Last December, with some hesitation, I posted a personal essay I’d written for Racquet Magazine on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The piece examined why Serena’s retirement from professional tennis, in order to have another child, had prompted an existential crisis for me. Serena and I are both 41, and her sadness around the word “retirement” echoed my own sadness around the word “motherhood.” While I came to no firm conclusions, I ended the essay suggesting that my husband and I would likely not have children, given my age and our ambivalence, despite family and social pressures to reproduce.
One week after posting the article, I found out I was pregnant.
I knew I would be okay without kids, even if a twinge of sadness remained.
I had initially written the piece in early August, when Alejandro and I were still in the will-we-won’t-we throes of removing my IUD and playing pregnancy roulette. Writing the piece felt like finding solid ground after trudging through a steaming, buggy, couples-therapy swamp. After finishing it, I knew I would be okay without kids, even if a twinge of sadness remained. Still, in September, that very twinge led me to remove the IUD and roll the dice. We decided we would try for six months, a year at most, and then pat ourselves on the backs.
When I posted the article, a week before Christmas, I was smarting from all the photos of young families on Facebook, and what I knew would be the inevitable round of questions about my childbearing desires at holiday parties. I captioned each post as a semi-manifesto. On Instagram, I wrote “As a childless woman at 41, I’m constantly fielding inappropriate questions from total strangers about having kids. It was healing to find my truth on the page instead of stammering something at a cocktail party.” On Facebook: “There’s a lot of pressure on women to not just have kids but to unequivocally want to be a mother. In this time of holiday cards and families posing together, I’m sending love out to those women who are on the fence and whose photos might look way different.” And on Twitter, I leaned even more provocative: “When a woman feels new life stirring inside, does it always have to be a baby?”
I felt like I had made some sort of declaration, that I had finally side-stepped the pitying looks from mothers when I said I didn’t have kids. But what had I declared, exactly? By claiming temporary childlessness (which is so often treated as temporary insanity), I had simply admitted that I didn’t know what I wanted, but I was tired of feeling ashamed. In the days after posting, I basked in the glow of my friends’ praise and congratulations, for another creature I had birthed: my essay. I made plans with an acquaintance I met in Spanish lessons to grab a drink in the new year and talk more about the subject. She, too, had huge doubts about having kids, even though she was ten years younger, and had been relieved to find companionship in my essay.
I’ve avoided setting up that meeting with my Instagram friend, worried she’ll see me as a hypocrite, a lost ally.
But holding the positive pregnancy test in the bathroom a few days later, even before going down to tell Alejandro, among the waves of excitement, fear, dread, and joy, I felt that old stand-by, shame. I had just gone on the record as (probably) not having kids. Now I was switching sides? And, indeed, the first person we told, Ale’s sister, after shrieking and congratulating him, asked: But what about the article?
What about the article?
In the weeks since, as I’ve found myself repeating my justification, which is nothing but a shrug, it’s made me think about the nature of personal essays as both truth-seeking and deeply contemporary: they land somewhere, for a moment. Perhaps, for the writer, that moment will stretch to the end of their life. Perhaps, as with me, the truth of that moment will be disrupted by another emerging truth, one week later. I’ve avoided setting up that meeting with my Instagram friend, worried she’ll see me as a hypocrite, a lost ally. I’ve felt similarly disheartened when childless female friends have changed their minds. It can look, from the outside — and feel, from the inside — like you caved.
It doesn’t feel like you’re allowed to say that a miscarriage may come, in some small manner, as a relief.
But what if truth is always carving its way in us, rather than blowing us up like a balloon? So far, my seven and a half weeks of pregnancy have been horrible. Constant nausea and exhaustion, among other digestive mishaps I won’t gross you out with. Yesterday, at my first ob-gyn appointment, the ultrasound revealed that one reason for my extreme discomfort is that I am carrying twins—but one appears to be vanishing, a smaller sibling with a slower heartbeat that will likely not survive.
Having lost my only younger sister, staring at those two pulsing sacks on the screen felt like a grotesque parallel to my own tragedy, nearly thirty years ago. It’s called “vanishing twin syndrome,” and most women don’t even know that they are carrying another twin, which is absorbed into the placenta. Next week, I will go back for another ultrasound, to check the viability of both embryos.
What do I want now? I don’t know. Part of me yearns for the smaller one to make it, even though I am terrified by the idea of twins. I will also be relieved to see that the healthy embryo is newly solitary there, blinking its heartbeat at me. And, wrenching as it is to say, I will also be okay if I emerge from pregnancy without a child, even though I know I will still grieve. I am still that woman who wrote that essay about her ambivalence, and her more extreme inner sister, the one who never wanted children. In America, as a pregnant woman who has decided to go through with the pregnancy,it doesn’t feel like you’re allowed to say that a miscarriage may come, in some small manner, as a relief. Especially when you have that thought in Texas.
For the next week, and the next weeks, I will not know what fate has in store for the scant beings within. That, too, is like the truth. It emerges and recedes. It dawns and dreams and dims, just like consciousness. Personal essays are the ultrasounds of our psyches, a blurry image that is both illuminating and limited in what it can promise and predict. My thoughts and my heart and my embryos are where they are right now. Next week, we will be somewhere entirely new.
Davon Loeb’s debut memoir The In-Betweens follows the story of his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood as a biracial young man growing up between various cultures, races, and identities. Loeb grows up with a Black mother and a white, Jewish father. In school, he is one of the few Black students in a primarily white New Jersey suburb, and at home with his mother, he’s the only one of his siblings who is half white.
Throughout the story, Loeb struggles to fit into his communities, always feeling a sense of difference and disconnect. Belonging to multiple different worlds, Loeb reckons with his family history on both sides, reflecting on his Jewish identity as well as his Black identity. As he grows, he begins to define what race, culture, and masculinity mean for him.
Lyrical in its storytelling, The In-Betweens begins as a narrative of a young boy piecing together his childhood in a series of short, poetic essays. Loeb plays with language and memory, bringing together a tale that gets more grounded as it goes on, reflecting the narrator’s growth and assuredness as he gets older. And within Loeb’s own story, we get the stories of those who played a significant role in his life. His mother becomes one of the most important figures in the book, shaping him into a man and teaching him what it means to be Black in America.
The In-Betweens comes at a time when race and identity are fraught issues in this country, and in our political climate, where even teaching about race is becoming criminalized, a book like this is even more important. While Loeb’s story is personal, it is also highly universal, telling the stories of so many kids who have never had their stories told.
I spoke with Loeb over Zoom to talk about some of the major themes in his memoir and what he hoped readers would take away from the book.
Deena ElGenaidi: Your memoir is called The In-Betweens. Can you talk about what it means to be “in-between” and what aspects of that idea you hope readers will resonate with?
Davon Loeb: Initially, I remember thinking about the title of the book as those category boxes we had to check when we were taking a standardized test as a kid, thinking about how I’m a kid in a room, mostly with faces that didn’t look like mine, feeling like I had to pick a box. The box always said, “Check one.” You could never check more than one. There was this authority coming from whatever the standardized test was telling me, saying I had to pick a race. And as I’ve moved through my life as a Black and white, heterosexual, able-bodied man, I’ve felt more in between spaces than a part of one.
I’m neither fully Black nor fully white. I lived in a community that was all white, and yet I was part Black, but at home, I was the only one in my family who was half white. I have always felt like I’ve never fit into one category. I think if we strip race of that idea, and we strip whatever subjectivity there is—gender, sexuality, socioeconomics, religion—in many ways, we all feel in between, depending on what it is we’re struggling to fit into. And that’s important. While I’m an in-between because of my race, my culture, and the color of my skin, so are many of us. So are all of us.
DE: Well, like you said, race plays a large role in this book, and it’s an additional way to show your in-betweenness. You talk about being mixed race and being one of the few Black students at your primarily white schools. From what you’ve seen in your time as a teacher, do you think these experiences have changed for kids today? And why is it important to write about those experiences, especially in our current political climate?
DL: I think it depends on the communities. In New Jersey, for example, the teacher population racially does not match the student population, even if you’re in a diverse community. We just don’t have many teachers of color. So I don’t think that has changed much.
In many ways, we all feel in between, depending on what it is we’re struggling to fit into.
In New Jersey, we do have a law that you have to teach diversity and inclusivity, which is great. But the majority of that curriculum is not being taught by diverse teachers. No matter if the teacher is the greatest teacher in the world, there’s going to be a disconnect when you’re teaching about diversity, and yet not by diversity.
Ironically, I teach in the same district that I grew up in. I love where I grew up, and you can see that so much in the book. There is this sense of duality in that I love the Pine Barrens, and I had great experiences as a kid, but I also didn’t. They had Confederate flags at our football games. Even today, not much has changed. What I do think has changed, however, and what I think is even more important, is that the books the kids read are by people of color, queer writers, writers of different religions. So while the teacher population hasn’t changed, I do think that there’s an increase in books by writers of color.
DE: Do you feel like the culture has changed with the kids since you were in school?
DL: I could say in some ways, it has changed. There is more diversity in some of the suburban South Jersey communities. But at the same time, I think because of what has happened politically in the last five to six years, you could argue that it’s almost been amplified, which is why I think books like mine and books by writers of color are even more important.
