We live in an era of precarious conflict: highly-fragmented, hyper-connected, the world both smaller and painfully far apart, in combat geographically, and with our own bodies, from rogue cells to drone wars.
Evie Shockley’s suddenly we is a visually exciting, linguistically dynamic, and altogether thrilling shapeshifter of a collection that is both a response and antidote to these times. Beyond its experimental, polyphonic, modern architecture, at its core, it’s a nuanced and sensitive exploration of collective and individual identity, within the context of broader societal, historical and environmental obstacles.
Throughout the collection, there are multitudes and multiplicities, emphasizing the urgency of language now, and what it can and can’t encompass, yet the power of the collection is in the personal and intimate contemplations of voice, identity and agency. In “the lost track of time” she writes:
“i’ve measured out my life in package
deliveries and what’s in bloom. the time is now
thirteen boxes past peonies. if you can locate my
whenabouts on a calendar, come get me. i don’t
know where i’m going, but i need a ride.”
suddenly we offers readers that necessary ride, and this collection underscores why Shockley was recently named the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2023 Shelley Memorial Award which “recognizes poetic genius.” I spoke with Shockley over email about what it is to be human, and seek humanity in these in-between times, through verse and vision.
Mandana Chaffa: Might you talk about the genesis of these poems, a number of which speak to or engage with other creators? Who and what guided you through the process of interlacing them?
Evie Shockley: With the exception of the series of poems in “the beauties: third dimension,” each poem had its own genesis in one of the myriad occasions, ideas, and emotions that constitute the vast territory I (we) have traversed in the past six years. To even gesture towards it—the international #BlackLivesMatter protests following the murder of George Floyd, the multiple signs of US democracy’s frailty, the unfolding of the coronavirus pandemic, the increasing numbers of mass shootings, and the further evidence of climate change, along with all the sometimes encouraging and sometimes horrifying ways that people and institutions have responded to such events—is to remind myself of how difficult it often was finding the energy to write, let alone discovering the forms that could carry what my poems needed to carry.
MC:Many of these pieces point to forced societal roles that imprison the individual into a tight container, in poems that break through traditional forms, underscoring the friction of form and content.
From “can’t unsee”:
“a woman is innocent until proven
angry. a man is innocent until
he fits the profile. a child is innocent until she sees her mother or father in cuffs. can’t unsee…”
This idea of innocence, individually and collectively (and who gets to define that), is a thread that runs through the collection. There’s the personal aspect (and elsewhere you reframe the lost innocence of Eve gorgeously). And of course, the political power structures that commit harm and (mis)use language to their own ends, stealing one’s innocence, one’s individual Eden.
Language is both tool and terrain in this racialized ‘loss’ (theft) of innocence.
ES: Indeed. Others more eloquent than I am have talked about the seemingly instinctive need of the powerful to grasp the garment of innocence and wrap it around them like a shield. The US could not simply be the victim of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center; it had to be an innocent victim, as though it had played no role in creating the conditions that made its financial epicenter a target. Or, for an example that I take up explicitly in the book, the US government and many of this country’s people seemed desperate to locate the blame for the pandemic on people or causes that were outside our national boundaries or that, if within the US, could be othered, alien-ated, as the spike in anti-Asian violence made manifest. By the same token, innocence is denied—rhetorically, ideologically—to the disempowered, as I highlight in the lines you quoted. When activists or scholars call attention to the criminalization of Blackness and Black people in the US (and many other places), they are pointing to the way we are denied the presumption of innocence, time and again, in the courts and in the court of public opinion. Language is both tool and terrain in this racialized “loss” (theft) of innocence.
MC:Similarly, I feel so much hope in this collection’s embrace of the “we.” Many works of literature are first or second-person narratives, but we, that is of the populace, of the movement, of a forward motion: we the people,we will get to the promised land, we are the world. Of course, the other side of that “we” is we the mob, we the unquestioning masses, but there’s a deep sense of connection in many of these poems. So much motion: evolving, or turning, throughout the collection.From the poem “perched”:
“…i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.
i am
black and becoming.”
ES: One of my main interests in the book is how our understanding of ourselves as individuals interacts with, informs, limits, or opens up the ways we imagine ourselves in relation to others—groups of others. The poem “perched” is an important one for signaling this interest, if quietly, in ways that are suggestive for lots of other poems in the book. Like so many poems in the African American tradition, it uses what some have called “the i that means we,” which allows an individual experience to stand in for a widely shared or generic Black experience. The poem is ekphrastic, thus its i is plural in a more specific sense: it is the young girl figured in the sculpture, “Blue Bird”; it is something I imagine or sense in the experience or emotional repertoire of the sculptor, Alison Saar; and it’s some aspect of myself.
Moreover, the sculpture itself, which appears on the book cover, seems at first to be of a single figure but includes as well the blue bird that gives the piece its name. What kinds of connection between the girl and the bird does the sculpture enable us to envision? The poem suggests one or two of many. Other points of possible connection are animated, I hope, by the invocation of the “world” in which this i (these i’s, we) must “become.” What the book makes a space for thinking about are all the things that play a role in shaping who an individual may see herself in community with or in solidarity with: the tiny personal or large historical events, the emotional openings or obstructions, the largely random or carefully cultivated interpersonal encounters, and so forth. The title is partly tongue-in-cheek, in that only rarely does one’s sense of collective belonging or connection with others happen “suddenly.” The major social formations (divisions) we are living with today—racial, national, religious, economic, regional, etc.—have been building / being built for a long time. In many of these poems I’m wondering, pondering, how we can make our actions today the pre-history of new or different forms of collectivity.
MC: There are so many layers in the collection, including lush poems like “fruitful,” in which “you grow my garden no you are / the whole of it” followed by a verdant list of nature’s glory in which “here, i become my best self, i exist / at peace with birds and bees, no knowledge / is denied me”. This poem is followed by “dive in” which is an equally sumptuous engagement with desire and intimacy.
Both in terms of content and craft, how did such a range of poems come about? Do you find yourself writing in sections, as it were? Or is the personal and political so entwined in your aesthetic that you’re writing about a range of themes, multiple styles, all the time?
And perhaps more philosophically, how do we embrace our personal selves and desires, with the political demands of being a human being at this time? How does the heightened awareness and immediacy of reactions co-exist with the being of human being, which runs on a completely different temporality?
One of my main interests in the book is how our understanding of ourselves as individuals interacts with the ways we imagine ourselves in relation to others.
ES: One thing your question suggests to me, regarding range and stylistic variety, is that this is the flip side of the “unruliness” or “uncategorizable-ness”. That is, the heterogeneity I used to fear was a failing—or used to fear would be seen as a flaw—in my work, might actually be one of its strengths. Because I write poems, not books of poetry, I don’t approach the page with any sense that what I write today must be “like” what I wrote yesterday. I try to avoid my default modes and attune myself closely to what the ideas, language, or feelings giving rise to a poem seem to want to become. The decision about what poems speak to each other enough to co-exist generatively in a collection comes later. But I’m always pushing myself to think about my experiences as holistically as possible. The tools I’ve amassed as a literary scholar steeped in Black feminist thought, the Black radical tradition, and oppositional poetics, among other analytical approaches—prepare me to bring critical, intersectional, associative thinking to my daily life, as well as to the structures and language I use in writing poems. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I’ve figured out how to balance or reconcile all the demands of my being (as a person with insistent bodily needs and messy, complex emotional desires) with all my political commitments. Rather than attempting to offer sage advice or one-size-fits-all pronouncements, I’ll just say I try to keep my wits and my tools about me, and use them in making the most ethical choices I can in the moment. Half of the battle is recognizing when such a choice is before me.
MC:The collection starts with the visual and verbal vista of “alma’s arkestral vision (or, farther out)”: the “we” that is created by multiple “you”s and the lone, but necessary “me” that closes the link and makes it complete. It ends with the remarkable poem “les milles” which I’ve already referred to, which starts with this indented couplet, and ends with the one that I’ve posted right below it:
“there is no poem unless i we can find the courage to speak
[…]
there is no poem unless you we can find the courage to hear.”
What’s in the middle is a moving, painful contemplation about how we find it hard to move on from history, or learn from it, “map the territory of the human, / with arrows pointing in every / direction : some leading from / you, some leading to you.”
I’m especially taken with the bookends of the first and last poems of the collection (as well as the central passages within the last poem). We live in a time that calls for great courage, though perhaps it always takes immense courage to maintain one’s humanity. I keep returning to how you entwine the lowercase and capital P of politics (and person); it feels deeply connected to many of the poetic voices of the ’60s and ’70s, yet is entirely of the moment, as you ask: “must every place-name on earth / be a shorthand for violence / on a map of grief”?
ES: Perhaps the reason the political and the personal are always intertwined in my poems is because I gain and hone my politics in community: through exchanging ideas, reading others’ arguments, learning about experiences that inform people’s commitments and critiques. I also fuel my motivation in community; insofar as I know nothing I do alone is going to create change of the magnitude needed, it’s (inter)actions with like-minded/open-minded people that inspire me to keep working to envision and engender a world that is fundamentally just and nurturing for all life (not only some humans, not only humans). Collectivities that we’ve had thrust upon us but have reshaped to serve simultaneously as our spaces of refuge, in the context of this money-driven, power-hungry world, will have to be exchanged for the collectivity that our shared planetary existence constitutes. But how on earth (pun intended!) do we get from here to there? On what terms can we forge the new solidarities that will make relinquishing our current racial, gendered, ethnic, national, class-based, religious, species-based forms of belonging (and division) even thinkable? suddenly we begins with the dream and ends with the current reality. That may seem counterintuitive or even pessimistic, but it’s not intended to be. Like good poems so often do, I hope readers will find that the book’s ending propels them back to the beginning, to re-read “alma’s arkestral vision” with a fuller sense of its stakes and a readiness to work towards the greater collectivity it imagines.
Writing addressed to a specific “you” generates an effect unlike the electricity of classic second-person narratives. Instead of a jolt, direct-address writing delivers a subtler charge, like opening someone else’s mail or overhearing one end of an emotionally raw monologue.
While draftingThe Skin and Its Girl, I found myself adrift in a storyline that spans 200 years across Palestine and the United States. My first-person narrator seemed inexplicably omniscient, and she was immune to revisions that tried to reel her in. In the final revision that changed everything, I placed my narrator at a gravestone and had her address the entire thing to her deceased aunt, who’d kept an important secret from the family.
As a device, a narrator who addresses a single, stable “you” creates an anchoring through-line. And as a rhetorical move, it felt intuitive—able to embrace all the worlds orbiting in the galaxy of this novel, and to contain sprawling tendrils in an intimate message.
Although capable of becoming an almost-invisible device, direct address turns up everywhere—in fiction and nonfiction, classics and contemporary books. In many of these, it enables a more powerful kind of communication, revealing a layer of the narrator’s self that can only make sense when hauled out a little ways and offered in the direction of someone beloved. Its intimacy presents the reader with an affective challenge: the conceit is that the narrator needs to tell their story to a specific listener because that person is the only one capable of understanding, yet in “overhearing,” the reader is invited not just to be a voyeur, but to crack open the narrator’s isolation.
I love this tacit challenge, love that it holds the door open for us to empathize anyway, to imagine another life, another city, another history; to enter into a form of community. These eight writer-narrators all step into a space of new power, and as they reckon with that power to shape a story through artifice, they each choose a listener who knows the stakes and who will keep them as honest as they know how to be.
“You better not never tell nobody but God.” With this opening line, the novel sets out its basic terms: young Celie, burdened with two pregnancies by incest, narrates from a culturally imposed silence. We soon figure out that every chapter consists of one letter from Celie to God, elevating the act of storytelling to a kind of prayer.
Across the novel, however, this initial format undergoes some (ahem) meaningful adjustments. Without spoiling it for folks who have yet to experience this classic, I’ll say that Celie addresses only chapters in the novel’s first half to God. Most of the second half, however, is addressed to her beloved-but-absent sister Nettie. (And some of the novel’s middle chapters are physical letters Celie receives, the only true epistolary material.) Celie’s dynamic relationship—to silence, to her imagined listener, to her sexuality, and to her own power as an uneducated Black woman enduring life in a violently patriarchal South—is, for me, the novel’s most electrifying structural choice. Communicating to God and then to absent Nettie allows Celie to be entirely honest about her life. She doesn’t need to alter what she says in order to protect or appease an in-the-flesh listener.
