The Webbed-Arm Man Never Wanted My Twin

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“The Last Unmapped Places” by Rebecca Turkewitz

Imagine, please, a September storm hugging the coast as it sweeps northward. Dark, moody skies with clouds so thick they seem solid. The apple trees in our backyard thrashing. A heavy blue tarp, draped over whatever project my dad was working on at the time, loose and flapping in the wind. The ocean, only a few miles from our house, roiling along the jagged shoreline. The rain arriving all in one rush like an exhaled breath. My family inside, snug and languid and unaware of my absence. My mother stretched across the couch, reading; my father in the kitchen pickling vegetables; my twin sister drawing quietly at the coffee table. A crack of thunder so loud and so in sync with the lightning flash that my mother is about to say, That must have struck something nearby. She stops because my sister’s hair is standing on end, fanned out like a sea anemone. Then my mother smells singed wood, singed earth, singed hair. Hannah is crying and my mother grabs her, but Hannah appears to be uninjured. My father rushes into the living room, knife still in hand. “What happened? Why is she screaming?” My mother smooths down Hannah’s hair and asks her what hurts. Hannah continues to sob. “Oh my god,” my mother says when she realizes there’s nothing wrong with this twin, the one safe in the living room with her and my father. “Oh my god. Where’s Rachael?”

Hannah and I were eight at the time. I was outside by the backyard oak tree. The lightning cored the oak and then an errant arm of electricity reached for me. I was out cold for several minutes and when I opened my eyes the world swam in front of me like a television channel that wasn’t in focus. Thanks to the miracle of Hannah’s electrically charged hair, my parents were there when I woke and an ambulance was already wailing in the distance. My mother loves this story. As family lore it’s irresistible: the raging storm, the twin connection, my mother’s instincts, the proof of our uniqueness, and the razor’s edge of disaster that only nicked us.

I spent a week in the hospital. For several years I had joint pain and occasional seizures in which my face went slack and my head snapped up and down like a skipping CD. I started getting migraines accompanied by blurred vision and moving colors and a strange settled sense of dread. But I was lucky to survive. The doctors and nurses told me so again and again. Still, I didn’t feel lucky. I felt exposed. I felt like someone had broken into the house that was my body and moved all my things around. 

And the part of the story that my mother always left out of her frequent retellings: when my parents asked if I remembered anything leading up to the lightning strike, I told them that I had been beckoned outside by a man in a black rain cape. His voice was low and throaty. His breath smelled like damp soil. When he gestured for me to walk in front of him and his cape opened, I saw that his arm was webbed; a pink flap of flesh ran from his wrist to his waist. His shoulders were high and hunched. I wanted to resist, but was too scared of not obeying. Rainwater streamed over his face. He told me, “The smoke gets thicker the further you go.”

We lived in a small town on the Maine coast, where kids rode dirt bikes through the woods and walked without hesitation over barely frozen streams and had no fear of the dark, yawning nights that seemed to swallow everything during our long winters. Even before the lightning strike, I was the quieter, stranger twin. Afterwards, I grew jumpy and fearful, which were great sins in our town’s childhood kingdom. Hannah saved me from being an outcast. Whenever she sensed I was about to do or say something too weird she changed the subject or caught my eye and gave a quick shake of her head. When I told friends at a sleepover to keep the lamp on to ward off the Webbed-Arm Man, Hannah laughed loudly and said he was just a character from a bedtime story our mom had told us. When I hesitated to retrieve a Frisbee from a crawl space that pulsed with a sinister energy or a beach ball that floated too far from the shore, Hannah would rush past me with feigned excitement and recover the item before I could refuse.

In some fundamental way, I didn’t understand what people expected of me. Once, when I was ten, I proudly showed the supermarket cashier a dead mouse that our cat had killed. I’d been keeping it in a toy handbag. As the cashier shrieked and people in line turned away, my mother said only, “She’s a little scientist, this one!” while Hannah apologized and ushered me out the door. My mother, a librarian from New York with wild gray hair that she wore much longer than was fashionable, wasn’t perturbed by my behavior or the way the town regarded me. But my father was horrified when Mom recounted the story. He buried the mouse, still in the handbag, in the yard while I cried. Dad asked Hannah what I’d been thinking and Hannah said, “She wanted it for her bone collection,” reluctantly leading him to where I’d stored the sun-bleached skeleton of an opossum I’d found by our back fence.

Hannah was my opposite in every way. She resembled our dad: sandy-haired, athletic, and approachable. I’m more like our mother: dark-eyed with angular features and unruly curls. And Hannah always knew exactly what people expected of her, which was a different sort of burden than the one I carried. She was adored, confided in, and admired, but she had her own anxieties, which she hid from everyone but me. She worried about our father, who she claimed was stressed about money and the properties he managed. She worried that our mother found us boring. She worried about our parents’ frequent arguments, about a close friend whose brother was cruel, and I assume also about me—my fixations, my strangeness, my poor health.

I never figured out how Hannah intuited others’ secrets, but even when she told me about them, they didn’t trouble me much. My fears were visceral: that the undercurrent would drag me to sea if I went into the ocean past my knees; that our dad’s truck would fishtail in the snow on the drive to school; that there was someone crouching behind the rhododendron bush, ready to grab me every time I rushed onto the porch. I had seen the Webbed-Arm Man and I knew he was watching from whatever dusky corner of the universe he resided in. I knew that he was waiting.

Before we go any further: Hannah is dead. She drowned three years ago, when we were thirty-one. The knowledge of her death is like the fear I felt in childhood: a second shadow that’s always with me. And this shadow falls heavily over my recollections of our lives, so there’s no true way to tell this story if you don’t know that’s what I’m building towards. Besides, I’ve never liked surprises, even when they’re for other people.

Hannah and I never stopped being close, though eventually the world began to edge its way in. Amidst the many other mild mortifications of middle school, Hannah began to cultivate friendships that, for the first time, didn’t include me. In high school, she joined the volleyball team and jogged five miles every morning before breakfast. As I brushed my teeth, I would watch from the small bathroom window as she stretched in the driveway, lithe and flushed and pleased with how much she’d accomplished while the neighbors still slept. I had no talent for sports, but I developed an intense passion for geology and started a blog on the rock formations of the Maine coast. Hannah had her first boyfriend, a surprisingly tame relationship that nonetheless overwhelmed her and filled her with moony longing. But weekday evenings still found us in comfortable camaraderie in our room, debriefing the day and planning for the next one.

On our sixteenth birthday, Hannah secured her license and we discovered how much we loved to drive together. We’d meander through the woods, pointing out abandoned railroad crossings, fire towers, and leaning cabins. I felt more settled than I had in childhood, tethered more firmly to the world as others saw it, but I had few friends and I was achingly lonely when weekend evenings Hannah disappeared to parties or team sleepovers or her boyfriend’s basement.

When the time came to apply to college, our dad sat us down at the kitchen table and told us he wanted us to go to different schools. Hannah laughed and said we’d consider it. Later, I asked Hannah what the big fuss was and she told me, “He wants us to be normal,” which was how I learned he thought we weren’t. 

We disregarded Dad’s advice and went to a small college within an hour’s drive of our hometown. Everything about college was a surprise. I, who’d never felt comfortable anywhere, was suddenly full of purpose. I dove with pleasure into the study of maritime history, the geology of the ocean floor, cartography in the middle ages. It seemed there was a class for everything. I even braved late-night walks alone through the dark campus, grasses rustling and strangers’ footsteps echoing through the narrow corridors between buildings, if it meant I could stay at the college’s library until it closed. I started dating a girl who worked in the interlibrary loan office and was absorbed into her group of clove-smoking, intricately tattooed friends. I took six classes at a time. I helped my professors with their research. I never turned in a single assignment late, even when my migraines nestled in my head and pulsed their jagged spikes into the tender flesh behind my eyes.

Hannah, who’d always been competent and sure-footed, suddenly lost all momentum. She’d been recruited for volleyball, but played badly and was taken off the starting line-up. Eventually, she quit the team. She began drinking more and slept with her Spanish TA. When she confessed to her chaste high school sweetheart, he refused to forgive her. She missed classes because she’d been partying, then because she just didn’t want to go. She chose subjects seemingly at random. She began staging protests with my girlfriend’s friends, becoming passionate about specific causes—veganism, the cafeteria workers’ rights, banning plastic containers—only to abandon them weeks later. She started a frenzy of volunteering—teaching ELL courses to custodial staff at the school, serving at the town’s soup kitchen, working with kids at a youth shelter.

When we were juniors, our parents divorced. I knew I should have felt more strongly about it, but all I felt was a slight sadness at the thought of our dad all alone in our old house. Hannah, on the other hand, spent hours on the phone trying to reconcile them, reckoning with my mother’s anger and restlessness, my father’s loneliness and sense of failure. Against the advice of her advisor, she went abroad to Madrid. My migraines became unbearable while she was gone and I was so exhausted I starting falling asleep in class. I didn’t think I’d survive her absence, but after only a month, Hannah had an incident with some sleeping pills and red wine that alarmed her host family, and it was decided she’d come back early. When I picked her up at the airport, she was so thin I wanted to wrap my arms around her just to give her more heft. On the ride home she told me, “It’s like I’m watching myself. I don’t even know who’s running the show.” She moved in with me and for a time we were as close as we’d ever been. I walked her through her daily routines until she’d regained her bearings and come back into herself.

Our senior year, I got lost in my thesis, a sprawling history of humans’ attempt to map the seafloor, and my girlfriend felt neglected and left me for a freshman poet. Hannah’s charm and intelligence kept her held aloft while she continued to slip and slide, never quite gaining traction. She came home one night, unsteadily drunk, and darkened when she saw me with a draft of my thesis spread across the floor. “Look at you,” she said to me. “You’re so good. You’re so focused. Do you remember when I had to check the closet every night for the Webbed-Arm Man before you could sleep?”

“You saved me,” I told her.

“Rachael,” she said, dropping to her knees in front of me, grasping my wrists. “How does a person know what they’re worth?”

When she touched me, the boundary between us fell away, as it often had when we were children. I felt her shame and emptiness like a wave of nausea. I felt her furious love for the world and her belief that she was undeserving of it. I realized that her frenzy of volunteer work was her way of trying to earn her place—not just at the college, but on this earth. I rested my forehead against hers. She had saved me; she was still saving me. “There’s no one better than you,” I told her, because it was true.

