife, paid a thousand dollars for a vinyl figurine of Sloth from The Goonies.

Her wife retaliated by deciding to build a kayak. She wasn’t very handy, and tried roping me in at first, getting moon-eyed while describing its unique construction. Look at the plans, she said. There are no nails, no screws anywhere. I didn’t get it. How will it stay together? I asked. With  pegs and lashes, she said. We can steam the boards together in the backyard. I had no idea what that meant; I didn’t think she did, either. She took meandering field trips to various lumber yards, kept coming home with the wrong kinds of wood. After three or six or seven of these failures, she hired a handywoman, a “rent-a-dyke” whose woodshop she’d been disappearing to every night.    

And we did all the right things. We ate breakfast together. Had sex. Between us we shared six Google calendars, went to therapy, hosted a bi-weekly movie night. I didn’t know what to do. Mostly I was doing a lot of laundry, waiting for them to come to bed. I moved dishes along, from the sink to the dishwasher to their homes in our cabinets. I cooked dinners with too much butter, delivered full plates to the office and labeled leftovers for the freezer. At the start of the pandemic, we’d seen footage of cruise ships floating at sea, bobbing beyond ports where they couldn’t dock. We’d held onto each other while the clips cycled over and over again on CNN. We thought lucky us, we will never be stranded like that.

I used to think of us as a constellation, as individual fires connected by unseen forces. That’s what we should call us, I’d said—the Little Dipper. Throuple and polycule were straight people words that sounded like science projects. My girlfriend’s wife suggested The Triangle (since we’re all equal). I don’t remember when one of our in-laws joked about us being a harem. We vetoed him immediately, but then someone said the thing about the group of crows. After that, everyone called us the murder.

They’re really stressed right now. I think maybe they see me and hear me talk about you and wish they could be back in grad school, too. How’s Priss?

She’s good, Miller nodded. Gets out next week. Counting the seconds ‘til we’re both on break. We’re taking the dogs camping.

Cool, I said. Miller’s wife was a stressfully hot flannel femme and decorated swimmer who taught second grade. In the past I’d wondered how much time Miller spent worrying about Priscilla waking up one day like, Oh shit, how the fuck did I end up marrying this nebbishy trans sadboy, why has god abandoned me, but then one day I just straight up asked and Miller was like, Dude I literally do not think about anything else.  

You should’ve said something, I said. We could’ve waited until her school year was over, I would’ve loved to see her. Miller did not acknowledge I was lying. She’s been a bunch of times. And today’s more of an us day, they said. Two little guys, right?

Right, I said, Two little guys. But next time? A little plausible deniability would be good for us—Ocean City is big into cop shit. Like, get ready for ‘family friendly’ fun. You can’t buy alcohol. They like Nazis and baseball. They want to see good American women in bikinis.

Whatever, Miller said. I don’t care; it’s one day. I love the ocean, I’m a delight—you’re a delight—we’re gonna swim and take naps and no one’s gonna talk to me about their fucking dissertation. I didn’t even bring a book. I’m gonna get a hotdog and think about nothing. These motherfuckers—

They don’t know a thing.

Exactly.

As we rolled off the Atlantic City Expressway, the sky spread out for us. Blue, blue blue; light, high and hopeful, like the sun had gone for a ride in a balloon that would never come down. The horizon was patchy with pale clouds. We rolled our windows down, and I blasted Miller’s playlist all the way down Asbury Avenue, a synthpop track about self-control that sounded vaguely Swedish and gay. The chorus was the word “self-control,” over and over.

They don’t know! I yelled over the music.

Absolutely fuckin not!! Miller yelled back.

I knew Miller would lose their mind the second they saw the boardwalk. Ocean City was fully committed to pastels. All fonts were nostalgic, every shop window ripped straight from a hazy memory of an unexamined childhood. Underfoot, each plank sat tight against the next, all solid hardwood, pressure treated and feathered with bike lines. Police officers dotted the path like candy buttons; American flags hung everywhere, as if today and every day was the Fourth of July. It had none of the scruff and grime of Atlantic City, eleven miles to the north (the beach the murder preferred when they weren’t too depressed to drive; we were the least weird things there). Signs pointed us towards sand toy shops, saltwater taffy, clean bathrooms. In the distance: the ocean, unbothered, roaring like the white noise machine outside my therapist’s office door.

What do you want to do first?! Miller asked. Their backpack bobbed behind them, bright pink and patterned with flowers, a homosexual bullseye. You want to get ice cream? Hotdogs? God, this place is amazing. Look at that Ferris wheel! They have carnival games?? Dude, you didn’t tell me! I gotta win P something. I’m—oh my god, holy shit, look, they have frozen lemonade. We have to get one, I haven’t had that si—

Let’s get a spot first, I said, pointing to an area between lifeguards. We passed families in Tommy Bahama chairs, spread out like honey on toast. Clean, blonde heads on clean blonde sand. There was no one like either of us anywhere. Trust me, I looked.

Underneath my clothes was a new, red singlet. A one-piece spandex thing, kind of like what Greco-Roman wrestlers wear, from an online-only gender-neutral swimwear brand, Captain Beefhart. It didn’t have a built-in binder but came with the next best thing: a thick double lining that smoothed breasts into something less breast-y. The algorithm had dangled it across my social media every summer for years. Instagram, I eventually admitted, knew more about my gender than I did.

It looked great, but I’d only pranced around in it safely at home. The murder adored it. Ooh, look at my little muscle man, my girlfriend whooped. She said it with the set of implied air quotes we used to refer to all genders and pronouns in our house. She was kidding but also not. It was a joke, but also it wasn’t. I writhed for my audience. That’s my Baywatch boyfriend!

Miller stripped immediately and zoomed around the blanket, pulling out sunscreens and a hat. They tucked the edges of the blanket under our shoes. I’d never seen them undressed before. They had so much chest hair. Their bathing suit was a tiny pair of black, glossy, flamboyant speedo shorts, covered in white and yellow daisies. The trunks were tiny—no bigger than the microfiber cloth I wiped my glasses with—and so tight, you could’ve shot them from the back of a classroom like a rubber band. They were stupefyingly faggy and made them look like a 70s gay porn star. Their bellybutton was an outie.

Their bathing suit was a tiny pair of black, glossy, flamboyant speedo shorts, covered in white and yellow daisies.