The Color Purple continues to be an influential text, in part because of the ways it uses both form and content to express skepticism toward the overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, masculine literary landscape it entered in 1982. Walker models a different set of authorial choices that shift power to her main character, giving Celie not only something that must be said, but also the force of an oral storytelling tradition, which doesn’t tell stories to thin air; there is always a listener. Like so many of the other novels on this list, Celie’s two listeners are individually and specifically capable of bearing witness to her pain, yet also safely distant from her: they are listeners-in-stasis, with limited power to steer the story’s events. This passivity is not weakness. On the contrary, it is as powerful and significant as holding open a door that might otherwise have shut the narrator in silence.
Bastašić’s debut novel was first published as Uhvati zeca in2018, and after winning the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, she translated it from the Serbian for its 2021 publication in English. Obsessed with reflections and doubles, the novel uses direct-address narration as the writer-protagonist Sara tells her side of the story to the addressee: her estranged childhood friend, Lejla.
Many years after the Bosnian war, Sara has emigrated to Dublin and is living with her Irish partner, pursuing literary ambitions, when Lejla calls out of the blue. Lejla’s brother, missing since the beginning of the war, is in Vienna and Lejla needs someone to drive her there from Mostar, Bosnia. It’s a bizarre favor after so many years of silence, and the resulting road trip with Lejla—who is both predictably maddening and maddeningly elusive to Sara’s first-person narrator—opens up their youth, fraught risky sexual situations, and the male gaze. Meanwhile, they are also pulled down into sharply differing versions of the events that drove them apart, centering on Sara’s police-chief father in the Serbian Christian stronghold town, and the efforts of Lejla’s Muslim family to efface their identity after her brother’s disappearance.
The narrator’s direct address is unstable, referring to Lejla as you in the childhood story but as she in the present-day road trip. The intentional wobble offers a way of exploring femininity, sexuality, and violence as it is experienced along the intimate, convoluted lines of an entangled friendship, and it also seems aware of how easily Lejla’s side of the story might shatter Sara’s own version. Acknowledging this tricky hall of mirrors, Catch the Rabbit draws from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and without ever pressing the novel’s conflict themes too hard, it instead captures their fragile dynamic indirectly, in gentle but insistent fairytale undertones that put me in mind of Barbara Comyns’s The Juniper Tree.
Split between two direct-address storylines, this novel alternates between contemporary Brooklyn and a historical narrative footed in Ottoman Syria. As bird artist Laila Z builds a life in 1930s America, she keeps a diary of unsent letters to a woman she had loved in Syria. Almost a century later, second-generation Nadir discovers the journal in a condemned building. Laila’s letters are interleaved with his own story, which he narrates to his mother’s ghost as he struggles to come out to his friends and surviving family as nonbinary.
Both narrators are linked by their search of an apocryphal bird, Geronticus simurghus. As Laila writes about her adventures in the wilderness beyond Dearborn, where she hopes to make a sketch and prove the bird’s existence, we learn in the present-day Brooklyn storyline that Nadir’s ornithologist mother met with a fatal accident while protecting the building where she was convinced the bird was nesting. After her death, Nadir becomes intent on finding the lost Laila Z illustration of the species, setting up a structure in which these two storylines embrace the search for both the bird and its image; its living existence and its representation in the scientific record.
Like Nadir’s ornithologist mother, Joukhadar is driven by gaps in the record; he aims to add queer and transmasculine lives to America’s historical and literary archives. Direct address allows both of his queer storylines to span the gap between life and death, old world and new, and the gender binary, enlivening and embroidering the space between. That action of speaking across a mystery also parallels an important movement in the story’s content, the idea of transmigration: the east-to-west journey of Syrian immigrants to America and the migration pattern of a rare bird. This is the novel’s cardinal movement, and it trains us to identify a similar pattern in the narration itself—not only Nadir’s movement across the gender spectrum, but the voice of each character speaking to a distant listener, sounding out the shape of gorgeously wild terrain.
In The Friend, we overhear a meditation addressed to the narrator’s writing mentor known for philandering with his students, who has recently died of suicide. She is part of a prickly intellectual crowd that brims with opinions about the literary world and vocation, but her focus is newly consumed by heartbreak. Also there is the mentor’s grieving Great Dane, Apollo, whom she adopts and bonds with. Like his Olympian namesake, he brings some light into her darkness, opening her attention to the substance of her love for a dog and her dead friend, as well as to the ethical dimensions of adapting real life to fiction.
As with many of the others on this list, The Friend’s narrator is a writer, bringing a keen consciousness for the universe of storytelling. She shares summaries of other stories and films, rumors and factoids she’s heard, conversations, and also nods to the form and archetypes of a fairytale. In other words: for this narrator, writing without awareness of an audience is impossible—and writing about someone’s suffering is treacherous ground too. Talking about would center only the speaker’s experience and risk flattening her mentor’s death into just something that happened, mere fodder for a new manuscript. Yet the narrator instead talks to him, implying she still has business with him, opening a place big enough for the grief necessary to buoy this novel. It makes her grief both more credible and accessible to the reader, even while the text leans into its metafictional layers.
Addressing absence is a powerful way to use this kind of “you” storytelling. The novel thrives in the one-way space where the narrator speaks without hope of getting an answer. As much a meditation on the act of turning a person into a subject, Nunez explores the shadow play of ego across others’ experience, and what it illuminates about our own feeling.
Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine, winner of the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, approaches his sixth novel from an intriguing distance: the writer is the you, and the first-person narrator, Dr. Mina, is writing his novel for him.
The situation is this. An unnamed writer has traveled to Lesbos to help the Syrian refugees there, but even after two years on his therapist’s couch, he still finds himself unequal to the task of telling “the refugee story.” Consequently, his character becomes the novel’s you, a lurker at the edges of his own project. Meanwhile, the true storyteller is Dr. Mina, a Lebanese American like the writer, and a trans woman surgeon who witnessed the same horrors on Lesbos. She says at the outset, “I’m writing now. I’ll tell your tale and mine,” and as she immerses herself in the crisis, she often addresses the writer directly to talk about what he cannot, equipped with a perspective he does not have.
The narrative finds all sorts of layers on which to explore the distance between doubles. The immigrant’s split identity is a big one—unable to inhabit one’s full identity in either Lebanon or America. So is the shadow of Mina’s boyhood, the person her family recognizes haunting the true self they will not. Dr. Mina ruminates too on the slippery motivations of Western volunteers in a crisis zone, and her own position as a volunteer who feels more at home among the refugees than among her fellow helpers. Even Lesbos itself is charged with the instability of being a borderland between one difficult place and another.
Alameddine’s wry humor can flip to a tragic tone on a dime, ideal in this war-zone novel that is in search of an elusive “right” perspective for interrogating our species at its best and murderous worst. Besides being a device for one queer character to speak to another about a shared experience of marginality, direct address activates this essential distance between two realities, just as a telescope requires the distance between its two lenses in order to see anything at all.
When searching for perspective on difficult material, direct address can also be aimed at a past self. This memoir’s “house” is a haunted one, referring to the years when the author was the victim of an abusive relationship. She and her girlfriend were writers getting their MFAs, and Machado’s approach to the material is arresting and vivid, full of interplay between the content and the process of writing about it. Central to both layers is a warping instability—of self-boundaries in the story, and the chimeric quality that arises from the different genres and literary tropes Machado selects for each chapter: “Dream House as Noir,” “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®.” In these, she allows the container to shape the material, mimicking the uncanny and often-terrifying quality of not being in full possession of oneself.
Our guide through this haunted house is Machado-the-narrator, the I who brings not just hindsight but cultural knowledge to the page. But it’s a you we’re following, the victimized past self: “[Y]ou are this house’s ghost.” Direct address creates both distance and compassion for oneself, a way of both closing off a series of painful events and holding open communication with a younger self.
I’ll admit to an obsession with self-aware queer writing, the kind that is an active participant in its own creation, skeptical of its authority yet blazing with a refusal to remain silent. The approach also highlights the truth that narrating the story of one’s own victimization is hard not only because it’s so personal but also because telling a trauma story means gaining the ability to be one’s own narrator, and for many queer people, it is often for the first time.
Direct address lights up other kinds of memoir too, even ones whose intended listener is still alive and certain to read the text. In this situation, Laymon addresses Heavy to his mother, a Mississippi intellectual committed to Black liberation. It’s a risky and deeply ambivalent text, for he also writes as a son who was beaten “for not being perfect,” for not measuring up to her standards of speech and conduct that were meant to help him survive a life in a nation with a “brutal desire for black suffering.”
“I wrote this book to you because, even though we harmed each other as American parents and children tend to do, you did everything you could to make sure the nation and our state did not harm their most vulnerable children.”
The project involves not writing “a lie.” Instead, Laymon writes through the body. He tells the story of being an obese kid and later an anorexic writing professor, marking time by his weight and age; of being an obsessive eater and then a compulsive exerciser. His experience with sexual trauma in childhood, his feminism, and his development as a writer parallels his mother’s own compulsions and the larger story of a family whose fierce intellectual drives are weighted against self-destructive tendencies.
Intentionally, however, the narrative keeps a firm elbow against a tokenized reading. Laymon’s repetition and syntax have an oratorial quality that hums with the intensity of speaking directly into one ear, resolved not to do “that old black work of pandering and lying to folk who pay us to pander and lie to them every day.” The telling lives between one body and another: such as in the thick alliteration that tugs at the mouth as it grazes over the book’s plosive repetitions. In the sound is a staccato plea for his mother to pay attention, to remember where they’ve been, to stay awake, to not forget the painful past in the same way America repeatedly forgets all its sins.
In Vuong’s best-selling debut, the narrator, Little Dog, addresses this hybrid novel-memoir to his mother, a Vietnamese manicurist in Hartford. Because she is illiterate, the pairing creates a charged space containing both safety and confession as Little Dog recounts a working-class upbringing inflected by trauma, his mother’s survival of the Vietnam War, and his first gay relationship.
As an esoteric fusion of story and craft, the novel opens the overhearing reader to the range of language. This is a narrator who is concerned that the word laughter is trapped inside the word slaughter; one who, in most of the novel’s 70 instances of the word word ties language somehow to the body, to the physical world. It shines among these other works in the direct-address family, and yet it’s also an interesting counterexample to this list. We believe Little Dog addresses the narrative to his mother because she has the history to understand his hurts. Her illiteracy isn’t her fault, but at the same time, Little Dog has an adept hand in his own story’s composition.
The choice to embed his communication to her in a text replete with sophisticated literary techniques underscores, for me, how class markers can result in mutual difficulty. As one of the few people in a working-class family to attend college, I’ve at times gone back home and felt the dangers of this slow erosion of context from around conversations. Here, Little Dog’s barriers to being understood by his mother rise alongside the cultural and linguistic ones they faced as immigrants to Hartford. As a result, sometimes the eavesdropping literary audience gains an edge over the speaker’s intended listener, reversing the “a story only you would understand” dynamic. No single human listener can understand the whole story.
In Wayétu Moore’s novel She Would Be King, a mysterious power draws three extraordinary people together, as “Alike spirits separated at great distances will always be bound to meet, even if only once; kindred souls will always collide; and strings of coincidences are never what they appear to be on the surface, but instead are the mask of God.” June is bullet-proof, with superhuman strength; Norman may, under the right circumstances, disappear into thin air. Lastly, a strikingly beautiful, cursed “witch” named Gbessa (pronounced “Bessa”) cannot die because she possesses the power of life. Traveling alongside a ghost, who periodically summons or urges on the protagonists, the story journeys to Virginia, Jamaica, and finally the colony of Monrovia, culminating in the foundation of the nation of Liberia. But what is freedom, the novel asks, in a world built by colonization and enslavement, maintained through institutionalized racism and patriarchal control?
She Would Be King is an odyssey of friendship, love, and suffering, set against the backdrop of a country’s painful birth. Exploring the overlap of racism, sexism, and classism, the novel weaves magic with its language, juxtaposing the poetic and spiritual perspective of the integral, omnipresent supernatural against colonized Christian “reality.”
