In her debut collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner meticulously unpacks her fears, revealing their complex interiors. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from 1980s horror films to parenting to adoption to wildfires to reincarnation to autoimmune disease to murder. She weaves research throughout her personal stories, which has the effect of ensuring that readers learn something about themselves and what it means to be human.
The collection is set primarily in Nebraska, but Keisner’s observations move beyond the general sense of the Midwest. She brings us murky man-made lakes as places of refuge and homes made of earth that look like bunkers. The location that most reverberates is that of the family unit. Keisner has many identities—daughter, granddaughter, wife, and mother—and each role requires something different from her; as a mother, she finds that she is best equipped to contend with the question of fear and what to do with it.
I spoke with Keisner over a series of emails about the genesis of her book, adoption conversations and what they are missing, and how she turns fear into action.
Sari Fordham: I loved this book and was so taken by your candor throughout. The collection is about fear, but it takes a lot of bravery to write so honestly about such a disdained topic. Was there a story that you had to talk yourself into writing?
Jody Keisner: I had to talk myself into writing the first chapter, which eventually became the title of the book. I was ashamed of my seemingly irrational fear of intruders and my compulsive nighttime “checking” of locks, behind furniture, under my bed, etc. Before I began writing about my fear and better understood where my bizarre behavior came from, I viewed both as a weakness, a childish preoccupation. I didn’t want to expose this particular weakness to the public, and I also feared that writing about it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if my essay would manifest as an intruder. (I know. I know.) Of course writing about it helped me to see that my fear and other women’s fears of being alone at night aren’t all that irrational or childlike. While our reasons are as varied and complex as our experiences, they are also largely related to our awareness of the threat of violence from men.
A couple of months ago, I read this tweet asking how people made themselves feel safe at night if they lived alone. About a hundred people replied–mostly women–with answers ranging from knives under beds, chairs barring doors, dogs, guns, alarms, etc. I was surprised there were so many of us. For so long I had been ashamed of my “weakness.” Maybe my fear is more common than I realize.
SF: Oh, absolutely! I read the last chapter alone and in a sketchy Airbnb and I actually turned on a light before going to bed. While I knew driving to the Airbnb was statistically much more dangerous than staying in one alone, the idea of someone coming into the apartment felt much more tangible. You write: “Upward of 80 percent of American women will experience sexual harassment or assault during their lifetime.” How do you think this fact shapes female experiences?
JK: Statistically speaking, we women are unlikely to be murdered in our homes at night or while out for a solo jog, two examples I explore in my book. But also statistically speaking, we are likely to be sexually harassed and assaulted during our lifetimes. Too many of us will be raped or suffer domestic violence. Women–and especially BIPOC and trans folks–grow up under the ever-looming threat of violence from men. Frankly, our society doesn’t seem as perplexed by this fact as it should be. To put it bluntly: if white boys and men endured as much violence or the threat of violence as girls, women, BIPOC, and trans folk do, would our patriarchal society do as little as they are currently doing to stop it? Women grow up surrounded by images of real and imagined violence against the female body, which can certainly make us feel as if the threat is greater than it actually is. Not that some amount of threat isn’t all too real, especially the threat of sexual assault. I really hope this changes, but right now, I’m teaching my two daughters to be resilient and aware.
SF: Thank you! When a woman is afraid of violence, that fear is so often used to minimize women collectively. Meanwhile, male violence is viewed through the lens of the individual and we miss the opportunity to notice that something is broken in society. Throughout your book, you refuse to be minimized, which I found empowering. I came to see you as an expert on resilience in the face of fear. So I wanted to ask you, with so much terrifying stuff on the news, how can we respond without being overwhelmed?
JK: Wow. Thank you. I certainly don’t see myself as an expert on resilience! But I am a person of action, which is how my mother taught me to be. These days when I’m overwhelmed, which feels like a lot of the time, I know I must do something. Let’s say I’m overwhelmed at the gun violence we continue to endure as Americans, as but one example. I write a ranty Facebook message to connect with others or call them to action, too. I write to my representatives. I donate to support gun control reform. I write essays because I refuse meaninglessness. I practice self-care and go on long walks when my day allows it. I live in the now with my two daughters. But also: a good friend reminded me that none of us has to do all of these things at once. Just doing a little bit each day or each week helps. I can’t change our nation’s gun policies by myself or today, but I can do something small to help today. Humans have this amazing ability to thrive and go about their ordinary lives despite the horrible things that are happening all around us and all over the world. Yes, it’s resilience. We must be resilient in the face of adversity, trauma, and change. We just shouldn’t be complacent.
SF: I like that, particularly the value of small actions and how they can add up.
One of my favorite essays in this collection was the braided essay, “Fractured.” In it, you write about being adopted and your longing for reconnection. Later, you write about adopting your second daughter and the anger you feel at your friend who suggests your adopted daughter is somehow less yours. After Dobbs, adoption has come roaring to the edge of public consciousness. What are your thoughts about anti-choice politicians pointing to adoption as a solution for unwanted pregnancies?
JK: So, let me back up by saying it already troubles me that adoption is often viewed as a last resort for people who haven’t had luck with other reproductive avenues or medical interventions (if they can afford them). The common refrain goes, “Well, you can always adopt.” Adoption is a thing unto itself and it’s a very fraught, complicated thing. It certainly shouldn’t be viewed as a safety net for folks who have exhausted other options and are somewhat “resigned” to adopt. Adoption and the intricate, lengthy, and lifelong process of raising an adopted child has to be a priority and something you are committed to and fully invested in. An adopted child is an adoptee their entire life; the adoption component doesn’t disappear after the adoption is finalized in court. Families who are adopting should understand their adopted child will have different needs and likely have different struggles than a biological child would. This is even more complicated with interracial adoptions.
Those who propose adoption as an alternative to abortion are betraying their utter lack of knowledge about the psychological complexities of adoption and the reverberating and lifelong effects on the adoptee, the birth parents, and the adoptive parents. They are essentially saying to pregnant women: “Well, you can always surrender your baby after birth!” From what I understand, many women who place their children up for adoption do so because they don’t believe they have the financial means to raise a child, or an additional child. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many birth mothers, including my own. They talk about the trauma of relinquishing their children and the lifelong grief and depression that sometimes follows. Adoption is traumatic for both the baby and mother. Framing adoption as the solution to abortion grossly under simplifies the reality of both.
Free and accessible birth control, comprehensive sex education in school, paid maternity and paternity leave—and for all employees and not just those in white collar jobs—affordable daycare, more services for children with disabilities, improved insurance plans to support family planning, access to emergency contraception, more financial support for programs that reduce domestic abuse, affordable housing. These are a few solutions to unwanted pregnancies. Medical intervention is also a solution to unwanted pregnancy and pregnancy that endangers the woman’s life. There is so much we should be doing to support women and children!
SF: Something I admired in this memoir is how you were able to place so many different stories in the same book, and how they all clicked together into a cohesive narrative. Could you talk a little bit about your writing process?
JK: I write about what is on my mind at the time, what I’m obsessing over. Which is to say, in terms of structure and unity, the book was all over the place when I had a first draft. I printed out each chapter and laid them out on the floor and looked for thematic connections. I probably re-ordered the book a dozen times, which also meant I had to revise as much, so that certain narrative threads carried throughout the book. For instance, the Pain-Thing appears in the second chapter, “Recreationally Terrified,” and also appears in a few of the other later chapters. That is the result of revision and my realization that I kept returning to my fear of pain and my fear of my loved ones being in pain. Connecting themes and metaphors helps create a sense of cohesion, and so does making sure important characters – like my Grandma Grace – make appearances in chapters even when they aren’t the central focus. I was also told by an early reader that I had a big hole in my narrative, and eventually filled that hole with “Haunted,” which more thoroughly explored my childhood relationship with my father.
SF: What advice do you have for someone who wants to write a memoir, but is having a difficult time finding a structure?
JK: I classify Under My Bed and Other Essays as a memoir-in-essays. I organized my book by theme: Origins (I seek out the origin stories of my greatest fears); Under the Skin (I examine the scientific reasons for humans’ experiences of love and fear); Risings (I explore the ways I overcome or learn to live with my fears). Within the themes, I mostly organized chapters chronologically, but not always. I move in and out of time a lot. I think “structure” is very personal to each book and the author’s writing style and preferences. There are so many possibilities!
One recent evening, I brought to a simmer a pint of dry, hazy cider, then draped into the pan a whole glistening trout. I diced an onion, having torn off the papery outer layers; having peeled back the thin, translucent membrane still clinging to the pearlescent surface of the bulb, and browned it in a foaming bath of salted butter. Once the onion had browned, I folded in a pound of chopped fresh spinach. I lifted away the skin of the poached fish and layered my greens into its belly; I boiled down the cider, ambrosial with the addition of a leafy sprig of tarragon, and whisked in heavy cream, all of it commingling into a silky almond-colored sauce, which I poured into a deep dish and, afterward, laid my trout to rest in the center until it was time for dinner.
It had been a buttery day already. I’d spent my past few meals eating through recipes from Dining With Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Époque, a cookbook and quasi-encyclopedia by English chef and writer Shirley King. I’d griddled up a croque-monsieur for breakfast (no crusts in the Belle Époque!) followed by a lunch of unctuous leek-and-potato soup, and was excited for my triumphal truite farcie aux espinards, which seemed to me an Escoffier special, as Continental as could possibly be.
I’d been hoping for a Proustian moment, even knowing full well that these things are famously involuntary.
When I took my first bite,a shudder ran through my whole body. After a few more tastes, suddenly, the memory returned: the taste was that of the trout which on Sunday mornings at Combray—
I’m kidding. Maybe I’d been hoping for a Proustian moment, even knowing full well that these things are famously involuntary.
When I’d picked up the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, I was not particularly expecting to enjoy it. It was more of a personal challenge, a desire to know what all the fuss was about. I vaguely suspected that I (having read neither Deleuze nor Barthes) would not actually understand it. But I quickly realized I’d been hoodwinked by the legend and literary theory; this is not an impenetrable book at all. Once I felt welcomed into the world of the narrator, Marcel—which didn’t take long—I did not want to leave it.
King, the cookbook author, described a similar experience with Proust in a 1979interview ahead of the publication: “I read it morning and night, and it suddenly occurred to me that Proust was as much obsessed with fine food as I had been.” She elaborates on this in the introduction to Dining With Marcel Proust: “Within the first few pages, one becomes aware of the brilliantly told, minute observances of food which Proust weaves into his story.”
In King’s hands, Proust’s “minute observances” are translated into hundreds of recipes, from the simple (creamed carrots, baked eggs, shortbread) to the elaborate, all referenced some way or another in his work. It’s an atlas of the “bourgeois cuisine” of Proust’s lifetime, which prioritized seasonality and quality of ingredients, but also appreciated comfort and deliciousness over style—a luscious world of lobster à l’Américaine, pike quenelles with prawn sauce, mushroom-and-liver-stuffed pheasant, and gâteau St. Honoré. It’s unmistakably the same world that the author has built on his own, albeit over the course of many, many more pages.
Food in Swann’s Way is a load-bearing image, a prop and a pleasure, a thing that families, cliques, and towns are built around. It not only enriches the world but in some cases holds the key to it. It is there in the routines of young Marcel’s family in the town of Combray, and in the rituals of Paris high society as Swann, a well-connected family friend and object of Marcel’s fascination, meanders through it. The story seems strung together by the hosting of salons and suppers, the arguing over wines and unfinished plates, the ordering of pears from Chevet and strawberries from Jauret. Most deliciously, to me, the culinary prowess of the capable family cook Françoise, “under whose careful eye,” the French literature scholar Hollie Markland Harder has written, “food preparation seems to be elevated to one of the fine arts.” Soon enough, I found myself instinctively interpreting cooking-and-eating as one of those arts (like music, painting, and skilled conversation) around which these characters’ lives revolve.
