The summer after our college graduation, a few friends and I decided to pool our money together and find a stage big enough for our real lives to play out on. We set our sights on leasing a temporary apartment in Atlanta with a self-imposed move-in deadline of early August. The hope was to reclaim that year-and-a-half we had spent apart due to the pandemic.
Apartment hunting looked like fitting semi-weekly video calls into our busy, post-grad schedules so we could browse Zillow and Apartments.com as a group. Instead of in-person showings, we settled for virtual tours of 3D rooms with the same nondescript wooden flooring and beige walls. And no matter what day of the week it was, we could call managers to ask about available units and get their voicemail without fail.
I read these words for the first time under my momma’s roof, the same place I’d been for the past year and some months.
After one person backed out, we refined our search to include two—even one-bedroom—units. The conversations turned into how many of life’s comforts (e.g. balanced meals, disposable income, in-unit washer and dryer, etc) were we willing to give up to make this happen. Summer came to a boiling point and I remember one of us saying, “I don’t think it’s supposed to be this hard.” People move all the time, right? But, without secured employment, a lifetime’s worth of savings, or a potential co-signer, our options were limited. And my desperation to separate from my pandemic pod was palpable, almost blinding.
To leave one place for another, even for a vacation, took more resources and support and money than I had ever considered.
“Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere,” wrote Jamaica Kincaid in her book-length essay, A Small Place. She goes on to say that, “They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live.”
I read these words for the first time under my momma’s roof, the same place I’d been for the past year and some months. And during that time, I hatched not one but several escape plans, only to witness their execution fall apart before I could slip out the door. Kincaid’s book found me nearing the tailend of my foolhardy plots, when the glamor of escape was diminishing, any plausibility a thing of the past.
In response to critics emphasizing the “angry tone” of A Small Place, Kincaid says in an interview, “In my writing I’m trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn’t whether I’m angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen? I think I’m saying something true. I’m not angry.”
Kincaid writes about the impact of European colonization on the small, beautiful island of Antigua—where she grew up—and how modern day tourism acts as a continuation of that legacy. If “tourist” is a robe that the reader wears often, then her use of second person POV may feel like an indictment.
How does truth sound to the one who has done the speaker wrong? I imagined it would sound a lot like anger.
What struck me while reading was how direct and uncompromising the perspective was: “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.”
In the first section, she takes the tourist, as in you, on a tour of Antigua. She contrasts your perspective of your gorgeous Caribbean vacation with the complex lived experience of the natives. What you learn is that the natives don’t see you as the good and moral person you think you are.
That tug on my feet to leave everyone I love behind as I search for something greater feels distinctly American.
Whenever life in the Western world becomes too mundane or the political atmosphere too unavoidable, our first instinct is to get away from it all. We plan our escape to some faraway, ever-blue island to live out an unaffected fantasy where politics can more easily be ignored. For westerners, the cure for dissatisfaction is mobility. To go or to stay is seen as a choice that anyone can make. That tug on my feet to leave everyone I love behind as I search for something greater feels distinctly American.
Yet, the “you” Kincaid refers to couldn’t mean me. I saw myself not just in the tourist but the native as well—a Black face reduced to the background. Everyone is a native of some place. But, too many of us are unable to escape. Meanwhile, those who can go participate in an industry that relies on the exploitation of the ones who can’t.
While my friends and I scrambled to secure an affordable apartment in the city, Maui was short on water. As a way to regulate water usage, officials restricted the locals from watering their lawns, imposing a $500 fine for those who disobeyed. The hotel and tourism industries experienced little to no limitations.
That specific tension between locals and tourists in Hawaii was explored in the first season of HBO’s The White Lotus which premiered that very summer. The show focuses on the staff at a luxury Hawaiian resort and the mostly white tourists vacationing there. The tourists snorkel and lounge by the pool reading Nietzsche and Ferrante while the resort staffers endure dehumanizing interactions in order to keep their paychecks.
In an interview with TheNew Yorker, the showrunner, Mike White, discusses his intentions behind the portrayal of the tourists when he says, “[I] didn’t feel like I could tell the story of the native Hawaiians and their struggles to fight some of their battles, but I felt like I could kind of come at it from the way I experience.”
Those narratives share one common perspective: that of the traveler.
