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.
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.
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 thatfollows 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, andif 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.
Like its playfully long title, Jemc’s novel gallops across the lives of Ludwig and Sisi, snorting at their royal duties with the irreverence of a wild horse. The cousins don’t take well to monarchal reins, their bodies still lanky with teenage freedom when they reluctantly assume power. Half-feral in her love of forest and field, Sisi becomes engaged to the Emperor of Austria, also her cousin. Her life’s purpose, she is told, is to produce an heir. She gives birth to four children, neglecting all but the last, and travels around Europe’s spa towns, after diagnosing herself with tuberculosis to ensure she’ll remain undisturbed. Ludwig is a misanthropic dreamer who prefers Goethe to geopolitics. He plays hooky anytime he hears the word “military” and recites poetry to avoid signing edicts. A naively devoted patron of the composer Richard Wagner, Ludwig throws money at operas, reaping the benefits when Wagner’s company performs just for him. Both rockstarishly excessive, Ludwig and Sisi’s disinterest only makes their people love them more.
I spoke with Jac Jemc over Zoom in late January 2023. We discussed the erasure of Ludwig’s queerness in royal documents, the relationship between creation and connection, and the cousins’ haunted inheritance.
Elizabeth McNeill: You’ve written six books to date, mainly horror exploring the nature of reality by creating discomfort and instability in the reader. Did this background draw you to Ludwig and Sisi, figures who created discomfort and instability in their own day? Was this fascination at first sight, or a slow burn?
Jac Jemc: Ludwig was the start of this project. The thing that drew me to him was the story of his death, which I talked about in the prologue of the book. So, there’s no spoiler alert needed to say at a certain point he’s declared insane by a doctor who’s never met him, and then found murdered within basically 36 hours. He and his doctor are both found murdered, and no one knows what happened. There’s all of these historical conjectures. I just love the theories and that kind of mysterious element of his life, to say nothing of all of these apocryphal stories and trying to parse what’s actually true, and what are just rumors. That definitely seems related to an interest in horror that runs through some of my work. But also, the fact that he was so obsessed with building these huge castles that he almost saw as stage sets more than architecture. These haunted psychological spaces ties back to my last novel, which was a haunted house story. So, that’s what drew me in and then everything expanded out from that in terms of finding other people in his life I was equally fascinated by and wanted to explore more.
EMcN: Speaking of exploration, in the acknowledgments, you call this “a fiction based on many personal fictions.” Could you elaborate? I really want to know how you gathered all of this data. It’s just so rich!
JK: So many of the characters wrote these self-mythologizing memoirs, or were keeping diaries or writing letters for very specific purposes, where the truth might be slightly obscured behind what they’re trying to attain with the information they’re sharing. And, of course, there are these royal spin doctors deciding what they want to be public about the different kings’ and queens’ lives.
The biggest thing that it’s hard to work through and find factual information about is the fact that King Ludwig was absolutely queer, and the royal documents have tried to erase that to the best of their ability. When I was looking back at the documents, at the diaries that they haven’t destroyed entirely, it’s very easy to see. I think the danger of that, too, is that one of the relationships Ludwig is most well known for is his patronage of the composer Wagner, and everyone I talked to about this project will say, oh, well, he was in love with Wagner, right? Like, he was romantically in love with him? No, I don’t think so. I think that part of his life was so obscured and covered up that we just assume that. I think he was in love with lots of people, but his love for Wagner was really focused on the music and the art Wagner was creating. And so, disentangling the theories and reinterpreting the sources and trying to come to my own understanding of these historical figures was a great challenge and a lot of fun.
EMcN: So, the two monarchs at the novel’s center, as the wonderfully long 19th-century title puts it, are “in pursuit of beauty and connection.” But despite getting everything they could possibly dream up, beauty and connection elude them. How did your own understanding of beauty and connection change over the course of writing about these lonely, yet beloved figures?
JJ: In the beginning of working on the project, I was more focused on the art aspect. The initial title that I wanted for the book was the German word “Gesamtkunstwerk.” It’s a term Wagner coined to mean “total work of art,” that coming together of all the properties, in his case in an opera production. But it could be for any type of art being created. Think of all that goes into it to create that immersive experience. And my agent said, bad idea, an inscrutable word as the title. We sold it as Total Work of Art, just the English translation. As we were working on it more, my editor said, is this the right name for the book? I am grateful to her for that, because I think that, ultimately, the book did become more about this attempt at finding ways to connect more than it was about creating a beautiful world to inhabit, and realizing that connection is a big part of that. And if you’re missing that, you’re missing out on everything. One of the reasons that happened is that, as I was researching Ludwig, I started to bring in all of these women who were present in his life or his family’s life. Sisi, his cousin, is one of his best friends and a parallel iconoclast. At one point, there were two other major threads in the book: Lola Montez, the courtesan who wooed his grandfather and made him abdicate the throne. And a sculptor, named Elisabeth Ney, who’s still in the book but in a more minor role. I started to pull in these other people who are similarly trying to achieve something outside of what was expected of them, but often falling on the human relationships in their lives as a consolation for ways those careers didn’t go as they expected, or not even falling on them as a consolation, but sometimes those relationships suffering because of the effort they were putting into trying to achieve these very large scale goals.
EMcN: It’s a shame you couldn’t keep the title “Gesamtkunstwerk!”
JJ: I know, I love a long German word! If I saw a book with that title on the hardcover table at a bookstore, I would be like, snatch, I want it! But I am attentive to the idea that maybe that is not true of everyone.
EMcN: One of the things that initially struck me was the long title. It’s getting at the same sort of thing as “Gesamtkunstwerk,” without being a German word. It really captures that time.
JJ: I did like that we eventually added the long subtitle and I found a way to make it a little cheeky.