I could not shake the impression that Proust loved not only food, but also writing food.
But after traversing those first 600 pages—I have read only the opening slice of Proust’s million-word novel, a small, small sample, I admit—I could not shake the impression that Proust loved not only food, but also writing food. The cookery runs deep into the language. Food is a truth of its own: young Marcel feels his mother’s love “like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin,” and later, preparing for his first trip to the theater, finds he is “as little capable of deciding which play I should prefer to see as if, at the dinner table, [someone] had obliged me to choose between rice à l’Impératrice, and the famous cream of chocolate.” (How better to convey cravings than with something sweet?) At one point, a frantically lovesick Swann approaches a window he believes to be that of his then-mistress, Odette, and peers jealously “between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice.” Eating and loving intermingle, with many characters seeming to conflate one with the other. Later, in a moment of jealousy that interrupts his enjoyment of a glass of Odette’s orangeade, Swann works himself up imagining that someone else would ever taste her recipe.
The Proust scholar James P. Gilroy has described this author’s tendency toward “gastronomical synesthesia”—sensations blend together and gastronomy comes in when other words fail, evoking feelings that sometimes don’t quite make sense, but also, deeply, do. In one of my favorite passages, Marcel recalls walking in Combray in winter, watching the sun set with “a fiery glow which, accompanied often by a cold that burned and stung, would associate itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the poetic pleasure I had found in my walk, with the sensual pleasures of good feeding, warmth and rest.” The sunset is not so separate from the fire is not so separate from the chicken is not so separate from home, and Combray would not be Combray without any of it.
Here are a few of the foods that Marcel, the man, enjoyed in his non-novelized life: red mullet from Marseilles, fried smelt, ravioli, chocolate soufflé, Russian salad, beef with chicken gizzards, Gruyère and beer, eggs and Béchamel. As James Beard notes in the introduction to Dining, “It is well known that he loved sitting at table with a circle of friends.” Proust even loved food when he hardly had an appetite. We’ve learned from Céleste Albaret, his housekeeper and biographer, that the author’s poor health eventually robbed him of his beloved hunger; still, Albaret remembers running to the market, quickly frying up a fish, and serving it with wedges of lemon. “Sole were about the only food he could eat at the end of his life.”
Before reading Proust I’d had no inkling that I would find in him a kindred spirit.
I, too, would like to eat a whole fried sole on my deathbed. But before reading Proust I’d had no inkling that I would find in him a kindred spirit in this particular regard; maybe the hushed and reverent tones concerning his work had obscured for me the Béchamel and beer of it all. Or maybe the many flavors of Proust’s writing and writing life have been overpowered by his own masterstroke.
I first learned about Proust’s madeleine, arguably the most famous food in Western literature, in a high school history class, 15 years before I would actually pick up the book in question; at the time I had heard of neither Proust nor madeleines, and was subsequently taught to never think of one without the other long before I understood what was actually happening between them. This is probably true for many people: Proust makes a prominent appearance, naturally, on the “madeleine” page of Wikipedia, and the page for “involuntary memory” opens with a picture of madeleines.
Famously, all it takes is a teacake to slingshot Marcel back to his childhood. Specifically, to a visit to family in Combray, and even more specifically, to the house of his Aunt Léonie, who had a habit on Sunday mornings of letting a young Marcel dip a madeleine into her cup of lime-flower tea. Once that door opens, everything else comes rushing in: the village, the church steeple, the flowers and trees, the people of Combray, the people in the house, the people who made Marcel who he is. This is the real beginning of the story Marcel wants to tell, and the power of the madeleine is one of Proust’s sweetest legacies.
But I was not prepared for how evocative I would find the actual description: I could see the “squat, plump little cakes” in my mind, “which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.” I could nearly taste one, “so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds.” I was unexpectedly moved by how tenderly the author describes soggy crumbs at the bottom of a teacup, and felt my own memories of warm tea and crumbs and home and winter in my peripheral vision—understanding, intuitively, all that could be contained within a teacake.
I followed Proust in imagining food as a portal, an invitation; not just associated with memory but often wrapped up in it.
Could Proust have gotten the reader there with anything other than food? I doubt it. Marcel doesn’t seem to think so, either, with his famous observation that “taste and smell alone,” fleeting senses so difficult to share with others, “bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” It’s one of many places where I followed Proust in imagining food as a portal, an invitation; not just associated with memory but often wrapped up in it, the container for memory, or memory itself. “Proust constructed his book as a vast sphere of signs, of experiences to be tasted,” Carol Mavor observes in Reading Boyishly—“perhaps resulting in a madeleine or two for ourselves.”
I remember the first time I realized I was allowed to like food: I was 23 years old, which is not that many years but also more than anyone should ever spend without truly being present during a meal. It was fall. I was in a restaurant on a foreign harbor with white-washed walls and white-clothed tables. The sun beamed through the warped pane of an old window, through my wine glass, and onto a mother-of-pearl spoon bearing a small hill of luminous salmon roe. I have written this scene what feels like a hundred times over, but I still feel I haven’t even scratched the surface. I could write a hundred pages and still have more to see.
A few months later, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a food writer. Some knot had untangled in me, or something had been knocked loose—I think, in a previous iteration of this scene written by a younger me, I claimed to have seen God. I guess I do feel a shimmer of the divine when I look back on it. In my family, food was cooked with efficiency and eaten without feeling; nobody had told me it could do a thing like that. I was thrilled to find something I wanted only more of, and thrilled by letting myself ask for more. I was beginning to understand that some things live more in the body than the brain.
Something I had been taught to see as a minor character was actually everywhere, all around me. It was ahead of me and behind me, before me and after me. Food was an active thing: it could tap into my depths, release chemicals into my cells, beckon something just out of reach, transmit me across time and space, and set me off in search of what I could learn, about my world and about myself, by paying attention.
Proust certainly was a master of paying attention. It’s one of the reasons his autobiographical novel is sometimes a reference point for writers of memoir, a demonstration of how a writer can find meaning in the mundane and transmit a version of themself on the page. I see traces of Proust, too, in the explosion of the food memoir and the popularity of food-centric personal essays; In Proust, Gilroy writes, “even the most profound revelations of essential truth can be inspired by activities associated with the consumption of food.” Food writing today recognizes our connections to food as legitimate, and recognizes food for all the varying things it can be—an exercise of zooming into something sensory and turning it over and over until we see it differently.
In some ways food writing relies on recreating the madeleine moment: memories unlocked, formative experiences revealed. But the best of it doesn’t just reiterate this potential but jumps off from it, writing through the steam and smoke until something emerges. In eating his tea-soaked crumb, Marcel notices “the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.” Food feels like love, and it feels like us. Still, it’s even more when we make meaning of it; Marcel realizes “that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.”
The Guardian reported in 2015 on a set of recently published drafts, dating to 1907, in which Proust’s seeking is clearly underway. Turns out that the writer played around with the madeleine section. Maybe he knew what an epiphany he had on his hands and wanted to land it exactly right: before Proust arrived at a teacake, Marcel had found Combray spreading over a snack of toast with honey, and later, hard biscotti, both of which don’t seem quite right to me, either. I’d been tempted to think the madeleine was a real and vivid memory; in reality it was just a literary device, but Proust knew enough about food to make it true. And as I continue through the rest of In Search of Lost Time—a task to be savored—I find myself looking forward to the next time he will welcome me to his table.
I call my book, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster, a book-length essay or set of interconnected essays but, really, this is a failure of language. Trouble is I simply don’t have words yet for what I’m trying to do, and for what the sui generis women on this list have already done. I long to explode notions such as genre, category, and book. But I don’t just want to destroy stuff. My whole project is to take all those exploded pieces and build a whole new art form. If this process sounds Frankenstein-like that’s because it is. Mary Shelley’s monster is a sort of patron saint of Weird Girls, which is itself a monster sewn together from the various “bodies” of all I was grappling with as I wrote it: motherhood, writing and how the former often tried, monster-like, to devour the latter.
My book explores the topic of the “art monster,” an ancient notion but one named by Jenny Offill in her 2016 novel Dept of Speculation—when the protagonist shares that she wanted to be this kind of artist who gets to focus solely on the art (often a man who achieves this dedication because some woman handles everything else) but then she became a wife and mother. Weird Girls asks what happens when that art monsteris also the wife and mother. But it also asks why we need to be limited by all these categories in the first place. I wanted my book to leave you with questions like, What if we’re all something more hybrid and audacious that lives outside the borders of definition?
As I have tried to do, the writers in this list create a whole new kind of literature by breaking every rule and busting down the walls of genre, blowing up such outdated notions as gender, race, genre, and ultimately notion itself. Read them and be thrilled and transformed but, please, whatever you do, don’t you dare categorize them.
Where to even begin when it comes to how Rankine’s book is impossible to categorize? Moving fluidly between what was once called “poetry” and “prose” (but also through “scripts for situation videos,” among other innovative approaches), Citizen unearths what Cathy Park Hong will later call the “minor feelings” of living in a highly racialized America. Even the fact that Citizen is usually (reductively) categorized as poetry reflects on the very questions of borders and boundaries Rankine calls into question in the first place. Through images, prose poetry, scripts for videos, and more, Rankine looks at everything from art and poetry to Serena Williams’ tennis matches to tell a story of race in America. Throughout the book, Rankine telegraphs Zora Neale Hurston’s adage, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” in theory and in practice—as in the case when Rankine dedicates consecutive pages to Glenn Ligon’s artwork that features these very words. In Citizen, Rankine drags poetics (a field often associated with, well, literal fields) into the flawed urban details of a racist modern world, but without losing any of the sublime.
There is something downright mesmerizing about Hong’s chronicling how binge-watching Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy enabled her to understand a whole set of emotions concerning race in America and her experience as the child of Korean immigrants. She labels these sentiments that Pryor unearths for her “minor feelings,” or the toxic experience of being forced to question any negative racial emotions under the regime of the so-called American dream. She touches, too, on the doubled sense of debt carried by Asian immigrants both to America—with all its false promises of dreams and equality—and to their parents, who gave up everything so that they may supposedly attain said dreams. By connecting her revelation concerning “minor feelings” to Pryor’s work, Hong also elevates the often-undermined genre of stand-up comedy, offering it up as a mode with much truth-telling potential when it comes to sociopolitical matters.
In this genre-defying memoir, Mailhot examines personal and collective trauma through the lens of Native culture. She covers her struggle with the specters of mental illness, abuse, and racism, to name just a few. In a memorable section, she checks herself into a mental hospital with one key caveat: that she be allowed to keep on writing. And keep on writing she does. A key insight comes when she muses on the problem of seeking help from the apparatus (the mental hospital, etc.) of a nation that has always excluded people like her. This leads to a remarkable sequence in which she contrasts the mental health mechanics of the U.S. with the Native practice of healing pain through ceremony. In Heart Berries, Mailhot invites readers to transcend any previous notions of “pain,” “ceremony,” and even “motherhood,” “mental illness,” and “womanhood,” and our brains become so much more expansive for it.
Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil
In this book, indeed a space for monsters, Kapil considers monstrosity as a metaphor for all sorts or creative and boundary-breaking potentiality. In this ode to hybridity, a presence called Laloo makes her way through various cultural landscapes, shedding light on each but very purposefully never imprisoning any given one in definition or category. Instead, the spirit of this book is one of shifting perspectives and modalities, which reminds us of our own creative potential as we encounter the lovely stuff of the world but also the more unsettling aspects. In this way, Kapil raises the following question: how can all of it—the world, our texts, our identities—be remade in any given moment? This poetic odyssey is neither for the categorizer nor the faint of heart, but it welcomes all who dare venture down its genre-breaking path.
