From Iago, Claudius, Richard III, and the murderous Macbeths in Shakespeare, to Choderlos de Laclos’s master manipulators in Les Liasons Dangereuses, to Nabokov’s silver-tongued Humbert Humbert (who seduces the reader as effectively as he seduces young Lolita), opportunists abound in literature.
My last novel, The Answer to Everything, was about an impecunious artist who starts a cult to make money. In my most recent book, The Opportunist, I gave myself an entire cast of conniving characters to backstab, menace and double-cross.
So, why do these odious types show up between the pages so often? Because, while they may be dodgy, even despicable, opportunists are never boring. They hunger for power, sex, revenge, riches (all the juicy stuff!) and will turf any principle to get what they want. If you aren’t acquainted with the opportunists listed below, I urge you to hit up your local bookstore or library forthwith.
In no particular order, here is an armload of deliciously deceitful reads:
Heller creates a wonderfully textured portrait of the treacherous Barbara Covett (maybe a little on point with the name though) in this tale of loneliness, desire and betrayal. Barbara, a friendless spinster who is amusingly contemptuous of almost everyone, becomes infatuated with Sheba, the blithe new pottery instructor at the school where they both teach. Barbara expertly wheedles her way into Sheba’s seemingly perfect life, becoming her key confidante. But when Barbara discovers that she has exaggerated her own standing in Sheba’s heart and mind—spaces occupied by those she deems far less worthy—she becomes enraged, bitter and vengeful. The book is presented as Barbara’s carefully written account of the scandal that explodes her friend’s life: Sheba’s ill-conceived affair with a 15-year-old student. Guess who detonates the bomb?
Come for the wheeling and dealing young gonif Duddy Kravitz, stay for the authentic flavor of mid-century Montreal, specifically Mile End, a working-class Jewish neighborhood (where breakfast at the cab-stand is a salami sandwich and a Pepsi) and Ste. Agathe, Canada’s answer to the Catskills. Duddy isn’t all bad, and watching him teeter on the edge of decency is what makes this story so ultimately heartbreaking. In becoming a big macher like the notorious Jerry Dingleman, a kid from the block who made good, Duddy betrays his friends, his family, his lover and his soul.
Love is literally blind in this wonderfully wicked tale of a man who has everything and loses it all. Albinus is a wealthy, respected art critic, living in Berlin with his devoted wife and daughter. One evening at the movies, he spots Margot Peters, an usher with a “pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face.” He pursues the 18-year-old and soon begins an affair. Margot, a vulgar slattern, doesn’t give a toss about Albinus, but she knows a meal ticket when she sees one. Even though he’s an adulterer who eagerly abandoned his spouse and young child, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Albinus as first Margot, and then Margot and her dastardly boyfriend Rex, strip him of absolutely everything (including his eyesight). You can almost hear Nabokov chuckling as he gleefully puts Albinus through the Margot/Rex wringer.
Alys, Always by Harriet Lane
Frances Thorpe is driving home one night when she comes across a crashed car with a dying woman inside. By the time the ambulance arrives, Alys Kyte is dead. Because Frances was the last to speak to her and hear her final words, Alys’s family wishes to meet her. Thus begins Frances’s entry into a world of wealth, privilege and culture. It turns out that Alys was the wife of celebrated author Laurence Kyte, and the mother of two children. Once Frances gets a glimpse of the Kytes’ lifestyle, complete with country house and swimming pool and lunches at the club, it’s as if a veil has been lifted. There’s really no going back to her lowly singleton existence. Frances is a clever woman who knows exactly what makes people tick. That insightfulness, plus an abundance of patience, enables her to infiltrate the world of the Kytes and milk the illustrious connection for all its worth.
Everyone gets erased—whether through dementia, murder, or an opportunistic act of self-deletion—in this scathing novel about an African American writer and his family. Thelonius Ellison, aka Monk, is an erudite novelist who writes books that the publishing industry doesn’t want—at least not from Black writers. They prefer runaway bestsellers like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by a contemporary of Monk’s who spent a week in Harlem once. Pissed that his most recent manuscript is failing to attract an offer, he bangs out a parody of what he thinks the White world wants from him: My Pafology— a “gangsta” tale of turmoil (in which chapter four is “Fo” and chapter five is “Fibe”). Alas, the manuscript is taken at face value and his agent sells publishing and movie rights for gazillions, forcing Monk to make a decision. Will he own up to his prank, or will he become Stagg R. Leigh, the ostensible author of the ghetto narrative? Monk isn’t conniving or evil, but he does seize a lucrative opportunity in an unprincipled way, and his literary hoax is too cutting and fun not to include on this list.
The bad guys in Elmore Leonard novels range from slightly adorable to absolutely terrifying. In The Switch, we have two of the former and one of the latter. Louis and Ordell are low-level criminals who kidnap the wife of Frank Dawson, a rich and shady businessman. Richard is the dangerously stupid, heavily-armed neo-Nazi with a convenient place to stash Mickey, the businessman’s wife, until he forks over the ransom. The fly in the ointment: hubby has no intention of paying. Frank filed for divorce from Mickey a few days before she was kidnapped, and he has a buxom young mistress who he hopes to marry when the kidnappers conveniently make it easy for him to do so. The fun is in watching Mickey self-actualize and go from meek housewife/kidnapping victim to full on opportunist when she learns the truth about her asshole of a husband.
A fun one, especially for writers. Jacob Finch Bonner’s first novel garnered the “New and Noteworthy” stamp of approval from the New York Times Book Review. His second was a bit of a bust. His third and fourth couldn’t find publishers. Now, the once promising writer is slogging it out as a teacher in a series of third-rate MFA programs around the country. As he begins his latest gig at Ripley College, Jake expects the usual cast of MFA-program types. What he doesn’t expect is Evan Parker, a smug young man who says writing can’t be taught and that he only joined the program to get an agent out of it. Parker informs Jake that he is well into a novel, one with such a compelling plot it will be an unparalleled success, a “sure thing” that Oprah will pick for her book club and everyone will buy and love. One evening, Evan privately shares the plot of his novel with Jake, and Jake realizes with chagrin that the arrogant jerk is right. The story is so good it can’t be messed up. When the program is done, Jake waits for the news of Parker’s outrageous advance and insta-success. But it doesn’t arrive. And Jake learns why: Evan has died. So, Jake pinches the plot and writes the novel himself, and just as Evan predicted, it’s a huge success, propelling Jake to the top of the bestseller lists and back to literary stardom. There’s just one problem: somebody out there knows Jake stole the story, and he’s going to have to deal with the repercussions.
You won’t find a more malevolent force than the beautiful and deadly Zenia, who rampages through the lives of three very unlikely friends: Tony (Antonia), a war historian, Roz, a wealthy businesswoman, and Charis, a hippie-dippy crystal seller who reads auras and raises chickens in her backyard. What bonds these disparate women together is their shared dread and hatred of Zenia, the maneater, the husband stealer, the thief, the liar, the rogue who stirs up strife for the sheer pleasure of it. Bitch on wheels is too gentle a term for cunning, malicious Zenia, whose words are “what a fist sounds like just as it smashes.” When the book was first published, rumors swirled about who Zenia might be based on, and it’s fun to read and speculate on Atwood avenging herself (or her pals) in print.
In Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, the ocean is queer. Survival is subversive. Tiny shrimp scurry around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, scrappy and alive in a place hostile to all life. A yeti crab dances for food. The goldfish, an animal we can only imagine as a tiny carnival pet, grows feral when released into the wild, far bigger and browner than the bowl that once confined it. All this time, we realize, we’ve had the wrong idea about goldfish.
Reading this book, you can feel Imbler, a queer, non-binary writer of mixed race, holding up each sea creature to the light, asking not “what are you?” but “How do you live?” What they imagine for these beings—perhaps hope for—are unstable, wide open futures. Descriptions invite readers below sea level (“personal pan pizza,” “shiny bodies like someone put a dime on a pat of butter”), we watch life bloom in the wake of a whale’s death, and, somehow, there is beauty even in a ten-foot worm with jaws. Yet even when thinking of the butterfly fish, Imbler displays a resistance to the uninterrogated. “Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that so often gets things wrong,” they assert.
These essays are deeply personal, nuanced, searching. “My Mother and the Starving Octopus” examines Imbler’s relationship with their Chinese mother and their shared anxiety around food. “My Grandmother and the Sturgeon” recounts how Imbler’s family fled Shanghai during occupation, escaping on a small houseboat down the Yangtze and nearly dying of starvation until a Japanese soldier brought them a sack of rice. In a piece that raises questions about sexual autonomy and the gray zone, Imbler juxtaposes the predatory habits of the sand striker with that of boys and men, marveling at the ingenuity of creatures in danger, even themselves. “Hybrids,” an essay “dissecting ourselves,” grapples with the writer’s half-Chinese, half-white identity, confronts histories of miscegenation and eugenics, and recalls how they first encountered the word “half-breed” when they were twelve years old and scoping out a Neopets chat board. (“And this is the part where I might tell you how my parents met”—they write—”but I don’t want to because I have to keep some parts of my family to myself”).
The collection, reckoning with climate change and disaster, relays anxiety but also wonder, innate curiosity, and adventurousness. “There are many ways to be a predator,” Imbler writes, but even more ways to exist. Ten creatures, they seem to be saying—but one life.
Annie Liontas: Is the ocean queer?