Hannah’s mention of the Webbed-Arm Man that night surprised me. Over the years, we’d stopped discussing him, and I thought she’d mostly forgotten him. I had not. My fear of him had lost its sharp edge, but I never stopped believing. I’d seen or sensed him several other times. When I had my seizures, I used to wake to the harsh smell of wood smoke, which I took as a signal that the Webbed-Arm Man was close. When I was twelve, an October snowstorm knocked out the power and Mom sent me to retrieve a flashlight. The candle I was holding snuffed out just as I took my first step onto the basement staircase. I reached an exploratory hand into the sudden blackness and felt a wet flap of flesh; I scrambled back upstairs and locked the door behind me. I also occasionally caught glimpses of him under porches or in bushes or off the side of the road. And once, when I was brushing my teeth in high school, worrying over why Hannah hadn’t yet returned from her morning run, I saw him leaning against our neighbor’s fence, his eyes also trained down the road. By the time I’d gained enough courage to rush outside, he was gone and I could see Hannah turning onto our street. My dad dismissed my sightings as the product of an overactive imagination or a symptom of my epilepsy. My mother believed me, or claims she did.

My fear of him had lost its sharp edge, but I never stopped believing.

Even in college, when I’d become less skittish and more grounded, he was present in my life. Most notably, on a camping trip at Acadia National Park with my girlfriend, I’d made the Webbed-Arm Man into a campfire tale as we roasted marshmallows, embellishing the story with a series of elaborate recurring nightmares I’d never had. That night I couldn’t sleep, worrying about a group of men at the site next to ours, who’d kept trying to flirt with us and then grown surly and quiet when they realized we were a couple. It began to rain and the loamy smell of the wet soil brought the Webbed-Arm Man back to me in the form I always knew him to be: a memory and not an invention. I woke up Elise and forced her to sleep in the locked car with me. When we drove into Bar Harbor the next morning, I had a voicemail from Hannah.

“I know, I know, I know you’re fine,” the recording said. “But I just had a feeling I couldn’t shake, so please call me when you’re back in civilization, okay?” 

For me, the years after college passed like rolling down a hill: effortless and inevitable. I attended grad school, where a tendency towards fixation is the most promising trait, and my research burned so brightly everything else in my life seemed to dim. I won awards. I graduated with the highest honors and started my dream job as a map librarian at the Boston Public Library. A woman named Priya took an interest in me after touring an exhibit I’d curated on mapping the cosmos, and fought her way into my vision long enough to make herself part of my routine.

Hannah took back up with her high school boyfriend and they were married within a year. Part of the reason he’d been so chaste and unforgiving all those years ago was because he was a deeply, onerously religious man. Hannah became very involved in their church, which distressed Mom to no end. But the church stabilized Hannah’s life and gave her a community who valued her generosity, even if they couldn’t see that it wasn’t earnestly in service to the lord, but born from her intense need to correct the debt she thought she owed the world. Out of some punishing instinct, she got a job organizing study abroad programs at a company based in Portland, which she was very good at despite her failure in Madrid.

Although our lives had very different shapes, she remained one of the only people whose motivations and desires were not opaque to me. Every morning we woke an hour early so we could talk on the phone as we drank our coffee. I’d close my eyes and imagine her across from me, and it always seemed that if I just reached out my arm, she’d be there on the other side of the table, ready to take my hand. Once, when I opened my eyes after the call, I was looking at Hannah and Chris’s tidy kitchen counter and had to shake my head hard before my own small apartment came back into view.

I remember almost everything about the night that Hannah died. I’d brought Priya to Maine for Thanksgiving to meet my family. Priya is Indian-Canadian, so she had no other plans, and she wanted to see where I came from and get to know the golden sister I talked so much about. Hannah and Chris picked us up at the train station and whisked us to Mom’s apartment in Portland for our day-before-Thanksgiving meal, which Mom kept calling “the first Thanksgiving” to acknowledge that we were going to our father’s the next day.

By then, my mother had moved into an attic apartment at the edge of the city. The house was at the top of a steep hill and Mom’s bedroom window had an expansive view of the bay, so in the mornings she could watch the lobster boats slinking out to sea and the clouds of greedy seagulls trailing after them. Hannah was worried that Mom was becoming eccentric—she’d developed an obsession with the Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis and painted bright pastoral scenes on every free surface of her apartment—but Mom was much happier than she’d ever been living with Dad or raising us.

Priya complimented my mother’s artwork and seemed genuinely charmed that Mom had ordered a buffet of Thai take-out because she’d forgotten to defrost the turkey. Mom offered to show Priya more of her paintings after dinner. I watched Hannah’s expression carefully for a clue as to how the interaction was going. Hannah gave me a little nod of approval, but there was sadness underneath it.

After dinner, Mom disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a pot of mulled wine. When she theatrically took off the lid, the dining room filled with the scent of cloves and Priya clapped. Mom bowed and then poured each of us a steaming mugful. When she slid one over to Chris, he said stiffly, “You know I can’t have that.” He was five years sober.

“Just one can’t hurt!” My mother took a showy sip of hers. “It’s delicious.”

“She does this on purpose,” Chris said to Hannah. He hated when anyone drew attention to his sobriety, highlighting his one deviation from the righteous path.

Hannah took his mug and put it next to her own. She said something softly to him that I couldn’t quite make out.

“Suit yourself,” Mom said. “But it’s the one thing I cooked tonight.” She laughed. When no one laughed with her she shrugged. “I guess if you’re drinking, Hannah, that means no luck yet on the pregnancy front.”

Hannah blushed and shook her head. She and Chris had been trying for years. Chris insisted that God would bless them when it was time.

“My friend Patty was telling me all about IVF,” Mom said. “It’s normal now. So there’s no need to be so prudish about it.”      

“That’s enough!” Chris said, so loudly that Priya jumped.

“Don’t be startled, dear,” Mom said. “He’s always like this. You two have the right idea. If I’d been smarter, I’d have been a lesbian, too.”

“Mom,” Hannah said sharply. She turned to me, “How’s your new exhibit coming? Have you started installing it yet?”

“What new exhibit?” Mom asked, allowing herself to be led. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“I did,” I said. “When we talked last month.” But Mom only vaguely remembered the conversation—she was often painting or out for a walk when we talked on the phone. But I was happy to explain the project again; my work is one of the few conversation topics that come easily to me.

This was the first major exhibit I was designing on my own. It focused on places that are still uncharted. I’d titled it The Last Unmapped Places, and was working sixty-hour weeks because I needed it to be perfect. Mom asked for examples, and I explained about the miles-deep cave system under farmland in Vietnam, an unclimbed mountain in Bhutan, the shifting outline of Greenland’s coast, and shantytowns in Pakistan with no reliable street maps.

Hannah had finished both her and Chris’s wine and was filling her mug again. Chris made a show of checking his watch. “You’re sure you want to have another?”

I kept talking as if he hadn’t interrupted, so Hannah wouldn’t have to respond. “The challenge is figuring out what to display, since the focus is the unmapped. But really, it’s about mystery and its tug on the imagination. Our last exhibit was on trains, and now we get to feature remote sections of the Amazon jungle seen by no one still alive on this earth.” 

“How ambitious,” Chris said, draping his arm over the back of Hannah’s chair in the proprietary posture that men like him are made for. “But you should be careful. If you spend too much time scratching away at the mystery, you’ll eliminate the very thing you think you love. As soon as you find the unknown, it becomes the known.”

“Is this about God?” I said. “Again?”

“Rachael,” Hannah said. “He’s not trying to convert you. He’s just making conversation.”

“He wants to make good believers out of all of us, like he did with you.”

Priya put a cautionary hand on my knee.

“I don’t have to tolerate this,” Chris said.

“She’s just feeling defensive,” Hannah murmured.

“Don’t do this again,” Chris said. “Pick a side.” 

“How can I?”

Chris stood, nearly upturning Mom’s wobbly table when he braced himself against it. “I’m going home. If you want to stay, you can call me when you need a ride.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said, but I was pleased that the night would carry on without him.

“So you’re really not coming?” he asked. Hannah didn’t look at him when she shook her head.

We continued drinking, and I began to feel really good, surrounded by the women who made up the whole of my social world. At some point, Mom announced that she was going to bed, but encouraged us to stay up talking. 

After she left, Hannah became confessional with Priya. She explained that we hadn’t been raised with God. She was drunk—really drunk, like I hadn’t seen since college. “I do feel awe in church,” she said. “But the God I feel, it’s as if He’s channeled through Chris, like I’m believing through him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Priya said. I could tell she liked Hannah, which was not a surprise. Everyone liked Hannah.

“Do you think it’s really okay? Sometimes I don’t know.” Hannah started to cry. Priya and I got out of our seats and crouched next to her. We each took one of her hands.

When Hannah’s crying had slowed she said, “I’m not always like this.” Then, she turned to me and said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I feel like I don’t have any edges anymore. The way I used to feel only with you, I feel that way with everyone.”

I squeezed her hand.  

I don’t remember what we talked about after that strange interlude, but we forged on and the mood lightened. Eventually Priya said that she’d like to see Maine’s famous coastline before she left, and Hannah said, “What better time than now?”

Outside, the night was clear and fresh and ripe, and it calmed me to take the sharp air into my lungs. Hannah led us to a park with a small gazebo and a wrought-iron fence. It was an almost-full moon; a funnel of light sliced across the river. We climbed down a steep stone staircase partially hidden by trees, which spilled out onto a paved path that wrapped around the cliff. I recovered my bearings; if we’d gone right we would have come across the ferry terminal and then the seafood restaurants and ice cream shops and fish markets. Instead, we turned left, towards the open ocean. We could hear waves slapping against the sea wall.

Priya took in a big breath. “I smell salt!” she said, delighted.

“The water’s so choppy.” I was surprised. “It’s not that windy.”

“Are you already forgetting the ways of the ocean?” Hannah teased. “It stormed yesterday. The sea remembers.” 

When we came to an old jetty, Priya hopped out onto the rocks. She took in the gyrating peaks and valleys of the water. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “On a night like this, it’s obvious there’s no risk of losing mystery, no matter how much you study it.”

On a night like this, it’s obvious there’s no risk of losing mystery, no matter how much you study it.

Hannah followed Priya onto the rocks. “How lovely,” she said. “What a lovely sentiment.” Then she said, so low that I could barely hear her over the tut-tut of the waves, “You will be so good for Rachael.”

And then something went wrong. A twisted ankle, the sole of a shoe too smooth to grip the rock face, or a step made unstable with alcohol. Or maybe something darker. I know. I know there’s the possibility that Hannah intended, or half-intended, to go in. The only certainty is that one moment Hannah was a striking silhouette against the blue-black sky, and the next she was in the water.

I heard the splash and the sickening intake of breath as the cold hit her. I screamed. I ran to the sea wall and dropped to my knees. I searched and found Hannah surfacing, pulled in toward the piers faster than I would have expected. She tore at the water.

I must have encouraged Hannah to swim. I must have shouted for help. Hannah, when she said something finally, was impossible to understand.

I stood up. I took off my shoes and my coat. From the jetty, Priya saw my intent and hissed with as much intensity as a slap, “Don’t you dare.”

