My Wife Lived Countless Lives Before She Met Me

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Connie” by Catherine Lacey

Often X made the argument that our supposedly liberal society was illogically puritanical about age differences in romantic partners, that “some” fourteen-year-olds were more mature and capable than adults well over twice their age. I agreed this was a possibility, but it seemed sagacious teens were in shorter supply than lecherous adults, and lust itself has a transfiguring effect, a way of taking action and justifying it later. I’d once had a professor who’d pursued me while I was his student, and though I was technically and legally mature enough to consent, the imbalance of power seemed to me a warning. To this, X groaned: Didn’t I know that personal experience blurred the truth? And furthermore, she said, the professor obviously hadn’t been appealing enough to me, so it wasn’t an adequate example. I did not bring up the fact I’d been quite attracted to him, as I never mentioned any attractions I’d had in the past; I even found it difficult, in her presence, to remember them clearly, so completely my sense of desire and sexuality seemed to rest in her hands. We never reached a conclusion to this disagreement; we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.

X often spoke of the truth as if it were a stable, glowing object—something just within her grasp—but she argued for the opposite as well, that reality itself was a shifting illusion, never to be known. I believed her on both accounts. I believed nearly everything she ever said.

But the memory of our abstract bickering came to me as I tried to understand X’s long-ago relationship with Connie Converse—whether they were a couple or an intense pair of friends, or whether such a distinction even mattered. Connie was twenty-one years older than X, roughly twice her age when they met, but each of them needed the other—intensely at times—and each of them behaved irrationally about the other in ways that suggest theirs was not a wholly platonic bond.

In November of 1971, after her affair with David Moser was uncovered and she was fired from her job at the deer processing plant, X began traveling vaguely eastward for a few weeks, forging a path of accidents, brief rides between small towns, soup kitchens, gas stations, and women’s crisis centers. “Another crisis center,” she noted in a journal. “It’s beginning to seem I may be having one.”

In her backpack X carried a little cash, a notebook, two photographs, two changes of underwear, a pair of clean socks, a camera, and several newspaper clippings. She had a folding knife tucked into her bra. If anyone asked, she would have said her name was Dorothy Eagle, that she was twenty-one, that she’d been born in Kentucky. If anyone offered her anything, she took it—rides, food, a place to stay, money.

X had no home, no family, no connections—and yet she moved with a propulsive forward force, sure of her fate. She had forgotten her origins and thought only of the future, all her allegiance placed in the years to come.

Her aimless months of hitchhiking away from Montana landed her in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where, on Thanksgiving Day 1971, she met Connie Converse at a soup kitchen where X was eating and Connie was serving. For years, Connie had been living in a deepening depression; volunteering—the only human contact she had aside from her secretarial job—was her primary salve. Connie’s younger brother, Phil, told me she had become preoccupied with the Southern Territory at this time, and the more she read about the famines and prisons and oppression down there, the more pointless life seemed, and the more pointless life seemed, the more she wanted to know about the world’s cruelties.

As is often the case with betrayed love, Connie and X remembered their first meeting differently. In writing, each casts the other as the nexus of their entanglement, remembers herself as the clueless bystander caught up in the other’s plans. In Connie’s unpublished memoir, she wrote that “a young woman named Dorothy Eagle” approached her in tears, saying she’d been turned away at the women’s shelter and needed a place to sleep for a few nights.

“She caught me off guard,” Connie wrote, “and I could hardly believe myself when I said she could stay with me. I don’t know why that seemed like the right thing, as it makes no sense looking back at it . . . Then some months passed and she was still there—I suppose I forgot she was supposed to be looking for a place. Forgot or just didn’t mind.”

X’s diaries—though perhaps they are not to be trusted—tell a different story:

This lady picked me up in a soup kitchen and has put me up in her place for now. Her line was that she was a writer, too, as she’d seen me with my notebook. I can’t imagine how desperate a person has to be to approach a stranger to say that—I’m a writer, too. But I was tired of crisis centers and park benches. Been here a week or something, and every night she starts getting panicky after the sun goes down, like she isn’t sure what to do with me, like something has to be done. I’d say it’s probably doomed.

Connie had been living in Ann Arbor since 1960 after a fifteen-year stint in New York. When she dropped out of college in March of 1945, she’d been certain of her talents as a musician and a writer. Her drive toward a career as an artist was derailed by the Goldman assassination in April of that year, then extinguished when the Great Disunion occurred that autumn. Like many others in their twenties, Connie threw herself into protest and activism nearly full-time—marching, writing letters, volunteering, or reading the horrific news between her temp jobs. When the pace of the movement to liberate the Southern Territory slowed in 1946, returning to her pursuit of folk music and fiction seemed absurd. In a letter to her brother from May of that year, she sums up her problem: “Is life in the small things, in songs or stories, or is it in the large things, in the country, its laws, in the liberty and safety of others? I feel it cannot be in both. I cannot be in both. I am so weary, Phil, I can hardly sleep but I can hardly get out of bed.”

As the years went on she tried to remain in both worlds. She wrote her dour ballads, and occasionally a political essay, while still attending and helping to organize rallies and sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns. Both pursuits were rife with rejection. Demanding liberation of the ST was increasingly Sisyphean, but Connie’s attempts to get a manager for her music career were just as hopeless, and she was losing stamina for open mic nights. Activism became her tool for avoiding her creative ambition, and her music seemed like a time-wasting escape from the urgent reality of her activism. This stalemate continued into the 1950s, punctuated by occasional moments of success—a good show, a new song—and in 1954 she was invited to perform on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite. None of it was ever quite enough.

The same year as her Morning Show performance, Gene Deitch invited Connie to perform at his salon, a regular event he held and recorded in his Greenwich Village apartment. Connie arrived in a long shapeless dress, leading someone to quip that she’d “just come in from milking the cows,” to which she retorted, “I’ll milk you,” then took up her guitar and began to play. She impressed the crowd that night, though they still found her strange and old-fashioned. The problem, perhaps, was that Connie had all the qualities a male folk musician was allowed to have in the 1950s and none of what was expected of a female singer. She was bewildering when she should have been seductive, rugged when she should have been glamorous. Her songs were about steely women when they should have been about powerful men. Her voice had a stilted, pedantic quality—the sort of irregularity celebrated in Bob Dylan—instead of the nostalgic, mellifluous tone of a woman. A booking agent told her she needed to buy some lipstick and high heels before he could get her gigs. Shades of equality could be seen elsewhere in the Northern Territory, but stages and spotlights still demanded a beautiful docility. At the time, few noticed or cared about correcting the prejudices in an industry seen as ultimately frivolous.

Connie met similar hurdles with her writing. A prominent editor once rejected one of her short stories on the grounds that it was “too morose.” Her essays were often accused of being vitriolic, irrationally negative, or obsessed with trivialities. Now that Emma Goldman’s policies had delivered paid maternity leave, federally mandated equal pay, and subsidies for housework, what did women have to complain about? In 1960, Connie gave up and moved to Ann Arbor, got a job as a secretary, and mostly gave up her creative work. X’s arrival in 1971 diverted Connie from her plans to drive her Volkswagen off a cliff she’d chosen in Canada.

When X and Connie met, each had reached a sort of impasse that seemed to winnow their focus on each other. While Connie had been discouraged enough to believe the impasse was the sole destination of her life, X was young enough to believe she could hurtle herself over it. “I only know that I have to create a powerful monster, since I am such a weak one,” X wrote in the journal she kept while living with Connie. “I have to create a monster apart from me, someone who knows much more than I know, who has a world view, and does not get such simple words wrong.”

Early in December 1971, Phil Converse stopped by to check on his sister, and wrote a letter to his mother about what he found:

There’s this young woman, a Dorothea [sic] Eagle, living with Connie for now. Must be half her age. I think it’s a little strange to just take in a woman we don’t know (homeless?), but it does seem the company has done Connie some good. She has to set her mind on something or else she gets all flustered. She’s cooking in earnest—there was even a big cake under a dome, like a holiday.

When Connie admitted she’d once been a musician, X asked her new friend to sing for her. Connie refused. X kept asking; Connie kept refusing. It was only after X found two tape reels in a closet labeled MUSICKS VOLUME I and MUSICKS VOLUME II—Connie’s home demos and the recording of the Deitch salon—that X first heard her talent. Arriving home from work that evening, Connie was chilled to hear those old recordings again, a past self sneaking into the present.

It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage.

This sort of gesture—to force someone into feeling what they wanted to avoid—was something X did all her life to anyone she felt she had the right to change. It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage. In her notebooks, Connie recalled that odd morning that her friend Dorothy found a new strategy to force Connie to become (or recall) the sort of person X wanted her to be:

It was a kind of drag, I guess. She layered all these clothes on, kind of stooped a little, wore this wig and dark sunglasses. She came out of her room looking like that and we sat there, eating breakfast. I remember saying, “Well, good morning, and what’s your name?” And she said, “Bee Converse.” And I asked if that meant she was my sister and she said, maybe. My brother, my wife, my husband? Cousin? She kept saying “Maybe” or “Who knows?” And later she went to the piano and started playing “The Ash Grove” and other songs. I sang with her on some of them, something I hadn’t done in years. I didn’t know she played piano. But that was just how we went about things—not having to explain ourselves.

Connie’s brother, Phil, stopped by unannounced one evening that winter and introduced himself to Bee, not realizing she was Dorothy. Having fooled someone without even trying, X had the confidence to go out in public as this new persona. One night in March 1972, Bee joined Connie and a few of her co-workers at a pub. With their two-decade age difference less apparent beneath the costume, they were pegged as a couple right away.

Eileen Ellman, who worked with Connie at The Journal of Conflict Resolution, remembered, “It was so clear how happy they were, would’ve been silly to point it out. But nobody had ever seen Connie Converse with a date. It would be like seeing a cat wearing shoes . . . Then to hear that they had the same last name—where they married already? Or cousins? They tried to shrug it off—just old friends—but nobody was buying it. You could tell from the way Connie looked at her. Something was going on.”

In X’s archive, I could find only one note from Connie, an inscription in a Thomas Bernhard novel: “We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.” When X told Connie she was planning to move to New York that spring, Connie discouraged her, insisting that New York was a cesspool of hacks and frauds who just want fame at any cost.“ Anyone will stab you in the back to get ahead,” she said, “and no one wants anything to do with you unless you’re ahead of them in the game, and even then what they most want is to defeat you, take your place . . . That’s all it is, a place full of people eating. Just people eating everything right up.”

But Connie’s objections were no use. At the end of March, X hitchhiked away as suddenly and easily as she’d arrived. Connie stayed in bed, barely ate, lost her job, stopped bathing. Her brother came by to check on her, but she wouldn’t speak to him. A month later, she found several letters in the hill of mail piled up at the front door:

Dear Connie,
Please get in your car and drive to New York City. My address is 23 Grove Street.
Your Friend,
Bee Converse

Dear Connie,
It would do you some good to get out of Ann Arbor. My address is 23 Grove Street in New York City. Bring your guitar.
Your friend,
Bee Converse

Dear Connie,
See my other letters. I am not kidding around here. 23 Grove. New York, NY. That’s Manhattan.
Your friend,
Bee Converse

X also sent a letter signed by “Dorothy”—three pages of yellow stationery in bulbous cursive. “I cannot imagine what might be keeping you in Ann Arbor when there is so much life and opportunity for you here. It is certainly not the same city that you left in 1961. You won’t recognize it. You may not recognize yourself, either. Bee complains of your absence all the time,” she wrote. “People do cling to consciousness, and under the most dreadful circumstances. It shows you that it is all we have, doesn’t it? Waking up, the first and the last privilege, waking up once more.” She must have known, whether explicitly or implicitly, how close Connie always was to suicide.