Machado explores abuse, and the creativity that can help to combat and process it, via different genres in this beguiling book. For instance, there are chapters such as “Dream House as Inciting Incident” and “Dream House as Romance Novel.” Though this book covers traumatic territory, it’s important to note that it’s actually a blast to read. Fun though it might be, it’s built on weighty ideas, and this gives it a paradoxical flare as we zoom through “Dream House as Stoner Comedy” but all against the backdrop of deeper narrative and cultural theories. For instance, Machado draws on such work as Saidiya Hartman’s concept of the “violence of the archive.” And, let’s just say, if this doesn’t sound fun, this is simply not the book for you.
In this audacious book, Boully asks what the body would be if it literally were an essay… made up only of footnotes. In this way, she somehow creates a text simultaneously about presence and absence, love and loss. Boully plays knowingly with such often-debated forms as the “lyric essay” and even postmodernism itself; case in point: when Boully herself surfaces in a tongue-and-cheek manner in the spiderweb of footnotes to a text that never existed in the first place. Boully has spoken in interviews about having written this text after a breakup, which places it alongside such genre-exploding break-up books as Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as far as breaking forms to discuss breaks between people. Ultimately, if you are not a fan of linguistic and ontological rule-breaking, proceed at your own risk.
Chew-Bose’s virtuosic and hilarious book explores being a brown girl in a white world by disavowing the very thing that creates this contrast between “brown” and “white” in the first place: any clear-cut notion of category. Chew-Bose is having none of it, and you will feel lucky for this; she will take you on a journey to the far reaches of the mind when it’s let off its categorical leash. Though the trope of a heartbeat as linguistic punctuation officially appears in the first essay (“Heart Museum”) only, this insistent beat-beat-beat punctuates the whole collection, reminding us of the human at the center of all these identity politics. In the end, Too Much and Not the Mood is versatile enough to cover both matters of identity and matters of the heart while remaining innovative throughout.
On my birthday, Otto takes me to the moon. I’ve never been before. In my twenty-five years I’ve seen it glowing above me, the Man’s face on the moon pockmarked with the cities we built long ago. There are pictures, of course, from when it was a barren world, when it only shone bright white in the sky by the light of the sun. I have never known the dark of a new moon. When that time of month comes, the neon bathes the moon’s surface in a rainbowscape. Up there, the lights never turn off.
“Trust me, you’re gonna love it there,” Otto says. “You may never want to leave.”
We cruise in the ship with the window shades drawn. Otto had rented a private space taxi, just the two of us and the pilot. A playlist of old Bowie tunes streams from our helmets’ radios. Strapped in my seat, I feel the floating of my stomach, indicating we are in zero-gravity.
“You take all your girlfriends to the moon?” I ask.
“Only the serious ones.” He winks.
I was unsure when Otto first suggested the moon. The capital, Voluptas, stands on the near side in view of Earth, a once-glamorous getaway of riches and promise. My grandmother told me it was a luxury to go when she was young. It’s since lost its shine under dust, full of crime too distant to bother with: illegal gambling, prostitution, drugs. It’s basically a ghost town; the tourists turn to far nicer resorts. I think of my friends who have visited the outer worlds. Last year, Lana got engaged on a trip to Mars. My cousin is on her honeymoon on Titan. But those worlds are expensive, and the moon is cheap. Besides, Otto reassured me that the moon has revived in recent years. He hasn’t told me how. He said it will be a surprise.
I knew a girl who went to the moon, back when its reputation was at its worst. A rebellious schoolmate named Uma ran off with an older boy when we were teens. Photos came out of her at a lunar casino. Then, nothing. Uma disappeared. Rumors spread that the boy dumped her and left her to fend for herself on the wasteland of the moon as a hooker or beggar. But no one ever learned what happened. She was just another lost girl.
Back then, I wasn’t surprised that she ran away like she did. She always got into trouble—smoking at school, skipping classes for weeks at a time. I rolled my eyes with the rest of my classmates, like she deserved it. But now, a decade later, I look up at the moon and think about her for the first time in ages and hope that Otto is right. That the moon really has changed for the better.
Otto and I have been dating nine months. Our first date, we met up at the oxygen bar after work. I had just started my job in the temperature control department at the climate regulation facility; he’s a water engineer. At the bar, we swapped cannulas and sampled each other’s flavored air—extinct tastes, honey, banana. Sweetness hung on our breaths.
Now in the ship, I hold Otto’s hand through our thick gloves. He gives me a smile, and I give his hand a squeeze. I think I love Otto. I like that he says that I’m good at my job. I like that he calls me Shadow for keeping the planet cool. I like that, on a whim, he messaged me to say he booked a flight to the moon. I like not knowing what to expect from him.
A few months after we met, at the endangered species reserve, we looked out on sleeping baby pandas and he asked me if I planned on having kids.
“I used to think it wouldn’t ever be a possibility,” I said. “But now I think I do want kids. I really do.” The Earth was more stable and habitable than it had been in nearly a century. Work like mine and Otto’s meant we could put a pause on climate change. The future, for now, felt like something to chase.
But I could feel Otto bristle beside me. “I don’t feel the same.” He sighed. “The planet’s overpopulated enough as it is. More babies should be the last thing on everyone’s mind.”
I understood. The stigma of having children hadn’t yet disappeared with our generation. I’d had my own reservations in the past, but lately, I questioned why I even do my job if not for the future people who would live as a result of my work.
I rubbed his back and said, “We don’t have to think about that right now.” And we didn’t.
Still, I can see a future with Otto. I’ve hinted at getting engaged to him before, but he remains tight-lipped. Though I think he has a secret; I think he might propose on the moon.
A chime sounds in the ship. The window shades rise with a whir, and the surface of the moon comes into view. We have not reached the city; outside is crater plains and distant mountains. Barren in the way a quiet moment feels, but its emptiness is peace. I am awed. I could swim in the Sea of Tranquility. I could stamp its valleys with my footprint. The moon is bright gray against the black of space, and I see the shadow of our ship gliding across the surface as a dark spot on the moon. We are so small.
“See?” Otto tells me. “The moon isn’t the dump you think it is.”
We’re kilometers from land, yet I feel like I could punch through the glass and touch the lunar soil. I imagine dipping an ungloved hand into the ground. I imagine the texture of broken chalk.
We make our landing in Voluptas; the bubble-shaped buildings block any view of Earth. I disembark and am overcome with a sink-or-swim feeling as I adjust to the gravity. I leap ahead, far away from the ship. The glare of the city’s neon almost blinds me. I blink, and there are others I see, dozens and dozens of people semi-floating in their suits.
“I didn’t know the moon was this populated,” I call to Otto with my mic.
I look back. In the distance, he stands in the threshold of the ship’s door. I can’t see his face through his helmet’s shield.
“Otto?” I ask. “Are you coming?”
He doesn’t reply. Everything is so quiet. Then, in pops of static, I hear the humming of his voice tickle my ear with a rendition of that old Sinatra song about flying to the moon.Off-key and slow, it’s more eerie than romantic.
I feel so heavy where I should be weightless. “Otto,” I say again. “Let’s go.”
“Shadow?” his voice crackles in my ear. “I don’t see things working out between us. I’m just not looking for anything serious, you know?”
I feel like the floating suits are staring at me. “Otto, I don’t understand.” I try to run toward him, but I move in slow motion. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’ll still remember you, Shadow, every time I peer up at the sky. I mean, look!” He gestures to the Earth I cannot see. “The moon isn’t that far at all.”
Otto turns away. The doors of the ship close on him. A rumble tosses up rocks as the engine groans. I search for a reaction from the other people, the dozens of suits that congregate this crater. They do nothing, and I only see my face reflected back in their shields as I beg for help. Behind me, the ship blasts off in a cloud of moondust.
I start to hyperventilate, yet I know I’m wasting my precious oxygen. I rack my brain for a clue to what went wrong. Was this because I mentioned having kids? Hinted at engagement?
I remember my coworkers’ girlfriends, women who came to work events clinging to their partners until they broke up, and I never saw or heard from them again. I remember missing persons reports with an urgency that faded when bodies were never found. I remember Uma. Is she here? Is she in one of these suits stranded on the moon?
In high school biology class we did a lesson on decomposition. We learned that if you died in a spacesuit, bacteria surviving off the body’s last exhalations would start to break you down. Then, the corpse would ferment from the solar radiation. Over time, micro-meteoroids and debris would tear open the suit, and the dust of you would leak out into space. No body to be found.
I grab the shoulders of the person nearest me, shake them, scream to them. But it is a hollow sound, and the suit in my hands is a hollow thing.
What do you say, when your 30-something daughter asks to move back into your small apartment? What do you say, as a person who isn’t comfortable uttering the word “gay,” when she brings along her long-term partner—another woman? What do you say, when confronted with new ways of living, protesting, loving, and taking up space? These are questions that the narrator in Concerning My Daughtergrapples with. Kim Hye-jin’s novel, translated by Jamie Chang,centers the experience of being the mother of a queer child.
The mother tries her best to live a socially acceptable life: she works as a caretaker in a nursing home, donates some money to church, and—crucially—feels that she has done everything to dutifully raise her daughter. Her daughter Green, on the other hand, is an adjunct professor and keeps getting involved with campus protests. Green’s choices are indecipherable to her mother, who desperately wishes for Green to get married to a man. Meanwhile, Green’s girlfriend, Lane, keeps attempting to make conversation; home tensions escalate quickly. At her workplace, the mother grows increasingly concerned and attached to Jen, an elderly woman left without any family. Concerning My Daughter is a fascinating look at the double-edged nature of acceptance: on the one hand, the mother struggles to accept her daughter’s sexuality and life choices. On the other hand, she also desperately craves others’ acceptance, so as not to be perceived as an outlier in society. Kim doesn’t offer straightforward answers, but instead presents differing perspectives with nuance and heart.
Editor’s note: This interview was translated by Jamie Chang and Jaeyeon Yoo.
Jaeyeon Yoo: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that the publisher called this work “a mother’s coming-of-age novel.” How did you decide on the narrator for this book? What do you think we learn about ourselves—and our capacity for change—as we grow older?
Kim Hye-jin: The novel’s main narrative is about the experience of a mother struggling to accept her queer daughter’s life, but broadly speaking, it is a story about understanding. It is also a question of if we ever fully understand one another. If I had chosen the daughter to be the narrator, it would have been much more obvious what the novel was trying to say. But I wanted to point out that not all processes of understanding are achieved as immediately, as easily as we think. I wanted to follow the process of having difficulty with understanding—of refusing, hesitating, fearing, being frustrated, and yet not giving up. Because everyone’s individual experience is different, I think that one also experiences change differently as we age. In my case, I’ve found myself getting a little more flexible as I age. When I was younger, I only recognized my life as solely my own, and believed that I could control my entire life through my own willpower and effort. But since accepting that this is impossible, there’s been an aspect of comfort. Whereas I was only focusing on myself until now, it seems to me like I’m gradually seeing more of the world outside me.
JY: I was so struck by the depictions of the nursing home facilities. They were very painful and vivid, forcing readers to confront scenes we’d prefer not to think about. What made you focus on nursing homes?
Is there any place that can show the life of the elderly as honestly and nakedly as a nursing home?