Still, I took a step back, poised to jump. I felt how cold the ground was beneath my socked feet, which made me pause for only a moment, but it was enough time for Hannah to go under again. I lost her. I scanned the water, then caught sight of a dark figure. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing a shadow or an underwater rock or her body. “Do you see her?” I demanded. Priya was useless, sobbing and shaking.

Then, around the edges of the Hannah-shaped blot, I saw a black, shifting form that slithered through the water like heavy fog. The shadow slunk forward, somewhere between a liquid and a solid, before coming together and opening its great webbed arms behind her. The air grew thick and murky and there was a sudden dank-earth smell. There is no way for me to describe it now—it’s like describing the particular smell of a house you no longer live in—as clear and distinct as a fingerprint but you only know it when it’s around you. I’d smelled it before, all those years ago. The fear I felt was beyond fear. It was fear that the bottom fell off of.

Later, after Priya’s desperate call to the police, and the officers’ embarrassed questions, and the rescue boat and the divers and the condescending explanations about currents and riverbeds and tides, I asked Priya if she saw the thing in the water, the thing that wrapped its arms around Hannah. And Priya admitted that she may have seen something, but she was sure it was only a reflection or maybe a refraction of light. I asked her if she smelled him, and she looked at me with such deep concern that I dropped that line of inquiry.

Four days later, a water taxi driver leaned over the side of his boat during low tide and saw my sister’s body below him. In the great sorrow of that day, I lost my sense of caution and I pressed the matter again with Priya, asking what exactly she thought she’d seen that night. She snapped, “This is crazy. You think it was your childhood monster? It was nothing.”

But I’d recognized the long arms and the wing-like flaps and the sidling, confident movement. I know that I’d caught, once more, a glimpse of what it is that comes to take us away.

For years, the cloak of grief held me under its damp, pressing weight, and the only time I ever felt alert was in the archives at the library or deep in the world of a book. Talking to Priya or my parents or the throngs of school children I was expected to usher through the library collection was like interacting through muslin. I studied every detail of Hannah’s drowning, turning my memory of it inside out. Not only the what-ifs of what might have happened if I’d jumped in or the unanswerable questions around what caused the fall, but also how high the moon was, how fraught the sea. How the leafless bushes had held onto their winterberries. How the staccato thump of the waves against the seawall resembled the trapdoors in our arteries opening and closing. I tried to recall precisely that peculiar dusky smell and the way the air thickened and cracked open and the feeling that bloomed in my chest the moment I knew Hannah had passed through. This is all I can tell you. Like all stories about death, you’re left with the survivor’s incomplete tale.

Only recently have I been able to lend my attention more fully to the details of the present world. And I notice, sometimes, just before I fall asleep or when the motion-activated lights in the library archive go out, a certain flicker of movement and then a feeling of airlessness. And it’s like, if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to breathe. And I wonder why the connection that passed between Hannah and me all our lives, which was the pride of our bohemian mother and the unease of our cautious father and as normal to us as eating or drinking, would be severed by death. In the darkness, I open myself up. I become what I am meant to be: her mooring on the other side of all that smoke.

7 Books That Bring the City of Mumbai to Life

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Bombay, Mumbai—whatever you want to call it—is a kaleidoscope layered with complex charisma and frenetic energy. With its chaos and music, its sounds and smells, the city has been immortalized in many literary works, fiction and non-fiction alike. 

My debut novel, Such Big Dreams, took me a good ten years to write. In that time, I managed to travel back to Bombay twice, seizing opportunities to visit some of the locales featured in the story: Juhu Beach, where the scent of fried snacks wafts down the sand. The local trains, packed tight with commuters, where a seat with good breeze is almost worth swinging a punch over. What better way to write about a place than to physically immerse yourself in it, meditate on its contours, and then furiously scribble it all down minutes later? 

Back home in Toronto, though, those memories faded with the months and years that passed since my last visit. As I wrote and edited on dark, wintery mornings, I found myself turning to contemporary literature about Bombay, longing to reconnect with the city’s heartbeat.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

In this work of nonfiction, Mehta takes his readers on a whirlwind ride through the sprawling city of Bombay that symbolizes the Indian dream for many migrants. The book chronicles the lives of bar dancers, film-makers, migrant workers, rival gang members, politicians, offering social commentary on the interplay between power, pleasure, corruption and labour.   

“A city like Bombay,” Mehta writes, “like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else.”

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

Beginning in the 1970s and carrying us to the recent past, Narcopolis is a haunting, hallucinatory novel about Bombay’s opium culture. A sprawling series of vignettes on characters like an opium addict, a eunuch named Dimple and a poet-slash-artist, the book takes the reader through the seedy underbelly of the city, asking at one point, “How the fuck are you supposed to live here without drugs?”

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

In this novel, a ruthless developer offers the occupants of a crumbling old apartment building a buyout so he can build a luxury high rise tower. As the clock counts down to the developer’s deadline, forgotten dreams bubble to the surface as neighbors are pitted against each other and families are torn apart

In Bombay, virtually everything is for sale: “In the continuous market that runs right through southern Mumbai, under banyan trees, on pavements, beneath the arcades of the Gothic buildings, in which food, pirated books, perfumes, wristwatches, meditation beads, and software are sold, one question is repeated, to tourists and locals, in Hindi or in English: What do you want?”

Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale

Set in the 1990s, Milk Teeth charts the relationship between two childhood friends as their neighborhood teeters on the brink of change. Digging into nostalgia, urbanization, and the notion that a city is an amalgamation of communities, Mahale highlights the absolute freedom that Bombay life can offer as well as the claustrophobic societal conditions from which unmarried women, queer men, and minorities search for reprieve. 

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro 

Beautiful Thing is a non-fiction account of the life of Leela, an ambitious young bar dancer. The book follows Leela into dance bars, brothels and tiny flats as she tries to carve out a better life for herself. Faleiro pinpoints paradoxes that make up Leela’s unforgiving world—glamor and squalor, pleasure and pain—as she fights to survive. 

“When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours,” Leela says to Faleiro. “Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road.”

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo 

This book of non-fiction is about the residents of Annawadi, a sprawling slum flanked by the international airport and a handful of gleaming luxury hotels. Never patronizing, never romanticizing, Boo carefully digs into the abject conditions of her subjects and the complications of crushing poverty.  

“In Annawadi,” she writes, “fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they avoided. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.”

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Sacred Games is a 900-page saga that charts the story of a police officer and a larger-than-life gangster in a game of cat and mouse. The book takes the reader through the gritty underworld, to the corruption of the film industry. Full of filthy Bambaiya slang, and featuring a cast of colorful characters, the novel is a lesson on Indian post-colonial history and a love story to the city, summed up by the line: ‘When you’re away from it, you can miss it, physically you can ache for it—even for the stink of it.’

7 Books to Devour if You Love “Yellowjackets” 

Posted on by Jo Lou

Showtime’s Yellowjackets was the unlikely sleeper hit of 2021 with its dark, off-kilter narrative and female characters who are messy, deeply flawed (and sometimes just downright sinister). The series follows a 1990s high school girls soccer team who, after dominating at the state championships, are on their way to nationals. But their plane goes down in a nondescript mountain range, leaving them stranded. And then there’s the present-day timeline, where the survivors are navigating their daily lives, following a pact to never speak of what happened after the crash. That is, until it becomes clear that their past isn’t going to stay suppressed. 

The second season of Yellowjackets was even darker than the first, planting erotic cannibalism in the public consciousness. Here are 7 books to devour while you’re waiting for season 3. Eat up! 

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

When an ambitious artist puts her career on hold to be a stay-at-home mom, she begins to wonder if her lifestyle changes are manifesting in rather… dog-like ways. Are her canines growing sharper? Has that patch of fur-like hair always been there? With her husband away pursuing his own career, she is left on her own to determine what—if anything—is happening to her. Yoder’s debut is dark, meaty, and deeply hilarious. 

Small Game by Blair Braverman

When Mara decides to join the cast of a new survival TV show, she isn’t that concerned about being in the wilderness or living off the land. As a professional survivalist, she’s more worried about navigating her new TV teammates and being under the camera’s constant eye. But one day the show’s stars wake up to find that everything has changed. Mara and the others can no longer drop out of the challenge to be helicoptered to safety—the stakes, now, are truly life and death. And not everyone will make it out of the wilderness. 

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha doesn’t fit in with the other girls in her prestigious MFA program. But when she’s invited to a mysterious gathering by the popular girls, who call themselves the “Bunnies,” she gets more than the literary workshop she bargained for. Bunny delves into the dark side of female friendship as Samantha becomes entangled in cult rituals and fantastical creations. 

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read 

In 1972, a team of rugby players boarded a plane for a match they would never play. On their way to Santiago, Chile, the plane crashed deep within the Andes mountains—leaving the survivors stranded in the snow. As the days turn into weeks, the team must learn to survive against the freezing temperatures, avalanches, and starvation. This real-life survival story is more engrossing than any horror tale, even without an Antler Queen. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Korede has a secret: Her sister, Ayoola, murdered her boyfriend. And not just one—the sister she loves seemingly can’t stop putting knives into men, and Korede is always there to don rubber gloves and clean up the mess. But just how far will she go to protect Ayoola and her deadly habits? 

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Yellowjackets was directly inspired by William Golding’s 1954 classic, where a plane carrying prepubescent boys crashes on a deserted island. Left without adults to direct them, the boys begin building their own semblance of civilization. But it doesn’t take long before their newfound society to grow sour, cultish, and murderous. 

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Trembley

Are the teen Yellowjackets experiencing a shared delusion, or is there something supernatural happening in those woods? While the show keeps us guessing about Lottie’s powers and the lingering “darkness,” A Head Full of Ghosts is equally as suspenseful. Is 14-year-old Marjorie really possessed by a demon? Or are her erratic behaviors due to something not so sinister? Don’t be surprised if your opinion changes with each flipped page.

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Minda Honey’s “The Heartbreak Years”

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Minda Honey’s highly anticipated debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, which will be published by Little A this October. 

In the car she’d had since high school, and with her boyfriend by her side, Minda Honey journeyed cross-country to Southern California. By the end of that year, Obama would be president, she’d be single, and everything would change. 

Thousands of miles away from family and friends, Minda must navigate online dating and new relationships, and the challenges of early adulthood. From steamy hookups to narrow escapes, frustratingly adorable meet-cutes, and confusing relationships, Minda navigates the all-too relatable realization that nothing ever plays out quite like the romantic comedies of our youth. Traversing California, Colorado, and eventually returning home to Kentucky, Minda sets out to redefine what matters most in her life, purely on her own terms. 

In her fearless, unflinching, beautifully rendered debut, Minda examines her past relationships with an eye well-tuned to the nuances of consent, gender, sexuality, and race. Reflecting on the promise—and disappointments—of her twenties, this memoir is Minda’s story of a Black woman choosing herself, embracing independence, and having a little fun along the way.