Sabrina Imbler: I was just reading an essay by Sarah Thankam Mathews, the author of All This Could Be Different, where she writes: “Oh me and my friends like to play this game where we look at an object and we’re like, is this gay? Is this light bulb gay? Is this rug gay?” I think that’s a good exercise to apply to everything around you, but, also, the ocean is very frequently described as a queer space. If you look anywhere in the natural world, if you think about it biologically, everything is queer. Things are reproducing and creating more of themselves in ways that are so beyond any kind of frame of heterosexuality that we humans have. I think of the ocean as a space of imagination and impossibility, and I think about queerness also as a place of possibility and imagination and wonder. So, yeah, at least to me, the ocean is gay. But I don’t think anyone looks at the ocean and thinks, “This is straight.”
AL: I’m also thinking about queerness as resilience and how, considering all we’ve done to try to kill the ocean, it keeps coming back in these surprising ways. That was one of my favorite things about your book. You tell us “it is easier to die than live,” but we are shown, time after time, the resilience of these ten creatures, often juxtaposed against the experiences of queer youth. So what do you want us to remember about survival?
SI: I’m happy that you picked up on that word resilience. So much scientific research on biological systems and the ocean is centered around this question of resilience. We often think there’s no way there could be life here, and then we find it, and we’re like, “Why? Why is it here? How is it living? How is it thriving?” These spaces are defined by our very limited human view of what we need to survive and what we find hostile. I’ve been recently reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World, also a book with a bunch of different creatures. It’s very focused on the specific ways these animals can sense their environments. We use light, we use heat, but other creatures have all these different staples for how they experience the world, and are unknowable to us.
How do we manage to be resilient in the face of all these things that seek to destroy us?
If I were to be plunged down to the bottom of the sea, I would die immediately. I don’t belong there—they belong there. Still, I couldn’t help but draw these parallels in the book, using the ways that their bodies have evolved to be perfectly suited for these foreign and alien environments, spaces that might not seem friendly to life. That’s the big thread of the book, How do we manage to survive?How do we manage to be resilient in the face of all these things that seek to destroy us? Whether that’s the chemistry of the earth or, you know, these communities around us that are human or non-human that we may feel threatened by. I could never camouflage my body in the way that a cuttlefish could, I can’t take that directly and apply it to my own life. But all these ways of living, they sort of open new portals, and I start to wonder, how does this make me feel about the way that I move through the world and the way that I am perceived and the agency that I have in my own life?
AL:“My Mother and the Starving Octopus” reads like an act of empathy towards your mother, who immigrated from Taiwan, but it also grapples with your eating disorder. (“If mom grew up wanting to be white, I grew up wanting to be thin”). What did this writing and research illuminate about your relationship with your mother and your own body?
SI:The first time I wrote about the octopus was for Catapult. I didn’t really think about the ethics or understand consent back then, I was just publishing this essay on this website and thinking, my mom’s not gonna see it; who’s gonna see it except for my little community?
When it was time to revise and expand it for this book, I realized my mother was the spark of this story. But I really want to respect her privacy as a person and acknowledge that the reason I’m writing about this octopus and my relationship to it is informed by my own fixations. So I tried to remove a lot, and when I expanded the essay, I expanded my own personal experiences. Then I sent her the final version. I was so nervous. Maybe she would say that I couldn’t write it, or that she didn’t want to appear in it. And I love my mother so much and I’d respect her wishes. But it ended up being a really generative conversation for us, because over the years I had tried to broach a conversation about eating and about food and about weight, and we would hit these walls. It was very raw for both of us, and neither of us really wanted to go to certain places. And my mother is very stubborn. But she read the essay and added some points of clarification, like moments of mismemory that I had had, and that was really interesting. It allowed me to dig deeper and to ask, why did I remember that this way? Why did my mother remember this that way? She helped add a lot of levity in how she talked about her own body and her own eating. She shared an anecdote of this racist doctor being like, “Stop eating so much Chinese food!” and her being like, “Fuck you!” I think that’s so funny, and it also just helped spotlight how my mother pushed back. I was so inspired.
AL: A similar stitching or mirroring also happens in “How to Draw a Sperm Whale,” where you borrow the language of whale autopsy to give us the necropsy report of a queer relationship. But, as with the rest of the essays, you’re never wanting to draw direct lines, it would be too neat. Yet it does seem like you learn something about aloneness versus feeling alone.
SI: I was still reeling from this breakup, not necessarily the breakup itself, nor the relationship itself, but—just trying to understand why this breakup had this magnified impact on me. I found it almost embarrassing, like, why am I still thinking about this person? Also, I really didn’t want to write a breakup essay that looked the same. I needed to find a wrinkle that made it feel like a fresh and generative thing to write about. I kept coming back to Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams because they felt very similar in the ways they asked, how do we use medical language to talk about death or illness or grief? These incredibly emotional human experiences, how does the language of bureaucracy warp them? I read so many whale autopsies, I went through so many weird marine and mammal stranding reports and looked at all of these very graphic photos. I went in many different directions. But the heart of the essay, ultimately, was about how the whale lived. Not just the grief, but what remains after something that large dies or is killed? How can we think about that? What is restored?
I learned that queerness is not tied up with a relationship. It really is tied up with identity and how you live your life and your platonic community.
I started [“How to Draw a Sperm Whale”] as an essay about this particular relationship, and then in writing it, I realized this is much more. It turned out to be about me and how I learned to understand myself as a queer person who could be alone and who could be single. I learned that queerness is not tied up with a relationship. It really is tied up with identity and how you live your life and your platonic community. What it means to be alone, and how there can be joy in that.
AL: Tell us why we should love crabs.
SI: Well I’m a Cancer.
AL:Same!
SI: So I guess this is a biased conversation. We are all pro-crab. I should come out in the pocket of Big Crab.
I mean, crabs are super cool. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the evolutionary phenomenon called carcinization. It goes viral every so often because it is so funny: this evolutionary trend of more and more separate evolutionary lineages evolving the crab body plan and how there are so many things that we call crabs that are not true crabs. Like porcelain crabs, or spider crabs, or king crabs, or yeti crabs, which are technically squat lobsters, which are also not lobsters. [These] species evolve over time and their bodies realize that actually, the ideal form to be is a crab. You can scuttle, you can walk in all these different directions. You have a hard shell. It just works. I’m less interested in taxonomy debates and am more inspired by the fact that all of these different lineages came independently to the conclusion it just makes sense to be a crab. You find them all over the world. I was in Puerto Rico in March, and I was at a gas station, and there was a crab. It lived in a hole, it would come out and snap its little claw and go back. They’ve been able to conquer all these different niches and little realms on earth, it’s just very, very impressive.
AL: Who is the unsung hero of the ocean?
SI: My book is absolutely biased towards large or at least visible creatures. A lot of the creatures that I wrote about, such as the salps, which are gelatinous—their body is almost entirely water, they really don’t fossilize—are hard to capture. It’s hard to record them through our own human machines and human contraptions, and yet, they are responsible for cycling so much carbon toward the bottom of the ocean. They’re agents of global cooling, it’s just all happening out of sight and out of mind. As I was learning about the salps, I had this realization that, oh my God, my book is all made up of macroscopic organisms. Maybe I should have a plankton chapter! There’s this whole scale of oceanic creatures that I didn’t even get into, yet they are so vital to the chemistry of the ocean and they feed all of the creatures in my book, in some way. The plankton that are photosynthesizing at the top of the ocean are responsible for all of the nutrients that cycle out into the creatures that I talk about. And krill! Krill do so much! Without krill, so many whales wouldn’t be around. There was a moment when I was looking at all the essays in my book and I was like, where are the tiny guys?
AL: A frank discussion about climate change is inevitable, grim, heartbreaking. What in the research was hardest to confront? What is our failure of imagination?
SI: As someone who is a science journalist by day, every day I wake up, I think about climate change at least once. It is so present in so much of the work that I do. I was really trying to figure out how I could talk about climate change in the book. I didn’t want it to feel redundant or preachy or to distract from the connections of these narrative switchbacks, but it was absolutely something that I thought about all of the time, this grief that I held throughout the reporting process. I would learn about a creature, and then I would immediately think, let me just Google it and see what’s happening. And what would come back is [something like] “half of this population will disappear because of climate change,” or a statistic that all sharks are in danger because of climate change. The grief and anxiety that hung over the process helped bring me back to the work when I felt disconnected from it or when I found it hard to write. It creates this urgency around why I want people to know about these creatures and why I want them to care.
When I Look Up an Iguana Turns His Head Away From the Sun
He asks: What is beginning?
Something I never notice, like my nails growing.
I hiccup, forgetting why I’m waterside
or that we’re both abandoned
like balloons at a wedding.
A foraging pelican winks at me
twice. Somewhere in Nevada
a goldfish has resolved
to starve to death.
He asks: What if aspens aspire to silence,
which the wind has outlawed?
I trust the expired volcano
that admits its vulnerability
more than an escalator step moving
wearily into the destined position.
He asks: Are you inculpable
enough? Drinking down the winter
that brims my southern eye socket,
I freed my ravaged enemy
with an unrecognizable bear hug.
He asks: Will you pity a graffitied lamppost
or the machinist imprisoned by his own gadget?
I, speechless, only think of my father.
He asks: Can you love
in all the ways love is named?
The Frond
Today I bike to work and run over
a coconut leaf the size of my leg,
shaved off by last night’s razor storm.
No bell tower tolls for this fall;
even the rising sun turns a blind eye.