KH: Is there any place that can show the life of the elderly as honestly and nakedly as a nursing home? This is probably not a story only limited to South Korea. The nursing home in the novel is the mother’s workplace, and a place where she thinks of her own old age, worries about her daughter’s old age. The miserable elderly lives of herself and her daughter—I thought, isn’t this the most fundamental fear of the mother, perhaps? Korean nursing homes appear frequently in the media, [and] I remember visiting my grandmother in the nursing home with my parents. There are definitely nursing homes that exist outside this model, but I think that the majority of nursing homes do not fully respect or take care of/comfort the elderly.
JY: What drew you to write about the social issues in Concerning My Daughter? What roles do contemporary news and/or activism play in your work?
KH: Issues—such as elderly care, generational conflict, LGBTQ+ rights—are problems that people living in contemporary Korean society face directly or indirectly. I too can’t help but worry about these issues, and they affect my writing. Of course it differs amongst individuals, but I wanted to talk about how these social issues affect an individual’s life, and how complex and multi-layered they are. If you look at this novel from within, it is about a mother in her mid 60s wrestling to understand the life of her 30-something-year-old daughter. But if you look at the novel from the outside, it is also a text written by me in my mid 30s, trying to understand my mother’s generation.
JY: I noticed the use of nicknames in this book, such as “Jen,” “Green,” and “Lane” (which are written in transliterated English in the Korean original). Was there any significant reasoning behind the nicknames?
KH: Green and Lane are nicknames commonly used by women in their mid-30s within the community. There is much more of this type of tendency these days, where people no longer live by the one name they were given at birth. In this manner, Green and Lane are people who want to live by names they have chosen themselves, not the names given to them by others. The name Jen came from an abbreviation for the name “Jaehee” (Lee Jaehee). At some point, a reader told me that the symbolism of the Chinese character “jen” (禪) means “to head towards good” in Buddhism. I remember being surprised by how that symbolism was strangely similar to the novel’s Jen.
JY: Another theme in Concerning My Daughter is the role of food. The narrator often frames an inability to “digest” certain knowledges, and offering rice is her way of showing love. Could you talk more about your thoughts—and perhaps the connections between—the acts of digesting, caring, and understanding? How does the body offer up different ways of processing information?
‘Did you eat?’ is one of the questions that my mother most commonly asks me.
KH: “Did you eat?” is one of the questions that my mother most commonly asks me. My mother is always curious about where, when, with whom, what I ate; she worries about whether I might have skipped a meal. I know very well that this is one way of showing love. That this is the most natural and direct expression of love, from a mother who isn’t accustomed to saying “I love you.” In the last scene of the novel, the mother pushes the rice and banchan to her daughter and the daughter’s lover. I thought that this, in that moment, was the most care that the mother could express. It is a way of love that I have experienced, and also a realization that, sometimes, forms of expression other than words can reach much deeper.
JY: Speaking of different ways of expressing love, how would you define “family”?
KH: In the novel, Lane asks the mother, “What is a family? Family is people who support you and are always there for you. Why is that family and not this?” Like this question, shouldn’t the family now be defined and chosen by the individual, rather than being stipulated by society, laws, or institutions? I believe that family should include not only the fixed and immutable traditional forms of family, based on blood, but also the various forms that individuals choose. If the category of family can be expanded to be more flexible than now, I think that we could find solutions to many of the problems that our society currently faces.
JY: What were some of the challenges of translating this book?
Jamie Chang: This project generated more psychic rather than technical woe: I was unnerved by how much I was sympathizing with the mother character, often chiding Green for not having her finances in order and putting her mother and partner in an impossible position. I had to do some soul searching for residual internalized homophobia.
Korean literature is just starting to imagine lesbian lives situated in contemporary Korean life.
As for technical woe, romanizing “Lane” was a bit of a challenge. Her name is spelled in Korean as 레인, which can be romanized as Lane, Rain, Lain, Rayne, etc. I thought “Rain” might be too on the nose, as the partner character is the glue that holds the tottering mother-daughter relationship together, so I chose Lane, as in Jane Lane—slightly cooler but supportive nonetheless.
JY: What would you say is distinctive about Kim Hye-jin’s prose, and how did you try to achieve a similar effect in English?
JC: Kim’s prose reminds me of Park Soo Keun’s paintings from the 1960s. When you examine it up close, all you see is texture. But if you take a few steps back and look at the whole canvas, images emerge. Kim uses uncomplicated prose to tell a deeply nuanced story, so I tried to get out of the way and let the story tell itself.
JY: In a 2019 interview, you talked about the potential of literature to help LGBTQ+ communities. There’s been a surge—at least, in the US publishing market—for translated queer Korean narratives; I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve noticed in current literary trends (both within South Korea and what is being translated), and queer Korean literature.
JC: I think, and Concerning My Daughter is a good example, the queer Korean narratives are starting to leave the realm of genre fiction and move toward literary fiction. With lesbian characters in particular, their narratives have been explored in the realm of young adult, fantasy, horror, or science fiction so far—teen lesbian succubus, post-apocalyptic lesbians, lesbians on Mars—as if it is inconceivable that lesbians would live down the hall from you, make your food, teach your children. I think Korean literature is just starting to imagine lesbian lives situated in contemporary Korean life, and that’s very exciting for me.
The premise of this book has all the ingredients for an excellent mother-daughter movie: impoverished lesbian activist moves in with her homophobic elderly mother and brings her partner as well. In the meantime, the mother plots to kidnap her favorite patient from the convalescent home… I really do hope someone adapts this story for the screen.
The first chapter of Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir Uncultured opens with a screech: It is 1993 and Mestyanek Young—then 5 years old—is inside a commune in Brazil, standing at the back of a line of children waiting to be paddled. As she explains, it’s a normal day in the Children of God, the cult founded by David Berg in 1968 and made notorious from allegations of sexual and physical abuse.
From that unsettling opening, the book follows Mestyanek Young through another decade of growing up in the notorious sex cult, a childhood spent moving from commune to commune while living in the shadow of near-constant physical and sexual abuse disguised as divine love.
At 15, she finally broke free and ran away to Texas, landing a job at Chick-fil-A and enrolling in a Houston high school before going to college and eventually joining the military. But the U.S. Army, it turns out, is grappling with problems not wholly dissimilar from those that plagued the Children of God: violence, misogyny and the constant fear of both. Not just the story of a harrowing upbringing and its aftermath, Uncultured presents itself as an exploration of group behavior, and the ways we are prone to programming and indoctrination.
When Mestyanek Young and I talked about that during a phone call, I reminded myself to make sure to avoid using the word “cult” in the casual ways people often do, as a descriptor for any group with the slightest tendency toward intensity. Saying that to a cult survivor seemed almost rude, an insensitive way of minimizing their pain. But in a book dedicated to exploring the parallels between cults and all other organized group behavior, it’s also kind of the point.
Keri Blakinger: By the end of the book you seem to come to a very cynical conclusion that there’s essentially no big difference between a cult and any other sort of organization with its own culture. Is that what you want readers to take away from this?
Daniella Mestyanek Young: I kind of agree with you that maybe the end is too cynical. But what I want readers to take away is just that when you see something we can all agree is evil—a sex cult that traffics children, except 100,000 people didn’t agree that it was evil—and you see such striking parallels with group behavior and echoes of rape culture in the United States Army, you are then invited to see that in your own life and ask, “Where are the parallels”?
I kind of jokingly say that I want readers to just walk into every group that they’re in and ask themselves: Is this a cult? Just because I do think that the fundamentals of group behavior are the same. I think groups come from a very similar DNA, and I also think that what people want to call good or bad values, for example, are sort of two sides of the same coin. You know, most people would never say love is a bad value, but David Berg weaponized love.
With this move into people-first organizations—which is definitely an improvement on profit-first—I think the potential to go into extremism is right there. We see it in the story of WeWork and the story of LuLaRoe, which are some of the best depictions of being in a cult that I’ve seen. And those are businesses.
KB: Constantly asking that question seems like such a lonely way to approach human interaction.
DMY: I think that for many of us cult babies, we do just fundamentally have a different view of group behavior, and human behavior. We didn’t get to form personal identities, so then you only have group identities. And then you get that taken away, or you learn to live without it. So I do think that for many of us, it’s hard to be in groups.
I study leadership, I study groups. Extensively. But I’m happy that I don’t have to be working at a corporation anymore, because I do think I’m quite cynical in how I look at groups and where the potential for toxicity is.
KB: If one of your takeaways is essentially that there’s no fundamental difference between a cult and any other organization, that seems in tension with the many chapters you spend delving into the abuses and trafficking in the cult and in the Army.
DMY: I guess it’s not that there’s no fundamental difference—it’s just that there’s no obvious and clear differences in the way that people think there are from outside these cults or these high-control groups.
Like I say in the book, people say to me all the time, like, you don’t seem like a cult survivor. I’m like, “Okay, how many cult survivors do you know?” And every documentary you ever see about cults, the only way we can talk about it as cult survivors is sensationalized. But what’s actually creepy about cults is that they’re so normal. Even the children that grew up trafficked in the sex cults can’t all agree that it was a bad thing. And that’s the same thing you see in many organizations.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the quote that human beings are all 99% the same, it’s that 1% of difference that causes all the world’s problems.And I feel like with groups, basically they all have 99% of the same DNA and the same potential trouble spots or potential great spots. But what that means is that no matter how great you think your group is, you’re also just 1% away from the sex cult that trafficks children. And even the Children of God didn’t start that way—they started as love, faith and Jesus and they went on a ten-year journey to become one of the most evil organizations.
KB: This book pretty extensively tackles misogyny as one of the prominent themes. Did you think of writing this book as like a feminist act?
There’s so much self-help and thinking about the individual in our individualistic society—but how much do we think about groups?
DMY: 100%. One version of how we thought of telling the story was going to be less focused on groups and much more focused on feminism. I think we ended up sort of blending, going through the process of telling both of those stories we ended up blending it a lot.
But I don’t think I realized how critical it was going to be of the culture in the military. I still saw myself as a proud Army captain. I mean, I didn’t resign my commission until last year. It was really hard for me to move on from being Army captain and understand that while I would hope everyone would agree rape culture is bad in the military, let’s fix it. But of course, I’m going to come under fire for speaking out against my family. So a lot of that was a journey for me and was surprising and the cover was reflective of that.
KB: Tell me about that picture of you that’s on the cover.
DMY: That’s me being trafficked as a child by a cult. A little soldier of God.
The cover was sort of the break in the identity for me. Like, “You’re really doing this, you’re really moving on from Daniella Mestyanek, U.S. Army captain, to that girl that wrote a book about cults.” And using this photo for me was hard too because the photo itself felt very exploitative.
All groups have the potential to become toxic, just like all people have the potential to become toxic.
This is me clearly at an age where I couldn’t consent to being filmed for stuff that we were then—all the children of the Children of God—were forced to sell on the streets all over the world. I kind of had this realization that part of the act of me writing this book and of telling this story was me taking back all of these things that happened to me and exploiting my stories for my own benefit and the ideas I want to talk about. So using this picture in a powerful way is kind of doing the same thing.
KB: What has the response been like so far? I’m asking this because I’ve seen some of your back-and-forths on Twitter lately, and I’m wondering how the fact that you are a woman writing about systemic misogyny in male-dominated spaces has influenced the response to this book.
DMY: I’ve gotten a lot of praise, a lot of applause, and a lot of, “You’re so brave.” I’ve also gotten: “Why are you lying about your service? Why are you a traitor? Why do you have to criticize the Army?” And I think I’m allowed to tell both the story of how I’m proud to have been one of the first women being sent out deliberately on those ground patrols and also how they were warning us to watch our backs and be prepared essentially for gang rape. I don’t think anyone wants me to tell those stories, but here we go.
KB: So what do you want people to get out of this book?