Introducing The Heartbreak Years, cover designed by Emily Mahon and Tree Abraham.

Tree Abraham, senior art director at Amazon Publishing said, “We wanted a cover to embody an early-2000s LA style without being hackneyed or generic. We asked for some of the author’s creative inspirations and one of the artists she shared was Mickalene Thomas, whose collaged elements admixing glitter, neon, and textural layers felt aligned with the atmosphere of the social scenes Honey writes about. I shared a mood board with the designer Emily Mahon and she came back with a stunning array of options that married that feeling of watching a summer sunset with a wall of torn-up concert posters found plastered in a nightclub.”

Honey relished the opportunity to take an active role in coming up with the concept of the cover. “Twentysomething Minda loved big gaudy Betsey Johnson jewelry and preposterously high Jessica Simpson heels and I had—I kid you not—hot pink, tangerine and lime green bedding. My life during those early adulthood years was a mishmash of so many things at once. I was partying. A lot. I was dating. A lot. And I was trying to keep my rent paid working whatever halfway decent jobs I could find in the wake of the Great Recession.”

“So, this book cover, with its collage-y pieced together strips of bold colors, glitter and palm trees is the perfect visual translation of that time. I made one minor suggestion—the addition of the road map of Louisville on the far left. I wanted this cover to represent, in some small but important way, who I was and where I was from when I arrived in Southern California. Driving is also a major motif in my memoir. Road tripping. Driving away. Driving into my future. Driving as escape. This cover is the bat signal letting my readers know I wrote this book for them—all the twentysomething Mindas out there and the thirtysomething Mindas wondering what those Obama Years, those Drunk on the Dance Floor Years, those Heartbreak Years mean for us now.”

The Heartbreak Years will be published by Little A on October 1st, 2023, and is available for pre-order here.

“Chain-Gang All-Stars” Makes Prison Abolition Irresistible

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Imagine a world in which your life depended on your ability to kill. Your freedom contingent on another person’s destruction. All at the behest of state and corporate overseers for the entertainment of millions. This is the world of Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s masterful new novel, where incarcerated people can opt out of decades long sentences by participating in televised gladiatorial death matches. Participants, or Links, are organized by prisons; each group is known as a chain and forced to fight other chains. If a person can stay alive for three years, they can commute their sentence. If not, they die a grisly death in front of cheering crowds. This contract, which has yet to free anyone, is put to the test by two Links, Loretta Thurwar and her lover Hurricane Staxxx, two superstars (and targets) of Chain Gang All-Stars, the crown jewel of Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE). 

Art imitates life in Chain-Gang All-Stars. The punishment for being convicted of a violent crime is more violence. For every battle won, Links accrue “blood points” or currency that helps them purchase food, weapons, clothes, and medical care. Viewers record and attend the matches the way basketball fans devour March Madness. Corporations make millions by administering the games, brokering sponsorship deals, and producing high-tech surveillance and torture devices, one of which is surgically placed inside the Links wrists. And federal legislation makes it all possible. The games are the ultimate public-private partnership.  

Chain-Gang All-Stars’ depiction of a racist, hyper-capitalist carceral state is an undeniable echo of our world, but it’s not the only one. At the heart of this book is the capacity of incarcerated people to resist and rewrite the rules of their imprisonment. Adjei-Brenyah’s characters, like incarcerated people in Alabama and Pennsylvania, organize strikes. They call for the abolition of prisons and immigrant detention. As they are compelled to participate in a program that considers their deaths sport, the main characters adopt a pact of nonviolent conflict resolution among their fellow Links. Together, they consider many of the same questions we’re grappling with as a society. Can people change? Can we build something new in place of the old? Is it possible to reconcile harm, forgiveness, and love? 

I spoke to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah about violence, the profitability of suffering, and the promise of abolition.

nia t. evans: Chain-Gang All Stars, a highly popular and profitable program where incarcerated people are forced to battle to the death in exchange for the promise of freedom, is a political, corporate, and media collaboration. Together, they convince the public that these kinds of programs or what they call “hard-action sports” are in the interest of public safety. Did our current public safety discourse inspire your creation of this program?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: Absolutely. We sort of know now just how much corporations have influenced the way we are governed. There’s overt explicit stuff, like lobbying, but there are also more subtle things that we aren’t always privy to. The bottom line is if someone can make money off it, anything is fair game. That’s one part of it, but I also think, culturally, we want to see individuals suffer. There’s a lot of suffering going around, and we don’t have the vocabulary or the ability to engage that suffering outside the terms of creating more suffering. 

That’s one of the most fucked up, fundamental pieces of the prison industrial complex. It doesn’t allow us to grow the muscle as a community, society, civilization that would help us deal with those who do harm. Instead, we just continue the harm cycle. 

nte: This book forces readers to contend with our collective investments in violence. The carceral state has trained many of us to see violence as a matter between individuals and the violence of the criminal legal system as accidental, unavoidable, or even justifiable. Can you talk about how this book works to redefine the nature of violence?

There’s a lot of suffering going around, and we don’t have the vocabulary or the ability to engage that suffering outside the terms of creating more suffering.

NKAB: It’s so interesting to watch as the state is so willing to unravel personal histories and nuance when they kill others. When the state kills its citizens, it’s there’s a deep dive into a whole set of circumstances. There’s a capacity to hold multiple truths at the same time. But when it’s someone who isn’t wearing a badge or is a privileged civilian, suddenly you’re on your own. You’re just this evil person who erupted from the ground to cause harm. That’s why storytelling matters because bad stories are central to the state’s ability to get us to feel okay about murdering us. 

I call the police in the book soldier-police for a reason. We have a highly militarized police force. And we’re trained to think that if not for these people who are killing us, we will be much less safe than we are. It’s a big part of the state’s campaign to make us feel impotent. I like to poke holes in that idea in my writing. I try to make sure that the people who are being subjected to these things, like the Links in Chain-Gang All-Stars, are depicted as humans with as much capacity for love and goodness as anyone else. I want to make sure we don’t forget that people who have committed so-called crimes are human just like all of us. And no matter what label we assign to them, they are capable of feeling great love and great pain just like anyone of us.

nte: What led to the decision to foreground this story in the love between two queer incarcerated Black women? 

NKAB: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the heart of the book. When I started this story, I thought it would be one of the short stories in my first book, Friday Black. I had this woman named Loretta Thurwar standing in the center of this huge arena. She was looking back, sadly, at the fact that she’d been forced to kill many people she was close to. I don’t know where that came from exactly, but I knew it had to be.

I had an awareness about how a Black woman in an American context can be both loved and crushed at the same time. Sexualized and spit on. It’s this weird thing that happens when a Black woman does pretty much anything in the public eye. You’re always waiting for the cultural tide to turn on her. The analog I’ve been giving is Serena Williams. There’s a certain kind of edge of violence in the way people perceive her. People are always willing to reduce her to her body or disrespect her even though she’s the GOAT.

And I wanted Thurwar to be the kind of person who enacts change. Men are so often seduced by the promises of capitalism and power in general. I found it hard to believe that a man would be that kind of position of power and still think the system was worth changing. I also wanted to give Thurwar a counterpart who truly understood her, someone who embodies love and that became Staxxx. At one point, I thought maybe Loretta would be with a man, but I just didn’t believe it when I tried to write it. And that’s how they came to be. 

nte: Many narratives about incarceration tend to privilege state actors or civilians, but this story prioritizes the interiority of incarcerated people. How did you prepare to write these stories? What archival material did you turn to?

We can get to Mars if we want to, but I don’t think we should until we figure out how to build compassion among each other.

NKAB: The research definitely grew over time. There’s a huge former prison in Philly, the Eastern State Penitentiary. They had a project of collecting letters from currently incarcerated people. I did a deep dive into that. I was pretty far into the book when I read Solitary: A Biography by Albert Woodfox. I read a lot of memoirs by currently incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Those sources helped me get the voice. I also work with a group from where I’m from called the Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow. Many of the members are formerly incarcerated and they were really generous about sharing their experiences. What I was struck by was how they were just people who were feeling greatly in a terrible system, in a really particular kind of hell. That might be super obvious, but it gave me the context I needed to write this book. 

nte: There is an abolitionist collective in your story, the Coalition to End Neo-Slavery, working to end the games and free the participants. How did current abolitionist struggles inspire your depiction of that group? 

NKAB: It was important for me to represent them as humans trying. Sometimes we think of resistance groups as magical people who are born with all these gifts and they can see things and possibilities we can’t. But I wanted to make clear they are just humans trying. They have doubts and fears just like anybody else. 

That said, I think they are sensitive to great horror. And a lot of times personally afflicted in ways that are direct and indirect. They’re people who find community in people who care. I tried my best to pull on what I knew from groups I’ve been a part of and the energy of the movements I see, but ultimately, they are people who feel motivated to action by love. That’s how I think of them. People who feel motivated enough in their regular lives to do something about what they care about. And they dedicate their time and energy and are willing to bend other parts of their lives around that thing. 

nte: I want to talk about one of my favorite characters, Dr. Patricia St. Jean, or Doc Patty, as Thurwar calls her. She sets out to make something that eliminates suffering, but her work is stolen and becomes a tool for torture, pain, and domination. What was it like to write that character? 

NKAB: I’m glad you brought her up. No one’s asked me about her yet. There was a time when I wondered if I was doing too much by having her in the book. When we were in the early rounds of editing and I hadn’t fleshed her out enough, it felt she might be superfluous. That’s why I like feedback, even if it’s bad feedback, because it teaches you what you care about. And I was protective of Patty from the beginning. On some level, she’s a personal character for me. A couple of months after my first book came out—I had been working on Chain Gang All-Stars for at least two years—my dad passed away. He had cancer. He had the long-ish kind that included several years of suffering. And he had really bad neuropathy from chemo. He was in pretty much constant pain for a while. And we tried everything—marijuana teas, lots of stuff. In many ways, Patty comes from that time. 

I wanted her to be someone who was seemingly very disparate from the group and then we discover how connected she actually is. I wanted her to be brilliant and really motivated in a serious way by losing her dad. Patty’s journey is, to me, the story we see unfolding again and again in our society, that technological advancement without more ethical growth will inevitably lead to terrible things. 

I am confident in our ability to make and do great things. We can get to Mars if we want to, but I don’t think we should until we figure out how to build compassion among each other. 

Patty is motivated to help others, but also harbors a lot of guilt and stress she doesn’t have an outlet for. She’s someone who has both the ability and drive to change the world, and, in many ways, that possibility is robbed from her. And I think that’s what the world does. Especially when it can and there’s money to be made. 

nte: Has writing Chain-Gang All-Stars changed or complicated your relationship with abolitionist politics and literature? 