I’m used to travel narratives that feature endless descriptions of white, sandy beaches beneath a tangerine sunrise and how foreign countries can be the backdrop for one’s self-discovery—or lack thereof. Those narratives share one common perspective: that of the traveler. The result: the native Hawaiians in The White Lotus become “hollow plot devices in service of illuminating the inner lives of the series’s mostly white protagonists,” writes Mitchell Kuga for Vox.
So subtle, and yet so violent and visible is their villainy, that it’s impossible to blame anyone other than the tourists for the suffering of the resort staffers. Any larger discussion of how tourism makes us complicit and turns us into, as Kincaid describes, “ugly things” is buried underneath one wealthy character’s declaration that imperialism is in our human nature.
After weeks of missed calls and unanswered emails, we found an available apartment that wasn’t too far out of our budget and suited our basic needs. We applied, paid the application fee, got approved, and never heard back from them again.
We called.
No answer.
Another week or so passed by. We checked on our application and they had given the unit to someone else. August, in all its blazing disappointment, came to an end. I was still at home.
I’d been watching YouTube vlogs of girls in their twenties moving to New York and Hawaii and living these dreamy, idyllic lives despite the virus claiming thousands of loved ones every day. I envied them.
Talking to a friend, I joked about moving to Hawaii myself. “I might not be able to afford an apartment in Atlanta but I can afford this plane ticket.”
“Maybe,” she hesitated. “Or maybe not. Aren’t the local Hawaiians begging people not to come?”
“Oh, right,” I said. Heat flushed through my body as I realized my mistake.
I had spent the last few weeks scrolling past tweets discussing the water shortage and TikTok videos of locals breaking down how tourism has wrecked their quality of life.
I had spent the last few weeks scrolling past tweets discussing the water shortage and TikTok videos of locals breaking down how tourism has wrecked their quality of life. I had a vague awareness of what she was talking about but my perception of Hawaii came from travel vlogs of influencers on vacation. The footage they took portrayed Hawaii as an island paradise with picturesque landscapes. Looking back, that depiction was so similar to Kincaid’s description of Antigua: “Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play, for no real sunset could look like that; no real seawater could strike that many shades of blue at once.” Later she writes, “It is as if, then, the beauty—were a prison.”
None of their videos mentioned a drought or water restrictions. But, with many travel narratives centered around the tourist experiences, that’s often the case. The natives—their worries, their economy, their reality—are a nuisance compared to the larger narrative of a white person’s self-discovery. And I went along with that erasure just as easily as the girls who made the videos.
Before the pandemic, I always thought that I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted to.
That conversation with my friend exposed a blindspot of mine. I hadn’t yet unpacked the American exceptionalism I grew up learning in school or how other parts of the world might perceive me on the basis of nationality. I avoided content that contradicted my fantasy version of Hawaii simply because I could. I had the luxury of distance that being American afforded me. And if I’d followed that instinct to flee all the way to the airport, I’d be the tourist that Kincaid describes, despite my race or gender. Though being a Black woman comes with its own complicated feelings around American identity, how could I deny the ways my nationality has made me culpable? I’d be a part of the problem instead of the solution. Before the pandemic, I always thought that I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted to. But, now I can see how that feeling is closely tied to where I was born.
Staying still has never been a part of our American cultural identity. We’re encouraged to leave home as soon as possible because bigger lives are waiting for us far away. We pride ourselves on being rugged individualists who don’t need anyone or anything. But, all of that just makes it easier to dehumanize and violate others for our own benefit. If those early days of the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that the real privilege is choice. The choice to stay or to go.
We can ask, “Why don’t they leave?” But, maybe the better question is: why can’t we stay home?
Read Kincaid’s words long enough and her message becomes clear: “There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home.”
Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Best of Friends, explores how a long, complicated friendship is shaped and tried in tumultuous political landscapes. Maryam and Zahra are unlike in several respects—the families and social classes they come from as well as the values they intend to live by could not be any more different. Yet, in ‘80s Karachi, none of these differences seem to matter. Even as the girls move from Karachi to London and the former grows up to be a venture capitalist whereas the latter an advocate for human rights, they remain deeply committed to being there for each other. Neither the passage of time nor the conflicting nature of their professional lives can drive a wedge between them. However, when they confront a shared, painful memory from their Karachi days in present-day London, they can no longer avoid speaking of their differences.