DMY: It is definitely a trauma survivor story and a recovery story. I wanted to write a book like the books that have helped me, so every time we vulnerably tell our stories, someone else is going to have these realizations. And I hope my story can be part of some other people’s survival guide. And also I want them thinking more about groups. And to clarify that cynical-ness—it’s not that I think all groups are the same. I just think all groups have the potential to become toxic, just like all people have the potential to become toxic. There’s so much self-help and thinking about the individual in our individualistic society—but how much do we think about groups?
In our society we have all these ways of isolating ourselves into one idea and everything is becoming more and more polarized, so I really do want people to stop and think about their group dynamics. You don’t have to compare it to a cult. I find that makes everyone uncomfortable, no one wants their organization compared to a cult.
At the end of the day, in no way am I saying the U.S. Army is as bad as the Children of God. But I’m saying here are all these exact same sorts of toxic structures that we see in both groups. And where can you look at those and then see those in your groups? And either, you know, help fix it or get out.
When people ask me about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, they usually want neat answers to questions like: how long did the Northern Irish conflict last? How many people died? Why did conflict break out? Who won? I can regurgitate some facts as quickly as Wikipedia: the conflict that became known as the Troubles broke out in the late 1960s and dragged on for about thirty years, “ending” in about 1998. More than 3,500 people died and tens of thousands were forcibly displaced. Nobody won.
But it’s hard to encapsulate the Troubles in a few facts. Seeing the conflict as being a territorial dispute is overly simplistic. Class strife, capitalism, sexism, religion, toxic masculinity, poverty, intergenerational trauma, homophobia, and tribalism were all accelerants thrown onto a bonfire that burned fiercely for far too long—and they’re all issues I tackle in my latest novel, Factory Girls. I see the Troubles as yet another traumatic period in a long history of violence on the island of Ireland, from the brutal conquest of Ireland by the English, to the partition of Ireland, through the bombing of Belfast in World War II, and up to the post-Ceasefire suicides that now outnumber those killed in the Troubles.
Despite—or perhaps because of—this history, Northern Ireland has inspired many brilliant works of fiction, from Booker prize-winning novels to deliciously dark indie hits. I’m proud to be part of a literary community who weave a rich tapestry of human stories from what had been locked away in dusty history books or sunk deep in people’s memories. My favorite Northern Irish books illuminate the pain, hope and trauma of the conflict while using humor and black comedy in much the same way we did during the worst days—to push through anguish with laughter as a painkiller.
Awarded the Booker Prize in 2018, Milkman examines the impact of gossip, violence and surveillance on a community that chooses to be willfully ignorant to the harsh truths of their reality The story unfolds in an unnamed city that is both recognizably Belfast and yet also a dystopian everycity. The unnamed protagonist, middle sister, learned early on not to draw attention to herself, and so she takes refuge from the violence exploding around her by keeping her nose in 19th-century works of literature, even when walking. Middle sister successfully keeps her mother and other family at arm’s length, not divulging her maybe-relationship with her maybe-boyfriend, never mind her interior life. But when she attracts the “romantic” attention of a powerful “renouncer of the State,” middle sister lands in a world of trouble.
Burns dissects the impact of toxic masculinity in a bleakly funny, forensically impartial narrative. I highly recommend that non-Irish readers listen to Bríd Brennan’s narration of Milkman, which nails the accent but also gives listeners “permission” to laugh at the blistering humor while sorrowing for lives cut short, curtailed or stunted by violence, dogma, and fear.
Across The Barricades by Joan Lingard
Like thousands of other teens schooled in Northern Ireland, I first encountered Joan Lingard’s work because Across the Barricades was on our syllabus. The best-selling Young Adult novel features a teenage romance between Kevin, who is Catholic, and Sadie, a Protestant. Their religious backgrounds make their love affair a doomed and dangerous Romeo and Juliet story. Before reading Across the Barricades I’d never found anything that described the conflict I’d been born into. I became obsessed with Lingard’s Kevin and Sadie series about the early days of the Troubles, times when you might meet and interact with a Protestant long enough to fall in love.
Fire Starters by Jan Carson
Like lots of Northern Irish writers, Carson explores how the shadow of the Troubles falls now in Ireland. In Fire Starters, she exploits the border between fantasy and reality to highlights how toxic masculinity drives men to violence, to “solving” problems with fire and fury rather than with dialogue, compromise, compassion and empathy. Carson’s work raises the destabilizing question at the heart of trauma recovery: “how does my pain deserve time and attention? How do I dare take the time to heal and grow when so many other people have it worse than me?”
Kennedy left Northern Ireland at the age of 12 after the family pub was bombed. She grew up in the Republic of Ireland and spent three decades working as a chef. Her debut novel, Trespasses is set in 1975 and depicts a world before the systemic self-harm depicted in Milkman, before the cumulative weight of decades of violence and segregation that defined my own experiences in the Troubles.
Trespasses is an atmospheric love story featuring Cushla, a young Catholic school teacher who works part time in her family’s bar, and Michael, a Protestant barrister who defends young Catholic men accused of crimes against the state. Kennedy doesn’t try to to do anything stylistically outrageous in her novel, rather it’s beautifully written, giving the reader a sense of something distilled, something rich, deep and calm despite the turmoil of the times in which it is set.
Dance Move by Wendy Erskine
Belfast-based English teacher Erskine writes stories that capture delicate shifts in mood and menace in a way that makes me feel like a teenager again, trying to sense if a pub or street is safe to enter. Funny and unsettling, using a trademark Northern Irish black humor alongside beautifully observed dialogue, her collection unravels the emotions and consequences of events from long ago.
Veteran peace worker Divin’s debut Young Adult novel Guard Your Heart explores how trauma affects three generations on both sides of what is still a divided society. Divin’s teen protagonists grapple with everything other “normal” teens are dealing with—from climate change and suicide to their sexual orientation—but they must also excavate and reckon with the past too. Funny, sad, fierce and brave, Guard Your Heart is a guide to forgiveness and moving on while not erasing the past.
Country is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad set during the Troubles which somehow manages to be so engrossing that Daisy Johnson has described it as being “like sitting in the pub listening to a good friend tell you stories.” The story is set after the ceasefire in “bandit country”—the lawless border area between the North and South of Ireland. A local woman has turned informer, enraging an IRA gang who storm a British army base. As in the Iliad, death and betrayal are plentiful, and yet Country manages to move beyond the tragedy and glory of war, nudging the reader to interrogate the classical narrative, to ask how we might move past the old ways.
The invented Western history of Thanksgiving, the one often perpetuated as early as elementary school and idealized in broader American culture, is a harmful myth. Here at Electric Lit, we want to use this day to draw attention to the many stories and experiences of Indigenous people and remember the true history and legacy of settler colonialism. One bright spot in another tumultuous year full of regressive politics and heartache is the great abundance of books by Indigenous writers published in 2022. Across all genres, Indigenous writers wrote stunning work that is vast and distinctive in its style and subject matter. Several of these books, which are included in the list below, are award-nominated and posed to leave a lasting mark on contemporary literature.
From intimate memoirs and poetry collections to gripping thrillers and sprawling coming-of-age novels, this roundup includes thirteen new books (nine of which are debuts!) by Indigenous writers across North America that you won’t want to miss.
Calling for a Blanket Dance is a remarkable coming-of-age debut that follows Ever Geimausaddle from infancy to adulthood. Ever, who is half Mexican, half Native American, grows up in a world riddled with violence and struggle. The novel begins with Ever, only a few months old, witnessing his father injured at the hands of corrupt police. After this life-altering incident, his mother struggles to keep her job while caring for her husband, and Ever faces obstacle after obstacle in a world that continually threatens his safety. As the novel unfolds, Ever’s Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across the state of Oklahoma to be closer to her, and Ever and his family continue to search for and find strength in their familial identity and the supportive communities that celebrate their heritage. With beautiful prose and a deeply moving cast of characters, Calling for a Blanket Dance introduces Oscar Hokeah as an important and exciting new voice in literary fiction.
This beautifully curated poetry collection takes readers on a journey from Joy Harjo’s early work to reflections on our current moment. A three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo has become a cherished figure in American poetry, celebrated for her poems that are at once musical, political, intimate, and interwoven with ancestral stories and tribal history. With an introduction by Sandra Cisneros, this collection offers fifty gems by Harjo that feel both stunningly precise yet all-encompassing in their predominant themes: love, death, resistance. The poems are accompanied by notes that offer unique insight into Harjo’s process and inspiration, from sunrises and jazz to Navajo horse songs. Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light is a true gift, and, as Cisneros says in the foreword, the world is better for Harjo’s artistic evolution: “Once she was the quiet girl. Now she sings for the nation.”
In this powerful memoir-in-essays, Greg Sarris explores questions about home, connection, and belonging in vivid prose that is both humorous and profound. Sarris, who is currently serving in his fifteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Granton Rancheria, grew up the adopted son of a white couple in California and did not fully learn about his indigenous heritage until his twenties. Becoming Story gracefully moves between the past and the present to chart Sarris’ journey toward learning about himself, his people, and his homeland. Sarris reflects on the forces, both historical and personal, that shaped his early life and his later work as a tribal leader, uncovering the delicate interconnections between personal story, community stories, and place.
Set in the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation in Maine, Morgan Talty’s debut short story collection Night of the Living Rez is composed of twelve incredibly crafted stories that explore what it means to be Native in modern America. The stories are linked through the character of David, a Penobscot boy living on the reservation, and his brazen and loving voice that illuminates life and death in this changing community. Talty’s writing is heartbreaking and humorous, portraying the particularities of boyhood, intergenerational trauma, and grief with an eye that feels both fresh and deeply truthful. The braided stories create a vibrant portrait of this Penobscot community, exploring everything from infant loss to porcupine hunts, runaway daughters to weed runs. Night of the Living Rez teems with compassion and insight, offering a reading experience that will devastate and haunt its readers in the best way possible.
At the center of this sprawling, multiple-point-of-view debut novel is Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties who is, more than anything, searching for herself. Adopted by a white couple who provided little affection or knowledge about her true history, Ruby is plagued by questions about her identity and sense of purpose, which has left her floundering. As the novel unfolds and Ruby’s story becomes ever more complex, the narrative dips into the perspectives of those in Ruby’s orbit: her birth parents and adoptive parents, past lovers, social workers, her children. The effect of this collection of perspectives is an intimate and nuanced illumination of Ruby as a woman surviving in the face of painful family history, colonialism, and patriarchy. Tender, funny, and brimming with the desire to love and be loved, Probably Ruby is a moving narrative about Indigenous identity and belonging.
A Calm and Normal Heart is a sharp and often-surprising debut story collection that illuminates the lives and desires of contemporary Native women. From Oklahoma to California, the twelve stories in this collection reckon with questions of belonging and home, asking what these promises hold, especially when one is of an identity that is constantly pigeonholed or overlooked. In one story, “THNXX by Alcatraz”, the young protagonist Mary finds herself at a Thanksgiving dinner and has to explain the true history of the holiday to her white host. Later, she states, “What I hate is that I feel like I live in a different country that’s here, inside this one, but no one believes my country exists.” The characters in A Calm and Normal Heart seek variations of home while traversing an unreliable and often inhospitable terrain, also dealing with histories of abuse and the effects of patriarchy. Riveting and full of imagination, Hicks is a writer whose smart wit and deeply tender characters pull the reader in from the first page.
In the town of Ada, the body of an unidentified Native woman is discovered after a snowmelt sends floodwaters into the town, washing the body up in its pull. The only evidence the medical examiner finds is tucked inside the woman’s bra: a torn piece of paper on which a hymnal is written in English and Ojibwe. This is the incident that begins Sinister Graves, a propulsive mystery set in 1970s Minnesota that follows 19-year-old Cash Blackbear as she attempts to discover the truth behind the disappearances of Native women and their newborns. Rendon’s mystery novel simultaneously grips and informs, depicting modern Native American issues and drawing attention to the violence committed against one of America’s most vulnerable populations. Powerful and haunting, Sinister Graves is a riveting character-driven mystery with the fierce and nuanced Cash Blackbear at its helm.