DE: There’s also a lot of scenes that have to do specifically with masculinity, and you as a child trying to fit into what other people around you think a man is supposed to be. But as the story goes on, you begin to define masculinity on your own terms. Could you talk a little bit about how the people around you defined masculinity, what you took from it, and why it was such an important theme in the story.
DL: Actually, I think I had a little criticism about the masculinity that’s been shown in the book. Part of it is when I’m a kid, the narrator almost feels complacent to the masculinity. But it’s because he’s a kid. He’s still trying to construct his ideas. The masculinity is often showed physically through fighting, through strong bodies. And then as we move through the book, the narrator is still trying to figure that out.
There’s a chapter called “5-Series BMW,” which is really jarring. It’s about the narrator’s stepfather working on a car, and he makes a bunch of crude statements about the car being like a woman. There could be a push to pull into those scenes and really try to be more expository in the writing and really challenge it, but I don’t, in the sense that the narrator doesn’t challenge it. The narrator doesn’t understand what’s right or wrong yet. And then we move into another chapter, which is intentionally supposed to show toxic masculinity at its worst. It’s the chapter “Not the Worst of Boys,” which shows how these young boys, when they’re teenagers, have such a gross understanding of girls. I felt like it would be too easy to write myself neatly, to write myself as the narrator in a way where I look like the hero. But the narrator wasn’t the hero. The narrator did as much wrong as the other characters. That’s what toxic masculinity is, and I think it would be unrealistic for the book to arrive at what masculinity is when the narrator still doesn’t know yet. The narrator is still coming of age, and that reflects society — this is what boys are taught.
DE: That was a particularly interesting chapter because there is a sense that the writer knows the behavior is wrong, but at the time, that reflection wasn’t there for the narrator, and I think it played with that pretty nicely.
DL: It was hard. It was really uncomfortable to write that—to go back and relive it—but in no way as uncomfortable as it must be for someone to experience it on the other end. I have a chapter where I’m learning how to do manual labor by women, and I think that was my attempt to show masculinity rather than just to talk about it.
DE: That actually leads to my next question. There are a lot of women in the story that play a pretty important role. You have your mother, your maternal grandmother, and then later on your paternal grandmother, who sort of in her lack of presence plays a role. What do you want readers to take away from the role of women in the book and how those women shaped you as the narrator?
DL: In many ways, in real life, my mom has shaped me into who I am, especially because my relationship with my real father and my stepdad is somewhat and can be contentious. But I also think that it is the nature of the family in which I grew up. Sometimes, Black families have these strong women who are our narrators, who are storytellers, and who are trying to build these young men into good young men.
I didn’t have any teachers that looked like me or any books written about stories like mine. And I think so many of us are looking for that.
There’s a chapter about my mom telling me that if I get in trouble, my white friends are going to have different consequences, and how she feels this fear every time I go out. I wanted my mother to be as much of a character as everyone else.
I really like—and I haven’t had that conversation with anyone—how my paternal grandmother has played a role in the book. It doesn’t seem like there’s much, but I think there’s this sense of the narrator trying to find love through her, even though he doesn’t find it.
DE: Your mother also feels like such an important presence throughout the entire memoir, even when she’s not physically present. We hear her voice through the narrator. When you were writing the essays, how did you think about or envision your mother’s role as a character in this story?
DL: I wanted to show her in a way where she grows with us. She starts off as a poor Black woman who is trying to find herself and her independence. She’s this frontier woman. As we move through the narrative, her voice does get more cemented into the storytelling. She is part of the character building of herself, and also of me.
It actually wasn’t that hard to write her into a character. I think I was scared because it’s my mom, but I think I do it in a way where she is presented fully and dynamically. She’s a hard-working Black woman who did her best to raise a young Black man who didn’t know how to navigate the world on his own. And I think that she succeeded.
DE: Another interesting part of the book is when you try to connect with your Jewish identity. You come to this realization that even though your mother isn’t Jewish, and you weren’t raised Jewish, it’s a part of who you are. So for people who haven’t read your book yet, can you explain what led to that interest in that part of your identity and how that changed over the years?
DL: In storytelling, I’m always about using singular events. And sure in life, there’s more than one event that makes us think, “What’s my story? What’s my family history?” But in the book, I talk about this experience of going to the Holocaust Museum in DC when I’m in high school, and that really was a pivotal moment in my life when I felt connected to something other than what I grew up with.
What’s interesting is that when I would go somewhere with my dad, who’s white and Jewish, I almost felt like the world looked at me differently. Navigating going to the movies or going to a diner with a man who was white and seeing how he navigated through the world felt different. But because I only saw him sparingly, there wasn’t a consistent “this is my family. This is who I am.” But going to that museum, I felt connected to something other than myself. So it really wasn’t until leaving high school and going to college, into a more diverse town, that I started to embrace my family. Then after I lost my grandmother, I felt more connected to her.
DE: I want to go back to the beginning of the book. You start off before you were born, with your mother and father’s romance story. Why did you make that choice? And what was it like writing about this past that you weren’t a part of, but essentially was your origin story?
DL: It was uncomfortable in the sense of trying to imagine my mom and my father like that, but in a mature way. I had fun telling it, and I think the language is supposed to reflect romanticizing this relationship. But it also was hard to write because I’m shedding some serious personal experiences on the page, and I’m not only making myself vulnerable, but I’m making my parents vulnerable.
I think it’s hard to write about parents, but I felt like it was the most appropriate place to tell a story about two people who loved each other and were in an in-between in themselves and their relationship, and also as a Black woman and a white man in the ‘80s. Even then, which doesn’t seem that long ago, but I guess it is, their relationship was difficult on many different levels. So I think in order to understand who the narrator is—to really understand his identity—we have to start before he’s there.
DE: What is the biggest thing you want readers to take away from this memoir?
DL: Most of the readers right now are going to be adults, but I just think about being a kid and never reading anything like this. I wrote it for the kid I used to be. Kids of color don’t have many books written by them. And even kids who are in-between don’t have many books about their stories. I just think it’s so important to show that we’re all connected, even when we’re not. I just imagine a room full of kids reading this book and saying, “Wow, this happened to me” or “Wow, there’s a kid next to me, and this is what their life is like”—that they can develop empathy through my story.
I really want this book to get into schools and to be able to talk to kids because I didn’t have anyone. I didn’t have any books. I didn’t have any teachers that looked like me or any books written about stories like mine. And I think so many of us are looking for that.
Alcea was the first to write on Tripadvisor. She wrote that she was planning a little visit to Monk’s House, the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, in Rodmell, 4.8 kilometers south of Lewes, in East Sussex, England. However, she had a bladder problem and so didn’t dare travel until she knew what toilet facilities were available at the house. Because of her bladder problem, there had to be more than one toilet, so she wouldn’t need to stand in a queue if she suddenly had to pee, but it would be worse still if there was no toilet there at all. She had read on the website that there was a toilet outside that visitors could use. Was there anyone who knew what it looked like? She imagined, as it was a house from the beginning of the nineteenth century, that it might be one of those toilets with a carving on the door, a half- moon for example, that it was low under the ceiling, and to the side of the main house, so one might have to walk some way to get there. Or perhaps, Alcea wrote, it was one of those Porta-Potty toilets that were never pleasant to use. She had watched lots of videos on YouTube where people talked about their visit to Monk’s House, ever hopeful that she might catch a glimpse of the toilet.
I ate a yogurt as I sat reading this, and I have to say, I was utterly gripped by the problem. I’ve had a bladder problem myself and know how crucial is it to have a toilet nearby if one is to venture out into the world. But it wasn’t only this identification with her bladder problem that captivated me, it was also how she described her longing to visit the house. For example, she wrote that she had seen people on YouTube walk down a road in the rain, the road to Monk’s House, they were thoughtful and reverential, with only the slightest swing in their arms. She had seen close-up shots of leaves lying in the roof gutters above the winter garden, and leaves lying on the glass roof of the winter garden, a black-and-white cat stalking across the grass. She had seen what the living room looked like, with its stone floor and armchairs and paintings, the stone floor didn’t surprise her, it was not so usual in Norway perhaps, but she had once been to Brittany and stayed in a house with a similar floor, so she was not completely unfamiliar with brown European stone floors. The floor, Alcea wrote, was often cold, so she wondered how they had heated the house, and what they had on their feet when they walked around inside, but she could learn about that later, right now the most important thing was the toilet. And the toilet was not shown in any of the videos she had seen. She so yearned, she wrote, to wander around the house and see everything as it had been when Virginia Woolf was alive. She longed to stand and look at a long-stemmed flower, for example a rose or a hollyhock, sway in the summer breeze, or the rain. It was as though the rain on the grass and Virginia Woolf’s hollyhocks meant the world to her. I’d never seen anyone write anything like it on Tripadvisor, so I was simply enthralled. She longed for the grass around the house and to come out of a room that she had seen on one of the films, and to think Virginia Woolf once came out here, in exactly this way, only now it was her. Here she was, very much alive, and walking through exactly the same door that Virginia Woolf had walked through. She might even be placing her feet in exactly the same places that Virginia Woolf had placed hers, who knew, it was impossible to know for sure, wrote Alcea. But it was the toilet that was most relevant for her, if she was going to be able to do any of this at all, and she would be desperately unhappy if it couldn’t be done, if she had to sit in her own garden all summer and only daydream about Virginia Woolf’s garden, it would just not be the same. She didn’t even have hollyhocks in her garden and she somehow envisaged that Virginia Woolf did, but, Alcea wrote, she might be wrong, as hollyhocks are biennial. And then someone would have had to plant the hollyhocks year after year, and someone else would have had to take over from them, as it was at least two generations since Virginia Woolf died, in terms of the working life of a gardener, that is, if not, the gardener who had planted hollyhocks every other year since her death would now be ancient. Alcea ended by saying: If anyone has any kind of information about Virginia Woolf’s toilet, please reply.