EMcN: Going back to the theme of connection, so much of Sisi and Ludwig’s unhappiness comes from punishing themselves to fit these narrow expectations of gender, sexuality, appearance, and even royal duty. Considering your love of feminist horror, I’d be interested to hear what you think is haunting Sisi and Ludwig, and what the necessary exorcism is, if an exorcism is required at all.
JJ: I think it is the expectations placed on them and their inability to escape them. I think that both of them would have been happier if they weren’t royalty. They were put in positions where they were being asked to do things they were not made to do, or they were not talented at. And so, it meant that they tried to rebel in whatever ways they could, but they still felt like they had failed to a certain extent, because everyone expected one thing, and they did something else. They’re both descendants of this Bavarian line, the Wittelsbachs, and they were very aware of the inbreeding and the line of madness in that ancestry. I am also really curious about the way in which they distrusted themselves. They had an aunt who believed she’d swallowed a glass piano, and they knew there was this possibility something had gone amiss in their genetics. I feel like that was haunting both of them: this fear that their opinions or desires would be discounted because of a certain familial history.
EMcN: I’d love to talk about how art functions as an escape from Ludwig’s kingly duties. He creates this dream world through his patronage of Wagner and his obsession with castle-building. Fittingly, the Ludwig of your novel is such a romantic, operatic character. Do you think Ludwig was an artist in his own right? He seemed to have a unified vision.
They tried to rebel in whatever ways they could, but they still felt like they had failed to a certain extent, because everyone expected one thing, and they did something else.
JJ: People don’t realize that so many aspects of modern-day theater were started by Wagner. The fact that the house lights are dimmed, that the orchestra is put under the stage. Wagner did these things to make everything feel like you’re in the show you’re watching on the stage. There’s a reason Wagner was the one Ludwig attached himself to in terms of the opera or stageplay he wanted to exist in. So, Ludwig is an artist to a certain extent, but he’s more of a producer. He has the money and an idea of what he wants to support and see more of in the world, and he finds the people who are able to to materialize his visions.
EMcN: You’re trapped in the smallest room in Ludwig’s smallest castle for a month. You can’t leave or admit anyone else into the room, except for either Ludwig or Sisi, who is also trapped in the room with you. Whom do you choose and why?
JJ: This is such a hard question. I would have to choose Sisi because I feel like Sisi would at least potentially talk to me or communicate with me in some way. I am not convinced that Ludwig would not just shut down and rock in the corner and ignore the fact that I was there with him. He would be so much more tormented in that situation, and I think Sisi could deal with it a little better. I say that with great difficulty because, when push comes to shove, I am more fascinated by Ludwig. But he’s more of a wild card. And I don’t know if that’s what you want for a month.
Mother finally came for a visit. We don’t know why it’s taken this long.
We were happy like the end of fall. The day glimmered. We went for a walk in the woods with the dog in the all together mode of what was cut out of us.
Sunlight dappled the path, maybe that was it. Roots, of course, bulged irregular veins, maybe that was why. Perhaps it was her unexpected decline.
Mother fell without a sound. We turned when we heard her cry out. She was sitting on the ground, we were holding a handful of her blood. The hand is not a good cup. Good thing I have tissues, Mother said. Mother didn’t have enough tissues. Yet somehow the bleeding stopped. We decided to turn around and go back home. The dog lagged behind to smell and re-smell Mother’s blood and to retrace her fall.
I won’t do that again, Mother said. Her face had swollen. My face is fat, Mother said, I hit my face. Mother said, I’ve had enough of the woods. We decided to stick close to home. That sounds good, we all thought. Let’s not overdo it, we said. There’s nothing worse than overdoing it.
Then Mother fell in the yard. Or rather she stumbled hard. A little foot clip on the grass and she couldn’t walk. She couldn’t sit down. She stood. She hobbled. We supported her as best we could. Mother didn’t say she wanted to go home, but she wanted to go home. We could tell.
Mother said, I’m tough.
Mother took aspirin. Mother took heating pad. Ice pack. Bathtub. Arnica. Gin.
The foot’s worse than the face, Mother said. Right foot, right foot, lead with your right foot, Mother said. Mother will not come back to visit again soon. It’s not our fault, but it happened on our watch. It’s time. Catching up with her. Time to rest. By the time it was time to go home, Mother sat in the back seat. She didn’t say much. We drove her. We wanted to climb inside her. We wanted to steer the rest of her life. We wanted to be her eyes. We wanted to be the light underneath her feet. We wanted to always catch her blood and put it back in. We looked at her in the rearview mirror. She seemed unsteady even within her seat belt. We wanted to be closer. We wanted to be too far away. We wanted it all. At once. It stripped us of ourselves, the way we all used to be. Together. We saw Mother onto a bus. Goodbye, Mother said, it’s time for me to go. We drove away empty of everything. Time got the better of us.
When my father was born there were three astrologers in attendance at the hospital in Kolkata. You could never be too sure, my grandfather said, about who had the most accurate wristwatch, and the good astrologers care about time, deeply. That is their life’s work, of course, to understand when and where the planets move and to extract from these orbits the history of our lives.
But sometimes the paths that we’ve been pre-destined for aren’t the ones we end up taking. We fall outside of the pages of the divine ephemeris, groove away from destinies that have been handed to us. I’m especially drawn to stories where characters are lurched off their well-trodden paths. Expectations are vanquished: the unfamiliar is where we see who they really are.
In my story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, I explore these rifts in our astrology through characters who through choice or chance transition from their birth families to cultivate chosen families, finding new ways to make it in the margins. I think the short story is a powerful technology for anyone trying to figure out what it means to live a good life, and for any of us for whom that good life is beyond usual boundaries, these story collections illumine possible paths. They reshape personal histories. They welcome dreamers and misfits. They allow us to leave our charts behind.