I didn’t know you had so many tattoos, I said, freezing with a hand on my zipper. What’s that one? I pointed to a bluish stick-and-poke blob below their collarbone. It’s supposed to be the Shade from Hollow Knight, they laughed. Prissy’s friend did it in undergrad. Hollow Knight was a video game Miller played compulsively back when they were still doing “dyke with bad posture.” They’d walked through it for me on Twitch after my prelims. The Shade looks like the shadow of the main character, the knight, but it’s an enemy. It spurts out of the knight’s body whenever you die. When you restart, your Shade is waiting there for you, ready to attack. You have to kill it before it kills you.

Here, this one’s better. They turned around and pulled down one side of their shorts. On their ass below the seam was the Shade in a solid, professional outline, now a real ghost floating in deep black, a four-inch tentacle body with glowing eyes. A nail—the knight’s signature weapon—stuck out of its back. Wow, I said, T gave you a lot of ass hair.

Shut the fuck up, they laughed, pulling their suit up. This is all me—100% homegrown, Armenian body hair, baby. When I was a girl, it was a fuckin’ nightmare. My mom tried dragging me to electrolysis when I was like, nine. My littlest sister still practically lives there.

You grow that Robin Williams chest nest yourself, too? I asked. I couldn’t help it; I pointed. You can barely see your scars! Miller slapped a pat of sunscreen on one arm. Dude, that’s not a compliment, they said.

I squinted at them, pretended the sun was in my eyes. I knew Miller was thinking about whether they wanted me to apologize, or if they should silently forgive me, or say some small thing to remind me that we weren’t the same. I stared down at my feet, unzipped my shorts and slid them off. People were looking at us, probably looking at both our chests, trying to figure out who and what we were, wondering if we were homeless or some kind of vintage cosplayers. I kept my head down.

I don’t think I want ass hair, I said, finally. I don’t want to look like the men in my family. My father and brother were bushy, like Brawny paper towel men. I folded my shirt into my backpack, away from the sand. I hoped Miller would say something.

Cute suit! they said. But T body hair isn’t genetic, you don’t know what you’ll get.

Well, they both have acne too, I said. Do you want to swim?      

Acne isn’t genetic, either, said Miller. And I knew they were over it for now, at least enough to turn this into a pep talk if I wanted, but I didn’t, not really. I didn’t want anyone standing on the other side of the thing I was so fucked up about to help me, especially Miller.

And anyway, it wasn’t the right time. A teenage boy wearing an official-looking fanny pack stepped onto our blanket and asked for our beach tags.

What the fuck are beach tags? Miller asked me. The boy pointed to a sign.

Ten dollars? Miller said. Ten AMERICAN dollars?

I got it, I said. Get me a hotdog or something later. Do you take cards? I asked the kid.

There’s an ATM just up on the boardwalk, ma’am.

I blanched. I’ll be right back, I said. I sang “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys while I walked to the ATM and back, replacing all the lyrics with ma’am.

You can take Accutane, Miller said, after I gave the Ocean City foot soldier our money. He handed us two pink pins to stick on our bags.

Does my suit look weird? I asked.      

I already said the suit is cute. It’s so cute! Do you need me to say it again? It is very cute! Let us swim.

I took their hand. The sun was white and still and achingly full. It floated directly above us, still on its hot-air ride. I know I said I don’t like touching my friends, but I wanted us to rush towards the water together, so we did. We’d never held hands before and I was surprised by how I felt, how much I felt. It was like holding my girlfriend’s wife’s nephew for the first time, getting totally overwhelmed by his infant perfection. Everything in our lives, whoopsie daisy, was such an intricate practical joke. 

Miller’s grip tightened. Their nails were immaculate. I LOVE THIS! they yelled as we crashed in. Peak Miller. Sometimes I only realize I’m feeling something after I hear them say it first. I’m not actually sure how it would feel if we ever lived in the same place. It might be too much. But I love the ocean, too. Water has always been my favorite body part.

We kept holding hands. I don’t know why; it just felt good to jump up and duck down together when the waves came. Each time, Miller yelled a little louder: I LOVE THIS! I LOVE THIS! Me too, I thought. I wanted to make a joke about the ocean being our biological mother. I wanted to say I love this and I think my girlfriend and wife hate each other and I think I want top surgery, and I’m sorry, but I just watched them yell into the sea. The water was fucking freezing, and I let it tighten around my brain.

I loved my friend so much. I couldn’t even make words, I just kept holding their hand, tighter and tighter, tight enough to accurately take their pulse. I took deep breaths, trying to make my heart beat together with theirs. The waves kept hitting us, the next and the next. The rhythmic bashing—it all felt so good. Different groups of children kept coming and going, joining us and getting tired, disappearing again.

I was trying to work out a joke about bottoming for the sea when a big wave hit us out of time. We misjudged it. It was too fast and we were too close; the crest collapsed over our heads. We were thrown apart—we had to let go. I tumbled. All the way, ankles over neck over who the hell knows. The crotch of my suit filled with sand and I cut my foot on something, a shell or some rocks. I clawed for the surface, but nothing. Just nothing. I tried again. I started to get scared. Don’t panic, I thought. I searched and reached but couldn’t see; everything was murky and brown and liquid. There was nothing to hold onto. It disappeared; I disappeared. And then, a second later, I found it. The bottom. My feet planted on sand, sweet and solid, like it was the easiest thing in the world. I stood up.

When I broke the surface, I hit the air coughing and snorted out everything I’d swallowed. Saltwater burned the bones behind my face.

Miller was a few feet away, already upright, floating like a beacon. I swam over and grabbed their hand again. Then I opened my mouth and screamed in their face. They smiled, with their dripping, sandy moustache, and screamed right back.

I’ve seen an album of Miller’s old photos. At eleven they looked more like a horse than a girl, chaotically gendered and gay as fuck, a wild colt, the kind that lives on a beach and won’t let a single human get near it. If we’d grown up together, I would’ve hated them. And then what? We wouldn’t have gotten to experience the Stand By Me corndoggery we were enjoying right now. Miller and I stood there like Yellowstone’s last two wolves. When the waves came for us there in the shallows, we threw our backs against them and screamed. I screamed until my throat burned. They screamed even louder. It’s really hard to stop screaming, once you let yourself start.

The sound coming out of my mouth wasn’t joyful anymore. Miller said something. I think it was, You okay, buddy? I stopped moving. One wave hit me hard, then another. Miller gave me a good shake. Hey. HEY. Do you need to get out? They grabbed me with both hands. I think we should get you some water. I stopped screaming, and nodded. Yup, they said. Definitely water time.