That night Connie got out the shoebox where she’d hidden the few things that X had left behind—a lighter, a barrette, several bobby pins, and a clipped-out article from a magazine, a profile of a man who’d been orphaned when his unmarried mother murdered his wealthy father. The story, Connie remembered, had been headline news when she’d first moved to New York—a crime of passion, gossip fodder—but she wasn’t sure what interest X would have had for it. The next morning, Connie pocketed the article and the lighter, clipped the barrette into her hair, left a note for her brother saying she was going to find a new life for herself, and drove to New York City. Phil would not see his sister again until he was called in to identify her body, nine years later, in 1981.

As I tried to make sense of X’s relationship with Connie, and as I failed to uncover the truth of it, I sometimes recalled—though I wished I could forget it—that old fight of ours about romance over age gaps, and X’s claim that my personal experience had warped my ability to see this issue clearly. With them, however, expectations were inverted—Connie was the one helplessly in X’s thrall, despite her being twenty years older, and I wonder now if X had always been a thousand years older than anyone, that everyone she ever loved was always a child to her, always something to be molded, to control. Or perhaps it’s all much simpler than that: we cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

10 Tips For Applying to Writing Residencies

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Like a lot of writers tackling a book project, I’ve applied to a few residencies with mixed success. But it was only this year, when I reviewed applications for a residency that I had previously attended that I really started to see what makes some applications fail and others really succeed. 

Most of the factors that decide a person’s acceptance are settled before they write their application— namely, the quality of the work, its alignment with the mission of the residency, and their personal qualifications as a writer. But a weak application can get a very established writer passed over with little more than a second thought, while a strong one can send an emerging writer to the top of the short list. So what can you do to put your application in contention? 

1. Be specific about what you plan to do.

We know you’re working on something big. Maybe it’s not a book, but it’s still something hefty, like a series of essays, articles, or poems. Whatever the project, if it’s big enough to benefit from time at a residency, it’s almost certainly too big to do the bulk of the work during your time there. If only for that reason, it’s best to avoid limiting your statement of purpose to something general like “I plan to work on my book.” Say something more specific like, “I plan to finish chapters seven and eight of my book,” or “I plan to complete a revision of my book, with a focus on dialogue.” 

All of us reviewers are alumni and staff of the residency, so we’re quite familiar with the place and the community that’s formed around it. One of the questions on the tops of our minds is how you might fit into it. Often, when discussing applications, I found myself and my fellow reviewers saying things like “I could imagine this person there.” When we could see the person working, that was a good sign for the applicant. Telling us, specifically, what you plan to work on helps us get there. 

2. Lean into your work over your resume.

As a reviewer, I was more interested in the projects the applicants planned to work on.

A residency might be a career milestone, but it’s not a job. Your professional achievements until then give us a sense of who you are. But as a reviewer, I was more interested in the projects the applicants planned to work on. Often, my co-reviewers and I encountered people with impressive careers but who shared very little about their projects. I couldn’t tell if they had just chosen to say very little about their project, or if they hadn’t worked on it enough to know themselves what it was really about. Often, those applications left me wanting to know more about the applicant’s project, but, lacking a real sense of it, I was reluctant to voice my support. Talk about your work and why a residency is a place for it and not just a place for you. 

3. Choose a sample that relates to your chosen project.

Residencies will often ask you to send your best work as a work sample. Absent more specific guidance, I recommend you pick something related to the project you plan to work on while you’re there. A residency is generally neither a time to start a new project nor a time to finish one. It’s a time to work through the long middle of a project, or, often, through one of its junctures, when research turns to writing, or writing turns to revision. As tempting as it is to send something that’s finished for you, it can be just as— if not more— beneficial to send something that isn’t, along with a note in the accompanying essays explaining where the project stands and how you plan to move it forward. What questions remain unanswered for you? What problems are you still trying to work out? If those mysteries still interest you, there’s a good chance they’ll interest us, as well. 

4. Be honest and show a range of emotions.

You care about your work, you’re excited about the chance to dedicate yourself to it. Maybe you’re also stressed by the day-to-day of life, but you’re also feeling a sense of resolve as you plan to work on it more. Even for professionals, creative endeavors into your life can be messy and emotionally complicated, but being honest about that can make you relatable. One applicant told us she had been working on the book while taking care of her parents. She had managed to make a lot of progress over the last few years, but finding the spare moments had been difficult lately. Still, she said, she needed to see this book through to the end. A residency made sense to her, and it made sense to us, as well. A residency can be a humbling experience: other people have read your work, thought about it seriously, and cast a vote of confidence in you and your project. When applying, it can help to show humility and not just confidence. 

Residencies want to know that you see their special qualities and that you want to take part in them yourself. 

5. Say why now, in particular. It’s always a good time to write in a beautiful setting. But when you’ve been working on a single project for years and you feel stuck and need to rejuvenate your spirit, or you find yourself on the precipice of a creative outpouring, it’s a very good time. If that sounds like you, say so in your application. Even a short residency can be a life-changing experience, a moment when your project finds new life. Show us that you and your project are ready to meet the moment. 

6. Explain why you want to go to this residency, in particular. Every residency is a chance to step away from your daily business and work on something you care deeply about, so what (other than an impending deadline) drew you to this one? A few of the applicants I encountered this cycle told us their project was set in a landscape similar to the area surrounding our residency. For them, the “Why here?” question had an obvious answer. Not every place you’ll apply to will be so perfectly aligned with your work. Even so, residencies want to know that you see their special qualities and that you want to take part in them yourself. 

7. Embrace the communal side of the experience.

A residency isn’t just a nice desk with a view. For a little while, it’s also a place to live— typically in a community of other writers and artists. While you’ll spend most of the allotted time working alone, for the rest of the time, you’ll be with other people, cooking, eating, going for walks, talking about your work.

Don’t assume a selection committee will assess your writing via your work sample alone.

The community spirit can extend beyond your time on site. Residencies often form communities of alumni— people brought together not just because they spent some time in the same place, but because they’ve all elected to make their own uphill journey through a big creative endeavor. The social side of a residency isn’t a burden. It’s a perk, and residencies want you to think of it that way. At the very least, they want people who will take their role as a temporary member of a household seriously, and not leave their dishes in a pile in the sink. For an application, a residency might ask you to write a little bit about your experiences with communal living, but even if it doesn’t, it’s good to signal that you don’t mind living and working alongside other people. One (subtle) way to do that? 

8. Consider your application essays another writing sample.

While your work sample might be the single most important part of your application, bad essays can overshadow it. When a statement of purpose or an autobiographical statement falls way below the allotted word count but leaves a lot of questions unaddressed, or it just feels a little rushed, it makes us wonder why. It’s normal to dislike writing about yourself, but good writing can happen anywhere, including in an essay you’re reluctant to write at all. Don’t assume a selection committee will assess your writing via your work sample alone. If your essays are well written, that counts for your application. If they’re not well written, or not even thoughtfully written, that counts, also. Treat this portion like any other writing assignment that matters to you. Give yourself time, take it seriously, and proofread it a couple times before sending it. 

9. Follow the rules.

This one sounds obvious, but reading applications, I was surprised how often it came up. Applications are a limited way to get to know a person, so admissions committees consider not just what a person wrote, but how they wrote it. When a residency gives applicants 2,000 words for a statement of purpose and they turn in twice that many, that’s not a good sign. Maybe they refashioned an application for another residency without considering the requirements for ours. Or, maybe they saw the rules, but think they’re too important to have to abide by them. That’s not good, either. Following the rules won’t win you a lot of points with the selection committee, but ditching them entirely can make for a really bad first impression. 

10. Keep applying.

We passed on many, many qualified applications this year. Small details make the difference, so keep writing, and keep applying. As you write more and your writing improves, your work samples will as well, and as you apply to more residencies, you’ll get a better sense of how to present yourself to each of them. If you don’t get in anywhere, sign up for their newsletters, mark their deadlines in your calendar, and keep trying!

I Never Made a Living Wage When I Worked in Publishing

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I want to tell you a story:

Years ago, when my son was in preschool, I found myself in the human resources of big Harry Potter rich publishing house. I’d crossed the bridge from the New Jersey suburbs we’d found ourselves in. At the time, my husband and I were renting the top floor of a house in one of the toniest suburbs in the county. I didn’t have health insurance, but my husband and children did—through my husband’s home country. We’d just come from there, flown overseas, where things had been easier and cheaper. Childcare was subsidized and my son was happy and I was researching my first novel. But my husband’s green card had been denied and we were broke.

It goes without saying—the need for money is why one works.

To save money a friend of ours lived in the dining room and we had one car. In this tony suburb full of backyard structures and moms who lived in their perfectly manicured fiefdoms, where the only people in the streets were lawn care workers, we stuck out. I didn’t have a Gucci bag. Our car was not German. The roommate in our dining room gave everyone pause. Even if staying at home had been my thing—and it wasn’t—we didn’t have the money to do the things other stay at home moms did. For my son there were no camps, no mommy and me, no enrichment activities like the ones the kids around us took advantage of. I didn’t have money for pilates or yoga or Botox. We didn’t even have money for a proper flat for just the three of us. It was time to I went back to work.

The HR person scrutinized my resume. She asked why I’d changed jobs so frequently, not staying more than a year in any one publishing job. Because I needed to make more money, I told her. I almost rolled my eyes. She knew as well as anyone how low the publishing salaries were. Her eyes narrowed: Are you only interested in the money? My face flushed. Of course I was interested in the money. It goes without saying—the need for money is why one works. I told her that I’d gotten into publishing because of my love of books and the industry. Publishing had been my first real job, my only real job, I told her. I’d taken a few years off to have my son and we’d moved overseas so we’d have family help. But now I was back and I wanted to work.

I didn’t get the job, which was for the best, financially speaking. I’d done the math. My pay would hardly cover the child care costs and travel into the city. In the end, I left publishing. I took a job close to home where I worked as a nurse recruiter. My hours were flexible and no one cared that I hadn’t worked in a couple of years. I made commission. I talked to nurses all day and I did this until my daughter was born. There I was never shamed for working because I needed money.

When I started out in New York City publishing I made 19k a year, 25 years ago. This was a standard salary for editorial assistants and here’s a fact that won’t shock you—it wasn’t a living wage, even then. During that period, I lost my apartment. I squatted in an abandoned building in an apartment that was open to all who wished to enter. I starved. My mother had offered to send me a plane ticket home but refused to help me stay—I decided on my own to do so.

I had one room with a door I could lock. I showered at the Y. There were weeks before my next paycheck where I lived off the dry oatmeal in the office kitchen, learned to order soup and ask for extra bread on dates. I never passed a payphone without checking the coin release for abandoned change. I pushed aside washing machines at the laundromat for stray quarters so I could afford a bagel, a phone call, a subway ride. When a man at a street fair asked me to be a call girl I had a big long think on it before I finally said no.

When my mother had stage four cancer when I was 10, we were not financially ruined. Her union job protected her.

I wanted to live in New York, wanted to work in publishing. I wanted to be a writer. I lived close to the bone, and I had no social life. Getting cheated by a cashier meant the difference between eating a hot dog off the street or starving that night. After some time, I left that publishing house for another and made a few thousand more. But when I left that first job, I also left editorial acquisitions—the sort of job that decides what books get published. I worked for managing ed, copy editing those already acquired manuscripts. Managing editorial departments, production departments, publicity—these jobs generally pay more than acquisitions—which are generally more prestigious and which might explain the sorts of books that we’ve always seen published, continuing to get published. With the extra money, I got out of my squat. I had managed to save the prerequisite first and last month’s rent and some extra money for a bit of furniture, and moved to a room downtown. This was the late 90s when there were still cheap rooms to be had in Manhattan. Then I jumped off to a dotcom that was short lived, but where I finally was paid a living wage. My last boss in publishing asked me how much I would make at the dot com and when I told her, she laughed. “You wouldn’t make that in ten years here,” she said. She might have laughed, but to me it was serious.

