Everywhere I Look, No One Looks Like Me

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I’m born in May my parents think I look perfect. And I do, at first. But when they  look closer into those newborn baby eyes, they see the black and purple specks floating around the white iris of my right eye—a phenomenon not inherited from my new family. 

As a toddler, my mother wheels me into eye doctor appointments where they force my lids open and drop down orange liquid as I stare up at the ceiling lights until my eyes go fuzzy. These drops make them heavy, like bowling balls rolling around my head. My vision becomes blurry and I can just make out the hot air balloon at the very end of the big hulking gray machine they sit me in front of. I place my chin on cold metal as a doctor flashes bright yellow lights across my vision. He tells me to look at his ear, the corner, the floor, my mom. I do as I’m told. 

I place my chin on cold metal as a doctor flashes bright yellow lights across my vision.

Around ten years old the pigment in my eye leeches out across my skin. “It must have been a result of puberty,” mom says. “The darker skin wasn’t there when you were born. It grew on you.” The spots find their way across my under eye, painting the circle purple and blue and black. People start asking if I’ve been punched. They say things like, “Are you alright?” Or, “How did you get the black eye?” Or, “I’d hate to see the other guy.” These are people in grocery stores, at my brother’s baseball games, people doing my nails on mommy-daughter dates. These are people who don’t know me but feel entitled to ask.

My first job is at my local Goodwill. I man the cash register and put back clothes people try on. One day, a gruff-looking man in a white t-shirt and light wash denim jeans saunters up to my register. He throws the shirts and pants down with a loud thud, puts his right hand on the counter, and leans forward with all his weight. 

“So who punched you?” 

“What?” I ask, convinced that I must have misunderstood. “I’m sorry?” 

“Your eye. Who punched your eye?” 

My body goes hot and I can feel the rising nausea signaling a panic attack. My whole body shakes. I look behind him and around me, begging for an escape, but I can’t see one. My knee goes crazy, banging against the white drawers beneath the table and my left hand darts to my right arm, sharp fingernails digging into my skin as I bring myself back to this moment, back to reality. 

“Uhm, no one. It’s extra pigment; I was born with it.”

“No, come on. You can tell me. Who punched you? Your dad? Disgruntled boyfriend?”

“No, sir, it is extra pigment. I was born with it. I promise I wasn’t punched.”

“Come on. Who did it?” 

I stammer out my answer one last time. It finally seems good enough.

I stammer out my answer one last time. It finally seems good enough, or he got bored, because instead of persisting any further he just shifts his weight, puts his hands in his pockets, shrugs, and says “I guess that’s what we’re calling it now.” 

I’m silent as I ring up his items. He pays, leaves. I turn off my register light. Tears stream down my face before I make it to the bathroom.

I daydream in the car, head knocking against the glass, about laser removal treatments. I don’t have a boyfriend like the other girls in school and I know it’s because of my pigment. Mommy-daughter dates turn into dermatology appointments and makeup counter sessions looking for a foundation thick enough to cover my skin.

Everywhere I look, no one looks like me.

Parts of my body, parts of myself, are always available to the public: my arms, my legs, my stomach, my hair, my skin, my eye. It’s too much. I’d give anything to shrink down, for no one to see or touch this body.

I’m accepted to Skidmore College after bonding with the English chair about our mutual interest in sign language. She has long reddish brown hair, slim features, and a strong face. She immediately intimidates, wearing a stunning silk blouse with black work pants. When she hears I’ve always wanted to learn ASL, she dittos the desire. She tells me that when I get into Skidmore, I must take her freshman seminar, Extraordinary Bodies. “It’s an introduction to disability studies,” she says. “I think you’d really like it.” 

Who gets to decide what is a disability and what isn’t? What about folks with abnormalities?

Disability studies is a new term to me. The DSM-5 teaches me terms like “visible disability” and “invisible disability.” The terms feel familiar and yet alien on my tongue, as if it doesn’t belong there. As if I’m trying to cram it in.

We read Sula in college. I completely miss Morrison’s mention of a birthmark. I tell my professor, “I think it’s because I have a birthmark on my eye, too. I think it was just a normal feature to me. I read it, absorbed it, and moved on. I didn’t recognize it as something abnormal.” 

Sula doesn’t have a disability. Or does she? Did we read Sula for Shadrock alone? Who gets to decide what is a disability and what isn’t? What about folks with abnormalities? Where do they fit? Why do I want to fit? Am I appropriating disability studies? What am I so scared of? 

Later, in graduate school, I co-teach a five week workshop for middle schoolers. My partner is a towering fantasy writer with one hand. For the weeks leading up to our first class together, I chastise myself for wanting to say something. Maybe joke about how the writing institute put the two marked kids together. But I can’t decide if my pigmentation is abnormal enough, or if I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe my whole obsession with defining it and finding community is just disguised narcissism. Maybe I’m not that special.

“Do you think the kids will say anything?” I finally ask, laughing in an attempt to hide fear.

What did I expect Will to say? Maybe look hurt, eyebrows furrowed in distaste. Maybe he’d curse me out for comparing my silly little pigment to his amputated arm. And yet that fear itself is internalized ableism — the idea that he has it worse simply because his body is more different. If I know anything about Will, it’s that he manages. He types, by one hand, thousands upon thousands of words, handfuls of characters that are themselves “abnormal” and disabled in various ways. And when he speaks, he gestures animatedly with both arms. Sometimes, deep in thought, he rubs the stump of his left arm. He’s found his normal. He tells me he hadn’t thought about it, but “They’re kids; they’re curious. I might say something because I’m sure they will. We are marked. No use in ignoring it.” 

The students never mention anything. But Will does use our abnormalities for an example when discussing a prompt with them. They’re aspects of ourselves we can pull on, make meaning out of — but only on our own terms. As the cliche goes, it’s our differences that make our stories more interesting. 

I went to Sarah Lawrence College for my master’s, the same school as Lucy Grealy, an author and person who toed the line between disability and deformity. In her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, I see my own ruminations on perception and sight replicated in someone else. Of wearing a mask she writes, “I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.” And I cry the first time I read it because I see myself, right eye caked in a mask of makeup, aching to go unnoticed. 

Still, I ask myself: What right do I have to compare my experience to Lucy’s?

Eventually, I stop wearing concealer around my black eye. Much like Hannah Walhout, who writes about being an incredibly tall woman in “Attack of the the Six-Foot Woman,” I can’t exactly pinpoint the time things changed. “It was probably, as with anything,” she writes, “a gradual accumulation of minor events and small recalibrations: a conversation here, a casual touch there, time spent, self-talk, moving toward acceptance of the things I cannot change.” It’s two things at once: an ultimate submission to reality, and a deep transformation into empowerment. 

I see myself, right eye caked in a mask of makeup, aching to go unnoticed. 

As a culture, we are constantly altering our concept of normal. Bodies are made into trends and profited off of. For years we have one standard, and then suddenly it changes. Headlines hit the news that “heroin chic” is in again, and we internalize that, molding our bodies from their normal state and into something else. Much the same, disability—as a category we fit people into—is not an inherent mode of existence. It needs someone or something else to be cast as normal, or standard—someone to be ostracized against.

“[The pigment is] what makes your eyes blue or green or brown. I just happen to have more of it. It doesn’t affect my sight.” This is what I actually tell people. Before, I never realized how charged that language is. My entire explanation is an attempt to normalize the pigment for other people, to make it recognizable. What happens if I stop doing this? 

Lucy spent her whole life looking for the next surgery that could fix her jaw. And, yet, at the same time, she was deeply loved, sought after by the community around her. In Sula, the birthmark transforms and morphs depending on outside perspectives of the body it paints. Sula’s not perfect, but it’s not because of the blooming rose on her cheek. And she knows that. Perhaps the weight of our abnormalities depends on how much we give it. 

The social model of disability argues that the environment, not people with disabilities or abnormalities, is at fault.

Markers like “disability” or “ability” are tenuous. The social model of disability argues that the environment, not people with disabilities or abnormalities, is at fault. And that if society prioritized accommodations and change, those barriers would cease to exist. So why am I obsessed with deciding if I can attach myself to the disability community if, by this logic, disabilities aren’t necessarily an innate nature, but rather a response to an inaccessible world? Not that anyone’s experience is invalid or made up, but since the idea of normality is a social construct, then so is any divergence from it. This is something I learned in every disability studies class I took. In fact, the social model is internationally recognized as being the model. I’ve spent so much time using the academic analysis of media and representations, when this maybe explains everything: Our experiences and the way we view ourselves, with disabilities or not, are too often decided for us.

A birthmark is defined as “an unusual and typically permanent brown or red mark on someone’s body from birth.” It’s not a perfect fit for my pigmentation, but it’s close. I think what I’m trying to do is normalize the abnormal, stop attempting to fit my pigment into an already existent reference point while arguing for a change in what normal encompasses. 