The frond blocks the narrow sidewalk
like a fish bone stuck in the town’s throat.
When I run over it,
the fish bone gives a moan
as if spitting a bubble.
Celery on the cutting board. A bamboo
broom sweeping the sea into a ditch.
Dew splashes. Three tiny lizards
flee with their tails curled.
A woman yawns in her fern-green jeep
waiting at the traffic light.
Desolation echoes. My porch light
long broken. Mailbox unchecked,
and I bike to work. Summer is eternal.
Somewhere, a couch longing
for my lolling skeleton: if sharp enough,
my ribs could lacerate the moon.
Tire marks all over my spine.
Soul never closer to soil.
Mary-Alice Daniel has been on a journey, literally, across continents. She documents her experiences in A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which is a memoir about places, from which she has been uprooted, assimilated into, revisited, and settled, giving the reader a close look into the lives of African diasporas. Daniel has a way of parsing dire childhood experiences into insightful and humorous narratives. My copy of the book is colorful. Passages on every other page are highlighted for profound statements I hope to return to, funny anecdotes, or sentences too beautiful not to acknowledge—I’m not surprised that her next offering is a poetry collection.
In this interview carried out via email, Daniel and I talk about, among other things, the peculiarity of her experiences, the complexity of her relationship to Nigeria, a country that was once simply home, and the varieties of Black experience in the US where she now lives. Her responses here are as interesting as her book, and I am happy for everyone to read both.
Ladi Opaluwa: Your memoir is focused on place, which seems like an interesting choice considering the tenuous connections that you have with the various places that you’ve lived. Was this lack of rootedness earlier in your life a motivation for the book?
Mary-Alice Daniel: In my prologue, I talk about my “rootlessness,” but my perspective has shifted, and I can now see that I actually have many, many tangled roots. After leaving my birthplace in Nigeria as a young child, I spent the first decade of my life in Reading, England, before my family moved to the American South. Since adolescence, I have called these places something like “home”: Nashville, Tennessee; suburban Connecticut; suburban Maryland; Brooklyn; Harlem; Ann Arbor; Detroit; Chicago; Los Angeles. My childhood was shaped by the culture shock coloring extended return trips to Nigeria. And it was shaped by the reverse culture clash of coming back to the West, where my immediate family remained alone—just the 5 of us.
I’ve always been on the outside looking in. A major motivation in writing this book was to reposition myself. Instead of being the misfit, shuttled around from one place to another—the way I long existed in the world—I became an architect. I am drawn to manipulating chaos. In my poetry, which is wildly different in tone and style from this memoir, I’m like a kid with a borderline unhealthy fixation on fire. I like to stoke chaos, watch it proliferate, watch things burn. In this book, however, my instinct was to create order from my personal chaos. The cultural chaos I refer to involves several kinds of incongruity, including the peculiar spiritual ecosystem I come from. My ethnic tribe is 99% Islamic; my native culture cannot be divorced from that religion, and much of my maternal family is Muslim. I was raised in an Evangelical home. But the Christianity I was raised to revere was syncretic and superstitious. It mixed traditions from Islam, from the pre-Abrahamic animism of my region, and from the Catholic and Protestant missionary schools my parents were educated in. I’m now agnostic; I work through religious trauma in writing.
LO: An adjacent question: At what point did you realize that you could/should collect your experiences into a book, or, to be outrightly nosey, when did you start writing this book?
MAD: I didn’t start writing this book until I’d wasted half the time I had before its first deadline. I had a call with my amazing agent, who read some pages I’d just sent her and asked me bluntly, “You do know that people can tell when you’re writing something you don’t really want to—right?” I did not, in fact, know that. She told me to write what I wanted to write. I was nervous and scared to do so; I’d never written anything of this length in this genre. The book I sold was more of an academic/critical project, which I envisioned becoming a collection of essays. I never intended to write a memoir. I wasn’t comfortable breaking the many, many cultural taboos I had to break in order to divulge intimate details about myself and my upbringing.
LO: In your narration, Nigeria is a destitute place, but also a homestead that you return to as you move around the world. Even the plotting of the book mirrors this pattern of returning. Now that you have chosen a home for yourself (I do not want to give away the name), and have not returned to Nigeria in over a decade, what is the country to you now?
MAD: It is “Back Home.” That’s what we call it. It’s full of family, most of whom I haven’t seen in a decade. It’s full of fading and false memories. I still don’t often really think of Nigeria as a country. It’s so wildly different from place to place, and I only know my corner of it. Here, I should give a bit of background about Nigeria as a country and what makes the North different. Nigeria is roughly fifty percent Muslim and fifty percent Christian. It is divided geographically, with an overwhelmingly Islamic north above the inverse of an entirely Christianized south. Most Nigerian immigrants in the West are from the southern/central parts of the country, and so are almost all prominent Nigerian writers. As a writer, I represent a rare perspective from my radicalized, remote region.
I am from the extreme north—the desert region near the border with Niger, which is its own world. People there don’t often emigrate to the West because the way here is through education, and the educational infrastructure is poor. The terrorist group Boko Haram, which was founded in the same city I was born, means “Western education is forbidden,” and they ceaselessly attack secular schools. Literacy rates are low, especially for girls. My mother happened to be the brilliant, lucky exception. Her father converted to Christianity when he was in a missionary hospital recovering from leprosy, and he sent her to Baptist boarding schools; from there, she went on to universities in Nigeria and England.
The country where I’m from—the places I used to return to as a child—feels like it’s gone: beyond my grasp. Violence and terrorism make it impossible to visit, and there’s no end in sight. The country is a long-distance phone call with a breaking connection.
LO: You write glowingly about the Fulani tribe. For instance, “If I say I am Fulani, this is to say I go without fears.” However, in Nigeria, the current perception of the Fulani herdsmen as terrorists (which you acknowledge) is vastly different from that of the innocent nomadic herdsmen that I knew growing up. How does this turn of events make you feel about your relationship to the tribe?
MAD: I am interested in your description of my depiction of the Fulani as “glowing.” I very much intended to be critical of the cultures I came from, as well as the cultures I’ve been carried into. I don’t think that I view any part of my tribal history through rose-colored glasses. My relationship to an ethnic group whose identity is inextricably linked with Islam is complicated, as I am not Muslim. It was the Fulani, specifically, that brought Islam to much of West Africa, in a saga featuring both violence and poetry beginning over a thousand years ago. What you perceive as a glow might just be the intensity of my connection to this tribe in particular—to me, it reflects an identity stronger than “Nigerian.” Nigeria is so nebulous. I am fascinated by the long and unknown (in the West) history of the Fulani. But extremists from this tribe are, in fact, committing acts of atrocity. My Christian relatives in Fulani-land are a persecuted religious minority and the targets of our own tribespeople.
I still haven’t figured out exactly how to talk about the Fulani mostly because my words will naturally carry more weight due to the scarcity of voices from the Fulani sphere. When I told one of my Black American friends about writing this book, one of the first things she said was that she’s not interested in hearing any more negative narratives about Africa. I agreed with her . . . then proceeded to write some negative things about Nigeria. I had to balance my resistance to adding to awful stereotypes with the equally awful realities about the specific area I’m from. I cannot get away, and should not turn away, from atrocities taking place. While writing, I tried to make it very clear that everything I write applies to this region only—by making it distinctive.
LO: You detail the initial difficulty you had with assimilating in the US, even within the African American community. Something that I struggle with as a Nigerian in the US is being Black and not African American. I find that some people frown at my attempt to define myself strictly as Nigerian (I’m not American). Possibly, they see it as an attempt to avoid the struggles of African Americans. Right now, my cultural identity is Immigrant; as you write, “culture trumped color.” Anyway, all of this is a preface to asking what being American African, as you describe yourself, means to you. Is it about genealogy or about the degree of assimilation into the African American culture?
MAD: I have one foot planted in two worlds—African and American. These two worlds host a Black diaspora that is often in conflict after centuries of estrangement and rupture. I call myself American African because Africans and Americans alike have said that I am not “really” either. If I am not “really” American because I wasn’t born here, and I am not “really” African because I didn’t grow up there—am I just nothing, then? The answer is that I am both. I am “really” both. And I have conflicting feelings about both places and identities. I think my audience is made of others who are told they are not “really” enough because of immigration status or something else. I feel a strong sense of kinship with these people.
LO: When you write, “Mary is my original mystery,” I instinctively read mystery as misery. My middle name is Mary. It seems that every Mary that I know, especially non-Catholic Marys, have a hang-up about the name. I call this the Mary-trauma. I have gone from promoting it from a middle name to a first name and then reverting, to silence it. You have found peace with the name, but do you ever consider what you would name yourself if you wanted to?
MAD: I still don’t like my name and have no preference whether people call me Mary or Mary-Alice. Most people shorten it. But it’s actually another thing I find sort of humorous, just because it’s so incongruous. I don’t think I’m a Mary or will ever be a Mary. And “Alice” is semi-ludicrous to me. Still, the idea of changing my name is unappealing because as a serial immigrant, I long ago reached my limit in terms of dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork. The idea of further complicating the boxes of records I already have—some of which already contain troublesome naming errors—doesn’t seem prudent.
The idea of changing my name is unappealing because as a serial immigrant, I long ago reached my limit in terms of dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork.