This recipe is easy to execute, though it requires a little patience and forethought. In honor of fufu, sweet potato-infused vodka serves as the base. Fufu is a ubiquitous, varied, and starchy staple that accompanies soups and stews in West Africa and beyond, a comfort food shared with June and Norman at a pivotal moment. The mild, aromatic vodka is combined with sour tamarind and smooth coconut water, a reference to June and Norman’s meeting in the jungle, where they eat fresh tamarinds, catch fish, and collect coconuts to drink, or to use as cups. Likewise, Norman falls for a captivating and ill-fated villager who smells deliciously like fresh coconut and mint. Coconut also honors the Maroon women and their nets made from coconut leaves.Mango syrup is included for the mangoes enjoyed by the wealthy families in Gbessa’s village. In a time of danger and uncertainty, Gbessa’s mother nourishes her with cooked fish, rice, and ripe mangoes.
This booktail is presented against a split backdrop: reflective blue and sparkling gold, which complement the book’s abstract and dynamic cover. On the left, a blue mirage mimics an ocean horizon, the overall effect conjuring a beach on a distant shore, complete with craggy rock cliffs. In contrast, the flat yet textured gold on the right evokes riches, royalty, and magic. The cocktail appears in front of the book, atop a mirrored base. It’s served in a tall, icy glass, garnished with fresh mint and a blue patterned paper straw. Scattered about are pops of yellow and orange–marigolds for Norman’s mother and the “untamed yellows” present throughout the novel.
She Would Be King
Ingredients
Vodka
2 large sweet potatoes
2 oz sweet potato-infused vodka
1 oz coconut water
1.5 oz mango syrup
2 tsp tamarind paste
Mint garnish
Instructions
Wash, peel, and cut the sweet potatoes into large chunks. Place in a large jar and fill with vodka, until the potatoes are submerged. Seal and shake, then set in a cool, dry place for 4-5 weeks. Shake the jar once a day. The vodka will turn a light golden color. Once the liquor is ready, add all liquid ingredients to a shaker, along with a large ice cube. Agitate vigorously for about 20 seconds, then strain into a tall glass filled halfway with crushed ice. Garnish with fresh mint.
Some of the best moments of my life have been spent in libraries, first as a patron, later as a librarian, and I have witnessed firsthand how hard the past few decades have been on libraries. As America has continued to dismantle its social safety net, libraries have been forced to pivot from being a resource for all things books to also functioning as community centers for those in need. Today’s librarians don’t just lead storytimes or maintain collections, they’re also first responders on the front lines with their own personal safety at risk. The demands of the job necessitate that library staff, particularly those serving in high-poverty communities, serve as combination mental health counselors, social workers, security guards, first responders, and babysitters while putting their personal safety at risk.
The American Library Association (ALA) is a non-profit organization that advocates for and supports libraries, library workers, and the right to read. Their mission is “to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”
According to the ALA, American libraries are facing an unprecedented wave of censorship, with 2022 having the highest demands of book bans on record. The vast majority of the challenged books were written by or about individuals whose voices have been traditionally excluded from the national conversation, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.
I spoke recently with the president of the ALA, Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada, about how to take a stand against book bans, how the ALA is working to support all patrons and library staff, and how the American public can support our libraries.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: I was a school librarian for many years. In 2019, before I left the profession, I had my first challenge. It was a precursor to the mass challenges brought forth by parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty (which officially formed in 2021), but it was very much part of a coordinated effort to ban books, in my case specifically targeting a book featuring a trans protagonist. Can you discuss the recent unprecedented rise in censorship and how ALA is working to address these book bans?
Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada: These are organized efforts. These groups are issuing templates of letters to write to libraries. They’re issuing lists of books to ban. Our response is to get as organized as they are, to make sure that our libraries and library workers are prepared for book challenges, with strong collection development policies, as well as knowing what resources are available to them, such as ALA’s office of intellectual freedom, which can provide one on one advice and support, whether it’s legal, financial, or political.
We also have our Unite Against Book Bans campaign, which we are asking everyone who believes in the freedom to read to sign, because we cannot, as library workers, do it alone. We have to have the public who is against book challenges to sign on with us and write letters to their editors, to their board of library trustees, to their school boards, emphasizing the positive impact that access to the books that are being challenged provide to their communities, to their personal lives, to their children’s lives, and to continue speaking out and educating their friends and family to the value of having access to ideas that we may not even agree with.
We know also that it is a vocal minority that is pro-book challenges. In March 2022, ALA did a survey of folks across party lines— Republican, Democrat, Independent, red, blue, everywhere in between— and found that 71% of voters opposed book bans. We again know that these are organized attempts. There’s lots of different groups— you mentioned Moms for Liberty. There’s Americans for Prosperity, No Left Turn in Education, these folks have chapters popping up everywhere. Sometimes they’re not even actual parents concerned for their children’s wellbeing who are putting forth these challenges. They are just people who are caught up in this morality and this notion that they want to have power and control over how other families live their lives and raise their children.
DS: Last night I read about a library in Texas whose board would rather close the library and fire the library staff instead of including works reflecting the lives and experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC persons. I’m on the board of a literacy organization here in Georgia, Books for Keeps, which distributes twelve free books to kids every year. The children choose their own books. One county told us not to come if we wouldn’t censor our distribution list. I was raised Christian nationalist, I’m very familiar with the mindset, and I don’t think the public at large is taking these efforts to ban books seriously.
Our library workers are working very often in underfunded and sometimes unsafe conditions.
LP: I also think that people don’t understand the power of their voice. If we write letters, if we make these calls to our legislators, if we demand that we have access to these books— these are elected officials, these people technically have to listen to us. We can speak out with our votes, which we should also do. But we can speak out in a myriad of different ways. And we have to, because it’s fine for a family to determine what their family reads, but it is not okay for them to determine what another family reads or has access to.
The Texas defunding that you’re referring to is just one example. The state of Missouri is trying to get rid of all state funding towards public libraries right now, because of the public backlash, and so we just have to remain vigilant in this fight and we have to all be in it together.
DS: Related to this, several states, including in Georgia, where I live, and Montana, have proposed bills which would fine and jail librarians for distributing books which people find obscene. Can you discuss the role of this proposed legislation and how it weakens libraries?
LP: The goal is to dismantle public institutions that promote education and access to information. Because they know that libraries are trusted institutions, that we work with parents to find the right books for their families, and that we don’t force upon any particular ideals or opinions, because we are trained to not do that—that is not our job, that is not our position—but this is the way that they will continue to have power over individuals, to erase the individuals that they don’t want to be members of their society, who have ideas that they don’t want their children to have access to, despite the research. We know that just because children read something or have access to something does not mean that they will start believing that or go to do that particular thing. I read a lot of murder mysteries— I’m not going to commit any murders.
I think that it’s really important for us to understand the political game that they are trying to play. It is a very dangerous one, because people’s lives are at stake. We know that LGBTQIA+ youth who can see themselves reflected in books and movies will have a lower chance of self-harm, so when they restrict access to these materials, they are erasing identities and people and that becomes harmful to those individuals as well as harmful to their own children, because they are not able to develop skills of empathy. They are not able to understand why someone else may love a different type of lifestyle, and ultimately they are not able to be good community members and productive members of the larger society that we all live in, no matter how hard they try to deny that.
LP: I have not read Overdue. Our library workers are working very often in underfunded and sometimes unsafe conditions. They don’t have the resources that they need to be able to do their jobs effectively.
In the ALA-Allied Professional Association, what we’re really trying to look at is how, at the national level, we can support library workers in their home institutions. We can’t take the place of their administrations, but we can help to empower library workers, whether it’s that they need to organize, whether they need an advocacy plan for funding their library, and promoting that funding, whether they need advice and help on working in unsafe situations, and what their options are for that, like what training looks like for the library worker to be able to handle that, but also what setting boundaries looks like, and what we are and are not allowed to do within our institutions. Just because we’re a public space doesn’t mean that we’re a free-for-all for every type of behavior, right? It has to be behavior focused. We have to make sure that we are consistent in enforcing our policies and our procedures, and consistent in making sure that our library workers work in safe spaces, and that if they are not, that they have the resources that they need.
It’s something that is very close to my heart, having worked in a number of different communities. I worked in a community where we were on lockdown once a week, where we would just have to shut the whole library down and be inside.
It’s on all of us to make sure that our libraries are funded and to advocate for them as well. It’s a community effort.Also, because libraries now are often a replacement for so many social services, it also speaks to the dismantling of our social safety nets, and of our mental health resources. We are now the catch all for all of that. We need to speak out to stop having those cuts at all of those different levels and make sure that every part of our social fabric is fully funded.
DS: You were the first chair of the Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Can you discuss the function of the library in marginalized communities? Are there specific ways that ALA wants to address the needs of marginalized patrons?
LP: We have moved from a model of equal library services and we are trying to get one of equitable library services and inclusive library services, to recognize that people are coming from different places and backgrounds and that we really have to be able to develop one on one relationships with our patrons to understand their needs. We know we can guess their needs based on some demographic information as well as the communities that they live in, but we really have to make sure that we are looking at the full intersectionality of our patrons and our communities to be able to best serve them.
Some of the ways that we are supporting that work is by putting out things like a DEI scorecard for libraries to be able to understand where they are in their equity, diversity, and inclusion journey and to understand how they support their staff, but also how they support their communities and what types of programming is available. We also provide grants. There’s one called Great Stories Club and it focuses on book clubs for teens and adults with a variety of different topics and backgrounds.
Through programming and through professional development, we are making sure that our library workers today understand that equity, diversity, and inclusion is a core value to our work and our profession. We are no longer the segregated classist libraries that were essentially founded by a misogynistic, anti-semitic man, Melvil Dewey. Recognizing, to be quite frank, how far we have come from that, but also recognizing how far we still have to go.
DS: When I was a school librarian I worked in a Title I school. Most of my kids were Black and brown. In my district, only two of the librarians did not identify as white, a trend that is reflected nationally— in 2020, 83% of librarians identified as white, as did 76% of library workers. Do you have any initiatives in ALA to diversify the library staff?
It’s on all of us to make sure that our libraries are funded and to advocate for them as well. It’s a community effort.
LP: The primary initiative that we have is called the Spectrum Scholarship Program. It provides library school students with tuition support, as well as leadership development. They have a cohort every year of folks who are working in libraries already and going through library school, folks who are one or two years into their program, with tools and education on how to survive, to be quite frank, in a predominantly white institution, but also how to be proactive with diversifying the field and sharing that. It is a small program. The number of individuals (with) a 50-60% acceptance ratio.
I was not a spectrum scholar. I was not accepted into the program. But there are also other supporting factors to help diversify and to help support librarians of color through ALA affiliates like the National Association of Librarians of Color, which I came up through, and the Asian-Pacific American Librarians Association, which also have mentoring programs and support for individuals who are going to library school and through every stage of their career.
Through ALA’s programming and offerings in our professional development, there are a lot of programs and classes on how individuals can be allies, how they can assess their libraries to make sure that they are inclusive environments, not just to the community but also to staff. Because there’s also a retention issue, right? There may be an increase in folks who are going through library school, but who are we having stay? The retention issue is across the board right now in libraries, regardless of race, ethnicity, and class background for the variety of factors that we have talked about today. But also, it’s exceptionally difficult sometimes for people of color when they are the only ones in their library. They may not be able to be seen and heard and to give feedback. We’re continuing to work and look at different ways to support library workers of color and to continue diversifying the institution, but a lot of it is on the local level. It’s all very cultural. It has to start from day one and it has to start from administrations.
DS: What do you envision as the future of libraries? Where do you see us headed?
LP: We are going to continue being responsive to our communities. We’re going to continue working our best to be proactive. The core thing that we need to really focus on is preparation for ourselves, right? It’s really difficult to predict the future, as we saw, when the pandemic hit us, but what we can do is prepare for many different outcomes and prepare ourselves for change management, and prepare ourselves to know that nothing is going to stay the same forever, and to get our institutions ready for that change, whatever it is, or whatever it may look like.
We are going to continue thriving, we’re going to continue being trusted community centers, and places for our most vulnerable to go to and to feel safe in, regardless of book challenges—we know that the majority of people still trust us and love us. We just have to mobilize those voices to speak as loud and clear as those who oppose us.