When I was younger, I used to tell myself stories to feel better about my perpetual black eye. I’d try and convince myself how cool it was, that I was unique, separated from everyone else. It was that time in my life where all I wanted was to be distinguishable from my peers and so like Sula’s, my pigment transformed into what I needed. At some point, I traded that for a desire to fit in. And the pigment morphed again, into a threat. Now, I want to try something altogether new: let my pigment exist without searching it for meaning.

Why David Cameron Should Read “Empireland”

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

So in the fall of 2015, I went after David Cameron. Not in person, or in any print or visual media (the Daily Mail would have lapped it up). I took my shot on Facebook, back when it was slowly but steadily losing its cultural influence over anyone who would not eventually vote for Trump. Whether my anti-Cameron rant means anything to you (he was prime minister at the time) might depend on how much stock you put in social media, but maybe it was for the best that online was where it stayed. Regardless, I was on fire. Cameron had just visited Jamaica, and in stunning and downright imperial fashion, demanded that we Jamaicans get on with moving past the legacy of slavery—that we stop living in the past. With that trademark condescension he reserves for speaking to people of color, he advised us to “focus on the future.” He then introduced the real reason for his visit, which was to announce that the United Kingdom was about to front a whopping 40% of the cost to build a new prison on the island. That way Jamaicans convicted of crimes in the United Kingdom could be sent back to the country they had supposedly come from, whether or not they were legal British residents. Even by Churchill’s colonial standards, the speech was jaw-dropping. Equally enraging was how the entire Jamaican parliament—based on the rowdy British model no less—seemed to take it like a bunch of house slaves being given a sermon on loving their masters. I couldn’t decide if the speech came from ignorance, arrogance or simple gall.

On my first trip to the UK… I was a little appalled that the British Museum would ask me for a donation to enter.

Cameron seemed ignorant of how much his country’s imperialism, particularly during slavery, had shaped every aspect of the Britain he has lived in, from its magnificent palaces right down to the stunning sense of national entitlement that allowed him to make such a speech. How it was only a few years before his speech that the British people had stopped compensating slave owners for post-abolition losses. On my first trip to the UK four years before, I was a little appalled that the British Museum would ask me for a donation to enter. I couldn’t conceal the sense that I owned the place, or at least that I had earned it through the work of my people, unpaid during slavery, and barely paid after. Looking around Bristol and Liverpool, I wondered how I was supposed to get over all the bad that had been wrought by the empire, while the empire itself held on to all the good. So after David Cameron’s speech, I couldn’t hold myself back:

“Listen David, I feel you. I’m with you on this forgetting slavery business, screw all the haters. I too am all ready to move past slavery and forget the whole thing. I just have one condition: You First. You heard me. I promise to stop bitching about the legacy of Slavery and Colonialism (don’t get it twisted, the latter was even worse) and move on if you also move on, by destroying every building, every landmark, every statue, every port, every bridge, every road, every house, every palace, every mansion, every gallery (Hello, Tate!), every museum, and every ship built with slavery and colonialism blood money. That would mean that London, Bristol and Liverpool would all have to go. Then we’d all be just about full free, David.”

There was Cameron, and by extension Brits like him, surrounded by the empire’s façade of colonial opulence, oblivious to the scars on the back side. So when I came to Sathnam Sanghera’s book, I did so with visceral expectation, saying to myself he better preach. I approached the book with amens in check, ready to dish them out at every fact that I already knew, happy that now white people would learn the truth of what I, and many like me, felt. Except, more often than not, the person doing the learning was me.

I wondered how I was supposed to get over all the bad that had been wrought by the empire, while the empire itself held on to all the good.

If all Sanghera wanted to do was unveil scars, then this book would be only half as effective, half as stunning, half as revelatory. Digging, simply for its own sake, sometimes leaves us with more holes in our stories, not fewer. It makes it easy for people on both sides of history to pounce. History is complicated. Not every forward-thinking movement came from beyond colonial influence. After all, abolition was codified not too many doors down from slavery. And some of the most appalling atrocities done in colonialism’s name came from the colonized, not the colonizers. But Sanghera is more than just a muckraker. Yes, he exposes these sordid legacies. But furthermore, he traces the surprising bloodlines from which these legacies still flow. It never occurred to me, for example, to trace the origins of British racism toward the Caribbean beyond the first landing of the Windrush, back to India in 1857. On the other hand, I used to look at multiculturalism as the great civilizer of our modern times—until, that is, I saw it was a reality of British life that predated the Tudors.

Sanghera’s Empireland is not the historical painting some would like. Paintings aren’t hard to find—that’s what the Jan Morrises and the Niall Fergusons of the world are for. Rather, Empireland is a mirror. Mirrors show truths that paintings do not—messy, complicated, uncomfortable truths. And of course, those messy truths are, in fact, us. This is not a furious book. In fact, much of it is conversational, eager to engage, disarming and sometimes funny. But it will nonetheless provoke downright blinding fury. This is also not a partisan book in the least, but still one that will provoke some readers to take sides, at least until they get to the end of an incendiary paragraph. It’s still a new thing to see imperialism written in this way, refracted through the eyes of the “mother country.” It’s something that Sanghera must have known that we might not have the language for, yet.

Even still, it doesn’t matter if we don’t. The most important lessons do not wait until you’re ready to receive them. And while we may know much about empire’s impact on pre-Commonwealth Britain, its persistent and striking impact on modern Britain is another story, one where denialism intrudes upon the conclusion. Imperial revisionism is nothing new. It sweeps through France as much as it does through Britain. But the vibe one gets from the U.K., at least from those within it nostalgic for empire, is that the country wants to have it both ways. It wants to be the land that ended slavery, that fought the Nazis. But it’s also proud to have given rise to the imperially nostalgic Nigel Farage and the still-present influence of Enoch Powell, a man who Farage cites as a political hero, and whose views were shaped most critically by his time in colonial India.

Sanghera’s Empireland is not the historical painting some would like.

Powell is long dead. But there are many living Brexit voters who still remember the last gasps of imperial Britain. There are certainly enough novels and television shows that romanticize the era, most with a dash of discrimination, offstage violence and the occasional rape to pass the work off as “complex.” And there are many British citizens old enough to have actually sailed on the Windrush (my now gone uncle Errol being one of them) who yet recognize the mix of ignorance and arrogance that continues to make such exceptionalism possible. We’ve read and seen a ton of this recently, revisionist attempts to “complicate” the record of horrible events, the deeds of despicable people, as if the ambivalent lens is the superior one. I read this book feeling as if I had witnessed and sometimes participated in the legacies of the past. But I never felt responsible for them. Sanghera rejects the culturally relativist trick of making everyone feel equally accountable. Empire has left consequences in every single country it touched, and it is important to unearth those consequences, interrogate them, learn from them, so that we recognize the strands that persist within us. Empire left consequences for Empireland as well, and it is because of our failure to recognize these aftershocks that racism is looked upon as a rootless aberration, or denied altogether. You can read this book and concede why Brexit was not an anomaly at all, but an all but inevitable outgrowth of the imperial position. The most Britishly British outcome Britain could have ever granted itself.

Empire has left consequences in every single country it touched

Sanghera often presents these staggering facts as if he has just discovered them himself, and even he can’t hide how much they astonish. He invokes the “I” often because the truths he’s unearthed are as much for him as they are for whoever reads his book. There’s a reason for this. Sanghera makes these consequences feel personal, because we have a personal stake in what he’s found. The stories in Empireland—and the story of empire itself— cannot be told without it becoming personal. History will remain incomplete, full of holes, if it ignores the actual humans it affects. And in reading Empireland, we find ourselves living within this history. Maybe this is how we should have been looking at history all along.

Empireland is a crucial journey of discovery, not just for those within the empire, and not just for those from former colonies granted independence. This journey is also for those from the colony that took independence by force: America, of course, a country that holds its Yankee spirit (see Hamilton, the musical) and its unquenchable Anglophilia (see also Hamilton, the musical) with equal fervor. You don’t have to go too far south to see a country that never figured out what to do with its past other than mythologize it or forget it, each approach chafing against the other. Slavery’s memory still hangs high and swings low in all states, and statements like “heritage, not hate” show how tricky it is to pull nostalgia from the memory of atrocity. The problem is that we haven’t yet discovered an alternative. Empireland suggests one. It shows us a way to revisit the past with eyes unflinching, yet open and generous. We can stare down history’s atrocities, but the key word here is “we.” Stepping into the future is not the work of one person, or one nation. With books like this, maybe we can finally reach that future together.

8 New Novels that Envision an Alternate Future

Posted on by Jo Lou

When I sat down to write Users five years ago, I had no intention of writing a particularly topical novel. At the time, a story about a lead creative working at a VR start-up who goes to war with his user-community, whose hasty solution ultimately leads to his downfall, felt like an exaggeration—a hyperbolic expression of fears and dissatisfactions that were bubbling up in me after going to work as a writer in a variety of tech settings. But, with the rise of web3, and the scramble by major corporations from Microsoft to Alphabet to Facebook to wrap us in their virtual or augmented nets, it’s starting to feel like reality has caught up to the exaggeration. I wish I could claim it was intentional, but I have trouble predicting what will happen in the next few hours, let alone several years.