Questions related to justice and loyalty often form the core of Shamsie’s fictions. Her previous novel, Home Fire, winner of the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction, dealt with issues of filial loyalty, set against the backdrop of an unjust mandate issued by a nation state. In Best of Friends, Shamsie considers how assumptions of justice and loyalty impact a lifelong friendship. Reading the new book, I was struck by her artful portrayal of two ambitious and powerful women, and the broader cultural contexts changing their relation. When I spoke with Shamsie over Zoom, I asked her about the driving forces behind the novel and the historical moments that were formative for her and her main characters.
Torsa Ghosal: Your novel’s premise reminded me of tweets, memes, and Quora threads pondering if it’s ok to lose friends over politics. The online discussions raise a question: is the place of true friendship outside the sphere of one’s political life? I feel your novel shows how friendships—even childhood friendships—are motivated by belief systems and these belief systems are, in the end, political. I was wondering if you think there’s something about our cultural moment that has made it urgent for us to reassess the meaning of friendship. I guess, this is another way of me asking you why write this book now?
Kamila Shamsie: All those posts about “don’t lose your friends with politics”—I will be surprised if very many of them came from Pakistanis. When I went to university in America, and I was writing, people started to make comments about bringing politics into fiction, as though politics was something that stood outside. But when I was growing up, it wasn’t something standing outside of daily life. Some of my earliest memories include the day Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged when I was six. A friend of my parents came in the middle of the school day to pick up his two sons, my sister, and me and take us to his house. He lived quite near our school. So, as soon as Bhutto was hanged and there was news that there might be trouble in the city, my parents basically got on the phone with him, and he went and picked all of us up. To me at the time, there was something exciting about leaving school in the middle of the school day and going home to my friend’s house. So, I was always aware of political events and how they were, you know, doing something as basic as disrupting the school day.
Many years ago, I was somewhere in the States, and someone asked me this question about bringing fiction and politics together. It was a young woman who asked it and I sort of said to her, not with any prescience at all, but just in a kind of “let me imagine a situation” way, if ever Roe v. Wade is overturned in this country, you’ll see that politics isn’t separate from life. What’s happening now in the U.S., certainly, but I think, also in the U.K. around Brexit, and with the laws that spring up around COVID, is that there’s this greater recognition that what goes on politically is deeply intertwined with the fabric of our society and therefore, our family and friendships. But, to go back more directly to your question, I did notice in 2016 that between Brexit and Trump there were a lot of people saying I can no longer speak to so and so, because we have such divergent views. And again, it’s nothing new to people from the subcontinent. In India I’m sure for a while now over Modi, there have been these kinds of conversations going on between old friends. I had this idea of a novel of childhood friendship which I’d wanted to write for a long time, but now I could see it in the moment, in a very specific kind of way.
TG: A gap of 30 years separates the two major sections of the novel. Did you decide on that gap at the outset, or did you arrive at it later?
What’s happening now… is that there’s this greater recognition that what goes on politically is deeply intertwined with the fabric of our society and therefore, our family and friendships.
KS: I always knew I was going to follow a friendship through several decades. The original idea was that you would see Zahra and Maryam in many more sections. You’d see their 20s and 30s. But at a certain point I realized that the story itself was in the adolescent years and then in the mid-40s and that the other stuff—I had to think through them—but that wasn’t what the novel wanted. So, I started out imagining quite a different shape, but it was always going to be two girls who were absolute best friends. That we would see them at a very early stage and follow their friendship down the stream, see the ways in which they were very different people in a world where they couldn’t ignore the differences anymore.
TG: I noticed Zahra’s and Maryam’s relationship to images—photos and videos floating across media platforms as well as their own self-images. Zahra is committed to projecting a virtuous image of herself, and because she is intelligent, she is aware of what she is doing until she is not. Maryam, on the other hand, takes responsibility for protecting her friend’s image, which in turn contributes to her own ideas of who she is—someone who works behind the scenes to save the people she loves. And the self-images of both Zahra and Maryam are influenced by the political moment in which Benazir Bhutto gets elected Pakistan’s Prime Minister. I wonder why you chose that moment in history—do you have memories of what Bhutto’s election meant to you at the time and what you think of that era in retrospect?