London has served as the setting for many a novel—the backdrop to tales of scrappy orphans and drunk, dancing thirty-somethings, of marmalade-adoring bears and magical nannies. It’s also, of course, the setting for so many love stories.
Not quite as romantic as Paris, nor as hustle-and-bustle-y as New York, London sits somewhere in the middle, a charming city with grit, a gritty city with charm. And its greatest love stories often walk a similar tightrope. Sure, some feature the type of happily-ever-after in which the music swells and crescendos at the end; but, like its own identity and character, the majority of London’s love stories are constructed from a combination of toughness and tenderness, of joy and complications. They capture the beauty of falling in love, of course, but they also capture the reclaimed power that comes—sometimes—with falling out of it.
It’s a balance I’d like to think my own novel, Adelaide, has struck. Set in London, it details the rise and fall of a torrid and toxic relationship between the titular Adelaide Williams and a foppish-haired, emotionally unavailable Englishman named Rory Hughes—a relationship Adelaide eventually (and somewhat disastrously) exits, choosing instead to put herself first. Toeing the line between commercial and literary fiction, Adelaide, like London, hopefully balances light with dark—something so many brilliant writers, and their London-based novels, have done before.
This reading list features seven books that strike a similar balance—each telling its own version of what it means to fall in and out of love in the British capital.
I’ve heard other writers describe Dolly Alderton as a millennial Nora Ephron—big shoes to fill, surely, but if anyone can wear them with confidence, it’s Dolly. And Ghosts, her debut novel, is a shining illustration of why.
It follows Nina Dean, a food writer in her early thirties living in north London, as she navigates the shifting nature of a number of relationships: with friends, with parents, with ex-boyfriends, and one, notably, with a beguiling man named Max. Alderton brilliantly captures the twists and turns of modern dating—the joy of late-night dancing, the distress of being ghosted—with sharp humor as well as big-hearted tenderness. An Ephron-esque talent, no doubt.
Maame by Jessica George is predominantly a coming-of-age story about 26-year-old Maddie Wright, but it’s speckled with romantic adventures (and entanglements) throughout. George tackles everything from the magic of first kisses to the hellish nature of apps (including the fetishization and microaggressions to which Black women are far too often subjected) to the challenges of dating while grieving with unparalleled grace and wit, painting a painfully accurate portrait of one young woman’s love life in London.
An exploration of love, language, and identity, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers details the adventures of Zhuang—or, simply ‘Z,’ as she becomes known (it’s difficult for the English to pronounce her full name)—a Chinese student who’s just arrived in London. Cleverly written in “broken” English, we read as Z enters into an affair with an older Englishman, experiencing infatuation and culture shock in equal measure.
When Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity opens, Rob Fleming—a 35-year-old record shop owner in London – is reflecting on his ‘all time, top five most memorable split-ups’ (his most recent split—from a woman named Laura – doesn’t make the list). We then join Rob as he revisits these past relationships, attempting to understand what’s led him to a rather lonesome present.
Like most of Hornby’s work, it’s full of charisma and self-effacing humor, seeking to understand the very nature of what it means to love and be loved.
A slow-burn, contemporary romance, One Day In December tells several love stories over several years in London—each one messy and complicated in its own unique way. At its center, though, is the relationship between Laurie and Jack—two strangers who lock eyes through a misty bus window one day in December (as the title implies)—and the ways in which fate thrusts them together and tears them apart.
Named for the bustling street in east London, Brick Lane is a novel about an arranged marriage between Nazneen, a new immigrant, and Chanu, a middle-aged man living in London (on Brick Lane, naturally). After moving from Bangladesh and eventually building a family with Chanu, Nazneen begins an extramarital affair with a younger man, and drama, understandably, ensues. The book grapples with themes like motherhood, loyalty, and—of course—the meaning of love, all through the lens of Nazneen’s relationship with herself and with others.
A light-hearted romantic comedy, The Flatshare follows flatmates Tiffy and Leon, who share an apartment, but—due to conflicting work schedules (Leon is a night nurse, while Tiffy is in publishing)—have never actually met. It’s quirky and hopeful—a romp of a read—but it also addresses the challenges that come with haunting, lingering past relationships and gaslighting behavior, proving that even the happiest of ever afters aren’t free of trials.
Before you were born, your spirit lived at home with us. We were close—a bond that could never break. Played patty cakes and breathed in stardust. Traveled on comets and surrendered to freedom. Unfortunately, you had to go to that big house to receive your placement on Earth. We never knew why an individual was chosen, where they were going, or when they would return, but we trusted that it was your time. Every piece built up to your big moment. After you did the necessary readings and rituals, we had a big party to celebrate your new flesh. On the day of your departure, the Lord of Heaven assigned you the Orisa, who would walk with and support you. You would not remember their name, but you would remember the sensation of their love. Ifá blessed your destiny as you were cut open from your mother’s womb and thrust into the light.
Life is really about those isolated moments that explode. Big as microelements that created the universe. Small, like when you’re dreaming, lost in your subconscious, and you have a life-changing epiphany. One night three years ago, I woke up from a dream, my heart racing. Before I opened my eyes, my subconscious shouted, I want to be on estrogen!
I was sleeping in my nephews’ room at my sister’s condo. To my left, her boys together were sleeping in the adjacent bed, wrapped around their plushies and blankets—quiet enough that I heard their gentle snoring and the ceiling fan, but it couldn’t stop the heat trapped in my body.
My internalized transphobia was steadfast like a fortress, and I masked it, claiming I didn’t care how I presented.
Before that estrogen dream, I had no urge to transition physically and was comfortable not using gender-affirming treatment. My male-presenting performance was familiar; embodying femininity was dangerous. I’ll look stupid in a dress, my legs are too hairy for that, my skin’s terrible; I’ll never look like a woman. My internalized transphobia was steadfast like a fortress, and I masked it, claiming I didn’t care how I presented. It turns out my fortress was made of sand; before I realized it, rushing water surrounded me and pulled me into the current. Naked, I saw my body for who she wanted to be.
It’s true that I didn’t know I wanted to be a trans woman until that dream, but it’s also true that she was always inside of me.
The reality for my Black trans sisters is fucked up and will continue to be so. The consistent violence leaves too many wounds. Not all of us can remain resilient and brush off the critics. Sometimes the critiques puncture our strengths. I feared the potential bruises from visibly transitioning: family members looking at me with confusion or disgust, the shame they would express, and the loneliness of standing in my truth. It takes so much to live freely. On a good day, I know how I need to take care of myself, but on the days when my depression, anxiety, and anger smother me? Shit.
The ancestors created a tradition that helped them feel connected to God; their descendants adapted it and brought in new elements, especially to live through the atrocities of enslavement. We can access those same tools to thrive. One is Isese (Ee-shay-shay), the Yoruba tradition, philosophy, religion, and way of being that God sent various Orisa to help us. I’ve experienced immense healing as a devotee during my gender transition. My spiritual work has transformed my emotional well-being, allowing me to take a leap of faith.
It’s true that I recently became an Orisa devotee, but it’s also true to say that the Orisa was always inside me.
In the spring of 2020, I developed a long-distance relationship with my partner, Johnny, who lived over 700 miles away in Atlanta. We met on Instagram when he saw me on a mutual friend’s story. We joked that if it wasn’t for the quarantine, we wouldn’t have given each other the time. The spark that ignited our love was my comment on the colorful beads he wore in one of their photos. Johnny later revealed himself to be an Orisa practitioner. I had questions.
I knew I was queer when the priest denounced queerness as a sin, and I felt doomed.
I came into the tradition because I love hearing stories about Black deities. My family didn’t tell me the fables of our Dominican heritage. More concerned with making and saving money, my elders wanted me to be the best student possible and very macho—the markers of masculine success. Our folklore began with our uprooting, moving to the US, hoping to escape Island poverty. They sacrificed their home so that, God willing, I would build a prosperous one here. I relied on my Catholic upbringing to teach me about good and evil.I knew I was queer when the priest denounced queerness as a sin, and I felt doomed. I flogged myself with shame to discipline my desires. But my flesh couldn’t contain what bubbled underneath; punishing myself did not bring me closer to God. I left the church when I went to college and wandered into New Age spirituality, studying astrology, Tarot cards, and chakras.
Those New Age practices grounded me, but listening to Johnny waxing poetics about Orisa brought me deep-rooted joy. Above all, he emphasized that Isese stood on Iwa Pele, the ethics of developing a gentle character, and connecting to your bespoke destiny. I felt aligned—like drinking water after being thirsty for so long—and my spirit felt compelled to learn more. Talking about our spiritual beliefs opened our hearts to feel safe with each other. Our daily acts of care brought us closer together: facetiming late at night, sending affirmations, and processing our past relationships—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We made it work because we chose to love. I am grateful Johnny supported me during a rocky post-grad transition. I fought for my life to live out my authentic self.
I share my journey to encourage my sisters to include African-based traditions in their healing practices. The three years since practicing Isese, I’ve moved to the South, landed my first job, and started transitioning, including gender-affirming hormone therapy! Let me be clear: I am not advocating we stop visiting our mental and physical professionals. But why can’t we get consultations from a (credible and trustworthy) Orisa priest? It can help us mend our weary souls and balance our health, mind, and soul.
She listened as I cried about feeling lost, wanting to fly outside my flesh.
2
The summer of 2020. I had just graduated from Williams College but was surviving off unemployment. I lived between my sister’s in Newburgh and my mother’s apartment in West Harlem. While applying for jobs, I wrote, read, babysat my nephews, and practiced my divination skills with my Tarot cards. I preferred my sister’s because I loved the quiet of Newburgh, where I heard my intuition. I regularly walked to the waterfront and talked with the Hudson River. She listened as I cried about feeling lost, wanting to fly outside my flesh. Seeing the river traveling between the Hudson Valley, I wondered when I would flow to a new destination.
That estrogen dream proved I still had some growing to do, but I didn’t feel safe doing it in New York. The city held too much of my past. My mother’s eyes struck me, and her words wounded me. She prayed for my salvation, believing I hung out with “demons.” In a way, she saw the darkness around me.
When the pandemic began, I asked myself a few question: How much more time do I have left? Am I wasting the little time I have? On top of that, my critical self-talk convinced me I was not enough and paralyzed me from taking action. Estrogen will make me crazier and more emotional—why do I want to take it when I’m already a mess?
The obvious choice, for my peace, was to stay with my sister. But she didn’t have much space for me. Sharing a room with the boys had adorable moments, but I sacrificed my privacy. I remember doing yoga in the room; the boys took it as an invitation to jump on me. They were joyful, but I was irritable. Another time, I tried to put an ancestor shrine in the kids’ room—just a white sheet, a glass of water, and a white candle—but my sister wanted me to take it down. She was worried for the boys’ safety. She asserted that they could break the glass and hurt themselves, but under her statement, I knew she was uncomfortable. We compromised that I would put it inside a dusty cabinet in the living room. Only when everyone was asleep could I pray in front of the shrine.
That fall, I visited Johnny in Atlanta. By then, we had been dating for five months, and I’d taken two trips to Atlanta. They took me to a local Ile to get my first Orisareading. My future godmother said: be ready for a change, be kind to women, and be careful with whom I share my light and, to observe these messages, pray to my Ori, my spiritual essence from Heaven.
I imagined what I might gain. A place to wear whatever I want, go wherever I want, eat whatever I want.
I talked with Johnny about my frustrations at home, and they offered refuge at their place until I figured my shit out. Leave New York, my homeland? With no job and living off the money from my unemployment benefits? To live with a person who had known for less than a year? The decision weighed on me until I imagined what I might gain. A place to wear whatever I want, go wherever I want, eat whatever I want. I would miss my family, but a new life in a new city was exciting. I decided to take that leap of faith.
Johnny and I drove to New York (it was their idea) to pick up my things, planning to spend Christmas with my family. The plan was working great—my sister supported my decision and felt comfortable with Johnny, the boys loved him (I was jealous when they gave him more attention than me), we cooked dinner for them, and when we needed a break, we took drives to the waterfront and prayed to the river—until it was almost Christmas time. My mom had never come to Newburgh, and she didn’t want to meet Johnny; her choice reeked of prejudice. I never told her my moving-out plans, knowing she would disapprove, so instead, I said that my “friend” and I were staying for Christmas and then going to Atlanta for New Year’s. Still, she disapproved of me not celebrating the new year with the family.