When I write, I’m often using my imagination to process an immediate world that would otherwise be overwhelming. I think that’s one great power fiction has, and part of why I’ve always been drawn to it. Intentionally prescient or not, I’ve always turned to writers for depictions of life, not only as it is, but as it could be, or will be, that make the living of life feel a bit more manageable. That’s a tall order, given the past decade. And the future has started to feel more unpredictable than ever. But here’s a list of books about the future that make those distant (or not-so-distant) days feel a bit less daunting—either in the way they imagine the future or in the way its being imagined is made meaningful.

Out There: Stories by Kate Folk

Weird how writers called “weird” wind up predicting the future with what feels retroactively like utter clarity. A woman is tasked with keeping her house moist. Another must navigate a world of online dating full of artificial men called “blots” distributed by Russian hackers. Folk writes stories about the future in a way that feels both absurd and inevitable, which is what the future always is.

Flux by Jinwoo Chong

This time-bending work of speculative fiction takes place in the 1980s and the 2000s, decades into the future, and on an iconic television show called Raider. At its heart, it’s a story of generational trauma and grief, but on its surface, this neonoir is about a defunct tech startup that may have disrupted space-time. What’s not to love?

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

In the last few years, Serpell has put out two powerhouse novels. Most recently, the breathtaking and grief-soaked The Furrows. Before that, her massive speculative sci-fi debut The Old Drift. This is a multi-generational tale about a colonial settlement in Zambia that starts in 1904, where a mistake alters the course of generations for decades to come. We witness the rise of the charismatic huckster behind a homegrown technological movement called the Afronauts, traveling from riverside mosquito tents to a world of microdrones and viral vaccines.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

In a ravaged future that is not so hard to imagine, this lush novel follows a downward-spiraling chef brought to a land of plenty, where wonder, delight, and violence change her in shocking and surprising ways. In Zhang’s hands, you know the prose will be impeccable, the insights will be keen, and the circumstances will be both dire and beautifully rendered.

Notable American Women by Ben Marcus

I still haven’t read a book that comes anywhere near the experience of reading Notable American Women for the first time. To call it experimental is an oversimplification, but it’s not inaccurate. This unpacks and reassembles toxic family relationships in a landscape that could be the future, or could be the past, but is perhaps more accurately described as an alternate reality manifested by great feeling. Who hasn’t wanted to keep their dad in a hole out back, with a special yelling tube for essential communications, while you and your mother pursue a life of complete stillness and silence through behavior modification?

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this bracing and brilliant debut, a young woman loses herself in Y/N fanfic (short for “Your Name” where the reader is part of the story) borne of her revelatory obsession with a K-pop star named Moon. It’s a funny, surreal, and rousing search for the unattainable that reaches beautiful heights of absurdity, paranoia, and existential panic.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Called a “perfect” novel by both Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, The Invention of Morel is a spiraling piece of shocking speculative fiction. Blending crystal clarity and surreal shadows, it tells the thrilling story of a strange island, where an image-based machine may be able to recreate reality for eternity by capturing and replaying the souls of the island’s inhabitants, as well as that of one love-sick visitor.

Forthcoming: Real Americans by Rachel Khong 

This is a multi-generational love story about a mixed-race family involved in genetic silencing. Tracing a devastating arc from Maoist China to near-future San Francisco, this novel uses wit, heart, and powerful intelligence to examine the choices we make in the wake of the choices that have been made for us, and it considers how we might come to know the difference.

6 Short Story Collections from Around the World

Posted on by Jo Lou

When I began writing, I imitated. I didn’t know what writing involved, but if it was a craft, then imitation seemed an intuitive place to begin. I approached composing a short story the way I might cook dinner.

The process involved timing, taste, intuition, and some theatrical flair. But what was served up never looked anything like the originals. I practiced with the scale of an Annie Proulx story, attempted Jhumpa Lahiri’s method of letting the story quietly unravel, and channeled Sandra Cisneros’s playful metaphors. Admiring what other writers are doing is still the only way I know to write, but over time I’ve found new archetypes set outside the English-speaking world. These collections were closer to what I was trying produce about Thailand. So in the course of writing Welcome Me to the Kingdom, these are the story collections I learned from.

North America: The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee

Any globetrotting story-collection list must begin with Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories, which I bought over a decade ago knowing nothing about Mukherjee or the collection. I went purely on the opening of the first story. And then the opening of the second story. I should just list here first sentences, because Mukherjee’s beginnings are all aces. To read its cover, it’s a collection about immigration, but I was not prepared for the range of experiences, languages, and boundaries crossed. Mukherjee runs the gamut of North American migrant origins: India, Italy, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and more. She gets away with this because of the confidence and verve of her writing, evident in a first sentence like this one from “Fighting for the Rebound”:

“I’m in bed watching the Vanilla Gorilla stick it to the Abilene Christians on some really obscure cable channel when Blanquita comes through the door wearing lavender sweats, and over them a frilly see-through apron.”

Pakistan: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Muenuddin

I love the sense of periphery in Daniyal Muenuddin’s story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. The stories revolve around K. K. Harouni, a declining patriarch of Pakistan’s old landowning class, which is fitting given that the collection is also a lens onto the country’s changing feudal system. We see how this system is tapped by wily servants or infiltrated by outsiders hoping to improve their stations. Declarations in an early story (“you came with nothing, you leave with nothing”) echo into a later one, as if we readers were, as the collection’s title suggests, drifting from room to room on the failing estate, among characters waiting for their time to come.

Nigeria: What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

In her collection, What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, set in Nigeria and the US, Lesley Nneka Arimah masters time. She collapses it, as in the opening story, the threateningly titled The Future Looks Good, in which an entire family history is unspooled in the time it takes for a character fumble with her keys at the door. In Second Chances, Arimah rewinds time, allowing the narrator’s dead mother to step from an old photograph into the room. But my favorite use of time is in how the father in Light hoards the time—a single moment, really—he has left with his daughter, who will soon leave Nigeria, and him, behind.

Haiti: Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat’s collection skillfully retells a period of Haitian history. In Children of the Sea, a boat of refugees stranded between Haiti and the US becomes the vehicle a love story between a fleeing dissident and a lover left behind. The woman in Nineteen Thirty-Seven visits her mother in prison, who survived a mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic only to be rounded up in a witch hunt. By the end of the collection, we feel we’ve walked the political landscape of François Duvalier’s brutal regime, passing historical landmarks, moving from Port-au-Prince to the fictional country town of Ville Rose, from the “Massacre River” on the Dominican border to a churchyard where dissidents murdered by the new regime have been buried.

Japan: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

The Diving Pool was Yoko Ogawa’s first collection (three novellas) to be translated into English. It’s a study in control. All three stories are narrated by women, and all three narrators share an uncanny detached voice, as if the narrator were not in the story but observing from the same distance as the reader. By taking control of this distance, Ogawa draws us readers in slowly, holding back enough to lure us into an uneasy empathy. By the time we realize what’s happening, we’re already aligned the narrators, implicated in their cruelty, as if to show us what we’re capable of. One of the narrators describes this tension thusly: “As the tip of his finger ran over the inside of my mouth, I fought the urge to bite down with all my might.” Which becomes what the reader feels: the want to bite, the will to hold back—initially, anyway.

Across countries: The Boat by Nam Le

Nam Le’s story collection exists in counterpoint to Mukherjee’s—where I started this list. If Muhkerjee’s is a collection about the world coming to the States, then Le’s is about writing away from the US into the world. The opening story finds a fictional Le in an MFA program, facing down a visit from his Vietnamese father while deciding whether succumb to the book market’s appetite for “ethnic lit.” The story opens the door for the collection’s ethnic wandering. Le’s sentences have the daring and energy of Mukherjee’s, but the stories take place in Colombia and Japan and Iran. Le channels Medellín gangsters, Hiroshima orphans, and an Australian schoolboy before finally coming full circle to a story about Vietnamese refugees.

9 Books That Rethink Our Narratives About Health and Healing

Posted on by Wynter Miller

In their Grammy-winning comeback song “Not Ready to Make Nice,” the (formerly Dixie) Chicks sing, “They say time heals everything but I’m still waiting.” The lyrics claim power in not healing, in refusing to shut up and let it go when those in power continue to benefit from that very expectation. The Chicks were reflecting on a rather specific experience—being threatened and silenced after they criticized George W. Bush—but the implicit questions they pose remain relevant. What happens when time doesn’t heal us the way we expect? Is healing possible in the terms we have laid out for it? 