They led me back up the beach and sat me down on the blanket. I collapsed next to my bag and waited to be handed the Mountain Dew. My throat was swollen and raw. My uvula felt like it was full of splinters. But instead of the hot soda, Miller pulled a pair of thawing, frozen water bottles from their backpack. I was saving these, they said, unscrewing both caps. P was like, “you cannot only bring lukewarm Mountain Dew for an entire day at the beach, that is chaos” and you know what? She was right.

God bless wives. I drank the entire bottle, then sucked at the cold air around the last strands of ice until the plastic crackled in my hand. Thank you, I said.

Thank Prissy, said Miller, taking the empty. I got worried, I’m glad you’re okay.

I’m okay.

Good.

Hey Miller?

Yeah?

Some people get really fucking ugly when they go on T, don’t they?

Dude—they snorted.

Right? I’m not making that up?

Yeah, no, I know, they said. But like—scars are beautiful. For real. Like, I love mine. They’re hot. I worked my ass off for them. I want guys who are looking to be able to see them. I like that—    

I know, I know.      

No—you don’t. I love you, but you literally cannot know, not until you do it. And if anyone hears you you’re gonna get cancelled so fucking hard, I’m gonna have to pretend I don’t know you, it’s gonna be like Mariah Carey pretending she doesn’t know JLo—    

No one around here has any idea what we’re talking about, I said. It’s just us.

Miller looked over their shoulder. Touché.            

I mean, some people get hotter. Mostly, right? Like Elliot Page.

Hell yeah, off the charts; that’s our guy—

But like, there’s this dude I follow on Instagram? Who started HRT over a year ago? He was so hot before, and now he looks like a werewolf, and it’s just…embarrassing? Like he’s a total mess. His beard is awful, he’s got, like, tufts. He looks like the cover of an Animorphs book.

Oh my god, they laughed. Shut the fuck up. He’s HAPPY, that is sick—

But funny?

Yes, they said. Very funny, but—

It’s just that YOU look really good, and how would—

Excuse me, a voice interrupted. A woman stood over us, a tall one with a long shadow. Standing beside her was another woman, also tall. Both wore jewelry and were tanned to a shade of raw leather. Can we talk to you for a second? Neither of them was looking at Miller.

Me? I said.

Our friend over there just wanted to ask you something.

I was confused. The women looked at me, then pointed to someone, a woman sitting under a striped umbrella twenty feet away. She was wearing a halter-top one piece with a straw hat and sunglasses. She stood up, smiled and waved. I looked at Miller for confirmation.

I’ll be right back, I said.

You absolutely will, said Miller.

Once I got up, the women walked towards their own camp fast; I was a foot shorter and had to jog beside them. None of them looked queer. You never know, though. Maybe the woman on the blanket had a nonbinary kid and clocked me and wanted to ask me where I got my bathing suit. Maybe she’d met a lesbian recently and was about to mistake me for her.

Hi, I said when we got to their blanket.

Are you okay? said the friend.

Sorry?

We just wanted to make sure you were okay, she said. We saw you fighting with that guy. He grabbed you really hard—

He shook you, said one of the other women. You looked like you were crying.

Oh, no, I said, He didn’t—

He did, said the woman on the blanket. We saw. He was screaming at you.

No, that was just—

It’s okay, said the woman on the blanket. I know. It’s like, it’s almost nothing. But it’s not okay for him to do that. If he touches you like that in public, it’s only a matter of—

No, I said. We were just—we were having fun. He was helping me.

Honey, she said. I’ve been there.

Thank you, I said. I really appreciate it. This is actually really cool. The women looked at each other. But we’re fine, I was just freaking out. Everything’s fine.

They looked ready to throw me in the trunk of their car.

They looked ready to throw me in the trunk of their car.

Can we call someone for you? one asked.

No, no, you guys are great, I said, taking a slow step backwards. Shit, shit, shit. This is really sweet of you. Please do not call anyone. That is my friend over there; we were just having a shouting contest. We were having fun, that’s all. I took another step.

I’m giving you my phone and my email, said the woman on the blanket. Don’t go anywhere. She rooted in her purse and plucked out a business card. She had fancy, shiny nails. Her card had a photo of a McMansion on it. Stacey something. A realtor. You’ve got my cell and my office on there too, just in case. Tell him I thought you might be interested in buying locally. The other women clucked with affirmation. If you need anything. Okay, honey? An-y-thing.

Thank you, I said.

Can I give you a hug? Stacey was already standing up.

I don’t really do hugs, I said. I’m sorry. I backed off their blanket, elbowing one of the standing women in the process. She was wearing a mesh caftan; I got caught in one of the holes.

Ow! she said, grabbing herself.

Stacey’s cardboard card wilted in the sweat of my fist. Thank you again so much! I said, turning around. I’m sorry! I ran for a while in the wrong direction before realizing Miller was back the other way.

Dude, we need to move, I said when I found them. I was out of breath. Now. I grabbed my backpack and shoes. I’ll explain, but we should go. I’ll buy you a lemonade.

I did not like their vibes, said Miller, solemnly. They swooped up the blanket and beach toys over their shoulder like Huck Finn. Let’s lemonade.

So they thought I was trying to domestic violence you? they asked once we were off the beach, speed-walking past the boardwalk off-ramp that led to the parking lot.

Yeah, they wanted to call the cops. Do you think we need to go? Your car’s that way.

Wow! Miller said, puffing up.

Okay, I know you’re excited that they thought you had it in you, but I need you to focus—

I mean, they laughed. Come on. They couldn’t have looked that hard.

That got me. I stopped to laugh and catch my breath.

No way we’re leaving now, they said. They pointed to their wrist, to where they wore their imaginary watch. It’s Miller time.

From there we slowed down. We wandered through a busy part of the boardwalk flush with old-timey carnival games. I looked over my shoulder every few feet, just to make sure. The midway was a good place to disappear. It was easy to camouflage ourselves in the gauntlet of gentle grifting: pyramids of milk bottles and rows of goldfish in tiny bowls. Noise, lights, mirrored ring tosses, crane games, water gun races, kids, kettle corn.

Can we go a little further? I asked. I just want to be sure.

Definitely.

We kept wandering until Miller stopped in front of a basketball toss staffed by an old man. Older than all of our parents—the man should’ve been basking like a potted plant on a sunporch, or shuffling across a parking lot with a flock of great-grandchildren toward Old Country Buffet.   

