Who Is a “Bad Jew”?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Guess I’m a Bad Jew. That’s the same refrain I give when I sprinkle cheese on tacos or forget the second verse of the kiddush.

This line is repeated across the Jewish world so consistently that it feels like an ontological category, an objective measure of a class of Jews who simultaneously embarrass our people and to which we secretly belong. But in the ever evolving world of Jewish tradition, there really is no one way of doing things, no perennial and unchanging standard, so why all the shame?

As Emily Tamkin unpacks in her new book Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, the label is more about how some people seek to marginalize opponents inside the Jewish world, and who we decide are representative of the type of Jewishness we want to survive. Whether it is right-wing Zionist leaders lobbing criticisms at anti-Occupation activists, or progressive Jews decrying the assimilationism of their wealthy counterparts, the question of who is a “real Jew” is one that has deep connections to exactly who is in charge of our Jewish future.

I talked with Tamkin about what the term has started to mean for American Jews, how their experience has changed, and just how many types of Bad Jews there are. 

Shane Burley: So where did the idea for Bad Jews come from?

Emily Tamkin: Two things happened in tandem. The first is that I had written my first book, which was on George Soros and trying to understand what his influence actually was and unpacking why he’s such a lightning rod for conspiracy theories. One right-wing response was that attacks against him aren’t antisemitic because he’s not really Jewish. That those attacking him don’t even really think of him as Jewish because he doesn’t go to synagogue or because of his relationship to Israel, that he doesn’t mostly give to Jewish causes, and therefore it’s not antisemitism. I did an interview around the book and someone on Twitter, whom I will not name, tweeted that it was a horrible interview because “a lot of very Jewy Jews don’t like Soros.” And I was like, did you just pull Jewish rank?

This really upset me. And then I considered, “is this really upsetting me because of Soros? Or is this really upsetting me because of me and my own life and feelings about American Jewishness?” I kind of knew that this was not a unique moment—I am not the only person who has had feelings about American Jewishness and my place in it!—and thought that perhaps by zooming out a bit and understanding American Jewish history I can better understand this fraught and contentious moment as one of a series of fraught and contentious moments over what it means to be Jewish in America. 

SB: Give me the anatomy of a Bad Jew. What kind of things do people get singled out for, or single themselves out for, as Bad Jews?

ET: I make the case in the book that there really is no such thing as a Bad Jew, or, if you prefer, that there are infinite types of Bad Jews. It all depends on where you sit. So it’s not a useful phrase. Having said that, far and away the most common answer from my interviewees to my question “what do you think of when you think of a bad Jew?” was “oh, I think of myself.”

There’s clearly something deeply internalized in many of us. In moments when I myself have thought I was a Bad Jew, it was because I felt like I was doing something different from a larger community. Which is silly because if you look at Jewish history, there are many moments in which people are breaking away from the community. That’s a Jewish tradition too. 

There’s the Jewish observation spectrum. I eat shrimp: I’m a Bad Jew. I only joined a temple pretty recently and I didn’t grow up going to shul: Bad Jew. Intellectually, I really disagree with this interpretation, even if, in my life, it has made sense to me. I think often when you have people of different denominations come together, it’s sort of assumed that the more observant is the better, more pure form of Jewishness. I disagree with this, too.

The other universe where the phrase Bad Jew exists is the political. During the Trump years, you would have liberal-left people saying that Stephen Miller is the worst possible Jewish person, because how could you learn Jewish history and learn about persecution and fleeing for refuge and turn out to be Stephen Miller? I think to many people his politics were a refutation of what they felt were Jewish values. On the other hand, you have people who look at Jews who criticize Israel and say “How could you turn your back on your fellow Jews?” 

SB:  Is the most profound contention in this equation the question of who is a Jew? 

ET: The question of Bad Jews and the question of who is a Jew are interrelated. 

When Matthew Bronfman, the new head of the Hillel Board of Governors, was asked in an interview what kept him up at night and he said that American Jews’ connection to Israel and intermarriage, and that these two things are connected. Do I think that this is the most productive use of Mr. Bronfman’s sleepless hours? No, I do not. But, again, that’s his truth.

Years back, Ben Shapiro tweeted that there have always been Bad Jews and in the United States Bad Jews vote for Democrats. And now you have people making arguments that perhaps these aren’t even really Jews because they’re making arguments that others disagree with. So I do think this phenomenon is happening, that the claim of Bad Jews is also about defining some people out of Jewish identity. 

Do I think that it will fundamentally change American Jewishness? Yes, but I think that it’s always been fundamentally changing. Obviously I get frustrated by much of the discourse today and find it alienating and unproductive, such as the shouting back and forth about who is the real Jew. That’s not really a way to reach understanding, better policy, or any goal you might have. Unless, of course, your goal is to narrow or limit who feels welcome in your conversation, which I think, for some, particularly on the political right (though not exclusively), is indeed their agenda. But I don’t really think that it means this is going to be the end of American Jewishness. I think that people who think this is the end should read my book. They will see that there have been many other moments in the last century where people have also been convinced that something was going to irreparably and fundamentally change American Jewish life that there would be no more American Jewish life. I think in a certain sense we have simply found new ways to have the same arguments.

SB: What features do you think people typically associate with American Jewish identity? And when you talk about changing Jewish life, how is it changing and what kind of positive differences might be in store in the coming years.

ET: There are a few stereotypical stories about American Jews, and I sort of disagree with all of them. 

There is one that says that American Jews came to this country, worked really hard, and rose to the top, which is not precisely what happened. There’s a story that says American Jews are basically just like every other person in America, but they eat bagels, which is not exactly what’s going on here either. (Or, maybe for some people, this is actually a meaningful expression of Judaism for you, which actually I think is fine. Go forth and nosh.) There is the one that says American Jews are weak, rich, and lazy and that the true fighting Jews are over in Israel, which I also, surprise, think is problematic. There are all these simple cliches that come to mind. So I am not going to answer what a “real” American Jew is because I don’t think there is such a thing. Part of the reason that I wrote this book was to present some of these narratives and then complicate them. 

The claim of Bad Jews is also about defining some people out of Jewish identity. 

There is a lot of talk now about American Jewish institutions and American Jewish participation. This is a common critique that says that people no longer want to participate in civic life anymore as American Jews. After having written this book, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think the ways that we participate might change, certainly. I understand that synagogue membership is declining. Perhaps people are turning less to the establishment institutions, but I see so many people finding new ways to gather and try to make their own institutions and to show up in new ways. I think that we are seeing, on the one hand, increasing polarization, but I also think that we’re seeing more pluralism. I am cautiously optimistic that somehow the latter will win out. I see that people are still engaged in, and care deeply about, American Jewish life, whatever that means for them. And they are finding new and creative ways to participate in it.

There is not just an American Jewish life, there are American Jewish lives, something I find hopeful rather than threatening.

SB: It seems like young Jews, particularly on the left and involved in more radical politics, are actually leaning more into Jewish spiritual life rather than just a celebration of secular Jewish culture. Do you think that there is more of a discovery of actual Jewish religious practice, and will this recenter spirituality in Jewish identity in the U.S. rather than elements like ethnic identity?

ET: Firstly, I want to acknowledge that American Jews are by and large Ashkenazi, but not exclusively. And people’s ethnic Jewish backgrounds do continue to be a source of meaning for many. I have been taking Yiddish classes through the pandemic. My family comes from Eastern Europe. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with having an ethnic or familial or historic attachment to your Jewishness. There’s just more than one way to do that. And there is, again, more than one ethnic attachment to Judaism and Jewishness. 

Having said that, yes, I do think that in the left generally today you’re seeing more people making more of a claim on religion. I think you can see this in the response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, where progressive Jews are making arguments on explicitly religious grounds. When you see groups coming up with signs that say “Baruch Hashem for Abortion,” sure, they are saying that we need to have secular institutions to preserve religious liberty, but they’re doing so by speaking in the language of religion. You’re seeing people engage in queer Talmud study, or Talmud study for Jews of Color. That’s great. I don’t think you need to have deep knowledge of Jewish texts to be Jewish at all. But I think that people increasingly feel that they want to have ownership of it, or a knowledge of it to grapple with.

SB: As you trace the American Jewish history of the 20th century, you also tell the story of Jewish assimilation, decreased antisemitism and the inclusion of white Jews into whiteness more broadly. Do you credit the right-ward turn in some Jewish civic organizations to this assimilation?

ET: Firstly, we should note that although there are many American Jews who are on the right, if we look at young American Jews in particular, they are moving left.

Mainstream establishment Jewish organizations are to the right of American Jews more generally. And there has always been a gap between mainstream American Jewish organizations and American Jews. There’s a process I describe early on in the book, where Jews were trying to figure out who they were in terms of race and ethnicity and assimilation and acculturation. But institutional Jewish leadership at this time knew exactly what they wanted to be. They wanted to be white, because they understood that whiteness in this country came with rights and privileges and they were not going to have that taken away just so people could feel different and special. So you have American Jewish leaders arguing before Congress that American Jews were white and needed to be treated as such. 

[Diversity] is the future of American Jewishness.

I also think that as more American Jews have intermarried and more American Jews, and Americans more generally, are comfortable being more critical of Israel and America’s policy towards Israel, not all, but some American Jewish organizations have responded to this not asking why this shift is taking place but instead doubling down on more conservative political positions. I think it’s interesting when people associated with these Jewish civic groups ask why people aren’t engaging in American Jewish institutions anymore. One reason could be that when a change was happening in their constituencies, they didn’t ask why, they instead just insisted it wasn’t happening. 

While many Jews are moving to the left and becoming more critical of Israel, the traditionally Orthodox have also become more politically involved and, by and large, this is a right-wing political bloc. Orthodox Jews are one of the fastest growing demographic group of Jews, as well. So we can’t discount that there is a real American Jewish political right. 

But since there are some in Jewish civic organizations who are comfortable speaking for all American Jews and doing so from the right, I want to note that there are other trends happening in Jewish political life as well. 

You can look at what’s happening in the United States and whatever trends you want here, but there’s also the fact that our generation grew up post-Oslo. I’m 32, so basically all of my adult life there has been no progress towards establishing a Palestinian state, or towards ending the Occupation of the West Bank, for example. In fact, it has become more entrenched. So if you’re a progressive minded young person in the U.S., you are probably not going to feel the same way that your parents did about Israel. I don’t think this is unique to me. I know a lot more younger American Jews who are more comfortable criticizing Israel than their parents were. I do not think that many American Jewish civic organizations know how to grapple with that, or that they’re particularly interested in grappling with it, as opposed to trying to shut it down. 