The big five publishing houses are owned by huge conglomerate companies. Harper Collins, recently on strike, is owned by News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s company. They pay these wages because they have always paid these wages—not because they can’t afford to pay better. Publishing is the sort of job that wealthy white people historically did, no one else need apply. Coming from greater Detroit (and not the parts that typically wound up in places like New York City), I had not understood any of this. If I had, I’m not sure I would have come at all. I was willing to pay the enormous price of moving to New York City because I’d been too ignorant to understand the price that would be exacted of me.

My father and mother had followed their calling. Both believed there was something noble in their professions. My father was a reporter who refused any editor or management position he was promoted to. His union job was safe and he was a union man until he retired. My mom was a Detroit public school teacher. When my mother had stage four cancer when I was 10, we were not financially ruined. Her union job protected her. Moving to New York City I hadn’t realized that my dream job was a job for people who had trust funds, or, at the very least, a parent or spouse who helped with rent or paid off credit cards. Not for people with parents who would not, or could not, help them.

…since those years, every interaction I’ve had in the publishing world has reminded me of the difficulties I faced.

Here is a fact: if a person cannot make a living wage in their job, even living as frugally and close to the bone as I was, then the wage is too low.  It’s unconscionable that publishing—especially those with big umbrella corporations like News Corp or the late Sumner Redstone’s company, Paramount Global, continues to pay their publishing employees so little. When I looked at starting salaries of publishing positions today, I was shocked to see they are exactly as low now as they were then, adjusted for inflation. Only now things are much harder. I lived without cable television or a cell phone back then. It would be impossible, especially during the past three years of remote pandemic working, for anyone to live without internet.

It’s especially unconscionable in light of what we know now—and let’s be real, we knew it then—that low wages keep out those with less means, and those from marginalized communities, in particular. This kind of gate-keeping is deeply problematic, and the exact opposite of what publishing should be doing.

Ever an optimist, I believe publishing can change. It’s heartening to watch social media support for these young, underpaid workers. There was no such thing all those years back when I was broke and struggling. We were told that all editorial assistants had it hard; we were told we were paying our dues. And we were told that it was necessary.

A passion alone for literature and books does not pay the rent.

I’d love it if we left that line of thought behind. No one deserves to be underpaid and unsupported. I am now on the other side of the publishing equation, as an author. My life is far more comfortable than it was then thanks to circumstances that had nothing at all to do with the publishing industry. But since those years, every interaction I’ve had in the publishing world has reminded me of the difficulties I faced. I wouldn’t wish those difficulties on anyone. Junior publishing has banded together because the low salaries and workloads were untenable and because rather than leave the industry, as I and so many others did, they’re organizing unions and spreading the word. One publishing house has settled with its striking workers and a few others have committed to raising starting salaries. These are small, but good, steps.

But here is another fact:

People work for money. They go to jobs in order to get paid. Unless they are wealthy, our society demands this from them. A passion alone for literature and books does not pay the rent. It might be easy for publishing executives to forget that reality once they’ve reached a certain income bracket, but it makes it no less a reality. I sat in the HR department of that publishing house because my family needed money, not because I loved books so much. I took that nurse recruiting job because my family needed that money. It goes without saying that nearly everyone in publishing loves books—it should also go without saying that everyone in publishing deserves a living wage.

In “Vintage Contemporaries,” A Young Woman Reconciles Her Idealism With the Realities of Adulthood in New York City

Posted on by Jo Lou

In 1991, 22-year-old white Wisconsinite Emily is the beleaguered assistant to a literary agent. She wants to be a writer, she loves Literature with a capital L, and she’s unimpressed by the feel-good writing of her mother’s college friend Lucy, who wrote a few novels for a small press. But Emily appreciates that Lucy is a real author who she might be able to take on as a client—and that Lucy acts as a sort of adulthood midwife, taking Emily to cocktail parties and teaching her to cook. Meanwhile, Emily becomes friends with another Emily, a brilliant, volatile, and effortlessly cool aspiring theatre director who lives in a formerly abandoned East Village squat that was rebuilt by its tenants, and that always seems to be just days away from being seized by the NYPD. In deference to her intense new friend, Emily becomes Em.

15 years later, Em is estranged from Emily, focusing her attention instead on her new baby and feeling simultaneously wondrous, panicked, and exhausted about motherhood. Em, who checked in with the office every day of maternity leave, goes back to work as a senior editor at St. Martin’s Press, trying to publish reprints of Lucy’s books and discovering the problems at her workplace, as well as her place in them—that a thick skin developed from crying in the office bathroom might not be the badge of honor she thinks it is. As Em ages and the city gentrifies, she figures out what she wants out of friendship, work, and art, and her responsibilities to each.

As a suburbs-to-NYC transplant who was an assistant at St. Martin’s in 2006, and as the mother of a young child, much of the book rang true for me—the shitty apartments, the alternating stress and excitement of being a publishing assistant, the pretension about what constitutes coolness and art, and the “I love my baby” mantra of a doting, flailing mom.

Dan Kois and I talked about writing Vintage Contemporaries, his previous career as a bad literary agent, the gendered assumptions in stories of female friendship and new motherhood, writing about race as a white person, and how the working conditions in publishing have only gotten worse.

Katy Hershberger: I really liked Vintage Contemporaries. One of the reasons that it resonated so much with me, I think, is because I worked in publishing for a long time, including at St. Martin’s at the time when Em was there.

Dan Kois: Oh my gosh. Please tell me what errors I made.

KH: You didn’t! I think that your descriptions of the [publishing] houses and those jobs was really spot on. Like St. Martin’s being less formal and less respected, more commercial, than a lot of other publishers. I’m curious how you captured all of that.

DK: It’s totally imagined. In terms of the very specific St. Martin’s of it all, I worked in publishing long, long ago and sort of have this image of St. Martin’s as a slightly scrappy, slightly less formal place where it might be a little bit harder to smuggle the literary into what seemed like a publishing mandate that was more commercial. But that was purely my external view. And so I was trying to sort of imagine my way into what it would be like to work there if you were a slightly literary person who also acknowledged the realities of commercial publishing.

KH: What was your experience in publishing? You worked as a literary agent?

DK: While I was doing an MFA in the late ‘90s, I was an agent’s assistant in Washington, DC. And then a junior agent sort of trying to get my own clients and my own projects. I had a few minor successes and one sort of large success that turned into an enormous personal failure. And then within a few years, I stopped working and publishing because it seemed clear that being an agent specifically was not for me, and I was not good at it. I took it too personally when I was unable to sell things that I really believed in. And I really struggled with the way that it required a certain kind of knowingness—a certain kind of always seeming like you are a step ahead of things and that you were constantly playing a game, and I felt like I was not good at playing that game. And I didn’t enjoy faking at parties that I’d read every book that everyone mentioned, or navigating lunches that were semi-social but also actually commercial. I just didn’t feel good at that. It made me unhappy. And also my clients were not that happy because I was not securing good deals for them, because it turned out I wasn’t a good agent.

KH: Do you feel like some of that feeling is specific to publishing or specific to agenting? Maybe it’s because I started out in publishing and I’ve done it for so long, but in some ways that sort of feels like all of New York or maybe just adulthood and business.

DK: Maybe, and I’m sure that there are aspects of any business environment you get into where there’s a certain amount of faking it ‘til you make it that is involved. But I think that I’ve been lucky enough to end up in a professional world now in which curiosity and a willingness to admit to stuff that you don’t know is actually an advantage rather than a liability. In the sense that journalism tends to reward that kind of curiosity. And also, maybe, I do wonder if the fact that the things that I was having to fake and the people I was having to disappoint were in the realm of literature and books, things that really, really, really mattered to me, made it harder for me to stomach the baloney that I had to go through in order to feel like I was making some kind of difference.

KH: That it might be a little bit too close to how the sausage is made?

DK: Yeah, maybe. I certainly was not good at writing. For example, when I was in that world, I really didn’t feel like I could write anything of my own because every day I felt like I was being exposed to this universe of people who are constantly engaged in analyzing and critiquing, and judging the worth of writing, and I couldn’t even bring myself to make something in the period when I was working in publishing. And that was very frustrating to a person who, I should add, at that time was in an MFA program completely failing to write fiction.

KH: It’s such a disconnect, trying to be a writer and then working with writers.

I didn’t enjoy faking at parties that I’d read every book that everyone mentioned, or navigating lunches that were semi-social but also actually commercial.

DK: Yeah. You know, in journalism I haven’t found it as hard, maybe because journalism is so specifically process-oriented. Like in journalism, there’s very little of “I am being precious about my precious words.” Because that is not the way journalism works and no one has the budget to be precious with your precious words. And so I’ve been able to make my own stuff while doing journalism in a way that I wasn’t able to while I was working in books.

KH: You’ve written about the awkwardness of publishing and promoting your book during the HarperCollins strike [which lasted 66 business days before reaching a deal with management], and your support for the union. Reading this book and being in this moment during the strike, publishing feels very “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Employees are asking for the same things that they were asking for decades ago and that your characters are dealing with, or in some cases perpetrating. I’m curious about your view of this moment in publishing, in the context of the book.

DK: I don’t think it feels like “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” They seem worse. I don’t know if you noticed, but the characters in my book have their weekends off. They don’t really have to deal with a lot of email at night. So it kind of seems worse now. It certainly seems worse than when I was in publishing. And it is true that the things the young publishing characters in the book face—having their work feel unappreciated, and being underpaid, and facing low-level or high-level kinds of abuse in the workplace—are definitely not gone, but they also seem to have been added to, in the way that almost every job I know of has been made substantially worse in the last 20 years by having to be constantly available, and the shrinkage of every industry but the growth of every individual job so that everyone now is doing the job that once upon a time would be done by seven different people. So that all seems way worse. Sorry, that’s depressing.

KH: It doesn’t make it not true. 

I also thought a lot about how this book fits in with this long history of stories about female friendship, where there’s sort of one wild alpha friend and the other one’s more of a follower. Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, Julie Buntin’s Marlena… Do you think this kind of friendship is specific to women?

DK: I’m sure that can’t be universally true. I do think—and my agent made this argument to me when this book was in revisions—that thinking of these particular kinds of friendships, in the context of their literary precedents, is something that is somewhat unique to young literary women. That thinking to yourself, “which Ferrante character am I?”, thinking of yourself in the context of which one of this universal diametric am I that I’m intimately familiar with from the books that I’ve been reading all my life, does seem in some ways specific to women. At least I’ve never had that experience when I was in friendships that resembled these in different ways. So I don’t know that the friendship is specific, but I do think there’s something a little bit gendered about having these kinds of friendships presented to you over your cultural life, and then finding yourself inside one of them and having this way to contextualize the thing that you find yourselves in.

KH: So it’s more that women might be mapping their own experiences on to these kinds of narratives that they’ve seen.

Almost every job has been made worse in the last 20 years by having to be constantly available, and the shrinkage of every industry but the growth of every individual job that would have been done by seven different people.

DK: Right, or mapping the narratives on to their own experience. Finding in the narrative the way to contextualize an experience that they suddenly find themselves in.