I was a shooting guard in high school, Miller said, staring at the plywood backboards.

You told me, I said. You want to do it? I’d love to see you shoot hoops.

I wondered if the old man had a family in Ocean City.

Five for five, he said. Get a ball in the hoop, win a prize. He gestured to the wall behind him; the stuffed animals were too big to fit through the doors of Miller’s car. Easy peasy.

Miller handed the man a bill and took the basketball. Bonk; a miss. They looked down at their feet and adjusted their stance. I saw them at their all-girls’ high school, shooting threes alone all afternoon. I don’t think it was easy, being a horse at an all-girls school.

Bonk; off the rim. Bonk. Whomp, off the wooden backboard, into a stuffed hippo. I still like you, I said. I patted their back.

I really want to win you something, they said.

You don’t have to do that. You really don’t. We definitely don’t have room in our bed for one of those giant animals.

Maybe let the lady have a go? the old man suggested.

Ah yes, Miller said. The . . . lady. They handed the last ball to me.

Naw, I said and shook my head. I’m terrible. I hate basketball. You can do it. You do it.

I just missed four in a row, Miller said. Take a turn. Win me something. 

I stood in front of the hoop and squared up. Deep breath, I thought. You can do this. Two little guys. I closed my eyes.

Bonk.

Aww, that was pretty close, the old man said. Thought you had it. Try one more. On the house. Let’s see what you got. He handed each of us another basketball.

Get ready, Miller said. You’re taking home a ten-foot gorilla.

I can’t wait, I told them. And then we took our shots.

Bonk.

Bonk.

Oh well, Miller said. We tried. That was fun.

It was, I said.

Wait, the old man called. He slowly stood up off his stool, then turned around and bent over. I like you two. You’re sweet. Good to each other. I like that. He rummaged around. Let me see . . . ah, here we go. He handed Miller a stuffed animal, a fat little dog the size of a lemon.

I love dogs! said Miller. Thank you so much! Their voice cracked, on love and thank.

You two have a good night, said the man. Take care of her.

We will, we told him.

When we drove home later (after a nap, two hot dogs, an extra-large boat of crinkle-cut fries, and a couple seconds of Miller frantically gesticulating at a random guy with top surgery scars we saw tossing a football like a Jersey Shore Ken Doll), we were too tired to sing along to the playlist. The road was quiet; we were quiet. The sky turned a darker blue; the sun would set after all.

Want to stay over? I asked. We were getting close to the city. We have plenty of room.

I want to, but I shouldn’t, Miller said. I want to see Prissy. Plus, I don’t want to leave her alone with the dogs overnight, they’re a handful. Last week one of them ate, like, a foot and a half of carpet.

Right, I said. I get it.

We kept driving. I can’t believe that guy gave you a stuffed dog, I told them. That was magic. Like, how he knew. The dog didn’t look like either of Miller’s chihuahuas, but in my head, I already was sure it meant something.

Just before we got to the city, we sped past a family of deer eating grass on the shoulder behind a metal rail. They perked their heads up in our headlights as we got close, a cluster of adults with a couple of babies; they dove back into the brush and disappeared as we passed.

Hey, I wanted to say—Miller said, when we took the exit for my neighborhood. The murder should take you to the beach sometimes. Either of them. Or both of them. It’s not that far.

I know, I said.

It’s not even an hour. That’s a thing they should want to do. 

I know, I said. I know. Thanks.

There was no salt in the air when I opened the car door in front of my house. It was just a dirty city on the edge of a short night. The lamplights were chemical, and a kelpy funk tumbled out of the car with me. It was hot and staticky on the street. The sand in my crotch dug at me. I wanted a shower. I looked up at my house. None of the lights were on. Girlfriend #1 was probably in the office, staring into the blue light of her laptop. Girlfriend #2 was still out, somewhere under the rent-a-dyke’s jigsaw.

This was great, I said, reaching in Miller’s window to hug them one last time. I didn’t know when I’d see them again.

Anytime, my friend.

I know, I said. Then I turned back to my house and walked inside.  

8 Stories Within Stories

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There’s something viscerally appealing about nesting dolls. The same holds true, I’d argue, for nesting narratives. Each new layer to the story can either reveal or obscure the capital-t Truth at its center. Sometimes both! As a magazine writer and editor, I’m particularly aware of the difficulties intrinsic to writing about other people’s lives. Nesting doll—or frame—narratives confront that particular anxious itch: in them, the narrators (often writers) disappear for long stretches, or reveal themselves slowly, or crumble under the weight of the stories they’re telling. 

In my novel, The Mythmakers, a young journalist reads a short story by an author she met years earlier and finds signs that the story is about her. When she learns that the author has died, but that his widow lives not too far away, she abandons her life in Brooklyn to track the woman down upstate. What follows are glimpses into the lives of the couple, their families, and friends: a teenage future physicist living in Houston at the height of the space race, a mysterious therapist with a commune in the woods, a classical pianist grappling with failure.  

I love reading about writers, but I also love abandoning what I know and sinking into a story about people with desires and professions that don’t resemble mine. Here are stories that have the best of both worlds—books worth swallowing whole.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov 

On its surface, the book reads as a comic portrait of bumbling Russian professor Timofey Pnin. He does strange things to the English language, his ex-wife walks all over him, he’s the butt of his colleagues’ jokes. But from the very first page a puppetmaster lurks between the lines, and as the story progresses it becomes increasingly clear that one particular narrative thread holds the key to seeing the truth below the attractive gauze of storytelling—a subtle nesting doll in reverse.

The Night Ocean by Paul LaFarge

In the wake of her husband Charlie’s disappearance, Marina Willet, a psychiatrist and our narrator, retraces his recent travels and interactions in the hope of finding answers—and maybe Charlie himself. Before his disappearance, Charlie had become obsessed with the shadowy relationship between the weird author H.P. Lovecraft and a teenage fan named Robert Barlow. The book contains so many effortless shifts in place and time, from excerpts of what’s purported to be Lovecraft’s diary; to the travails of the adult Barlow, a professor in Mexico in the same circles as Rafael Nadal and Diego Rivera; to the WWII story of a shifty character named L.C. Spinks. It’s seamless, a high-flying trapeze act. Paul was my undergraduate professor and advisor, and his writing and teaching were and continue to be hugely influential to my own work.     