I was not at all familiar with that part of Great Britain, I had not read Virginia Woolf, and I didn’t know if Virginia Woolf’s house had a toilet, in fact, I had never been to Britain, but immediately started to search on Google and wrote that even though I knew the area fairly well, I couldn’t say anything about the toilet facilities, in particular, at Monk’s House, however: the building was part of the National Trust, so one could safely assume that the toilet was of a relatively good standard and not horribly primitive. In addition, I wrote that she would find the email address for Monk’s House on the website, under “Contact Us.” I wished her the best of luck.
A whole day passed before she answered. I remember the day well, nothing happened. I sat and read other posts on Tripadvisor, but it was all so uninteresting, Algarve, Pyrenees, Venice, all I could think about was Virginia Woolf’s toilet. I opened the fridge and saw that there was no yogurt left, so I went to the shop, but was impatient to get home to see if Alcea had answered. I saw some bushes swaying in the wind and thought about hollyhocks. I looked at the grass around my block in a different way when I got home: So that’s what grass looked like! But there was no answer until the next day. Alcea wrote to thank me. She had written to them, but the house was closed for winter, and she assumed that someone would be checking the email, maybe the gardener? She imagined the gardener sitting in Virginia Woolf’s living room in winter, with cold feet, answering emails. She could just imagine what he looked like. He had green Wellington boots and a sixpence cap. It was wet outside and damp inside in winter, and the fact that it was damper now than ever before, not less, was a worry. The gardener had a weathered face, and he sat with the laptop on his lap, and checked the emails that were sent to Monk’s House, and it was strange to know, Alcea wrote, that he existed at all, so many years after the people who had lived in the house had gone, that he could sit there like a point in posterity in his green Wellington boots, which perhaps left wet marks on the brown stone floor as he sat there and answered emails about what the toilets looked like. She imagined that he was thinking: “Well, I guess one can also ask what the toilet looks like,” but what he wouldn’t know was that this was of particular importance to her, to whether she would go there or not, whether she would be able to experience walking around in Virginia Woolf’s garden, and whether she would be able to see everything that she longed to see. He couldn’t know that underlying this rather trivial question about the toilets was a deep yearning.
He couldn’t know that underlying this rather trivial question about the toilets was a deep yearning.
No, I replied, as I didn’t really know what to reply. I regretted it as soon as I hit “send,” why couldn’t I answer any more than “no”? This small no bothered me for weeks, that I had not been able to give a better response, and to say that she had helped me to notice the grass around my block. It bothered me so much that I couldn’t face going on to the page to see if she had replied, but eventually, I had to check, and she hadn’t, instead there was a post with bad spelling from someone who it later transpired was called Emma:
I’ve also thought about going to Monks House, have you been there yet? Can you say a little about what it was like. But I wondered also about what and how the daybed is.
After this, I went onto the site daily to check if there were any answers, but there was nothing. However, several weeks later, there was a post from someone who later turned out to be called Samantha:
Hello, have you been to Monk’s House yet?
So I jumped on as well after a few days, and wrote:
Hello, we’re curious to know how you got on, did you find out if there were hollyhocks etc.?
But there was still no response. All was quiet for months. Samantha, Emma, and I all carried the same worry, why had she not answered? Every time I saw the bush I had noticed on the day that I went to the shop to buy yogurt, after I’d read her post, I reflected on her silence. It was as though it was her blowing from inside the bush. Emma, Samantha, and I all more or less simultaneously sent private messages to one another, where we asked one another what we thought had happened to her. And so our internet friendship began, and quickly became very intense. It turned out that we were all Norwegian, and that we all liked to daydream, which was why we were on Tripadvisor, even though we weren’t actually going anywhere. Soon we were sharing our deepest, most private thoughts and fears and joys. Emma had a death threat hanging over her, one of the students who had been expelled from the high school where she worked had sent an email to her and threatened her, but Emma wrote that even though this was a real threat, the fear that came from inside and prevented one from showing one’s true colors, or doing things one didn’t really dare, was worse. She had been so touched by Alcea’s question on Tripadvisor about Virginia Woolf’s toilet precisely because there was something fearless about it. Samantha countered that it was in fact fear that had prompted Alcea to seek more information on the internet about the toilet, after all, she feared that there was no toilet there at all. And that, in truth, is fearless, to ask for information about what a toilet looks like, said Emma, on the internet, that is, in our small chat group, and I admire Alcea for her fearlessness. I myself had wondered and wondered what she had meant by asking about the daybed, but didn’t dare to ask. Emma had also confessed that she’d been very drunk the night she sat there surfing the internet and found Alcea’s post about Monk’s House, and that was why her post had neither question marks nor periods, and the syntax was a bit odd. She hadn’t meant to get so drunk, but the wine was so good, and it was Friday and she had too many tests to correct that weekend, and on Monday she was going to meet the parents of one of the other students who had sent another death threat. We had replied to this with three laughing faces, both Samantha and I. We were all absolutely certain that if Alcea, as we called her, the Latin term for hollyhocks, was still alive, she would have written an answer on Tripadvisor and told us, because we believed, from what we had read, that she was the sort of person who liked to tell things. Let’s go to look for her, Emma wrote one day, then we can meet in real life, and then we can all go on a trip, together! Yes, wrote Samantha, what a fantastic idea. I agreed, with great enthusiasm.
So we decided to go to look for her in Monk’s House, but we got no farther than Oslo Airport.
Samantha was the first one I met, at check-in, she was wearing light blue denim and had short blond hair, and in a way, that was that. She had a light brown leather handbag and a dark pink backpack, of the Norröna variety, and a blue rain jacket, and a thin purple woolen snood instead of a scarf. Samantha was in many ways a bit like the question she had asked Alcea: direct and straightforward. “Hello, have you been to Monk’s House yet?” We spotted Emma coming toward us from the escalator, we realized immediately that it was Emma, though we of course didn’t know. She was dressed in black, black denim, black leather boots, black trench coat, and a black scarf with tassels, with thin shoulder-length brown hair and a lot of makeup. I can’t quite explain it, but I noticed that something was making Samantha uneasy, and saw the same thing on Emma’s face when she reached us, a kind of twitching in their bodies, as though they recognized each other from their daily lives as soon as they saw each other and had immediately pigeonholed each other.
But the mood was buoyant as we went through security. I hoped, as I stood there sweating in my raincoat, that nothing about me was too disappointing for the other two women, I was a very ordinary man, and I had earphones round my neck. I was wearing blue jeans and sneakers and had a green Norröna backpack, so Samantha and I were more alike on the outside. But I had felt closer to Emma, on the internet at least. I could completely sympathize with her wish to stand naked and fearless in the face of the world. To really feel that I was filled with inner calm and that nothing was dangerous. “‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory,'” Emma had written to us, it was a quote from one of Virginia Woolf’s novels that neither Samantha nor I had read, and it was how she pictured the three of us in the chat group: we sat close together with sentences, the edges of our bodies enveloped in mist. We three were an unsubstantial landscape. And yet, Emma wrote, we were beautiful.
We were possible only as long as we were on the internet, where we were sentences and our bodies were enveloped in mist.
When I write this now, I realize that it must have been this that made her disappear. We were possible only as long as we were on the internet, where we were sentences and our bodies were enveloped in mist. She, with her black trench coat, must have reacted to our colorful Norröna rucksacks and blue denim. But still, I didn’t think that was enough to forgive the confusion and sorrow that both Samantha and I felt when we went to the duty-free to look for Emma, who we thought had gone to try a Chanel perfume, a green one, as she said she had. There was no Emma there. No Emma at Chanel, Dior, or Versace. No Emma came to the gate. We got the information desk to put out a call and ask her to meet “Elos and Samantha at Gate 23.” No Emma came. When I heard our names, that we were standing by a gate, which was here, it was as though who I really was dissolved into the mist, and I saw that Samantha was feeling the same where she stood; that we were not standing there, that we were not called Elos and Samantha, not like this. We’re not going, are we, Samantha said, and looked at me as she slowly faded into gray before my eyes. No, I barely managed to whisper before the air erased us completely and the gate personnel called for Emma one last time.
I have sometimes wondered if Emma was in fact Alcea. If it was she who wrote the first post on Tripadvisor and commented herself, after I did. If she was playing a game with us, to lure us in and then disappear twice, perhaps she wanted someone to feel that the numbing silence to be found on the internet when someone doesn’t answer is the same feeling as when a traveling companion disappears at the airport. At other times, I’ve wondered if she was killed by one of her students. Neither theory is particularly plausible. But every time I see hollyhocks swaying gently on their long stems in the wind, I’m touched by the feeling of something extraterrestrial and mysterious, as if they had been planted there only to remind me of something.