The most likely name I would take would be Amina, which was the name I was supposed to have been called. The name is a parallel to Mary, mother of Jesus—Amina is the mother of the Prophet Muhammad. There was also a Queen Amina who ruled part of the Nigerian North in the 16th century (I was raised with the fanciful idea that I’m her direct descendent). She’s famous for allegedly offing the lovers she took in each new territory she conquered, spending a single night with each one and beheading them all the next morning to keep their love affair secret. My mother decided to name me something “aggressively” Christian when her siblings began marrying Muslim spouses and giving their children Arabic names in that tradition. “Mary” was her way of outwardly professing faith through me.
LO: I had a most uncanny moment while reading the book. One evening, I was sitting beside my mum on a couch, I glanced at her and saw that she was wearing the same wax print that is on the cover of the book. This realization led to a lengthy conversation about the book and the ubiquity of wax print in our culture and the connotations of their design. Has the cover of the book sparked any similar conversation with your mum or any older African woman?
MAD: It took me a long time to find this cover, which centers a painting by Nigerian artist Adekunle Adeleke. I love the cover, but it hasn’t come up—it’s definitely the book’s content that is of primary concern to relatives. I was raised conservatively—socially, not politically. Raised to be modest, private. Our regional literary tradition features fables, poetry, and novels, but memoir is not really a thing, culturally. The fewer people in my extended family that read this, the better.
LO: I can’t get enough of your pristine prose and your stories. What is an anecdote that did not make it into the book that you would be willing to share, however briefly?
MAD: I can share two things.
1. Adjusting to the different American pronunciation of “Adidas” when we first moved to the U.S. was a Big Moment for me and my siblings. (Ask a British friend how they say it if you don’t know—it’s hilarious.)
2. When my family first moved to Nashville, there was one “fancy” Chinese buffet we reserved for special occasions (if we kids were well behaved in church for a long streak, or if we had out-of-town guests). I was mesmerized by the iridescent blue-green mussels they steamed, and I would always take the prettiest one, clean it, and add it to a growing stockpile. I’d never seen anything like them before and thought they were rare or expensive, that they might increase in value over time. One day, my mom found my gross little collection and threw everything away. I think about that oddball kid who was so impressed with shiny shells. In the book, I describe her as “clueless, shabby.” And now I think I envy her. One of my favorite words is “lucipetal”—seeking or being attracted to bright things like light. She embodied that. I’m circling around it.
The thing about being from Queens is that when you leave Queens you realize there’s no other place in the world like it. It lives in your imagination like a wild-flower-weed, its roots deep in the hard rock soil of Queens.
My novel, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion, takes place in my home neighborhood of Corona, Queens. The main character Razia is a young Pakistani woman growing up in a tight-knit Muslim community. She prays five times a day, reads Quran and goes to extra religious service on the weekends, all the while wearing skin-tight acid wash jeans, feathering her hair and wanting to date boys break-dancing in the schoolyard.
Razia’s father owns a butcher shop, Corona Halal Meats. It’s on the same block as a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, an Episcopalian church and a masjid Razia’s father and uncles are building. Razia’s closest friends are from the neighborhood and they tend to find trouble everywhere they go. When Razia is accepted to a high school in Manhattan and leaves Queens and her childhood friends behind, she makes a new friend, a young woman she is deeply attracted to, and she realizes why she’s always felt different from her community, even her best friends.
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a book for anyone who’s ever had to leave the world they grew up in to be who they needed to be. It’s a book for those who remember what it was like to be queer and not have the words to express it, those who struggled to reconcile their religious faith with their desires. It’s a book for anyone who wants to feel the pure sensory experience of living in Queens in the ‘80s.
Here are 7 books about living and loving in Queens by writers of color:
There can be no list about Queens that doesn’t include Ishle Yi Park, the first woman and first Asian American poet laureate of Queens. In Angel & Hannah, her gorgeous novel-in-verse, we follow the story of Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens and Angel, a Nuyorican boy from Brooklyn who fall in love. They fend for themselves, dealing with addiction, disownment, and poverty. Their love’s song is beautiful to witness. Did I mention the entire book is written in incredible hip-hop sonnets?
This beautiful memoir, a mix of poetry, song and passion, tells the story of Rajiv, an Indo-Caribbean poet growing up in the United States. Young Rajiv longs to know more about his family’s history in India and the legacy of his ancestors who were indentured laborers working on sugar plantations in Guyana. When he comes to New York City to stay with relatives in Queens, he discovers a community of queer brown activists who share his longing for the past but are also looking towards the future. But even here, Rajiv feels like an outsider. When his cousin outs him as an “antiman”—a Caribbean slur for gay men—Rajiv is disowned by his family. Healing this pain through music and poetry, he embraces his identity and claims his status as an antiman—forging a new way of being entirely his own.
In Mama Phife Represents Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest. This book is a gorgeous tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, and treasured fragments including journal entries, letters, drawings, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik wrote to his parents. Boyce-Taylor’s incredible gift for poetry and the depth of this mother-son relationship is a treasure for fans of both artists. In this moving collection, we follow the journey of a mother’s grieving heart.
The Girls in Queens is a skillful novel about female friendship, the secrets we keep, the loyalties we hold, and the reality that we may all know a sexual predator, whether or not we want to admit it. The girls in Queens in this book are Brisma and Kelly, best friends who protect each other. They are each other’s mirrors, at times kind, at times cruel. When they discover a friend and former boyfriend from their community is a sexual predator, their loyalties are divided and they make drastically different choices on how to move forward. An essential book in this time of reckoning.
Ly Tran is a child when she immigrates from a small town in Vietnam to Queens. As Ly navigates the landscape of her new home in New York City, she works long hours as a manicurist alongside her mother and tries to do well in school. When her eyesight weakens and her father forbids her from getting glasses, calling her diagnosis of poor vision a government conspiracy, Ly struggles to know how to move forward. Her father spent nearly a decade as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and his trauma is held by the family with compassion, even when it wounds them. Ly is a brilliant writer and the deep honesty of this memoir reminded me so much of the vulnerability and pain that is often part of being a girl from Queens.
This creative and energetic novel brings readers into the lives of a group of friends—young women of color growing up in Queens. It’s a collective portrait, written in the second person, a record of the forces that bind friends, families, and communities. As the friends in Brown Girls navigate schools, marriages, motherhood and professional accomplishments, they return again and again to the circle of their friendship and to their hometown of Queens.The passion of their friendship beats at the heart of this book.
This book is laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and heart-wrenching. Alejandra Kim’s family is from the Korean diaspora in Argentina and it’s not easy for her to fit into any box, whether it’s in her fancy Manhattan private school where she is a scholarship student or her Jackson Heights neighborhood. Alejandra has just lost her father, and she feels she must hide this deep pain, even from her closest friends and especially from her mother who is numb from overwork and grief. When a microaggression at school thrusts Alejandra into the spotlight, she must make a difficult decision and decide who she can trust and who she must be for herself and her family.
Hi everyone! Dorian here, back with another vlog. You all were absolutely blowing up the comments section on my last video with things like, “Dorian! How do you look so young?”, “What’s your secret??”, and “It is not humanly possible to look this good for this long.” So flattering! I wanted to give you guys a thank you for being such dedicated subscribers, so today let’s dive into my skincare routine!
You have to start off with a clean face, so to begin I usually go in with gel cleanser first to get all the dirt and grime, and then a micellar water as a softer way to clean up any residual gunk. Next, have your friend Basil paint a portrait of you.
Now I know, I know, this part is a splurge. Not everyone has an artistically talented friend who idolizes you so much that their adoration practically spills out of the painting, and even the ones that do may have to cough up some dough for a really good portrait. But trust me, I’ve tried a lot of different things to keep my face looking fresh, and this is the one part of my routine that is non-negotiable. You won’t believe the results.
While you apply the toner, pledge your immortal soul to the painting.
Ok, moving on! After I cleanse my skin I use a nice moisturizing toner. This is great for hydration which is important to me because I have very dry skin. While you apply the toner, pledge your immortal soul to the painting. Beg it to absorb any sign of age or sin so that you, yourself, can remain youthful and untouched by the wrinkly, gnarled hand of your own wicked nature. Once you’re done with that, you can fan your face a bit to help the toner dry. I know I look soooo silly right now but just trust me!
So now your face is clean and toned and it’s serum time! A lot of people skip this step, but finding a good serum works wonders! I love this peptide serum in particular because it’s great for anti-aging and making the skin feel plump and springy. By now, you have no doubt done something terrible, like ruefully scorned a lover or acted in a selfish manner—I know because I have! If you look closely, you’ll notice that the painting has changed expressions and now mocks you with a sneer. At this point, I typically pop that baby in the attic so that no one else can be horrified by its transformation. Again, people sometimes want to just skip this step, but I find it’s really important to hide the proof of your iniquity from your friends and family.
Now that your skin has gotten all its vitamins and nutrients, you should be feeling fresh and clean. For makeup, I’m going to start with a foundation base, and I use this long-lasting one for full coverage. The long-lasting part is really important for me because I need my makeup to stay put all throughout the night. If you’ve seen any of my other videos, you know that when I go out, I go out, so I need a foundation that can keep up, ya know? If you can’t get this particular foundation, a drugstore foundation is also totally fine because, again, your painting in the attic is going to be taking most of the damage anyway.
Is putting my soul in a painting safe? Does my insurance cover it?
A lot of people ask, is putting my soul in a painting safe? Does my insurance cover it? Will people be able to tell I’ve had work done? And the answers to that are yes, no, and you won’t even care because you’re going to be looking like an absolute snack and they’re just jealous.