KH: I have a similar gendered question about motherhood. Em’s experience of motherhood also felt very familiar to me. I have a toddler, and I think there’s a lot of writing about motherhood recently that kind of explains this feeling of love mixed with ambivalence and exhaustion, boredom and trying to figure out who you are in the context of this new role. Do you think that’s an experience specific to mothers, or is it similar within fathers?

DK: It certainly was my experience. I don’t know how it is for all fathers but that section, minus the very specific nursing complaints and the gendered return to work situation that she finds herself in, maps a lot of the feelings I had, the panic and anxiety and love that I felt during that time when my kids were really little. And which I think, in a lot of ways, my wife also felt and which tons of new parents feel. There are certain expectations and pressures that come in that time and remain incredibly gendered, and certain judgments that moms face that dads don’t seem to face. That’s very woman specific, I think, but this general sense of being overwhelmed with love and happiness, but also anxiety at the same time, definitely came from my own experience.

KH: That’s really interesting. I’ve wondered that a lot personally. There’s, blessedly, so much talk now about the challenges of motherhood and the sort of Nightbitch of it all. But knowing that that’s not necessarily specific to women is really interesting.

DK: I do think it’s like a lot of things: It is a universal human experience that is made 30% worse because of the patriarchy. But it’s nevertheless universal.

KH: I really felt like within this book, Em was sort of realizing her own whiteness, which comes in fits and starts. She starts out this uncomfortable girl from Wisconsin who’s never spent time around Black people, and then becomes closer to people who don’t look like her in this neighborhood, and then eventually marries a Black man, but has to be reminded that she’s still white and still makes white people mistakes. And I was curious about this part of her character and what that was like to write about as a white person.

DK: I think it has been a shared experience for many white people of my generation, coming to terms with the environments in which we were raised and our own discomfort with even talking about racism and our race even more broadly. I think it’s funny in a way to think about it as a bunch of old white people becoming woke. But in fact, for many, many people, one of the journeys into adulthood is truly understanding the way that other people live and view the world, or at least starting to, and starting to understand your own blind spots and shortcomings. 

I simply was not in a place in my life where I was willing to devote a lot of psychic energy and artistic work to shit that made me feel bad.

I was writing a book that was in some ways about starting out 20 and becoming older and learning about all the things that you didn’t understand when you were younger. And that’s been, I think, a really universal experience for a lot of people, that particular kind of learning and understanding. So it was fun for me to explore that and see what it means to grow at least a little bit on all these different fronts. It didn’t seem like you could write this book about this particular kind of generational change without thinking through that aspect of it.

KH: There really is so much of Em reconsidering a lot of her younger life and realizing her own missteps.

DK: Realizing the things that she was right about, and also the things that she was wrong about. And even reconsidering from the context of 38, the person you were when you were 33. A lot of her work experience in the later sections of the book is about her seeing her older self from the perspective of young people and coming to understandings that she didn’t think she would.

KH: Speaking of things that she was both right and wrong about, Lucy’s writing is something that Em didn’t respect a ton at the beginning. It wasn’t considered high art, and she eventually came around on it. And I was really struck by Lucy’s commitment to writing about good things. I’m wondering if that’s a philosophy that you share.

DK: It certainly was while writing this book. That was a pretty personal decision that I had to make in order to even get this book written. A lot of this book happened in very busy times in my life, when I had small and medium-sized children, when I was working hard jobs, and sort of fitting this into the cracks whenever I could. And I found, sort of like Lucy, I simply was not in a place in my life where I was willing to devote a lot of psychic energy and artistic work to shit that made me feel bad. And in some ways that felt a little bit like a cop-out to me, certainly to my 23-year-old self whose feelings about art were way more like Emily’s. I would have viewed it as a huge cop-out, but it was the only way I could do the thing that I wanted to do. And so I just decided that that was the kind of book that this was going to be. 

One of the things that made me happy while writing this book was embedding within the book that particular argument that books like this have value and are not necessarily lesser works of literature than books that reflect a different kind of anxiety or misery about living, or that confront an audience or even challenge an audience emotionally or psychically, in ways that this book simply was not interested in doing. I read a lot of challenging and confrontational books and really love them, but I also am coming as I get older to recognize the value in my life of cultural products that are about happiness, that soothe, that assuage, that don’t pander but that do meet an audience at the spot in their lives where they maybe are.

My Empty Ears Listen for the Shore

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Windpipe

Most throats are more
drainpipes than foghorns.

Happiness mimics the horizon,
its clarity dependent on distance.

An estuary froths
with a language of its own.

In stranded abalones
stranded ears thrive.

No wonder the water’s instinct
to haul ashore. No wonder
a seabird’s life demands to fathom.

Like no other, glut.
Let the word test its wings
against your wind.

Mind on Repeat

We call emotion the ways
we didn’t choose to think.

Under the night sky–if countless,
if really countless, the stars don’t count.
You do, and does.

How long it’s been to want
from scratch. Without an echo
of the past want.

So many sorry’s must feel sorry
they’re not redeeming enough.

Sorry for those who, by a leap
of faith, made love
for meal after meal without anyone
to say enough.

What's held
back comes
back in waves.

Soon there's no emotion worthy
of articulating.

On a Lighter Note

To know each flower
is mostly a stem.

Insects–the field, for they are
one and the same
from a distance.

In place of late fruits, simultaneous birds.

The sun lashes out
on the pond full of tadpoles, most
born to feed watersnakes.

Clouds drive off its margins.

The world’s filling up with them.

Was it not heavier before.

A Jewish Girl’s Slow Transformation into An Anti-Semite in WWII France

Posted on by Jo Lou

“entre chien et loup”

—French expression: “between dog and wolf,” i.e, twilight or dusk

So opens Tara Ison’s newest novel, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, set in WWII France throughout the time of the French collaboration with Nazi Germany. The book follows the slow, horrifying transformation of Danielle, a twelve-year-old Jew in hiding with a Catholic family in the rural farming town of La Perrine. Over the years of the war, Danielle assumes the false identity of a French Catholic girl named Marie-Jeanne, embracing her new life so entirely that she loses hold of what’s real and what’s pretend, forced to live in the liminal space, the twilight, between two identities until her former self is all but consumed. By the end of the book—and the end of the war—Danielle is a devout Catholic and anti-Semite with fascist ideals that betray the very people she belongs to. 

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf not only examines the calculated ease with which evil spreads and the ways propaganda perpetuates self-sabotage, but it acts as a timely warning in the midst of a global resurgence of fascist rhetoric and glorification of nationalism. Danielle is a character you cling to, even when it makes you sick, and this book is a harrowing reminder of how swiftly we can rationalize our own evil. 

“Maybe that’s the real reason for Confession,” Danielle thinks to herself in the final pages of the book. “Not for God, or priest, or anyone, to bless or forgive you, wash away your sins. Maybe they don’t ever wash away or disappear. But having to put yourself into words means you have to hear yourself. Look at yourself. Make yourself and who you are real.” 

Rachel Reeher: A pillar of the book is the process of performance becoming belief. At such a young and malleable age, Danielle, a Jewish girl, has to perform a level of anti-Semitism throughout WWII in order to stay alive. Can you talk about self-harming ideologies as an engine for the story? 

Tara Ison: Anyone forced to live under an assumed identity eventually struggles with this, especially when the stakes are life and death. Danielle is twelve when the war starts, a very precarious period of adolescence—the sense of self and identity are still forming, fragile. At the same time, she’s a somewhat bratty twelve-year-old, and when she’s first put in this situation, she has a naive arrogance that many adolescents have. She thinks she can handle it. She looks at it like a game of pretend, like she’s practicing for her future as an actress. But as the story goes along, she makes mistakes, she realizes she has to commit to this role, to take it seriously. 

Initially, she’s thrust into the world of a French Catholic family who have varying perspectives on the war. Her fake uncle and fake cousin believe that “foreign Jews,” or Jews who aren’t of French ancestry perhaps should be “returned to their homes.” They don’t see it as being taken away to be exterminated, per say, but there is an anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic feeling in the house. The person she’s closest to, her fake aunt, Berthe, is what I’d call casually anti-Semitic—we’re all children under God, they’re our brothers and sisters, but of course, they’re different from us. 

Danielle is able to brush that off for a time, but gradually she has to start transforming her own ideas in order to reconcile them in her mind. She tells herself they’re talking about other Jews, not her. It doesn’t take long for her own othering of Jews to begin. She knows she’s Jewish, but she’s begun the process of categorizing. There are the foreign Jews—the immigrant Jews who are taking jobs—and then there are French Jews, like her, the harmless ones. Once she starts down that path, the effects of it are insidious. The internalized anti-Semitism takes hold because it feels like a path to safety, to survival. 

It’s like holding a mirror to the French collaboration with Germany. France felt that choice was the only path to surviving as a country. For Danielle, performing anti-Semitism and later embracing it becomes her path to security. By then it’s too late.  

RR: There’s the tension between war and childhood, and the question of whether they can coexist. Danielle tries to remove all the childlike parts of herself, in order to be strong, to be an adult, to be capable. What was your approach to that dichotomy? 

TI: As Danielle settles into her false identity, the fear of making a mistake ceases to be a concern. It’s not a false identity for her anymore, there isn’t a mistake she can make because she really is this new person, this Marie-Jeanne, now. Responsibility becomes something entirely different for her in light of this transformation. She becomes a devout Catholic and starts to internalize the stories of the saint and heroine, Joan of Arc, starts to believe that not only does she, Marie-Jeanne, have a responsibility to save herself and her town, but in many ways to save her country, just like Joan of Arc.

Danielle’s responsibility is also invoked by Vichy propaganda. They were very clever at manipulating their children. Brainwashing, indoctrinating. They knew the children of today could be the fascists of tomorrow, and they wanted to instill in a young generation that responsibility to the state. To the point of self-denial, self-destructiveness even. Danielle buys into the message that she has a duty, an obligation as a young woman, to contribute to the regeneration of a new France. 

Finally, there’s the responsibility to her new family. She truly bonds with her fake aunt and uncle and she even grows to love them. The war continues and the scarcity grows—food is harder and harder to find, survival becomes increasingly difficult. This family took her in when she needed them, and as she matures, she feels it’s her responsibility to give back. 

There’s a paradox—she goes from being a bratty twelve-year-old to, in many ways, being a selfless, caring, responsible young adult, only it’s at the cost of so much. 

RR: At one point the narrative even says, “…but why did God punish them for her sins, make them suffer, all those innocent people? …why did he choose to save her?” Is it an inherently human tendency to place that kind of responsibility or blame on the individual? Is that line of thinking innately tied to religion?

TI: That moment happens late in the novel, when Danielle’s commitment to her new identity finally cracks and she’s forced to confront a connection with the people she’s betrayed and rejected. It’s survivor’s guilt, and the question she’s asking can be either a secular question or a question of faith. 

It can be hard to read books about the things we’re living, seeing on the news at night.

It’s easy to ask yourself why have I been lucky enough to have this job, house, resource, privilege, etc., when others don’t? For those committed to a faith, that question gets asked directly of God. It’s a short step from those questions of God to feeling a sense of responsibility yourself. If You’ve blessed me with life and survival when so many have died, it must be because I have a purpose. There is something You want me to do. Danielle doesn’t know what it is anymore. She convinced herself that she made choices that honored God, that honored the Catholic faith. Now, she’s seen that those choices didn’t result in “good,” that she herself was perpetrating evil. 

By the end of the novel, she’s having both a crisis of identity and a crisis of faith. She’s stripped of any moral certitude, any sense of self. She has nothing to believe in anymore. She’ll have to start all over, to reconstruct an identity for herself. 