KS: It was such a significant moment. I was 15 at the time, so I have extremely clear memories of the day Zia-ul-Haq died. I was convinced that we would just have another military dictator after him. I was only four years old when Zia-ul-Haq came into power. So, I didn’t know any other reality. I didn’t know how to conceive of any other reality. And much like in the novel when the adults started to say there will be democratic elections I just thought, why are they being so stupid. I really thought they were being unbelievably naïve. Once it happened and Benazir was elected, it was amazing. It felt like the whole city of Karachi became a giant party. Before that only because of cricket I knew that the whole country could feel joyous together, and this was ten times that or hundred times that, just a feeling of change and something new, and things we hadn’t believed possible seemed possible now. It was so dramatic to see a woman there because power had only ever looked male to me. At school parties, we would listen to campaign songs, and they would bring us to the dance floor like nothing else did.
There was a period after that, and maybe this is why I didn’t write about it earlier, I equated the joy with the disillusionment that followed because, of course, nothing can live up to that kind of hype. Also you realize how many old systems remain in place and people can be disappointing. So, it has taken for me to get even older to look back and think, actually, to have lived through a political transformation, to have lived through a moment where what seemed impossible proved possible is an incredible thing. I am very, very grateful that I have that.
TG: Living through such a moment makes you believe that things can change! I wondered about the extent to which Zahra’s and Maryam’s takes on the image of the “woman in power” contribute to their rejection of conventional heterosexual paradigms in their own ways, even though there are questions raised in the novel about whether Maryam is making a “wife” out of her talented sculptor partner and if their domestic arrangement is a radical departure from heterosexual marriages.
KS: Both Zahra and Maryam are very excited by the election of Benazir but for Zahra it’s the fact that there is democracy, and all the people who have been her father’s friends—journalists as well as human rights lawyers—are suddenly on the winning side of history. She does have a wider sense of it, and then beyond that she’s delighted that it’s a woman. But Maryam doesn’t care that much for democracy itself. To her, there’s a woman. That is very significant because Maryam wants to run her family’s business. She wants to take on the roles traditionally associated with men. I don’t think Zahra is rejecting heterosexuality, though she rejects the traditional paradigm of heterosexuality. Whereas Maryam just rejects all of it—heterosexuality and marriage—although she does have the partner and the child, so in that she is hewing close to tradition more than Zahra.
I wanted to show two young girls who see through the figure of Benazir that the paradigm you’ve been taught as the norm doesn’t have to be the norm. And then, at the same moment, as Benazir comes to power, they have the car ride where they see that the world will still treat them as vulnerable. They will still inhabit the bodies of vulnerable fourteen-year-old girls. So, how to navigate that with the idea of the woman being empowered?
TG: Yeah. As for the rejection and replication of paradigms, I was also struck by the older Maryam thinking of herself as a “conqueror” in the U.K. It is deeply problematic and ironic given the colonial history, but Maryam is also a character who you can see thinking in this way. Your novel shows how generational wealth and privilege transfer across borders and the extent to which one’s sense of justice becomes rooted in privilege.
I wanted to show two young girls who see through the figure of Benazir that the paradigm you’ve been taught as the norm doesn’t have to be the norm.
KS: There’s corruption in the world in which Maryam grows up. Corruption comes with the class position they have—in the way they use it to get favors from their friends. They are not above using violence to have their own way. They don’t think that the law applies to them—what matters is who they know and what they can get away with. I think there’s an interesting conversation within Maryam where she justifies everything as looking out for your family or friends. I also wanted to show how easy it is to transport that to another country. I think, very often, class is talked about as being very specific to a place and, of course, the subtexts and nuances of it are. But also because of Maryam’s privilege, she has a sense of entitlement. It doesn’t occur to her that there’s any room she won’t be welcome in. So, she walks into every room and privilege recognizes privilege. In the UK, she’s able to do a lot of replicating of the network she’s grown up with in Pakistan.
TG: Like how easily she blends in with the members of the High Table! I also think your portrayal of a range of class, gender, racial, and social positions in this novel underlines how identity is not ethics. A Pakistani-origin woman making a place for herself in an exclusive club that’s predominantly white and male need not be a moral or virtuous undertaking by default. Could you talk about what it means to differentiate ethics from identity?