This reading list features eight books published in the last twenty years, plus one book published fifty years ago (it’s worth the trip back in time, though, I promise) that challenge traditional healing narratives. In the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions about health and healing remain all too relevant; many of us are realizing that illness permeates many of the spaces we exist within, and still more of us are reckoning with our vulnerability to illness and our (in)ability to recover. Memes like “nature is healing,” a phrase that has endured in our lexicon since it first appeared in March 2020, ironizes the premise that the world is restoring to order, as if “order” is possible. 

But our acute interest in healing has not just emerged in the last two years. Indeed, many of these texts predate the pandemic, and yet already engage with the demands our desire for healing incur. Reading them helps us rethink our existing narratives about healing and recognize that if our arc of recovery deviates from the template, then at least we’re in good company.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Even though it is now over fifty years old, Le Guin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven stands the test of time, featuring a ruthless, robust examination of the costs underlying the promise of endless advancement. George Orr desperately wants to be cured of his condition, one that prompts him to dream so vividly that his dreams begin to change the world around him, but when he gets caught attempting to self-treat with drugs, he is sent to dream specialist Dr. William Haber. Haber possesses a capitalist’s faith in progress, prioritizing ends over means, and is certain that, if he can just unlock the brain’s full power, anything is possible—even utopia. Reading The Lathe of Heaven teaches us that there are no shortcuts to paradise, or to finding a cure. With Orr’s habit of manifesting Dr. Haber’s instructions in unexpected ways, Le Guin indicates that salvation might lie in the unruliness of imagination.

The Undying by Anne Boyer

In her 2019 memoir, Anne Boyer expertly weaves together her experience with cancer and her research on the industries and images that have arisen around illness. In prose that is both accessible and personable, as well as neatly divided into digestible chapters, Boyer charts a conversation between everyone from Aristides to Audre Lorde to Siddhartha Mukherjee, and cites sources ranging from prestigious medical journals to YouTube comments and Wikipedia pages. Boyer not only invokes the traditions we have developed for speaking of illness, but also investigates them—and then initiates her own tradition. Contrary to convention, Boyer insists that pain doesn’t destroy language. It changes it. And with this very book, Boyer develops a new language, demonstrating how it might become possible to talk about illness more fully, in all of its intricacy and incongruity.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies might be one of my favorite books. Maddie Mortimer narrates her novel from the points-of-view of a cancer patient named Lia, her husband, her daughter, her mother, and her actual cancer. In entangling these perspectives, Mortimer depicts with both candor and compassion what happens to our bodies, our minds, and our communities when we are sick. Making cancer a narrator itself, with surprising insight into and even sympathy toward Lia, unsettles our narrative expectations of healing—an unsettling that is also mirrored in the novel’s inventive form. Throughout, words take the shape of spirals, doves, and fireworks; they are scattered, bolded, and boxed on the page. In giving illness a voice and a shape, Mortimer creatively addresses a central question in all illness narratives: what language effectively represents the experience of being ill? Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies shows us how unexpected, unconventional representations best capture not just a dense and difficult experience, but also the myriad ripples it makes on the lives it touches.

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

It has become a truism that “healing isn’t linear” a concept that Ward makes literal and also the subject of scrutiny in her 2013 memoir. Her reflections on the young Black men she has lost represents an utterly unique approach to narrating one’s own past, especially significant amid the current memoir boom. In alternating chapters, Ward moves forward in time from the 1970s and backward in time from 2004, desperate to make sense of the loss of her brother by approaching it from every angle. This structure prompts readers to see traces of the past in the present and of the present in the past. With heartbreaking honesty, Ward endeavors to show the tangled, traumatic reality of living with grief and of how healing can be strikingly nonlinear. Indeed, Ward reveals herself to be less healed than haunted, except in Ward’s framing, the haunting is itself a privilege, a reminder of her loved ones’ enduring presence. The memoir functions as an ode to these men’s lives, a critique of the systems that endangered them, and a testament to storytelling for its power to sustain connections. 

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking deserves all of the acclaim it receives—it’s really that good. In her typically masterful way, Didion narrates the year following her husband’s sudden death, a year during which her daughter also had two dire health scares. Another memoir that defies any sort of orderly timeline, this book brings its readers into the worldview of the grieving. In Didion’s desperate attempts to determine a cause and a chronology of both her husband’s and her daughter’s illnesses, we see both the desire to predict any and all vulnerabilities and its impossibility. In her search to locate her grief in myths, literary traditions, and her own memories, we see Didion come to terms with all that loss entails, including the stories that will go untold and the questions that will go forever unanswered. Didion opens her wounds for her readers, sharing her worst moments in astoundingly lucid writing that offers an intimate look at what it takes to live on.

Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead

This 2006 novel from Colson Whitehead is not always considered among his best, but it’s my favorite and for good reasons! The novel features a plot so odd it feels like a fable: a nomenclature consultant has been hired to rename a town in order to settle a dispute amongst the community leaders, who respectively represent old money gone stale, new money on the hunt for the next shiny thing, and a local political dynasty. Given this plot, it is no surprise that the novel considers the particular rites and references involved in any name. But it also dwells with profound effect on what happens when we paper over our wounds instead of confronting and caring for them. Like many of Whitehead’s novels, Apex Hides the Hurt has no interest in redemption. It tackles the long-term consequences of the structures, from racism to consumerism, that have harmed its characters, and traverses the uneasy path of navigating a world with our injuries visible and still bleeding.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride’s 2016 novel Lesser Bohemians takes some getting used to; her distinctive writing style omits most of her sentence’s subjects. That said, adjusting to McBride’s extraordinary syntax is worth the effort, as it fosters its own rhythm and, perhaps more notably, the grammatical fragments neatly reflect the narrator’s fragmented experience as she begins university in England, as well as a complicated love affair. A novel that understands love to be as fragile as it is forceful, The Lesser Bohemians depicts a couple learning to care and be cared for—even after extensive traumatic experiences. As the characters speak of, and, at times, become subsumed by their pasts, they come to recognize the ways in which they are scarred and are brought to wonder if they can ever build a future together. McBride depicts in beautiful form the gradual realization that imperfect lives, bodies, and loves need not become perfect to be precious.

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat’s debut novel gives us a queer Palestinian protagonist who craves belonging, but continually destroys, or doubts, her chances for it. You Exist Too Much is a story of her relationships—the romantic entanglements she stumbles into, the friendships she refuses to form, and the passionate affairs she can’t stop visualizing. In her quest for healthy intimacy, the unnamed protagonist begrudgingly foots the bill for a rehab center called The Ledge, which is the most recent in a series of treatment attempts for her eating disorder and supposed “love addiction.” Her desire to fixherself ricochets through the glimpses we get of her life, but the novel provides no easy answers or endings. Instead, Arafat asks her protagonist and her readers to occupy the murky but meaningful connections that demand and define so much of us.

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

In meditative prose that can be disconcerting in its frankness, DeForest’s debut unpacks the toll that the business of life and death takes on its practitioners. In short chapters titled after segments of the medical chart, DeForest details a doctor’s perspective on the inner workings of the body and of the hospital. Her narrator provides scathing illustrations of her colleagues’ disregard—a function of their training, she admits—alongside searching depictions of her patients. As the narrator points out, everyone is eventually a patient—a framing that reminds us how we are implicated in the system she depicts, in which our lives and stories often don’t matter to those caring for us. The novel ultimately asks its readers a difficult question: how can we reanimate the significance we attach to our own and others’ bodies? A History of Present Illness might not have answers, but its questions linger.

Escaping Society by Living on Top of a Coca-Cola Billboard

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Maria José Ferrada’s lucid, minimalist How to Turn into a Bird, Ramón’s job is to take care of a Coca-Cola billboard in a Chilean community. Already an “odd, but not a bad person” who is “fond of a drop,” Ramón decides to ascend to the skies and takes up full-time residence in the billboard. The move gets the housing complex gossiping about his move and state of mind. 

His nephew 12-year-old Miguel, who narrates this novel of curious, philosophical vignettes, visits and begins his own inquiry about the nature of life, conformity, madness, and freedom. Back on the ground, the community’s children are similarly enthralled. Then one of the children disappears, sending the adults into a panic, and reviving older memories of a disappearance. Miguel, ever questioning humanity, observes as the community descends into violence directed towards a family of homeless people. 

I spoke to Ferrada via email with a translation provided by Elizabeth Breyer, who translated this novel and Ferrada’s previous novel, How to Order the Universe, about loners, the pursuit of happiness, and the spirit of childhood and how it is the antithesis of a dictatorship. 

J.R. Ramakrishnan: ​Where did this book begin for you? What inspired Ramón, the billboard, and little Miguel? 

Maria José Ferrada: I was drawn to write about someone who marginalizes himself by choice. Someone who could live like everybody else but decides not to. The idea interests me because it is the kind of reflection that makes you question the choices you have made in your own life, and whether you made some of them out of a desire to fit in, rather than as a response to what you truly wanted or needed. Ramón, the central character of the novel, goes to live up a Coca-Cola billboard because he decides to stop bowing to that extrinsic pressure. The central image is real: ten years ago, I read a newspaper article about a man who had started living up a Coca-Cola billboard. I wanted to imagine how his neighbors, his family, his community would interpret this decision. And above all, how a child would see it.