SB: How do you think that this idea of a “Bad Jew” relates to the way that Jews of color often face marginalization inside of Jewish spaces?

Change has always been a constant in American Jewish life. It has always been changing, always challenging itself.

ET: I am saying all of this as a white Jew, so take it for what it’s worth, or not worth. But many Jews of color have said that they don’t feel like they’re treated as real Jews within Jewish spaces, and therefore their opinions on Israel, on American politics, on how the synagogues should be run, and how the institutions should work, are discounted. This was true in interviews for my book, too. It really bothers me that some American Jews who go through the country as white people try to say that they aren’t white. I’m not saying there aren’t distinct Jewish cultures, or that they aren’t targets of white supremacy. And, fine, I won’t tell you how to identify. But I will tell you that people who looked like you and were Jewish a hundred years ago argued that they should be counted as white because they knew it came with certain rights and privileges. You have probably benefited from that. I know that I have. When I hear that, often what I hear is that this person doesn’t want to take accountability for battling white supremacy in this country. Or doesn’t want to feel responsible for working toward a better and more equitable future. And it’s very rich when those same people claim the mantle of real Jewishness.

I also have very little patience or respect for people who do not want to treat Jews of color like they’re full Jews. Because they are. And this is also the future of American Jewishness. It’s becoming more diverse. If you have a problem with that, I have bad news for you. You can make peace with this or you can be deeply unhappy with the future of American Jewishness. The other thing that really upsets me is that in many cases the Jews of color who are being marginalized in Jewish spaces are Jews who want to be actively engaged in Jewish life. Isn’t that what you said you wanted? They say they’re concerned about Jewish continuity and the continuation of Jewish tradition and peoplehood, and then they turn around and treat Jewish people who want to be engaged as less than.

SB: Do you think that there is sort of an alternative Jewish civic organizational scene forming right now, and how do you think organized Jewish civic life will change as younger people take the reins?

ET: I know that there are American Jews who are trying new ways of engaging with Jewishness and creating new organizations. I don’t want to be Pollyanna about it, however, because I think these new groups are not nearly as well funded or as empowered or given the same space as the mainstream, long-term establishment American Jewish organizations, some of which are very uncomfortable with the fact that these alternatives are forming and their understanding of what it means to be Jewish in America is being challenged. But that challenge to their hegemony is not disappearing.

I would remind those who are uncomfortable with this changing landscape that change has always been a constant in American Jewish life. It has always been changing, always challenging itself. There have always been people saying, “no, you’re doing it wrong,” and people who have pushed back on that. There have been many moments of contest and conflict, but, to me, part of being an American Jew is trying to figure out how to be an American Jew. That means struggling to determine what it all means and where your places are and how you relate to others. And that can, again, be very fraught and frustrating. It can be very painful. But it can also bring tremendous moments of joy and meaning.

My Mother Rearranges Strangers’ Lives in the Dark

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“None of That” by Samanta Schweblin

We’re lost,” says my mother.

She brakes and leans over the steering wheel. Her fingers, slender and old, grip the plastic tightly. We’re over half an hour from home, in one of the residential neighborhoods we like the most. There are beautiful and spacious mansions here, but the roads are unpaved, and they’re muddy because it rained all last night.

“Did you have to stop right in the mud? How are we going to get out of here now?”

I open my door to see how deep the wheels are stuck. Pretty deep, deep enough. I slam my door.

“Just what is it you’re doing, Mom?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?” Her confusion seems genuine.

I know exactly what it is we’re doing, but I’ve only just realized how strange it is. My mother doesn’t seem to understand, but she does respond, so she must know what I’m referring to.

“We’re looking at houses,” she says.

She blinks a couple of times; she has too much mascara on her eyelashes.

“Looking at houses?”

“Looking at houses.” She indicates the houses on either side of us.

They are immense. They gleam atop their hills of freshly mown lawns, shining in the dazzling light of the setting sun. My mother sighs, and without letting go of the wheel she leans back in the seat. She’s not going to say much more. Maybe she doesn’t know what else to say. But that is exactly what we do. Go out to look at houses. We go out to look at other people’s houses. Any attempt to figure out why could turn into the straw that breaks the camel’s back, confirmation of the fact that my mother has been throwing her own daughter’s time into the garbage for as long as I can remember. My mother shifts into first gear, and to my surprise the wheels spin for a moment but she manages to move the car forward. I look back at the intersection, the mess we made of the sandy dirt of the road, and I pray that no caretaker catches on that we did the same thing yesterday, two intersections down, and then again when we were nearly at the exit. We keep moving. My mother drives straight, without stopping in front of any of the mansions. She doesn’t comment on the huge windows or fancy doors, the hammocks or awnings. She doesn’t sigh or hum any song. She doesn’t jot down addresses. Doesn’t look at me. A few blocks down, the houses grow more spaced out and the grassy lawns flatten: carefully trimmed by gardeners and with no sidewalks in the way, they start right there at the dirt road and spread over the perfectly leveled terrain, like a mirror of green water flush with the earth. She takes a left and drives a little farther. She says aloud, but to herself:

“There’s no way out of this.”

There are some houses farther on, and then a forest closes in on the road.

“There’s a lot of mud,” I say. “Turn around without stopping the car.”

She looks at me with a frown, then pulls close to the grass on the right and tries to turn back the other way. The result is terrible: just as she manages to get the car in a vaguely diagonal position, she runs up against the grass on the left, and brakes.

“Shit,” she says.

She accelerates, and the wheels spin in the mud. I look back to study the scene. There’s a boy outside, almost on the threshold of the house behind us. My mother shifts gears, accelerates again, and manages to move in reverse. And this is what she does now: with the car in reverse, she drives across the street, goes into the yard in front of the boy’s house, and draws, from one side to the other across the wide blanket of freshly cut grass, a double-lined semicircle of mud. The car stops in front of the house’s picture window. The boy is standing there holding his plastic truck, transfixed. I raise my hand in a gesture that wants to apologize, or warn, but he drops the truck and runs into the house. My mother looks at me.

“Go,” I say.

The wheels spin and the car doesn’t move.

“Slowly, Mom!”

A woman pushes aside the window curtains and looks out at us, at her yard. The boy is next to her, pointing. The curtain closes again, and my mother sinks the car deeper and deeper. The woman comes out of the house and starts to walk over to us, but she doesn’t want to trample her grass. She takes the first steps along the path of varnished wood, then corrects course to come toward us, practically walking on tiptoe. My mother says shit again, under her breath. She lets off the accelerator, and also, finally, lets go of the steering wheel.

The woman reaches us and leans over to talk to us through the car window. She wants to know what we are doing in her yard, and she doesn’t ask nicely. The boy looks on, hugging one of the columns by the entrance. My mother says she’s sorry, she’s really very sorry, and she says it several times. But the woman doesn’t seem to hear. She just looks at her yard, at the wheels sunk into the lawn, and she repeats her question about what we’re doing there, why we are stuck in her yard, if we understand the damage we’ve just done. So I explain it to her. I say that my mother doesn’t know how to drive in the mud. That my mother is not well. And then my mother bangs her forehead into the steering wheel and stays like that, dead or paralyzed, who knows. Her back shudders and she starts to cry. The woman looks at me. She doesn’t know what to do. I shake my mother. Her forehead doesn’t move from the steering wheel, and her arms fall dead to her sides. I get out of the car, apologize to the woman again. She is tall and blond, brawny like the boy, and her eyes, nose, and mouth are too close together for the size of her head. She looks the same age as my mother.

“Who is going to pay for this?” she asks.

I don’t have any money, but I tell her we’ll pay for it. That I’m sorry and, of course, we will pay. That seems to calm her down. She turns her attention back to my mother for a moment, without forgetting about her yard.

“Ma’am, are you feeling okay? What were you trying to do?”

My mother raises her head and looks at the woman.

“I feel terrible. Call an ambulance, please.”

The woman doesn’t seem to know whether my mother is being serious or pulling her leg. Of course she is serious, even if the ambulance isn’t necessary. I shake my head at the woman to say she should wait and not make any calls. The woman takes a few steps back, looks at my mother’s old, rusty car, and then at her astonished son behind her. She doesn’t want us to be here, she wants us to disappear, but she doesn’t know how to make that happen.

She doesn’t want us to be here, she wants us to disappear, but she doesn’t know how to make that happen.

“Please,” says my mother, “could you bring me a glass of water before the ambulance gets here?”

The woman is slow to move, she seems not to want to leave us alone in her yard.

“Okay,” she says.

She walks away, grabs the boy by the shirt, and pulls him inside with her. The front door slams shut.

“Could you please tell me what you’re doing, Mom? Get out of the car, I’m going to try to move it.”

My mother sits up straight in the seat, moves her legs slowly as she starts to get out. I look around for medium-sized logs or some rocks to use as ramps for the wheels, but everything is so neat and tidy. There’s nothing but lawn and flowers.

“I’m going to look for some wood,” I tell my mother, pointing toward the forest at the end of the street. “Don’t move.”

My mother, who was in the process of getting out of the car, freezes a moment and then drops back into her seat. I’m worried because night is falling, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the car out in the dark. The forest is only two houses away. I walk into the trees, and it takes a few minutes to find exactly what I need. When I get back, my mother is not in the car. There’s no one outside. I approach the front door of the house. The boy’s truck is lying on the doormat. I ring the doorbell and the woman comes to open the door.

“I called the ambulance,” she says. “I didn’t know where you were, and your mother said she was going to faint again.”

I wonder when the first time was. I walk in carrying the pieces of wood. I have two, the size of two bricks. The woman leads me to the kitchen. We walk through two spacious, carpeted living rooms, and then I hear my mother’s voice.

“Is this white marble? How do they get white marble? What does your daddy do, sweetheart?”

She’s sitting at the table, a mug in one hand and the sugar bowl in the other. The boy is sitting across from her, looking at her.

“Let’s go,” I tell her, showing her the wood.

“Look at the design of this sugar bowl,” says my mother, pushing it toward me. But when she sees I’m unimpressed, she adds, “I really do feel very bad.”

“That one’s for decoration,” says the boy. “This is our real sugar bowl.”

He pushes a different, wooden sugar bowl toward my mother. She ignores him, stands up, and, as if she were about to vomit, leaves the kitchen. I follow her resignedly. She locks herself in a small bathroom off the hallway. The woman and her son look at me but don’t follow. I knock on the door, ask if I can come in, and wait. The woman peers at us from the kitchen.

“They say the ambulance will be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” I say.

The bathroom door opens. I go in and close it behind me. I put the wood down beside the mirror. My mother is crying, sitting on the toilet lid.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

Before answering she folds a bit of toilet paper and blows her nose.