In the Hands of the River is a beautiful debut poetry collection that explores and affirms the connection between humans and the enivronment. Meadows gracefully weaves threads of personal narrative, ancestral history, and the natural world into stunning language that speaks to the experience of growing up a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage in Appalachia. The collection is filled with memorable imagery that allows readers to see the natural world anew, Appalachia a place where “mountains rub their shoulders blue.” With lush sounds and incredible emotional precision, these poems are both an ode and an elegy to the place in which Meadows spent his formative years.
Erika T. Wurth’s debut novel is filled with haunting. Set in Denver, Colorado and following 35-year-old Kari James who loves ripped jeans and Stephen King, this literary horror novel is dark, edgy, and deeply moving. When Kari’s cousin finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, the bracelet inadvertently calls upon her mother’s ghost, and Kari is plagued by visceral visions and dreams of her mother who went missing. Kari sets off on a mission to uncover what truly happened to her mother all those years ago. Part murder mystery, part ghost story, White Horse conjures a contemporary horror atmosphere through its love of dive bars, cigarettes, metalheads, and family secrets. Fans of immersive and thought-provoking horror will not want to miss this electric debut from Wurth.
This important and informative nonfiction debut details Indigenous American history, from the first humans to populate the Americas to the present. Krawec unpacks the harm and legacy of settler colonialism, interweaving personal narrative, history, scientific analysis, and myth to uncover and explore themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance. Throughout the book, Krawec gives voice to the pain and injustice experienced by Indigenous people but also asks readers, descendants of both Indigenous and European peoples, to imagine a better future through collective action. What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the environment and each other? At its heart, Becoming Kin is a powerful invitation to remake the world into a place that is more equitable and hospitable for both its people and its natural environment.
Forthcoming in January 2023, this gripping horror debut follows Mackenzie, a millennial Cree woman whose haunting nightmares about crows lead her on a journey to discover the truth about the violence committed in the place she calls home. Mackenzie’s sister Sabrina is dead, but two years later, night after night, Mackenzie’s bad dreams return her to a time when Sabrina was still alive: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite. As the novel unfolds, Mackenzie is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery of what really happened at the lake, and her visceral dreams begin to encroach upon reality, blurring the line between sleep and wakefulness. Bad Cree is a satisfying slow burn that explores loss, generational trauma, and violence through a narrative that is chilling yet, at its center, burning with a defiant resilience.
Set in the Pacific Northwest, this debut memoir by LaPointe is poetic and punk-infused, exploring questions about love, art, and home. At the start of the memoir, LaPointe offers a clear thematic trajectory for the narrative, writing, “What happens in the longhouse is not what this story is about, but this is a story about healing.” Healing is certainly a predominant thread throughout the memoir as LaPointe deftly moves between multiple timelines, offering stories about family history and personal experience and the ways they connect in the present. The memoir deals with large and painful topics such as colonialism, generational trauma, and loss, but also brings the nuances and particularities of LaPoint’s voice to the page, paying homage to the vibrant Washington music scene and her love for performance. Red Paint is a beautiful story about lineage, love, and what it means to reclaim one’s life.
Set in 1883 in the fictional mining town of Goetia, this dark fantasy novel follows the smart and passionate Celeste as she assumes the role of advocatus diaboli to defend her sister Muriel against murder charges. Muriel is accused of killing a member of the Order of the Archangels, the rulers of Goetia. In the world of Tread of Angels, society is split into two distinct classes, the Elect and the Fallen, with the Fallen largely discriminated against because they are descendants of the demons who chose Lucifer over God. Celeste and Muriel are both half Elect, half Fallen, but Celeste grew up with her father passing as Elect while Muriel lived in the slums with her mother as a Fallen. These complex social dynamics along with Roanhorse’s rich worldbuilding create an epic fantasy story filled with suspense, manipulation, and poignant religious imagery that serves as a searing allegory for our own world.
This holiday season as we reckon with what it means to live on a stolen land, let’s take the time to read Native authors in their own words. Here are highlights from our archives about contemporary Indigenous literature:
In his essay, acclaimed horror writer Stephen Graham Jones writes that his characters are Native because they’re Native, not because their Native-ness is going to let them save the world:
My characters had always been Blackfeet all along. There was never any reason to actually say it, but they always were. Just, I wasn’t hanging dreamcatchers and braids all over them, as that would be a lot like making them wriggle into loincloths so they could fit the limited expectations of . . . everyone, pretty much.
Empire of Wild is a novel steeped in folklore about a Metίs woman who searches for her missing husband and stumbles upon missionary revivalists with sinister motives. Native writers Melissa Michal and Cherie Dimaline talk about the ongoing struggle for Indigenous representation:
I write first and foremost for community. There’s no way I can remove myself from my world view, who raised me, who I am, where I come from.
Savannah Johnston’s short story immerses the readers in the worldview of a new father who wants to provide for his baby and his partner, but lacks the resources to do so:
Tommy wasn’t ready to go home. It had been six days since Donna and the baby were discharged from the hospital, and the house seemed to close up around them. For nearly a week, he woke with the sun and told Donna, doped up and perpetually naked, that he was going to look for a job. He didn’t tell her that there were no jobs, or that he spent the past four days with his uncles at The Office, a roadhouse off SH-54.
In Crooked Hallelujah, Justine comes of age in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, surrounded by loving, but flawed matriarchs. Spanning the 1970s to the present day, the novel follows Justine as she leaves her community to raise her daughter in Texas amidst poverty, trauma, and fundamentalism. In the interview, Alexander Sammartino asks Kelli Jo Ford about mother-daughter relationships, displacement, and rejecting religion:
Coming from people who I’ve seen work hard their entire lives at the expense of their bodies and well-being, and then not being able to have a good life once you no longer have the body to sacrifice—seeing people breaking their backs and struggling, but still ending up in circumstances that are hard, despite a lifetime of hard work.
A mixed-genre collection of prose and poetry, The Beadworkers takes place in the Native Northwest, centering on the lives of contemporary Native Americans grappling with kinship, yearning, and belonging. Beth Piatote converses with Carrie V Mullins about stringing together the future of Native American fiction:
I created a story in which absolutely nothing bad happens to the Native character. She, like her ancestors, moves freely from one place to another, “carrying her roots with her.” The reservation and the city are seamless, though different, sites of indigenous life. She has a stable, ordinary life and while she shows compassion for a poor white woman fleeing a domestic violence situation, it is still through Indigenous eyes that the reader sees the white woman. That, in itself, is important.
Postcolonial Love Poem celebrates the bodies of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women, while fighting against erasure and reclaiming desire. Arriel Vinson talks to Natalie Diaz about the pain America has inflicted on Native people:
The American dream has always been in shambles, in pieces for my family, my community, and me. We never dreamed it. America never meant for us to dream it. And Mojave dreams are too strong for what is American. So they don’t match up.
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese contains bitingly funny autobiographical musings about Tiffany Midge’s life and identity as a Standing Rock Sioux woman, encompassing topics like offensive Halloween costumes to reclaiming Thanksgiving. In their interview, Julie Vick converses with the writer about why there should be thousands of great Native American novels:
Two things always present in classic Western literature are death and tragedy. And by that logic there should be thousands of great Native American novels.
An excerpt from her novel Crooked Hallelujah, Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave” follows a Cherokee woman who returns home after a long absence to tend to her elderly mother:
Justine squinted into the photograph, trying to imagine her grandmother so young. She had been a maid in a big ranch house when she’d met Justine’s grandfather, a barn hand who Justine knew had been a terrible drinker. It wasn’t hard to imagine Granny’s strength. She was kind, but she was not soft. That’s where Lula got it, where Justine got it, and Reney, too, Justine figured, though she’d done her damnedest to keep Reney from ever having to access that kind of strength. Granny had been brought up in Indian orphanages and, later, Indian boarding schools. She’d never taught her grandchildren the language beyond basic greetings. She simply said that life was harder for those who spoke it.
Feed is a poetry collection that’s “an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York’s High Line park.” In their conversation, Arriel Vinson talks to Tommy Pico about what it means to live a full life:
Some things that were adequate nutrients in the past don’t work anymore. Some things you loved, you can’t really digest anymore. Today, especially, with the endless feed of the internet? Sometimes you need to restrict some streams of intake. Sometimes you need to log off.
Elissa Washuta’s essay collection “White Magic” reckons with the colonization of spirituality and what it means to be a Native witch. In the interview, Deirdre Coyle asks the author about confronting personal pain through tarot, pop culture, and magic:
Even though I don’t have the same methods as witches, the aims are ultimately the same as they ever were, and that’s the kind of witch I am.
The visit was proposed during a period in which I was suffering from the tyranny of time. Which isn’t to say I was suffering because I was getting older—I didn’t care about that. I was consistently underestimating how long it took to do a thing, to do anything, consistently believing that I could accomplish, say, five things in a given span of time when really, I could do just a single thing, maybe two. This disconnect began to emerge in my understanding as a failure, and through repetition—that is, over time—the failure became a pattern of failure, until the pattern, a thick, intricate brocade, became indistinguishable from me, from my life.
There were books, I knew, to combat this. Books and podcasts, TED talks and seminars, all of which sought to solve the time problem. I didn’t want to solve it. I didn’t want to “manage my expectations” or “be realistic.” I simply wanted to believe that I could accomplish a certain number of goals in an arbitrarily delineated period of time, and then, one day, accomplish them. And the next day, do it again, until a new pattern could be created, one of success and satisfaction, that would with no effort eradicate the previous pattern, unspool it until it was just a pile of thread that could blow away on a stiff breeze.
The issue, or at least a big part of the issue, was that I did not want to give anything up in order to meet my goals. I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do, for as long as I wanted to do it, and also do the things I needed to do, either for work or for my own personal prosperity. I was a bookseller, and a large part of my job was to read. Not every bookseller, believe it or not, reads. But I was a serious bookseller, and I wanted to be able to talk about the books on the shelves, in order to better sell them. I would never run out of things to read, and while this fact may have agitated or overwhelmed certain kinds of readers, it brought me a lot of solace. There was so much, I would never read it all, but for as long as I lived, there would be new things to read. Books were a kind of eternity, to me. The fullest extent of time, or the complete absence of it. In the end, it amounted to the same thing.
What I liked to do, every morning without exception, was to sit in my big chair with a cup of coffee and my phone, and do several word games. It was one of those rare practices that was both luxurious and practical, the way many people felt—not me—about having their hair done. I’d sit and sip and punch in letters and feel my brain slowly come awake, the fog of whatever weird dreams had decamped during the night starting to lift, the first birds airing their first grievances outside the window. Sometimes, the cat would sit on my lap, which would necessitate a pause, a recalibrating of coffee mug and blanket, an obligation to set my phone down in order to dispense the required pets (ear, ear, neck, base of tail, never belly).
After my daughter got up and off to school, or to wherever she was going if it was summertime, I’d finish the coffee, the word games, the tidying up. I’d review my list, which was rarely written down, but always contained items like “finish x book,” “start y book,” “submit edits for z.” I was a freelance editor and consultant and worked for different companies and the occasional writer hoping to land an agent with their novel or memoir. The only reason I was qualified to do this was because I had read so many books, and knew grammar better than most. I made a website advertising my services and for seven months nothing happened. Then, someone asked to work with me, and agreed to my rates, and after that, it was steady going. That was twelve years ago, and I’ve rarely had less than three projects happening at once since.