JRR: You have a prolific history publishing children’s books in Spanish and this is your second novel for adults with a main character who is a child. Would you talk a little bit about writing from the perspective of a child for adults after having written books for children? 

I was drawn to write about someone who marginalizes himself by choice. Someone who could live like everybody else but decides not to.

MJF: I count on the adult reader having more context than the child reader. Adult readers can use their own experience to fill in the gaps, to grasp all that the child narrator does not say. On the other hand, a child narrator does not have many discursive tools with which to describe his perceptions of what is happening around him. But he still needs to say it. We adults allow ourselves to be vaguer. We can go around in circles and ultimately say nothing really engaging. A child narrator doesn’t do that because children don’t generally do that. It’s closer to reality: there’s less of a discourse mediating between them and what they observe. 

JRR: In the novel, you have the conflict of the homeless children and the concern that they would affect the children of the housing complex. This ultimately leads to violence by the residents. Is there really such a thing as childhood innocence? And would you say Chilean writers of your generation (having grown up in the Pinochet era) have a specific fascination with childhood? I am thinking of your literary compatriots such as Nina Fernández (especially in Space Invaders) and Alejandro Zambra.

MJF: I believe that everyone has such personal motivations, so it is difficult for me to speak in general. In my case, I would not speak of fascination, but of great interest, because it is a time when we ask ourselves fundamental questions, we look for meaning—children ask themselves why we are alive, and why we die one day—and it is a very serious quest. Those of us who were born in Chile in the ’70s or ’80s lived through a dictatorship. And a dictatorship is precisely an affront to that search for meaning: the dictator wants to be right and does not want you to ask questions. It is the absolute reversal of the spirit of childhood. In fact, it is very difficult to imagine a dictator as a child.

As for innocence… I think it’s a word that is a bit discredited. It is associated with naivety. I prefer to understand it in the sense of someone who has a fresh perspective. In that sense I think there is innocence in certain children and in certain people who seem to maintain a connection with a kind of original simplicity.

JRR: Ramón makes a successful (?) escape from the capitalistic society through the Coca-Cola billboard while others are resisting in smaller ways. Paulina and Miguel stealing, and Paulina dreaming of being a film extra while arranging her products. Ultimately, all three escape the community and perhaps, capitalism? Have they achieved the “OPEN HAPPINESS” promised by the Coca-Cola billboard at the end? 

MSF: ​​I think the characters realize that happiness as a goal is an invention—an effectual one—of Coca Cola. I like to think that as the novel progresses, the characters shed the anxiety that is generated when pursuing something like that. They lose things, of course, but they get closer to something like freedom, because no other person has decided anything for them. That other has many faces, it can be a mother, a school, but it can also be a group that, with the best of intentions, ends up dictating the rules and being terribly cruel to those who do not fit the mold. My characters are loners and respect their own need for solitude. It is not easy for them because their environment—their family, their school, their neighborhood—wonders, How could it be possible that this person does not want to live like us? How could he or she not want to believe in the truths we believe in? The easy way out is to quickly decide that the person who has chosen to live differently is “weird” or “crazy”—or any other derogatory label—and from there, dismiss him or her. We see it every day.

JRR: You have published a memoir of your time in Japan, and I am curious, how your time there informs how your work, and perhaps specifically this novel? 

MSF: I am a passionate reader of Japanese writers. Among them, some poets who practiced Zen Buddhism. I am especially interested in their relationship with language. For them language is a trap, a kind of wall that stands between the self and reality. Their quest has to do with reaching a direct experience that is not mediated by language. And I think children know that experience. Because there is a moment when they approach reality without words that allow them to order it. And on that path, they can catch glimpses of meaning that escape us. I think that in some sense that is the same thing that the characters in this novel do.

JRR: I tried to read both English and Spanish versions simultaneously and it was super interesting as someone with unsophisticated but very functional (Mexican) Spanish. What was your reaction to reading your novel in English for the first time, which I am assuming you did? For example, the title is different in Spanish (El Hombre del Cartel). Tell us about the conversations you and Elizabeth Breyer had about changes like this. 

MSF: ​​This is the second time I have worked with Elizabeth as a translator and I marvel at her ability to find the right words and silences. Because there are many things that a child narrator does not understand, so she leaves gaps in the text. Translating those gaps must be difficult, but when I read the English version I see that they are there and that the text gets a particular rhythm from them.

The process was very nice, because in the case of this novel there were very concrete spatial things: where the sign is located, what I mean when I talk about a village or a dirt field. We came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to send images. I imagine they helped Elizabeth to tell that landscape in her language. Anyway, I think that, as in the previous novel (How to Order the Universe) she found the words that a child would have used: simple words, which are not necessarily the easiest to find.

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Isle McElroy’s “People Collide”

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for acclaimed writer Isle McElroy’s sophomore novel, People Collide, which will be published by HarperCollins this September.

When Eli wakes up alone in the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that somehow, he’s in her body. His male body has vanished, as has the personality that once resided inside Elizabeth’s body. As Eli searches throughout Europe for his missing wife, he embarks on a no holds barred exploration of gender and embodied experience. 

People Collide follows Eli as he comes closer to finding Elizabeth—while learning to exist in her body—and as he questions the impact this metamorphosis will have on their relationship. He wonders: how long can he maintain the illusion of living as someone he isn’t? Will their young marriage wither completely under the pressure of a new and sudden existence in bodies they thought they knew?

People Collide is rich and rewarding, a tender portrayal of ambition, sacrifice, desire and loss, and shared lives and bodies. It shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we really are.

Here is the cover, designed by Stephen Brayda, and with art by Tina Berning.    

“The cover for Isle McElroy’s People Collide had to be striking and bold to match the novel’s enticing premise,” Stephen Brayda, Art Director for HarperVia told Electric Lit. “I explored various solutions for cover art but one artist’s work in particular resonated most. Berlin based illustrator Tina Berning has a portfolio full of figurative, expressive work, and her piece When It Hurts IV aligned perfectly. The combination of strong type and considered art complements the many detailed layers in McElroy’s writing.”

McElroy feels similarly, noting their immediate connection to this cover. “My editor Rakesh Satyal originally sent four cover options. I knew immediately which one I wanted. While the other options were great, this was the cover that truly embodied People Collide. The designer, Stephen Brayda, and I went through a few rounds of revisions before landing on the version seen here. Changes included adding a border, making the paint a bit brighter, and a minor tweak of the font. Brayda did an incredible job through the revisions—even though I felt immensely needy asking for any changes—and I think the final version is perfect.” 

“Tina Berning’s figurative drawing captures the fraught and erotic codependency at the center of the novel. How might two individuals twist into a shared creature following a few years together? Where, in a relationship, does one person end and another begin? Brayda’s decision to texture the cover with such vivid brushstrokes not only makes for an evocative image, it speaks to one of the most crucial moments in the book: a sex scene set in the Pompidou. Over the process of choosing a cover, I discovered something about my book that I hadn’t previously been able to articulate. The hand reaching out of the border, for instance, reveals the novel’s deeper anxiety about partnership. Even as these two figures are so intimately embraced, one hand appears to be testing out an escape. To paraphrase Newton: for every collision, there is an equal and opposite separation. It was my curiosity about this emotional space—the action and the reaction—that drove me to write People Collide.”

People Collide will be published by HarperVia on September 19th, and is available for preorder here.

Four Ways of Looking at a Campus Murder

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Excerpt from I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

“You’ve heard of her,” I say—a challenge, an assurance. To the woman on the neighboring hotel barstool who’s made the mistake of striking up a conversation, to the dentist who runs out of questions about my kids and asks what I’ve been up to myself. 

Sometimes they know her right away. Sometimes they ask, “Wasn’t that the one where the guy kept her in the basement?” No! No. It was not. 

Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he—no. The one where he’d been watching her jog every day? The one where she made the mistake of telling him her period was late? The one with the uncle? Wait, the other one with the uncle? 

No: It was the one with the swimming pool. The one with the alcohol in the—with her hair around—with the guy who confessed to—right. Yes. 

They nod, comforted. By what? 

My barstool neighbor pulls the celery from her Bloody Mary, crunches down. My dentist asks me to rinse. They work her name in their mouths, their memories. “I definitely know that one,” they say. 

“That one,” because what is she now but a story, a story to know or not know, a story with a limited set of details, a story to master by memorizing maps and timelines. 

“The one from the boarding school!” they say. “I remember, the one from the video. You knew her?” 

She’s the one whose photo pops up if you search New Hampshire murder, alongside mug shots from the meth-addled tragedies of more recent years. One photo—her laughing with her mouth but not her eyes, suggesting some deep unhappiness—tends to feature in clickbait. It’s just a cropped shot of the tennis team from the yearbook; if you knew Thalia it’s easy to see she wasn’t actually upset, was simply smiling for the camera when she didn’t feel like it.