KS: That’s particularly relevant at the moment in Britain because you are having the leadership contest for the Conservative Party, and a lot of people are commenting on the fact that the leading candidates were, with one exception, either women or not white. It was sort of like “look.” But these candidates were all saying how they will commit the most cruel acts against refugees and immigrants. So, what difference does it make? It’s such a shallow version of diversity to say it’s essentially about skin color and name. There’s also very little diversity of class, and that doesn’t get talked about. Beyond that, what’s happening is a very old story. It’s a colonial story. You go back to Macaulay’s Minute on Education where he says, we will create a class of Indians who is Indian by blood and color but English by temperament, so they will rule for us. They will do the work of the Empire. For a while you’ve seen people who aren’t white, who look at world where power is defined by whiteness and make decisions about the positions they’ll take to get to the top, which is to basically replicate certain forms of whiteness without being white. That’s very convenient for their political party because no one can accuse them of racism when they enact racist policy.
Years ago, I was listening to an interview with John Edgar Wideman. This was in the ‘90s and I was relatively new to America and much about race in America, I just didn’t understand. I remember listening to John Edgar Wideman talking about how racist societies have these safety valves. If you treat any large group of people only with brutality and oppression, then that will create pressure and the pressure will build and build until they blow the roof off. So, you create a safety valve that allows a little of the pressure to dissipate. You do that by having a few people from that other group who do get to the top and then you can point to them and say we’re not racist. And that in fact helps the racist system to keep going, because the system says, look, we are changing, and their hope is that no one notices if there’s a change in substance or if the change is a cosmetic change. Now Maryam is someone who absolutely sees how she can play the system.
Mims has been complaining a lot lately that Jodie’s breath stinks like dead fish left too long on a hot stoop. She’s not wrong, but I’m tired of hearing about it, so I tell Mims, “You don’t have to haunt Jodie’s mouth, you know. No one invited you—certainly not Jodie—and if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and ascend.” But she won’t. Stubbornness, some have said, is a mark of the women in our family. I guess it’s the kind of mark you carry with you into the next life, as you shuffle up to the great beyond or boogie down into the cat’s mouth. I’d have preferred a big nasty scar across my cheek for all eternity, not that anyone asked.
Jodie is a tabby, marble-eyed with orange peel stripes along her back. I feed her and the other kitties in the alley beside my building every morning. They rely on me to eat, you see. It was fun for a while, that is until Mims took up residence behind Jodie’s sharp little teeth and started carrying on.
Sometimes I wish Jodie would pick another alley, maybe somewhere over by the park where people can afford to give her the good stuff: chicken liver pâté, smoked salmon, sardines swimming in imported Italian oil. Some well-off widower might even snatch her up and let her have the run of a chic park-side pied-à-terre. But I’d miss Jodie if she left. Mims too, I guess, though she’d never catch me saying so.
I know what the other tenants say about me: that I’m a kook, the bat-brained cat lady, the reason the whole block smells like piss. They avoid me in the stairwell and kick around my welcome mat, showing their resentment in small, neighborly ways. 2-B is the worst. One of those young, spoiled transplants who expects the neighborhood to be all curtsies and rosebuds like his parents’ place in Mayberry or Mayfield or wherever it is he came from. He takes out his garbage at the same time every day, just in time to watch me feed the kitties breakfast before heading to my shift at the City Fresh. He lives alone, so no way he makes that much trash. He’s only there to fix me with his disapproving stares and remind me that the landlord has a strict no pets rule that I’m in dire risk of breeching. He asks if I know how many parasites stray cats bring around the building. Says he can show me reports that prove they’re no better than rats. Calls them an affront to his senses. So I say, well excuse me your majesty but I didn’t realize I lived above the Archduke of Brooklyn, which hardly patches things up between us, but gets him off my case for another day. Fancy guy above his knees, 2-B, but he never wears socks with his shiny leather shoes, so what does he know about odor management?
He doesn’t see what I see. He doesn’t see the tourists and the couples out for strolls who stop when they see the kitties perched on handrails or staring from behind the chain link. They coo and giggle or stoop to scratch behind an ear before moving on, taking smiles with them. I feel like the work I do taking care of them is good work. Brightens things.
Anyway, it wasn’t me that started feeding them. Some were here before me, and some will be here when I’m gone, but for now they rely on me, and I’m not going to let them down.
“Good luck with that,” says Mims.
Jodie blinks up at me, tail swishing on the stained pavement. I bend down to her mouth, getting a face full of that low-tide stench, and ask Mims: “Why’d you have to go and bring that up?”
She’s always reminding me of how I left things between us, as if I could forget.
We never had pets growing up. Mims wouldn’t allow it.