Alvar understands home isn’t a singular place but rather a constellation that we carry with us. The conflicts in these stories—for instance in the first story, Kontrabida, where a young pharmacist returns to the Philippines to visit his sick, dying father and his mother who may have dark motives—explore moral ambiguities. They defy easy categorizations and allow readers to empathize with characters whose actions might be described as more ethically gray than good. This is something I love about the story form: the speed at which we’re thrown into the woods, as it were, kept away from any surefootedness about what’s wrong or right.
The primary instrument writers have is the sentence. Books are built on these, of course, and writers decide the rhythm of each line, forecast how the words might land in the reader’s brain. Reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s sentences is like watching the world through an alien mirror, with the distortion that’s provided taking us closer to the heart of the heart of the matter. Take a fictionalized Bob Dylan for example, who visits a family for Thanksgiving, and who the narrator eventually describes as, “He was supposed to create some sort of lather, and he barely summoned enough energy to behead a pile of string beans.” What is beheaded in these stories are ordinary expectations and what is revealed is worthy of many rooms of family albums.
Few places remain the same from our youth, and when I visit Kolkata, the city of my birth, I’m especially attuned to the ways in which the old guard rubs up against the new, and in her second collection of short stories I love how Divakurni describes these transitions between the traditional and the modern, and the city beneath the city. In “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,” a widow now living in Sunnyvale struggles to provide a glowing review of her new life in America. What she can offer in the confusion of new devices and disappointing grandchildren is a feeling of living outside the margins that I think many of us have felt in those particularly challenging and liminal moments of our lives.
I’ve always admired how Colm Tóibín refuses to shy away from the most difficult parts of family life. With candor and compassion, he’ll examine choices from years past that may have left characters doomed to their loneliness. Somehow, memory becomes evidence that the heart exists, that it does what it does despite a lifetime of missed consolations. Perhaps my favorite story, and one I return to every few years, is “The Pearl Fishers.” In it our narrator has a meeting with a lover from his past and his lover’s new wife. We explore the complexity of this situation as we do the modern Irish moment, and what it means to be a gay man with the “true Catholic church” casting its judgments.
A Good Place for the Night by Savyon Liebrecht, translated by Sondra Silverstein
In Savyon Liebrecht’s sixth story collection, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverstein, characters find themselves away from home: in America, Munich, Hiroshima, Jerusalem, even a futuristic world blighted by nuclear catastrophe. Throughout, Liebrecht explores the sanctity and relevance of place because as those who’ve crossed borders know, nothing holds us more in our orbits than our relationship to what we consider home. These are unsettling stories that ask us to question where and how we find comfort and love. Still, there is always warmth, even in the title story with its apocalyptic landscape where new family bonds are stubbornly formed.
The Boat by Nam Le
What does it mean to write an “ethnic story?” the narrator of Nam Le’s opening story wonders. In fiction, we’re often working to make the familiar unfamiliar, which poses an interesting challenge for writers whose heritage takes them outside of a “conventional” literary milieu. Returning to my starting metaphor, perhaps our astrology is in part a function of our cultural capital, of what is venerated by the world we live in. Except, all the other worlds deserve their due, and Le explores them with a sense of adventure. Columbian assassins, Hiroshima orphans, all get their time on the page, as does the desperately real and the gritty, a thirteen-day boat journey across an unforgiving ocean.
I first came across Nathan Englander’s first short story collection in a dusty bookshop in Jerusalem. So many who come to the holy city are looking for an altogether different sort of life, a reclamation of a spiritual or religious self, which the hallowed old city walls might provide, but in this seminal collection Englander’s characters are often fighting against the social walls that limit their search for love and expression. They are striking out, miserably, honorably, always evoking a great empathy, to make their own life within or outside orthodoxy. No astrologer could predict the turns of fate these characters face and that’s some of the joy of these stories.
So many libraries, so little time! As writers and readers, we here at Electric Literature know there’s nothing quite like stepping into a space that has been specifically designed to invoke and perpetuate a love of reading. With book-banning efforts escalating across the country and funding for these important public institutions often not regarded as a priority, libraries of all ages, languages, and architectures deserve some extra love and admiration. Below is a list of several of the world’s most stunningly beautiful libraries, from Seoul to Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro, to add to your bucket list.
We also encourage the EL community to support your local libraries, which are equally awesome and won’t require a pricey plane ticket to access!
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Abbey Library of Saint Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland
Founded in the year 612, the Abbey Library of Saint Gall is the third oldest library in the world. Designated a World Heritage Site in 1983, the library currently houses around 160,000 volumes. Back in the day, Benedictine monks used the library to work on manuscripts by firelight. Now, visitors can walk through the space and admire the beautiful, medieval architecture, but they must wear fuzzy slippers provided by the library in order to preserve the original wooden floor. Mandated library slippers? No resistance here.
Built in 1776 and designed by the architect Joseph Hueber, the Admont Abbey Library is the largest monastery library in the world. Hueber, committed to the Enlightenment period, wanted the library to reflect the expansion of human knowledge, stating, “Like the mind, the rooms should also be filled with light.” The ceiling is painted with exquisite frescoes depicting the stages of human knowledge up to the Divine Revolution. The library is often cited as the inspiration behind the enviable library that the Beast gifts to Belle in Beauty and the Beast. If you want to live out your Disney Princess fantasy and twirl among breathtaking bookshelves, you can do so here!
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France
Located in Paris and established in 1461, this stunning and studious-looking library is the repository of all that is published in France. The library is home to hundreds of thousands of books as well as incredible cultural artifacts, including Charlamagne’s ivory chess pieces, the first globe to use the word “America,” and Mozart’s handwritten score of “Don Giovanni.” After undergoing twelve years of renovations totaling approximately $256 million, the national library is reopened to book lovers and history lovers alike.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, Mexico
Located in the downtown Buenavista neighborhood of Mexico City, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos was established in May 2006 and is named after the philosopher and former president of the National Library of Mexico, José Vasconcelos. The library celebrates contemporary architecture with its primary materials of steel and concrete, and its hanging stacks and catwalks. The space also holds the giant art sculpture “Matrix Móvil” by plastics artist Gabriel Orozco. The sculpture displays the real skeleton of a gray whale, bearing graphite designs on the bones. Suspended from the ceiling, the sculpture has become an iconic part of the library’s identity.