Finally, I like to finish my routine with a little powder foundation just to give my skin that matte look. Don’t want to be out and about with my face looking all oily! Now, if you’ve been engaging in a lot of hedonistic activities, just one bacchanal after another of carnal delights, you’ll notice that your picture looks pretty hideous. This is totally normal! You’ve been fucking and sucking your way through London, and all that action is bound to take a toll.
At this point you should be feeling pretty guilty and wanting all the proof of your atrocities to disappear. So you’re just going to grab a knife and lunge, blade-first, at the painting that now mocks you and your hypocrisy. Be careful you don’t have any leftover toner on your fingers, or else the blade could slip and you could accidentally stab yourself in the chest. If this happens and you are suddenly made into the crumpled, horrid being you have always known yourself to be, take solace in the fact that you’ll soon be dead and therefore will not have to suffer being ugly for long.
Thanks so much to Superficiality for sponsoring my video today, be sure to check out some of their other great products like sexism and The Kardashians!
When I first started dating my partner, I mentioned to his family that I was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, a town famous for having a mayor named Harry Baals (pronounced the dirty way) and for being, according to Men’s Health magazine, the third most sexually satisfied city in America, three years running. Despite being armed with such noteworthy trivia, my boyfriend’s parents still insisted on telling their friends I was from somewhere in Nebraska. Maybe Illinois or Iowa, they said. One of those flat, forgettable states with a lot of corn and a vaguely backward population that seemed to subsist solely on a diet of mayonnaise-based casseroles and basketball. My almost in-laws are lovely people, by the way. Not a bit snobby or inattentive as a rule, but they were born and have lived most of their lives in Oregon. Until I came around, they hadn’t mingled much with Midwesterners, so to them, one flyover state was as good as another.
That kind of casual dismissal used to bother me, used to rankle, and I would go to great lengths to prove my individuality and defend my home state against any perceived slight-slash-indifference. Now, though? I mostly let it go. I’m older, I’ve mellowed, and I’ve also come to believe that being written off by whole swaths of one’s countrymen can actually be a boon, particularly if you’re a writer. There is no more fertile territory than the unknown. The writer Michael Martone, also from Fort Wayne, often puts it this way: most readers know more about India than they do about Indiana. That means Hoosier writers have the chance to introduce the wider world to the state’s northern lakes, central plains, and rugged, southern hills and to the complex, fascinating, and funny people who live there. What a privilege.
Stories set in Indiana have a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf. Here are just a few of my favorites.
The words “heart-wrenching” and “wondrous” and “powerful” and “richly observed” have all been used to describe this award-winning memoir of family, Black girlhood and Black joy, racial strife, and self-actualization, and they all apply. All of those words and then some. Ford, a Fort Wayne native, writes of growing up without her father—during her formative years, he was serving time in a local prison—and of working tirelessly to earn her mother’s love. When Ford is sexually assaulted by a boy from her school, she learns the truth behind her father’s imprisonment: he is in jail for rape. Rather than allowing this realization to tear her world apart, Ford makes herself whole through the act of writing. This book is as inspiring and enthralling as it gets.
Read enough books set in Indiana, by Indiana writers, and you’ll start to notice the rust. The rust and rot and despair at the center of things, and that’s because the state used to be one of America’s most productive industrial hubs. Well-paid manufacturing jobs were everywhere… until they weren’t.
In this luminous National Book Award-winning debut, Tess Gunty takes us to the fictional town of Vacca Vale and the affordable housing complex, La Lapinière, commonly referred to as the Rabbit Hutch, where a smart and ambitious young woman named Blandine ruminates on Christian female mystics and ponders an act of eco-terrorism. Without resorting to spoilers, I’ll just say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you’ve noticed this book’s title being bandied about for some of the top awards in publishing, that’s no coincidence. It manages to achieve that much-sought after but rarely realized goal of an ending that is both surprising and inevitable. I can’t wait to see what Gunty writes next.
If you thought Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio was a smoldering study in Midwestern dreams deferred, imagine a larger cast of characters transplanted to a post-industrial Indiana town where everyone’s lives are thrown into disarray—and often discontentment—by the closure of the local eraser factory. Then you have some idea of the unique magic of Michael Martone’s Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana. Martone has become one of Indiana’s most beloved writers, next to Kurt Vonnegut and Gene Stratton-Porter, thanks in no small part to his intimate knowledge of the workings of the human—and Hoosier—heart. Plain Air is soulful and funny and deft and anything but plain. It crackles and sparkles like fireworks over knee-high corn and then falls back down to earth in embers to burn there in secret.
Hoosiers often refer to their capital city as “India-no-place.” It’s a gentle dig at its modest nightlife and overall mild vibes, but anyone who’s read Maurice Broaddus’s take on the town might beg to differ. In his hands, Indianapolis is unrecognizable, but for a few familiar place names. Set in a vague, dystopian future after America lost the Revolutionary War, Pimp My Airship follows the misadventures of the poet Sleepy, his sidekick, (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah, and a privileged young woman named Sophine awakened to the politics of oppression when her father is murdered. Broaddus brings his characters and all the disparate, shining threads of the story together in a big and beautiful masterstroke at the end. Never has Indianapolis seemed more steampunky.
The dolls on your great aunt’s guest bed are creepy, sure, but they can’t hold a candle to the roaming— and headless—dolls that haunt this beautiful and strange collection from Indianapolis native Susan Neville. Neville, a professor of creative writing at Butler University and the author of The Invention of Flight, Indiana Winter, and the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award-winning In the House of Blue Lights, imbues these stories with just the right amount of magic realism and lyricism, as well as righteous anger and no-nonsense grit. In “Here,” one of the book’s standout pieces, a grieving mother lashes out at war plane flying overhead. In another, “Plume,” a politician skips town, poisoning the place in his wake. Neville’s world of ghostly robots and misunderstood marionettes pining for a different life would almost defy description if it weren’t somehow so viscerally familiar.
First things first, it doesn’t get any more Midwestern, any more Hoosier, than insisting that your town is full to the brim with good people. We’ve all heard the shopworn line, “things like that just don’t happen here, not in our nice, tight-knit community.” Ashley Flowers, known to her legions of fans as the host of popular podcast Crime Junkie, is more than happy to set the record straight in this transporting, fast-paced novel about murder and memory set in the small town of Wakarusa.
Margot Davies, a Wakarusa native and a successful journalist, returns to Indiana to take care of her ailing uncle. Soon, she’s swept up in the investigation of two murders, one of which took place when she was still a young girl. Spoiler alert: the ending’s ambiguous, but it’s clear that Margot learns some hard lessons about herself and the pleasures and perils of going home again.
In my humblest of opinions, no list of noteworthy authors writing in or about Indiana is complete without Jean Shepherd, the Hoosier humorist best known these days for being the narrator of the perennial holiday favorite, “The Christmas Story.” You know, that wacky comedy about Ralphie and his tireless— some might say problematic and unhealthily obsessive—quest for a Red Rider air rifle? The movie is based on a handful of linked narratives that form the heart of this zany, sweetly observed novel based on Shepherd’s Hammond, Indiana childhood. Framed as a very long conversation with a very patient barkeep, In God We Trust is a hilarious and tender sendup of family, home, and the seductive powers of nostalgia.
Nivedita, a mixed-race graduate student in Dusseldorf, has it (kind of) figured out. She runs a popular online blog about being a mixed-race German woman and has a staunch support system in her cousin Priti and an ok boyfriend. Most importantly, she studies with Saraswati—a hot, hotshot, woman-of-color professor who teaches her everything she needs to know about postcolonial studies. Saraswati is the glamorous professor we all dream of studying with, the type who “stare[s] straight at the camera lens, her lips pursed like she was about to blow a kiss, as if she’d just said Foucault.” But Saraswati turns out to be white, not South Asian. Identitti, translated from German by Alta L. Price, follows the chaotic unraveling after Saraswati is outed, complete with unexpected alliances, cultural theory rabbit holes, and goddess hallucinations.
Sanyal, who received a PhD in cultural history and is the author of two academic books (Vulva and Rape), is an expert at upending assumptions about race or identity politics. Weaving in Twitter replies, blog posts, and childhood memories amidst the Saraswati chaos, Identitti is a hilarious and polyphonic roller-coaster ride.
It was a joy to connect with Mithu Sanyal over Zoom, where we talked about the German language for ethnic identities, collaboration within social media platforms, and writing about the mixed-race German experience.
Jaeyeon Yoo: What is this novel about for you?
Mithu Sanyal: Everybody always thinks it’s a book about cultural appropriation, and it’s actually a book about being mixed race. I needed the cultural appropriation story as a catalyst to tell the story of being mixed race. My first draft was just Nivedita and Priti, and their relationship. I was kind of running in circles, but once there was this thing on the outside (of the Saraswati case), it was so easy to tell the story. In Germany, we just haven’t got any literature about being mixed race or post-migrational literature. Rather, of course we have it, but not in the mainstream.
In Germany, we had this law that you could only become German if you were of German blood, if you had a German father, originally. When I was born, I couldn’t get German citizenship because my mum had a German passport but my father did not. My mum was one of the feminists who fought for the right to give their children their nationality. The idea was that being German was something inherent, and that these [non-German] people go away again, these people don’t exist.
When I was born, I couldn’t get German citizenship because my mum had a German passport but my father did not.