“Pets bring mayhem,” she’d say, hipshot, a Salem pinched between two fingers. “They’re impolite by nature. They break and tear and bite and yowl and there’s simply no benefit to having them around.”
Our narrow house in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights was tactfully strewn with various valuables that were to be admired, but never touched. It felt like living in a museum filled with relics of a bygone and presumably superior era—one that surrounded us daily but was hardly ever spoken of aloud. A time called before. Keepsakes and tchotchkes from holidays, framed photos showing semi-alien likenesses of a younger Mims and Fred, all bathing suits and boat decks, arms intertwined beneath marquees, backs to alpine vistas. Snapshots of the whirlwind adventurers they used to be. Sometimes I’d catch Mims sighing over them, bending toward the photographs as if trying to soak up the youthful glow radiating from her erstwhile skin.
I used to wonder what it might feel like to tear at the photographs with my teeth, to overturn her seashell collection, to squat on the oriental rug and leave a puddle to settle into the fibers.
“To invite an animal into the home is to elect chaos,” Mims said on the one occasion that I dared to ask for a puppy. Fred looked up from his paper to remind her that they used to have a very obedient greyhound that liked to sit at their feet and was never any trouble at all, to which Mims replied: “One is plenty.”
She didn’t need to explain what she meant. It’s a wonder she carried me to term.
This morning I wake up and go down to feed Jodie and the others before my shift, same as always. I’m not two steps out the door before Jodie runs up and Mims starts mewling over how cold it’s been getting at night, even though the leaves have barely started to change.
I’m feeling mean so I pat Jodie’s skull all gentle and say: “You know I could bring you inside where it’s all nice and warm, give you a bath and let you sleep on the bed. Wouldn’t that be nice?” Jodie purrs against my knuckles. “It’s just too bad I wasn’t raised that way.”
Mims grumbles something in response, but Jodie has started cleaning herself so I can’t hear what it is.
She always had a knack for slinging insults. If a nervous young hire at Fred’s firm came for dinner she might remark that he had a handshake like a wilted petunia. People that talked too loudly or too much were rattle caps or clack boxes. Politicians were pigeon-livered, toddlers were interminable fussbudgets, and almost everyone other than Mims was, at one point or another, nuttier than fruitcake.
Fred had Mims admitted to the bin in ‘69. I was ten. Fred said he just couldn’t maintain her anymore. He always talked about her like that—like she was an antique car or some faulty appliance.
The bin was actually the San Francisco Towers Mental Health Treatment Facility, but nobody liked to say all those words back then. Words like that put it too plainly. Nut house, loony bin, kook castle … these names just lightened the mood.
We would visit her twice a month. Fred called them confabs. I’d sit in the waiting room and pretend to read while he talked with the doctors, then they would show us to a big room with a couple of card tables and a TV that was never on, and there would be Mims—face upturned to a wire-netted window, dressed all in white, posture perfect. There was always a super big guy watching from the corner who looked ready to intervene if we tried to attempt a daring escape. We sat across a table and never touched. Mims was never big on hugging, but I remember knowing that if the urge should suddenly come over her to scoop me in her arms and hold me, she might be stopped.
She didn’t talk much, just listened to me yammer about school while Fred went about filling an ashtray. I guess I thought that as long as there were words filling the air between us then things were all right. As long as I talked, she would have to sit and listen. The two of us tethered together, solid and whole.
At the end of these meetings Mims would always do two things: politely thank us for coming and ask that next time we bring along a bottle of her perfume.
The place had no smell. Just the flat sharp scent of cleaning chemicals, that subtle sting, as if someone had scrubbed and scrubbed until you could almost forget there were ever human beings there at all.
On the outside Mims had moved on a cloud of the stuff. You could smell her coming rooms away. I never got lost in the grocery store—all I had to do was follow my nose. Fred said she couldn’t have it in the bin on account of the glass bottle. We would bring other things from home—paperback mysteries, the latest National Geographic—but all she wanted was the perfume. I could understand why. The place had no smell. Just the flat sharp scent of cleaning chemicals, that subtle sting, as if someone had scrubbed and scrubbed until you could almost forget there were ever human beings there at all.
When I get home from my shift at City Fresh there’s a note pinned to the building announcement board:
The following tenants respectfully request that anyone involved in unsanitary or otherwise harmful activities within or around the building please desist immediately, or management will be informed.