It was the story that got told and retold.

It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention.

It was the one where we were all young enough to think someone smarter had the answers.

Maybe it was the one we got wrong.

Maybe it was the one we all, collectively, each bearing only the weight of a feather, got wrong. 

#1: Omar Evans

In the morning I couldn’t remember what I dreamed, except that it was troubling, that it was about water, that I dreamed about texting friends about the dream. I didn’t feel rested in the slightest. I knew, as the sun finally came through the blinds, that I couldn’t get up until I’d stayed there with my eyes closed fully picturing the night Thalia died. If I could do that, if I could think it all the way through, I could get up and leave behind me whatever had tangled these sheets into a sweaty mess.

So—may the universe forgive me—that’s what I did.

Thalia changes from her costume, the tulle smelling of sweat and sawdust. She puts on the jeans and sweater that will later be found neatly folded on the pool deck bench. They never found a shirt, just a green cashmere sweater, so let’s assume this is all she has. Hiking boots. No coat; the more foolhardy of us are done with them.

She grabs her backpack (reported contents: hairbrush, lipstick, tampons, calculus book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Granby-issued weekly planner, assorted pens and scrunchies, mini deodorant, dorm room key), slips past the other changing girls, exits via the backstage fire escape. No one will miss her: All her friends in the cast and a lot of other kids, Robbie among them, are heading to the woods to drink by those two disgusting old mattresses.

Her footprints melt into others’, and in any case, they’re rained away by the next night, the soonest anyone would think to look.

She avoids the floodlights till she’s behind the gym where there’s no light at all, her fingers on the building’s bricks to guide her. At the emergency exit she knocks three times, and Omar disables the alarm. He’s been waiting right there, impatient. They go to his office couch. 

Thalia’s still in her stage makeup, the green eyeshadow that matched her dress. Omar says she looks hot.

Or no—he says she looks slutty, and she bats her eyes, pouts.

Maybe he asks if the makeup was for Robbie. He asks why she needs to look trampy for the play, asks if she’s looking for more boyfriends, because he knows she doesn’t care about him, she’s probably fucking Dartmouth guys, too.

Sometimes this is foreplay for them. Sometimes she says, What if I went to a frat party and saw how many guys would screw me?

But he’s not in the mood, and he stands over her, still high on whatever he took while he waited for her, and he grabs her throat and maybe he didn’t mean it till this moment. If her face hadn’t seized with terror, he could still play it off as a joke, but it’s too late; she’s seen what’s in him, and the only way he can fix things is to stop her from seeing him and judging him and remembering this. He slams her head against a new CPR poster taped to the cinder-block wall above the couch. She claws him, makes the deep scratch the police will find nine days later behind his right ear, down to his collarbone, the one he’ll say he got from his neighbor’s dog. There was no skin found under her fingernails, but hours in chlorinated water could account for that. He chokes her harder, and when her arms go limp he steps back.

If her face hadn’t seized with terror, he could still play it off as a joke, but it’s too late.

No. This couldn’t be it.

This was the version we were all handed—this was what he said in his confession (drugs, his office, the couch, the wall, a poster no one ever remembered seeing), but I couldn’t make it work. The movie director who lived in my brain wanted to scrap it, send the actors home for the day.

Omar was someone who noticed the stress in your shoulders before you felt it yourself—not someone who bottled up rage till it exploded.

So maybe instead—maybe there’s someone else there. Maybe Omar has a violent friend, one whose temper erupts. And Omar decides, later, to take the fall for them both.

Maybe Omar has taken tainted drugs, ones that make him hallucinate. 

I had to leave it at something happens. Because it did. Because there was no other explanation. Because there was no one else in the gym that night. Something very bad happens, and he can’t call for help.

She’s breathing still. He has enough medical training to know, even in his haze, what he’s done, and also to know she could still survive this. But if she survives this, he won’t.

He checks the hall, carries Thalia over his shoulder the twenty-six feet to the pool.

He strips her rag-doll body on the pool deck, wrangles her into a spare suit from the equipment locker. He’s reminded of dressing his little brother, pushes down the thought. Her breaths: ragged but steady. He rolls her into the water, doesn’t notice till she’s in that there’s blood on the pool deck cement. This must mean there’s blood on his wall, blood on the hallway floor. Her dark curls had been hiding the wound.

Omar grabs the pool net, uses the handle end to hold Thalia’s body a few inches below the surface. She doesn’t struggle. This is what he said in his confession, a detail that always destroyed me: the idea that someone who’d been so alive could be killed—so gently, so slowly—by a pool net.

Omar racks his brain to think who’s seen them together, who might know. He can’t deny being here in the gym; he’s been making calls all evening from his office phone. He’ll have to say he saw nothing, heard nothing. (So why, then, when they first questioned him, did he volunteer that his door was open?)

He waits ten minutes, longer than anyone could possibly survive without air. To his surprise, she sinks a little. Her feet lower than her head, but both below the water’s surface. He folds Thalia’s clothes, puts them on the bench. He knows where the maintenance guy keeps the bleach, industrial strength, and he goes to the cabinet, uses his shirt cuff to lift the bottle, to pour it onto the bloody pool deck. He watches it fizz white. He scrubs with a forgotten towel, and it’s a long time before he can step back and not see a pinkish blur. He turns on the lights for a second, to check. He uses the same bleach and the same towel on the drops that dot the tiled hallway. He’s lucky: In his office, there’s blood visible only on the CPR poster. Still, even after he peels it off, folds it, stuffs it in his backpack, he scrubs the wall. He returns the bleach to the maintenance closet. To do this, he has to reenter the pool, has to see Thalia bobbing below the surface.

He’s sobered a bit, and it’s harder now to look. The smell of chlorine starts to sicken him, and the last thing he needs is his own vomit at the scene. The water keeps moving her. Her arms don’t stay by her sides, her head hits the lane line. She’s close enough to his end of the pool that he can reach one lock of her hair to pull her closer. He rubs the hair in his fingers, because oh God, what has he done, such a beautiful girl—he ruins everything. He breaks things. He broke his own marriage. This is who he is, and he hates who he is, hates that he’s the same boy who once broke his grandmother’s crystal hummingbird. Look at him. Look at her. He wraps her hair around the lane line, getting his sleeve wet. He wraps it around five, six, seven times, to anchor her in place, to keep her from—what? He doesn’t even know.

He locks the pool door behind him; maybe it will buy him time, delay the moment her body is found. He takes the towel, to burn with the poster.

All that night, all the next day, his hands smell of chlorine.

(Was I satisfied with my story that morning? I told myself that despite the missing pieces, I ought to be. Perhaps the dull nausea I felt had something to do with last night’s dining hall lo mein. In any case: I was able to get out of bed. I was able to start my day.) 

#2: Thalia

The products of that night’s insomnia: 

Half-dreams about you and Thalia, you looking into the dumpster, you keeping Thalia hidden in your house all these years. You morphing into the guy who assaulted me in college. Me trying to put my contacts in, but they were the size of dinner plates, stiff, wouldn’t fit in my eyes. 

An itching on my thighs that worsened the harder I scratched, an itch that arranged itself in long, hot welts. 

Another story, another film reel I made myself watch all the way: 

Thalia takes off alone. 

She wants to get away from Rachel and Beth, who pretend to be her friends but aren’t, and from Robbie, who’s bound to be drunk and insufferable in the woods. She wants to get away from you, wants to make sure you don’t find an excuse to keep her back as everyone leaves, that you don’t look at her with puppy eyes and tell her she’s the one with all the power, she’s the one who has your heart in her fist. So she changes quickly, slips out the back. 

Earlier, she took a few tokes off Max Krammen’s joint, a soggy thing he kept in the pocket of his Merlin robes. And late in the second act she sipped from Beth’s flask—but she isn’t wasted, just lighter, full with her own ideas. 

She floats to the gym and finds the front door unlocked. She finds the pool door unlocked, too, and locks it behind her because she can change right here on the deck into the spare suit she’s found, one Omar spotted the last time he passed through, scooped up wet from the floor—and what, sneezed into? wiped across his sweating forehead? would that be enough?—and dropped on the bench with his DNA in the knit. 

She knows if she gets in slowly it’ll be too cold; she’ll chicken out. So she climbs to the observation deck, because if she can fly in—and she’s seen people do it, knows it can be done—he’ll be irrevocably in the water. 

She climbs over the two bars of the rail, painted Granby green, holds the top bar behind her, stands with only her heels on the edge. It’s a matter of force; the only danger is not jumping hard. 

She used to have conviction. As a ten-year-old, grass-stained and sunburnt, swinging from branches; as a twelve-year-old athlete, diving racquet-first for the ball. But something has happened to her lately, even on the tennis court, a failure of the body to go full bore, to surrender to her will. It’s an instinct, perhaps, for self-preservation, but one that always betrays her. 