RR: One of your epigraphs is from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who says, “To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that he’s doing good.” We often hear about the role denial plays in the mentality of the aggressor, like Solzhenitsyn is pointing at—a concept that’s especially relevant when discussing Nazi Germany. But I’m interested, too, in the role of denial for the victim, where forgetting the “truth” or what is “real” might be the only way to survive, to move forward. That feels like a strong undercurrent in this book, too. Is it something you were thinking about?

TI: There are tiers of humanity that embrace evil for the sake of evil. But the larger tier of people, and the scarier one because it’s so relatable, are the people Solzhenitsyn is referring to. We don’t want to think of ourselves as monsters. So there’s a psychological process of denial, of transforming our belief system in order to support and rationalize our actions so we can sleep at night. 

But Danielle is in a sort of in-between—one foot in the world of the victim and the other in the world of the aggressor. She has to convince herself that she’s doing what has to be done to protect herself, her family, her village, France. We’re all susceptible to that kind of rationalizing. It starts with tiny steps, tiny acts of othering. In WWII France, it began with tiny acts. Jews being turned away from non-Jewish restaurants. Once you start doing that, you’re committed to the path. At what point do you draw the line? At what point do you say I’ve gone too far? By then, human beings are being packed into box cars and carried to extermination camps. 

After Danielle has fully assumed the identity of Marie-Jeanne and suppressed or rejected any part of her former self, there’s a scene where she’s writing a letter to someone just after the Jews in the southern zone have been required to wear the Jewish star on their clothing. Initially, the southern zone wasn’t occupied by the Nazis, and Jews there weren’t made to wear the Jewish star, but as the war went on and the noose tightened around France, eventually they were. In this letter, Danielle wonders why people are protesting the new requirement. She wonders how it’s any different than a Christian wearing the crucifix, why it’s not something a Jew would be proud to wear as a sign of their faith. Part of that is naivety of what it truly means, but part of it is willful ignorance. By then she knows on a subconscious level what it means, but it’s easier for her to think of it as benign, and not as another step in the perpetration of evil, forcing the victim to self-identify. 

RR: Were there moments that were especially challenging to write?

We don’t want to think of ourselves as monsters. So there’s a psychological process of denial, of transforming our belief system to rationalize our actions so we can sleep at night. 

TI: The ending. Finding the right psychological place for Danielle to land was difficult. I wanted to end on a note of hope, but I’m always thinking about Charles Baxter’s perspective on epiphany—that it rarely happens in real life. We may have moments of insight, of self-awareness, but the truer story is about the journey and not the arrival at revelation. 

I wanted the door to open for Danielle just slightly, a crack. For her to realize she couldn’t continue as the person she’d become, but have no idea how to reconstruct herself in the world. She just knows she has to try. Pushing her too far into self-awareness would have rung false. That final scene required more drafts than I can count. 

I also spent a lot of time on the two scenes between Danielle and Lucien, a Vichy official. Both are grooming scenes. Lucien is a very skilled manipulator who knows how to take this girl’s vulnerable mind, calculate her weaknesses, and lead her gently down a path that will get him what he wants. Information. Allyship. Once someone understands what scares you, that’s the entry point. That’s how he gets in. The trajectory of those scenes was a balancing act. Lucien isn’t a major character in the book, but I found him fascinating. 

RR: You’ve written a book about the mass tolerance of evil. Even though the story takes place almost a century ago, do you find that narratives like these are especially timely for our own cultural climate?

TI: When I first started writing the book twenty-five years ago, I was primarily interested in the psychological trajectory of Danielle. It wasn’t until five or six years ago that I realized how disturbingly timely the narrative is. We’re witnessing a global resurgence of fascist dogma, radical right-wing ideologies, anti-Semitism. Have we learned nothing? It was disturbing in recent years to re-read sections I’d written ten years ago and feel like I was reading a headline from today, or the words of a speech from a current world leader. 

But a contemporary novel about what’s happening in the world today might feel too close to home for some people. It can be hard to read books about the things we’re living, seeing on the news at night. Some people don’t want to spend their reading time going there. But a novel that’s set almost a hundred years ago can allow a reader to access the same issues from what feels like a safer distance. I hope the relevance, the timeliness, the disturbing truth of what we’re reliving does sneak up on the reader. I hope it offers clarity on how it’s happened in the past, how it’s happening now, how it could happen in the future. 

Unraveling the Myths White America Tells Itself

Posted on by Jo Lou

When David Mura’s parents were eleven and fifteen, they were forced, along with their families, to board trains from the West Coast to remote camps in Minidoka, Idaho and Jerome, Arkansas, where they spent much of World War II. A few years back I visited what is left of Jerome— the same “camp” where my father-in-law, aged four, was imprisoned during what became known as the internment. The 120,000 Japanese Americans who were forced to leave the West Coast lost all their land and possessions from before. They also lost their cultural identity. “My dad’s white teacher in the Jerome, Arkansas camp said to his class, ‘When you get out of here you should try to be not 100% American but 200% American,’ ” Mura explains, “So in both conscious and unconscious ways, my parents took as the meaning of their imprisonment that their crime was their Japanese ancestry—and this involved both ethnicity and race, since neither the Italian nor German American (i.e. white) communities were subject to mass imprisonment. Accordingly my parents raised me to assimilate into a white middle class identity as they did.” 

As a consequence, Mura learned to “think like a white person…what I wanted to be,” worshiping patriarchal white heroes like John Wayne and Robert E. Lee. However, in his twenties, “as a result of reading Black writers like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, I finally admitted to myself that I was not white and would never be white.” Mura began a lifelong quest exploring his own racial and ethnic identity through essays, poetry, performances, and his memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sensei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. Throughout his career Mura has been exploring the ways he had been taught by whiteness to think about race, only to realize that these stories were filled with lies, distortions and denials.

In his latest book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, Mura examines works by Faulkner and Frantzen, popular films, as well as foundational narratives of white supremacy—Jefferson’s defense of slavery, the whitewashed history of Reconstruction, slavery’s re-creation via mass incarceration—to show how white identity is based on a shared belief in a false history which allows whites to deny their culpability in present and past inequities. Pointing out how implicit and explicit biases regarding Blackness lead to the murders of fellow Minnesotans Philando Castile and George Floyd, Mura demonstrates why we must as a culture change our internalized narratives regarding whiteness, because this ignorance, as most recently illustrated with the murder of Tyre Nichols, is literally a matter of life and death. 

Deirdre Sugiuchi: You live in Minneapolis/ St. Paul. You raised your family there. How did living in this community, the one time home of Philando Castile and George Floyd, inspire you to write The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself? Can you discuss the urgency you felt?

David Mura: I often drive the road where Philando Castile was murdered; I’ve even received a couple speeding tickets there (it’s a notorious speed trap). But as an Asian American I was never in danger the way Castile was.

George Floyd was also murdered a few miles from my home. My middle son, who works at a nearby high school, knows Darnella Frazier, the brave seventeen-year-old who took the video of Floyd’s murder. The demonstrations at the 3rd Precinct were close enough that I rode my bike there.  

When I began the essay about Castile’s murder in 2017, which started my book, I began reading widely about the issues of race in history, political science, economics, law, etc. I quickly realized how intricately the roots of his murder go back in our history—to the ontology of slavery and the division between whiteness and Blackness; to ideological defenses of slavery by Jefferson; to pseudo-scientific studies in the 19th century which viewed every crime by a Black person as evidence of intrinsic Black criminality (crimes by white people did not cast a stain upon white people but were regarded as the acts of specific individuals, often explained through socio-economic circumstances). The idea that the racism of the past—particularly the racist thinking of the past—has no influence on the systemic racism of the present is utterly false, complete nonsense, and is another example of whiteness gaslighting BIPOC Americans. 

That my book ends with an essay on George Floyd’s murder and a coda on the murder of Daunte Wright, is a tragic, cruel and telling irony— in the time since we have continued to see more murders and beatings of Black citizens. 

DS: Can you discuss how the prescriptions of whiteness, “the behaviors and beliefs that have served to protect and preserve the racial status quo since America’s beginning,” impacts the way white America narrates and interprets not just our racial past but also our racial present?

DM: America began with two contradictory goals: One was to establish freedom, equality and democracy. The other was to institute white supremacy and maintain white oppression of Blacks and Native Americans. White America is fine with telling its history through the lens of the first goal, but is decidedly not fine with telling its story through the second lens. In this, the experiences, consciousness and narratives of Black Americans are deemed un-American or too distant in the past for us to consider, unnecessary blemishes or accidents or even harmful, or at best secondary and minor.

Whiteness, as I define it, is a set of beliefs, ideas and practices which, from our very beginning, established white supremacy as a guiding ideology for white people. White people learn and practice this ideology both consciously and unconsciously—hence conscious or explicit bias and unconscious or implicit bias.

My book examines the epistemology of whiteness: white knowledge is always considered objective, valid, true and official; Black knowledge is considered subjective, suspect or invalid, untrue and unofficial—unless whiteness decrees it. You see this in the telling of our history, in Black patients telling doctors of their pain, and in the differences between the ways whites receive police accounts as opposed to Black accounts of police encounters (whether white or not, police uphold the rules of whiteness). In the past few years, it’s not so much that white America has started to believe the narratives of Black people about the police, but that technology—dash cams and cell videos—caught up with police racism. 

DS: In your chapter “Philando Castile and the Negation of Black Innocence,” you discuss how since 1619, Blacks in America, as slaves, were regarded as property, as less than human or inferior human beings, and how viewing Black people as property led to viewing Black people collectively as criminals. How did this mindset, of viewing Black people as inherently criminal, impact how the police officer viewed Castile? How did such biases influence the way Castile was covered in the media after his death?

DM: My book takes sometimes difficult academic theories, synthesizes them, and tries to make them comprehensible to non-academic readers—Afropessimism, Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, DuBois’s double consciousness, the ontology and epistemology of race, Gates’ Signifying Monkey, Critical Race Theory. I explore these theories because they help us to understand how deeply racial bias and Whiteness are embedded in the American psyche and how complicated that process is. The simplification of race by conservatives and even liberal whites is partly a way to obfuscate the workings of racism and partly a way to silence any racial critiques of whiteness. And yet, BIPOC understand, see and know the reality of racism in America. As one older Black woman said to Wilderson when he addressed a community meeting in the Bay, “I’m not a scholar like you, I didn’t go to college, but when you talked about slavery, that is how I feel. Like a slave.”

The idea that the racism of the past has no influence on the systemic racism of the present is utterly false and is another example of whiteness gaslighting BIPOC Americans.

Officer Yanez, who murdered Castile, had attended a police training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” which states that the first and primary duty of the police officer is to ensure their own safety and that that the officer’s role is like that of enemy troops in a foreign country—i.e., you are not protecting and serving your fellow citizens. To Yanez there was no possibility of seeing Castile as a fellow citizen, much less “Mr. Rogers with dreadlocks.” Castile was a priori cast in the tautology Black=criminal; whether this association was conscious or unconscious made no difference. Yanez was supposedly responding to his “feeling” that Castile, with his dreadlocks, looked like two Black men who had held up a local convenience store. But Castile was riding with his Black girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter—whom Yanez did not see. In other words, Yanez was incapable of seeing any of the Black occupants in the car. This inability to see the humanity of Black Americans goes back to the original ontology of slavery and white fear of Blacks. 

DS: Can you discuss the danger of proposed legislation like Senator Tom Cotton’s “Saving American History Act,” which prohibits federal funding from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary and secondary schools, and the various attacks DeSantis has made on education in Florida including the retraining of librarians and refusing to approve AP African American studies. How is this related to racial backlash historically? 