NKAB: To be honest, when I wrote the book seven or eight years ago, I was writing hoping I was an abolitionist. I thought I was, but abolition wasn’t in the cultural zeitgeist the way it is now. I think I believed in a shallow way, but then I did the work and realized it was the most important thing I could say next. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our ability to respond compassionately to poverty, mental health, crises, addiction, and so many other crises is destroyed by the very fact of prisons existing as they do. Them existing as they do at all stops us from being able to respond with heart to those things. So, I became an abolitionist in writing this book. It became a channel through which to grow my relationship with abolitionist thinkers and movements. And it gave me like an ideological like bedrock to know what the fuck I mean when I say abolition. And by that, I mean, we need to add things as much as we remove them. And I’m so grateful to the book for that. It made me a smarter, better, more complete person. And because of that, this time around, I feel like I already won. I feel vaguely ashamed of even those eight years ago not 100% identifying as an abolitionist in a meaningful way, even if I agreed with the ideas theoretically. But the book got me there. So, regardless of the external markers of success, I feel like I already won. 

Three Femmes and Three Mascs Go to the Woods, What Could Go Wrong?

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Jenny Fran Davis’ debut novel Dykette is indisputably, vibrantly, hilariously queer. Dykette follows three couples (and a charismatic pug) on a ten day, pressure-cooker trip to Hudson, New York. The oldest of the couple, Jules Todd (a news anchor who reads like a fictional Rachel Maddow) and her partner Miranda, a therapist who seems perpetually wrapped in a cashmere, invite two twenty-something couples to their upstate house to admire the domesticated bliss of conventionally successful middle aged dykes. The third-person narrative closely follows the high femme, PhD in “the feminine miniature” candidate protagonist Sasha and her boyfriend Jesse, a very nice, handy and resourceful butch and Darcy and Lou: cool, beautiful, artistic, down for whatever, vaguely internet famous as they spend the holidays together. 

Three femmes and three mascs go to the woods, what could go wrong? If you answered “a lot” you’re correct. Dykette reads like gossip from your favorite, albeit somewhat messy, friend—it’s full of cunty observations, bizarre situations, performance art, high femme antics and jealousy. There’s competition amongst femmes, butch/femme dynamics, photo shoots with the sexy Grinch filter and a lot of gay sex. Yet at its heart, it’s about flawed people who are desperately trying their hardest to be liked by one another, to find in each other the queer utopia that is community.

 I spoke to Jenny Fran Davis by phone about being femme, desire as a driving force and the allure of the butch/femme dynamics.

Ariél Martinez: The book opens with a sexy Grinch filter photo shoot. What does the Grinch mean to you?

Jenny Fran Davis: I feel like the Grinch didn’t hold particular meaning for me as a kid. I don’t really remember thinking about the Grinch until the Grinch filter came along. The Grinch filter was pretty pivotal for gays in general in the past few years. I began to think about the Grinch as bitterness and cockiness and just having all around a bratty attitude. And I think that’s probably part of why we as gays think that the Grinch is so sexy. I was also thinking of the Grinch and his redemption arc as being aspirational to Sasha in the book. His heart can grow two sizes and he comes around at the end and sees the beauty of Christmas or whatever. That was fun to play with also and just thinking about this character that we’re supposed to see evolve in a pretty specific and wholesome way. I was thinking along those lines in terms of Sasha’s arc, playing with whether she was able to embody the same loving, forgiving, wholesome attitude of the Grinch. And I don’t necessarily think she does, but I think that is an interesting aspiration for her, at least at the beginning of the book. 

AM: I haven’t read that many books with a blatantly queer femme protagonist like Sasha. Can you talk about your relationship to being femme and how that factored into the writing of the book?

JD: I’m so happy to be talking to a fellow femme about this. It’s so interesting because being femme feels so native to me. It just feels like the lens through which I see everything, think everything, say everything, experience everything. So in a way I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was just feeling my way through it. And I think that was a really interesting way to practice writing and maybe something I haven’t done as much in the past, but letting myself be more impulsive and perform a little bit more dramatically on the page and really channel this character of Sasha who definitely resembles me in a lot of ways, but also isn’t quite me. Navigating writing this character who in some ways is an exaggerated version of myself in some ways, but has different motivations, yet shares this fascination and obsession with being femme was really interesting to play with. And it gave me a lot of leeway to experiment and try things out and take ideas and impulses a little bit further.

In terms of being femme in general and the femme protagonist thing, that’s something I feel like I’ve been thinking about more since finishing the book and thinking about its reception. Throughout the process of writing, it really just felt normal and unremarkable just because it’s so in my bones. Starting to contend with how people read the book and experience the book and then taking it a step further in how they will experience or think about me as the writer has been a more explicit way of thinking about being femme and the way that I’ve been afraid to express myself in certain ways for fear of derision and judgment and all of these things that I’m sure writers of all genders feel.

AM: Another thing that struck me in Dykette is the different women and their very different iterations of being femme. I was wondering how you thought about these characters and their relation to their femininities. 

JD: The dynamics of the femininities among Miranda, Sasha and Darcy was the most fun I had writing this book. Part of what’s so fun about being femme is sort of scrutinizing other femmes. That’s been such a joy of my life and my work and my writing is just studying how other people are doing that and being envious and in awe of, and judgmental of, and jealous of and oftentimes extremely turned on or turned off by something another woman is doing. It consumes so much of my personal thinking and writing. And it was so fun to to think about how these characters are relating to each other in all of these different ways and trying on different parts of each other, seeing what might work for them, what they might want to take, what they might want to reject in themselves, what they recognize and hate, what they recognize and love.

A big part of writing this book was leaning into things that feel trite and frivolous and superficial and stupid and taking those things if not seriously, then at least spending time thinking about them and putting them on the page. That was a way that I wanted to both resist the urge to shy away from writing about things because I thought they were trite, but also to not to not try to make what feels trite and frivolous feel unnecessarily weighed down or serious, like let those things be light and fun. 

AM: I wanted to ask you about humor. Are you just a funny writer or was it something that you consciously brought into the writing process? Did you always envision it as being funny? 

JD: It was really important to me to write something that felt joyful and fun. I want it to feel like dessert or gossip. Like those things that are so delicious and so fun because to me being gay is so fun and so funny. I wanted to translate the joy and the manic humor that I often feel with my friends onto the page. And that was an important thing for me to not lose. Not that writing the book was translating a real life story, but I feel the way that I was thinking about what I wanted to faithfully represent from my own life was the element of joy and fun and lightness.

There’s so much humor and double edged serious and funny elements to all of my friendships and relationships and also to my relationship with myself. I find that embracing humor eases every feeling. And that was important to me to translate into writing. Even in the super tense or serious situations among the characters are real feelings of betrayal and jealousy and loneliness and pain. And all of these things are rarely, at least for me, just that. I was trying to capture the way in which there can also be a perverse joy to feeling jealous. It was important to me to capture the complexity of some of these feelings. It ended up opening a lot of doors in terms of plot and structure also. 

AM: I feel like desire is so present in this book in so many different directions. Did you think of desire as being a plot force?

Being femme [is] the lens through which I see everything, think everything, say everything, experience everything.

JD: Totally. Desire is kind of the plot force in this book. It’s kind of a cliché of writing fiction. Like, think about what the characters want and that has to be the most central thing. I don’t know that I explicitly started out thinking in those terms but very quickly, it became clear that every interesting thing I was writing had to do with what a character wanted and what they were willing to do to get it. I think all of the characters want multiple things. It’s not like they each have this one desire. Sometimes you really want two things at once. And pursuing one of those will mean that it’s a lot harder to get the other things. I feel like that opened up a lot of doors too, just embracing the complexity of desire. Both really wanting something but also not wanting something at the same time. Desire was super, super top of mind as I was finishing the book and then revising and making sure that desire was both thematically and plot wise, woven into basically everything the characters do and say and feel. 

AM: There’s a lot of sex in the book, and then there’s also these kind of nebulous sexual experiences too. Did you know you wanted queer sex in the book? And did you want to see these more nebulous situations?

JD: I definitely knew that there had to be sex in the book. I was also really nervous about that because it’s so easy to be so cringe and to write the most humiliating sex scenes. I was really scared of being cringe. I was experimenting with writing sex without a ton of editorializing and kind of just saying what happened without overwriting the meaning or the feelings surrounding it. I was interested in the mechanics of the sex that was happening. I thought especially because the book is written in the third person, what if I withheld that a bit and just described the acts that were happening without immediately divulging what the characters thought and felt about those acts. I think that was a way that I thought around feeling so cringe as I was writing and also tried to capture the ambiguity or ambivalence of a lot of those sex scenes. 

AM: What did you know you wanted to communicate in writing butch/femme dynamics and what obstacles, if any, did you face in writing those?

JD:  Butch/femme dynamics are… I love them. I think they’re so fun. I think they’re so fun to be in and experience and play with in my life. And also so fun to write and read about. So I knew that that would be a big part of this book.

Contending with the recent and past history of the way that people think about butch/femme dynamics as mimicking heterosexuality, which I definitely want to mostly reject, is really interesting. I think there is sometimes a joy in perverting heterosexual dynamics, even when that looks like imitating them in some ways. Playing with them would be a better way of putting it. I think that aside, the more intellectual debate or intellectual legacy of butch/femme dynamics aside, I just think that they’re very definitely underexplored. I know there are a lot of really amazing representations in literature, but I guess I’ve found that in recent queer fiction, I just haven’t come across many depictions of it. Not that my project’s goal was at all to represent everyone or to include every possible iteration of queer relationships. But I also didn’t want butch/femme dynamics to be the only queer dynamics that I explored.

And so although that dynamic is really present for the protagonist, Sasha and her boyfriend Jesse, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for Jules and Miranda or for Darcy and Lou. It was fun for me to think about how the really, really strong butch/femme dynamic of Jesse and Sasha is being seen by other queers and delighted in but also challenged at certain times. And just the way that this dynamic exists within a relationship, but also how it kind of works in the midst of other queer relationships that don’t necessarily have that same masc/femme thing going on. I was really interested in that dynamic being subject to the pressures of the current moment that it finds itself in, but also the friends surrounding that relationship and the other dynamics surrounding that relationship and the coexistence and push and pull among all of these relationships and how they change in response to one another. That was something that I was really excited about exploring. I wanted to write such a joyful and fun butch/femme dynamic because in my experience it is so joyful and fun. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its challenges and that it’s any better or worse than any other sort of dynamic. It was really generative and fun for me to write about, like all of the ways that it’s such a delightful dynamic because in my experience, it really is.

AM: I was describing your book to a friend and my friend who—I love them so much but they’re not a big reader—was like, wait so is it Rachel Maddow fan fiction? 

JD: Oh my God. I was about to say that.

AM: I thought that was so funny but can you just talk me through how Jules came to be? 

I think there is sometimes a joy in perverting heterosexual dynamics, even when that looks like imitating them in some ways.