The fine art world is one of sophistication, wealth, and beauty, a fertile atmosphere for chronicles of intrigue— of artists who will create guileful forgeries for a price, and wealthy collectors draped in gold, who are relentless in their search for rarified artistry.
Characters unfold their easels and cultivate their collections in the most glittering metropolises- Paris, New York, and London, cities with storied histories of lofty, gilded institutions of art. But an unsightly immoral depth slithers beneath the dazzle of extravagant gallery parties flooded with frothy champagne. Beauty creates value, and value attracts thieves. Here are eight novels that follow the trail of beauty down a dark corridor of artifice.
Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize winning The Goldfinch is required reading in the category of stolen art novels. It begins with a 13-year old Theodore Decker taking a trip to a museum with his mother, where they both become victims of a terrorist’s attack that destroys the building and much of the art within it. Theo survives, and is able to make his way out of the rubble, clutching an art piece that he and his mother had viewed together just before the blast: a painting in muted tones of a small bird chained to its perch, called “the Goldfinch.” Theo tragically realizes that his mother hadn’t survived after waiting at home and calling hospitals around the city searching for her. The painting that he dragged from the rubble becomes a focal point of Theo’s existence as his life is ripped apart with grief.
As Theo is dragged through a tumultuous childhood into an unstable adulthood, the painting remains his center, and he continues to hide it from the world. However, his treasured token suddenly becomes lost to him, and he is forced to follow its trail to a dark place. Tartt imbues Theo’s story with so much color, with its starkly real characters and the intense relationships between them, making it a thrilling and beautiful read.
Gabriel Allon is an art restorer and occasional spy who has faced many skilled assassins and terrorists throughout the 22-book long series. He has navigated a dangerous career of life and death battles often centered around stolen and forged art. In this 22nd installment of the series, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Allon seems to have retired and settled peacefully in Venice with his family, his wife taking over his restoration business. But like many skilled spies, Allon is not allowed to remain in retirement for long. His old friend, an eccentric art dealer from London, requires his very specific skills in art restoration and spy work to investigate the rediscovery of a centuries old painting. Allon quickly finds that the painting is a very well done fake. This sets him on a trail, littered with murdered bodies, after the forger who created it, and their lucrative enterprise of deceiving the fine art world by tainting museums and art collections of the wealthy with forgeries.
As this is the latest installment in the series, some may suggest that you read all of the Gabriel Allon series before reading Portrait of an Unknown Woman in order to gain context for how the characters and relationships evolved throughout the series and culminated in this latest installation.But if you’re looking to jump in without reading The Kill Artist through The Cellist, it is still possible to understand and enjoy Portrait of an Unknown Woman.
Will is a senior art major at Harvard, and the son of Chinese American immigrants. With his education, Will is aware of the colonial evils that has filled Western museums with the artistic works of his ancestors. So when a mysterious Chinese benefactor selects him to lead the heist that will return five art pieces to Beijing, he agrees to the illegal and potentially impossible mission. His team consists of four other students: Irene Chen, the fast-talking con artist and public policy major; Daniel Liang, a pre-med student with a talent for lockpicking; Lily Wu, an engineering major who car races as a hobby and is a smooth getaway driver; and Alex Huang, a silicon valley engineer who serves as the team’s hacker. They risk losing everything they have strived toward for their futures, but stand to gain 50 million dollars in reward money, and a chance to make history.
This novel is inspired by the rumors surrounding real life museum thefts in the past couple decades, where it is speculated that the Chinese government targeted large European and American museums with thoroughly coordinated maneuvers to obtain art stolen during centuries of imperialism. As Li’s research for this novel included watching her favorite movies Ocean’s Eleven and The Fast and the Furious, this novel promises to be a thrilling and wild ride.
Barbara A. Shapiro’s The Art Forger fictionalizes the real unsolved theft at the Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. A present day struggling young artist named Claire Roth reproduces famous works of art as a legal means of making a living. However, her desperation to escape a life as a starving artist makes a shady deal with a wealthy gallery owner, Aiden Markel, very tantalizing. In exchange for payment and exposure at his gallery, Claire is supposed to create a replica of a piece stolen from the Gardner Museum, one of the Degas Masterpieces. When she receives the artwork to copy, she is unable to determine if she was given the real one that had been stolen, or a very good forgery. Claire’s search for the truth leads her down a winding path of thrilling deceit and centuries-old secrets.
Stealing Mona Lisa by Carson Morton
Based on the real theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911, Stealing Mona Lisa is a story of a ragtag group of con artists who set out to steal the world’s most famous painting. Eduardo de Valfierno makes a living creating forgeries for fabulously wealthy patrons in Argentina, who believe that the art are authentic pieces. He meets the beautiful and unhappily married Mrs. Hart, who sets him on a journey that leads back to Paris to lift that famous painting from the Louvre. Eduardo and his crew run into danger as they are pursued by a persistent police inspector. Casted with a crew of lovable rogues and rascals, this novel is an exciting and fun read.
Roger Brown has a cushy, gold-rimmed lifestyle to maintain that his work as a corporate headhunter cannot support alone. Even with his skill in his day job, he requires something under the table to keep his wife’s developing art gallery afloat. At an art opening, Roger meets the answer to his financial problems: Clas Greve, the CEO candidate for a major company, and the owner of a priceless Baroque-era Peter Paul Rubens painting. Clas seems to present a double opportunity to Roger, who dabbles in art theft. But after breaking into Clas’s home, Roger comes to find that this fateful meeting was a devastating stroke of misfortune.
Fake takes us alongside professional forger Emma Caan’s impetuous plunge into the opulent and dangerous fine art scene. Emma specializes in 19th-century paintings, taking legal commissions from wealthy collectors who have authentic art pieces to protect and keep hidden. While she is skilled at her craft, her adeptness is a constant reminder that she had the potential to realize her own artistic dreams. But she remained in her current line of work in order to take care of her family. That is until Leonard Sobetsky, a man of immense influence in the art world, appears and draws Emma into the glitz, glamor, and financial opportunity of the less legal dealings in the art world. While Emma chases stability, she quickly finds herself in over her head with what this new world demands of her.
Lisa Barr is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, art-lover, and journalist, and she brings all of her experiences into writing Woman on Fire. The Woman on Fire painting was stolen 75 years ago by Nazi looters, as was the life of the fictional German impressionist painter who created it. Young journalist Jules Roth talks her way into working with the lead investigative reporter Dan Mansfield to find the painting. For Dan, the job is personal; his friend, Ellis Baum, is dying, and has a deeply sentimental and historical connection to the work. She wants to see the painting one last time.
The job won’t be as simple as tracking down the piece. Powerful heiress Margaux de Laurent has her sights set on the same painting, and she is used to getting what she wants. She comes from a wealthy family of art collectors, and commands the overwhelming resources that her status grants her. But Jules is determined, and ready to take on the ruthless de Laurent. Woman on Fire is a thrilling and romantic novel that showcases Barr’s passionately thorough research into art looted during the Holocaust.
About twenty pages into Sofia Samatar’s memoir The White Mosque, Sigmund Freud appears, sitting in a train compartment late at night. Up to this point, Samatar’s story has been primarily about her travels across Central Asia to study The Bride Sect, a Mennonite group who fled persecution in Russia toward the place they thought Jesus would return to usher in the apocalypse in Uzbekistan in 1889. The Bride Sect crossed the desert on Conestoga wagons. Samatar and her tour group of 21st century Mennonites follow in their footsteps by tour bus.
Then, without warning, Samatar imagines a night train, with Sigmund Freud on board. Into Freud’s compartment bursts a stranger, an old man in a dressing gown. As quickly as he comes, he disappears, because the apparition is Freud himself: his own unexpected reflection in a mirror when the moving train jolted the bathroom door open.
Freud actually told this story to introduce his theory of the unheimlich—usually translated in English as “the uncanny”—a concept that has spurred a century of thought about Self and Other. But Sofia Samatar, in a traveling state of mind, turns to Freud’s story because unheimlich, in its most literal English translation, means “not home-like.” Freud’s haunting, for her, didn’t just happen to take place on a train; it is, in its essence, a travel story, an incident made possible by the literal disturbances of travel.
While Freud at first glance has nothing to do with Mennonites or Central Asia or multiracial identity or any of The White Mosque’s main threads, his midnight encounter with himself—and the eerie suddenness with which Samatar conjures him—is an early indicator that she is not just writing about her travels or her ghosts. She is obsessed by all the Others who burst in when we travel, with the way in which “to be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting.”
The White Mosque is travel literature as ghost story.
“How do we enter the stories of others?” Samatar asks, as she and her fellow Mennonite tourists rumble in a bus across the Uzbek desert. “I am thinking of bodies in motion.”
Sofia Samatar herself is the daughter of a Somali Muslim scholar who met her mother, a German-American Mennonite, when she came to his village as a missionary. Samatar counts herself when she surveys “a world full of ethnic ghosts: the ghosts of modernity, of travel.”
Unlike Samatar, my ancestors on both sides are white and Christian as far back as I can trace. Like her, though, my mother’s family has also made a family legacy of global missions. Both Samatar’s and my maternal families entered the stories of others burdened with Radical Protestant heritage (Calvinist Southern Baptists in my case; German American Mennonite in hers).
My mother’s family has also made a family legacy of global missions.