“Where do people get all these things? And did you see there’s a staircase on either side of the living room?” She rests her face in the palms of her hands. “It makes me so sad I just want to die.”

There’s a knock at the door and I remember the ambulance is on its way. The woman asks if we’re all right. I have to get my mother out of this house.

“I’m going to get the car out,” I say, picking the wood up again. “I want you out there with me in two minutes. You’d better be there.”

The woman is in the hall talking on a cell phone, but she sees me and hangs up.

“It’s my husband, he’s on his way.”

I wait for an expression that will tell me whether the man is coming to help my mother and me, or to help the woman get us out of the house. But the woman just stares at me, taking care not to give me any clues. I go outside and walk to the car, and I can hear the boy running behind me. I don’t say anything as I prop the wood under the wheels and look around to see where my mother could have left the keys. Then I start the car. It takes several tries, but finally the ramp trick works. I close the car door, and the boy has to run so I don’t hit him. I don’t stop, I retrace the semicircular tracks back to the road. She’s not going to come out on her own, I tell myself. Why would she listen to me and come out of the house like a normal mother? I turn off the car and go inside to get her. The boy runs behind me, hugging the muddy pieces of wood.

I enter without knocking and head straight for the bathroom.

“She’s not in the bathroom anymore,” says the woman. “Please, get your mother out of the house. This has gone too far.”

She leads me to the second floor. The staircase is spacious and light, and a cream-colored rug marks the way. The woman goes up first, blind to the muddy footprints I leave on each step. She points to a room with the door half open, and I go in without opening it all the way, in order to maintain a semblance of privacy. My mother is lying facedown on the carpet in the middle of the master bedroom. The sugar bowl is on the dresser, along with her watch and bracelets, which for some reason she has taken off. Her arms and legs are splayed wide, and for a moment I wonder if there is any other way to hug a thing as massive as a house, and if that is in fact what my mother is trying to do. She sighs and then sits up on the floor, smooths her shirt and her hair, looks at me. Her face is less red now, but the tears made a mess of her makeup.

“What’s going on now?” she asks.

“The car’s ready. We’re leaving.”

I peer outside to get a sense of what the woman is doing, but I don’t see her.

“And what are we going to do with all of this?” asks my mother, gesturing around herself. “Someone has to talk to these people.”

“Where’s your purse?”

“Downstairs, in the living room. The first living room, because there’s a bigger one that looks out onto the pool, and another one past the kitchen, facing the backyard. There are three living rooms.” My mother takes a tissue from her jeans pocket, blows her nose, and dries her tears. “Each one for something different.”

She gets up holding on to a bedpost and walks toward the en suite bathroom.

The bed is made with a fold in the top sheet that I’ve only ever seen my mother make. Under the bed are a balled-up bedspread with fuchsia and yellow stars and a dozen small throw pillows.

“Mom, my god, did you make the bed?”

“Don’t even get me started on those pillowcases,” she says, and then, peering out from behind the door to be sure I hear: “And I want to see that sugar bowl when I come out of the bathroom. Don’t you do anything crazy.”

“What sugar bowl?” asks the woman from the other side of the bedroom door. She knocks three times but doesn’t dare enter. “My sugar bowl? Please, it was my mother’s.”

From the bathroom comes the sound of water running in the tub. My mother goes over to the bedroom door and for a second I think she’s going to let the woman in, but instead she closes it and starts gesturing to me to keep my voice down, that the faucet is running so no one can hear us. This is my mother, I tell myself, while she opens the dresser drawers and pushes aside the clothes to inspect the bottoms, making sure the wood inside is also cedar. For as long as I can remember, we’ve gone out to look at houses, removed unsuitable flowers and pots from their gardens. We’ve moved sprinklers, straightened mailboxes, relocated lawn ornaments that were too heavy for the grass. As soon as my feet reached the pedals, I started to take over driving, which gave my mother more freedom. Once, by herself, she moved a white wooden bench and put it in the yard of the house across the street. She unhooked hammocks. Yanked up malignant weeds. Three times she pulled off the name “Marilú 2” from a terribly cheesy sign. My father found out about one or another of these events, but I don’t think that was why he left my mother. When he went, my father took all his things except the car key, which he left on one of the piles of my mother’s home and garden magazines, and for some years after that she almost never got out of the car on any of our excursions. She’d sit in the passenger seat and say “That’s kikuyu,” “That bow window is not American,” “The cascading geranium flowers should not be beside the spotted lady’s thumb,” “If I ever decide to paint the house that shade of pearl pink, please, hire someone to just shoot me.” But it was a long time before she got out of the car again. Today, however, she has crossed a big line. She insisted on driving. She contrived to get us inside this house, into the master bedroom, and now she’s just come back from the bathroom after dumping two jars of salts into the tub, and she’s starting to throw some products from the dressing table into the trash. I hear a car pull up, and I peek out the window that overlooks the backyard. It’s almost night now, but I see them. He’s getting out of the car and the woman is already walking toward him. Her left hand is holding the little boy’s, her right hand working double-time making gestures and signals. He nods in alarm, looks toward the second floor. He sees me, and when he sees me, I realize that we have to move fast.

She contrived to get us inside this house, into the master bedroom, and now she’s just come back from the bathroom after dumping two jars of salts into the tub.

“We’re leaving, Mom.”

She’s removing the hooks from the shower curtain, but I take them from her hand and throw them to the floor, grab her by the wrist, and push her toward the stairs. It’s pretty violent; I have never treated my mother like this. A new fury drives me toward the door. My mother follows, tripping on the stairs. The pieces of wood are at the foot of the steps and I kick them as I pass. We reach the living room, I pick up my mother’s purse, and we go out the front door.

Once we’re in the car, as we’re reaching the corner, I think I see the lights of another car pulling out of the house’s driveway and turning in our direction, following us. I reach the first muddy intersection at full speed as my mother says:

“What kind of madness was all that?”

I wonder if she’s referring to my part or hers. In a gesture of protest, my mother buckles her seat belt. Her purse is on her lap and her fists close tight around its handles. I tell myself, Now, you calm down, you calm down, you calm down. I check the rearview mirror for the other car but don’t see anyone. I want to talk to my mother, but I can’t help yelling at her.

“What are you looking for, Mom? What is all of this?”

She doesn’t even move. She stares straight ahead, serious, her forehead terribly furrowed.

“Please, Mom, what is it? What the hell are we doing at other people’s houses?”

An ambulance siren wails in the distance.

“Do you want one of those living rooms? Is that what you want? Those marble countertops? The damned sugar bowl? Those useless kids? Is that it? What the fuck are you missing from those houses?”

I pound the steering wheel. The ambulance siren sounds closer and I dig my nails into the plastic. Once, when I was five years old and my mother cut all the calla lilies from a garden, she forgot me and left me sitting against the fence, and she didn’t have the guts to come back for me. I waited a long time, until I heard the shouts of a German woman who came out of the house brandishing a broom, and I ran. My mother was circling the house in a two-block radius, and it took us a long time to find each other.

“None of that,” says my mother, keeping her gaze forward, and that’s the last thing she says during the whole drive.

A few blocks ahead, the ambulance turns toward us and then hurtles past.

We get home half an hour later. We drop our things on the table and kick off our muddy sneakers. The house is cold, and from the kitchen I watch my mother skirt the sofa, go into the bedroom, sit down on her bed, and reach over to turn on the radiator. I put the kettle on for tea. This is what I need right now, I tell myself, a little tea, and I sit beside the stove to wait. As I’m putting the tea bag into the mug, the doorbell rings. It’s the woman, the owner of the house with three living rooms. I open the door and stand looking at her. I ask how she knows where we live.

“I followed you,” she says, looking down at her shoes.

She has a different attitude now, more fragile and patient, and though I open the screen door to let her in, she can’t seem to bring herself to take the first step. I look both ways down the street, but I don’t see any car a woman like her could have driven here.

“I don’t have the money,” I say.

“No,” she says, “don’t worry, I didn’t come for that. I . . . is your mother here?”

I hear the bedroom door close. It’s a loud slam, but maybe it’s hard to hear from outside.

I shake my head. She looks down at her shoes again and waits.

“Can I come in?”

I point her to a chair at the table. On the brick-tiled floor, her heels make a noise different from our heels, and I see her move carefully: the spaces of this house are more cramped, and the woman doesn’t seem to feel at ease. She leaves her bag on her crossed legs.

“Would you like some tea?”

She nods.

“Your mother . . . ” she says.

I hand her a hot mug and I think, Your mother is in my house again. Your mother wants to know how I pay for the leather upholstery on all my sofas.

“Your mother took my sugar bowl,” says the woman.

She smiles almost apologetically, stirs her tea, looks at it, but doesn’t drink it.

“It seems silly,” she says, “but of all the things in the house, that’s all I have left of my mother, and . . . ” She makes a strange sound, almost like a hiccup, and her eyes fill with tears. “I need that sugar bowl. You have to give it back.”

We sit a moment in silence. She avoids my eyes. I glance out at the backyard and I see her, I see my mother, and then I distract the woman to keep her from looking out there, too.

“You want your sugar bowl?” I ask.

“Is it here?” asks the woman, and she immediately stands up, looks at the kitchen counter, the living room, the bedroom door nearby.

But I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve just seen: my mother kneeling on the ground under the clothes hanging on the line, putting the sugar bowl into a fresh hole in the earth.

“If you want it, find it yourself,” I say.

The woman stares at me, takes several seconds to absorb what I’ve just said. Then she sets her purse on the table and walks slowly away. She seems to have trouble moving between the couch and the TV, between all the towers of stackable boxes, as if no place were good enough to start her search. That’s how I realize what it is that I want. I want her to look. I want her to move our things. I want her to inspect, set aside, and take apart. To remove everything from the boxes, to trample, rearrange, to throw herself on the ground, and also to cry. And I want my mother to come inside. Because if my mother comes in here right now, if she composes herself quickly after her newest burial and comes back to the kitchen, she’ll be relieved to see how this is done by a woman who doesn’t have her years of experience, or a house where she can do these kinds of things well, the way they should be done.

8 Books for the Recovering Nice Girl

Posted on by Jo Lou

Let us begin with the traditional greeting of Nice Girls: omg, hi!! Thank you for being here! As a lifelong Nice Girl, I need to be clear: I don’t wish to rid myself entirely of the trappings of “niceness.” I’m more than happy to hold the door for you. Yes, I’ll share my fries. However, I’ve started to question why I’ve spent so much of the past three decades of my life sitting quietly, waiting my turn, prioritizing others’ comfort above my own, all in the hopes that I won’t be seen as “mean.”