JD: I think Rachel Maddow fan fiction is a really great way to put it, but also because I’ve never met Rachel Maddow, it’s also just all of the sexy 40-year-old butches that I’ve ever known in one person who’s also total dork and really cringe, but also irresistible to Sasha in that way of being being 15 years older and having a successful career and being kind of famous and having a bunch of money and having this sexy, distant partner who Sasha’s really intrigued by. It is totally fan fiction. And then as things happen between them, there’s a disillusionment with Jules. It was really important for me to work through that in the writing because people are very rarely how we think they’re going to be or how we want them to be. 

AM: What’s your favorite part of the book? 

JD: I think the part where Jesse is accusing Sasha of trying to be a reality star. I feel like that gets at a lot of the inner workings of their relationship. And it’s also this moment where things between them come to a place where the performance hasn’t quite ended. I think that part of the book shows that we’re always performing and something can be both very performed but also very real. When Jesse yells out “who do you think you’re trying to be? You’re not Stassi Schroeder from Vanderpump Rules. You’re not this reality star brat caricature.” That’s a breakthrough moment where it punches through some of the overperformed dynamics between Jesse and Sasha. But it also brings us back to the reality TV world that we live in where we’re all performing ourselves all the time. And even in that accusation, I feel like Jesse is performing something too. That spat between the two of them really opened up something that I had been writing towards the whole time. And then in that moment of extreme tension and anger and hurt between the two of them, something gets exposed but also doesn’t get exposed to a point where they’re no longer performing. We see the performative nature of even vulnerability and raw emotion.

I Can Walk Through Walls But I Can’t Find Love

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Tunneling

The man can pass through solid walls.

To do so, he only has to jostle and vibrate the particles in his body. That’s it. This then frees them from the confines of the man’s emotions, specifically the failures (which he has extensively catalogued) and the desires (which he has extensively desired) that masquerade as his soul. Once jostled and vibrated perfectly, the man renders himself something other than alive, but certainly not inert, and he is free to pass through the nearest wall. While in this not inert but also not alive state, he can forget his poor performance review and the extra weight at his midsection and the half-empty bags of last year’s Easter candy in his filing cabinet. It doesn’t even matter that Courtney in accounting turned him down when he asked her to coffee last week, even though she isn’t dating anyone. Single for over three years she’d told Rachel, also in accounting, during a conversation in the office break room that wasn’t meant for the man to hear.

The man fears that passing through walls is perhaps the only interesting thing about him.

Courtney is unable to pass through walls. Her cells cling to each other with a fervency that can never be broken. She learned that the dust that collects on her tiny dresser and along the windowsill in her bedroom is sloughed off skin cells and as she cleans her apartment every Saturday afternoon she mourns the loss of those parts of her and wonders what memories they take with them. She turned the man down for coffee because she likes her life exactly the way it is. She is not interested in change.

The man, who attacks his loneliness with bags of candy, finds it difficult to understand that for Courtney, another day alone is preferable to an hour spent with the man in relaxed conversation. She feels similarly about the conversations she has with Rachel, also in accounting, every day at 3pm in the break room. He longs to banter with someone like that. Specifically, he longs to banter like that with Courtney in accounting. He wants to be past all the introductions and the life-changing electrical charges that leap between two people getting to know each other. To discover if their cells want to share electrons.

The day after the declined coffee invitation, the man heard Rachel laugh when Courtney relayed the information that he had asked her out. Rachel, as it turns out, would have said yes to a coffee date with the man.

What the man and Courtney could never know is that Rachel’s cells have been losing their magnetic pull, drifting away from each other. She feels less like herself every day. She responds to this lack of vibrancy by over-compensating. Laughing loudly at jokes that aren’t funny, coordinating the office birthday parties where everyone shoves cheap grocery store cake into their mouths as fast as possible in an effort to return to work before too much interaction occurs. All while waiting waiting waiting for someone to excite her. Rachel would take a chance.

The man, in his ignorance, can only feel the slight of Courtney’s rejection. He knows at this precise moment, which is 3:01pm, as he struggles to finish a mindless task at his metal desk, Courtney and Rachel are sitting at the white plastic table in the break room. Just on the other side of his office wall.

A wall that he can pass through.

The man’s body becomes quantum waves, loosening from the shape he loathes in the mirror, and he passes through the atomically small spaces between the wall’s matter. Much like a brick of cheese through a cheese grater. Except that on the other side, the cheese becomes a brick again.

It is always supremely disappointing, after so much effort manipulating himself on a molecular level, that the man finds himself completely unchanged. He reassembles himself, atom by atom, each piece in the exact spot as before he propagated through the barrier. His brain reshapes to have the same thoughts, the same uncertainties.

Courtney and Rachel look up. This is not news to them. The man frequently passes through walls to attend meetings and exchange pleasantries and confirm rumors. The coffee machine gurgles. The microwave hums. The air conditioner rattles.

The women each clutch a mug of coffee. The mugs were brought from their homes. Courtney’s is completely white while Rachel’s has a cartoon picture of a cat wearing a sundress.

“You know . . . .” the man says.

Courtney thinks of the breath leaving his body, the skin cells flaking from where his sleeve doesn’t quite meet his wrist, his accumulated memories with nowhere to go, and how she has no room to carry any of it. There is no available space.

Rachel feels a slight vibration. A rogue cell deep inside is activated. All her other cells wait for a message to be passed. On her face is an expectant look.

The man almost says something ridiculous. Like: “I don’t even like coffee.” Or worse: “I don’t like talking to people.”

But then the man’s gaze shifts. How has he not noticed Rachel before? She’s not just Courtney’s coworker. She’s an important member of the company. More important than most everyone else, in fact. She plans every office party, and once when the man told a joke that bombed while everyone was eating cake, Rachel laughed as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. At the time, the man had been too embarrassed to meet her eye, but he will never make that mistake again. Everyone in the company takes her for granted. To be very specific, the man takes her for granted. But he sees her now, and every particle in his body knows he made a mistake inviting Courtney to coffee.

“I was wondering if you’d like to join me for coffee, Rachel?”

The rogue cell deep inside Rachel, the one that has been waiting for a moment like this, alerts another cell and another and another, and they all become charged. The cells dance. There is much to discuss on the molecular level deep inside Rachel from accounting.

The man is waiting. The invitation is nice. It feels nice to be invited. But the man invited Courtney first. If Courtney had said yes, this invitation would have never appeared. It is a secondary invitation. The invitation stops feeling nice. Rachel slowly begins shutting down the charged molecules deep inside of her, one by one. The man seems lovely. He has always seemed lovely. Once Rachel saved him from total silence after he bombed a joke during a party she had planned for a woman who no longer worked for the company.

“I understand,” the man says, Rachel’s hesitation heavy between them. He walks to the door, anxious to leave the break room as fast as he can.

“I’ve never seen you use a door before,” Rachel says.

The man thinks again how passing through walls might be the most interesting thing about him.

Rachel thinks how the man’s ability to pass through walls can’t possibly be the most interesting thing about him. There’s a glimmer of hope. The rogue cell tries one more time to generate a charge.

“Send me an email,” Rachel says. “Let’s set it up.”

Courtney and Rachel share a look. The man can’t decipher its meaning. He expected to feel exhilarated, but he somehow feels even more humiliated.

“A door forces you to go the way everyone else goes,” he says. When the man returns to his office, he’s going to write that email to Rachel. He moves toward the wall that has his office on the other side. Courtney and Rachel watch. He anticipates the moment when he will pass through the wall, back to his cramped office and accumulating work, because he will stop being himself until he reaches the other side. As if he ceases to exist.

It will be a relief.

10 Novels About the Drama of Working for the Family Business

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When we think of a family business, what springs to mind first is probably a straightforward, even heteronormative, structure: a commercial concern (hardware store; funeral home; shipping firm) passing from parent to child (usually meaning, under patriarchal and capitalist tradition, from father to son). And there are plenty of opportunities for conflict in this simple structure—after all, it depends on children behaving as employees; parents acting as managers; siblings jockeying for promotion. (How does one give one’s daughter a lukewarm performance review? Is it possible to rage-quit one’s family?)

A book cover with orange and purple patterns of stained glass in the background

But there is also an infinite world of messiness to tap in stories of family business, beyond this relatively straightforward drama of the play of power between (literal) corporate families. One way to describe my novel Glassworks is as a story of a family business that doesn’t know it’s a family business: each generation of the Novak family thinks they’re striking out on their own, choosing independence, rejecting their predecessors’ legacies; but again and again they end up drawn to the same patterns, the same foundational elements—in their occupations, in their relationships, and in the muddy spaces between the two.

For better and for worse, what we do for a living often has a controlling stake in our waking hours, our mental health, and our identity. Wherever this also gets mixed up with the drama of family—duty and rebellion, guilt and pride, love and resentment—there’s bound to be a fascinating story ahead. 

Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken

There is a brick-and-mortar family business in this excellent novel of late vaudeville and early Hollywood: Sharp & Son’s Gents’ Furnishings, of Valley Junction, Iowa. Mose Sharp, the eponymous Son (and only boy among six sisters—his father has the store’s sign repainted upon his arrival), is fiercely determined to escape his professional and filial destiny. But even running away to make it as a song-and-dance man, he can’t quite shake the destiny (or is it a curse?) to ply a family trade—whether it’s devoting himself to a doomed double act with his sister Hattie; growing so close to his professional partner that he sees all their films as love stories; or being haunted at every turn (no matter how ancient the guilt, and how successful his showbiz career) by the shadow-self that should be behind the counter in his father’s store. Besides this prodigal son, McCracken gives us beautiful moments with all those sisters—Annie, for instance, who covets Sharp & Son herself and who’s done “everything an heir should have except been born a boy.” 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens, a quintessential “real English butler” looking back on his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, confronts long-buried doubts about his lordly employer’s legacy (and his own complicity in it). There’s already a fascinating sense of “family business” to this story—it’s difficult, after all, to think of an occupation with worse work/life balance than butler to an aristocratic country house. But in the most harrowing section of the book (which is saying something), Stevens hires his own father as under-butler. It quickly becomes clear to the rest of the staff—particularly housekeeper Miss Kenton—that “Mr Stevens senior” is in physical and mental decline. The compartmentalization and denial required for Stevens to project-manage his father’s senescence and rapidly failing health while on the clock, and under threat of constant interruption from their pampered upper-crust employers, lead to more than a few scenes so tense you’ll have to read through your fingers.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

I could have as easily listed Fowler’s earlier novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, in which (without giving too much away) sisterhood is harnessed as a behavioral science experiment. But I had to give the edge to Booth, which has haunted me in its genre-bending layers—a novel told from many perspectives, about the family of John Wilkes Booth. Many of the Booth siblings are Shakespearean actors (following in their father’s deadbeat footsteps), and they compete bitterly, onstage and off—for roles; for applause; for the next line. And then, of course, there is the trouble with Johnny. Fowler’s treatment of the Lincoln assassination (the inevitable gravitational center of the book, even before the reader cracks the cover) is masterful on a craft level—and with remarkable modern resonance we see the Booth family navigate another set of public performances, at once competitive and collaborative, as they are forced to transition to an entirely different type of household name. 