Byeolmadang Library in in Gangnam-gu Seoul, South Korea
Located inside the Starfield COEX Mall in Gangnam-gu Seoul, South Korea, the Byeolmadang Library is massive, awe-inspiring, and will look great on your Instagram story. The two-story library is sprawling and spacious, featuring towering walls of books and a ratating glass art installation. The space is also commonly used for major events, including talk shows, visiting authors, and even concerts.
Photo via Deichman Bjorvika Website
Deichman Bjorvika in Oslo, Norway
Opened in June 2020, the Deichman Bjorvika library is the new and beloved public library of Oslo. Made up of six floors that include literature collections, reading and study spaces, stages, and cinema halls, this library is home to over 450,000 types of media, both print and digital. Each floor of the library has a different atmosphere and offering, with the first floor featuring a cafe and restaurant for those who want to spend the day reading or working while having a hot coffee or bite to eat. The second floor is home to children’s literature, and the third floor features music, film, and comics, and also allows visitors the opportunity to rent out 3D printers, podcast studios, and DJ stations. In short, this library is cool as hell.
Klementinum National Library in Prague, Czech Republic
Located in the heart of Prague’s Old Town, the Klementinum National Library dates back to the 11th Century and is the largest library in the Czech Republic, housing around six million documents. The library’s name comes from the boarding school that monks of the Jesuit Order opened in 1556. Founded in 1837, the library houses a Mozart Memorial that is now a centerpiece of the library’s Music Department. Klementinum also hosts regular classical music concerts put on by the symphony orchestra, such as Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, which will be performed this February.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, New York
What started as a personal library for collector and cultural benefactor Pierpont Morgan is now a popular and treasured public institution in the heart of Manhattan. Built between 1902 and 1906, the library is majestic yet intimate. The library features three-story inlaid walnut bookshelves and, we kid you not, two staircases concealed behind bookcases. A variety of rare books and artifacts are on display, including writing by Henry David Thoreau and Johann Gutenberg. The library also has a number of rotating exhibitions, making each visit a unique experience.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
First off, let’s take a moment to admire the name of this library. Cabinet of Reading? How very official and mysterious! Located in the center of Rio de Janeiro, this stunning library was established in 1837 when a group of forty-three Portuguese emigrants gathered at the house of Dr. António José Coelho Lousada and decided to create a library to expand knowledge and instill a taste for reading among their social circle. In 1900, the library became a public institution and remains open to visitors today.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Sarasvati Mahal Library in in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, India
Founded in the 16th century, the Saraswathi Mahal Library is one of the oldest libraries in Asia. The name “Saraswathi” comes from the Goddess of Wisdom and Learning. The majority of the collection is written in Tamil and Sanskrit, and all materials are preserved via microfilm, with library officials encouraging attempts to publish rare pieces from the Medieval collection. The library is free and open to the public!
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Seattle Central Library in Seattle, Washington
The first thing you’re likely to notice about the Seattle Central Library is its unusual appearance. Coming in at eleven stories tall, the glass and steel building was designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus to ensure that the building’s architecture served the needs of a library space, rather than forcing the library to cohere to a more generic structure. The architectural gambit has certainly paid dividends to Seattle locals and visitors alike, as the library includes a “Book Spiral” that continuously exhibits the entire nonfiction collection, a massive, 50-foot “living room” reading area, and, of course, its unforgettable exterior.
Taking inspiration from such disparate sources as Noah’s Ark and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart was designed to be a calming, meditative monolith at the heart of Stuttgart, Germany. The cubic structure is encased by a glass block façade, and the library features a bistro, cafe, and rooftop terrace that provides visitors with a breathtaking, all-encompassing view of the Stuttgart Valley. The future is now, and it rules.
Founded in 1854, the State Library Victoria is not only Australia’s oldest and busiest library, but also one of the first free libraries in the entire world. The library is home to several permanent exhibitions and art galleries, as well as a number of massive and luxurious reading rooms, including a huge collection of Victorian newspapers, a wide-ranging assemblage of reading materials exploring the performing arts, and La Trobe Reading Room and Dome Gallery, commonly referred to as the Dome Gallery. Built to accommodate over a million books and hundreds of readers, the Dome Gallery was the largest in the world when it first opened in 1913, and it’s still a pretty remarkable place to post up with a book.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The Library of Strahov in Prague, the Czech Republic
Completed in 1679 inside Prague’s Theological Hall as an addition to the long-standing Strahov Monastery, the Library of Strahov features beautiful stucco ceiling decorations as well as artwork and paintings from the 1700s. Home to approximately 2,000 volumes, the Library of Strahov is one of “the best preserved historical libraries,” and is a dream come true for book lovers and history enthusiasts alike.
Boasting over 1.2 million books, China’s Tianjin Binhai Library has been nicknamed “The Eye” in honor of the large, spherical auditorium at the center of the building, which, when viewed through an opening at the top of the structure, bears a striking resemblance to an iris. The futuristic, five-story building first opened in 2017 and features rows upon rows of bookshelves that line the walls from the floor to the ceiling. You’ll forgive us if we can’t help eyeing this spot!
I was born a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Moscow. My mother and I emigrated to the states in 1996. We were undocumented for 11 years, desperate for our green cards. I often wondered if Mom made the right decision in leaving. America was hard on us. We were alone. We had a whole family in Russia; a community that didn’t exist here.
Every time I asked my mother why we left she would close up. Most times she commented on how I should appreciate America instead of asking stupid questions. I was a freshman in high school when a kid in my English class asked me if Russia was “really that bad,” after our unit on Orwell’s Animal Farm. I didn’t know, so I started reading. I learned about the scarcity everyone living under the Soviet Union seemingly experienced. The paranoia. The isolation. The unknown. I filled in the gaps my mother refused to elaborate on with novels and memoirs. Even still, I couldn’t decide if becoming undocumented immigrants in the U.S. rather than citizens of Russia was worth it.