We were supposed to celebrate Christmas at my mom’s, but when my sister told me at the last minute that Johnny wasn’t welcome, it was a blow to the chest. When will Mami accept us? Accept me? But I felt obligated to greet her. Johnny somberly understood and offered to stay in the car. Assuming it would be a quick hi-and-bye, I left them in their car and promised to bring a plate of food.
When I told her I wanted to be a writer, she made me vow that I would write her memoir, an honor I didn’t appreciate at the moment.
I entered a chaotic scene: my sister cleaning the whole apartment, removing the plates from cupboards to wipe the shelves, clearing out cabinets filled with old memories and broken electronics we no longer used (but never threw away), mopping the floors, the kids were screeching over their new gifts. I assumed my sister’s cleaning was a distraction because our mom was stressing her out—maybe about Johnny and me. She urged me to stay and help clean. I was pissed. It wasn’t right to leave Johnny alone, but I obliged, thinking the faster I did this, the quicker I could go.
My mom lay on the couch talking with my tía Gladys. She gave me the phone to say Merry Christmas to her. My tía had been sick for the last year, in and out of the hospital for a kidney infection. She asked me, “You remember my promise?”
“Yes, tía,” I said, remembering when I told her I wanted to be a writer, she made me vow that I would write her memoir, an honor I didn’t appreciate at the moment. She was the first person in my family who supported my writing. I told her I loved her and returned the phone to my mom; that would be the last time I talked with my tía.
Two hours later, I returned to the car with a cold plate of food. Johnny looked broken, upset to spend Christmas in cold isolation. They started the car and drove away. I wished I could’ve cried, but instead, I shut down.
3
Johnny and their Morehouse brethren lived in an apartment complex in Marietta, a 35-minute drive from Atlanta. I was not used to living around forests and disgustedly-excessive mansions. The state hung onto its chattel slavery legacy: a residentíal community named Plantations Place, another apartment complex called Power Ferry Plantation, and more. The buildings near us housed many South Asian families; the kids would frolic in the parking lot every day after school, to the drivers’ frustration, and their parents flocked up and down in small groups. Black families lived in tiny clusters, like the middle-aged gay couple who put up colorful holiday decorations.
Freed from engaging with my family, I focused on self-care: journaling, meditating, divining, doing yoga, working out with Johnny at a nearby gym, and praying in front of their Orisa shrine. I went to thrift stores and brought dresses for the first time; I started using she/they pronouns. Johnny and I built an ancestral shrine proudly displayed in our room. I hoped that committing to small daily acts would lead to peace.
The chaos inside you is louder in a place of stillness. My critical voice believed I was an imposter: I made a mistake leaving New York. I ain’t doing shit here. I don’t belong here. I’m using Johnny to run away from my problems. Can I be feminine? Can estrogen change my body? I don’t have the income or insurance to cover the costs; put myself in debt for what? I saw myself naked in the mirror and saw my beard, broad shoulders, and tall body and was disappointed.
I saw myself naked in the mirror and saw my beard, broad shoulders, and tall body and was disappointed.
Johnny and I had bad fights based on small misunderstandings, but we projected old anger and insecurities into the argument. I voiced the doubt I was feeling inside, and that triggered Johnny. “Do you want to go back to New York?” Johnny asked me one night; in his tender eyes, I saw panic.
I assured them I did not: “This is my home.”
I prayed to my Ori, as my godmother instructed me. I expressed gratitude for waking up another day. Invisible hands caressed me, letting me know I was not alone. I changed how I spoke to myself, shifting my perspective from “I” to “We/You.” I dug deep into the shadows of my soul to find affirmation. In my journal, I wrote: You’re writing this as a reparation for your inner child. She deserves a space to feel and be, and that’s beautiful.We are proud and love you so much.
The biggest charm of Marietta was its nature trails. The Chattahoochee River (coyly called ChattaCoochie) snakes through the land, and my enclave was near many of her streams. One day, walking through the forest, I needed to clear my head. After doing my self-care routines, I felt so small and in the dark. I ain’t worth shit; people younger than me are living my dream and making hella money and I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere. That’s when I came upon the Chattahoochee’s main tributary, Sope Creek. Hearing the water rushing over stones spurred me to sob. I kneeled on the sandy bank and prayed for the water to hold the emotions I couldn’t anymore. I cried like never before, and I surrendered.
You will be ok—we’re here, the water confirmed.
When the weather warmed, I regularly hiked to find peace. I sat on top of rocks that resembled prehistoric eggs and journaled to God. During times of uncertainty—like when I received rejections from jobs, literary magazines, and creative fellowships—I sat by the creek to remind myself that I am a storyteller. I witnessed my soul’s sensations as I listened to the water, teaching me how to mother myself. To show gratitude, I gave her offerings of fruits, honey, and songs of praise.
Johnny suggested I communicate with my mom, reminding me that a tenet in Isese was honoring your mother. My sister and I talked on and off but rarely mentioned our mom. “You know how she is,” she persisted, not wanting to get in the middle of our feud. I don’t wanna hear her talk shit. But she’s your mother–don’t let her anger stop us from giving her love.
Begrudgingly, I called her. She picked me up while working in her taxi; I said, “Hi, Ma,” and she replied, “I am? I didn’t know I had a son.” She never asked about Johnny; when she did, she ranted about how I took advantage of their generosity. She asked when I would return to the City; I gave vague responses. I stopped the conversation before we both got heated and tried the next week again.
What brought us together was God. “God is with me,” I reasoned after she said that I was going against God’s wishes. She and I had different definitions of God—my God is queer, and hers is conservative—but our God was compassionate. One Sunday morning, she talked about her favorite Bible passage, “Before you leave to go anywhere, say Pslams 91.” She credits that verse for protecting her in her 20-plus years of taxi driving. I read the first lines: “…I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’”
“Aha—that’s it, son,” she laughed. From there, reaching out to her on Sundays morphed into our ritual. She would ask me if I went to church, and, knowing that I attended an Orisa service, I said yes. Is it worth improving my relationship with my mom if she always sees me as her son? Have faith that the work you’re putting in will heal.
Later that April, I serendipitously got a remote job at an NYC-based non-profit. The Executive Director, who remembered when I was a student of the program, offered me a remote position to assist in writing communications and grants. I had a salary and health insurance; I could afford gender-affirming hormone therapy and take the essential steps to be myself!
But the blessing of the new opportunity tormented me. At night, it was difficult to go to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about the rookie mistakes I made during the day. I misspelled a student’s name in a press release and, devastated, earnestly wanted to kill myself. Remember, you’re still new and have a lot to learn. It’s ok to make mistakes. But damn, why am I fucking up so much!
More cracks appeared, and I was overwhelmed with simply caring for myself.
In the morning, I woke up irritable. I gotta work, so I can have a place to live, shit to eat, and not be an absolute failure. I can’t do the shit I want. Praying to my Ori momentarily centered me until I fell into despair again. On the weekends, I recharged as much as possible, rarely communicating with my friends; two days were never enough. More cracks appeared, and I was overwhelmed with simply caring for myself. Improve my health, maintain a job, plan for my future, grieve the violence we endure, and more.Had done my self-care routine, done the readings and rituals. Ended the feud with my mom. Got a damn job and health insurance. What else can I do?
Later that week, I returned to the Ile to get another reading to clarify what I needed to do. I was prepared for the reading to reveal a hidden enemy preventing me from succeeding. I was surprised when Orisa said they wanted me to take it easy. My godmother advised me to focus on rest and joy because I lacked them most. They were right; I wasn’t sleeping well and shunned myself from the world to manage my imposter syndrome and perfectionism. Immediately, I thought, Am I taking my life too seriously?
4
The autumn leaves changing color reminded me to be mindful of how my life changed. Johnny and I moved from Marietta; our new apartment building bordered Bankhead and Buckhead, with gentrification demolishing the landscape. No more strolls to the creek. In its stead, Marietta Boulevard sprawled for miles, new constructions on either side. Black and Brown men in hard hats hammered away while their white bosses lollygagged to the side. There was a small creek nearby, but it smelled like sewage. Detached from nature, my roots needed more nourishment to survive.
I finally understood I might be a part of the problem.
Johnny recommended that I see a therapist. We had just had another fight, and Johnny pointed out the repetition of my patterns that had fueled the fire: not communicating my emotions, shutting down, and becoming passive-aggressive. I finally understood I might be a part of the problem. I started the arduous process of finding a new therapist and reviewed dozens of websites and reviews.
I found an available therapist who did virtual sessions. In our session, I cried, “The pressure to succeed is killing me.” On the screen, the room’s darkness engulfed me; a small light shined through the shades. She was adamant that I take a medical leave from work to start antidepressants: “Your serotonin levels are imbalanced, and the best way to address it is to begin an SSRI treatment.” Take pills? I don’t need to be medicated. That’ll fuck with my head. Then: What else have you got to lose? Do you want to continue feeling shitty? I took her advice, took off from work, and scheduled an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner. The nurse diagnosed me with PTSD and put me on Prozac and Quetiapine. I was worried about the stigma of taking them, but my therapist advised me not to attach too much to the label and instead focus on healing. No more shame, no more shame, no more shame, I said as I ingested the pills.
The medication helped immensely. My mood swings lessened, and the critical thoughts didn’t feel so powerful. I could see myself clearer now that the dark clouds were gone. You see, don’t you feel better? Things were looking up; my concentration during work improved, the foundation between Johnny and me strengthened, and I planned to visit my mom and tía Gladys during the Holidays (I would go alone to avoid what happened last Christmas).
Johnny and I were heading to a gathering with their friends when my sister called me. I heard my mom wailing in the background. My sister managed to say that tía Gladys had passed away. The night she transitioned, she told the family around her to ensure I kept my promise. We later learned that a bullet from a past shooting—a jealous lover—caused her illness.
Before leaving, I told my therapist that I feared going to New York while transitioning. She said, “You are going to say goodbye to your aunt. Prioritize caring for yourself and avoid anyone shaming you for who you are.” To say goodbye, I decided to write my tía a letter to express what I wished I said.
We talked briefly about nothing; the elephants in the room couldn’t be named.
I arrived at my mom’s apartment, but she wasn’t there. Knowing she couldn’t handle seeing the sibling she saw as another daughter in a casket, she stayed with the kids upstate. My sister was drunk and watching television on the couch at my mom’s. We talked briefly about nothing; the elephants in the room couldn’t be named. She wants to be alone, and you need rest for tomorrow. I headed to bed early and spent the rest of the night writing the letter and praying for peace.
For the wake, I wore an outfit I bought from the women’s section and put on my heeled boots. My sister also put a lot of time into her look, even dying her hair this gorgeous brown color. We both agreed to look our best for our tía, who always complimented us on how good we looked at family functions.
A quiet trip except for the sound of our heels, my sister and I entered the funeral home and greeted people separately. Ok, we’re on our own, but we’ll be fine. I didn’t recognize most of the people there. Male cousins I hadn’t seen in years tried to dap me up, but I went in for a hug instead. Some relatives complimented my looks and were glad to see me. But I dissociated to withstand heaviness; I couldn’t share my emotions, so I hid them. Wanting to give her the letter, I asked my sister to go with me and support me, but she wouldn’t go. She had fear in her eyes. A very sweet cousin offered to be by my side. I kneeled on the rail and took in what I saw: puffy, yellow skin, eyes closed, deep red lipstick, and arms crossed. It was my tía for sure, but her spiritual essence was gone. I placed the letter by her hands. Head down, I forgot where I was for a moment until my cousin helped me to stand. The rest of the service moved on, but I wasn’t there. My sister and I took the train back to Harlem with nothing to say to each other. The next day, we went to the burial and watched the casket be lowered. I held my sister’s shoulder as we walked to the gaping hole and threw our roses.
Afterward, she drove us to Newburgh, where my mom lay on the couch in her pajamas, watching television; she hadn’t showered in days. I kissed her on the cheek. She looked at me: “Hi, son.” For the first time in a long time, I saw myself in her. I got on the couch with her and watched television while she and my sister gossiped about who was and wasn’t at the burial.