And how does a seventeen-year-old girl lose that control? Did it crack the moment the bingo chart went up in the bathroom? If a thirty-three-year-old music teacher takes possession of a teenager’s body, does he take agency from her muscles as well? Does he fray the line between body and mind? Perhaps not entirely. But enough to make an inch, three inches, five inches of difference? 

She springs, but she hesitates slightly, doesn’t push off with the legs of a ten-year-old but with legs that have been told what they are until she believes it. 

She knows, in the way you always know, in any bad fall, that the earth is rising for you, and she manages to twist. Not to right herself, but to turn like a barbershop pole so it’s the back of her head that hits the pool rim. And not even the outer rim, but the inner one, the one under a few centimeters of water. Her head leaves no dent; her blood billows through the water in faint pink clouds. 

She struggles a minute, drifting in and out of consciousness. She can’t pull herself out but she follows the lane line to the shallow end, draping herself on the green and gold rings, nestling them under her chin, slipping under, coming up, slipping under, coming up on the far side, but now something has her hair, something’s pulling her head back and down, and the easiest thing, the only thing, is to sleep. 

#3: Robbie Serenho

He has split himself in two.

There’s a Robbie Serenho who goes to the mattress party, who’s captured on film, seen by friends, who checks in only twelve minutes late, who shows up at breakfast the next morning and jokes around and finds out that afternoon with the rest of us that Thalia’s dead. This is the Robbie who loves Thalia, the Robbie who’ll be a decent father and teach his kids to ski.

But there’s a second Robbie, the entitled jock, the one who’s gotten everything the easy way, the one who can’t control his anger or his fists, the one whose hard edges come out when he drinks. This is the Robbie who meets Thalia outside the theater.

The first Robbie takes off with his friends while the second Robbie needs to ask Thalia about all the time she’s been spending with you. He noticed something tonight, when he snuck backstage before the show. He saw you leaning too close to Thalia, your hand on her elbow. He noticed the way she looked at you, tilting her face down, her eyes up. He lingered backstage, tried to get her attention during her scene, which made her turn her head to the wings and mouth What? He goes to sit in the audience then and seethe. Dorian leans over to tell him one of his Thalia jokes. “Your girlfriend’s not a slut,” he says. “She’s just a volunteer prostitute.”

Robbie’s backstage again at curtain call, beckoning her into the wings.

He says, “Let’s go for a walk.”

He interrogates her, won’t stop asking about you. He’s drunk. There were Poland Spring bottles full of cheap vodka floating around the audience, and Robbie, for all he drinks, can’t hold his liquor. While the other Robbie sips his first beer at the mattresses, flashing the camera a peace sign, this Robbie is wasted.

They end up behind the gym, and Thalia tells him she has to leave because she needs the bathroom. But there’s a bathroom in the gym, he tells her. He has a master key in his pocket, because he always does—and this back door accepts it, doesn’t need the special pool door key. The exit alarm doesn’t sound. (Things always work out for Robbie.) They go through the pool, quietly, quietly, and down the hall—not past Omar’s office, where the door is open and the light is on, but just into the girls’ locker room, where Robbie won’t stop asking questions even while she pees.

She takes so long that he steps into a shower stall with his clothes on, turns on the water. He must have fallen asleep for a second, leaning against the wall, because she’s in here now with him, slapping his cheek, telling him to wake up.

If they’re in the shower they might as well have sex, and he tries to take her wet clothes off.

She gets mad and yells, pushes him away. She’s making too much noise. He asks why she won’t have sex, asks if it’s because she already had sex with someone today, asks if that person was you.

She tells him he’s an idiot and tries to leave the shower stall.

This Robbie grabs Thalia’s neck, shakes her, just wants to shake sense into her, needs to shake her against something hard, against this wet and slippery wall, and he feels like an animal, feels like when he’s flying down a hill in snow, when the fire flows into his muscles, when his body is a machine. He doesn’t tell his body what to do because it knows, it follows the hill, it follows gravity, and that’s what he’s doing now, following gravity, until Thalia starts seizing, her eyes rolling back. She slides to the bottom of the stall, the water washing the blood on the wall from red to pink to nothing.

She slides to the bottom of the stall, the water washing the blood on the wall from red to pink to nothing.

He sobers up, or at least the things in front of him come clear: He needs to fix this. Not fix her, because it’s too late, she’s twitching like she’s electrocuted—but fix all of this, this bad movie, this problem, this thing that’s befallen him.

He drags her small, wet body out of the locker room and back to the pool, gets her clothes off, gets her into a swimsuit he finds. He has all the time in the world, because meanwhile the other Robbie, the one in the woods, is singing along with the boom box, a falsetto rendition of “Come to My Window.” That Robbie is hamming it up, spinning with his arms out, as this Robbie slides Thalia into the pool, knowing, to the extent he knows anything right now, that she’s still alive, that what he did in the shower might have been an accident but this is intentional, this is murder, is murder, is murder. He has time to find the bleach, to use it on the pool deck and in the hall—Omar is gone by now, his office light off—and in the locker room. He has time to vomit in the sink, to wash it down the drain, to wash his hands and face.

There are extra clothes in Thalia’s backpack—a green sweater, jeans, some underwear—and he folds these neatly on the bench as if this were what she’d worn. He’ll take the wet, bloodstained clothes and find a way to burn them.

He slips back out through the emergency exit. In the morning, it occurs to him that he should have left the key with Thalia, given her a plausible way to have entered the pool alone.

But then, this version of Robbie is not the one who’ll wake up in the morning, because this Robbie vanishes. He becomes molecular, floats away in the damp March air.

The real Robbie is hurrying back to his dorm now with his friends, crossing North Bridge, happy and only a little drunk and only a little late for check‑in.

He’ll get married and have kids and live in Connecticut, and he’ll never know what he’s done. 

#4: Me

I did it myself. I don’t remember it, I don’t know how it’s possible, but I did it in a fit of jealousy and I blocked it from my mind completely, and all the subconscious tugs bringing me back to Granby, leading me to this moment, came from the molten core of guilt in my soul.

A ridiculous thought, but as I spiked a fever Sunday morning, as my body paid for those hours in the ravine, I half slept and rechewed the same dreams and occasionally became convinced that I’d followed Thalia to the pool. No, I’d led her to the pool. Or I found her in the pool, and we swam together until she looked at me and held a hand to her bleeding head.

What alibi did I have? That I shut down the lights and the soundboard, that I reset the props and locked up the theater, went back to the dorm, studied alone until the fire alarm went off.

What if my memories were as false as dreams? What if my dreams were really memories? What if we swam together in borrowed suits until the water became heavy and thick, until Omar tried to throw us the life preserver, but it only sank? There you were, throwing rocks from the observation deck, and they kept missing us, so I grabbed one and helped you, I lifted it over Thalia’s head and brought it down. Then I sank to the bottom, a rock myself; I sank there and lived there for years. 

“Better Things” Taught Me How To Build a Home and Why It Matters

Posted on by EL Assistant2

My last day in North Carolina, I got teary watching a junk removal company cart off my couch. I spied self-conscious from the window as it teetered on the trailer. It was a couch, a bland couch, designed to disappear, a grad school couch that I’d been dying to send on its way. And yet the moment felt significant, a bookend. I’d bought it the day I moved to town three years ago in a torrential August downpour. Now it would stay in North Carolina (as junk!) and I’d be on my way, leaving a home I’d unwittingly come to love. My stuff was boxed up, bookshelves and lamps sold on Facebook. I didn’t know when or whether I’d be back. 

There was more to it, too. The night before the junk removers came, I’d sat there and cried through the series finale of Better Things. Some symmetry connected the show to this very small moment in my life. 

Better Things is a plotless show that follows Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon), a mid-career actress in Los Angeles who’s raising three children and dealing with her mother who’s slipping into dementia. Each episode is comprised of several micro-episodes, Seinfeld-like in that it’s “about nothing” but more of a collage of the everyday things that compose a life. In the first episode of the show’s final season, Sam accompanies her daughter Max to an apartment showing, goes with her brother to a genealogy appointment, fights with her mom about purging her house, and celebrates her child Frankie’s friend who got into Harvard over dinner at a sushi restaurant, stressing to Frankie, “It’s important to celebrate life and life’s rituals.” 

…if you asked me what color my childhood bedroom was painted, I would genuinely draw a blank (maybe beige?).

A subtle theme emerges in this episode to frame the show’s send-off. Sam teaches Max that you can’t just tell the management company, “I love it. I’ll take it,” minutes after entering the unit (and Max later bemoans how Sam’s credit is as bad as hers). With her mother, Sam insists that she should go through her boxes of junk and save mementos from her late brother instead of consigning it all to the dump. People are building their homes, and Sam’s is on the brink of change.