On February 24, 2022, as headlines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shocked the world—I recognized, without a doubt, my mother made the right choice for us.
From the revolution in 1917 to 2022, this reading list contains stories of the decision and journey to leave Russia and the sacrifices that were made along the way.
Weather of the Heart by Nora Lourie Percival
In March 2022 there was an exodus of 300,000 young adults from Russia. In September 2022, that number climbed to 800,000. Commentary on the “brain drain” effect as skilled and educated Russians flee abroad have been splashed across news articles since the beginning of the war. This “brain drain” has been happening since 1915. People have been slowly trickling out of Russia for the last century.
Nora Lourie Percival left Russia in 1922 with her mother. Nora’s memoir starts with her experience in her return k to the place of her birth, Samara, a city on the Volga River, after almost 80 years away. The memories then jump back to the early days of the Russian Revolution. She writes of her arduous journey out of Russia and why she had to leave as a child. The similarities of Russia in 1915 and Russia in 2022 are shocking.
Passages such as: “I am really thinking mostly of our poor Russia. She is losing so many of her best people in these wanton days. If I can save one or two for her, I must do it,” said by Pytor Ivanovich, Nora’s father’s friend, who is trying to convince her father to leave the country, are astonishingly similar to the headlines I read about Russia every day. The first half of the book describes life in Russia before and after the civil war. The memoir follows the trials faced by the author as she survives the civil war and then immigrates to America, taking care to describe both her own experiences and the collective experience of others like her.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine highlights the desperation that so often accompanies stories of immigration. Told from the perspective of Rosalinda, a critical and narcissistic Tartar woman, the story follows her tumultuous relationships with her daughter, husband, and granddaughter from the late 1970s through the 1990s. While moments of humor—from the sheer absurdity of the protagonist’s lofty opinion of herself and thinly veiled loathing of her family—punctuate most scenes, the core centers around the trauma endured by Aminat, her granddaughter, as her family’s dysfunction spins out of control. As food dwindles and hardships pile on, Rosalinda decides she must do whatever she can to get Aminat out of Russia, no matter the cost.
“’Sulfia,’ I said tenderly, ‘It’s for Aminat’ sake, don’t you see?’ She has no future in this country. It will eat her up and won’t even spit out the bones. You need to find a foreigner, Sulfia.'”
Elena’s Gorokhova’s memoir paints a picture of what growing up in the Soviet Union was like in the 1950s through the 1960s. Her lyrical language is loving and tender when recounting her memories of St. Petersburg, almost as though Russia was a family member. Her book describes her childhood, both lovely and awful. She ruminates on the beauty of her city and her appreciation for the arts and culture of Russia while also acknowleding the problematic parts of her heritage with a child-like lens, curious, but ultimately knowing something is intrinsically unfair about the life she was born into. For example: she asked her English language teacher what the word “private” meant. There is no word for private in the Russian language because the people of the U.S.S.R. had no privacy.
As a young adult, Elena starts considering what her life would look like outside of the iron curtain. In the last part of the book, Elena compares Russia to her mother and ultimately uses this reasoning to leave the U.S.S.R.: “
I want to leave this country, which, it dawns on me, is so much like my mother…They are both in love with order, both overbearing and protective. They’re prosaic; neither my mother nor my motherland knows anything about the important things in life: the magic of theater, the power of the English language, love….You can’t breathe, you can’t move, and you can’t squeeze your way to the door to get out.”
In her memoir, Elisa Brodinsky Miller asks what happens to Russia now? Set between the years 1914-1922, she finds cache of letters from her grandfather Eli written to his wife and children during the Russian revolution. For eight years, the family was broken up and without the resources to reunite with Eli in the United States. The correspondence between her family members helps her piece together what happened with her father’s family during the years they could not be together.
“The situation in Russia right now is such that in general one cannot say anything with certainty… Now Russia is undergoing changing times: what will result? There is no way to know. So in view of that to say anything in the present time about leaving or staying in Russia is very difficult,” written by Eli to Isor (his son) in December 1917. This book unintentionally parallels, through firsthand documents, the same questions Russians ask their country today. Elisa Brodinsky explains the history of Russia and gives context into what was happening historically at the time the letters were written, as well as how her own life mirrors her grandfather’s life in her search for opportunity.
Only One Year, written by Josef Stalin’s daughter, is a memoir which elucidates her decision to leave in 1967. The book starts with her going to India to mourn her Indian partner and spread his ashes in the Ganges. After some time in India, Alliluyev realizes she doesn’t want to go back to her home in the U.S.S.R. and she makes the painful decision to abandon her family and culture and defect to the United States.
“I began to feel any physical pain or injury inflected on others as if it were my own pain. Tears shed by others brought tears to my eyes. I learned to weep and laugh with my whole being. My heart was thrown open now, which previously had been compressed and jammed.”
This memoir is excellent if you want to understand how difficult leaving Russia was right before Glasnost and Perestroika. Told from two perspectives: the mother, Galina, and the daughter, Yelina, the memoir describes the trials and tribulations faced by Galina of getting her family out of the country and the painful sacrifice of doing so. The story starts with Yelina’s mother being sent to a gulag, leaving Yelina with a stranger who later tells her she can no longer care for her. Yelina is alone in Russia and on the cusp of puberty, relying on different people to offer her food and shelter until her mother comes home.
Part two switches to Galina’s perspective as she explains her sentencing and life in a gulag in the first place. The third part of the book, told again from Yelina’s perspective, answers the question of whether the mother and daughter were finally able to leave their motherland.