We had managed to survive, but to thrive? We carried too many wounds.
The rest of the time in New York, I processed all that had happened. I returned to the Hudson waterfront and meditated on the misery and traumas my family had endured: extreme poverty, racism, domestic violence, unjustified arrests, alcoholism, exploitative and oppressive governments, etc. We had managed to survive, but to thrive? We carried too many wounds.
I tried to envision how tía Gladys survived the worst moment of her life. If the bullet had been an inch closer, she could have died. After the shooting, she became paraplegic and had to change everything she had known. I imagined she wanted to give up, but she continued to conjure joy. She was always there for me, even when I wasn’t aware of it. When my mom talked bullshit about me moving to Atlanta, my tía defended my need for space, I would later learn. The love she showed me grew into the love I later gave myself. I wish I could’ve told her about my transition; she would have supported me.
My tía transitioned into Heaven, where she was embraced and welcomed home, while I got back on a plane to Atlanta. Looking out of the window at the pearly-white clouds, I felt stable. You’re transitioning into the person you’re meant to be.
A year later, I was naked on the table as the wax specialist ripped off my old hair and dead cells. I realized it was time to start hormones, to have a new beginning. My faith showed me that I could stand in my truth. I researched and talked around to find the best way to start. Thanks to the people at FOLX Health, I spoke with a knowledgeable clinician and received my estrogen and testosterone blockers within two weeks.
It is wild to think of how my body will change, but I know I am not alone. I have my ancestors, the cleansing water, the community of my chosen family who has my back, my John, my Ori, and more. We are here with you, don’t forget us.
We will lead you home
Before you arrive, we will sing your name
When you come home, we embrace you
Before you left Earth
We knew where you would go
This essay, by Leo D. Martinez, is the fifth in Electric Literature’s new series, Both/And, centering the voices of transgender and gender nonconforming writers of color. These essays publish every Thursday all the way through June for Pride Month. To learn more about the series and to read previous installments, click here.
As LGBTQ+ literature continues to evolve and incorporate more diverse experiences into the canon, it’s such an interesting time for romances featuring bisexual leads. There are f/f stories, m/m stories, stories with nonbinary leads and love interests, and, of course, m/f, the often overlooked branch of the bisexual tree. And with that widely varied combination of romantic pairings comes the ever-complex experience of being attracted to more than one gender and how society reacts to every such combination.
When I set out to write Sizzle Reel, which features a bisexual protagonist exploring her journey in not only finding love and community but unpacking her own internal biases and comphet lens, there was already a growing goldmine of romance titles for me to learn from.
These characters in these novels range from bisexual protagonists who go through the world at ease with their queer-presenting relationships, to them struggling against comphet in their first visibly queer relationship, or exploring erasure in hetero-passing relationships with either one or both people identifying as bi. Every experience comes with its unique challenges and privileges and every book below showcases a wonderful love story that goes beyond the traditional straight romance.
Ben is humiliated when his brutal rejection by longtime friend and crush Adam goes viral. He never wants to see Adam ever again, so he escapes to his grandmother’s Californian beach house to nurse his heartbreak and prepare for the baking show he’s been accepted to. His grandmother is celebrating her 80th birthday with a series of parties and the musician she’d hired for all of the events is… Adam. As much as Ben wants to avoid Adam, neither can deny the intensity of their chemistry. With all of Kae’s signature heart and steam combined with the sweetest bisexual baker boy falling for a pan musician, this book is everything.
When recent divorcee Dahlia joins a cooking show in London, she wasn’t expecting to fall for her “nonbinary-and-announced-their-pronouns-on-national-tv” competitor. The competition heats up and their love is put to the test. A heartwarming and sexy rom-com.
Last Christmas, Portland transplant Ellie had a whirlwind night of love with a hot female stranger. This Christmas, she agrees to be her friend’s fake fiancée and join his family for a holiday weekend in the mountains only to learn that the girl who broke her heart last Christmas is her friend’s sister… and there may still be some sexual tension between them. Wacky hijinks make for a fabulous holiday romance.
The last thing college senior Cassie needs is to find out the hot older woman she had a one night stand with on Parents’ Weekend is her friend’s divorced mother. But as her friend starts inviting her to more, well, family events, Cassie and Erin can’t stay away from each other as they try to keep their secret from blowing up both their lives. Hilarious, very scintillating, this book about the unlikely pairing of a 20-something player and a “recently-divorced-from-a-man-now-what” older woman is bisexual chaos in the absolute best way.
Bookkeeper Lauren and her happy-go-lucky coworker Asa are tasked to increase the revenue at a holiday-themed tourist destination. Their rivalry causes sparks to fly as they realize they must team up to save their little winter wonderland. Complex characters, a wonderfully kitschy setting, and perfect m/f with a bi love interest rep makes this book a winner.
Designer Astrid is asked to fix up a historic inn in her small town. She sees it as the perfect distraction from her breakup from her fiancé… only for feelings to emerge as she butts heads with the owner’s granddaughter who is the lead carpenter. A wonderful entry into the “I left a man and now I’m going to experience love with a woman” canon.
When Armenian American Nar’s mom gets involved in her love live, Nars is determined to make one of the Armenian men work. But Nar’s growing attraction to her wingwoman Erebuni complicates things. A beautiful exploration of how culture and familial expectations intersect with sexual identity.
A young woman’s restaurant starts to struggle financially and she must work together with her celebrity head chef to rescue the business, even as a connection builds and explodes between them. As emotional as it is steamy and romantic, this book soars as it follows a woman coming into her bisexuality later in life.
After Garland’s marriage crashes and burns, she agrees to go with her sister to an adult summer camp—only to meet the man she had a premonition about years ago. So, she decides it’s a sign that they’re meant to be together, even as she finds herself drawn to his vibrant sister. A pitch perfect “I divorced a man now what” novel that’s equal parts a journey of self-discovery and a swoony gay love story.
We met at the apex of a New York heatwave via an app designed to facilitate anonymous sex between gay men. The sky was low, touching the trees, and the sun refused to set. It was early August, my last week in the city, and I was on my back in Tompkins Square Park listening to the warble of a tenor saxophone. He was 436 feet away.
So close, he messaged. Just come over.
His profile name was %%%%%. I worried those percent signs carried a secret sexual meaning I was oblivious to. Did those ovals and slashes represent something? I scrolled through his three photos again. His hairline receded picture to picture.
Percent had been messaging me for days: u free? still up? come over already. I’d been ignoring him but today, with the humidity, I had an anxious bubble of sexual tension in my stomach. One month sober, I spent my days bouncing between AA meetings in the East Village, slinking out before anyone could talk to me about their Higher Power. This morning, I’d listened to a man complain about the Genius Bar for ten minutes. “They’re telling me I have to buy all new chargers,” he said to a circle of alcoholics staring at our shoes. I deserved some fun.
On my way to Percent’s apartment, I stopped at a bodega and purchased a stick of Old Spice Swagger. I’d sworn off deodorant years ago but I knew I couldn’t meet a sex stranger smelling like I smelled. The water had been out in my building for three days—no showers, sinks, nor flushes. Part of the ceiling in the entranceway had caved in and dark water dripped into a line of recycling bins. I applied the deodorant under my sweaty t-shirt as I climbed the five flights. Though the door was ajar, I knocked.
“It’s open,” Percent said in a Georgia drawl.
We nearly collided—he was already in the doorway, shirtless. We paused to inspect each other. He was not unattractive but not necessarily good-looking, somewhere in between. Sallow, nicotine-tinted skin. I could count the hair follicles he’d attempted to gel into volume. His eyes roved my midriff, my face.
“I wasn’t . . .” I began.
“Shut up,” he said. He grabbed me by the collar and kissed me, pulling me towards the bedroom in a sloppy foxtrot. His mouth tasted like old tennis balls. We collapsed into his unmade bed and had sex with no condom.
“Choke me,” he said and I obliged.
“Slap me,” he said and I obliged. Was this what the percent signs meant?
I tried to recall the last time I’d had sex sober. Never? I used to get drunk and find people in bars, on apps. I had a few guys I saw monthly: Taylor, who was always flying to Tokyo; Justin in an open marriage; Ryan with the armpit fetish. I didn’t expect anything from them and they expected nothing from me. We’d get drunk, fuck, and text each other when enough time had passed.
“You are by far the sweatiest, smelliest person I’ve ever had sex with,” Percent said when we were finished. Old Spice could only do so much.
I took my time in his shower, relishing the running water, carefully choosing the most expensive-looking bath products. While I shampooed, it dawned on me that this was not Percent’s apartment: the conditioners, the pink polka dot shower curtain, the framed curlicue quote on the wall, Don’t Quit Your Daydream.
“Do you live here?” I asked, wrapped in a magenta towel. The photographs above the bed featured a college-aged woman in Cabo-esque settings.
“No, it’s an Airbnb,” Percent said. “I told you that.”
“Right,” I said, but he hadn’t.
I dried off and got back in bed. I learned that Percent was visiting from Savannah. He was here alone mainly to see the Rolling Stones at MSG. He spent three hundred dollars on the ticket but ultimately decided not to go, wasn’t in the mood for crowds. The show was underway as we lay there. (Had I taken priority?) When I asked him how he’d been spending his days in New York, he told me he went to Starbucks each morning then sat in this apartment watching comedians on YouTube—too hot outside.
I explained that I was moving to Florida in a few weeks to become a therapist. Well, first to get a Master’s degree in psychology and maybe someday become a therapist. The plan felt more wobbly each time I explained it.
“Do you want a beer?” Percent asked.
“I don’t drink,” I said. Like it was a fact. Like it had been more than a few weeks.
“Never? Wow.” Empty beer bottles garrisoned the room, balanced on the lip of the dresser. His sex accoutrements were arranged neatly on the nightstand: water-based lube, silicone lube, poppers, an unopened box of condoms, a small vibrator with a wire attached.
“Have you been hosting a number of, uh, gentleman callers?” I asked.
“You’re number three,” Percent said. He rolled over so his face was in the pillow. “There are no tops down south. I have to stock up.”
Note to self: take some extra PrEP when you get home.
“You were the best though. By far,” he continued. “The others just left. Nobody stuck around. Didn’t ask a thing about me.”
Percent tried to convince me to sleep over but I said I needed to be up early, a lie. I gave him my number and we made vague plans to see each other the next day. Maybe we could see some jazz in the Village. Maybe I could help him find weed.
When I opened the door to my apartment, steam billowed into the hallway. My shower was running, the water back. I had left the handle turned to the ON position and scalding water had been pouring for who knows how long. My little studio was a steam room. Droplets snaked down every surface. White paint bubbled on the walls and a puddle encircled my mattress like a moat. I resisted the urge to ask Percent if I could come back. Instead, I opened every window, propped the door with a sneaker, and went down to the alleyway.
The alley contained the building’s trash bins and a dumpster, loose bags of recycling. The other apartment denizens avoided this area but I thought there was something magical about it. There were potted plants and a blue plastic chair that belonged in a second-grade classroom. When I first toured the building, a tan tortoise was out there basking in the smells, but I never saw it again. I sat for a while and listened to the rumblings of the trash chute, imagining what my neighbors were discarding at this hour.
My final days in New York should have been all goodbyes but I knew my friends would try to get me drunk. I pretended to be too sick to attend the going away happy hour my lab held for me. Though I didn’t have many things, I packed slowly enough to fill a week.
Percent had texted me a few times the next day to meet up and eventually I told him I had too much work to do, another lie. We’d had our sweaty sex and now it was a mostly positive memory. I wanted to leave it alone.
I guess you are like the others :), he’d texted.
I sent him a shrugging emoji and assumed I would never see him again.
Before driving south, I spent twelve days on an island in Maine in my grandparents’ sea-battered house. Nana was elated I was finally going back to school. By the time I was ten, she was certain I was destined to become a therapist. She watched me every weekend in the winter while my mom gave ski lessons, shepherding flocks of children down the bunny slope. I’d sit in the kitchen and she’d talk in one breathless stream, venting about my mother or the government or the other old ladies on the island.
“You really have a knack for listening, you know? Most men don’t know how to listen,” she said while she cut up sponges to put under my grandfather’s walker.