In She’s Nice Though, my new collection of funny essays and stories about goodness, kindness, and agreeability, I ruminate on the recurring chorus that’s been in my head since before I can remember: am I actually nice or am I just performing a role I’m expected to play? (Spoiler: I still don’t fully know!)

If you, too, grew up thinking obedience and goodness were one and the same, are in the process of examining your own intentions, or have wondered why you have the kind of vibe that makes strangers trust you to watch their stuff while they go pee: hey, hello, welcome. Here is some required reading for fellow nice girls who are learning to spread their nasty little wings. Fly free, girlies. Make sure to knock over a few gorgeous vases in the process.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

Weird girls and nice girls have a symbiotic relationship. For those of us who followed the rules to our own demise, there is an undeniable charm to someone who eschews cultural mores in favor of their own whimsy. Little Weirds by Jenny Slate is a collection of poems, essays, stories, dreams, and hopeful squeals about the intricacies and oddities of being alive today. “A Letter from the Committee for Evening Experiences,” for example, traces Slate’s confusing, occasionally anxious, and sometimes overwhelmingly mundane dreams. The collection is poetic and dreamy, soothing and intimate, like whispered secrets between childhood friends.

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby

Fellow Midwest sweetie Samantha Irby is the patron saint of funny essays for depressed people. In her most recent collection, she gives us a realistic daily routine, stories about the things that make you horny as an adult (being fully asleep by 10 p.m.), and a celebration of the delicious mundanity of modern adulthood.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

Nutting, who also wrote Made for Love, is a master of all things dark, gross, and messy—my personal holy trinity. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a collection of satirical short stories about, as the title suggests, women and girls with surreal, disturbing, and impossible jobs. There’s “Ant Colony,” which is about a woman who hosts an ant farm in her body after “space on earth became limited.” The collection opens with a woman being cooked in a giant pot of soup. Unclean Jobs is grounded by the women we follow who, despite their unbelievable circumstances, have reactions, thoughts, and feelings that are all too familiar.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, we meet Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese American PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on poet Xiao-Wen Chou. During her research, she discovers a secret that would unravel her work, her school’s East Asian studies department, and her understanding of race in the literary world as a whole. The book is a smart, satirical look at everything from the fetishization of Asian women to who is celebrated in modern academia. Smart girl vibes!

Hysterical by Elissa Bassist

Hysterical is a memoir about being heard or, more often, not being heard. It follows Bassist’s experience with mystery ailments (and doctors who couldn’t make sense of her pain), the #MeToo movement (and men who couldn’t make sense of female rage), and the frustrating and liberating experience of finding one’s own voice. Bassist manages to be funny, precise, and intimate while dissecting the mess of modern feminism—wow, women can have it all!

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West

“It took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry,” West writes in her essay collection, The Witches Are Coming. Per usual, West is incisive and smart as she explores the cultural climate in the wake of the #MeToo movement. She asks questions like “Is Adam Sandler funny?” and “Ted Bundy was not charming: are you high?” while bringing to light the exhausting persistence of misogyny.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Machado expertly blends science fiction, comedy, and fantasy with the horror of being a woman in this short story collection. In “The Husband Stitch,” a story about female bodily autonomy, she retells and expands the urban legend of The Girl with the Green Ribbon. “Especially Heinous,” a personal favorite, is a wryly humorous reimagining of Law and Order SVU episodes. The book is a macabre and fantastical salve to the festering wound that is chauvinism.

How to Weep in Public by Jacqueline Novak

Jacqueline Novak’s writing feels like falling dramatically onto a fainting lounge for an audience of one (your cat). How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression From One Who Knows is part advice column, part memoir, and a wholly honest account of what it’s like when the murder call is coming from inside the house that is your head. It’s funny, cozy, and raw, like taking Lexapro for the first time.

I Used to Think Werner Herzog Was Brilliant

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Werner Herzog can’t move mountains, but he once came close. In one of the most iconic and mind-blowing sequences in movie history, he pulled a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for his film Fitzcarraldo (1982). A lesser director would have used special effects, but not Herzog. 

Watching this singular scene as a teenager at an international film festival in Manila convinced me that the German filmmaker was brilliant, an artist of the highest caliber. Only a filmmaker with integrity could go to such lengths for his art. This was back in the 1980s, and like the rest of the world, I embraced Herzog’s mad-genius persona and enfant-terrible reputation. 

Fitzcarraldo (1982) is about rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman known as Fitzcarraldo in Peru, who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon in the early 20th century. To fund the project, he must get to a fertile rubber terrain. He needs to transport a steamship from one river on one side of the mountain into another river on the other side. He must move the ship over the mountain to fulfill his dream.

The real-life Fitzcarraldo hauled a 320-ton ship in disassembled pieces over the mountain, which was reassembled on the other side.

The real-life Fitzcarraldo hauled a 320-ton ship in disassembled pieces over the mountain, which was reassembled on the other side. That in itself was crazy, but Herzog’s vision of dragging a ship intact was crazier. Also, Herzog’s ship was heavier than the original. It took almost two weeks to move the 340-ton ship up and down the mountain with a manual winch system operated by 800 Ashaninka Indians.

Herzog won the 1982 best director award in Cannes Film Festival for Fitzcarraldo. A decade earlier, he’d dazzled international audiences in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), about the 16th-century conquistador Lope De Aguirre. It was another film with spectacular scenes, also set in Peru and involving indigenous people. Both films featured insane protagonists with quixotic dreams portrayed by the German actor Klaus Kinski. But it was Fitzcarraldo that cemented Herzog’s front-runner position in the German New Wave cinema. 

Nobody was surprised when Herzog went Hollywood. Even so, he maintained his auteur status with his unceasing fascination with intense or obsessive characters in such films as Rescue Dawn (2006), starring Christian Bale; Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) with Nicolas Cage; and Queen of the Desert (2015), featuring Nicole Kidman. 

All those years, I’ve equated Herzog’s audacity and unconventional tastes with genius. Imagine my surprise when I heard that the eighty-year-old director had written his first novel, The Twilight World (translated by Michael Hoffman). Here, Herzog had fictionalized the story of Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda, a World War II holdout in the Philippines. Book critics raved about the book upon its release, which they heralded as equally superb as Herzog’s films.

I know of only one novel that focuses entirely on Filipino characters living in the Philippines under Japanese rule.

I was doubly excited that the novel is set in the Philippines. As a Filipino American, I have yet to find a novel about the Japanese occupation of the Philippines that I like. There’s an abundance of history books, autobiographies, and nonfiction books about the era but very few novels. Most of the novels about Japanese imperialism are set in China. There are very few that tackle the Philippine experience, and I know of only one novel that focuses entirely on Filipino characters living in the Philippines under Japanese rule, Tess Uriza Holthe’s When The Elephants Dance. I thought Herzog’s  would be a welcome addition. I was almost sure it was going to be The One for me. 

Although Herzog is a debut novelist, he’s also a veteran screenwriter, and as a novelist myself, I was also looking forward to learning some writing tips from the legendary filmmaker by reading the book.  

In the introduction to The Twilight World, Herzog explains that while directing the opera Chushingura in Tokyo in 1997, he had an opportunity to speak with the Japanese emperor, but instead he’d asked to meet with Hiroo Onoda. The novel is based on their meeting. 

In the book, Herzog himself narrates the story of Lieutenant Onoda. It begins in 1974 on the island of Lubang in west-central Philippines when a young Japanese, Norio Suzuki, encounters Onoda in the jungle. Suzuki is an adventurer and traveler whose bucket list includes aspirations to see the pandas in China, the Yeti in the Himalayas, and Onoda in the Philippines. 

The unexpected encounter flabbergasts Onoda, for he’s been living undiscovered in the jungle for a long time. He was twenty-three when he arrived on the island as part of the forces occupying the Philippines during World War II. The novel alternates between 1974 and the 1940s through the 1950s to depict Onoda’s experience.

With a rifle and his family-heirloom sword, he survives 111 ambushes.

In December 1944, Major Taniguchi orders Onoda and six soldiers to “defend” and hold the island until the Japanese Imperial Army returns. And that’s exactly what they do for twenty-nine years until Onoda is the only one left standing. With a rifle and his family-heirloom sword, he survives 111 ambushes. 

The whole time, Onoda doesn’t know that Japan lost the war and that the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. He simply lost track of time, so much so that even the sight of American planes in the sky gives him the impression that World War II is ongoing, when, in fact, those American planes are fighting in the Korean War, and later, Vietnam War.

Onoda keeps his faith that the Japanese army will come back even though he’s filled with uncertainty. “There was no proof that when awake he was awake and no proof that when dreaming he was dreaming. The twilight of the world,” writes Herzog.

At one point, a man riding in a helicopter with a bullhorn asks Onoda and his men to surrender, but they fear it’s a trap. At another time, a man claiming to be Onoda’s brother attempts to coax him to come out through a loudspeaker to no avail. 

Suzuki disabuses Onoda of his belief that Japan is still fighting World War II, revealing that there had been newspaper articles about him. When he asks Onoda to go home to Japan, the lieutenant refuses unless Major Taniguchi orders him to cease hostilities. Suzuki vows to contact the military, and, true to his word, the young man returns to the jungle with Taniguchi, who orders Onoda to finally surrender. 

Herzog fans in the mainstream media loved the novel. One critic thought it was “as profound and thought-provoking as the best of his films,” noting that the director’s “seasoned eye for a well-framed shot also translates seamlessly to the page.” It’s easy to default to Herzog’s prestige born of a rich and extensive career—70 projects (feature films, documentaries, TV series) and 50 awards. 

But unlike those Herzog fans, I’ve had it with the director. The Twilight World opened my eyes to a worldview I no longer accept, much less celebrate. Perhaps it’s because in Herzog’s novel, there’s no equivalent to the “ship atop a mountain” scene that took my breath away. Maybe it’s because I’m way past my Fitzcarraldo infatuation as a teen. As a middle-aged Filipino American reader, I expected more from the book. 

I expected Herzog the novelist to enter the head of Onoda instead of reporting what the Japanese had told him. It’s not a documentary or a nonfiction book, after all. Indeed, the novel includes a caveat that, “Most details are factually correct; some are not.” 

Herzog the novelist offers nary a glimpse of Onoda’s motivation for fighting in a war that brutalized my people. Was Onoda among those soldiers who tortured, raped, and killed Filipinos? If so, did he regret his actions or did he feel justified hiding for twenty-nine years in enemy territory? 