Best friends Anya and Milka seem to have a typical Russian childhood. As they change and grow together, their motherland also goes through changes, as though Russia was also trying to grow up. At the precipice of the novel, an incident alters the trajectory of the friends’ fate, ultimately leading Anya to emigrate to America, not returning to her country for 20 years.
“I believed in the future of my country and that I was contributing to it by doing my job and raising my family… When the nineties hit, we all understood that it wasn’t enough, that the boat wars rotten through. We were all sinking, no matter how fast or hard we paddled.”
A Terrible Country tells the story of a postgrad Russian American returning to Russia to take care of his ailing grandmother. He struggles to understand the post-Soviet Russian landscape where cute cafes with high priced cappuccinos sit across the street from the KGB building where thousands were killed in the Soviet era. Andrei spends his days in the apartment playing anagrams with his senile grandmother and roaming Moscow to try and find Wi-Fi to work remotely at the university. At night, he looks for hockey games to blow off steam. When the economic crisis of 2007 hits, his brother pushes him to sell the apartment, promising to find another place for their babushka to live. After finding himself in a group that call themselves the “Octoberists,” he finally feels like he’s acclimating and decides to move back to Russia permanently. When the Octoberists are targeted by the police for their political mishaps, Andrei has to decide whether his new life in Russia is worth it, or if he should leave, once again, to America.
When I was in prison in New York in 2011, we had a name for Rikers Island: The Wild West. I’d come from an upstate county several hours north of that, so I’d never been inside the notorious New York City jail complex just across the East River from LaGuardia Airport. But I listened aghast at the tales of a teeming and lawless lockup beset by drugs, sex and violence. From where I sat in an only-mildly chaotic state prison, the place sounded terrifying.
As it turns out, it was probably even worse than I thought—and Reuven Blau and Graham Rayman’s new book of the scandal-plagued correctional complex lays it out in graphic, stomach-churning detail. Rikers: An Oral History opens with some little-known details about the complex’s history: It was founded on top of a literal garbage dump. That was in the 1800s, and since then things have only gotten worse. Violence is rising, guards aren’t showing up for work and more detainees died behind bars last year than in any other year since at least 2013.
Told through the accounts of more than a hundred guards, former prisoners, lawyers and public officials, the book explores the inner workings of a broken system and the ripples of trauma it leaves behind.
Keri Blakinger: Why did this feel like the necessary moment for a book like this?
RB: I’ve been covering Rikers Island for 20 years, and Graham’s done it longer than me. For both of us, there’s a bit of personal frustration, we write about some of these issues over and over and over again. And this was an amazing opportunity to highlight how some of these issues have been going on for decades. It gets some level of coverage, and then the administration makes promises and there’s some level of a solution—but then it just comes back up again. And in this project we were able to highlight how these problems are not necessarily new. There’s a lot of new attention to Rikers Island, but these problems have been there forever.
KB: Even though you have both been doing this for so long, there’s a lot of previously unreported material in here. Are there any stories that particularly stuck with you from your reporting?
GR: There’s a lot, but one of the main ones is the story that Nellie Kelly tells about the reverberations of her brother’s death, 10 years later. Ronald Spear was murdered in 2012 by a correction officer who basically beat him to death, and then there was a massive cover-up. It was an attempt to turn Spear into somebody who had attacked the officers and they were defending themselves—which is ridiculous, because he was frail and ill. And she talked about how ten years later when she’s making spaghetti, she can still hear him telling her to make it spicy. And she’s like, “I’m not making it spicy for you!”
What that illustrates to me is something that I think the public loses sight of: When these horrible incidents happen in the jails, the ripples flow outward for years and years afterwards. It’s not like they just go away once the investigation is over.
RB: It’s hard to remember them all. But for me one of the things that was really eye-opening was the concept of bullpen therapy, which is sort of unique to the New York City process. That’s when detainees are taken out at three or four in the morning for court, and the whole process takes all day. It’s soul-sucking and it plays into trying to convince people to take plea deals. A few people who had done several stints brought up this issue as the worst part of the entire experience. They could be on Rikers Island, they could be around all the other craziness—but not getting dragged to and from court and spending the entire day waiting and waiting and waiting in bullpens.
GR: Bullpen therapy—the idea that people would plead guilty to a crime rather than continue to experience the process of going back and forth to court—is just extraordinary. It illustrates a failed system.
KB: What is the thing that people most commonly misunderstand about Rikers Island?
GR: It’s not just one jail. It’s actually a huge complex of multiple jails. All of them are quite large—each one houses thousands of people when they’re at capacity. There was a time when there were more than 20,000 people in the jails. It’s a city within a city.
RB: For me there’s a couple of things and I think the biggest one is not unique to Rikers: It’s the idea that you do the crime, do the time. And you don’t do the crime if you don’t want to end up in a place like that. But the thing is, no one’s been sentenced to death. And there’s multiple deaths every year, including this year. The inability to just get basic medical care there is insane. There’s a perception that you go to jail and you’re looked after. But there are thousands of missed medical visits every year, and there’s ongoing litigation over that. And I think that speaks to the broader sense that people are not seen as people there. There’s just a lack of humanity.
When these horrible incidents happen in the jails, the ripples flow outward for years and years afterwards.
GR: Following on that, we interviewed an expert on heat-related illnesses who testifies all over the country doing assessments of prisons and jails, named Dr. Susi Vasallo. And she said that New York views itself as this progressive place but she said that what she saw at Rikers was as bad as any of the prisons that she saw in Mississippi or Alabama. To me, that just cuts to the heart of the thing: Here’s a city that thinks it’s so progressive and yet it allows this situation on Rikers—the conditions, the violence, all of the issues—to persist decade after decade after decade without really addressing them.
KB: How did you grapple with the perceptions of credibility of inmates who are typically—if unfairly, in my opinion—viewed as unreliable or untrustworthy, but in this case they are a large part of your narrative?