I’m not sure if I was good at listening or good at staying quiet.
During my twelve days on the island, my family was drunk most of the time—at the beach, during dinner, after dinner. I announced early on that I wasn’t drinking but it didn’t register. They interpreted it as one of those half-hearted proclamations made on hungover mornings, something I’d shake off by noon. My mom and my aunts put white wine and ice cubes in thermoses. Cousins offered me shots. Every afternoon, I was stuck in a row of beach chairs passing drinks up and down the line. My fingertips tingled with a real beer in my hand: they wanted to pull that frosted tab, pop it, let it sigh. Release all that aluminum tension.
I’m not sure if I was good at listening or good at staying quiet.
Most mornings I ran a loop around the island, sometimes looping twice, three times. That summer, some mysterious bacteria was killing off harbor seals. They washed up on the beaches and blended in with the rocks. As I ran, I could smell whenever I passed a dead seal. It was enough to make me stop once and throw up into a bush of tiny yellow flowers.
I had no service on the back side of the island, but when I got to the front, my phone connected to an invisible network and my texts came through. I usually had a text from Percent.
when do u get to FL?
u know Savannah is only 3 hrs away?
cum visit me some weekend, so many places to show u
I ignored most of these but not all. I was flattered. In the hour we’d spent together, I’d made an impression on this man. He wanted me, sober me.
there next week,so much packing, I texted with a cardboard box emoji.
Percent eventually slowed down, perhaps discouraged by my unresponsiveness. After a week with no contact, he sent me a photo of a band playing in front of a snack bar. The accompanying text said wish u were here. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t. Twenty-four hours later he texted sorry, meant for someone else.
figured, I replied.
It was a hurricane that pulled us back together: Hurricane Shania, a category three. I was only a month into my semester and just settling into my new life, but the governor said to evacuate. Power lines would fall, rivers would rise, and we had to leave.
I was renting the ground floor of a pale yellow house. It was hidden behind knotted vines and Jurassic leaves. My upstairs neighbors were twin sisters in my graduate program with the air of harried professionals. I wondered how they’d managed to get this far in life moving as a unit. Most of our conversations were about the man whose apartment I’d taken. He was gay too, they said, like me but really funny.
In my first year, I had to rotate labs every semester to get a taste of different kinds of research. The first lab I was assigned to seemed eager to shove me in a dark room and plunk me in front of a computer. Surrounded by dead switchboards and coiled blue wires, I watched videos of children’s faces in ultra-slow motion, muted, and systematically coded the movements of their facial muscles. 11 – nasolabial deepener. 21 – neck tightener. 45 – blink. Taped to the computer was a reminder that fear = 1+2+4+5+7+20+26. Someone else, in another dark room, was listening to what the kids said to see if their words matched their real feelings.
At a welcome bar crawl, I moved with a pack of my coevals, drinking Coca-Cola and watching them get sloppier. A woman I’d never met wedged next to me on a couch, flicked her tongue against my ear, and whispered, “You’re too quiet.” I went home after that.
With the hurricane tumbling toward us, the twins up and left, returning to their family in Tennessee. I made plans to go back to Maine, to visit a friend in Austin, to stay with another friend in New York. On airline websites, I chose window seats, entered my credit card info, but couldn’t click purchase.
I stayed up all night envisioning the house underwater. I filled the washing machine with my books, then the dryer. I lay on my belly in the living room and tried to identify which objects would neither float nor sink but stay suspended in the middle. Maybe the modem.
let’s meet somewhere, Percent texted at 6 AM.
u need to evacuate too, right?
what about asheville? my friend has a place
The idea pulled me out of limbo. Somehow it was better than my other options, better than home, better than staying here alone. My muscles trembled and vibrated. Shania was coming to raze our cities and he was thinking about me, still.
In an hour, I was on the road, spilling coffee on myself with each sip. The traffic inched. I leaned my head against the window and drove with one hand. Percent’s facial features wouldn’t quite crystallize. I tried to Google him with the limited information I had. I found nothing. Someone beeped as I drifted over the dotted line.
In South Carolina, I took a wrong exit. I followed a dirt road until it terminated inside a barn. I got out, sat on a sagging wooden fence, and let the sun singe my neck. I heard a newscaster’s voice: a man drove eight hours to meet a stranger in a cabin and was never seen again. I saw detectives holding up chunks of my body, like fileted salmon covered in pine needles.
I’d stopped going to AA when I moved. I tried one meeting but they kept thanking Jesus and I didn’t go back. Still, the messaging was imprinted in my gray matter. They liked to say look where your best thinking got you and gesture around the room at the sad people in folding chairs. Sometimes it seemed cultish, an attempt to erode your trust in yourself, but as I drove on, I saw the question lit up on billboards and abandoned drive-in screens: could I trust me?
Percent was outside when I pulled in, kicking at logs. It was a robin’s-egg cabin on its own hill. I sensed it had once been a shed. There were two camping chairs and Percent’s white pickup. He didn’t react much when I stepped out, just nodded in my direction. We were actually about forty minutes northeast of Asheville, perched over a field of tail-flicking cows, the sunset refracting red through the trees. I felt far from civilization.
“Hey,” I called as I approached.
“Hey,” he called back with a raised arm. We shared a short man hug and I tried to rub his hair, thinner than I remembered and crunchy with gel.
Inside, we sat next to each other on the bed. It was a full-sized bed that touched the walls on both sides. The only other furniture was a desk with a mini-fridge and a hot plate. The place smelled like must covered with lemon Pledge.
Leave now, it’s not too late.
“What took you so long?” Percent asked solemnly.
“I got lost a few times,” I said.
“Started to think you wouldn’t show.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
He kissed me then, whimpering like there was romance in what I’d said. We wriggled back into the bed and had sex, loud creaking sex, kicking the walls with no one around to hear. While I was behind him, I noticed a blurry tattoo on his back that I hadn’t seen in New York. It looked like the head of a drowning raccoon.
“What’s that on your back?” I asked afterward.
“It’s a wolf,” he said, “howling at the moon.”
“It’s cool,” I said before drifting down into an evening nap.
I awoke to find Percent eating salad from a Tupperware and watching Jerry Seinfeld stand-up on his laptop. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” he said and kissed my ear.
The bathroom was in a kind of outhouse, just a showerhead and a toilet. I looked through Percent’s toiletry bag and found his Rogaine. I sprayed a dollop in my palm and dabbed it along my hairline. Who was I to judge?
That night, we drove to a bar called The Backwater on the edge of the French Broad River. Percent had six beers and I had zero and we played seven games of pool and sat around a bonfire. We watched videos of Shania ravaging the Bahamas on Percent’s phone. We gasped, put our arms around each other, nuzzled neck-to-neck. I found myself talking with a hint of Percent’s accent, mimicking his elisions and swoops. I’d always been susceptible to accents; they osmosed into my voice box. I smelled the Rogaine on his head, our heads, but I didn’t mind. When a straight couple asked how long we’d been together, Percent said, “Two years.”
Shania chose another trajectory, veered out to sea. We could have gone home but we didn’t. Our days were spent in bed, whispering into collarbones and sucking on toes. We had sex three times a day, ate dinners we couldn’t afford, went to the same bar each night. Most mornings, we sat outside under a comforter and sipped Starbucks he drove twenty minutes to get. Percent admitted that the cabin was actually an Airbnb but he was able to extend our reservation.
In the quiet times, Percent told me his life story. His dad was bipolar and never in the picture; he was a card dealer in Vegas now. His mother worked at a dollar store and was an “active alcoholic.” At sixteen, Percent moved out and lived in a warehouse with some thirty-somethings who thought it was funny to get a young kid fucked up on spray paint and meth. He was so entrenched in credit card debt now that he’d stopped caring about money. He was banking on some catastrophic economic collapse to reset the numbers. “I’ve never told anyone this before,” he said as he slurped up squid ink pasta.
On day four, we hiked to a waterfall. We hiked past where visitors were permitted and swam naked in the cold water. On a wet rock, we jerked each other off, climaxing simultaneously into the river and letting our semen drift downstream. We built a cairn to honor our orgasms.
As we hiked down, Percent told me he wasn’t out to any of his family but some of his friends knew. He said he didn’t believe in coming out, like it was passé.
“Straight people don’t have to tell everyone who they fuck. Why should I?” he asked.
“That’s fair,” I said, though I thought he was in denial.
After a leaf-crunching silence, he said, “You know, it meant a lot to me when you stayed and talked to me in New York. You’re a good one.”
I wondered: what kind of men did he usually fuck? My sex partners spoke to me at least.
Words pulled each other from my mouth like a magician’s handkerchiefs, words I didn’t think I meant.
Each day, his accent got thicker in my throat. Syllables slipped out with inflections that weren’t mine. My phonemes dipped in new directions. I felt like I was living in an alternate reality, embodying an alternate me, watching myself through a periscope. I said whatever he wanted me to say, touched him where he wanted to be touched, succumbed to any pressure he applied. I told him he was beautiful, special, smart. I let him make plans for us—maybe we could spend Thanksgiving together. Words pulled each other from my mouth like a magician’s handkerchiefs, words I didn’t think I meant. Sometimes, I felt an I love you forming on my tongue, curling it with the weight of a sugar cube. It was ludicrous, I knew, but was it? Was love this feeling of being beyond yourself? Could you fall in love by pretending to be?
In a psychology class, I learned that people rate themselves as happier when they hold a pencil between their front teeth, which forces the mouth into something like a smile. Maybe they were just happy to sink their teeth into some wood, to leave a dent in yellow.
“Try this one, it’s grapefruit-y,” Percent said. It was night five and we were back at The Backwater, huddled on a bench by the bonfire. Percent was four beers deep and his face was pink, eyes glassy like a taxidermy mammal.
“Just a sip. It’s like juice,” he said.
Thus far, I’d obviated terms like AA or alcoholic. It wasn’t hard; Percent wasn’t good at asking questions. And now, here he was, pressing his pint glass to my lips.
Even before I took that sip, I had already broken the rules. The AA elders, from atop their snow-capped mountains of sober decades, discouraged any new relationships, any sex even, for the first year. They would have told me to stay away from bars and cabins and internet strangers. They would have said I was already at the foot of a slippery slope.
“Delicious,” I said, and it was. Bubbly, fruity, smooth. Sip still on my tongue, I felt my body losing gravity, bones porous and aerated.
Percent kissed my cheek.
The night did not stop there. I gulped down half of Percent’s grapefruit-y beer and we ordered another round, then another. A skinny man in a flower crown set up an amp and a bass on a low stage. With foot pedals, he looped himself on top of himself until his finger-plucking became a pulse. We stood on rocks and swayed into each other.
After that, I have only flashes. My vegetarianism went out the window—I remember eating chicken fingers in the dirt. I remember stumbling between groups asking if anyone had cocaine and snorting something off a key in a bathroom. I remember making fun of a man with a puka shell necklace, calling him a tween. I remember Percent saying, “Finally, the fun side comes out.”
He drove us home though he shouldn’t have. He said I screamed “I love you” out the window, to the night, one bare foot in the breeze. We pumped electronic music through dark farmlands, following black roads that bled into nothing.
Percent was excited to see me hungover. He recounted things I’d said, delivered humiliations like punchlines. He tousled my hair and pawed at me and told me my breath reeked. I breathed into a cupped hand and smelled dead seal. Our skin suctioned together with sweat as he licked me all over, the sun too bright through the blinds. I gasped.
While I hid under the covers, Percent drove to get coffee and came back with a thousand-dollar camera he’d purchased at Best Buy. “I shouldn’t have bought this,” he muttered as he unboxed the camera at the foot of the bed.
Later, he convinced me to go on a drive so he could test it out. Parked at an overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway, I sat in the passenger seat with my head between my legs. Outside, he took the same photograph a thousand times while eating a peanut butter sandwich, no jelly. I was fuming, imagining his gums sticking together as he pointed the camera directly into the sun. He continually adjusted the settings, turning dials and smashing buttons. When he got back in the car, he tried to show me the photos. They were white blurs but I nodded along, said wow.
We flew back down the mountain. We stopped at a pizza place and ate a cheese pizza and drank a pitcher of root beer, like kids at a birthday party. Percent drank two real beers too. I was spaced out but Percent didn’t notice. He monologued about a woman whose garage he hung out in as a child, who died of colon cancer last year.