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi 

Theater kids at a performing arts high school fall under the thrall of their transgressive and charismatic teacher; when British exchange students and their own instructors arrive, boundaries are further blurred. It’s tricky to summarize this one without spoiling the roller coaster-drop sensation of its reveals, but suffice to say that in the following two sections, narrative flips upend various beliefs and expectations. 

The Human Stain by Philip Roth 

Following a prostate surgery that’s left him incontinent and impotent, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer posted at Athena College, becomes close with Coleman Silk, his 71-year-old neighbor who has recently been ousted from his longtime post at the college for his use of a perceived racial slur. When Coleman’s wife dies, he says it’s from the stress of the scandal and demands that Zuckerman write a book about the whole situation. He does end up writing something, but the focus falls instead on Coleman’s hidden family history, his relationship with 30-year-old Fania, a custodian at the college, and the mental turmoil of her ex-husband, a Vietnam veteran with stewing anger issues. 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

In three normal length letters and then the longest letter ever written, lonely Captain Robert Walton tells his sister a strange tale. While Walton was stuck in St. Petersburg waiting for ice to melt and wishing for a friend, a ragged man named Victor appeared on a dog-sled, boarded the ship, and started telling his own story. He had built a monster from the bodies of the dead, and the monster wrought death and destruction upon Victor’s loved ones (because, interestingly enough, the monster was lonely, too). 

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Clocking in at over 800 pages, this evocative, sprawling book has some room for frames. A Japanese writer recalls her adolescence in America, when her father’s job took the family to New York for her high school years. There, the family met a mysterious, career-climbing man named Taro Azuma, who disappeared into a life of opera and penthouses. Years later the writer takes a post at Stanford and on a dark and stormy night receives a visit from a stranger, a young man with a story of his own to share—of a story told to him by a woman who’d served as Taro’s housemaid back in Japan. The book is billed as an adaptation of Wuthering Heights—Taro is the book’s Heathcliffe, his longtime, star-crossed love Yoko its Catherine—but Taro’s secretive wealth and tragic romantic heroism also evoke Jay Gatsby. 

Possession by A.S. Byatt

This is the only book on the list that doesn’t have a traditional first-person narrator, but it feels worth including for what it does have: a double timeline, one following 20th-century British scholars searching for clues to a presumed century-old literary affair, the other that 19th-century relationship. That second thread comprises dozens of diary excerpts, poems, and letters (by writers real and fictional); a complete 11-page short story—and the whole thing comes via an editorializing narrator intent on pointing out the magic of writing and reading, the length and limit of imagination, the pleasure of words. 

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

Over the course of a plane delay, the unnamed narrator—an author of middling popular success waiting at JFK for his flight to Berlin—runs into a college acquaintance who invites him for drinks in the first class lounge. There, the man tells him a twisting story of his rise, following their graduation from UCLA, in the Los Angeles art world, beginning with his saving a stranger from drowning, a successful man whose life he ends up worming his way into. The book has the propulsive pull of the most delicious psychological thrillers and an ending that feels—in the best way—like being pushed off a cliff.

I Became a Writer When I Needed a Fresh Start

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I came to writing at thirty—after touring the worlds of fashion editorial and luxury public relations, after doing a master’s in anthropology, after declining an offer to complete a doctorate in the field, after beginning an MFA in creative writing, only to leave after a semester. With each successive pivot, I grew not only more aware of, but also more self-conscious, of a kind of timid leave-taking in which I was fast becoming proficient, leave-taking I disguised as free will. But what quietly mounted within me was the pain of having abandoned several opportunities, the ache of a string of departures from possible lives for myself. Ultimately, deciding I didn’t need a degree to write, I tried my hand at essays while employed as an administrator in higher education. But the more I read and wrote, the more a grave fear would eventually take hold of me—that I had something to prove. That I was already behind. Or worse, out of time.

Perhaps something had awakened in me in a nonfiction workshop in 2016, when I’d written an essay about my relationship to Latin, a language I began learning at twelve and in which I majored in college. The essay chronicled my overwhelming loneliness as an adolescent, and it described how I’d clung to the dead language in order to feel both smart and superior. Although my peers commented on the essay’s beautiful sentences, they couldn’t help me see where to take the piece. And I felt close to the words I’d written because they recorded my experiment with a sophisticated style of writing. Something about that draft sounded like a voice that was just breaking to the surface. And because excelling at Latin suggested to me that I’d once seemed impressive to others, I ignored the fact that this essay was serving the original purpose that the ancient language had for me as a lonely teenager. I was, however, helpless in becoming obsessed with upholding this image of myself, lest anyone see me as a fraud. 

Each draft that I revised and sent out was influenced—and in some ways hampered—by my awe of brilliant work that I came across.

In all likelihood, though, no one cared about my sense of self as much as I did. 

The following year, I brought a draft of this piece to a prestigious summer workshop as one of their scholars, confident that I’d already distinguished myself from the rest of the attendees, confirmed in my suspicion that I was exceptional to the other writers I’d meet that week. In my naïveté, my fate was going to be decided around a workshop table, at an agent or editor meeting, or during an evening karaoke reception. In the years that followed, this single essay took on outsized significance in my mind. Each draft that I revised and sent out was influenced—and in some ways hampered—by my awe of brilliant work that I came across. The essay became a desperate effort to prove myself as intelligent, self-sufficient, and in control of the future I sought to secure for myself. I asked draft after draft to bear the weight of all my ambitions—or rather, my anxieties. And I expected my words to launch me coolly into the literary world, a move into the spotlight that I assumed would dispel the fear of my own shortcomings.

What my little anecdote suggests is how making art has become inextricable from showcasing to the world not just that art but also one’s identity as an artist. In a 2008 essay, Malcolm Gladwell asks why genius is so always linked to precocity—precocity being that state of having ripened quite young, before one has had a chance to live—and perhaps even toil—for years. And why does creative genius so necessarily burn bright at an early age, only to be extinguished while an artist is still young? Because the market over values the finished product as much as it mythologizes the figure of the prodigy, we in turn render invisible not just the process of learning, failing, or creating art; what’s worse, we pay too little attention to those who start late or develop their craft more slowly than the rest—what Gladwell and others call “late bloomers.” It bears noting that, in this context, this term refers to either artists who take years practicing, experimenting, making hazarded and gradual progress, or individuals who have decided to switch to art-making later in life.