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

This cult classic takes the notion of a “family business” to grotesque extremes, with carnival barkers Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski experimenting with radioisotopes, arsenic, and toxic potions of all descriptions to ensure their children can double as their sideshow exhibits. Sibling rivalry thrives, to say the least, among the Binewski clan (Arturo the Aquaboy; Iphy and Elly the Siamese twins; Olympia, our hunchback narrator; and telekinetic Chick). The small-town America carnival circuit bears witness to their Machiavellian power struggles and the sometimes equally disturbing displays of love that tumble headlong into obsession, with the whole plot literally powered by the ashes of the carnival’s founder and Binewski patriarch—Grandpa’s urn is bolted to the hood of the midway’s generator truck. 

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Without revealing too much about a novel that relies on its unexpected turns, I can say that each of Trust’s four sections is concerned with families in business together—chief among those “businesses” being the purest distillation of American capitalism itself, in the robber-baron age of pince-nez and unregulated markets. Partners become collaborators become accomplices; parents and children betray one another and their own ideals for the sake of their next project. The tension at the heart of many of the novels on this list is that between duty and transaction on one side, and love (or rebellion) on the other—there’s one painfully beautiful version of this in Trust, with the character Ida’s father refusing to accept a gift from her without offering her a penny as “payment”—narrating as an old woman, Ida says, “I still have the penny that saved us.”  

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

This novel of simultaneously epic scope and deep intimacy runs from eighteenth-century Ghana to the present day, rendering three hundred years’ and two continents’ worth of history in one family’s intricately complex lineage. Generations of descendants work together, and sometimes at odds—farming, fighting, mining, singing; shouldering trauma and striving for peace. From the opening pages, where both marrying and enslaving neighbors are used as strategies for surviving English colonialism, Gyasi examines the inextricable webs of choice and necessity, the relationships both filial and transactional, the fractal spiral of cause and effect that drives nations’ histories no less than individuals.

True Biz by Sara Nović

Among much else, this novel set at the River Valley School for the Deaf is about what happens when the boundaries collapse between work (or activism) and family. February, the headmistress at River Valley, lives on campus with her wife—an arrangement under threat on multiple fronts, both professional and domestic. The chronic simmer of their work/life tension lends dignity to the parallel dormitory dramas of their adolescent charges. Then there are the dynamics of Austin’s family—legends at River Valley, with Austin fifth-generation Deaf on his mother’s side. Austin’s hearing father works as an ASL interpreter, slipping between practiced neutrality in his role as a professional communicator, and full-blown participation in the emotional conflicts of their family life—particularly now that Austin’s newborn baby sister has just sent shockwaves through the house by passing her first hearing test. 

Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro

A different kind of story about the desperation that drives, and the duty that harries, a prodigal child. Fahad’s brutally charismatic father, Rafik, is determined to toughen up his sensitive son—readying him to inherit his legacies as cabinet minister and landowner of a rural estate in up-country Pakistan, and to defend them against threats from hungry competitors (including extended family). But dysfunction and failure are braided into both traditions, politics and land management, and Rafik’s rabid dedication to his legacy is no guarantee of its longevity. The scale of this deceptively quiet novel is large, and there are in fact many families’ livelihoods caught up in the consequences of Rafik and Fahad’s conflict. “We are your children,” protests one of the farmers who works the family’s land. “Who shall I punish then,” Rafik replies, “if not my children?”

The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil

This novel, set in an alternate post-Soviet Russia, has the mesmerizing symmetry and logic of a folktale. Twin brothers Dima and Yarik work opposite shifts expanding the Oranzheria—an enormous greenhouse that, paired with the satellite mirrors that keep the city of Petroplavilsk in twenty-four-hour daylight, squeeze maximum efficiency from nature itself. Work is now both the only thing the brothers have in common and the thing that keeps them ruthlessly separated on opposing schedules—until an encounter with the mogul who owns the Oranzheria changes everything. Dima and Yarik become “the poster boys for opposing ideologies”—one drifting into anarchy to become a folk hero of the resistance; the other rising from promotion to promotion until he’s a modern icon of oligarchy. 

Dombey & Son by Charles Dickens

An inevitable ancestor of every other book on this list, Dombey & Son is the tale of a hopelessly proud man unable to distinguish his firm from his family (and who therefore dismisses his daughter as entirely worthless). But besides the cold calculations of the title characters/business, Dickens offers us a bouquet of other examples of families “at home in public”—from the many, many characters who literally live at their places of work; to Polly Toodle, the wet nurse who balances longing for her own family with her occupation nursing baby Paul; to the Carker brothers, whose birth order is reversed in their positions at work, leading to scenes of dark comedy with the brother “Senior in years, but Junior in the house” bullied by his malicious younger sibling; to Mr. Dombey tasking his most obsequious clerk with communicating with his own wife, in a new “professional” role as the “organ of [Dombey’s] displeasure.” 

The Quest to Uncover a Disappearance in the Biafran War

Posted on by EL Assistant2

When Emmanuel Iduma was growing up in Nigeria, he learned little officially in school about the Biafran War, the civil war that split the country along ethnic lines between 1967 and 1970 when the secessionist Republic of Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria. Nor was the conflict talked about much at home, despite its great personal impact. 

“I have no account of the daily grind of my grandparents as they maneuvered to survive the invasion of our hometown. Most of my family’s war stories are hidden from me, as though repressed so long ago they now seem canceled out. I know only this sliver of fact: everyone in my father’s immediate family, except my uncle Emmanuel, returned from the war,” he writes in I Am Still with You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History, an expansive book in which he journeys through Nigeria in search of this lost namesake—at once an intimate memoir, a political reckoning, and a study in the creative process as it intersects with a country’s complex history.

Iduma returns to Nigeria, after a time in New York, to find Lagos erupting with the #EndSARS protests against police brutality. His father has recently died, and his search for the uncle he never knew—across familial hometowns and university libraries, monuments both mundane and overflowing with memory—is imbued with echoes of love and grief for a father’s long-lost brother, and a writer’s recently passed father.

Through a skillful structure and expressive prose, I Am Still With You brings together probing philosophical questions about inheritance, cogent historical and political concerns, and an exploration of the reverberations between personal and collective loss. Finally, the book is about the uneven process of discovery amid the certainty of unanswered questions. “Once it was clear how little there was to know about my uncle,” Iduma writes, “I realized I barely knew what I sought. Hence, chance encounters—not a prepared list of interviews and survivors—were my only approach to the aftermath of the war, my need to learn what I could from a slantwise perspective.” It is this perspective—inventive, tender, and all its own—that gives Iduma’s book such power.

I first met Iduma not long before he planned to return to Nigeria, when I was an editor at the New York Review of Books and we worked together on his writing. I emailed with Iduma about what stories and identities we inherit, love and loss in I Am Still With You.

Lucy McKeon: We worked together on the 2019 essay that was a precursor to I Am Still With You, and I’m struck, rereading it now after reading your book, by how a philosophical kernel of the book was already fully there in the essay: what is the meaning of a life when one dies so young and leaves nothing behind, like the flash of a meteor’s light? And what is inherited? I wonder if you can say more about what this question meant to you, then and now.

Emmanuel Iduma: At the outset, and up to the point of writing that essay, I was quite interested in the notion of brief presences. But in working on the book, I found it increasingly dissatisfying to designate a life in such terms. My uncle’s life was, as far I know, brief. But what could it mean to uncover a sense of his ambitions, to uncover the meanings of his person, to trace and flesh out that brevity? 

LMcK: And what do you feel you learned, as a writer, along that journey of discovery?

Since the war ended more than 50 years ago, how do we remain impacted by its catastrophes?

EL: While I researched the book, almost everyone I spoke with recalled a mere handful of details about my uncle. In that sense memory was a blind docent. And yet, a docent it was, leading me to a greater understanding of my family’s past. It wasn’t so much an evolution in my sense of self as a deepening, and even that in a way that didn’t eventually seem cathartic or therapeutic. I felt that I now understood how my identity was not only shaped by the war (and disappearance of my uncle), but also by my attempt to discover the extent of that loss. And so, regardless of how much anyone in my family could remember, by writing the book, I sketched out the terms through which I can now engage, and be at peace with, the unknown.

LMcK: Speaking of inheritance, the book is a beautiful tribute to your late father. It is also a meditation on familial relation: fathers and sons, and brothers, both biological and chosen. Was your search for your uncle Emmanuel always also a gesture toward your father?

EI: Yes, the book is, in every sense, a way to honor my father. His passing gave the book its urgency. I wanted to understand how he mourned his brother, how his brother’s absence shaped him. Considering him in retrospect meant that I made meaning out of his life as it related to mine. This was a form of consolation. I am aware that, as Peter Gizzi writes in a poem, conversing with the dead is the “most honest definition of silence.” Yet I came to my father’s life from what I made of it in his absence, and hopefully every word is one in which I pay homage to his fortitude and spirituality. And yes, since it is a search for my father’s brother, it seemed necessary for me to conceptualize brotherhood as extending from one generation to the next.

LMcK: You’ve returned to Nigeria recently when, in October 2022, the #EndSARS movement launches against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad’s police brutality; and you’re very near, and at one point join, the Lagos protests. You’re also, for the book, amid processing the legacy of the Biafran war and investigating continuing pro-Biafran agitation. Can you say a bit about the fascinating relation between the two political movements and moments, one of many aspects of the book that give it a kind of full-circle feel? 

EI: Each generation in Nigeria has had its political awakening. The Biafran war was such a moment for the post-independence generation. It was difficult, perhaps even impossible, for those in the Biafran region not to take a side. The same can be said of the EndSARS protests: my understanding was that the key actors in the leaderless movement were those born in the mid-to-late ‘90s. I don’t intend, with this comparison, to trivialize the acuteness of the war, or to mischaracterize it as similar to the experience of being on the street in protest. Yet it was clear to me while I wrote the book—particularly since that opening section was written after completing two drafts—that the real failure of imagination would be to avoid a reckoning with the histories that led, in part, to the protests. My sense is that political reckonings are cyclic in nature—an event sparks a reaction, a reaction leads to a flashpoint, again and again. It felt necessary to connect those flashpoints, to insist that it would be nearsighted to think in pockets of events.

LMcK: Names are central to the book, most obviously in the fact that you are your lost uncle’s namesake, but in other subtle and surprising ways as well (of your father’s many names you consider “what name his identity was staked at the beginning of his life”). Have you always felt close to your name, and did writing this book change how you identify with it? 