In the last twenty years, we’ve changed the laws about nationality and how you can get a German passport—you can get one by being born, and by living here, what else? But the idea that these [mixed race narratives] are German stories, they’re just as much our stories as well: that didn’t exist for such a long time. When I was writing the novel, I found out that Thomas Mann [a canonical German author] is mixed race as well. His mum is from Brazil, but nobody tells you; so, he is seen as this incredibly white German guy. But in all his novels, he writes about it—for example, his father gets the mum from “the bottom of the map.” Thomas’s brother Heinrich, he wrote a story called “Between the Races” about his mother. It’s a novel in plain view, but you’re not taught it. Being misled is a part of Germany’s history, but also of German literature, and we don’t see it immediately. It’s like: what you don’t know, you can’t see.
JY: Given this context, I found it fascinating in that you make us question our assumptions about what “mixed race” even means, especially the “race” part. What was it like, to write a work that was so self-reflexive—constantly deconstructing these concepts that it focuses on?
MS: Right now, everybody is talking about identity politics. But when I was writing the novel in Germany, that was a year or two before, it was just one of those terms nobody used. It was like taking something really dusty. In a way, this gave me a freedom because I was not so afraid about any backlash. It was still quite a cozy niche to write, and asking those questions [about identity politics] were easy because I wasn’t afraid of being canceled or anything back then. And that has changed, really has changed. But by now, I’ve got a kind of a name that people don’t think I’m just [writing Identitti]as a subterfuge to get rid of these discussions. Because I really think the discussions about cultural appropriation are incredibly important. Even with my nonfiction books, the themes were always part of a left wing or feminist or anti-racist group. But, at the same time, it is incredibly important for me to challenge our own assumptions. Not from the outside, not saying “Oh, aren’t you crazy? Stop doing what you’re doing.” From the inside, because I believe if we want to do what we’re doing better, we’ve got to constantly question ourselves.
I’m genuinely interested in how the book is going to be received [by Anglophone readers]. I’m not condemning Saraswati: that is the whole point. That until the end you stay unsure where you want to jump. I do know people who have read the novel and really hated her, but I also know people who read the novel and really loved her. And that’s important to me. I really didn’t want to judge her.
JY: Thinking more about the Anglophone reception: Identitti so effectively pointed out how race doesn’t work the same way globally, yet so much of the global language around critical race theory is English. Do you have more to say about the role of English in contemporary racial identity formation?
MS: In Germany, we didn’t speak about race at all after the Second World War. We basically had this idea, “This is what the Nazis did, and I’m not going to touch the subject.” Even the word “race” in German, Rasse, has never undergone this change; in the English language, “race” now means a sociological construct. It doesn’t mean that everybody who uses it knows or means that, but it is a part of the word. If you say Rasse, it just refers to the biological elements. And, sure, there are different human races, of course. So, we’ve had this big debate, because it’s in our constitution that nobody should be discriminated against because of gender, et cetera, and Rasse. But if you take [the term Rasse] down, then you’ve got a problem: you’ve got to pinpoint it. What can you put in instead? It’s really difficult because when you say racism, then you’ve got to prove intent—prove legal injustice in legal terms.
There is a lot of bad sex in German literature, not often good sex. I wanted to have at least one orgasm in a book, just because life isn’t like that—without orgasms or sex
Anyways, we didn’t speak about [race in Germany]. Even in the ‘90s when I wanted to speak about race, people said, “Yeah, but there are no human races, so there can’t be any racism.” And that was the end of the conversation. If I want to talk about it, then I’m racist, because I’m referring to racial constructs like the Nazis. So, you didn’t have a language at all. Then we imported the English language. It was very liberating. With a word like race, we could speak about things. Saying POC was liberating—but POC doesn’t mean the same in Germany. For example, quite a lot of people from Eastern Europe came in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They were called guest workers and so [many conditions] that apply to POCs in America absolutely applied to them, but in America, they would be considered white. I was on a podium once, and the American activist said that there are not enough POCs. But although we were all POC on the podium, she couldn’t recognize us as such because of the cultural differences. [For another example,] in England, I’m Asian—but in Germany, Asian doesn’t mean people from India. It only means people from Eastern Asia and people from Southeast Asia. Even those words don’t overlap. When I was born, the term for people like me was foreigner [Ausländer]. Which is bullshit, because I was born in Germany. I’m not a foreigner. We didn’t have a word for it; we didn’t have the idea that you could be brown and German. It just didn’t exist.
JY: What you’ve just said and some of the passages in Identitti have me questioning: do you think we need to express ourselves through language, in order for identity to exist at all? Put differently: do we need to “narrativize” ourselves, in order to “be” any identity?
MS: I’m not sure whether I’ve got the ultimate answer to that, but I know that I need narratives. When I grew up, I didn’t have a language for people like me. I always had to invent the language and the narrative for myself. Now there’s a lot of language about it, but it also means that we draw new borders. I’m glad that we’re starting the conversations I would like us to have as a society, but to do so in a more loving and friendly way. I’m so glad we can talk about these experiences, but now the experiences have become identities. Being mixed race is part of my experiences, but is it really an identity? Yeah, sure. It is, in a way, but what is an identity? We are starting to have new divisions but, at the same time, it is so nice to not to have explain yourself completely—which is like a burden being taken away. John McWhorter says in The Language Hoax that we overestimate the value of language, that it can’t really change that much. I agree to a certain extent: we’ve got to change laws and realities and working realities and all this—not just with language, to do something. What my job as a novelist is that I create narrative. I create stories. I’m trying to help change laws, but I haven’t been very successful. I have been quite successful in creating stories, and I always think that we need both narratives: the narrative of what’s special about certain groups, but also the narrative about what we all share as humans.
I also thought Identitti also really probed at our ideas of desire: what we find attractive, what we find erotic. I wonder if you see this theme being in conversation with your other books [which focus on depictions of vulva and rape]?
MS: Definitely. Sexuality is an integral part of life. And it’s so weird that it doesn’t play the same role in literature very often, especially in German literature. There is a lot of bad sex in German literature, not often good sex. I wanted to have at least one orgasm in a book, just because life isn’t like that—without orgasms or sex—and also because that’s the kind of person that Nivedita is. She’s young; she’s an intellectual but she receives the world very much through her body. So, it was important that this aspect was in the narrative. For readings, I’ve noticed I usually read the one scene where she finds Saraswati’s speed vibrator and masturbates. I also like the idea of [emphasizing] masturbation because I still hear people say, “Oh, women don’t masturbate.” The scene also shows their relationship, because there is a lot of crossing of borders that Saraswati does. On the other hand, it was very important that they never had sex with each other and have some borders that were not crossed.
JY: I loved how you solicited your friends for essays on a (fictional) scenario within the book. I made a mental note—if I want to include smart writing, coax my friends to write smart insights for me! I wondered if you could speak more about the role of collaboration in your writing?
MS: I don’t believe in the idea that we as authors are writing a novel on our own. I’ve been trying to write this novel for years and years now, and it never worked because the discussion, the discourse wasn’t that around. The internet was one of the characters in the book, and I can’t write the internet. It’s this many-headed monster in a way or a great choir. So, I just thought, “I’ll ask people and then I don’t have to write it. This is brilliant.” And it was initially the other way around. Because the book hadn’t been written, they didn’t understand me at first, [asking,] “So you want me to tweet about something that hasn’t happened?” So then, how can I log on to the internet in the book? Basically, all these two-liners [of fictional internet] took me an hour on the telephone or longer to explain. But after I started getting the ball rolling, I wanted to do loads of different things. I wanted to have all these different voices, and also to test: would this be an issue in Germany?
So, I asked them to write in the way they would write without thinking much about it—how would you react to it emotionally, at night, if you just read it quickly? Then I started asking people I didn’t know or my friends I knew via the internet. And that was so amazing. Very many people just donated tweets to the book, even though they didn’t know me personally—they knew of me from the internet or from my books and articles. This trust in me, that was so lovely and added new things; the tweets enhance the reading experience. Some of them are incredibly funny! I couldn’t have written that—not just the content, but also the style. They’re all written in their own way. The first reviews on Amazon, for example, people were saying, “Mithu is so good at mimicking the words and recognizing the way people write on the internet.” But obviously I wasn’t mimicking them, they’d written them.
JY: Do you have other thoughts you’d like to share about Identitti?
MS: I hope it will be different with the English translation than how it was received in Germany. Basically, the book has been received as autobiographical here, which is weird. This really is a novel. I don’t write autofiction, although I do appreciate it, and it’s a different genre. If people expect autofiction, they will be disappointed. And who am I? I mean, I’m not twenty-five. I’m basically Saraswati’s age, but I’m definitely not a white professor passing as a POC, so who do you want me to be?
JY: At least in the US, I’ve found that—generally speaking—if someone is not white and/or marginalized in some manner, then writes about that issue, people are going to automatically assume that it’s autofiction. It sounds like German audiences had a similar reaction to your book.
MS: Absolutely. I think there’s still this idea that being white equals being universal. That if you tell a white story, it’s a universal story; if you’re marked in any way, then you’re talking about yourself. When I started reading, all the books I was reading were about people who are really not like me, so I was bridging that gap and that was good. But then, when I read the Buddha of Suburbia for the first time—even though it’s such a different book from my life—it was like reading yourself for the first time and thinking, “This is so close to me.” And that was a relief. I think we need to do both in reading and in any other intellectual endeavor: we need to find ourselves and we also need to understand how others project themselves into the world. Once you understand and learn from yourself, it is a lot easier to look at the world.