Below this idiotic proclamation are a couple of signatures, but not too many. 2-B’s name is right at the top, written in a big Hancock flourish.
I tear the note down, crumple it, and leave it at 2-B’s doormat on my way upstairs.
“How’s that for unsanitary,” I say, hoping he’s right on the other side of the door, eye pasted to the peephole.
I’m worked up, so I go to my room and open my sock drawer. I’ve got an old necklace box in there, with a clasp and a neat golden trim. Fred gave it to me as a gift on my eleventh birthday, after a dinner of baked potatoes and Campbell’s cream of whatever was about to turn. I promptly lost the necklace, but I still liked the box. One day I snuck into their bedroom, stole some of Mims’ perfume, and sprayed it over the box’s velvet lining—three quick spritzes—then placed it back on her nightstand so it would be just as she had left it when she came home.
I think about opening up and taking a whiff, but I decide I’d better wait. I’ve only opened it a few times and I don’t know how many good whiffs the box has left. I can’t remember the name of the perfume or I’d buy some more, fill the box up regular or carry it around in my purse All I remember is that it had a bell-shaped bottle and some froufrou little French name. La something. I don’t wear any myself, but sometimes I walk down the aisles at Macy’s and let the ladies spray me, just in case I recognize the scent. Maybe I could cook some up at home with spices and scented candle shavings, bottle it and sell it. Eau de Mims.
It would probably smell better than cat breath.
I’m up before my alarm and can’t keep still, so I go down early to see what sort of mood Mims is in.
2-B is already outside, swiping at the garbage and tufts of kitty hair on the sidewalk with a broom. Sissy, a gray Abyssinian with a bite-sized chunk missing from one ear, comes up to sniff at him, probably thinking he’s got some tuna hidden in his pockets. 2-B whips the broom over his head and stamps his feet and makes a sort of bark-growl-shout, at which point Sissy retreats behind the compost bins.
I feel my face go hot, like it does when you’re close to a fire, skin all shiny and tight. I think I might go over and hiss at him on her behalf, but I don’t like the way his hand looks, wrapped all tight around the handle of the broom, so I wait until he leaves for work before bringing out the kitties’ breakfast. It takes some time, but eventually Sissy comes out and eats with the others.
I’m already late for my shift, but I sit for a while on the stoop to watch them play. When the tins are empty Jodie finds a patch of sun by my feet and spreads her body out all flat so I can scratch her belly. My fingers move through her ginger hair and skate the ridges of her rib cage, visible beneath her shifting skin.
“You really should do something about your nails,” Mims says. “You know how bad biting them is for your teeth, don’t you? And do you know what’s on your hands, what’s on everyone’s hands? Feces. That’s what.”
I tear a ragged chunk from the nail of my left pinky and grin with it clenched between my teeth. A group of kids clatter down the block, scaring Jodie back into the alley. There’s hissing from the shadows. I’m not sure if it’s Mims or Jodie or both.
Mims had good nails, while living. Not super long and colorful, but always very neat and clean. Everything about her was neat and clean, especially after she came home from the bin and Fred took off once and for all. He’d managed to keep her shut away for nearly two years, but they wouldn’t take her off his hands forever. I guess her return was the push he needed. He was packed before Mims walked through the door, his things boxed up and labelled, his life methodically carved from ours. Just like that, like a lancing, he was gone and Mims was there, moving through the rooms of our house, no longer an occasional phantom.
She traded her starchy white bin digs for patterned dresses and pearls, taking time in front of the mirror each day, making sure everything was in its right place. She was quicker to smile and, to my initial horror, even started to laugh. She chatted with neighbors, held marathon phone calls with old acquaintances, greeted me at the front door after school with orders to sit with her as she went about unspooling the fascinating story of her day. I would sit and listen, nodding here and there, noting the way her eyes seemed to widen with a renewed hunger for life and all its little wonders.
I wasn’t buying it.
I knew the real Mims, and this cheery broad was no Mims. This new woman, whoever she was, was trying to prove something. Maybe she thought that if she fixed her hair and sported the latest styles of shoes, she could play her way back into the world, convince herself that she was really a part of it all. It was a performance, and I wanted no part of it.