RB: I think that’s what the book is about. It’s about these stories and letting people know that these are human beings. Sure, some people have done some terrible things—but it doesn’t mean that they’re not human beings, who have experienced this system in this way that’s just inhumane. It doesn’t mean that their experiences are lacking in a way that we shouldn’t take seriously and amplify. And on some level it doesn’t make sense, it belies logic, to say that if somebody committed a crime then we shouldn’t believe their experience. Their experiences are real and they matter and society should be aware of them.
GR: We didn’t want to write this from 10,000 feet—we wanted this to be very intimate. And if you’re writing about a bakery, you go to the bakers.
KB: One of the recurring themes of this book is the incredible amount of violence behind bars. Are you worried about how readers will contextualize that, and whether they will see it as proof that inmates are bad people—or as proof that the system is broken?
GR: Well, I’m hoping they’ll see that the system is broken. That’s very broadly what that violence illustrates—a system that cannot just not be functional.
RB: There is an obsession with you know the fights and the violence—like in Oz, on television. What we tried to do is say, “Look, some of the stuff is probably even worse than you can imagine, worse that could be scripted. But also, there are people who are experiencing this.” And they experience it in the moment —and then it doesn’t leave you.
For example, I interviewed somebody who did time and afterwards would go to the bodega all the time. The woman behind the counter at one point told him, “Oh I know you served some time.” He asked why and she said she could just tell because he never smiled. It’s real experiences and it’s real trauma, and that’s what we were trying to explain to readers.
KB: Did writing this change anything about how you see Rikers?
It doesn’t make sense to say that if somebody committed a crime then we shouldn’t believe their experience.
GR: The main character in the book is obviously Rikers itself and the people who move through it and their experiences. But if you look at the stories, there’s some similarities between the experiences of correctional officers and the experiences of people being held in Rikers. So when I see aggressive folks who want to keep everything the way it is and not move to borough jails and just keep it all status quo, I think: Aren’t you actually subjecting your supporters to the same experiences that people who are being held there are experiencing? So that was one thing that surprised me, but it didn’t particularly change my view overall.
KB: This book spans several decades. After examining Rikers in that sort of long view, do you think that things are getting better at all?
GR: My instinct is it’s hard to tell. And one of the reasons it’s hard to tell is because of the closed nature of its physical location. It’s very hard for us as media to get in there. So we have to rely on external accounts and statistics from the agency, which—as we noted in the stats chapter—have been manipulated in the past to present an inaccurate picture of what was happening. I think the big question is: Should this city support receivership or can it continue to try to improve things as it is? It seems to me that the forces want to keep Rikers right where it is and don’t want to spend the money on [replacing it with] borough jails that are currently in the ascendance.
RB: It’s not so much about getting better or getting worse. It’s that these problems persist. No one is saying that these issues are going away. At any given time there might be a few less deaths. The stabbings might go down. Solitary numbers might be adjusted. The stats are all over the map. One thing that’s very clear from anyone you talk to is that it’s still an absolute nightmare place to be. And major, major problems still exist.
KB: Did writing this change your view of our society’s relationship to incarceration?
GR: It made me feel a lot stronger that Americans need to really think about what it is we want these institutions to do. We should all be considering what we really want out of these institutions.
I’ve lived most of my life somewhere in the murky territory between boy next door and gal pal (this was before people regularly used the word nonbinary). To my parents, I’ve always very clearly been their son. They did a great job of embracing my less-than-traditional version of masculinity, as long as we didn’t talk about it. My queerness could exist, but the minute I described myself as gay, my feminine aspects took on a menacing quality. In the conservative suburban Catholic world I grew up in, it wasn’t ok to be gay especially if you were unapologetic. It had to be hidden, because it was shameful. For years I minimized myself in an effort to make others happy.
While much has changed since I came of age as a queer person in Y2K-era Michigan, what has remained the same is a fundamental human need to be part of a social community with shared values. These standards may never be articulated, and they’re definitely not written down anywhere, but if violated, there are consequences. Anyone who threatens to upend the delicate social balance must know they’ve overstepped. It’s about maintaining an illusion, and once you shatter that mirror, the pieces don’t go back together in the same way.
This spring I was introduced to Christopher Soto’s work through his debut collection Diaries of a Terrorist, and what struck me most about the poems was his unapologetic queerness. I’ve often struggled to proudly express queerness in my life, so reading his poetry was like a jolt of electricity to my brain. I was so used to living in an environment where people say one thing and mean another that it felt revelatory to see someone like Soto unapologetically name evils that many “respectable” people have decided to accept as inevitabilities, such as the persecution of minority communities, and the injustice of the American prison system. He uses the collective “we” pronoun throughout, solidifying the notion that for him, poetry is communal – something that is both influenced by the community and also benefits the group. For a long time, I deliberately stayed clear of poetry because it was inaccessible and unnecessarily opaque. It seemed overly formal, holding readers at arms length, and begging them to unravel complex riddles designed to be perplexing. But in this collection, Soto finds poetry in the most everyday moments, even if (and especially when) they’re not pretty. Preconceived notions about poetry are played with and turned on their heads in Diaries of a Terrorist, a queer punk rock rallying cry for activism and abolition.
I deliberately stayed clear of poetry because it was inaccessible and unnecessarily opaque.
I’ve often joked about my hermit-like tendencies as a defense mechanism to hide my loneliness. My childhood spent growing up Catholic has made me inherently distrustful of becoming part of any group where I have to think or feel a certain way to be accepted. I value my independence and ability to form my own opinions more than anything. But during the COVID lockdown, it became clear to me that true isolation was not what I really wanted. I needed support and understanding, and it didn’t have to be all or nothing: even the biggest introvert has to exist in relation to others. As much as politicians love to push the myth of American individualism, it’s a lie. The things that truly benefit us are community action and activism, not wealth hoarding. Social reform, not increased incarceration. It may seem simple, but the way Soto breaks down how deeply we’ve been brainwashed was breathtaking to me—in its directness, and its clarity.