DM: Cotton’s “Saving American History Act” is a prime example of what he purports to not exist—systemic racism. So is DeSantis’ recent attacks on CRT, his administration’s canceling of Florida’s AP African American history, and his working to ban the term “systemic racism” in schools. Both white politicians are trying to silence the experiences, consciousness and narratives of Black people—and this, again, is proof that white supremacy and systemic racism continue to exist, both in our education and government, but also at an epistemological level.   

White America keeps saying the problem is not that white people have abused Black people throughout our history; no, the problem is that Black people keep remembering this history and telling it to white people—which somehow victimizes white people. My verb choice is deliberate: what whites like Cotton and DeSantis exhibit and what whiteness often embodies is the psychology of an abuser, who blames their victim both for the abuse and for not forgetting the abuse. 

Now it’s no surprise that Cotton, DeSantis and white politicians like Trump are engaged in a backlash against racial progress. Obama’s election became a signal to white America of the growing political and cultural power of BIPOC Americans; it made concrete the fact that some time after 2040 white people will no longer constitute a majority. We will all be racial minorities then. And white people are freaking out about their loss of majority status. 

But the same thing happened after the Civil War when, for a brief moment, Black people could vote in the South and won positions in government and began to exercise their rights as citizens. In our schools, we rightly celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. What we don’t examine, though, is how, throughout the post-war South, there were society wide efforts to re-establish the norms and practices of slavery; this involved not only violence and white terrorizing of the Black population, but complicated legal maneuvers and theory, racial pseudo-sociology and medicine, government laws like the Black Codes, discriminatory economic practices, racist organizing and the creation of the myth of the Lost Cause. This myth pictured the ante-bellum South as a valiant, noble way of life; it argued that the true causes for the Civil War were Northern aggression and the defense of states’ rights and not slavery, since Black slaves were not exploited but treated well and were perfectly fine with their lot. Eventually this myth became accepted by the North as part of the bargain the North made to ensure white and national unity. You can see this in the success of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and in Gone with the Wind, both the novel and the film. 

Similarly, after the passage of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s and efforts to desegregate public schools, the South began a campaign of backlash and resistance to these laws. The North followed suit when these laws began to be applied to Northern school systems. There was the establishment of systems of religious or private schools, as well as efforts which continue to this day to publicly fund private schools at the expense of public schools. In the South today there are schools and areas as segregated as they were in the 1950s.

Again white America is fine with telling the American story through the lens of racial progress. But it is not fine with telling the tale of white racial backlash, which has followed each and every move towards racial progress. 

DS: What do you think about the Moms for Liberty, a right-wing affiliated group who claim to be “fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government” and are leading book challenges nationally?

America began in the lie of white supremacy and it still has not abandoned that lie.

DM: In the recent controversies over CRT, conservatives like Moms for Liberty are so afraid of Black narratives that they believe the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges desegregating a New Orleans school in 1960 in the face of a hostile, shouting, spitting white crowd will hurt their fragile white children— rather than leading to their children to be inspired by a brave young Black girl. And yet these white conservatives never seem to be concerned for the “fragility” of Black children and the fact that almost every Black parent must tell their children narratives of police brutality and killings in order to instruct their children how to respond when they encounter police. White children are oh so fragile and need protection, but Black children, why would Moms for Liberty care about them?

DS: You end your book with a call to white Americans to transform their thinking about race.  You once undertook a similar journey. Can you discuss the rewards? 

DM: We all must work on knowing more, on actively combating racial bias and thinking, both in others and particularly in ourselves.

Baldwin stated, “The question of identity is a question inducing the most profound panic, a terror as primary as the mortal fall.” To question one’s identity is as frightening as confronting one’s mortality. And yet, white America, and indeed all Americans in our increasingly diverse country, are confronting experiences and people in our society that challenge our racial identities, the ways we think about and understand race. For white Americans this involves confronting how the ideology of whiteness has shaped their thinking, their beliefs, their practices, and the conditions of their lives. 

In this process, white America must go through stages much like what Helen Kubler-Ross outlined in On Death and Dying: 1) Denial; 2) Anger; 3) Bargaining; 4) Grief; 5) Acceptance. Most white conservatives are in the first two stages; white liberals in the third. They all are in a state of denial, and this denial keeps them trapped in weakness and self-deception.

America began in the lie of white supremacy and it still has not abandoned that lie. When individual white Americans admit this lie, they experience a sense of grief at first—they’ve lost their sense of innocence about America and themselves. But with acceptance comes not just psychological strength and courage, but a sense of relief: Oh, I no longer have to continue defending against the truth, repelling the truth, and thus, I no longer have to push away the experiences, consciousness and narratives of BIPOC Americans. When a white American does this, they come to see that we have never had a pure white America, that the American story cannot be told without the narratives of all of us. 

The shame white Americans feel over being white can only begin to dissipate when a white American accepts the truth about the racism in our past and the racism that continues to function in our country. What should come up then is less about guilt but responsibility and acceptance that we all have a role to play in making this country live up to its ideals. And then that white person can finally admit that the greatness of our country is due in part to the work of Black Americans to make this country more equal. Black Americans have always been on the right side of our racial history—and yet white America has never turned to Black America and said, “You have always been on the right side of history and white people did not recognize this. So now, in the present, we’re going to listen to you, we’re going to follow your lead.” To use Baldwin’s phrase, part of the price of this ticket is learning what BIPOC communities can teach white Americans about what it means to be an American. 

When white America finally does this, when it abandons its loyalty to white supremacist epistemology and narratives, we’ll know we’re on our way to real change and racial equality. 

8 Novels About Complicated Queer Relationships

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Queer fiction is experiencing a renaissance, with titles abounding across genres: literary, speculative, graphic, romance, YA. There are even a host of children’s books dedicated to introducing kids to LGBTQIA2S+ themes. Republican lawmakers hell-bent on legislating transness and queerness out of existence have (mercifully) no control over what gets published in our gay little corner of the world, and as long as these books keep getting published—and they will—LGBTQIA2S+ readers will continue to find themselves in fiction, a powerful antidote to heterenormativity and the conservative agenda. 

Happily, we’ve arrived at a time where books with queer characters aren’t just about coming out, getting bullied, or suffering dysphoria. That is to say, queer books aren’t always about queerness so much as they’re about queer characters getting up to the same kind of mischief straight characters have always been allowed to get up to. To be living in an age where queerness can be taken for granted in fiction is a true pleasure, because it means that the cishet experience is no longer the default. This opens things up tremendously: now we’ve got domestic fiction about lesbians and hard sci-fi starring trans people and all kinds of things in between. Instead of being the objects of pity, queer people are now allowed to be messy and complex, to travel to other planets, have situationships and exorcize spirits from haunted houses. 

These eight books are about the perils and rewards of relationships—the queerness of those relationships is both incidental and important. Incidental because, like I said above, we’re finally allowed to take queerness for granted in fiction; important because representation both celebrates and normalizes queer complexity. With Confidence, I wanted to tell a story of love and heartbreak that could belong to anyone, but happens to belong to a gay con artist who’s head over heels for a charismatic and unobtainable huckster of a pansexual lover. All of these books inspired me as I was writing, and I know they’ll continue to inspire generations of queer writers to come.

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

Set in the Pittsburgh of the 1970s, this book is like ice cream sprinkled with cyanide: delicious and dangerous all at once. Paul is a shy college student who develops an obsession with his classmate Julian, a lithesome Dickie Greenleaf type who need only walk into a room to become the center of attention. The two become secret lovers, longing to get out of Pittsburgh and start a life together without the nosiness of teachers and parents holding them back. But their love takes them in a truly toxic direction, resulting in an act of violence that had me gripping the book until my knuckles turned white. Think the creepiness of Leopold and Loeb meets the retro languidness of Call Me by Your Name meets the nerdy arrogance of The Secret History and you’ve got These Violent Delights.  

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Mathews’s sparkling debut follows a group of twentysomething friends in late aughts Wisconsin trying their best to figure themselves and their lives out. Sneha, the book’s protagonist, is a queer first-generation Indian American who lands a consulting job at a Fortune 500 company based in Milwaukee. She graduates college and moves to the strange, tiny city, where she lives above her toxic landlord and struggles to infiltrate the local lesbian scene. When she finally does find her way in, she meets Marina, a beautiful dancer whose Americanness both annoys and fascinates Sneha. The two begin a relationship, and, despite the all-consuming sex, Sneha finds herself struggling to match Marina’s needs for commitment and affection. The book’s sentences are like freshly-tumbled gems, and Mathews is a master when it comes to exploring the millennial condition. It’s no surprise this book was a shortlister for the National Book Award.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

Lawlor brings the early ‘90s to life in this hilariously irreverent picaresque about Paul, a person who can shapeshift among genders at will. At twenty-three years old, Paul is a stud in the Iowa City queer scene whose conquests are too numerous to count. His ability to casually switch out his sex organs allows him to float among in-groups: he goes from holding court with the burly daddies in Chicago leather bars to having some folksy lesbian sex at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Lawlor certainly knows their queer theory: references to Barthes and Butler abound, and Maggie Nelson herself called the book “hot.” Although Paul regularly pines for his dead lover Tony Pinto, the complicated queer relationship in this book is Paul’s with himself— for all his bravado and Tiresian abilities, Paul is still learning who he really is, and that takes quite a lot of trial and error. This book is for anyone who wishes Middlesex had more mixtapes and fanzines.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

This is a well-known classic, and no list of books about complicated queer relationships would be complete without it. David is a young bisexual American living in Paris: when we meet him, his fiancée Hella has returned to the United States and his ex-boyfriend Giovanni is about to be executed. The slim volume is a book-length flashback to the events leading up to Giovanni’s death. David and Giovanni meet in a gay bar owned by the flamboyant Guillame: Giovanni is handsome and penniless and David is compelled despite himself. When the two start sleeping together in Giovanni’s barren and messy bachelor’s flat, David struggles with questions of sexuality and masculinity, ultimately sleeping with a woman to “prove he’s a man.” But Giovanni clings to David, and when Giovanni is fired from his job at Guillame’s bar he becomes desperate, resulting in the commission of the crime that will lead to his execution. Baldwin’s time as an expatriate in Paris clearly informed this elegant and devastating novel, as did the fact that he was a giant of American letters.

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson

In this captivating novel, a nameless and genderless narrator who has trouble committing to relationships becomes obsessed with the beautiful and dynamic Louise. The narrator leaves their partner to pursue Louise, whose physicality Winterson renders on the page in her trademark sumptuous prose. A problem: Louise is married to Elgin, a research physician who thinks he’s on the verge of a breakthrough in cancer treatment. Another problem: Louise has cancer. Elgin confronts the narrator about the affair, talking them into leaving Louise so she can receive the treatment she needs. Heartbroken but convinced they’re saving Louise’s life, the narrator retreats to a cottage in the woods and takes a job at a nearby bar. When a local lesbian convinces them to go back to the city in pursuit of Louise, our narrator learns that Elgin’s intentions were less than noble, and all hell breaks loose. Winterson is a genius when it comes to understanding the body as text, accounting for every detail of Louise’s body with a bookish lover’s tenderness. 

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Many of Highsmith’s novels have been adapted for the screen, and it’s no wonder: the books are cinematic in their suspense and thematically timeless. The Price of Salt is no exception—it’s a story of lesbian love in a highly conformist era, when evidence of queerness was enough to lose custody of a child in divorce. Therese is a twentysomething loner in Manhattan with a job in a department store and a boyfriend she’s not attracted to. When Carol walks into the store, chic and self-possessed in her early thirties, Therese develops an instant crush. Carol gives Therese an address to send her purchases to and Therese sends her a Christmas card on a whim. Carol writes back, and an intense love affair begins. Unfortunately, neither of them accounted for Carol’s husband Harge, who’s onto the affair and wants a divorce, and who’s willing to wiretap a room to get it. Things get more turbulent from there, but Highsmith allows us the gift of a happy ending— all too rare in old school novels about queer love. 