So I triangulated my life among the bookstore, my family, and my freelance work, not necessarily in that order, because a triangle has no order. I started each morning in my chair, and also, before either going to the store if it was a store day or staying home to do freelance work if it was a home day, took a long walk, during which I’d alternate between listening to an audiobook and leaving voicemails for my best friend. My best friend and I had a decades-long arrangement: we would never pick up when the other called. We hadn’t seen or spoken directly to one another since we’d lived together in those punitively disorienting years after college. We moved to separate sides of the country, so it was easy to never see one another. Not infrequently we’d email, and over time, there were enough emails between us to fill a book twice as long as Infinite Jest and three times as long as Ulysses, more or less.
I felt bad for anyone who didn’t have a best friend they never saw. I felt bad for anyone who thought voicemail was an outdated, annoying technology. The perfectly left voicemail could take up the cellular phone standard of three minutes, or it could span nine minutes, fifteen minutes, each voicemail a discrete chapter that tantalizingly flowed into the next with the hasty tap of your person’s name. More than fifteen minutes was a lot to ask, six was the sweet spot, but when you were on a roll, describing, for example, the way your fourteen-year-old daughter still wrapped herself in a towel when she got out of the shower in the exact way she used to when she was five and had just climbed out of the public pool—Superman-cape style, with the same far-flung look she got back then from the cold, the abject stillness, the slightly pushed out bottom lip, the inability to do the precise thing that would make her warmer faster: dry herself, vigorously rub the towel up and down and all over. I didn’t routinely spy on my daughter during her showers or anything, but we had a stubborn bathroom door that wouldn’t close all the way, and once in a while, if I was walking down the hallway at the precise moment she was pushing aside the shower curtain, I could see her, stark still, towel around her shoulders, that middle-distance stare.
These were the moments worth transmitting to my best friend, the precise snapshots that would tell her both who my daughter was and who I was for taking notice. A friendship isn’t based on shared interests or sheer enjoyment of one another’s company. It’s based on time, pressure, and voicemails.
. . . he thought he felt better, but then he started feeling worse. So I took him off of it completely, and the doctor got mad at me. But what was I supposed to do? What are you supposed to do when your child is beside himself with rage one moment, and then the next hysterically crying, saying that he wants to die? Wait til Monday? Anyway, I hope you all are doing better than we are over here. It just feels like it has been one disaster after the next. I want to hear how it went with the volunteer thing.
I never saved her voicemails, even though there were more than a few, over the years, that deserved their place in the voicemail hall of fame. You could never plan them, but you knew when they were happening—just the right flow of language, zero stumbling or “umm-ing” into the next topic, a bit of spontaneous humor that you laughed at, right then, while leaving the message, knowing that she, listening on the other end, would be laughing too, that the past and present would be winnowed into the same instant, marked by your shared laughter. That was the whole magic of the voicemail: like a photograph, it captured a moment of attention, of bringing to light, out of infinite subjects and emotions that could be illuminated, the one or three that deserved preservation, an audience; the ones that merited the ear of your best friend.
Nothing was off-limits to the voicemail but there were matters that rarely came up—our jobs, for example. I wasn’t entirely sure what she did, something with numbers, in an office, but that’s about all I knew. Our spouses didn’t get much voicemail time. Parenting, however, was a big one. The loneliness of disliking it sometimes, sometimes more than sometimes. The decision-making fatigue. The constant worry about the encroachments of the internet, social media and predatory accounts and the loathsomeness of the phrase “screen time.” We weren’t made for the digital age, we’d complain, we weren’t made for this country, for this earth. Why did other parents seem tougher than us, less fazed than us, happier than us? What would be the reward for our vigilance and hypersensitivity? Early death? A heart attack? [Laughter.]
We also volleyed a fair amount about books we’d read, movies or TV we’d seen, articles we’d come across. We’d talk about our other friends, friends that the other would never know—good ones and bad ones, school friends and work friends, appalling behaviors at the neighborhood potluck.
She didn’t bring anything, which was fine, but then she took home someone else’s casserole dish? Like the dish was empty, and she’d come empty-handed, so what the hell happened there? Was it brazen stealing, or did she somehow convince herself she’d brought the seven-layer dip herself? Oh crap this is work calling, I have to go.
The arcane idea of the voicemail, its original purpose via the answering machine, was to simply let someone know that they’d missed a call from you, and to leave the barest information necessary to get a call back: name, time of day, phone number. Once in a while, a doctor’s office or other such service-related entity might confirm an appointment, such that no call back was necessary. Static data, as a note scrawled on a “while you were out” pad.
The new voicemail was a conversation, an art form. In all the years of perfecting our craft, we never mentioned it, never alluded to the fact that it was not merely holding our friendship together—it was our friendship. The body and blood of it. The currency and the sale. Without our five-day-a-week—weekends were for, it would seem, our lived lives, our families, our shifted routines—dialogue, we would not know one another at all, to say nothing of our most intimate details.
If I was honest, and why wouldn’t I be, I adored the arrangement because I found conversations in real time to be, more often than not, dreadful. The way I had to make sure my face was doing something neutral or appropriately reactive. The way I had to wait for my turn to speak, meanwhile enduring someone’s half-baked wisdom or boring anecdote or, god forbid, dream. The voicemail dispensed with all that. It was a monologue—no, a sterling, three-minute soliloquy. It floated between communication and rumination, letter and diary. A podcast for one. A very short play. A stand-up routine, a confession. We were so good at it, and it was ours.
You can maybe imagine where this was going.
I had my big chair, my word games, my voicemail and audiobook walks, my job and my other job. I was chronically late for nearly everything I needed to show up for, though I never missed a deadline. I punished myself by going to bed too late and waking up too early and being, always, more exhausted than I needed to be. And I talked about this a lot, on my voicemails to my best friend, this issue I had with time, something between denial and rebellion.
Every single day I imagine that I will get faster, that I’ll solve my puzzles faster and drink my coffee faster and take my walk faster and create, with my own efficiency, additional hours in the day, hours during which I could finish the two books I’m reading, as well as the manuscript I’ve been editing for weeks now. I just keep believing that there is a state of “being finished” that will last longer than it lasts, that can be permanent. That I can somehow fit all of my tasks and goals into a single day, and then be done forever? It makes no sense. I love what I do, but I seem to be striving for an endless nothing, the other side of whatever this side is, where time no longer exists and I can be in my chair or take a walk for as long as I want to, with no regard for whatever comes next. An eternal present, maybe? Do you ever feel this way?
Early one morning in February, after my word games and coffee but before my walk, I sat down to send an email that I’d meant to send the night before. I didn’t like opening my email before going for my walk; I didn’t like the reminders that awaited me there, crowding my thinking before the day was adequately underway. With some trepidation, I opened an email from my best friend with the subject line: April? For over a year, we’d used the same thread to write back and forth, whose subject line was, for reasons I eventually forgot, I give up lol. This was a fresh, standalone email, and its subject was the name of a specific month, a little over a month away.
J__ has a billion frequent flier miles and, as I keep rambling about, I really need to get away. What do you think? I could take a Friday and a Monday off, say, the 29th? I suppose I should be here for Passover, not that we do much, but J__’s family would be disappointed. I don’t think this conflicts with Easter? Let me know! Gah so excited to maybe see you for real. Would the universe even be able to handle it, or would we burst into flame?
My bowels churned; I felt as if I’d just read about a death. In a way, I had. I read the email three more times before starring it, my fingers on the trackpad of my laptop shaking, and slamming the machine shut. I used the bathroom like someone in the throes of food poisoning, the coffee and water I’d had earlier coursing out of me along with what felt like the past three days’ worth of nourishment. I was sweating, I was cold; my body seemed to be in possession of a knowledge that my brain felt too slow and curdled to grasp.
The phone had always been our medium, our chaperone, our interlocutor. Without it, we’d be as gross to one another as everyone else was to us.
Hurriedly, I put my sneakers on and my AirPods in and left for my walk. Ordinarily, I would have immediately listened to my best friend’s voicemail from the day before, and proceeded to leave her a voicemail in reply. But my finger hovered over her name for a full two blocks while I listened to silence. Why would she do this to me, to our perfect friendship? A visit? The disappointment I felt was catastrophic; the panic, annihilating. Would she stay in my house? Amongst my things? The dream of being in the school hallway in your underwear—this was worse. The phone had always been our medium, our chaperone, our interlocutor. Without it, we’d be as gross to one another as everyone else was to us.
Finally, I pressed play.
Hey, I just sent you an email about this but I’m so excited I had to call. Let me know! It’s the first non-work trip in ages and I feel zero guilt! I want to think of some fun stuff that we could do together—a spa day? A hike? I know you’ve talked about how there are some trails close by. And I can’t wait to meet all your people. Ahh ok I’m spinning out. Call me soon, I’ll actually pick up for the first time maybe ever?! Or send me an email or text or whatever.
I remembered with shocking clarity my mother’s cancer diagnosis from twenty years ago, the way my father told me that even with the most aggressive treatment, recovery was not possible, that she would die soon, within the year maybe, and how for weeks afterward, and really until her death, her death sling-shotting me into some other less chaotic realm of grief, I walked around feeling like a new person, because the news had changed me, had sliced my life across a perforation that I hadn’t known existed. Now, I leapt over a puddle and cursed myself for comparing a friend’s would-be visit to my mother’s illness, what’s wrong with you, what, truly, is wrong with you, but undeniably, I felt a similar level of disbelief and horror, a sort of suctioning out of my good, functioning self, and a taxidermizing of whatever was left.
I looked at my watch and noted where I was on my route and realized that I was, for the first time ever, perhaps, ahead of schedule, that walking while listening or leaving voicemails had for years, without my fully knowing it, slowed my gait. It’s hard to leave a voicemail of the caliber I was used to while walking quickly; one is much more likely to amble. I arrived home and took a shower and sat at my desk with the morning’s editing tasks and somehow completed all of them with enough time to wash the breakfast dishes and still be at work ten minutes early. Alongside my deep dread over the visit voicemail and email I felt a triumph akin to a scientific breakthrough, as though I had, by knocking over beakers and mixing forbidden agents, stumbled into the very solution I’d been seeking. I had discovered Time itself.
From work, I Googled “getting a new cell phone number.” Reddit boards teemed with stalkees, as well as regular folk who simply wanted to feel like they belonged in their new city by adopting their new area code. One person was hellbent on getting “69” and “420” in their new number, and Sprint apparently had made it happen. I could do this. It would be a pain but it wouldn’t kill me.
Driving home, I imagined calling my best friend and talking to her in real time. I imagined first telling her, I’m sorry, no, a visit just isn’t possible right now, we have far too much going on—and tried to imagine her accepting this, just this, with no further explanation. I couldn’t see it. We explained everything to one another, the most minuscule decisions of our lives, and the big decisions, too—anything I’d ever done, with few exceptions, had been sussed out via voicemail, or a volley of voicemails. Becoming a vegetarian, creating my website, changing my children’s schools, investing in crypto—my best friend was privy to all manners of decisions. How could I get away with, just simply, “no”? I imagined saying yes and then calling her two days before she was due to arrive and inventing an emergency—child in the ER, flooding in the basement—but I was far too superstitious.
So I imagined the conversation during which I said, I can’t wait to see you, this is too good to be true, please come whenever it works for you, and stay as long as you like. And my stupid eyes filled with tears at a red light because of course this was the right, true, correct thing. This was the “spirit of yes” we were always mooning about: opening ourselves, grabbing the conch from the Hecatoncheires of No that lived in our hearts and placing it in the hands of our better angels, that slim margin of self that desperately wanted more playing time.