“Is This How You Eat a Watermelon?” by Zein El-Amine
The kidney was secured and the doctors were ready to operate on Ghassan the following morning. But right now not one, not two, but three doctors stand at the foot of his bed. Ghassan is tired and nauseous but the sight of them amuses him. When they begin to talk, he narrows his eyes and melds the triplets into one body. The fact that their speech was rehearsed and sequenced for maximum effect, as if coordinated by one body and communicated by three heads, helps enhance the illusion. The doctors are channeling his older brother Kamal, the Minister of Labor. He can see Kamal sitting in their office, knee over knee, his bodyguard stoic beside him, giving the three-headed hydra stern instructions on how to approach Ghassan. “You have to handle him like an adolescent, he is in his forties but he is a child,” he might have said. Each doctor has dealt with Ghassan at one point or another in the past few years because of his various health crises: kidney failure, liver problems, diabetes, and high blood pressure. So they knew how to deal with him, but they would have been obliged to sit and listen and pretend to take notes out of fear of the minister.
Ghassan loves his food, his drink, and his family, or shall we say, families. His first wife was a Lebanese woman, Souad, a childhood friend who was always amused by Ghassan’s carpe diem attitude that infuriated his family. She saw this as innocence, not immaturity, nor recklessness, and adored him for it. She gave him three kids, two boys, and a girl. Ghassan was in his element when he was with his children. It allowed him to roll on the carpet, play in the mud, be a ravenous eater, and liberate his inner Tasmanian devil. This caused problems sometimes, especially during weekends spent in the south, in their home village of Assawane. Having the wilderness nearby, with its climbable fig-trees, abandoned forts, hidden wells, renegade beehives, scorpions, and snakes, raised the risk of Ghassan’s antics. However, he did not need to leave the house and put himself at risk, he can do wild all by himself.
Take for example the watermelon incident. One day Ghassan was sitting playing checkers with his youngest daughter Huda, who was seven at the time. They were in the courtyard of Ghassan’s ancestral village home and were using the backside of the backgammon box to play. Souad brought out a tray of watermelon slices. It was a June afternoon of bearable dry heat, so they sat in the cool shade of an old lemon tree that arced over them, laden with lemons. Ghassan looked up and saw Huda nibbling along the top of this red semi-circle of a slice that dwarfed her face.
“Is this how you eat watermelon?” he asked. She looked at him puzzled and waited for clarification.
“Is this how you eat watermelon?” he repeated. She started to worry, as he was not using his usual terms of endearment.
Then he added, “Do you eat it like this?” and imitated her nibbling. Huda looked back at her mother for help and caught her stifling a laugh.
“Do you eat a big slice of watermelon like a bird, like this, nm nm nm?” he pecked at his slice with his nose, pinkies raised.
Huda broke out in a smile that prompted Ghassan to explain. “You eat it like this, like a goat,” and Ghassan went into typewriter mode, chomping wildly at the slice from one end to another, watermelon seeds flying left and right. So daddy’s girl took the tip and ran with it, imitating him, putting her whole face into her slice of watermelon, filling her mouth and nostrils with it, digging in deeper until the rind curved up around her face. She looked up at her father with a long red smile that extended up to her ears, watermelon seeds entangled in her curls. He rewarded her with a pat on the back and kiss on the top of her head.
Two days later the family was back in Beirut. They arrived late at night and Souad put the kids to bed. She returned to check in on them and noticed that Huda was snoring. She joked about it with Ghassan, “She is even taking on your snore, God help us.” A week later Huda was feverish and was having difficulties breathing at night. They called the family doctor and he diagnosed her with asthma and prescribed some holistic treatments including weekends in the mountains.
But two weeks later Huda was still laboring with her breath, day and night, so they took her back to the doctor. This time, the doctor located the problem with a cursory examination.
“There is a seed lodged up her left nostril,” he told Ghassan with a smile and a shake of his head, “The damn thing is sprouting!” The doctor anticipated Ghassan’s accustomed hearty laugh, but Ghassan just stood there with a look of terror on his face. “I can take it out right now without putting her under,” the doctor added.
Ghassan crouched in front of Huda, pinched her cheek, and said, “It won’t hurt habibti.” The procedure took less than half an hour. The doctor put the extracted seed in a jar and told Ghassan that he should keep it to preserve this memory for her. Years later, when Huda will leave home to attend Lebanese American University, she will take the jar with her.
One night, as Ghassan was plowing his way through a mezze table at the Barometre, the owner introduced a Palestinian debke troupe and announced that they will be a regular Friday gig. One of the dancers caught his eye—a woman dressed in a traditional black dress with red and green tatreez embroidery. He noticed how serious and focused she was as she waited to get in the circle and how she came alive as soon as she entered the fray and led the troupe. Ghassan’s cousin Ali noticed his attentiveness and introduced them after the performance. The woman, Rana, did not take to him right away, mainly because Ghassan was uncharacteristically uptight in her presence, and partially because Rana was not putting up with any posturing from strangers that night. Nevertheless, Ghassan was smitten and he woke up thinking about her the next morning. He started to keep track of her through Ali, turning every topic of conversation between them into an inquiry about her. Beirut being Beirut allowed him to have many “chance encounters” with Rana: at movie festivals (although Ghassan did not have the patience to sit through foreign films), book fairs (although Ghassan was not a reader), and benefits for the refugee camps. Eventually, after several of these “accidental” encounters, she started to notice him and warm up to him. His humor began to flow easily and she responded with her mode of flirtation—merciless sarcasm that whittled away at his charm.
Several months later, after one of her performances, Rana sidled up to Ghassan at the bar after changing.
“What can I get you?” he asked.
“Tonight is not an Almaza beer night nor is it a Johnny Walker night, tonight is an Arak kind of night.”
“Oh really?” Ghassan replied.
“Yes, definitely an Arak kind of night,” Rana asserted, slapping the bar with every word for emphasis.
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know, maybe because the world doesn’t matter to me tonight.”
They drank Arak and snacked on mixed nuts. He kept his ego in check, she tempered her acidic critiques, and they were connecting for the first time. At a pause in the conversation, she looked up at him in silence, closed her eyes for a second and looked down at her drink, and up at him again. She asked him for a cigarette. They stepped out in the courtyard, which was under renovation at the time, and into the blaring horns of Beirut. She went through the cigarette so fast that Ghassan had a hard time keeping up with her. She dropped the butt to the ground and stepped on it with the force of a dabke stomp. He followed suit, assuming she wanted to go back inside, but when he looked up from putting out his cigarette her face was inches away from his. She cradled his head with both hands and kissed him. What stayed with him from that night is not so much the kiss itself but the way she held his head. She stepped away as violently as she had surged at him, a strand of sweat-swept hair across her brow, her V-neck linen shirt askew, olive skin twinkling in the streetlights. She told him that she was in the mood for “the village,” for the rural South. It was past midnight on a weeknight so he assumed that she was hinting at a weekend trip and offered to take her on one during the coming weekend. She fixed him with a serious look and said, “No, I mean now, I am in the mood for the village now.” It took him a minute to understand what she was proposing but when he did he put down his drink, took away hers, and headed for the door. She was behind him, pretending that she was not following, stepping on people’s feet while apologizing left and right.
They drove on the coastal road with the Mediterranean to their right, the flash of the moon panning the ocean, riveted by their reverie. They went through Sidon then skirted Tyre in a record hour and headed southeast from there. The car hugged the hills, the valley close enough to make one dizzy, no guardrails, no markers, and no lights. The sea breeze—cooled by the limestone cradles in the foothills—moved through the car. They drove through the villages of Jouaiya and Deir Kifa until there was nothing but the narrow ribbon of road laid across rolling hills. As they rounded an arid stone-pocked hill, a moonlit cornfield opened up in yellow glory. Even before the car came to a full stop, Rana bolted out and ran into the field. Ghassan ran after her. She kept disappearing and reappearing in his path, black hair moving among the blonde silk-tufted cobs. Then the clothes started coming off. Ghassan lost sight of her but followed a trail of garments: a tossed white linen shirt rendered fluorescent in the moonlight, a bra snagged on a stalk. A shed shoe almost nailed him in the head, and a pair of deflated jeans served as the last marker on her trail. Ghassan started stripping too, tripping over himself with every item, shedding clothes that he had bought that same week: pointed-toe cowboy boots from Red Shoe, a Pierre Cardin linen shirt, and charcoal Guess jeans from the GS store. He found himself naked and disoriented for a moment, the stealth rustle of her flight gone. Then he heard her singing a lullaby: “Tick tick tick, yam Slaiman . . . tick tick tick zawjik wane can?”
He found himself naked and disoriented for a moment, the stealth rustle of her flight gone.
He moved towards the source of the song and then stopped as the singing stopped, then it started again: “tick tick tick can bilHa’li‘am yuqtuf jawz wrimaan . . .”
He almost tripped over her laying in the fold of the field, parted corn stalks like an open book on both sides of her. Her skin shimmered with sweat, hips wider than he imagined, breasts gently jiggling as she labored with her breath through laughter. They were voracious in their lovemaking and they were at home with it, nothing orderly about it, nothing graceful, comfortable in its clumsiness, but well punctuated with the synchronicity of its completion. He laughed as she wailed a combination of nonsensical curses that involved God, the Prophet, and Ghassan’s mother; no one left untainted, desecration all around. They lay, in their fuck-flattened clearing and looked up at the sky in silence. Ghassan crawled on all fours looking for his pants, disappeared into the thicket, located the cigarettes, crawled back into the clearing, and jutted his head between her bent knees, two lit cigarettes in his mouth. She laughed and he sat cross-legged like a pudgy little Buddha, the cigarettes sticking out at angles from his puffing lips, waiting for her to stop so he could give her one.