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 

325 years in the future, a giant spaceship called The Matilda is carrying what’s left of the human race to an as-yet-unidentified new settling place. The ship is structured like a plantation, with Black and Brown people toiling below deck and white people enjoying the fresh air up above. Aster Grey is gloriously neurodivergent and queer—like all below-deckers, her body is essentially gender non-conforming, a fact that fuels much of the above-deckers’ policing and abuse of those below them. Aster is a healer, having trained with Theo, a mixed-raced (but ultimately white-passing) above-deck surgeon. Aster and Theo’s non-platonic relationship is strained when Theo asks her to help him save the ship’s Sovereign, who’s suffering from a mysterious ailment not unlike the one Aster’s mother suffered from before taking her own life. In helping Theo, Aster begins to piece together clues left in her mother’s engineering notebooks about The Matilda’s history, a project that fuels Aster’s desire for insurrection. The world-building in this book is exquisite, the essential queerness of its characters and their relationships is wonderful, and the brutality of Aster’s world—a space-allegory for the ravages of white supremacy—is brilliantly wrought. 

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin 

Set in the post-martial law era of late-’80s and early-’90s Taipei, this bittersweet cult classic is about a group of friends at Taiwan’s most prestigious university navigating love, queerness, and Intro to Chinese Literature. The book is structured as a set of notebooks written by a young lesbian who goes by Lazi: she’s head over heels for the resplendent Shui Ling but too lost in her internalized homophobia to keep up the relationship. Lazi and Shui Ling break up and Lazi goes on to graduate, get her first job, and date other women, all while keeping up with her very gay circle of college friends. But Lazi can’t get Shui Ling—who was her first love—out of her head. 

Intertwined with this fraught love story is a surrealist account of humanoid crocodiles that have begun to crop up all over Taiwan. They dress in human clothes and conduct themselves like humans, but they’re noticeably different— not unlike the queer people who populate Miaojin’s novel. There’s much to love about this book, from its punk epistolary style to its tender portrayal of queer friendship to the playfulness of its crocodile metaphor. 

I Dare You To Find the Joke in Pat Benatar’s Music

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I grew up in San Antonio, a place forever stuck in 1999, where nu metal still thrives to this day. When I left for college in 2005, I met a lot of new people and became enlightened and got into real music. My new friends and I listened to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors—all that classic stuff from the sixties and seventies—and made fun of people who listened to music we deemed to be garbage. We listened to the radio ironically and especially liked to dunk on artists from the eighties. They seemed especially ridiculous. Our favorites included Don Henley, Cyndi Lauper, and Van Halen, but one stood out above all others. One woman pushed the boundaries of lyrical silliness: Pat Benatar. On her 1983 hit “Love is a Battlefield,” she sings “We are young. Heartache to heartache, we stand. No promises or demands. Love is a battlefield.” A year later, she gave the world “We belong to the light. We belong to the thunder. We belong to the sounds of the words we’ve fallen under.” We laughed and mimed belting it out.

There was something unique about her, and I found myself listening to her on my iPod on the way to class and watching her music videos on YouTube when my roommate was gone. I was afraid he’d catch me and wouldn’t understand that I was watching ironically. I couldn’t afford that because I’d recently become a serious intellectual and artist. You see, I was taking Intro to Creative Writing. We read classic literary short stories, stuff by giants of the form like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, and Edward P. Jones. We were taught the tenets of serious fiction. We learned that less is more with dialogue and figurative language, and to avoid adverbs at all costs. I used another elective spot on a fiction workshop and kept writing. I tried to make sure my characters’ actions were well-motivated and believable, tried to keep things tight.

I tried to make sure my characters’ actions were well-motivated and believable, tried to keep things tight.

After I graduated, I found little time to write but wanted to at least keep reading. Without my professors and classmates, I no longer had anyone to tell me what authors to read next. I started following different book blogs on Twitter and checking out the “Forthcoming” sections on publishers’ websites. In early 2010, I scrolled down my feed and saw a striking black-and-white photo of a woman in a striped shirt, a defiant look on her face. It was a book cover for Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar, a memoir set to be released the following month. I laughed. It’d been a while since I’d thought of her, and all the songs flashed through my head. It was hard to imagine her as a kid, almost like she just came into existence fully formed. After a few weeks, I gave in and preordered it.

When it came in the mail, I dug in right away. Benatar was born into a musical family. Her mother, Mildred, was an opera singer who gave up her aspirations when she became pregnant with Pat. From there, she put her energy into her daughter, involving Pat in choir and theater from an early age. Through the guidance of her high school choir director, Pat became classically trained as an opera singer. She was set to audition for Julliard when her boyfriend decided to enlist in the Army. She writes, “Dennis pleaded with me to stay with him, to just blow off the audition, asking me not to go. And so I didn’t.” They got married and were eventually stationed in the Richmond, Virginia area, and Pat took a job as a bank teller. “Music faded far into the past,” she writes, “something I’d done in another life.” 

I get the impression that well before she left New York, she’d begun to feel disconnected from classical music. She talks about listening to 45s on her Victrola as a teenager with her friends. She writes, “When we were a little older, we got into the Beatles, and became obsessed.” Something about rock music resonated with her in a way that opera didn’t. It was wild and visceral. It broke all the rules she’d been taught about music.

In 2019, I moved to Illinois to begin my MFA. I was excited to have more time and energy for writing after spending the decade after undergrad with hardly any of either. I was back in the workshop setting, but this time with nearly three-hour-long classes and only five other people to help fill them. The tone was more serious. I was also in a class called The Craft of Fiction, where we could spend hours dissecting a single flash fiction piece. 

I learned a tremendous amount from the professors, but the solemn tone of the classes, along with teaching composition, left me in need of a release. I was lucky enough to find that in Chris, one of the other fiction students. We shared a love of fast food, psychedelics, and horror movies. He’d come over to my place once a week, and we’d take turns choosing the movie. I’d go with campy stuff from the eighties and nineties, whereas he favored whatever the newest release was. We usually felt the need to preface our picks with some kind of apology—“I’m not saying it’s a good movie, but…” It was similar to the apology I gave friends before turning on pro wrestling. We talked about watching indie arthouse dramas and Oscar-nominated movies. We “needed” to see them, but we never got around to it. There were too many horror movies to get through first.

We shared a love of fast food, psychedelics, and horror movies. He’d come over to my place once a week.

We started exchanging short stories outside of workshop, stuff we felt would get laughed out of the classroom. I gave him a story about the ghost of a dead SeaWorld orca, and he sent me a 9,000-word story about ghosts who wanted to be more present. They were funny stories, full of camp. I finally had someone to bounce ridiculous ideas off. I came up with a premise involving both D.B. Cooper and Bigfoot, and Chris encouraged me to see it through. These stories were fun but stifled in a way, hard to get through for reasons I didn’t understand. I assumed the premises just weren’t believable and tried to scale them back. I could have D.B. Cooper or Bigfoot in a story, just not both. I eventually set them aside and went back to writing stuff set firmly in reality. I needed to reel it in.

Benatar wasn’t a big Liza Minelli fan, but when her coworkers invited her to come with them to the concert in Richmond, she thought it might be a nice break from the monotony of her life. But it ended up being much more than that. “Something miraculous happened,” she writes. She wasn’t impressed with Minelli’s singing but by her showmanship, the way she performed and held the audience in her palm. Benatar was blown away, but at the same time knew she could do it, too. The next day, she quit her bank job and began seeking out singing gigs.

These moments are some of the most pleasurable for me when it comes to interacting with art, when I suddenly realize what someone is doing and what makes it work. One of these epiphanies came to me one night, sitting on the couch with Chris, eating calzones. It was my turn to pick, and I chose the lesser-known John Carpenter movie Christine. “It’s about a possessed killer car,” I said, and we laughed.

The opening credits played to the sound of a revving engine, and we looked at each other and smiled. We giggled when Christine, the classic cherry-red Plymouth Fury, claimed her first victims at the auto factory, smashing a man’s hand with its hood and killing another for ashing his cigar on the interior. Christine spares Arnie, the unsuspecting teenager who fixed her up, but soon begins to infect his mind. He goes from a nerd to cool to eventually paranoid and violent. Christine becomes jealous of his new relationship with Leigh, the prettiest girl in school.

We giggled when Christine, the classic cherry-red Plymouth Fury, claimed her first victims at the auto factory.

I settled into the movie and found myself rooting for Christine to take vengeance on Arnie’s bullies, and by the final act, I was rooting for Christine to be destroyed. She needed to be stopped. In the movie’s closing minutes, Arnie is killed while trying to run Leigh over with Christine before Dennis smashes Christine with a bulldozer. We then cut to a junkyard where Dennis, Leigh, and the detective watch as Christine is condensed into a cube. The detective looks at the teenagers and says, “I wouldn’t feel so bad if I were you two. You two are heroes.” 

“A real hero could’ve saved Arnie,” Dennis responds. This is incredibly silly, but Chris and I didn’t laugh. We were too worried about Christine coming back. I thought about Arnie before Christine got ahold of him. This is how I choose to remember him.

The legend Robert Ebert writes, “Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway.” He goes on to nail it down perfectly, writing, “One grin and the mood would be broken. But by the end of the movie, Christine has developed such a formidable personality that we are actually taking sides during its duel with a bulldozer.” 

Listening to Pat Bentar with this mind, I realized why her music works. Melodrama can transcend its genre by refusing to laugh at itself, thereby not inviting the audience to laugh along. We look to the artist’s attitude toward their art to tell us how we should feel about it. Pat Benatar does not wink at us. She isn’t Rick Astley dancing in a Canadian tuxedo or Cyndi Lauper leading a line of dancers through her house. You may still end up laughing at her, but it requires more mental effort to get there—you have to get there on your own. You’re just as likely to get lulled into the story.

Benatar does such a great job of coming off as a singular force of nature, but the truth is it took time for her to build up to this. Of her first demo tapes, she says, “They didn’t sound like rock and roll. My attitude, which I honed through performing, was solid, but vocal delivery was too controlled, too trained.” She wanted to take it further. She wanted to indulge. She only needed the courage to make the leap.

Acknowledging the absurdity of a piece is the creator’s way of preempting criticism, of taking a critic’s ammunition away, but it also places a ceiling on the work. A vision seen through without apology opens itself up to more criticism but allows for a greater experience among a portion of the audience. Benatar’s refusal to wink allows me to get into her music on a deeper level than I would be able to otherwise. It transcends the intellectual mind and taps into the part of me that takes romantic love very seriously.

One criticism I often received in workshop was that key points in my stories felt rushed through or skipped altogether. They were scenes where the reader expected some emotional climax or payoff. In my killer whale ghost story, there’s a point where the narrator and his girlfriend argue over letting a friend stay over, but the actual argument isn’t on the page. There’s the first hint of an argument coming then a section break. We pick up after the argument, with the narrator explaining that they aren’t on speaking terms. I tried to make up for this with humor—the hope being that if the reader is laughing, they can’t be thinking about whatever narrative issue came before. At the core of that hesitation is a fear of feeling exposed. I was afraid of openly trying to pull something off and failing. I’d avoided writing anything that might remotely feel contrived at the cost of being stilted and unfulfilling.

I was afraid of openly trying to pull something off and failing.