My missionary heritage was the defining force of my childhood. It shapes my first name, spelled with an S instead of a Z to honor Elisabeth Elliot, who, with her husband Jim, traveled as a missionary to Ecuador in the 1950s at the same time as my mother’s parents were training to be missionaries to the Hoklo ethnic group in Taiwan.
Elisabeth and Jim Elliot sought to contact and convert the Huaorani people, previously uncontacted by European societies. They dropped gift packages from airplanes, after which Jim Elliot and two other missionaries entered Huaorani territory on foot. The men were killed by the Huaorani people they encountered on January 8, 1956.
Refusing to take this very obvious NO for an answer, Elisabeth Elliot, along with other widowed missionary women, persisted in contacting, and eventually converting, many of the Huaorani people to Christianity. Upon her return to the United States from Ecuador, Elisabeth became a key figure in Evangelical Christian culture wars, writing and broadcasting to shore up patriarchal, heteronormative systems that feminist and LGBT rights activists were working just as tirelessly to break down.
Throughout my childhood, Elisabeth Elliot’s books sat on my mother’s bookshelf next to photographs of her childhood on Taiwanese mountainsides, pictures of the Baptist chapels, hospitals, and the orphanage my grandfather helped build. Elisabeth Elliot’s voice spoke from the kitchen radio every weekday morning, warning Christian women of the dangers of “perverting biblical gender roles” [sic].
My mother forbade anyone to ever call me a nickname that included a Z (“Liz,” “Lizzie,” etc) because that all-important S would be lost. “Never forget who you’re named after,” my mother said countless times throughout my childhood. “Never forget whose you are.”
I remain as haunted as my mother hoped, though not in the way she imagined.
The Bride Sect was one of many Mennonite communities driven out of Russia by state persecution in the late 19th century but was unique in its apocalyptic fervor. The ragged band, many of whom died in the trek across Central Asia, was led by Claas Epp, a man obsessed with a fantasy novel about the Second Coming of Jesus who reframed his community’s flight across the desert as a pilgrimage to the place where Jesus would first return to earth on March 8, 1889.
I remain as haunted as my mother hoped, though not in the way she imagined.
As thrillingly as Sofia Samatar records the Bride Sect’s journey, she even more compellingly explores how they kept living when their travels ended but (spoiler!) that greatest of all revenants, Jesus himself, did not materialize. They built homes and a church (the building called “the white mosque” by the Bride Sect’s Muslim neighbors). They married and had children. They tried to come to terms with this life in this world.
Reflecting on this predictable-but-unprophesied end to the Bride Sect’s story, Samatar explores the wider implications of being at odds with time—whether as a small group of refugees preparing for the world to end on a certain date, or, as in the case of Calvinist Evangelicals like my ancestors, missionaries so haunted by visions of fellow humans suffering the Last Judgment, that they fled their own homes and cultures and contexts, invading the stories of others in a constant state of apocalyptic emergency.
Samatar calls this apocalypse-panic driven invasion of other cultures “‘the missionary effect’… futurist and idealist, nothing to do with yesterday or the day before.”
Both the Bride Sect and my own ancestors (and I myself, before about the age of 18) hung their entire lives on the possibility that Jesus could come back tomorrow—this afternoon, even. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes it’s no accident that apocalyptic Christian worldviews are almost always held by Young Earthers: the same people who insist that the world and everything in it was created in six 24-hour days and that the world itself is just over six thousand years old. These bookended beliefs are born of what Bjornerud calls chronophobia, terror of time’s vastness, of its scale beyond not only an individual lifetime, but beyond an entire species’ existence. At this scale, time itself becomes un-home-like, other, foreign to what our body-minds can grasp.
What better way to erase history’s guilt and future terrors than to say that time itself will end any day now?
The Calvinists who raised me taught me that, unlike those decadent Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians who were entombed in centuries of accrued rituals and traditions, our version of Christianity was as fresh and untouched by history as it was the day Jesus left.
This ahistorical narrative seems driven by a terror of history and the vast number of ancestral mistakes that history holds. It seems equally terrified of a human future filled with history’s consequences. What better way to erase history’s guilt and future terrors than to say that time itself will end any day now?
No history: no ghosts. No future: no haunting.
If it is evil to refuse your own history and its consequences, I’d argue there’s even deeper evil in forcibly cutting someone else out of time’s relational fabric—taking from them the choice to know or deny their own ancestors or to shape a future that flows from knowing one’s own history.
Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother, her travel memoir tracing the Ghanian slave trade, that “being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging, and exclusion but … a particular relation to the past.” These ghosts of severed history are the ones always with Sofia Samatar on her travels, the ones she’s carried in her own mixed-race body her entire life.
I can only guess that many of them hoped to never be hungry ghosts.
Because time is a whole, any interrupted relationship to the past is also an interrupted relationship to the present and even to possible futures. The word mulatto, Samatar writes, comes from the word mule, “because mules are sterile. This is a way of saying that mixed people have no future.”
In a section of The White Mosque called “Stories of brown girlhood,” Samatar addresses her own history in the third person, calling herself “the child.” She brings to her experiences of mixed-race identity, Blackness, and otherness in majority-white Mennonite schools and churches the same sustained attention that she does to the Bride Sect, but also to Freud, Tamerlane, Langston Hughes, and the many other historical figures who haunt the pages of this book. She unghosts herself by locating herself in history and then marveling at the future that unfolded from “the child’s” beginnings, a future that, in the face of all white imperialism’s disruptions, is still unfolding.
I don’t have the right to say any people who still worship in the Taiwanese chapels my grandfather built (if any do; I’ve been unable to find out) are not truly at home. All of us who were Christian have ancestors who converted, always for complex reasons.
But I also cannot avoid the truth that for some people my ancestors, in a European Christian imperialist context, were the reason. I cannot not think about the fearful and dismissive tone with which my grandmother spoke about “ancestor worship,” an umbrella term she applied to all traditional Taiwanese religions. I cannot not imagine how the ancestors of some of the people my grandparents converted probably hoped their afterlives would be. I can only guess that many of them hoped to never be hungry ghosts, neglected in traditional practice by their descendants.
In late August of my 19th year, while trying to pray away my gay at a small Evangelical Christian community in the Swiss Alps (a few miles from the birthplace of Calvinism), I began, in dreams, to find myself at the gates of hell.
My hell most closely resembled a city park at dusk, packed with people. I can’t remember the way these people look in my dreaming mind, but I always knew, without ever being told, that they were people whom my grandparents and Elisabeth Elliot, my namesake, failed to convert to Christianity.
In these dreams, which I sometimes still have, I know the people looking out at me have no choice about where they go: they will be in hell forever. But I also know that I, the baptized and saved-by-the-blood-of-the-lamb lesbian woman, am a ghost who can move between worlds—but only once. I have to choose. If I so choose, I can leave my queerness at the gates of hell and turn back for heaven.
Every time, the dream ends as I walk through the gates, joining the crowds of hell, knowing I will be there forever and that, in a sense, I have finally arrived home.
To Freud, his unheimlich encounter with himself on the night train was less about travel and more about repression. He experienced himself in that surprised moment as Other, as an “old man,” because, among other reasons, he’d been unwilling to confront how old he actually was. His refusal to acknowledge the imprint of time and history on his own body, combined with a traveler’s disorientation, made the haunting possible.
The weird thing about the unheimlich, writes Samatar, is that “it leads you home to what you wish to forget: the revenant, the ghost.” But, she asks:
What if you were desperate to remember, in order to go on living, to be less afraid? I long to … embrace the elderly traveler who springs into the compartment, with his disordered clothes and strange, repellent face. To think with a shout of laughter, Why, it’s me!
Once, when I told someone the story of my name and my discomfort with my namesake, with all that Christian imperialist, heteronormative weight in Elisabeth-with-an-S-because-of-Elisabeth-Elliot, they asked if I’d ever considered changing my name.
The longer I live with my name, the more I’ve come to view it as one of my most valuable ghosts.
I knew the suggestion came from concern for the pain that my legacy causes me, and I also felt an immediate and strong objection to the idea, but wasn’t at first sure why.
I believe in the right of each person to name or rename themselves in light of their own and their communities’ liberation. But the longer I live with my name, the more I’ve come to view it as one of my most valuable ghosts.
Most things about the way I am in the world—my whiteness, my thinness, my Christianity, my cisgenderedness—are treated by the society I live in as givens. Alongside my “surprising” queerness (“you don’t look lesbian!”), the S-not-Z in my name is often the only thing about me that registers as other to most people.
Every time someone asks me about the S, whether or not I choose to reveal its full meaning (I usually don’t; it’s a violent story), my ghosts are brought before me: Elisabeth Elliot of course, but beside her, my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, and the more distant ancestors who invaded and occupied. My name is a direct line to my colonizing ancestry and the colonial present from which I benefit. If I changed my name, those realities would remain real, but I think they would flash less frequently before me. The ghostly light that history casts onto the present might allow me—might allow us—to travel a new path: not toward prophecy, but possibility. I, along with Sofia Samatar, “long to reimagine the conjunction of close and foreign as survival strategy, illumination, and hope.”
*My deep gratitude to Akilah White whose wise guidance shaped this essay and whose brilliant work introduced me to Sofia Samatar.