Within months of that encounter in the fields Ghassan left his wife. Although he could afford an apartment in a prime neighborhood anywhere in Beirut, Rana refused to leave the camp where she lived most of her life. Much to everyone’s shock Ghassan moved in with her. So instead of living on the very cosmopolitan Al Hamra street, within reach of his favorite cafe du jour (t-marbouta), his favorite beach club (The Officer’s Swim Club), and the restaurants he loves, he made a home of a second-floor built-up apartment. The place was of questionable structural integrity, precariously balanced atop a general store, entangled on all sides with a spaghetti mesh of illegally installed electric and cable TV wires, a back porch with a view of an open sewer. A small place but a sunny one lit up with Moroccan pastels that Rana had painted with the help of a friend.
Many people thought that this move would force a change in Ghassan’s lifestyle, that Rana would be the one that would tame him and get him to settle. But it took less than a year for him to get back to his old habits. He went back to his daily dips in the pubs and bars, and a diet that consisted of charbroiled meats, raw kibbeh, and dairy-heavy sweets soaked in rose water syrups. He was soon diagnosed with diabetes and started having fainting spells that landed him in the hospital. In the year that followed his diagnosis, Ghassan was rushed to the hospital three different times for various reasons: asthma issues tied to his smoking, liver problems tied to his drinking, and dizziness brought on by exasperated diabetes. Repent, repent, the doctors begged and he just smiled and nodded in his hospital bed. Days after his release he went back to his habits. Relatives would spot him on the streets at night, shake their heads, and mutter to each other, “God help his family.”
Now he sits here facing the multi-headed medics. One doctor—a tanned man, full head of gray, the type that spends his afternoons at The St. George’s Hotel pool-side, playing backgammon—conjures up a look of concern and demands, “We need to know that you are on board.” In return, Ghassan gives a sorrowful nod, pretending to play along.
“Very well, here is what is going to happen after tomorrow’s operation—for at least the next six months you have to refrain from alcohol and smoking. You will be placed on a strict diet for the next year. The list of prohibited foods and suggested meals is here, and I will give it to your family. Lastly, and this is the most challenging bit, you will have to wear a mask over your mouth and nose for the next three months.”
All three doctors wait for a reaction, but Ghassan does not flinch; his pleasant demeanor does not turn murky as expected.
“Are you still with us?” the doctor asks.
“We have to do what we have to do, God help us,” Ghassan answers with a shrug. The doctors leave and, on cue, Kamal calls to say how happy he is that Ghassan has been so cooperative, but turns stern at the end of the conversation with a warning. “The time for playing is over, Habibi. This is serious. Think about Ziad, think about Abdullah, think about Huda, and you will get through it.”
The call from his brother came at six in the evening. At midnight Ghassan goes to the bathroom, gets dressed, walks down the hallway without looking around. By now he is familiar with all the off-the-beaten-path corridors, stairwells, and exits. Additionally, as a resident smoker, he knows that there is a back exit to the hospital that would put him out on the side of the Corniche and that there is a guard there that he must get past. He knows the guard by name, so he salutes him and asks him for a cigarette. They smoke and chat for a bit and then Ghassan hands the guard a roll of twenties in dollars because he knows that he has been paid extra to watch him and call if he were to leave the hospital.
“What is this for?” the guard asks.
Ghassan winces as he sucks down his cigarette and answers, “For your memory loss,” in an exhale of smoke that wafts over the guard’s face. The guard hesitates, but Ghassan signals at the rolls of dollars to help him decide. The guard nods at Ghassan and opens the back gate.
Apparently fear of the minister trumped the sum of the bribe because the guard ends up calling Kamal anyway. The minister’s personal bodyguard, Mimo, is dispatched to locate Ghassan and get him back to the hospital. Mimo was a childhood friend of Ghassan who had actually given the bodyguard that nickname when they were teenagers. Mimo’s real name is Muhammad, a man with such a massive body that he carries his own climate. He has the brawn of a bouncer and the brains of a sleuth. It takes him three days to locate Ghassan. A tip from a bartender at the B-018 bar comes at five in the morning and Mimo puts in a call to Kamal and then to Rana. It is Rana who gets to the location first but cannot figure out where the bar is. She scans the buildings for signs of commercial stores but they are all residential. As she crosses a clearing between the buildings, she spots Ghassan emerging from the B-018. When one says, “emerging from the B-018” it literally means rising out of it, as the hip bar is a converted underground bomb shelter with a concrete roof that is flush with the ground. Its roof is equipped with hydraulic pistons that tilt up the massive slab to allow for a view of the sky and the stars. It was not unusual to see people staggering out of the B-018 in the early hours of the morning but this was way past closing time. Ghassan walks in her direction but does not recognize her until he is a few feet from her. There is no exchange of words, just a look of exasperation branded on her face. He puts his arm around her for support. They walk towards the car quietly, she holds him around the waist and he leans heavily on her. She opens the door for him but he stands there looking at her. For a moment, he is focused, and asks, “Where are we going?”
“Home,” she says.
“Home, home?” he asks.
“Yes, home home,” she answers.
“Not home hospital?” he asks.
“No, home home,” she repeats in resignation.
Rana starts up the car and Ghassan slumps against the passenger door. “I am in the mood for the village,” he mumbles.
“Really,” Rana answers, stopping the car.
“Yes really, let’s go now. I don’t want to go into the city.”
Rana turns around and heads to the coastal highway. Ghassan rolls down the window and manages to heave himself high enough to prop his chin on the door and let the wind run through his curly hair. Just past the airport, south of the city, they pass a mountainous pile of concrete rubble. “What is that?” Ghassan asks, nodding towards the pile that blocks his view of the sea.
“You don’t know?” asks Rana.
Ghassan narrows his eyes as if trying to recall something.
“How many times have you passed this in the last five years?” Rana asks.
Ghassan doesn’t answer and tracks the dumpsite as they clear it.
“It’s the rubble from the 2006 war. They hauled it out here when they were rebuilding and haven’t done anything with it yet,” explains Rana, ”you’ve passed it every weekend since then and you never noticed it?”
“Pull over,” Ghassan says, yanking on the door handle.
“What is it?” Rana asks.
“Pull over, I am not feeling well,” Ghassan yells as he opens the door and waits for the car to stop.
He runs down to the sandy beach and stoops over, hands propped on knees. Rana looks at him through the open door then turns her sight to the Mediterranean as he starts to retch.
Nov 1: Maybe I’ll just get some bad first drafting done, and that’s okay! Happy to be focusing on my writing this November.
Nov 2: Realized I have no plot. It needs more vampires . . . ? Sign up for acupuncture, cupping, and salt therapy to tap into my source energy.
Nov 4: Order five new journals to “help with the process.”
Nov 5: This is definitely harder than having a newborn. Canceled all my freelance projects so I can focus. Read a listicle on RealSimple about brain foods and decided to eat only blueberries and bananas.
Nov 8: Twitter tells me vampire sex sells so I’m marathoning True Blood for the fourth time.
Nov 9: Going deeper on research. The piles of books are making it hard to walk through the house. Hubby refuses to eat only fruit but I have to for mental acuity. Earmarked for our couples therapist in December when I have time to attend sessions.
Nov 12: Researching romance, rom coms, and true crime has led me to believe I should consider becoming the literary Tinder swindler to flesh out my plot.
Nov 13: 1,667 words a day is too much. Foraging for mushrooms has got to be easier, at least if I found some I could micro-dose.
Nov 15: Abandoned plot and decided to write an experimental novel. Cranked out 2,000 words today on my sensual dreams about eating chowder with Alexander Skarsgård. Suck it, Melville.
Nov 16: Call parents to discuss my masterpiece. They say the check is in the mail and hang up.
Nov 19: My border collie was accidentally crushed today when he ran under the pyramid of books in the living room. Going to try cats.
Nov 20: Spent day at the animal shelter but all cats have already been rescued. Just my luck, three other aspiring novelists got here first.
Nov 23: EMDR session to relive childhood trauma and mine my own psyche for unimpeachable content. I will NOT be canceled by YA Twitter.
Nov 24: Revisit email list of 200 from wedding to solicit beta readers. Queried every agent in Writer’s Digest. My novel might not be finished yet but they are going to want to get in on this early.
Nov 26: Forgot I left the stove on and lightly burned down the house.
Nov 27: Left son at the fire department after preschool to figure out my ending today. CPS coming tomorrow, but I have a vision now . . . Worth it.
Nov 29: Today a divorce attorney served me. He mentioned my hour-long livestream bragging about finishing a novel but that’s absurd. It’s not even the last day yet, how could I be finished?
Nov 30: Came out of a fugue state after winning NaNoWriMo. When I looked back at my laptop to read my masterpiece, there was only one usable sentence. It’s Anne Rice, but who can tell?
Dec 1: Now that the fumes have worn off, it’s clear I need more time. Writing a novel in 30 days isn’t really possible, you know? Ordered The 90-Day Novel on Prime. If it worked for Moshfegh, it can work for me.
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