Confrontation and sincerity, for me, are the hardest things to write. My professors told me I needed more of it, but it needed to be done with a deft touch. A little bit goes a long way. I think this is great advice, but melodrama offers another option. Instead of dancing around a moment, you can push directly into it. In the video for “Love is a Battlefield,” a clearly not-teenage Benatar plays a teenager who gets kicked out of the house by her parents. “You leave this house now!” her father shouts. “You can just forget about coming back!” This is dialogue I could’ve never written. I would’ve dismissed it as cliche and generic, but the truth is, we use cliches when we’re angry. Regardless of the material, Benatar chooses to just sell the hell out of it.

Recently, I’ve been writing more genre-leaning fiction than purely literary stuff. Last month, I read the first volume of a shared-world anthology set in an eighties pro wrestling universe. It is not a book that aspires to literary acclaim. It is strictly for the enjoyment of wrestling nerds, wrestling nerds like me. I wasn’t sure if they were open to unsolicited submissions, but I knew I had to try. I sent them a noir short story involving an alligator wrestler who may have disposed of a body by feeding it to his gators. It’s a genre story full of genre tropes, set in the already-campy world of pro wrestling. The editors may laugh at it when they read it. They might screenshot segments and send them to their friends to dunk on. They may think it’s a joke, but I won’t help them get there.

Rebecca Makkai’s New Mystery Novel Is Anything But Cozy

Posted on by Wynter Miller

I don’t know if we deserve Rebecca Makkai, but we certainly need her. The author of four novels and a short story collection, she’s been bringing range, depth, and humor to the literary world for at least fifteen years. She’s a regular among the pages of Best American Short Stories and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her 2018 novel The Great Believers . . . you have to wonder if there’s anything she can’t do. (Maybe, you suppose, she can’t publish a delightfully cranky writer newsletter that muses on Zillow mansions where the living room looks into the bathroom—but you’d be wrong.) 

Her latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You, tells the story of Bodie Kane, a film instructor and podcast host who returns to teach at the boarding school she attended decades earlier. One of her students decides to give the Serial treatment to a murder Bodie happens to know a little bit about, that of her senior-year roommate, Thalia Keith. Thalia’s death in 1995 was pinned on the school’s athletic trainer, a man of color, and something about the conviction never sat right with Bodie. She wonders: Could she have done more to make sure the right person went to prison?

It’s a literary mystery, an examination of the power—and fickleness—of collective memory, and a fascinatingly frank attempt to reconcile recent shifts in the way we talk about power, privilege, and abuse with the way many of us grew up. There’s also a Twitter subplot, spot-on 90s references, and characters who feel so current, they might be texting you right now.

I video chatted with Rebecca about what it was like to write a mystery, what happens when she hits a writing wall, and how it feels to come face-to-face with your teenage self on a high school campus.

Kelly Luce: There are a lot of boarding school novels out there, but this might be the first written by someone who lives at one. What’s that like?   

Rebecca Makkai: I actually live on the campus of the high school I attended. It’s so weird: I met my husband in grad school, dragged him back to Chicago, and this happened to be where he got a job. It was originally going to be for three years. It’s been twenty-one years. I don’t teach here. I don’t have any responsibilities at all. I love it, and it’s been a great community for our kids to grow up in.

KL: How long have you been incubating this idea for a novel set at a boarding school?

RM: I think it was inevitable at some point. There’s a lot of movies and shows and books about boarding schools. There’s this aesthetic of like, it’s always October. The leaves are changing and there are ghosts. And everyone’s white and everyone’s in a secret society. All freshmen live in a single room with a fireplace. Everyone’s wealthy. Often these stories are written by people who don’t know what an actual boarding school is [like]. So, there’s always been an impulse to write one, partly from this corrective angle of: oh my God, you guys are doing it wrong.

Isolated groups of people are fascinating to write about. And then there’s the fact that this is where I went to high school. It’s interesting the way layers of memory can be tied to a specific place. I have been in this position of overwriting my relationship to this place. I walk around and see spots tied to things that happened to me as a teenager, but that same place now has new meaning because of something that happened to me there as an adult.

KL: Did you set out to write a mystery?

RM: Yes and no. It was always going to be a story about the past.

KL: I guess all stories about the past are mysteries, in a sense.

RM: Exactly. Now, that doesn’t mean it had to be a murder mystery necessarily, which is what it is.  But it did need to be current, and we’re in a wave of obsession over true crime. It’s been eight years since Serial came out and it’s only getting stronger. Of course, the obsession that the world has with true crime is absolutely not new. You can look back at people’s obsessions from the 1800s and they aren’t any different. Recently, there’s been a new wave of podcasts covering true crime and those have often been problematic. It felt worth exploring. So that made its way into the novel and then a million other things too.

KL: Everything feels so current in this book. What was it like to write something so present?

RM: The pandemic messed things up. I started the novel in 2018 and my original plan was to have all these characters reconvene for this trial. Up until the last minute, I was putting face masks on people, changing sentences from “she smiled” to “she seemed to smile.” Because of masks. It just didn’t work. I had to find a way to write around it, which ended up being what the story needed anyway.

KL: There’s this elegant layering of the main story, where Bodie goes back to her high school to teach a class on podcasting, with a character being canceled on Twitter. And there are lyrical interstitials about violence against women. There’s the occasional direct address to the killer that pops up—there are all these different modes of writing in one novel. I’m curious if that was part of the plan or if one started speaking to you and then the others had to kind of come in?

RM: I marinate in an idea for a long time before I begin to write. And so a lot of different things came together early on, just in my head, before I started writing. I have these “lyrical sections” that are kind of, you know, about violence against women. And the strategy of including those sections was really the solution to a problem. In the world of the novel, I really wanted there to be some big story in the news, something parallel to the Christine Blasey Ford testimony or the Stanford swimmer rape trial. One of those things that really gets everyone’s attention.

I wrote these contradictory sentences, like: “it was the frat guy one,” but no, “actually it was the swimmer one,” but actually, “it was the one where the senator did this thing.” And I realized that I could have those passages live in an alternate space where all those things could be true at once. And of course, they’re not literally all true, even within the framework of the book. It’s not like she’s actually asking us to imagine that all of these acts of violence against women are happening simultaneously. It’s more like: clearly there is one case that everyone’s talking about and she’s refusing to really say what it is because it doesn’t even matter what it is. Because there’s always one happening.  

KL: It sounds like instead of seeing it as a problem, you made it a strength.

RM: I feel like when we hit a wall in our writing, it’s never a sign that it’s a faulty project. There’s really no such thing, unless it’s offensive. Hitting a wall is just a sign that the writer needs to step back and do some analytical thinking. Often when writers get stuck, it’s because they need to stop and outline. But also, you could think your way through the problem by getting more creative. Come up with something weirder, a strange narrative move, something you didn’t plan. So I’m always grateful when I hit a wall because I’m not going to land on the really weird solution when everything is going swimmingly—I’m going to land on a breakthrough when things feel stuck.

KL: Since this is a novel about a true crime podcast, I have to ask, was the first season of Serial an inspiration for you?

RM: Oh, for sure. I was really interested in the logistics of that case. People needed to keep coming back together to testify in these various hearings, they were constantly revisiting these few days from 1999. But they all still seemed to live in Baltimore. And I was thinking, what would it be like if the murder happened in a place like a boarding school, where no one involved was actually from? They wouldn’t run into each other, and then they’d have to reconvene Big Chill style. But in this horrible, horrible way. The original idea for the book was going to be these high school classmates sequestered in a hotel.

KL: I love that. So much awkwardness.

RM: The first pages I wrote were this woman arriving at this hotel, back as a witness in this trial. And then I had to go back into what happened, not only what happened in the 90s, but [also], how did we get to this place where the case was reopened? It was so much backstory. So I said, I’ll write a couple chapters. But then prologue turned into the bulk of the book. Which luckily, like I mentioned earlier, let me avoid the pandemic.

KL: This is a story about kids but anchored in an adult perspective. I like how we’re invited to contemplate: how much can we even know, now, about ourselves as teenagers? Who was that person? And there are dire consequences in a case like this when you’re being called to testify about someone’s guilt or innocence.

RM: One of the weirdest sources of inspiration for this story was this episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon goes to her high school reunion. And she’s like, “Everyone was so mean to me. I was this outsider.” And then she talks to people and they’re like, “We were so scared of you. You were so judgmental.” And she just had this completely false impression, not only of herself, but of everybody else. And that touched a nerve. I think I was probably in a similar situation. I think a lot of us were like, “poor me, I’m a freak because I like . . . slightly different bands.”

KL: The teens in the novel are rendered so well—the way they think about relationships, or bodies, or technology, or art. As a non-teen, was that hard to nail down?

RM: Not really. I don’t teach high school, but I’ve visited many high schools to talk about my work and I’ve taught undergraduates. And teenagers really have an entirely different ethos now. A lot of that, of course, came out of what made us reexamine our adolescence and the things that happened to us. And the way that younger people will talk about something like consent on Twitter is one of the reasons that we’re able to look back and go, “Wow. We grew up so, so differently.”

KL: Do you read a lot of mysteries? Did you study mystery structure? How did you approach the question of tying up the plot versus being a credulous storyteller?

RM: I don’t read that many mysteries. I’ve certainly read some Agatha Christie. I would love to be more interested in so-called genre mysteries because I think they’d be very soothing. I read Tana French, Laura Lippman. They’re not formulaic. And you don’t always get the satisfying ending you want.

KL: Being soothed by a genre means, in a sense, knowing what’s coming. Like watching a Hallmark Christmas movie.

To write a tidy ending would have been to tell a lie about the American legal system, about the American carceral system.

RM: The mystery was not the be-all, end-all goal of the process, it was to write a good book. I’ve been telling people it is a murder mystery in the sense that, at the beginning you don’t know who did it, and by the end you probably know who did it. I was resisting some of the more satisfying payoffs that are the conventions of a genre mystery. I felt a little bit allergic to that.

A lot of it is a commitment to realism. If I’m going to write about conflict resolution, which is a big part of this book, and I’m going to write about the stupidities of our legal system, I don’t want to slap fake satisfaction onto that. Things take years and years in the legal system and there’s rarely a tidy ending. To write a tidy ending would have been to tell a lie about the American legal system, about the American carceral system. And that was very much not what I wanted to do.

KL: It was trippy to read this. I think I finished it on the day the announcement was made about Adnan Sayed from Serial getting a new trial. And I was like, oh—I know what a Brady violation is!

RM: It is funny. The whole country learned about it at the same time. It’s one of many cases I followed closely over the past few years. And it’s just so different from the Dateline version of things, where every story ends with the right person being in prison. There’s a sense of satisfaction about it all. And I was just blown away, in that case and in others that I followed, with how absolutely impossible it is to get someone out of a false conviction.

That, and how common false confessions are. I think anyone who’s followed that case or others like it has gotten this little legal education of the process. And it’s not one that makes America look good.

KL: Are you working on the next thing?

RM: I’m writing something historical that has to do with the era around World War II. (No, it’s not a Holocaust narrative.)

You know, The Great Believers was so research heavy. With this book, I told myself I’d write something close to home that I knew a lot about, so I didn’t have to do so much research. And of course, I ended up having to do this legal research—but at least it wasn’t a huge part of the book. With this new one, I’m like: Oh God, I’m back in it now. I’m going to have to look up every single thing. If I write, “this person put on socks,” I have to do research. Like, did they wear socks? What were they made of, what did they look like?

I do enjoy it. This is a big part of being a writer. And there’s a sense where you revert back to that kid who weirdly loved doing research projects in grade school.