Marisa Crane’s debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is set outside of our reality: in an America where a cruel form of public shaming has taken the place of prisons.
In Exoskeletons we meet Kris, a new mother struggling to see a future for herself and her kid in the wake of her partner’s sudden death. As if that weren’t hard enough, Kris and her child both wear an extra Shadow, the physical brand that the “Department of Balance” attaches to anyone they deem a threat to the status quo. The book is speculative in the way that Octavia Butler’s Kindred is speculative: the premise pushes on the limits of reality only to bring us closer to understanding our own relationships.
In a fragmented and intimate style that evokes writers like Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill, Crane allows Kris to explore all the corners of grief, love, desire and hope as she finds a way to forgive herself and reinvent her family’s form. Crane and I spoke over Zoom about the early days of parenthood, the innate need for community, and all the ways shame can keep us stuck.
Rebecca Ackermann: What was the first seed of this book that felt urgent to get out into the world?
Marisa Crane: It’s probably weird to say that I love talking or thinking about shame—but it’s been so prominent in my life for my whole life. The start of this book idea was eight or nine years ago when I wrote a poem that was meant to shame me. The gist of the poem was “if the shadows of everyone you’ve ever heard followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” For some reason, I thought that would make me not do bad things or not hurt people. Which really doesn’t make any sense. I think I was steeped in a lot of shame and guilt over what we all do—hurting romantic partners, friends and family—and I wasn’t understanding that we all hurt people, but it’s what you do with that information and how you react and change and apologize and make active choices to behave better. I forgot about the poem forever. Years later, the first line of the book came to me in the shower: “the kid is born with two shadows.” I didn’t make the connection right away, but the line just wouldn’t leave me alone, and that’s always when I have to write something. The idea of the world came to me first because of that poem, but then I was like, “Okay, what could a baby have done to be born with two shadows?” The driving force behind this book has always been shame and how shame follows us and haunts us and keeps us from becoming what we can be. It can keep people stagnant or passive in their own lives.
RA: At the beginning of Part 1, you include an excerpt of a Mary Rueffle poem, White Buttons: “bright sunlight/can also be very sad”. It resonated deeply for me with the experience of parenthood, especially the early stages.
MC: As parents—and especially as mothers or people who are read as women—we’re expected to be like, “everything is amazing.” People still feel ashamed and lonely in those early weeks, and aren’t telling each other that they’re feeling awful. I’ve had some of my closest friends have kids, and then in the group text they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s so amazing. They’re so cute,” and just send cute pictures. But then three months later, I’ll find out that they were doing horribly. That bright sunlight line by Mary Rueffle really resonated with me. We’re told that a certain thing should be wonderful—like, you’re supposed to be so excited about bright sunny days. That’s the epitome of a beautiful day. So if you don’t feel happy about that, there’s shame underlying it. It’s really funny living in San Diego because it is almost always sunny, and I complain about it sometimes. My friends are like, “Oh, you live in paradise? Boohoo.” There are all these things we’re supposed to be happy about. And it’s hard to talk about it when we’re not.
RA: As a reader, it also felt like a small resistance for Kris to be so confident as the whole world is telling her that she’s bad in all these ways. Kris believes a lot of things about herself, but to not believe that she’s a bad mother is a hopeful piece of the book.
MC: Every day, most parents are berating themselves for not doing better, no matter how great they’re doing. So, I do think it is refreshing that Kris doesn’t really sit around being like, “Oh, I was awful today.” I also think the kid is really easy to feel confident parenting, because she is so self-assured and competent. She feels easy for Kris to relate to. I wanted the kid to have a lot of agency because there are so many books where the children are just used as means for other people’s character development. I wanted her to be a powerful character on the page. I think Kris sees that in her and is like, “I must be doing something right.” That’s helpful for Kris to see.
RA: There’s also a nice contrast that you’ve set up with the confidence inside their unit, and the very real problems that are going on outside in the world. That’s different from a lot of other parenthood literature, where it’s almost exclusively internal, about the dynamics of the relationship. In this book, the dynamics of the parent-child relationship are so good, and even the dynamics between Kris and the ghost of Beau are good. But what’s happening outside of the family brings serious challenges.
MC: I can’t say that it was a fully intentional choice. But I wrote it that way innately because in our world, and in the Exoskeletons world, these are some of the only ways that we can resist the powers that be. I do think that queer joy, parent-child joy and domestic joy are really powerful ways for us to resist. It’s a middle finger to the Department of Balance in the book. “Yeah you’ve got cameras in our home and you’re trying to fuck everything up, but we’re still bonding in these really powerful ways.”
RA: Yeah, let’s talk more about the community that Kris and the kid find in friends and extended family. I found it very meaningful that the relationships are not just between Kris and other people, but between the kid and these people too. It’s that sense of “it takes a village.” They are coming into the family to help—and not just to help in a one-sided way, but it’s an exchange. What pieces of community did you want to represent in the novel?
The driving force behind this book [is] how shame follows us and haunts us and keeps us from becoming what we can be. It can keep people stagnant or passive in their own lives.
MC: So often parents talk about how we need space away from our children, but we don’t talk as much about how our kids also need space away from us. They need all these various relationships that enrich their lives—friends their age, but also other caregivers, and other adults. If I am with my kid for three days straight, he will start getting super cranky, and mad at me. I’m like, “I think you’re sick of me. I think that like you need to go see a grandparent or one of my friends needs to come over and hang out.” And he immediately brightens up and learns different things from different people. We can’t give them everything as much as people want to believe.
I have been thinking about community so much lately because I realized that I was inadvertently raised in community without calling it that—I played team sports for my entire life, including in college. Your team becomes your family and community, and there’s also the coaches and the parents of other players. When I graduated college and wasn’t on this basketball team anymore, it felt like being flung out into the universe alone. My next writing project is a grief memoir about basketball, so that’s been top of mind. I’ve been thinking about community—how important it is and how we find it, maybe without realizing that we’re cultivating it. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are intentionally cultivating loving communities, but there are some that just spring up. It’s always beautiful when that happens.
RA: There’s this narrative in our American individualistic culture that the family is the unit that should be entrusted with a child’s care, and you shouldn’t need anything outside of that. If you do, that’s weakness. In my own experience, I’ve definitely needed more—and because of that narrative, it felt shameful to ask for help. But it’s such a strange cultural story when that’s not how people have lived for generations and generations throughout the world.
MC: The single-family home really destroyed a lot of that intergenerational community—especially for white people. Some other communities are still functioning in the way I think we were meant to with many different families and family members around to help raise the kids collectively. Even the framing of “you shouldn’t need help” is really harmful. Why should it be considered help? Shouldn’t it be considered this team effort, or what the kid needs? Flipping that narrative can be hard. But it’s beneficial to literally everyone.
RA: What I found restorative about Exoskeletons was that those ideas are understood in the novel: community and extended family are necessary, the kid needs other relationships just as much as Kris needs other relationships. That was almost a speculative aspect of the novel for me—in addition to the Shadows and the dystopian government. It’s a world where Kris already knows that parenting is not an individual sport.
MC: That’s something that is so prevalent in my own life. We have a group of friends here who are all parents, and we go camping with them very frequently. When we go it becomes this community where we all take care of all the kids. It’s completely understood. Nobody’s like, “Can you watch so and so for five seconds when I go to the bathroom?” It’s so refreshing. There’s 12 adults and five kids and we chuck them in the middle, and everybody cooks for everyone. But then we leave camping and all go to our separate single-family homes. I always have an emotional hangover afterward. The only way to replicate it in everyday life is if we buy tons of land, and all of us live on that land. But those things are really hard to make happen.
RA: I appreciated the bureaucratic euphemisms you use throughout the novel, like the Department of Balance and Shadows, and the way that the fictional government you’ve created cloaks their fascist policies in the illusion of abolition. It reminded me of how language plays a role in so many real-life stories of oppression, from World War II to the U.S. border crisis. What inspired your depiction of an oppressive government?
Queer joy, parent-child joy and domestic joy are really powerful ways for us to resist.
MC: I really didn’t pull from real history to inform the government. I was looking into shaming and humiliation throughout history, especially for queer and trans people. Queer people’s names used to be printed in a newspaper, things like that. After I wrote the book, I readThe Women’s House of Detention, and he talked about how before prisons, people would be marked—like their ears would be clipped or they would be branded. That is really what the Shadow [in Exoskeletons] is to me. It was interesting to learn that I made this accidental connection there. But I’ve been thinking a lot about how I didn’t build out President Colestein’s character. Fascists are going to fascist. I’m not interested in the president or the government. I’m interested in the people that the fascism affects—that was a guiding principle to me. My friend texted me the other day to say that my novel was answering a question that their fiction cohort had talked about: “How can writers have an antagonist that isn’t an active participant in the plot, but is a constant presence in the character’s lives?” That’s what I’ve been trying to get at this whole time.
RA: There’s a metaphor for generational inheritance in your story of a kid who’s born with a Shadow. Kris has an extra Shadow too and a complicated relationship to what she has given her child. It’s something they have in common, as you said, but it is also a source of tension. In the book, the solution for the lasting trauma of abandonment and shame is community care and self-forgiveness. How have you looked to shape your own destiny outside of what you’ve been given, and how do you hope your child gets to shape his?