That night, while we had sex, I forgot who Percent was. I lost track of him and he flickered into ex-lovers, morphed into Justin and Ryan and Taylor. The windows got steamy and, for a moment, the tiny cabin felt full. I flickered too: who was I exactly?
Percent fell asleep quickly and I sat alone outside. I counted the individual noises in the wall of night-sound: ribbits, chirps, bat screeches, the rubbing of cricket legs. Below, a cow moaned, perhaps giving birth in the moonlight. It was absurd to get so mad at Percent today. He knew nothing about me, my fears or addictions, the tangles in my brain. Did I want to be saved or neglected? Worshipped or swallowed?
Moths swarmed my phone as I looked up AA meetings back in Gainesville. I would go back, had to go back. Tomorrow. When I slipped into the bed, Percent wrapped himself around me and burped into my ear.
I ended it with Percent over the phone a week after we returned from Asheville. I was pacing my front porch, wind chimes whipping in post-hurricane breezes. I let him talk for too long. He talked about how much he missed me, how happy he was that I’d finally called. In a lull, I blurted out the words.
“What,” he asked, “am I supposed to do now?”
“Whatever you did before,” I said.
But Percent didn’t give up. He called me every day, many times a day, and left long rambling voicemails. He texted emoji-laden paragraphs. He found me on various sex apps and sent pictures of us he’d taken in Asheville, arms around each other, sun dipping below our shoulders. I tried not to read his messages, but phrases seeped through: I love you, I need you, we are one and the same. In another message, he called me Satan incarnate. When I blocked him, he spawned new numbers with strange area codes: Texas, Utah, Alaska. He made blank profiles with the same username. It was futile; it was whack-a-mole. Some nights, I slept with my phone in the microwave.
Soon he started appearing in Gainesville. The first time I saw him, I was sitting in a café, in a window seat, and he walked right by, dragging his fingers on the glass. Once I saw his truck in the parking lot after an AA meeting. And one night, when I got home from the lab, I found him waiting on the front porch, curled in a ball. I ran to my car and kept driving until the twins confirmed the coast was clear. “It was probably just a racoon,” they said.
Less and less I slept. Every rustle or creak was Percent breaking in. I was convinced he was living under the house or in the bungalow next door, which they rented on Airbnb. On more than one occasion, I went out onto the porch with a baseball bat, ready to swing at what was only loose siding flapping in the wind. I stocked up on mace at Dick’s Sporting Goods and changed lanes whenever a white truck entered my rearview mirror.
But sometimes, oddly, I caught myself worrying about Percent, especially on days when he didn’t reach out. After a week of silence, I wondered if he was dead. I searched the internet to see if anything newsworthy had befallen him. I called a hospital in Savannah to see if he’d been admitted. The operator said no and hung up before I could elaborate. I unblocked his number and texted are you okay, then twenty-four hours later blocked him again.
Slowly, of course, Percent faded into my dating history. He gave up on me, or perhaps he latched on to another boy. Whenever I retold the story, I omitted certain parts, certain decisions I couldn’t blame on a hurricane. To my friends, I reframed it as a joke. And I nearly bragged about him to the men I slept with, like I was proud to have been the object of this man’s obsession. With my therapist, with my mother, I tried to garner pity. My new sponsor, who called me slippery, didn’t seem to believe me. “How do you think he’d tell this story?” he said, which annoyed me.
On Saturday mornings, after the 11 AM meeting, I stay after to wash dishes. In the AA world, they call this a commitment. My sponsor cajoled me into it, but I’ve come to enjoy this time: the warm water, the steam, the quiet in the church after everyone is gone. But if my hands are busy, if I don’t resist, I can open, briefly, an aperture into his head. I can see myself in the doorway that first afternoon in New York, red-faced and sweaty and desperate. I can see myself clutching his hand, holding him, repeating his name. I remember all those tiny gestures I’ve tried to forget. The thing about selves is you can never shed them completely. They are hangnails, skin tags, birthmarks. Even when you believe you’ve changed, that old self lives on in someone else’s mind, a monstrous after-image blurring the film. Now I look to the door, waiting for him, for anyone, to burst through.
The books on this list explore the challenges faced by women from diverse backgrounds as they fight against patriarchal structures such as religious sects, border controls, and even humanity. Their battles take place across wide-ranging landscapes as territories act simultaneously as sites for confinement, flight, connection, creativity, and evolution. The women in these stories use a range of tools for their different survival strategies: their minds, their landscapes, novels, bodies, flora and fauna, disguise, dissociation, invisibility, time-travel, and transformation.
Lorena Cabnals, an indigenous activist, asks, “How can we fight for the right of women to choose what to do with her body without ensuring a space that body can survive in?” These books explore the ideas of territorial indigenous feminism and the issues faced by Black, Indigenous, and minoritized women fighting for sites of safety. Territorial feminism is at the heart of my book, Fire Rush, inspired by my own experiences of seeking safe spaces as a child and young woman trying to escape male violence.
Below are books about women writing about women fighting for land, space, and agency over their bodies as a form of revolution.
“In the mud, the border between land and body disappeared.”
Sorrowland is an alternative geography, a speculative landscape based on territory stewarded by Indigenous communities, Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, Lipan Apahce and Plains Nations. 15-year-old Vern is an albino intersex girl who gives birth to twins in a forest as she escapes the Black cult that is Cainland. She is a fugitive trying to escape an institution, trauma, and history. In her quest for survival, she questions where she belongs, where she is running to, and whether Africa is her land. Finding no answer, she seeks a site of safety deep within the soil. “Our roots are in the dark, the earth is our country.”
She fights for her and her children’s survival, running from Cainland and the men who control it, moving between three diverse terrains: Kingdom Plantae, Kingdom Fungi, and Kingdom Animalia, becoming transformed by each and forging a symbiotic relationship that is central to her survival.
What if “human” cannot and should not be claimed? What if to be human required a rejection of that which is considered human? This is the premise of Akwugo Emejulu’s book. Here, Emejulu talks about the first time she realized that as a Black woman she is non-human, existing on the borderlands.
Black women are fleeing humanity, seeking safety in another kind of way; they are fighting for survival in the liminal space of being, outside of humanity, but trying to stake a claim within it. Fugitive Feminism tries to find ways of surviving outside of the binary of human and non-human, woman and man, Black and white; finding a way into a beyond-human future, re-birthing into a new way of being.
This is no Afro-pessimistic book. Emejulu sees this act of survival as a means of transformation not only for women but for the planet, decentering the human as a way of being kinder to the Earth, noting, “Being unmoored from humanity opens up possibilities.” She says this is a book of refusal, of refusing capture in time and space.
This is Xiaolu Guo’s superstructure of a memoir drawing on language, place, cultural references, and life story. A Chinese immigrant writer and academic in New York trying to move to the beat of liberation, to create sites for creativity and freedom in between memories of the distant Eastern landscapes of her past, her present life in New York, and a future that awaits in London, where her child and the child’s father are.
Is New York a hostile place or a place of safety? She walks freely in parks and unknown areas of the city, but is she ever on safe ground, ever completely sure of herself and who she is within it?
Survival doesn’t always have to be an intense physical fight. This is on the surface a more subtle fight with the self, with desire, with what it is to be a woman and a mother and an artist. It is about the importance and survival of the creative life, which for many women may be the only landscape of freedom left to them. A place in which many women do not have the privilege to cultivate and inhabit.
This book grapples with an existential struggle, with the unfurling of the self in a world of distorted mirrors. When we untether our histories from our yearnings for creatively fertile futures, what remains? How do we get to where we want to be and what is lost in this (re)routing?
Guo delicately dances with the fragmented concepts of diasporic women’s lives and the search for congruence between the deep interior landscapes and the perceptible realities of the lives we live. A terrain for us to claim and be sovereign in is the skin we live inside of, the spirit that holds us, and the narratives we live.
The matrilineal-linked stories in this collection range across a 19th-century cigar factory, plantations, and modern-day detention centers. Spanning Cuba, Mexico, and Miami, Garcia presences fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, and women who live through revolutions, domestic violence, childhood abuse and the world(s) of “shadowy political figures.”
Survival in these stories is about making the right choices, even as loss and gain become obfuscated and difficult to untether from each other. Each choice is accompanied with a familiar strangeness: alienation, unbelonging, communion, refusal. Whether to go back across the border and try to get into the United States again, or face the risks of being labeled as repeat offenders. Or go back to their homeland and face hunger and death, or stay in the detention center. Or, as one woman considers, whether she should make her body a vacation in order to make a German man marry her so she can have sanctuary in another country. “It didn’t even matter who lay beneath me–it was my own smell and heat and indecency that drove me…”
And when they return to the lands of their foremothers, they are seeking a place of belonging, a womb of safety, “a kind of connective tissue.” But this connective tissue, this thread from the past to the present, isn’t enough.
The isolation and strangeness of detention centers with smiling zebras printed on the walls. The alienation of being in strange worlds where oil stacks burn in the distance and they are the only ones there along with oil workers so that Gloria thinks “We must be families made of bird.”
The young Black women in this book are fighting for freedom, for complexity, for beauty, for subjectivity, for contradiction, for love, for themselves. Hartman is untethering them from the archives from which they have been contained, classified, and constrained by the surveys of sociologists, rent collectors, social workers, and parole officers.
Hartman is fighting for their survival. She wants them to live through art. She exhumes the real lives of these women from their musty case files. Reduced by a cold, institutionalized gaze to criminality, pathology, deviance. She writes to transform them into radicals, anarchists, and trendsetters.
We encounter these young women as they move through the slums, on street corners, and foul alleys. Realms of “excess and fabulousness.” These women are hungry, lack water to wash. The questions in their heads: “Can I live?”
Newspaper articles confuse the girls, getting their names wrong. They become interchangeable, robbed of their subjectivity, not even afforded names or personhood.
The writer traces the footsteps of one young girl who is photographed naked on a sofa, languid and liberated in this moment. She traces her migration from Philadelphia to New York, the streets of the Seventh Ward, onto Tenderloin and then Harlem. Across the Black ghetto, a girl on the threshold of a new era, through epidemics of rape and lynching, to the otherwise possibilities of a new world. She was a girl trying to survive brutality and deprivation. A beautiful girl, her beauty intimating pathways to liberation, to experiment with what it is to live otherwise lives. Freedom as an improvisation with the limits of the ghetto. These characters create possibilities within (and outside) the confines of their lives. This becomes the radical act of survival.
The Vegetarian explores gender relations and power dynamics within a Korean family. The novel is told in three parts, from the perspective of the protagonist, Yeong-hye’s husband, brother-in-law, and sister. Yeong-hye herself is silent.
Yeong-hye does everything she can to live her life the way she chooses, to be free from the violence of her husband and the misogynistic structures of the world. To escape this, she seeks a life of arboreality. Through this, she transforms into a tree, bordering different states of being because she cannot survive in the world as it is.
Unlike some of the women in the other books on this list, Yeong-hye does not fight back physically. This book is about survival as a radical pacifist act that challenges the masculine ways of fighting and rebelling. Yeong-hye refuses to move to the rhythms of patriarchy, instead, she listens to the tempo of trees, surrendering to their pace. She uses the earth as medicine, finding power in entangled roots of trees.
“There are rapids ahead the doctors call ‘mania.’”
Mama Amazonica is a collection of poetry where Pascale Petit writes about her mother who was in a psychiatric ward. Petit places her mother in the Amazon rainforest, transforming her into Jaguar Girl, Hummingbird, and other mythical creatures as she explores the contours of her mother’s troubled mind, paralleling the survival of her mother and that of the natural environment. How can one survive without the other? The rainforest and the deep recesses of the human mind become entangled, boundaries blurred.
Like most of the other writers, Pascale Petit deploys radical writing techniques, exploring mythical landscapes to illuminate the landscapes inhabited by women in their quest to survive.
“Beetles with intricate cameras mounted on their carapaces record every harm that comes to her in diamantine detail.” It is through extraordinary images and fine detail such as this that Petit interweaves mind, body and land as her mother “swims through the star-splinters of a mirror,” and where “electric eels pressed to her scalp can vanish into backwoods where no one can reach her.”
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