In “To Blow on the Horns of A Bull” Soto illustrates how the violence expressed casually on the internet often leads to real life consequences:
Despite its lack of hands // the internet has such far reach
Behind its quiet blue // A chat room full of noise // Yelling
BREAK THE WALL // OR I’LL BREAK YOUR FACE
“In Support of Violence” asks us why society as a whole is often more obsessed with policing reactions to abuse than working to stop it:
We never wanted to harm // Only to stay alive &
We could no longer wait // Wishing strangers would // Help or empathize
Soto even queers the seemingly untouchable subject of Christianity, making harrowing parallels to the persecution and murder of trans people, in his poem “Transgender Cyborgs Attack”:
Our gender was against the law // But so was your God // Yes Jesus was trans //
// Her hair & her dress // Jesus was trans // How the Roman state crucified her in public
No subject is off limits, because queer people are everywhere, and Soto wants us to step out of the shadows. By directly addressing the violence that has come to be accepted as a “necessary evil” in American life, his poetry advocates for a community mindset, and for the necessity of citizens fighting for it. It’s not possible to willingly watch others be treated with cruelty, and then act shocked when it arrives at your doorstep. Only by actively resisting do any of us experience true liberation.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about what liberation looks like for me. What it means for me to be liberated in a society that values wealth, earning potential, and volume of consumption as the metrics for “success.” And I haven’t found an answer I’m completely happy with. I’m figuring it out, but the more I discover what I don’t want, the closer I feel to an answer that’s the most effective solution for me in the present moment. And that looks like a life where the way I treat the people around me is more important than how much money I make. A life where it is possible to both look after my needs as an individual, but also have time to look out for the collective good of others. A life where accountability can be seen as a necessary step towards personal growth, not a public scourge to be avoided at all costs.
It’s not possible to willingly watch others be treated with cruelty, and then act shocked when it arrives at your doorstep.
None of this is easy. Almost every step I’ve taken recently to reach what feels like a truer version of myself (emotionally, behaviorally, and aesthetically) has been met with resistance by people close to me. Especially if I don’t ask for permission. The more I’ve played with gender expression, the more I see looks that ask “but what was wrong with you before?” Nothing was wrong, things have just changed. And they’ll keep changing. Growth is often awkward and ungainly, and there’s no true end point. Change, as my therapist reminds me weekly, is one of the only constant things in life, so accepting it is really the only option that won’t lead to misery.
Part of this change involves the process of figuring out who I am as a writer and creative after many years of thinking the only value my art had was the money it could make or the clicks it might generate. Yes, writing as a career is a business, but that shouldn’t be the primary factor shaping my artistic sensibility or the content I produce. Content written purely for commercial purposes often reeks of inauthenticity, and readers can sense something missing even if they can’t readily identify it. The only way to succeed is to participate fully. To express oneself in the most authentic way, and take risks that may or may not pay off.
The formal inventiveness in Soto’s poetry is a big risk, one I’m sure many people would say is unorthodox, but as a reader, it was a particularly effective way into the overall narrative. One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Job Opening for Border Patrol Agents,” is formatted like a corporate job listing. It’s an indictment of the corruption that runs rampant in America’s obsession with policing marginalized people, and a takedown of corporate “hustle” culture that has trained people to turn a blind eye to everyday corruption. My first thought was “This is a poem?” but as I read it a second time, I realized I cared more about these everyday subjects than I ever cared while reading Robert Frost in high school (the last time I tried to give a shit about poetry), and that maybe the stuffiness present in so much lyrical poetry was designed to exclude. Soto’s poems are dynamic and confrontational, so those who like to maintain the status quo (whatever their motives) may find some of the poems jarring, the language shocking, and the frankness with which violence, rage, and abuse are discussed to be a little “too much.” But isn’t that what it is to be queer? To create space when the world tells us that we don’t fit in?
In Soto’s hands, poetry is accessible. It takes down all the garbage capitalist culture expects us to accept unthinkingly in order to to keep the machine running. It’s a call to arms, and a plea for justice, and it made me want to more fully embrace queerness in all aspects of my life. I’m tired of waiting to live my own life because it falls outside of what’s been deemed “typical.” I’m single at age 31, living paycheck to paycheck, and I’m nowhere close to owning a home or having a family. Every time a friend tells me I need to have hope and everything will turn out alright, it makes me angry, because hope is not what I need. I need change. I need support. That Hallmark-positive advice neglects the economic and legislative struggles of marginalized people in America, while assuming that the only thing worth aspiring to is being in a “traditional” family unit. I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about what I want out of life, and accepting that my life most likely won’t follow the same path my parents’ did. It used to make me sad, but it doesn’t anymore. Because I’m free to lead a life I can be proud of without feeling like a failure if I don’t meet arbitrary guidelines. Reading radical queer texts like Diaries of A Terrorist helped me see that there are people out there who are like-minded, even if I haven’t found them in my life yet.
I realized I cared more about these everyday subjects than I ever cared while reading Robert Frost in high school.
Soto and his work make me want to produce writing that both provokes and inspires. It doesn’t have to be either form or content. By playing with atypical formats, Soto has queered what poetry can be and created something fresh and alive. His freedom and playfulness made me realize that my work doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. When a writer can authentically jump off the page and grab readers by the throat the way Soto does, there’s nothing quite like it. Being outspoken and radically queer may not be considered “mainstream” by some, but I’d rather create change than be just another person following the mindless status quo of American capitalism.
So fuck it. Don’t wait. I am more than how “respectable” I appear to people I don’t know. I’m more than the amount of money I can make or the content I produce. The most vital part of me is expressed by how I treat others and contribute to the world. Being kind and thoughtful and behaving in a way that aligns with my values will always be more important than any arbitrary measure of success. That doesn’t mean there are never consequences, or that it’s always easy. But at least I won’t be waiting for permission to exist.
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