MC: Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is queer futurity. When I was younger, I could not see a future for myself, especially one that wasn’t basketball. Everybody told me I have to marry a guy and get pregnant and have some kids—which is funny because I’m married and have a kid. It’s not that far off, but my wife does matter. But I was really depressed and I didn’t want to arrive at that projected future. I threw everything into basketball because that was a future that I could imagine; I didn’t imagine relationships, I just imagined getting a full scholarship to a D1 and then I wanted to play in the WNBA. That was the only thing that kept me alive. When I graduated and I didn’t go play pro because of a million injuries and because I wasn’t good enough for the WNBA, that future felt ripped out. All of a sudden, I had to imagine a new future that I wanted to participate in. In a lot of ways, shaping my own destiny looked like deciding that I was going to embrace my queerness and what that meant for me, and start coming up with ideas of what family could look like. It came down to giving myself permission to hope and create a future that I actually wanted to be a part of.
For my kid, that’s such a deeper, harder question, but it’s important. It feels like an ongoing collaboration with my wife and everybody else involved in his life. I just want to create a world where he feels emotionally safe to dream up whatever he wants. My wife and I both have complicated relationships to things that have been passed down to us. But I don’t find power in negating, being like “I don’t want to be like so and so or I don’t want to do what so and so did.” I want it to be this expansive, creative process of respecting him as a person. My friend the other day, told me something that is so simple: In addition to saying “I’m proud of you,” always say, “You should be proud of yourself.” Building that pride is so important. In a lot of ways, I can barely see his future because I’m so focused on trying to make the present this wonderful place that helps him arrive at that future.
The afro is omnipresent, like skyline, like the raspiness of its owner, Nina, who is a revolutionary with moveable overtones. Her skin warms the green background and is caressed by musical notes, the longer you look they more they seem to move, like little people seeking refuge in the warmth of her cheeks, umbrella’d by her green afro. There is nothing below the neck, her head floats, ghostly, so it seems like she lingers between myth and memory, and this prepares you for the live recording. When she sings “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” I stop and consider how thin the minutes are, because every time I hear this song I’m disappointed in how I spent the day. I’m reminded that I’m running out of time to prove something, to finally finish all the studying that facilitates a comprehensive excuse for why I don’t have a formidable social life, or why I don’t have a significant other. It is the afro-futuristic boldness of this cover that reminds me that I too am omnipresent, if I chose to be. Because Nina was known for many things, but her reputation as a woman who suffered no fools, precedes her. So when she spends half of the song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” talking about time and self-preservation, I listen to hear myself in her voice, “You use up everything you’ve got when you give everybody what they wanted. But I will learn my lesson soon,” she says. Consider how time and culture work in tandem through this album cover, how the title makes parallel two colors, a most valuable product, the chemical element of atomic number 79, and the most beautiful being, a dark-skinned people. Black/Gold.
The Sound of Blue
You should start with rhyme,
with the syncopation of maps inscribed on your tongue
branding yourself a new taxonomy,
like the dizzying rage of unruly psycho-cum-fantastic people
trading fairness, for freeness
click your tongue and recount the revelry,
recount the bizarre,
because take it from me, it's better to start from sound than from solution,
and with all climatic things becoming cyclic, there is no denouement anyway,
not for some time.
Which is why it’s best to listen for the sound
of hot-blooded conversation grumbling down the sidewalk,
making its way to podiums of pulsating hate,
of radical world-making, of jazz-infused ideas blooming in protest,
of police choruses, a litany of thumping questions and commands
such as, where are you from/you have the right to/do you have registration
/put your hands on, take your hands off/ put your hands above
put your hands up/answer the question/ turn off the camera/ get out/ where is your father?
Of these echoes you should listen
for the riffing boorishness of state-sanctioned uniforms broadcasting
a soundscape of the not so new ordinary.
You should listen to hear life gasping,
battling its constant pneumonias, begging for new respite,
running circles around old-wars,
asking us to hear the sirens of rainbows busting into inferno,
ending in dim silence.
I’ve struggled with finding belonging my entire life. I grew up 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and spent most of my teenage years jumping from O’Hara Township, a white suburb, to the Hill District, a bustling Black area, and to Puerto Rico, where some of my family resides. In my school district, I was exposed largely to white writers and I searched for my heritage on my own in books. As a teenager, I fell in love with James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Huston, Heidi W. Durrow and Edwidge Danticat. When I read their words, I felt like my Black experiences were valid, vibrant, and alive. Writing gave me a space where I could be myself, where I could bring my bifurcated experiences together. When I read books by Black authors, it made me feel like someday I could write a book.
I found that I was hungry for representation everywhere I went. I’m the daughter of a Black American father and Puerto Rican mother, and I wondered if there were any writers out there like me, who were both Black and Latina. After finding Mayra Santos-Febres on a bookshelf in San Juan, and after researching more about Afro-Latine literature and getting to know wonderful Black Latine writers all over the country, I felt like I had found a kind of literary home.
In my short story collection When Trying to Return Home, my main characters, Black Americans and Afro Latines, struggle with the feeling of belonging, on the search for home and freedom whether it’s in Puerto Rico or Miami.
Our voices should be heard and Afro-Latinas deserve a spot in the literary canon. The following list includes amazing Afro-Latina writers whose work has given me strength, validity and power. These women are truth-tellers, they say the unsayable, they capture what it’s like to inhabit multiple identities. I hope you buy their work.
Dr. Ivelisse Rodriguez’s incredible book Love War Stories chronicles the stories of Puerto Rican women grappling with desire, personal will and the need to find freedom on their own terms: “Love between two people is up close, disheveled – a mélange of past, present, future love and acrimony…” In Rodriguez’s short story “El Qué Dirán” a young woman named Noelia prepares for her quinceañera while wrestling with her relationship with her aunt Lola who is lovelorn over her absent husband Carlos. The stunning “The Belindas” depicts the protagonist Belinda reinventing herself after a breakup with her ex. These stories will move you.
Jasminne Mendez is a Houston-based, Dominican-American poet and writer, her writing addresses the body, Afro-Dominican identity, womanhood and the power of storytelling. In her personal essay and poetry collection Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e, Mendez explores her struggle with chronic illness and infertility after being diagnosed with scleroderma and lupus as a young woman. In her poem, “To El Hombre Dominicano Who Told Me It Was Not My Place to Write about Dominican/Haitian Relations,” she writes that “my body is a midnight church” and she elevates the female experience by saying “Again, I tried to justify that my poetry was—for women, amas de casa bearing rifles & marching in skirts women.”
Mayra Santos-Febres’s work is fierce, immersive and captures Blackness, identity, love, nation and the many sides of Puerto Rico exquisitely. She’s also a prolific multi-genre writer who has written poetry and fiction. In her book Sirena Selena, an impoverished, majestic boy in drag entices Hugo Graubel, a wealthy investor and they engage in a long affair. In her Spanish language book Huracanada, Santos-Febres follows a chorus of voices, the survivors of Hurricane Irma and Maria. In this book, she empowers and complicates the story of an island trying to find its core in the aftermath of destruction.
Yesenia Montilla’s poetry is searing and gut-wrenching. Her collection The Pink Box examines dreams and memory beautifully, and poems like “Maps” in Muse Found in a Colonized Body explore the body and the borders we attempt to traverse, the poem aspiring to be a “meditation on immigration and on dreaming of a borderless world.” Her wide-ranging collections discuss the commodification of art made by female artists, sexual desire, and living as an Afro Caribbean woman in New York City.
Amina Gautier captures relationships in flux with stunning detail and emotional acuity. Her short story collection The Loss of All Lost Thing, winner of numerous awards, is about loss, grief and the vulnerability of pursuing human connection. In “A Cup of My Time,” a pregnant woman is forced to choose which of her unborn twins will survive. “Lost and Found,” one of the most heart-wrenching stories in the collection, is told from the perspective of a young boy who has been kidnapped. In her story “Now We Will Be Happy” from her excellent collection Now We Will Be Happy, cooking becomes an extended metaphor for fraught relationships, because tostones “make no excuses.”
The founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly that promotes Latine writing, Dr. Raina León is a multi-genre writer whose work is lush and encompassing. Her book black god mother this bodyaddresses topics such as loss, what it means to “mother”, healing and the body. It also captures the nature of performing womanhood: “i perform that I have it together/i perform control and joviality/i perform prayerful poise/what are you performing/when will the real rumble free?”
Elizabeth Acevedo will draw you in and make you feel as if your humanity is represented. She’s a poet and a novelist, two of her books are novels-in-verse. Her book The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, is about a high school student named Xiomara who attempts to navigate a complex relationship with her mother, budding romance and slam poetry. Xiomara learns that “There is power in the word.”
Ariana Brown’s work lifts spirits and speaks truth to power. The author of the poetry collections We Are Owed.and Sana Sana, the Houston-based scribe writes about her queer Black Mexican American experience with strength and love. In “Dear White Girls in My Spanish Class,”Brown says “Let me be clear. Spanish was given to my people/at the end of a sword, forced in our throats gory, /sharpened under the colonizer’s constant eye./Each rolled r is a red wet fingerprint pointing me back/to this. Spanish is not my native tongue. English isn’t either./The languages I speak are bursting with blood, but they are all I have.”