Deepa Varadarajan’s debut novel Late Bloomers expands the term’s meaning to include those who make a fresh start more than part of their way through life. Varadarajan, a graduate of Yale Law School, teaches at Georgia State University and has published legal scholarship alongside her fiction. Late Bloomers, which follows the four members of the Raman family, makes the claim that none of us is undeserving of a second act. Each character is given a chance to rediscover their resolve for living anew. Although the novel stumbles and skids in places, distracting readers with its overwritten, haphazard style, Late Bloomers finds footing in the human and very vulnerable reason some of us take longer to develop. Lying to others—but more often to ourselves—is so often what keeps us from experiencing our fullest self-actualization.

Varadarajan sets her novel within the span of a few days, offering four first-person perspectives of a family broken apart after the parents’ divorce. In a fictional Texas town, the moody patriarch Suresh finds himself living alone in the four-bedroom dream house he once shared with his wife Lata. Thrown into the deep end of online dating, he realizes how disappointing meeting women is while struggling to be a resource for his adult children, Priya and Nikesh: “It was so hard, this being alone… Death wasn’t some glimmer in the distance, assured but out of reach like the moon. It was close now—a porchlight right outside my house, casting its somber glow on my daily steps.” 

His ex-wife Lata, who has spent years keeping up appearances in her marriage, has taken her first job as a librarian, and now rents an unhappy apartment from a friend as she fends off the admiration of a college professor. She asks herself, “How has your life ended up like this? Why are you fifty-seven and living in someone else’s apartment?” The sulking Priya loathes herself for sleeping with a married man, an economics professor at the same college where she teaches history, offers a tender memory of togetherness. Remembering the home where their family lived before moving into the dream house, she reminds herself “how our four toothbrushes had sat together in that [four-holed] toothbrush holder, two adult-sized and two kids’ toothbrushes, crusty with the remnants of paste, leaning into one another.” She breaks into tears at the realization that her own toothbrush will never again have another companion. 

For much of the novel, these characters spend so much time apart, dwelling for entire chapters in their own minds, concealing from their family members the unfamiliar swerves their lives have taken, that Varadarajan’s decision to use four points of view works. Suresh, for his part, can’t divulge that a widowed woman and her eight-year-old son have shown up at his door without anywhere to go—no more than Lata can admit to being pursued by a romantic interest. And Priya is ashamed to tell her folks about being some man’s other woman. 

Perhaps our fault as a culture is failing to notice those artists who take longer to tell themselves, first and foremost, the desires that terrify them the most.

Even more unspeakable, though, is what the tender heart of the Raman family is enduring. Priya’s complacent brother Nikesh is in a strained relationship with the partner of the law firm where he works, a woman he lives with in Brooklyn and with whom they have a newborn son. Nikesh hasn’t told his parents that he isn’t in fact married to the woman with whom he’s had a child. Through comedic scenes as well as touching memories recounted in each narrator’s voice, the Raman family’s plans to gather for Nikesh’s son’s first birthday provide the pressure that will release the lies, and for each character to confront the delusions holding them back from enjoying a deeper understanding of who they are to one another and to themselves. But each of them is desperate to reveal “the reformed me,” “the new and improved” version of themselves, so much so that they can’t help but get in their own way time and time again. Their yearning to present themselves as somehow different or better gets in the way of their accepting themselves as flawed. 

In March, I saw the play Letters from Max: A Ritual, which adapts the collection of letters, poems, texts, voicemails, and conversations that playwright Sarah Ruhl shared with her former student Max Ritvo—a precocious and effervescent poet, who, as he underwent treatment for Ewing’s sarcoma, sought a language for the pain of confronting his own mortality. The play and the book from which it’s adapted both capture the unique style and sensibility of a young writer who seems fully formed from the outset of his career. The poignancy of the story lies in the fact of Ritvo’s all-too-soon extinguishing, the loss of promise that his early death effects. His struggle is not of learning how to create art but of learning, instead, how to let go of life. I left the theater thoroughly touched by Ritvo’s assurance of himself as a talented artist, one who trusted his abilities to arrange thought into language. But I also thought back to all the wonderful teachers I had in school, the ones who’d stood at the sidelines of my life, waiting patiently for me to tell them the thing I most wanted for myself. Yet I never articulated what I needed from them, my artistic ambitions never rising to the level of speech. As I walked toward the subway that spring afternoon, I realized I couldn’t fault my former mentors for having never placed a book like Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance or Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh in my hands. Perhaps our fault as a culture is failing to notice those artists who take longer to tell themselves, first and foremost, the desires that terrify them the most.

Nikesh has the honor of bearing what appears to be Varadarajan’s outlook as a late bloomer, someone he sees as, rather admirably, starting over. Reflecting on his parents’ decision to divorce at middle age, he muses, “Something brave about the two of them trying to cobble together new lives while other Indian people their age were settling into creaky lawn chairs with chilled mango juice in hand, reconciling themselves to deadened marriages and eventless retirements.” For his sister Priya, the stakes of not seeing one’s life clearly come into sharpest relief in a stirring scene at a bar, acted out with French fries. Indignant that her parents’ divorce has ruined her ability to be in a romantic relationship, she says, well on her way to drunkenness, “Your world—your basket—starts shrinking. All those possibilities, they start disappearing. Until one day, all you’ve got is one, maybe two fries, tops, left in your basket, and you can’t just throw one way, because if you do, then there’ll be no more fries left, and it’ll just be you all alone with an empty basket.” Although she’s in her mid-thirties, she tells herself it’s too late to have what she wants, and so she runs from life, from the unbearable turn life has taken in her eyes. As she gives up on herself, the ache we feel for her lies in subtext: Priya, like each of us at times, forecloses the possibility of experiencing enhanced and fuller relationships with the people she loves.

Without our responsibility to others, we may never know the next act of our lives.

But Varadarajan balances choice and chance, elucidating how our lives aren’t entirely up to us. Where Priya blames herself, Varadarajan places in Nikesh’s eyes all the empathy late bloomers are owed. Fate—or the vicissitudes of history—necessitates that we hold space for those who, in Nikesh’s mind, just want to “finally try to find a little happiness, to make up for some lost time.” “As far as I could tell,” he tells himself, “my parents had gotten a raw deal. They’d hit their twenties at precisely the wrong moment in India. A generation too early.” The unfortunate consequence, to some degree, of having sufficient opportunities to thrive living in the India that would open to the West in the 1990s was that Nikesh’s parents are now “breaking, at last, the bonds of duty and obligation and the keeping up of appearances that had served them so sorrily up until this point.” The stakes of resenting his parents, as Priya does, reveal themselves in Nikesh’s touching observation: “What would I do if, three decades from now, I discovered I’d pursued the wrong career, married the wrong woman, alienated my kid. The scary thing was: it wasn’t that hard to imagine.” Each of us needs some help, then, to see around the bends of our mind. Without our responsibility to others, we may never know the next act of our lives, might never learn to see ourselves in a changed light.