One of the great joys of reading a novel is seeing a fictional world from the author’s perspective. I expected to see Onoda’s fictional world through Herzog’s lens. He’s a German writing a World War II novel about a Japanese officer – a unique combination of elements, which I thought would give the novel substance and gravitas. But Herzog shows no interest in World War II or the Japanese or the Filipinos. He skips the massacres and other atrocities that everyone knows happened during the novel’s timeline, not bothering to develop even one Filipino character in a novel set in the Philippines.

The book, like Herzog’s films, is about Herzog’s obsession with obsessive characters. Onoda is the literary version of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre. The unnamed and faceless Filipinos in The Twilight World are just background players in exactly the same manner Herzog used indigenous people in his two “masterpieces” set in Peru.

The Twilight World opened my eyes to a worldview I no longer accept, much less celebrate.

All Herzog depicts in his novel is Onoda’s blind obedience to his superior’s orders, romanticizing Onoda’s madness just as he romanticizes Klaus Kinski’s insanity in his 1999 documentary, My Best Friend. Here, the director focuses on his turbulent love-hate relationship with Kinski–a frequent collaborator with whom he partnered on six films–even though Herzog admits in the documentary that they both wanted to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, had a history of mental illness and abusive behavior, including multiple suicide attempts in 1955, and posthumous allegations from his eldest daughter that he had sexually abused her throughout her childhood and adolescence.

What I learned from reading The Twilight World is this – Herzog does whatever he likes to do and ignores or erases whatever he doesn’t like. Most of all, he takes whatever he wants in the name of art.

In Herzog’s online MasterClass on filmmaking, he talks about his documentary TV series, On Death Row (2012). While producing this series, he was granted only fifty minutes to shoot and interview a convict in a designated space with only one additional crew member present. The circumstances were extremely constricting, but he agreed to the conditions. 

In his MasterClass, Herzog advises his online students to persist even in the face of obstacles during production. “Don’t complain, just get away with the film. That’s what we are, we are thieves,” he says, referring to filmmakers. “We get the loot from the most spectacular or scary places. We’re bank robbers. Just hit and run.” 

Herzog does whatever he likes to do and ignores or erases whatever he doesn’t like.

There was a time when I would have considered this statement to be a hallmark of Herzog’s brilliance, but, after reading The Twilight World, that time is no more. Appropriation is arguably a significant part of the artistic process, but Herzog’s “hit and run” style of appropriation is, to my thinking, the worst kind. This was true both when Herzog carved a path up and down a Peruvian mountain using indigenous people as labor and background actors for the sake of cinematic realism, and, most recently, when he wrote a novel about a World War II perpetrator in the Philippines without including the context of the protagonist’s Filipino victims. In both instances, art became a white creator’s tool of erasure. For Herzog, art serves merely as an artist’s “loot.” It’s all about him; it’s all for his use.

My esteem for Herzog’s films has changed, but I continue to enjoy his secondary works. He’s the subject of Les Blank’s documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), in which he literally eats pieces of his boot (cooked in duck fat) after losing a bet. He also portrayed a creepy, milky-eyed villain in the Tom Cruise movie, Jack Reacher (2012), and he was featured as the voice of a German pharmaceutical mogul in The Simpsons (2011). It’s easier to enjoy those works because they don’t claim any artistry; they’re all in good fun, and, crucially, not all about Herzog.

In My Best Fiend, Herzog explains one of the things about Kinski that drove him mad, stating, “Kinski couldn’t stand not being the center of attention.” In The Twilight World, I could say the same thing about Werner Herzog, as his fascination with himself–and his inability to fully embrace the humanity of the people who populate his chosen setting–got in the way of his fiction writing.

7 Books About Indian Women Who Defy Cultural Expectations

Posted on by Jo Lou

Every culture and age has an image of “ideal womanhood,” an idea that, at its most benign, filters down to truisms and expectations on women should behave. As a reader, I’m drawn to characters who are struggling at the edges of what society expects them to do, bursting at the seams to express themselves. Not all rebellions are explosive. Some are quietly performed in the corners of kitchens, some burn deep in a heart unable to express it in the outside world. As a writer, I have always been interested in the idea of agency—especially where agency seems non-existent. How do we, as women, assert ourselves in a deeply patriarchal society? Especially when claiming our voice often invites violence and censure from the society we live in?

When I started writing my novel Small Deaths, I was adamant about one thing: I didn’t want to invent tragedies and plot points where life had been so devastating. There is no incident in the novel that has not happened in reality. Small Deaths is based on years of archival research and talking to the women and intersex persons in Shonagachhi, the largest red=light district in Calcutta, and still writing my main character Lalee was a challenge. In the novel, Lalee is a sex worker who was trafficked as a child, and is now grappling with the reality of ageing, wants to better her circumstances by working as a high-end escort. I wanted to write with empathy, authenticity and ethically, if that makes sense, because how do we talk about sexual violence, assault, and trauma honestly, without turning it into yet another consumable? 

This reading list spans various genres and eras, but what they all have in common is a stubborn refusal to flatten the complexities of the women they portrayed, or to look away from the unsavory, often prickly aspects of what makes these women, human. 

Kari by Amruta Patil

Kari is a luminous graphic novel about being queer, broke, rudderless, and heartbroken in an Indian metropolis. Wry and cynical, Kari tries to survive in smog city negotiating career challenges, sharing too-tight-for-comfort living space with her roommates, and coping with urban ennui. Gorgeously illustrated, this throbbing book is an example of proto-Sad Girls literature before it became trendy, and a deeply moving meditation on the loneliness of being queer in urban India. 

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur

An unnamed narrator sitting in an old-world coffee shop recounts the story of his family and the devastating fault lines without quite revealing them. Nearly destitute, the narrator’s family live together in a warren of rooms till his uncle starts a spice business and their fortunes turn, seemingly overnight. New allegiances are drawn as the balance of power within the household shifts. The narrator’s wife, Anita, is the lone outsider in this familial tribalism, unwilling to subsume her opinions and individualism in the face of mounting pressure. 

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay

After the death of her mother, a restless, sarcastic and combative woman, Shalini is rudderless, drifting from jobs and relationships. Shalini decides to trade her urban Bangalore life to seek out an itinerant Kashmiri salesman with whom her mother had formed a bond. Her search takes her to the politically volatile northern region of Kashmir Valley, where she is taken in by local families. Confronted with the looming threat of violence and the complicated history of the family sheltering her, Shalini is forced to reckon with the dangerous repercussions of being in a situation she neither understands, nor can control, brought on by her privileged naivety. 

Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

In a small apartment in Bombay, the narrator and his sister live with their parents. Imelda Mendes, Em to her children, is by turns vicious and loving, cruelly forthright and charming. Her bipolar disorder—the suicide attempts and terrifying mood-swings called “microweathers”—is the defining experience of the narrator’s childhood. Their father, the Big Hoom, is the yin to her yang, the stabilizing anchor to the storminess of their lives. Em and the Big Hoom is a raw and nuanced portrait of a woman in the trenches of mental illness, and an exquisite sketch of Goan Christian life in Bombay.

Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Wearing her economist hat well but lightly, Bhattacharya maps the lives and desires of ten women over the years. These women are vastly different in economic and social class, ranging from poor small-town girls to  wealthy Delhi women, from battered wives to domestic workers. This nonfictional work is illuminating in its astute observations on women’s search for intimacy and autonomy in the post ’90s economic liberalization society in India. Blending data, statistics, and interviews with analysis of the Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan’s movies, Bhattacharya creates a unique portrait of contemporary Indian womanhood and female fandom. 

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” 

By now, the opening sentence of Doshi’s searing mother-daughter saga has been widely lauded for its chilling accuracy. Burnt Sugar is the story of Tara, a chaotic woman who eschewed the trappings of domesticity to chase after a religious guru. She lived both as an artist and as a beggar to spite her wealthy parents—all with a child in tow, her daughter Antara. Created in Tara’s shadow and to serve as her “other,” Antara is our deeply caustic narrator. As a child she was constantly rebuffed, spurned, and thrown in harm’s way by her mother, but as Tara starts losing her mind to Alzheimer’s, Antara finds herself thrusted into the role of reluctant caregiver. The novel is a delicate dance of love and betrayal, slowly revealing the deep cuts that mother and daughter inflict on each other. 

It Does Not Die by Maitreyi Devi

Set in colonial Calcutta in 1930, Maitreyi Devi is a precocious and educated 16-year-old, a poet who participates in a public intellectual life quite unheard of in a deeply patriarchal society. Her philosopher father—an adopter of 19th-century enlightenment ideals—invites a Romanian scholar, Mircea Eliade, into his home to study with his daughter under his tutelage. Thus begins a smoldering love story that crosses cultural and racial boundaries.

40 years later, Devi reads Bengal Nights, Eliade’s fictionalized account of their desperate, furious, but short-lived teenage love. Unsettled by the fantasy Eliade creates in his book, Devi sets out to reclaim her narrative of their relationship, culminating in a journey to meet the now old and blind Eliade. At once a portrait of a high-caste Hindu household in a time of late colonialism and a searing unfolding of a secret first love, It Does Not Die is an unmissable gem. 

I’d Like to Report Myself Not Missing

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Excerpts from “After the Rapture” by Nancy Stohlman

Before the Rapture, a bad thing happened, and the people were horrified, and they cried, and they played the details over and over like a particularly painful heartbreak. And someone decided that a memorial should be built, and everyone should wear red, and once a year everyone wore red and remembered the bad thing and it seemed right.

The next time a bad thing happened, people decided it was only fitting to designate another color—white this time—and people wore white, and some people wore red and white together to show how the two bad things were connected and that also seemed right.

But the bad things kept happening. Soon the primary colors were gone—then the secondary colors. The newest tragedies were forced to come up with creative coloring like teal or lavender and soon it expanded beyond colors—people in mourning for a specific tragedy could either wear the color or buy a bracelet made of that color and some people had 10–15 bracelets going up their arm until it was pointed out that the bracelets weren’t produced in an environmentally friendly manner and then people got rid of all the bracelets and tried to go back to the colors, but even the colors didn’t work now, because every color was affiliated with a tragedy, and if you were wearing, say, lime-green pants, but you didn’t know which bad thing was being mourned in lime green, then you might be called a poser and accused of trivializing other people’s suffering.

And still the bad things increased until there were several bad things every week, and new symbols had to be devised to express your horror: praying hands and beating hearts and hugging arms you could send electronically or turn into magnetic bumper stickers for cars or bicycles and you could also swap your electronic picture frame to one specially made to announce your devastation at the new bad thing, but sometimes another bad thing would happen on that very same day and you would not know if you should keep the original picture frame to mourn the first bad thing or if you should update to mourn the most recent bad thing, and those who updated would be called insensitive by the ones who had not yet finished mourning the first bad thing.