Each generation in Nigeria has had its political awakening.

EI: My father had two endearing names for me, “Nwannennaya,” and “Ezeali.” The former, as I mention in the book, translates as “father’s brother.” And the latter is the name of my maternal grandfather, since in my hometown the second son is called thus. In my early adulthood, I grew fonder of those names, especially knowing that my father, in using either name, was deliberate in his affection. In writing I Am Still With You, I hoped to work out, at least theoretically, what it meant to inhabit the identities of both my uncle and mother’s father, both of whom I know little about. 

LMcK: We share an interest in photography (and I would just plug your wonderful newsletter on African photography, Tender Photo, here!), and photos are central to I Am Still With You, both in the literal sense of Romano Cagnoni’s reproduced image of men training for the Biafran army and Priya Ramrahka’s early death, as well as your hunger for family photos—but also in your idea of “afterimages,” often appearing in dreams, “the climax of my engagement with the trauma handed down to me,” you write. How did, and do, images guide your process?

EI: When I write about photographs, I am looking for a piece of speculation in my reading of the image that can hint at an idea greater than the sum of the event that led to the photograph being taken. And yet I do not say this to mean that facts aren’t important, or that it is unimportant to state the basic details of where, when, and in what context a photograph was taken. I take those as starting points. 

Now that I think of it, my initial attempt to write about the war, several years ago, was through photographs. I had the idea for something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, a journal of photographs collected from various sources. But unlike Brecht, who wrote poems, I planned to write short texts in relation to each image. The core of that idea was carried over to my book, which was to consider photographs as central to any speculative reach for the past. Cagnoni’s photograph became the quintessential expression of such a method, in the sense of its invocation of a sea of pensive men going to war, and in the sense that each face can represent a distillation of an unknown fate. 

LMcK: What was it like to return to Lagos after your time away?

EI: I returned to Lagos just before the pandemic began, so I spent 2 years living largely in the quiet of our home, visiting only a select group of friends, most of whom weren’t writers. I think this has helped me understand Lagos and Nigeria less as a place where I had to be a writer, but where I had to make a life. I didn’t return to Nigeria because I wanted to change anything about my writing life, but because I wanted to be closer to my family.

By the time I was leaving New York – and I wouldn’t think of it this way at the time – I was thankfully plugged in to a network of editors and fellow writers, which is now global. I have received a steady stream of commissions, mostly to write about art. It would have been difficult to make a living on these terms in New York, given the cost of living, but in Lagos it has been possible.

In Lagos, I have sought to imbue my work with a character and mood that hews closer to narrative than to art criticism. In one sense, this comes out of writing a memoir that has little to say about art or visual culture. I’m still at the early stages of probing that transition from criticism to narrative—or finding a middle-ground between both—but I also think it is my attempt to propose my work to a “mainstream” audience, outside restrictions of predilections or expertise.

LMcK: Can you say a bit about how the Biafran War has been written about in the past, and how this history perhaps influenced your own writing about the war?

EI: There’s, in fact, a good number of literary works about the Nigerian civil war—one need only look at the bibliography of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which lists nearly 30 titles that inspired her novel. The other relatively recent book to explore the war is Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, styled as his personal history of Biafra. The distinction I made, as I prepared to write my book, was one between writers who were born before the war (and were old enough to remember its events), and those born afterwards. I belonged to the latter group, and felt our task was to work out our own “personal histories” in relation to the war, and to approach it with a different kind of immediacy: since the war ended more than 50 years ago, how do we remain impacted by its catastrophes?

LMcK: How has your sense of home and family developed over time, and how do you attribute the effects on your writing?

EI: My family moved quite a bit in the years I grew up. Before I turned 20, we had lived in 7 towns. And then, a few years after I left law school, I moved to New York to study. In all that time, I returned to our hometown on occasion. While it is true that my Igbo identity is framed by this itinerancy—that is, by the fact that I have not spent sufficient time in places where Igbo is claimed as a primary culture—I have become more and more interested in using my trajectory as a spark for my writing.

It has meant that my writing has dealt with subjects about home—going and coming through several seasons. The passage of life. These themes have always been electrifying for me. What does it mean to stay away, and then to return? In general, I think a writer is as affected by itinerancy, distance, and estrangement as by permanence and localization. I certainly don’t think that one needs any form of estrangement to write compelling literature, but in my case, much of the writing I have done has been in an attempt to bridge distances between home and elsewhere, and to consider the ramifications of absence.

9 Books that Showcase the Different Faces of Trinidad and Tobago

Posted on by Jo Lou

“Do you get internet in Trinidad?” 

“You must live at the beach!” 

“Do you really drink straight out the coconuts?” 

I’ve been asked versions of these questions about my home country many times when I’ve been abroad. Maybe because I’ve lived almost my entire life in Trinidad and Tobago, I’m used to the inherent complexities of our twin islands. We have a vibrant Carnival culture that sees two days of near-naked revelry in the streets but also a strong streak of social conservatism with powerful religious institutions and large swathes of the population who embrace so-called “traditional” gender roles and romantic relationships. We are one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries, largely thanks to our oil and gas reserves, but our crime rate is the sixth highest in the world. We’ve been independent since 1962, but the shadow of colonialism falls over our laws, our schools, and our thinking. 

However, every time I travel, I’m reminded that much of the world sees us as an island paradise tourist destination. I’ve told people that yes, we do get internet. I see the ocean multiple times a week, but I seldom actually go to the beach. And I love fresh coconut water (sometimes stereotypes are true). I think that one of the best ways to know the many faces of our islands is through literature. In The God of Good Looks, I wrote modern Trinidad as I lived it—a place with a booming beauty industry and Carnival creativity but also a rigid class structure and powerful elite who wield their power with impunity. 

But every country is made up of a multiplicity of stories. Each of these books shows a different face of my country. They show the beauty, the cruelty and sometimes the absurdity of life on these rocks in the Caribbean Sea. And each of them is a cracking good read.  

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

Recently, someone I loved very much got sick. The doctor said, “five good years, if you’re lucky.” But we weren’t lucky. As I was grappling with the reality of death—both the person’s physical absence and the logistics of burying a body—I read When We Were Birds. This is a novel set in a fictionalized version of Trinidad and steeped in local folklore; Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger whose life becomes intertwined with Yejide, a woman tasked with helping the dead rest easy. This novel revealed the many faces of death. While death can be scary and angry and uneasy, it can also be restful, like a long sleep, or “like an old lady in a rocker on her front porch settling her skirts.” 

The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo

This collection of interconnected short stories is a love letter to gay Trinidad and Tobago. Characters receive insultingly bad haircuts, have underwhelming threesomes, suspect a former lover of serial murder, and worry that their Grindr hookup is using them for food. Bagoo writes with familiarity and tenderness about “the cool, pretty boys at Boycode parties, the Muscle Marys at Carnival fetes, the slightly pretentious gays at Drink! Wine Bar, the drunk, sketchy gays at Club Studio, the nerds at his NALIS book club and the artsy, sexually fluid crowd at galleries.” The Dreaming is a book that holds both the joy and tragedy of the queer Caribbean tightly. 

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

“She was a woman, hooked, clubbed, half-dead, half-naked and virgin young.” The titular character, Aycaia, was one of the Caribbean’s indigenous people, cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid. This novel is set on a fictional island that has much in common with Tobago and examines the ways that a certain kind of sensual femininity can be seen as an affront and the sweeping power of colonialism, which extends past foreign ownership of Caribbean lands to encompass the ownership and exploitation of women too. The callaloo of my racial mixedness includes being part Carib—one of T&T’s first peoples—so it was a joy to see some of my history represented here. 

River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer

It’s 1834 and slavery has been abolished; however, the Emancipation Act has decreed that all former slaves are now apprentices and must continue to work for their planters for six years. “Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived.” Rachel can endure it no more and flees her plantation in Barbados to search for the children who were taken from her and sold. This novel takes us from bustling Bridgetown to the forests of British Guiana and finally to Trinidad. Shearer’s historical novel reminds readers of the terrible toll slavery took on our islands while also questioning the true meaning of freedom.

The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini 

Aletha Lopez is about to turn 40. And while she appears to be a poised Port of Spain store manager with a killer dress sense, she’s secretly covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace by sleeping with her boss. Aletha narrates in sparkling Trinidadian Creole, while flashbacks show us her childhood pockmarked by poverty and the presence of the awful Uncle Allan. This is a devastating read that looks unflinchingly at sexual violence and family secrets, but which also celebrates the enduring power of the human spirit and the life-saving properties of friendship.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein 

Set in the 1940s, during the turbulence of World War II, and nearing the end of colonialism, the Trinidad of this novel was both so familiar and so alien to me. When the wealthy and enigmatic Dalton Chatoor disappears, his young wife Marlee hires Hans Saroop to be her watchman and both families are devastated by the consequences of Marlee’s seemingly innocuous action. Perhaps my favorite part of this novel is Hosein’s description of the natural world. He writes, “The swifts in the darkening sky were moving like a knife slitting the dusk,” and the scene played like a movie in my mind. 

One Year of Ugly by Caroline Mackenzie 

One Year of Ugly follows the Palacios family—undocumented Venezuelans—who are thrust into a crime ring thanks to their now-deceased Aunt Celia’s shady underworld dealings. Many novels show Caribbean immigrants experiencing the bright lights of London or New York. But One Year of Ugly is the only book I have ever read that showed Trinidad as a place people immigrate to. The narrator, Yola Palacios, is foul-mouthed, bitingly sarcastic, and socially perceptive as she describes Trinidad from an outsiders’ perspective. Even as this novel takes us on a romantic romp through my country, it shines a spotlight on the challenges facing our Venezuelan immigrants.   

The Wine of Astonishment by Earl Lovelace

Lovelace is a living legend of Trinidadian literature and in The Wine of Astonishment he’s at the height of his powers. The novel follows champion stickfighter Bolo and a cast of characters whose Spiritual Baptist religion has been outlawed by the colonial government seeking to promote more “civilized” religions, like Catholicism. When Ivan Morton defends abandoning his Spiritual Baptist faith by saying, “We can’t be white, but we can act white,” he is parroting the words of all those who thought the only way to succeed was to conform. This fictional account of T&T’s very real history is a monument to our struggles and the brave people who fought to have the fullness of their identity recognized. 

Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul has a complicated relationship with his birth country of Trinidad and Tobago, and at his most cruel, he wrote lines like, “nothing was created in the West Indies.” However, Miguel Street is a less bitter, more loving portrayal of one Trinidadian street and the wacky cast of characters who reside there. I first read this book while studying in England and every story felt like home. I knew the characters on a cellular level. I recognized the enormous pressure we place on our children to pass exams (education is your only way out!!!). And I knew, too, that universal striving for a better life amidst a deluge of racist and classist discrimination.