Then I imagined her showing up at my door with her doubtless fashionable suitcase and traveling outfit, and my stomach lurched as it had earlier that day. In the months after my mother died, all I’d wanted was to call my mother to talk to her about how my mother had died. Turning onto my street, I was seized with the desire to leave a message for my best friend, detailing the acute anxiety brought on by the prospect of my best friend’s visit. Now I needed another best friend that I could leave voicemails about this best friend to. I pulled into my driveway and pressed my forehead gently against the top of the steering wheel. I’d hand-sold two copies of Moby Dick that day—a book about someone who got what they thought they wanted and died. Life was rife with contradiction.
When the doorbell rang, the house was pristine. I’d hired someone to come and clean, not just the regular parts of the house but the ceiling fans and baseboards and air vents. I’d taken the day, Friday, off of work, and cleared the weekend. The store was closed on Mondays, the day she would be leaving. She’d insisted on taking an Uber from the airport to my house, even though we lived less than fifteen minutes away. It’s fine! It’ll give me a little time to calm down from the flight, flying makes me so nervous.
We still hadn’t spoken in real time.
I’d set out a carafe of ice water with lemon, and a modest cheese board, and a bottle of rosé. I put a kettle on in case she wanted coffee or tea. The bunch of ranunculus I’d bought the day before was drooping prettily in its vase, the cat asleep in a shaft of sunlight on the rug. For a moment I allowed myself to enjoy the tidiness of my home, which too often felt threadbare and hodgepodge, stuck in the thrift store sensibility we kept meaning to leave behind us, periodically sizing up matching end tables and lamps online before abandoning our cart and using the money for something else we apparently cared about more. But today, the house shone, cozy and inviting, more ready for company than I felt myself to be.
I opened the door and my brain surged, ad hoc, into problem-solving mode. Nimbly leaping from my retinas to my photoreceptors to my optic nerve, the signals translated thusly: WHO IS THIS, THIS IS NOT MY FRIEND, WHERE IS MY FRIEND.
We spoke at the same time:
“Can I help you?”
“Ahhh!!!! I’m here!”
I don’t have the words to describe how not my friend this person was. My friend was petite; the woman before me was close to six feet. My friend was a brunette; this person was a redhead. She wore a long dress and a denim jacket and her sneakers were nondescript, nothing like the designer clothes my friend wore and had worn since I knew her, her outfits on social media regularly garnering comments like “you are so stylish” with six to ten heart-eye emojis.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“I’m sorry–you just–I’m–you look so different than I remember,” I stammered. My stupid stomach started hurting. Nothing kept more reliable time than my oversensitive gut.
She laughed. “It has been so long. You look exactly the same! Are you going to invite me in, or—”
With clumsy words and gestures, I let her in, this stranger who was my best friend.
“Your house! I love it. It’s so you. Can I use your bathroom?”
I showed her to the bathroom where I’d put out fresh hand towels and placed a single ranunculus in a bud vase on the sink. My heart raced. I worried about my brain, convinced something had happened to it. The onset of the rotating possibility I had always feared, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or schizophrenia or something not yet named.
At the kitchen table, my friend ate hungrily, pouring water, pouring wine. “I almost took a Xanax before I boarded the flight, but I didn’t want to be spaced out when I got here. I downloaded this meditation app for nervous flyers and I think it worked. A soothing British male voice repeatedly telling me to pluck a ‘blowball’ and blow the seeds, which I did, over and over,” she laughs. “It took me a minute to figure out that he was talking about dandelions. My seatmate must’ve thought I was nuts.”
I nodded. Even her voice was different than the one I knew so intimately from twenty years of voicemails, its pitch higher and more spirited.
“I just learned this year, from my son, that the yellow dandelion and the wishy puff thing are the same flower–did you know this?” She smeared goat cheese on a cracker and shoved it in her mouth.
“Yes,” I said distractedly. “They’re both dandelions, just at different stages. First they’re yellow, and then they turn into the puffs. My daughter told me that, too.”
“It’s weird that we never learned it in school,” she said. “I think this generation is going to be so much smarter.”
I thought of the many voicemails we’d left each other about how worried we were about our children, technology, climate change. About how burdened young people often seemed. The woman at my table seemed to have a rosier view.
“How is it going for Alex, being off the meds?” I ventured.
She frowned. “Who’s Alex? Oh, do you mean Adam? He was never on meds.”
I felt dizzy, not figuratively. The floor seemed to be moving.
“I swear, on the voicemails–”
“Here, do you want some water? You just got super pale.” She handed me a glass.
I took a sip, the slightest bit relieved that the water was water, tasted like water.
“You were saying? About a voicemail?” Her intensely blue eyes focused on me, the eyes of a stranger, but a stranger filled with concern for me, who was not a stranger to her.
I felt terrified of trying to explain, and being told that she’d never left anything other than a perfunctory voicemail in her life, if she’d ever left me one at all.
“I just was remembering a voicemail you’d left, about Adam, whose name I thought was Alex, and ADD medication,” I mumbled.
“Weird! You must be thinking of someone else.”
I am thinking of someone else, I wanted to say.
My daughter arrived home a short while later, pink-cheeked from her walk from the bus stop, and accepted a big hug from my friend, along with a set of fancy soap and lotion.
“My boys don’t get excited about stuff like this,” she said conspiratorially, and my daughter laughed and thanked her, giving me a look as if to say she’s great.
When my husband got home, I relaxed a little. Maybe, in his infinite reasonableness, he could make this make sense. He was so likable, so good with people. After a round of warm hellos, he grabbed a beer and began prepping hamburgers for the grill. I left my friend playing rummy with our daughter at the table and joined him in the backyard.
“I mean, what the hell is going on, right?” I asked him. It was a beautiful evening.
He looked at me quizzically. “With what?”
“With–are you kidding? That’s not her! It doesn’t look anything like her! I can’t figure it out!”
“What do you mean, that’s not her? Of course it’s her!” He started scrubbing the grill grate with the steel brush. “I mean, she looks a little different, but we all do. It’s called aging.”
I felt my insides collapsing, like icicles in a thaw. I hadn’t eaten much all day. It was the familiar burn of exhaustion that always plagued me when we hosted anyone at the house, the odious part of my personality that turned every fun, low-key hang into a strenuous big deal.
“What’s wrong with me,” I managed to say, before the tears came.
“Hey, it’s OK! It’s probably overwhelming to see her after all of these years! Of course you’re emotional,” he stopped scrubbing and hugged me, and I felt more angry than soothed, but I did feel slightly soothed.
“It’s not her,” I muttered into his good-smelling shirt.
“Well, her, you, it doesn’t matter. Reunions can be a lot,” he said gently.
“No, I mean, it’s literally not her,” I said, pulling away.
My husband turned his attention back to the grill, a disturbed look on his face.
I wanted, now, nothing more than to throw a tantrum, stiff-backed on the grass wailing a single syllable: no.
I felt the claustrophobia of having nowhere to go, a terrible fate in one’s own home. I remembered the feeling from childhood, laying on the ugly rug in my parents’ den, concentrating on the individual fibers, believing, on some level, that I could hypnotize myself out of it, disappear from my own prying brain. The ability, the will, to cope with my current situation seemed to slough from my body like dead skin, all at once, dramatically, all the cells that make a person calm and reasonable, just gone. The weekend stretched before me as an endless, odious task, and I wanted my chair, my privacy, my swathes of time to use and misuse as I wished; I wanted, now, nothing more than to throw a tantrum, stiff-backed on the grass wailing a single syllable: no.
Instead, somehow, I set the table. To an outsider I may have looked like someone who’d never set a table before, so slow and pronounced were my movements. Tiny mental calisthenics: by the time I finish folding this napkin, something will make sense. From the kitchen, I heard easy laughter, my daughter’s voice free from the strain she often bore in adult company. She wasn’t accustomed to visitors; we didn’t get a lot of them. Our families of origin, my husband’s and mine, were small and far away, real see-you-when-we-see-you types, a trait we’d both perhaps inherited. It felt ridiculous to me to get on an airplane to stay in someone else’s house, when we had technology to keep us both in touch, whatever that meant, and comfortable. To keep us, crucially, apart. My problem, I realized, as I carried condiments out to the table, was that I didn’t consider missing a person a problem to be solved.
The burgers were good but I had to keep reminding myself to pick mine up, take a bite, keep my face from going slack, participate in the conversation. During my husband’s story about the time a tree fell on our house, I excused myself. My friend’s purse was on a chair in the living room, her phone nearby on the coffee table. I touched her name on the Favorites list of my phone. After three seconds, her phone lit up and started buzzing. I let it ring until it went to voicemail. A recorded voice said “the voice mailbox you have called is full. Goodbye.”
“I missed a call from you,” she said later, when I was making sure she had what she needed for bed. She was scrolling through her phone, and her face looked happy.
“Weird,” I said. “Must’ve been by accident.”
In bed with my husband I feigned sleep because I did not want to talk about my friend. I was relieved that she hadn’t wanted to stay up late—she had, in fact, after we’d cleared the dessert dishes, asked if it would be rude for her to retire early. My husband squeezed my hand gently before rolling over and I was left with a solitude that felt precarious, surveilled. I calculated the number of hours left in the weekend. I interrogated my memory as if it were on trial.
The simple truth, though, was that everyone loved my friend. In the history of houseguests, a better one did not exist. My daughter asked repeatedly when we could go visit her, when she would be coming back. The irresistible charm that my husband emanated whenever he was around people he genuinely liked was emanating full force. At some point late on the second day, I felt myself giving over to the allure of this person, this new old friend. It was a loosening of some central scaffolding within myself that seemed to happen without me and without any warning. Suddenly I wanted her here. I wanted the now that she was in. I felt like she had become the familiar, and I had become a stranger in the best possible way.
We went out to dinner that night, just the two of us, and laughed until people turned around to stare.
“Should we order dessert,” she giggled, dividing the remainder of the bottle of wine between our two glasses.
“I’m so full,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes, “but yes.”
We did all the things my friend had hoped to do. Visited the Helen Frankenthalers at the museum, hiked along the river, went to the bookstore, where I showed her around and she bought all six books I recommended. We spent a half-day at the fancy spa that I’d never been to, sipping herbal tea before and after our hour-long facials in a heavily bambooed room redolent with mint and sandalwood, sighing in our plush robes. We loafed in the living room and backyard, drinking coffee and paging through magazines. We took my daughter to the record store and out for ice cream. The weather was a triumph, like no spring before or since. An incandescent ease had settled over my home, and I started to feel that I’d been given more than companionship, more than fun. Rather I was in a revised relationship with time, a romance with the present moment. For the first time, perhaps in my whole life, I wasn’t concerned about what came next, or how long anything took. We did more in one weekend than seemed strictly possible, as though the rules of time had changed, as though we were changing them with our very togetherness. Like being restored to health when I hadn’t known I was sick, like being given new lungs or better eyes, a completely different personality.
“You seem so happy,” my husband said, as we were getting ready for bed on her last night with us.
“I am happy,” I said. “She’s better than—” and I wanted to say my other friend, but I didn’t want to go back there, back to the self that refused weird, good, minor miracles—“than I remember.”
Still, I was me, and I knew I was me, and that I’d eventually return to myself, my baseline of trenchant narrowness, knowing exactly how I got in my own way and yet refusing to go around, to clear a path. Before long I’d be back in my chair, convinced I could get it right, knowing I would get it wrong, my life and how to order it, how much to exert on what, and when. On the morning of my friend’s departure, I woke up before the sun and went for a walk. I needed some way to say goodbye to her that would take into account my own experience of her having been here, having been real despite everything I knew, understood, remembered. I had to tell her about her time here, and about me. I said a prayer that her phone was on silent and pressed her name.
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