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroamanipulates time and roiling emotion effortlessly. She’s the author of the historical novels Daughters of Stone and A Woman of Endurance, which both show Puerto Rican Black women grappling with their environment. Daughters of Stone is about Fela, a talented Afro-Puerto Rican woman who overcomes slavery and who creates a lineage for her children.. A Woman of Endurance follows Pola, who is beaten by the oppression heavy in 19th-century Puerto Rico but survives and thrives. Her books brilliantly center the Afro-Boricua experience and as Llanos-Figueroa says in Daughters of Stone, “We all have stories. Sometimes the pain lies so heavily inside us that it can only be whispered.”
Jaquira Díaz is a powerhouse. Puerto Rico-born Díaz writes about the triumphs and perils of girlhood with sweeping, lyrical and engaging prose in her memoir Ordinary Girls. Her book follows her coming-of-age in Puerto Rico and Miami with gorgeous detail and wrenching beauty: “We were girls, but we’d spend the rest of our days together if we could. Until one day we realized that without meaning to, we grew up, grew apart, broke each other’s hearts.” Her works discuss Puerto Rico and Miami with gorgeous detail and wrenching beauty.
In our series Can Writing Be Taught?,we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re featuring writer and educator Abhigna Mooraka, who is teaching a four-week online course on reading hybrid-language prose as writers. We talked to Mooraka about the importance of community, saving your drafts, and physical movement as a way to get out our your head and into your body.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Honestly—community. I’ve had the good fortune of being in some truly excellent writing groups, and so much of my revision process is rooted in the trusted readers I gained through these workshops. There’s such comfort in knowing you’re being read with care and insight.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
The opposite! A lack of community and a sense of isolation in workshops where peers were reading my work with bias and without context.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Never delete your drafts, simply archive them. I’ve found that abandoned stories often have a way of figuring themselves out if we just leave them alone for long enough on the backburner.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
I think there’s at least one story everyone returns to.
Yes! Maybe more like a work-in-progress, probably. I think there’s at least one story everyone returns to—whether it is a recurring dream, a childhood memory, or a midlife miracle—when they think about themselves. Whether they write that novel or not is up to the person and their capacity to imagine and exaggerate.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
I wouldn’t, simply because I don’t think I have the right to. No matter the genre or the audience, writing is an intensely personal process, and only the writer can choose to give up on themselves. I like to think writing exists on a spectrum—there are days we write, days we don’t, and all the days in between.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
Criticism is valuable in knowing what to revise, but I think praise is what sparks the desire for revision.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
I find that thinking about my intended reader helps me write more authentically and more intuitively. But when I think broadly about publication, it stresses the story out of me. I don’t know if there’s a right answer for this, but I do know that thinking about publication before there is a tangible draft often distracts me from the writing itself. It’s nice to think of the first draft as something that only exists between my mind and the page.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: I love my darlings. See my answer re: a piece of writing advice I return to most. I’d keep my darlings on the backburner until they boil over and reinvent themselves.
Show don’t tell: Writing falls in a grayer area than this maxim gives credit for. Show, tell, scream, sing. Do what the story tells you to do.
Write what you know: Write what you can research! Lived experience is a great place to draw from, but in the end, it is an exhaustible source. As long as the narrative is coming from a place of respect and curiosity, the bounds are limitless.
Character is plot: True—in the sense that the plot is moving only when the characters are also moving. I don’t think this movement needs to be linear, though. Backward, forward, upside-down.
Lived experience is a great place to draw from, but in the end, it is an exhaustible source.
(A side note: I believe we turn to maxims as useful when thinking about writing as something that can be taught. It’s like math has all these axioms that give it a perceived degree of authority, and it’s great to think of these maxims as giving the craft of writing a similar sense of authority. But I think math and writing cannot be taught the same way—math insists on knowing and learning, but writing is more in conversation with unknowing and unlearning.)
What’s the best hobby for writers?
Anything that involves movement! I use dance to get out of my mind and into my body.
What’s the best workshop snack?
Always something to sip on. My personal favorite is bubble tea!
The resurgence of the email newsletter over the past couple of years is great news for writers. So much of our work requires probing our deepest thoughts in isolation, biting our cuticles, staring at cracked paint on the walls. Whether online or IRL, sharing insights and developing community is essential for survival. Subscribing to newsletters by writers, for writers is a way of staying in conversation with peers. Email newsletters can offer emotional support, tips and exercises for improving craft, and resources for getting published that might otherwise be inaccessible, especially to writers beginning their careers. Some even promote community-building by establishing writing challenges and providing platforms for writers to discuss their experiences. The seven newsletters below offer the best of craft andpublishing advice,writing prompts, pitch calls,and encouragement andcommiseration about the writing life.
Four years in a row, the author of eight books—most recently the novel All This Could Be Yoursand memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You—has brought tens of thousands of writers together for the #1000wordsofsummer project. Subscribers get a daily letter of encouragement from Attenberg or guest contributors, then aim to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. $5/month or $50/year gives paid subscribers access to participant discussion threads to stay accountable. When not in #1000wordsofsummer mode, Attenberg sends a weekly email covering creativity, productivity, motivation, and publishing. The way she talks about the writing life is tender and comforting. “There’s so much value in just touching your work every day, circling it, thinking about why you started it,” Attenberg recently wrote.
In her weekly newsletter for The Atlantic, Nicole Chung gives advice for living our best creative lives, answers reader questions, engages in conversations with authors and experts, and shares beautiful essays on how issues of the moment intersect with what we’re trying to do as writers. The author of the memoirs All You Can Ever Knowand the forthcoming A Living Remedy,Chung explores these areas (some of which require a paid digital subscription to The Atlantic for $59.99/year) with great care, from interviews on the reality of being an anxious writer and tips for negotiating with editors to insights on pitching and rejection, telling stories about pain without retraumatizing ourselves, and navigating writing about living family members. I particularly love her responses to reader questions, but her essays, which explore topics such as gun violence, anti-Asian hate, and abortion, are powerful. “If I act and work and write as though a more just future will exist,” Chung writes, “perhaps I’ll be one step closer to believing in it.”
Every month, Matt Bell puts out a free newsletter featuring fiction writing exercises, thoughts on craft, and reading recommendations. The author of 12 books, including the novel Appleseed and craft book Refuse to Be Done, Bell creates fresh, specific, detailed exercises on elements like character, story structure, dialogue, punctuation, the passage of time, worldbuilding, and audience and intent. The exercises are always in conversation with at least one book, short story, or essay. They’re lengthy, but fascinating; Bell’s joy and curiosity set the tone for every email. “There’s an art to fashioning a good exercise,” he said in his first newsletter. “I love the challenge of trying to balance clarity of instructions with well-chosen examples, and of imposing just enough difficulty to make space for play and surprise.”
This one’s for writers looking for cold, hard pitch calls. Twice a week, journalist Sonia Weiser, whose bylines include The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York Magazine, scours social media and sends subscribers a curated list of writing and writing-adjacent jobs. Weiser only lists jobs that pay, and she has a $4/month suggested rate for newsletter subscribers (otherwise pay what you can). In addition to pitch calls and jobs, Weiser’s newsletters incorporate comprehensive resources like her Reference Desk document with links to pitching help, payment support, and finding expert sources. Feel free to share this document with anyone, even non-subscribers.
If you’re seeking a comprehensive education on how to succeed as a journalist, Tim Herrera’s newsletter demystifies everything from pitching to negotiating rates to crafting essays. The former New York Times editor’s free weekly newsletter shares insights and resources on topics including finding freelance work using social media and ways to approach pitching editors. His advice is candid and practical (for example: to find an editor’s contact information, casually DM a freelancer who you’ve seen published in that outlet.) Herrera’s twice-weekly live Zoom panels with industry veterans on structuring long-form features, selling books, accelerating your freelance business, and even personalized pitch feedback roundtables, are particularly unique. For $6/month or $60/year, paid subscribers receive additional newsletters and access to recordings of Herrera’s panels.
Write More, Be Less Careful features tips in a variety of forms—essays, interviews, and even bullet points. Reddy’s digestible format, encouraging and light tone (“how to write when your brain is a fried egg”), and advice work toward her goal of helping people make writing part of their routine without dread. The author of three books of poetry, most recently Pocket Universe, Reddy sends free emails twice monthly: end-of-month intentions emails that ask writers to reflect on the past month’s work and set goals for the coming month, and mid-month pop-ins with prompts, ideas, encouragement, and links to resources. Sometimes she also spearheads initiatives like Back to Writing, an eight-week newsletter covering subjects that are hard about writing, from dealing with digital distractions to banishing imposter syndrome. If you like actionable guidance for your writing process, you’ll like this newsletter.
Jeannine Ouellette describes this recently launched project as “a newsletter for people determined to keep creating through relentlessly uncertain times.” Author of the memoir The Part That Burnsand founder of the creative writing program Elephant Rock, Ouellette lets uncertainty guide her writing and teaching. Writers will appreciate the extensive weekly prompts designed to get them out of their comfort zones and “peer over the edge of doubt” to discover new things, although some are only for paid subscribers ($6/month or $60/year), as is the community chat. Ouellette also sends monthly emails on the craft of writing, the writing life, book recommendations, author interviews, and more. Even in newsletter form, the sincerity of Ouellette’s writing tends to break your heart—in a good way.
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