It got to the point where the bad things had to compete with the other bad things, and a thing that would have been pretty bad back in the days of the primary colors was now almost ignored. And people abandoned the picture frames but they didn’t know which symbols to use, now, which led them to create new symbols like baking cakes in the shapes of tragedies that needed to be mourned, and sometimes they traveled to the locations of the bad things just to feel the awfulness more acutely and they became jumpy like children in volatile households who are trying to read the signs and see the next bad thing approaching and so sometimes they would see regular things as bad things and jump at the sight of prayer hands or beating hearts or hugging arms until they became numb and the bad things kept happening but they were out of colors, and out of ideas, and so, eventually, they did nothing.

I went into Walmart for a bag of ice, something I never do because I don’t like Walmart, and I don’t like ice, and the ice was of course located next to the wall of Missing Persons and there I was: missing. My picture, the one I got for my passport last year, was hanging next to an artist’s rendition of what I would look like now, one year later, which was basically the same but with longer bangs, which was exactly what I did look like. I stood there confused, reading my height and weight. It said I was last seen in Walmart one year ago, probably when I also needed ice.

There was a number for information, so I called. A woman answered. Missing Persons Hotline, she said.

I want to report a sighting of a missing person, I said.

Where?

Here, at Walmart. It’s me. I mean, the missing person is me. I’m not missing, I’m right here. I’m not sure what’s going on.

She sounded unconcerned. Well, it definitely says you’re missing. For nearly 11 months. Where have you been?

I haven’t been anywhere, I said.

What have you been doing?

I’ve been, you know, just doing regular stuff. Who reported me as missing?

All information from sources is kept anonymous, she said. You must understand why. People might be afraid to come forward if they had to give their names.

Well can you report me as not missing now?

Sure. We’ll need you to come down to the police station for fingerprint matching first, though.

I showed up at the station and they sent me to the Missing Persons wing. I sat in the lobby and it seemed everyone was staring, looking at my picture on the wall and then back at me. One woman finally approached the receptionist and said in a half-whisper—I want to report a missing person sighting.

I can hear you, I said. I’m not even missing. There’s been a mistake.

They took my fingerprints, confirmed my identity, and then thanked me for coming forward. It’s because of citizens like you that we’re able to recover people who might stay missing, she said, handing me a wet wipe for my inky fingers.

I went back to Walmart a week later to see if they had removed my poster but it had only been updated: Last seen in Walmart. Please call with any information.

Before the Rapture, all the romaine lettuce was quietly removed from grocery store shelves as if it had never been there. Thankfully there were other varieties of lettuce like green leaf and butter lettuce, but it was alarming to see those big empty spaces in the produce aisles like a mouth full of missing teeth.

Then the ground beef, and that hit a little harder. Then the chicken cholera, as it came to be called, which affected both chickens and eggs and surprised no one. Then porcine herpes, which was called the “most serious infraction against humankind yet.”

At this point vegans were feeling pretty smug, even without the lettuce, until locusts attacked the wheat and soy and corn crops, leaving them withered in the fields.

People continued to cautiously buy from the pre-packaged aisle until a report confirmed what we’d all suspected for years—the hormones in plastic were changing the gene structures of children and teens, and women were now hitting menopause at age 20, and men were growing breasts and bleeding from their asses. So all that had to go.

Then there was arsenic in the rice. Then toxic cinnamon. Then Coca-Cola dumped half a million gallons of soda into the landfills as if disposing of evidence.

And then, as quietly as it began, everything was returned to the grocery store shelves as if there had never been any lapse. As if we’d been dreaming the other. Now the strawberries were as big as lemons, the steaks were perfectly marbled, the roasted turkeys were glazed like the lips of a porn star, and the whipped cream dollops were flawless angels landing on a pillow of key lime.

It was only later we wondered how we could have been so stupid. Lab rats will consume enough poison to kill themselves if it’s fed to them slowly and has a pleasant taste; a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if it’s done in incrementally slow amounts, so in the end we did it to ourselves.

Being a Woman Is a Horror Story

Posted on by Wynter Miller

In the opening pages of Saturnalia, Nina deals herself The Drowning Girl from a divination deck, a symbol that suggests either death or renewal is looming. While Nina doesn’t believe in the fortunes she reads for her clients, today is different. It’s Saturnalia, a time for celebration, debauchery, and a flirtation with the supernatural at the biggest party of the year, hosted by an exclusive club. Nina doesn’t understand why her ex-friends have found success and acceptance within the members-only club while she remains alone and unhappy. So when the only friend she has left asks her to carry out a secret mission at the club, she accepts, not realizing the danger she’s in.

Set in a futuristic Philadelphia, and against the backdrop of a dying planet, Nina will fight for her future and her soul before the night is over. In rich, literary prose, Stephanie Feldman has created a vivid and strange universe, narrated by an unforgettable, if unlikely, heroine.

Stephanie and I spoke virtually about her unique relationship to genre, the importance of horror stories, and why the climate crisis described in Saturnalia doesn’t feel “near-future” anymore.

Jody Keisner: Saturnalia has a subtle and effective undercurrent of horror to it, which often appears suddenly and unpredictably in beautiful prose, yet I wouldn’t characterize the book as a horror novel. I’d describe it as a cross between literary fiction and fantasy. How did you discover the right genre for this story? Or perhaps a better question is, how did you discover the right balance of horror to include?

Stephanie Feldman: This question hits me right in the existential angst! My work has been called magical realism, fantasy, literary cross-over—so far Saturnalia has also been called horror, dark fantasy, and a thriller. As popular–and vibrant, and expansive–as literary speculative fiction is, I’ve still run up against a lot of resistance from editors. 

When I started out as a writer, I believed in my ideas, however weird they were–I believed that their weirdness made them worthwhile. After several years in publishing, I began to think I was bad at genre and that my uncategorizable ideas were a flaw to be conquered. I tried to write a “fantasy” novel and a “mainstream” novel, but they weren’t successful, in part because I still failed at fitting in a marketing box. My fantasy was too literary (whatever that means), and my mainstream novel was either too commercial or not commercial enough. 

In the midst of this, I heard the author Jeffrey Ford talk about the power of the “idiosyncratic vision.” It was such an important moment for me. It reminded me what makes my stories–any story–powerful. Breaking genre isn’t my flaw; it’s my strength. 

As for putting this into practice and balancing genre elements: I think of genre as a set of tools to draw on, rather than a set of limits. I may draw on tropes from different story types, but they’re all in service of the world, mood, and character arc. My earliest conception of Saturnalia included monsters (human, inhuman, questionably human!), but I also maintained focus on my protagonist, Nina, and her emotional journey. The novel isn’t about magic or monsters; it’s about Nina trying to confront her past, repair or obliterate her relationships, and break out of her self-imposed exile.

JK: Speaking of Nina, she’s on a journey to understand who she is within the context of a society where most people are looking out for their own self-interest. I found her character incredibly complicated. She continually evolves and tests herself. She isn’t always easy to understand—or like, in some instances—and in one climactic moment, her anger saves her. You have broken gender expectations with Nina. What was your intent for Nina when you first conceived of her? How intentional were you in having her break gender norms?

SF: At the beginning, Nina doesn’t quite understand herself. She has a lot of conflicting desires: she sees through the elite and their rituals, but wants to be one of them; she’s been gravely hurt, but still loves the people who hurt her; she recognizes her own misdeeds, but doesn’t have the courage to atone for them. She’s ashamed of her anger. She wants to be liked. So much of this is grounded in her experience as a woman, how people treat her and how she’s been socialized. 

For example, Nina struggles to negotiate her own ambition. How can she prove herself and be accepted among powerful and wealthy men, especially when they objectify, sexualize, and even assault her? How can she maintain her friendship with another woman who’s also a competitor? What does it mean when a man you love manipulates and hurts you? To return to the earlier question about genre: I think of Saturnalia as a horror story about being a woman.

It’s also a story about not giving up. Nina’s on a kind of obstacle course across the Philadelphia landscape, but also the social landscape: neighborhoods and institutions, networks and hierarchies. Fighting, trying—failing and trying again. Confronting the fears and beliefs that hold you back. It’s a messy business.

JK: Some people have questioned my choice to write about fear and other darker topics in my memoir, which reminded me of the refrain in your book: “blacker than black.” Have you ever been questioned about your choice to write about darker topics and “a horror story about being a woman”? What would you say?

SF: Yes, people have definitely suggested what I should write. (My least favorite suggestion: “You should write children’s books!” Because I have kids. It’s insulting, as if motherhood should be my primary and only interest—but that’s a whole other topic.) I have fancy reasons for why I explore dark material: fantasy and horror are fertile with metaphors for exploring society, power, and patriarchy, all topics I find desperately urgent. I also have a simple and inexplicable reason: I like it. Horror, the supernatural, the macabre—it’s my taste and my idiom. That’s generally what I tell people. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in this.“

She’s ashamed of her anger. She wants to be liked. So much of this is grounded in her experience as a woman, how people treat her and how she’s been socialized.

I’m dedicated to writing about women’s perspectives, and it’s impossible to do that without writing about what frightens us. Fear itself is hugely illuminating. What we fear reveals so much about who we are and about the community we live in. As you explore in Under My Bed, our fears also chart the stages of our lives, and reveal a certain kind of female experience. 

At the same time, we can’t write without a sense of curiosity. I loved the observation in your book that fear and curiosity are opposites, and that we’re curious as children and fearful as adults. Maybe, even as you and I reflect on and capture fear, we’re really exercising our sense of curiosity–we’re dedicated to growing through fear, not being constrained by it.

JK: On that note, I’m very much interested in Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s idea of “recreational terror” and how women in particular experience it. In other words, we not only grow through fear, but we sometimes enjoy experiencing it! In what ways do real life and fictional horror stories offer women a safe place to experience terror and rage, emotions young girls are often taught to suppress? Relatedly, what scary stories do you return to? Which scary stories would you like to someday subvert?

SF: So much–maybe too much–of my recreation is terror-based. I love scary movies and scary stories. I look like a soccer mom but I’m a goth at heart. Horror is therapeutic. I love nothing more than putting a horror movie on in the background to help me relax while answering emails. 

Horror stories let us experience our greatest fears at a safe distance, and that’s cathartic–not just mentally, but physically. There’s no release for the tension we feel when we’re walking alone through a dark parking lot, keys thrust between our fingers. Even when we make it to the driver’s seat and click the lock, the threat is still out there. Stories let us see it through to the end. Like you observe in Under My Bed, we know what to expect physically–the adrenaline, the pounding heart–so we can take pleasure in it.