When I chose the writing life, I asked a few friends—one of whom would go on to become the editor of this magazine—for advice on getting started. But what I dared not say was that I wanted to see my name on the cover of a novel. Is this another way of saying I no longer wished to feel the crushing weight of my own purposelessness and resulting loneliness? Perhaps, although I turned to writing personal essays and criticism first, writing without a plan, my process one of trial and error, of experimentation and hiding in embarrassment. The work of putting down words always abated these awful feelings, but after a few years of attending workshops, enlisting the support of several trusted readers, and making only incremental progress, I understood how unknowing I’d once been. I shrank from this self as much as my writerly identity took hold of me like a fever. My ambitions soared the more deeply and widely I read, and, in turn, I understood the extent of my own shortfalls, which only deepened my shame. 

But it’s not quite right to say that I came to writing at thirty—only that I stopped placing art-making at the periphery of my life. Creativity as a guiding ethos swung to the exact center of my personhood. I didn’t care that I conformed to Ira Glass’s observation about how artists experience themselves early in their careers: “For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.” The chasm between my tastes and my skills seemed untraversable. I in turn stopped reaching out to people, stopped sharing drafts, stopped submitting work. I closed myself off. The vague hope that I might embody the fantasy of a butterfly—soaring into visibility fully formed—was receding with each year I toiled. In a sense, I was up against a nameless antagonist, the very part of me that was bent on seeing me fail. 

In writing this essay, however, I’ve come across a string of buried memories. A flair for creativity had flown through me at an early age, finding a somewhat embarrassing but tender expression in dance, choir, and melodramatic poems. My amateur attachment to the arts fell away by twelve, replaced by a fixation on proving myself intelligent. Because learning Latin came easily to me, it shielded me from the fear that I might not be as smart or competent as I felt I needed to be to succeed. As long as I could muffle my artistic inclinations, the dead language safeguarded me from the terror of longing for a life dedicated to making art. And so, I raced ahead, absorbing all the facets of the abstruse subject, winning awards, and garnering praise. When, in college, other subjects challenged me, I slinked back to Latin’s familiar comforts, relinquishing countless chances to practice other skills necessary for becoming not smarter but more resilient. To have decided, then, almost a decade after graduation, that I wanted to return to a life engaged in the creative process ran me straight into myself—which is to say, my own sense of futility. Today, nothing scares me more than discovering I never had—or will never have—what it takes to write. The horror that I will humiliate myself as a writer continues to haunt and overwhelm me, causing me to fall away from the world. But this futility is both a monstrous and integral part of me. To quote Margo Jefferson, “You were always calculating—not always well—how to achieve; succeed as a symbol, and a self.”

Early in Late Bloomers, Lata shows us her pity for Jared, the forty-something manager of the library where she works. Though he slips away from work for hours for “dentist appointments,” it’s an open secret that he’s auditioning for musical theater roles. Says Lata to herself:

“I struggled to imagine him reaching any professional heights beyond his current library position. And yet, off he went, week after week, speeding out of the library door with the same urgent look on his face…and despite his best efforts, week after week, month after month, his life remained exactly the same. Completely unchanged. What made him keep trying? Blindness? Stupidity? This irrational dreaming, this clinging to the belief that it was never too late or that anything was possible—I’d never been able to decide whether it was an admirable quality in white Americans or a ridiculous one.”

In rereading this passage, I couldn’t help but think that Varadarajan has placed in Lata’s eyes the withering gaze of someone who existed on the sidelines of her own life in Georgia, watching her steal time to write her debut novel in private as she sought another kind of life for herself, one that belonged entirely to her.

The horror that I will humiliate myself as a writer continues to haunt and overwhelm me.

Jared has the privilege of illuminating the full meaning of the novel’s title. As he explains to Lata before the novel opens, “I have a soft spot for underdogs. And late bloomers. You’ve told me a lot of things about yourself, so let me tell you something about me. I didn’t come out as a gay man until I was forty. I know something about second acts in life. And I want to help you find yours.” When Lata comes upon him rehearsing in a room in the music building on campus, she is tickled to learn that he’s gotten the lead role in a performance. “He had kept trying and failing, trying and failing, until he succeeded. He was living the second act that he wanted. He hadn’t been afraid to try.” Although it’s precisely the lesson in perseverance Lata needs in order to date another man, to show up for her daughter Priya, to stop lying to herself about what she wants out of life, Jared’s determination to imagine another life for himself falls flat for me. For all his joy practicing in front of Lata, perhaps a part of me needed to see a more complicated relationship with the challenges of making art, about the many roles we play on and off stage. 

Although Varadarajan’s novel is written with little attention to the finer subtleties of language, the recurring image of landscaping offers a rare strain of beauty. “Instead of letting them die,” Suresh thinks to himself, remembering how he’d tended to the plants outside their dream home, “I had nurtured them to life, made them bloom.” Though a tired trope, a well-manicured property in Varadarajan’s hands becomes a prism through which the Raman family sees itself. Suresh takes quiet pride in his dedication to seeing life emerge again out of the ground, while Priya rethinks who her father may have been all along: “I hadn’t pegged Dad for the plant-nurturing type, but damned if he didn’t have a knack for it.” Even Lata reconsiders her husband’s character as she notices the desert willows and crepe myrtles as she pulls up to the house one night: “What I had expected, of course, was a mess… But no: in the dark at least, everything looked as good as I had left it. Maybe even better.” In showing us both women’s bemusement, something shifts inside us. Insofar as each adjusts her perspective toward Suresh, not letting ourselves see another possible truth keeps us from growing, from knowing who else we can become. 

This picture of a thriving garden touched me, what’s more, for in avoiding humiliation, I’ve lain in wait in an underground of my own making. Ashamed of the ways I’ve fallen short of who I’ve longed to be, I’ve hidden drafts of my work from others as much as I’ve hidden from myself. Having staked a rather premature claim on my inchoate identity as a writer, it’s fallen to me to consider shedding a particular—and particularly facile—image of myself as smart, superior, sophisticated. This was of course the very self I so wished to preserve and portray in drafts of that early essay on my relationship with Latin. For years I worried about leaving behind opportunities I was handed for accumulating skills, for gaining expertise, for advancing myself. But to have been so attached to seeing myself in a certain light, I inadvertently abandoned along the way the chance to find new eyes with which to see myself. 