Most importantly, though, when Sam and Frankie get home from dinner, the power goes out. Upstairs, Frankie panics, calling, “Mom!” on a loop. Triumphant when the generator comes on, Sam knocks over the statue at the top of the stairs, a little man wearing a beanie whose head everyone touches when they pass, a family superstition. The shot of the smash is raw, the lighting high-key. The moment is catastrophic. Sam passes speechless by the wreckage, spitting with her fingers to her mouth to dispel the bad juju. 

While it might not be much for plot, the significance of the crash is clear. Building upon seasons of theme and narrative structure, Sam’s home has been thrown into disarray. 

I’ve never had an eye for design. I have no clue what “goes” together, and if you asked me what color my childhood bedroom was painted, I would genuinely draw a blank (maybe beige?). While interning for my home state’s monthly magazine in college, I wrote copy for their various special publications. Because I was an intern with time on my hands and access to Google, this meant that I was charged with writing descriptions of local artisans’ wares for the annual home design magazine. I described a cutting board as “handsome and serviceable.” I wrote the sentences, “Rustic design with a modern industrial edge? Yes, please,” and, “Who says you can’t have your eco-friendly cake and eat it too?” When I watched Better Things almost a decade later, home design was still an afterthought. Previously, I’d lived with a roommate who had visions of how our home should look so I deferred to her, or else I was in somewhat transient living situations without disposable income.

Facing the end of graduate school, Better Things changed that for me. My friend Jon and I had started watching it in the thick of the pandemic; now both the show and school were ending. Over the series’ five seasons, I’d always loved the Fox family home. Their house is beautifully Californian, meaningfully furnished with the beloved artifacts of Adlon’s personal collection. Decor is colorful, vibrant, eclectic: vintage Falkenstein lamps by Sam’s bedside, gallery walls, bright yellow chairs in the kitchen, the touchpoint statue at the top of the stairs (they all need it for the Feng Shui). 

In the zone in her kitchen, making food for her family––it’s evident that these are all things she loves.

I’d always been open to adventure, finding a point of pride (and a moderate annoyance) in that I’d only ever lived in the same apartment for more than one year, once. There’s romance to being unencumbered, always ready to up and go. But something about the post-MFA move felt different. Every time one chapter of my life was ending, the next had already been arranged––fellowship to job to graduate school. Leaving the MFA, I was stepping into one of my life’s biggest unknowns. For years, the program had been a target, something to look forward to and organize my future. What would I have after graduating, to structure a “life as a writer,” which now seemed so formless? Single and without any clear, logical next steps in my career, it felt like I had to pack up my life, dog, and battalion of houseplants and find somewhere new for myself. 

Unpeeled from the structure of the program and the friends who’d guided me through the pandemic, I started an album of apartment inspiration on my iPhone. I saved pictures of places I’d seen before and loved, along with photos from the set of Better Things, its patterned quilts and scarlet rugs, its yellow couch with mismatched pillows. Constantly, I found myself thinking of Sam, her squad of cool LA friends, her little laugh, and serendipitous encounters around the city. When she cooks, the kitchen is chaos––wooden spoons tapping pots, halved limes desiccated on the countertop, one of her kids comes in and she makes them taste. In the zone in her kitchen, making food for her family––it’s evident that these are all things she loves. Her whole house feels this way, and over and over again, her design choices influenced mine. I wanted creative chaos, colors, life, activity. 

When I moved to Portland, Maine, I learned about things I’d never cared about––color coordination and poufs and washable rugs. I learned my style could be described as “transitional” and fell in love with the deals of Home Goods. Whenever someone told me that my place looked good, I was thrilled.

Even if I was moving into a life more alone, I was starting to see that there was a point to picking rugs with intention or spray-painting picture frames. I could bring life and joy into my home. This was why people cared about interior design. The sentimental part of me––a very large part––took to this too. My dresser? Jon and I found that at the vintage store on Castle Street. The ottoman? My mom and I made an enemy at Home Goods when she equivocated over the color and we scooped it up in the interim. These objects that constitute a home could be imbued with meaning.  

Yet, I know it’s bigger than that. I don’t just like things because they make me think of people. Better Things doesn’t narrate the story behind every artifact. The sum is greater than its parts. Something alchemical occurs when I bring all these artifacts together. 

Designing my home base was especially potent because of my loneliness and grief over life’s changes.

As much as I love the aesthetics of Sam’s house, what really mattered to me was what became possible within it. Through her care and attention, Sam builds a home. In the show’s final season, this space becomes an important sanctuary for her gay friends and nonbinary child. She stumbles through early conversations with her child Frankie about their gender identity and asks for patience––she’s trying to get it right. One night, her gay friend Rich comes over for a celebration. Sam cooks a dinner for Frankie’s friends, and it feels like they’re all being welcomed into this space and their adulthood as themselves. 

Better Things is organized around Sam having joyful, ordinary encounters with old friends, strangers in waiting rooms at the doctor’s office, or white-knuckling seatmates during airplane turbulence. Both in her home and in her life, she creates space for the life she wants to live and for others to join in, being themselves. Though the show eschews traditional plot, it collages a life that’s bright and real. As I pick through the stuff of a home that’s sunny and colorful, the collage reveals a lot of heavy moments in Sam’s life, too. So often I cried on that couch, watching her confront shifting sands in her friendships, disappointments in her career, the challenges of relating to and caring for her mother, her children coming into their own lives with their own attendant trials. And always, her house is somewhere they return. That her home is so resonant as a sanctuary is in large part because of everything going on outside of it. Designing my home base was especially potent because of my loneliness and grief over life’s changes. I was creating somewhere for myself to go back to. 

As the beginning of the final season indicates, Sam’s home and life are undergoing a sea change. She acquires her British citizenship and the whole family makes a trip to London to visit relatives. On the trip, both Max and Sam’s mother decide to move to the UK, so Sam and the other two children return, quiet and uncertain. The finale opens with Caroline, Sam’s sister-in-law who everyone hates and fought with in London, giving her a new statue for the top of the staircase. The figure is grotesque––a gray and bloated ballerino with crystals jutting from his head––and Sam loves it. Caroline tells her, “You are the essence of this family. You keep it going.” With the new statue’s guidance, their home will be right again. 

That night, Sam hosts her friends’ wedding in her home. All her friends come together for an evening, and Sam’s youngest daughter says to her, “You’re a really good person. You have a way of bringing people together and making people feel good, and I don’t know, I like it. I like you. I like the way you live your life.” Her daughter leaves “to take a shit,” and Sam takes one look at everyone assembled in her home and is overcome with emotion. 

Before “curated” became a despised buzzword, synonymous with turmeric lattes, minimalism, and beige, it had a specific meaning. There’s real value behind curation, resonance to choosing what to bring into your life, whether throw pillows or friendships. Seeking to curate my life the way Sam does has provided me more direction than I could have anticipated. When I took the time to design my life and make my apartment into a home, form arose from formlessness. I saw this unknown chapter worthy of embracing and settling in. I started reconnecting with old friends. I’ve sought out the gay community, emboldened to go to book club or the gay bar alone. Maybe my expectations had come unyoked from a clear narrative, but I could approach life like Sam. Could I look back on my day and find a better thing? 

A few months ago, one of my best friends from college got married in Los Angeles. The couple kept the guest list to only fifty people, and I was at once surprised and touched to be invited. I hadn’t seen May since we graduated, and now she was getting married.

When I took the time to design my life and make my apartment into a home, form arose from formlessness.

I traveled to the city with another friend, reuniting for the first time since the pandemic; my long weekend an endless hang and catchup around Venice Beach and West Hollywood. The night before the wedding, we went to a welcome dinner in the couple’s backyard, tacos sizzling in the heat of Culver City. The evening was surreal, spellbinding. I sat beside May’s friend from Italy, someone I hadn’t seen in eight years, and while he rolled cigarettes, I felt all these periods of a life weaving, colliding. The night glimmered with the bliss of these unexpected reunions. 

May’s high school mentor hosted the wedding in her gorgeous backyard in Santa Monica. The couple walked down the bocce court to the altar, where family members officiated the ceremony, everyone so joyous I could feel myself wanting to cry. May and her husband left personalized, handwritten notes on each place setting, and throughout the reception I caught up with old friends and met the people who were important to May’s life. I flew home the next day, convinced I had to move to LA. This was the life I’d been looking for on TV but better––it was real. 

The wedding was homemade, thoughtfully curated, not for a life lived but the life that the couple wants to lead. May said that in the invitations, she thought about who she wants in her life, now. In Santa Monica, it wasn’t just that I felt how this could be one of Sam’s backyard parties with her eclectic assemblages of friends, but the intention behind it all was built around building––friendship, connections, intimacy, and love.  

At the airport flying out, I got an interview request for the job I’d later take, launching me all the way to Maine. Choosing joy in that courtyard (dancing so emphatically an old woman clasped my arm at the end of the night and said, “You were the best dancer”), I was pointing myself forward. With some help from Sam––her vibe in the home and out––and the people and places I choose, I could find a way.