The one type of horror that’s too tough for me–the home invasion narrative. Perhaps because it feels too real, too possible. I do have one great idea for a home-invasion story, but I don’t even want to write it.

I return again and again to haunted house stories. They’re classic, of course, but I also think I just spend too much time at home–and this was true even before COVID. When my youngest was a baby, my fiction went through a “woman stuck in a house” phase. Not a very successful phase–it’s hard to create drama when you can’t go anywhere. Saturnalia was a reaction to those dead manuscripts, I think–I had to send my character out into the world.

JK: Humanity and the natural world are at odds in Saturnalia, most obviously through the climate crisis but in other ways, too. At one point, Nina thinks, “Everything we live by—our beliefs, our culture—it’s all a response to our environment.” Relatedly, some of Nina’s friends attempt to manipulate the natural world to their own advantage, which backfires spectacularly. Is there a warning in here for readers? Why did you want climate change to play a key role in the world you created?

SF: So much of this story explores anxiety about the future, and climate change (catastrophe, disaster) is one of our foremost collective anxieties. Exploring nature and climate didn’t feel like a choice, but a necessity. Saturnalia’s world is fantastic, but it’s still meant to feel like our own, and it’s impossible to discuss our lives today without discussing the environment.

Exploring nature and climate didn’t feel like a choice, but a necessity.

When I started writing, I thought of Saturnalia as “near-future”: Philadelphia, but deeper into climate collapse. As I wrote, though, environmental change accelerated, or at least the effects became more evident. Early drafts referenced a tornado–unheard of here–damaging infrastructure. While I revised, several tornadoes did touch down in our region, flooding city and suburbs. One tornado went down my street. A tree landed on our roof and our house was declared uninhabitable. I completed the final draft living with family–and the fictional tornado’s impact on the city and characters grew.

We’re back home and I don’t think of Saturnalia as near-future anymore. Sure, there are some different messes, like the book’s tick-borne illnesses and refugee crisis, but all of that could easily be happening now, or could appear tomorrow. 

JK: I agree! Saturnalia certainly doesn’t feel futuristic anymore. Also, society’s current misogynistic attitude toward women hasn’t improved in Saturnalia. Nina, for instance, wryly notes: “If you get raped […] it’s still your fault.” Men continue to freely ogle women, peering down their dresses and groping under their hemlines. Abortions must be court-ordered. Men want to create life without the use of an egg or female womb. The world you’ve created and the world we are currently living in are unfortunately very similar, though I’ve seen reviews calling Saturnalia a dystopian society. Can you speak to similarities between our “real” world and the world you’ve created? Are women already living in a dystopian society?

SF: If I once thought of Saturnalia’s physical environment as a thought experiment about the near-future, I always considered the women’s experiences as true to our contemporary world. In the book, abortion is illegal in Pennsylvania. It’s still legal in reality, as of writing, but it’s going to require a huge fight to keep it that way. If the book is dystopian, then American society is dystopian.

When the alchemists in the book create a human-like creature, Nina is the only one to immediately sense its humanity. Everyone else only cares about how they can exploit it. The characters treat each other in the same way, as tools they can use for selfish means. Nina has to come to terms with how she herself has been objectified and dehumanized. For all of our progress, women–and trans, nonbinary, and gender-queer folks–are still demanding to be recognized as people worthy of not just equal legal rights, but dignity and respect. Saturnalia is interested in our personal struggle to believe we deserve that dignity and respect. We need to believe in our worth so we can demand fair treatment from others.

JK: Power, money, knowledge, magic: it’s all used in various capacities by characters who are seeking a leg up no matter the cost to others, though we get glimpses of goodness–and “dignity and respect”–in how Nina’s friends used to once care for each other. In fact, friendship is what gives Nina hope and helps her find a way forward. Have I read this message correctly? Is friendship what will ultimately save us from our more base instincts and selfishness?

SF: Yes! Or, at least, what we need–as individuals, as a community–is solidarity and empathy. 

The characters who can’t move past selfishness and desire for power don’t fare well. We also need to balance ferocity and vulnerability. At the beginning of the novel, Nina is in retreat. She learns she can’t survive–physically or spiritually–on her own.

Which isn’t to say there’s a moral to the story, but I can’t rest in bleakness and dystopia. As dark as Saturnalia may be, I do think of it as a hopeful book, and myself as a hopeful writer. I like to end with possibility. 

Fatimah Asghar Is an Elusive Scorpio Bitch to the Core

Posted on by Jo Lou

Fatimah Asghar’s debut novel, When We Were Sisters, braids lyric and and narrative vignettes into a tender, vivid, heart-aching story of three orphaned sisters and the world they create together, the great beauty and stunning pain of that belonging. The book follows Kausar, the youngest, from early childhood into adulthood, her voice captured at every age with a poet’s ear for language. The characters are so thoughtfully rendered, so three-dimensional in their flesh and blood and bone and infinite complications, their twinned capacities for kindness and for cruelty. 

What always moves me about Fati’s work is its capacity for love, actual love, the kind that takes us to account, that holds and tends and nurtures and tells the truth. That does not hide, that does not seek out the easy narrative. A character who, in the hands of a lesser writer, would have been simply a villain, is allowed the full shape of his humanity, a capacity for tenderness even in a demonstrated capacity for harm. I read Fati, I see Fati, I spend time with Fati, and in every instance am taught to be a more active, loving, attentive community member, friend, sister. These sisters will stay with me for the rest of my life. This book. This sisterhood. And I am truly grateful. 

Safia Elhillo: You work so beautifully across many forms—poetry, film, photography, television. How did this project communicate to you that it wanted to be a novel?

Fatimah Asghar: This project started when I was in a really low moment and had just been through so much rejection. And I honestly just started showing up at my computer and writing, and letting the writing lead me to where it wanted to go. And I don’t even think I knew it was a novel—I just was writing. And it was different from anything else that I had ever written before because it wasn’t showing up as a poem or as dialogue or film, it was showing up as fiction, as narrative fiction. And I just trusted that it was showing up to me as it needed to and that I needed to follow it. So, I just let these small vignettes pour out of me and then would back up and observe it and then sculpt. Like even just being like: who is this character? What are they trying to show me? And it wasn’t chronological, so there were some of the vignettes that I would write that felt very adult and then there were some that felt very youthful, and so it was even thinking about—woah, this character is coming to me in so many different ways, at so many different ages, and how do I build a path for the reader to experience who this person is. 

SEH: Though this is your first novel, it is your second book. Does it feel to you like a second book, or a first? In what ways?

FA: Strangely, it feels like both a second and a first. There are feelings that I felt during my first book that I intimately know—will people like this? Is this book any good? Will it resonate with people? The deep feeling and want to hide after releasing something that’s so vulnerable, that feels so resonate with things that I felt around the first book. But with the first book, I was more confident as a poet. Almost all of the poems in If They Come For Us had been published, or had been read aloud. This book is not that way at all‚ it’s an entirely new genre, it’s not a thing that I have a lot of experience in, and very few people have read the book or heard the book out loud, and none of the book has been published. So, in that way, it feels very me. It feels like a thing that was incubated very solo, and now is being released. And even though it’s fiction, this is probably the most vulnerable and personal thing I have ever written. And there are so many words! Which is wild. 

So, it feels very much like a first. And it’s odd, working across genre, because there’s so much rhetoric about how do you “retain” an audience across different projects. And for me, I’m less interested in that. I think I’ve worked very hard to release myself from that. And instead just trust that each project is its own thing, and each project deserves its own audience and space to be its self in the world. And in that way, this book feels very new, very like a first. And I’m excited to see who resonates with it in the world, and who finds a home in it. 

SEH: I love the tactile reading experience this book invites—redactions with their missing words displayed across the page, sections printed sideways, whole pages printed with only a single line of text. What were some of the ideas and questions around form you found yourself sitting with while writing this book?

This book made me confront so much about myself, to really sit in the narratives and stories that I had created about myself and to unwind them all.

FA: Well bitch, you know I’m a poet at heart! And a visual, weird ass poet at that! LMAO. I’m so annoying. I feel like every time I write something the editors/ doulas/ executives of my projects are like babe nooo, can you just make this straightforward? And I’m like… no. I’m an elusive Scorpio bitch to my core, even when I’m speaking to you in the most clear and straightforward way possible. My friend, Krista Franklin, who is an incredible artist, gave me a really important piece of advice when I was writing the book. I was in deep turmoil and she just told me—write it however you can, even if it comes out in scribbles. And that just really helped me write and created an opening for me. I can’t say someone’s name? Bet, let me redact. This character doesn’t fully remember what happened in this moment? Bet, let’s carve out space for her non-memory. The line won’t fit fully across the page? Bet, print it sideways. It just became a question of: how do I tell this story in the way that feels best for me? And just trusting myself and my ability to do that.  

SEH: In the years since you began this project, what changed? About the book, about your writing, about you? 

FA: Oh my love, everything has changed. Quite literally everything. This book has been chasing me for long, begging me to pay attention to it and actually slow down to write it. And this book made me confront so much about myself, to really sit in the narratives and stories that I had created about myself and to unwind them all. So it really was some huge, tectonic level shifts in terms of even understanding myself, re-orienting towards love, and making space for my wholeness. 

7 Books Starring Characters With Rare Abilities 

Posted on by Jo Lou

Since I was a child, I’ve been captivated by stories of the paranormal. Growing up in an environment rife with real-world terrors, I commiserated with the haunted, longed for the transformative power of magic, and read books on the occult as if they were maps leading to hidden doors of unseen realms.

Not much has changed. Riding the liminal boundary between the material world and the unseen realms, my debut novel, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern, explores these semi-permeable boundaries as it zooms in on the plight of an extreme empath and a relationship between two women, one living and one dead, that changes everything. 

When Leah Fern, once billed as the Blazing Calyx Carnival’s “Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller in the World,” is abandoned by her magician mother at the age of six, she spends the next fifteen years waiting in vain for her return. A small-town outcast who takes solace in unusual visitations, she plans to end her life on her 21st birthday. But her plans are upended upon news that her reclusive neighbor, Essie East, has died with a secret: she knew Leah’s mother. And she’ll tell Leah what she knows, if Leah is willing to collect a series of letters, left via general delivery in post offices spanning the U.S. and Canada, and scatter Essie’s ashes along the way. 