Gardening is a practice that requires trial and error. And it demands in the gardener the will to flourish. Although Varadarajan cannot show us a subtler portrait of a middle-aged-man tending to a garden, we nevertheless catch a glimpse of the results of his off-stage patience and dedication. For her narrative aims, new growth emerges after a season of planting and pruning, lending the reader a sort of simplistic trust in his own efforts. But artists understand time as an element inherently constitutive of their work. It requires years to train one’s eye or ear not only to apprehend the world but also to be attuned to a particular way of representing that world through dance, film, or paint. Artists aren’t looking for assurance that their perspective or treatment is correct—rather that they alone trust how they see what they’re looking at. Late Bloomers doesn’t show how seeing, or rather, learning to resee, takes time. All the same, implicit in the novel’s gardening motif is a modest message: we seldom care for ourselves with the same determination as for our plants. About the things we care most—namely, ourselves—we lie. And what in turn eludes us is the emergence of new buds within ourselves, blooms that lay dormant for years before opening to the sun.

8 Books About the Lives of Women Writers

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Hours before my toddler announces daybreak with her cry, when the night shadows start to play their old tricks on my nerves and insecurity paints over my creative plans, it’s the stories of the women writers who have come before me that I crave most. I want to feel, down to the sheet-gripping tips of my fingers, that I am not alone—in my doubts, in my hopes, in my struggles.

Reading the stories of other women who share my drive to create can be the best medicine. These women almost always balanced writing with other tasks that crowd the surface of the female experience—raising babies, working day jobs, managing households, caring for sick family members, to name a few. Their lives inspire me not only because they were ultimately successful, but also because their success required the conquering of challenges along the way.  

In fact, I was so hungry for these kinds of stories that I decided to tell one in my first novel. Much like Mark Twain in the United States—a fellow creator of immortal young-adult characters who expressed deep admiration for Anne of Green Gables—Lucy Maud Montgomery (who went by Maud) reached celebrity status throughout Canada and the rest of the British Empire. She was even made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935. And yet, she experienced hardships that most of her readers could never have imagined. I knew immediately that hers was a story I wanted to tell. Eight years later, that story became my debut novel After Anne.

The books on this list all similarly showcase the lives of women writers. Each of these accounts moves and inspires, and can help those of us balancing creative work with life’s other commitments to feel less alone.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather L. Clark

This biography of Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Sylvia Plath takes on the intimate and previously unfamiliar aspects of Plath’s life, from her babyhood (recounting how early she spoke her first word) through her suicide at age thirty, when her children were toddlers. In addition to being a meticulously researched biography, Clark sprinkles in thoughtful literary analysis of Plath’s poetry that will appeal to any English major. Clark’s nuanced portrayal of each person in Plath’s life—resisting the temptation to demonize or aggrandize—makes this account particularly special. And Clark’s compassion and respect for Plath shows through in each line of the book.

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

In this memoir, Ann Patchett paints a raw and beautiful portrait of a twenty-year friendship between two writers—Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Patchett and Lucy Grealy, who wrote the critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face about her battles with childhood cancer and its aftermath. Patchett tells the story of the intersection between two writers’ journeys, tracing back to their time together at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and continuing through Lucy’s death of a heroin overdose at age thirty-nine. Their friendship was close but not easy, and Patchett’s memoir is all the more powerful for telling the many sides of it. 

The Moment of Tenderness by Madeleine L’Engle

This is a collection of eighteen short stories discovered by one of the granddaughters of Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time. Together, these stories create a poignant mosaic of L’Engle’s early life, from childhood to motherhood. Some of these stories were published during L’Engle’s lifetime, and others were only published posthumously. Some have a firm basis in real events, while others have fantasy and science fiction elements. Together, they will appeal to anyone interested in what inspired the work of one of our most fantastically imaginative authors.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Unlike the other books on the list, this one is pure fiction, by bestselling author Lily King. It tells the story of Casey Peabody, a struggling writer in her early thirties. Following Casey’s life over the course of a year, it shows her grappling with the aftermath of her mother’s sudden death, a failed relationship, and notices from debt collectors. Casey’s experiences with the male-dominated publishing industry and overcoming self-doubt will ring true for many women with creative dreams—especially those searching for their creative identity and grappling with grief or heartache at the same time.  

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

In what the New York Times Book Review described as “a feminist classic” of literary criticism, originally published in 1979 and recently reissued with a new introduction, Gilbert and Gubar explore how celebrated female writers from Jane Austen to Emily Dickinson conveyed their own life experiences of confinement through the characters they wrote. The book’s title comes from Jane Eyre, the novel in which a female character is famously kept locked in the attic, which is commonly understood as a metaphor for the ways in which women were historically imprisoned in the domestic realm. The recent reissuing of this classic text emphasizes just how much its messages resonate today. 

M Train by Patti Smith

This memoir of the life of National Book Award-winning author and multi-platform artist Patti Smith journeys through Smith’s life in a series of poignant vignettes. The book flows the way memory often does—through time and space, from past to present, from Greenwich Village to Mexico to Iceland. It includes not only Smith’s words but also her photographs, allowing the reader to see its subject more vividly. Smith unpacks the creative process in an intimate and introspective way that will resonate with creators of all stripes.

The Girls in the Picture by Melanie Benjamin

In this historical fiction novel, Melanie Benjamin tells the true story of the rise and fall of a female friendship in male-dominated, early twentieth-century Hollywood: the friendship between screenwriter Frances Marion and actress Mary Pickford. It follows Marion’s journey from moving to Hollywood with dreams of being an artist, to finding her calling writing stories for film, to her instant bond with Pickford, to their eventual falling out. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the challenges faced by women trying to climb the ladder of creative success while maintaining a close friendship at the same time.

Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody

Rounding out the list, this biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of beloved childhood character Harriet the Spy, explores Fitzhugh’s childhood in segregated Memphis, her struggles with her identity as a gay woman in the 1950s and 1960s, and her creative process and inspiration. Brody grounds her biography in careful research and insight, shedding light on the often-ignored cultural and social significance of children’s literature by delving into the hidden life of one of its creators.