The following books are filled with ghosts—ghosts of the dead, ghosts of memory, living ghosts, manufactured ghosts—and with haunted characters who live at the cusp between worlds and who shine with grief and hope.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

This riveting novel, told in alternating chapters by wives Miri and Leah, revolves around a mysterious rupture in the fabric of their lives when Leah, a marine biologist, goes on a three-week submarine exploration and doesn’t resurface for six months. Something has happened in the sea’s dark depths, and we watch this mystery unravel in Leah upon her return. Transforming in a way that at once seems both impossible and inevitable, Leah appears resigned to her condition, while Miri desperately searches for answers. But because the answers are, like water, elusive and shifting, the story becomes, in part, an elegiac tale of letting go.

Written with a deftness and surefootedness that makes page-turning a must, the watery world of this story surges with unassailable truths about marriage, love, and loss. “There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either,” Leah says, and the unique ways Our Wives Under the Sea occupies that space continue to haunt me. I’ll never look at the sea the same way again.

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

“‘You were never the smartest child, but even you should know that when a dead woman offers you a cigarette, the polite thing to do would be to take it. Especially when that dead woman is your mother,’” says Petronella to her daughter Yejide. Their relationship is as strained in death as it was in life, but what’s different is that Yejide has just inherited her mother’s legacy: she has the once-in-a-generation ability to communicate with the dead.

Darwin, whose story unfolds alongside Yejide’s, until their stories meet, has been raised by a devout Rastafarian who has taught him to avoid any dealings with the dead. But when the only work Darwin can find is a job as a gravedigger, his relationship with his mother takes a blow of its own when she sends him away. Enter Fidelis, the cemetery that sprawls through the city of Port Angeles, where a storm of unrest will soon be unleashed as a reckoning rises between the dead and the living and an intoxicating love story takes root and grows wings. With a lyricism and mastery that enchants with breathtaking (I literally gasped more than once) imagery and compelling characters drawn with exceptional wisdom and compassion, every page of this magical novel dazzles. 

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link

Dizzyingly imaginative, woven with humor and heart, this electric collection of short stories is populated by characters who dwell in unforgettable iterations of the uncanny. Mysterious occupants of a summer house have a penchant for constructing magical toys and a talent for telepathy and medicine-making. There are mummies, immortals, human-sized love dolls with ghosts inside them. A woman named Bunnatine has the ability to levitate; an astronaut named Gwenda sleeps for seven years. Some babies are born with two shadows: “If you didn’t bother to cut back the second shadow, then eventually you had twins, one of whom was only slightly realer than the other.”

Oftentimes, people do naughty things that shimmer with an element of surprise, and oftentimes their transgressions are underpinned by a desire so palpable that it could just as easily be the reader’s desire, which makes for an engaging and deliciously unsettling read. Here, where the uncanny becomes the norm—a ubiquitous second shadow—what thrills are the everyday human habits and emotions we all experience, recast. Reading this book, I felt as if I had a secret, I wanted to tell everyone. And… “If you can’t be honest with your best friend’s Vampire Boyfriend, who can you be honest with?”

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

“There’s something in her,” says Elaine to her sister at the start of this pitch-perfect navigation into the vicissitudes of mental illness. “There is a bug in her.” On the brink of a psychotic break that will land her in a long-term psychiatric facility, Elaine is referring to Francie, her eight-year-old daughter, whom she desperately wants to protect even though she doesn’t have the psychological means to do so.

The novel follows Francie after she moves in with her aunt, uncle, and newborn cousin and, years later, takes an unusual approach to time travel, setting up a memory tent on balcony, from which she journeys back to the period around her mother’s hospitalization. As she seeks to understand a series of unexplainable events revolving around a collection of two-dimensional objects that have somehow escaped their two-dimensional worlds, the common denominator between these objects is Francie, who appears to have a mysterious but unquestionable reach into another realm. Written in prose so lush and evocative that I found myself rereading whole paragraphs solely for the pleasure of it, this novel is a meditation on the magic that can bloom from trauma.

The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin

This fascinating and suspenseful novel—inspired by the real-life work of two doctors’ research into past life memory—revolves around the first sentence Noah, now four, ever spoke: “I want to go home.” He’s repeated those words so many times since then that his mother Janie doesn’t think much of it anymore. Until Noah’s insistence—coupled with his knowledge of things that seem impossible for him to know—leads her to past-live researcher Dr. Anderson, a man staring down the future dark tunnel of his own memory, following a recent and devastating medical diagnosis.

As they begin working together, Noah reveals more details about who he was before, where he lived, and how he died. What will happen when he, Noah, and Janie, knock on the door of the woman Noah claims was his mama before? Dr. Anderson suspects the answer will complete his life’s work, but will he be able to see it through before he loses the ability to follow it? These questions—along with some of the biggest questions of all: what happens after we die? In what ways are we all inextricably connected?—drive this book into rich and dynamic territory, where loss and grief pulse alongside hope and love.

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Lillian and Madison, once boarding school roommates, haven’t seen each other in over a decade. Madison lives on an estate with her senator husband and a son “whom she dressed in nautical suits and who looked like an expensive teddy bear that had turned human.” Lillian works two cashier jobs and lives in her mother’s attic. But when Madison invites Lillian to move to their estate and be the nanny for her twin stepkids, Bessie and Roland, who have the peculiar ability/liability to spontaneously combust when upset, Lillian’s life—and heart—is about to change in profound and unexpected ways.

Strangers thrust together every minute of the day in a separate guest house on the estate, Lillian and the children must grapple with the dark strands of their pasts, which share similar echoes, and the sudden intimacies of their new circumstances as their stories interweave in a stunning testimony to the heart’s capacity to heal and to love. A tender, uproarious, keenly observant page-turner of a ride, this novel’s unique take on found family is unforgettable—I didn’t want it to end.     

Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

When Cora, eleven, meets her aunt Ruth for the first time—“hair glistening like it had been oiled with star shine, looking like she could box down a mountain”—along with Ruth’s charming friend, Nat, who has a talent for talking to dead people, Cora is instantly infatuated with them both. But when Ruth returns 14 years later—“No Nat. No beauty. No power. No shine. Skinny as death and even older”—Ruth no longer speaks, though she is able to convey that she wants Cora to follow her out into the night. What ensues is a haunted (and haunting) journey like no other, told in exquisitely written chapters that alternate between Ruth and Cora’s mysterious trek through the wilds of upstate New York and Ruth’s young life, growing up with Nat in The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission, where she first crosses paths with Mr. Bell, a conman who, like Ruth, is more than he seems. The ways their lives intertwine across years and miles in this gothic tale that writhes with zealotry, greed, and the grotesque—but that glistens with unexpected galaxies of love—builds to a crescendo that broke my heart and rearranged my mind in the best possible ways.

8 Books That Wrestle With the Complexities of Religion

Posted on by Jo Lou

In the process of publishing my book, I learned that there exists an entire category labeled “Spiritual Fiction.” Fascinated, I investigated which books fall into this category, and I winced. Mostly, I found books of two extremes.

Extreme number 1: Books in which religious life is idealized well past the point of sentimentality (as in, sexless Mennonite-girl romances or novels involving doddering ministers and their charming array of folksy congregants). Extreme number 2: Books in which religious life is portrayed with a mind only to its horrors—young women, for example, escaping the polygamous great uncles to which they have been betrothed since birth.

My novel Out of Esau, about a married woman who falls into a relationship with the pastor of her small town, adheres to neither of these extremes, nor do the books below, which each approach religion with a curiosity for the questions it asks, along with its endless complexities.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty, a PhD candidate at Stanford, studies the neuroscience of addiction and depression, seeking explanations for her brother’s heroin abuse and her mother’s crippling sadness. Despite the progress of her scientific findings, she finds herself drawn more and more toward the ineffable faith of her past—what it had given her then and what she can still receive from it. The follow-up to Gyasi’s celebrated Homegoing, Transcendent Kingdom accomplishes exactly that: transcendence.

As a River by Sion Dayson

Dayson’s debut novel paints, among other sympathetic pictures, the portrait of Essie, a woman who has taken shelter again in the fundamentalist faith of her childhood. This through-line is one of many woven throughout As a River, where Dayson demonstrates the same great compassion for all of her characters, bringing them each fully to life, the major and minor alike, with threads of faith, race, and family running throughout.

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith by Daniel Silliman

Silliman’s provocative study is a page-turner, pulling the reader along story after story. His deep dive into each novel, along with the history and theology that brought each book to its time, helped me to better understand the faith in which I was raised, and to view it with an informed compassion rather than my usual bafflement.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The most fascinating character in the book is Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt historian who doesn’t much care for Rembrandt. Belsey is so anti-Christian that he has become rather a fundamentalist about it—banning Christmas from his house, for example, and cursing the church woman who visits his ailing father, whom Howard himself has not visited for years. Belsey’s arch-nemesis, the deeply religious and conservative pundit Monty Kipps, commits parallel moral failings to those of Belsey, and in the end, Smith leaves the reader marooned between Kipps’ apparently unhelpful God and the god Belsey has made of himself, urging us to squint toward the mysteries that lie beyond our own tiny ideas.    

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Throughout this book, the narrator’s point of view captures the quintessential ambivalence of a teenager wrestling with the truth as he’s been taught it vs. that same truth when held up against the world. Religion is most often portrayed as what it often becomes: a justification for violence and fear-mongering, and Baldwin’s tone remains critical throughout. Still, Baldwin’s Christianity is also a necessary and almost unavoidable default for so many of his characters. He brings the reader to understand its particular grasp and pull, which can become almost impossible to escape.

The Seeker and the Monk by Sophfronia Scott

In this book’s first chapter, Sophfronia writes, “I’ve always felt my job is to offer a way of looking at things. To model a way of living just by being.” The author’s “job” is the gift of this book. Scott’s perspective, super-charged from her deep dive into Thomas Merton’s journals, is like reveling for hours in the counsel of a much wiser friend. She takes writings that might initially read as disconnected from our present reality (a monk’s views on ambition and materialism, for example) and makes them immediately relevant, even urgent. Sophfronia’s modern take on ancient wisdom makes this book an inspiring and instant spiritual classic.

Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout

One of Strout’s earlier novels (written before the Pulitzer-prize-winning Olive Kitteridge), Abide with Me explores the age-old question, “If there is a God, why is there suffering?” Strout approaches this question from a particularly challenging point of view—that of Tyler Caskey, a minister in the 1950s whose wife has died and left him with two young daughters to raise. Caskey navigates his suffering alongside his faith, somehow handling both in a way that suggests it can indeed be done, even in the face of great adversity.

God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney

God Spare the Girls is a propulsive read that explores the lives of two sisters who discover a disturbing secret regarding their father, the prominent pastor of an evangelical megachurch. What gripped me the most was how the book bisected the faith at its center, separating its harmful, hypocritical, and patriarchal underpinnings from the truth—and even the empowerment—that the daughters discover within it.