In fact, I worked to counter and disrupt her efforts wherever possible. I smoked cigarettes by the fence after school. I liberated twenties from her purse and blew them on records. I skipped showers, cut out makeup and tweezing, and pronounced myself philosophically opposed to bras, claiming them as movable prisons. I fashioned myself into a negative reflection of all things correct and polite. An anti-Mims.
The effect wasn’t all I’d hoped. Mims was never shy about showing her disproval of my stained jeans and the way I did my hair, but the only times she really insisted I fly right was on Sundays.
That was another thing: this new, post-bin Mims got all interested in God. We’d never gone to church before—Fred wouldn’t hear of it, said he left God in a river in Korea—so all this holy business was new to me.
Church is where I learned to cover my mouth when I yawned, where I memorized when to stand and sit so I could spend the in-betweens thinking about things other than stoning and plagues and what it might feel like to try and touch your fingertips together with a rusty spike jutting through your palm.
Mims liked the music best. With Fred gone we couldn’t afford opera tickets anymore, so I guess it was the closest she could get. She wouldn’t sing along, of course, but she would shut her eyes and listen every time the organ started up. The sound made me picture a flock of geese being throttled behind the altar, but Mims didn’t seem to mind. Each time we stood for a hymn her breathing would change, get all slow and low. Once or twice, I caught her staring off into the middle distance, lost in the sound of mismatched voices straining to praise in unison.
In those moments—lips pulled together, hands clasped tight before her breast—I could almost believe her.
I feel like I’ve been pretty hard on Mims lately, so on Sunday I dig this old portable radio out of the closet. There’s usually a church service on one of the AM stations. I think maybe I’ll bring it down and ask if Mims might like to hear some music, but when I get outside 2-B is there, spraying down the sidewalk with a hose.
The kitties are nowhere in sight. Probably hiding out so they won’t get blasted. I wonder if he’s blasted them already. I cross my arms on the stoop and clear my throat, loud so he’ll hear.
“Oh,” he says. “Good, it’s you.” He turns a squealing valve and the hose goes limp. “I’ve discussed your behavior with the other tenants. Maybe you saw our note?” I can see he’s practiced this little speech in front of his mirror. “Well. We’ve tried to be civil, but the next time I see you putting out food for these animals I’ll have no choice but to report you.”
I suck my teeth at him like, report me for what, hot stuff?
He points the drooping hose at a tin of yesterday’s Friskies, floating in the gutter.
“Littering fines can get awfully expensive.”
He grins all sly and shiny to match his pressed white button-down shirt.
I wait for him to go off to brunch or wherever before setting out fresh food for the kitties, one extra tin each. A regular Sabbath feast.
After the sun has had a chance to dry the sidewalk Sissy and Jodie and the rest come padding out and soon enough they’re eating and the people on the sidewalk are pointing and smiling. Everything churning happily, working as it should.
“Hose this,” I say, arcing a glob of spit in the direction of 2-B’s window.
“Lovely manners,” Mims says, but I think maybe I can hear a smile in her voice, so I give Jodie a good scratch and tune the radio to a gospel channel. It’s not much like the Lutheran tunes I remember, but I don’t hear any complaints.
I’m not sure if Mims and I ever dropped the act, stepped outside our rival roles and faced each other head on, but if we did, it might have been the day of the whale.
It was all over the news. You might remember: a humpback came wandering into San Francisco Bay and couldn’t find her way out again. Gray whales weren’t uncommon further up the coast, but this one had come right in, started knocking around boats in the marina and doing laps around Alcatraz. The radio said people were flooding to the water’s edge to try and see it. I had been sitting on the floor by the radio, listening with the volume low, one ear pressed against the speaker. I didn’t know Mims was home until I shut it off and saw her standing in the kitchen, watching me.
“Sounds like a bunch of crap,” I said, my face reddening. I didn’t want her to see that I’d been taken in.
Mims removed her spotless apron and hung it on a peg.
“Let’s go have a look.”
It took half the morning and Mims’ makeup was running with sweat, but we eventually made it to the bridge. Hundreds of other people had the same idea, but with some gentle shoving we were able to squeeze into a spot against the railing. I held on tight, stared over the edge. The paint was fresh and left a blush on my palms.
Everyone else was looking out across the bay, pointing and squinting, watching the surface for the littlest break, a fin or plume of mist. Mims was staring straight down. The ridges of her spine stood out along her neck. Her hair, done up with a jade pin, was coming loose, falling around her face. She stared and stared, dream-eyed, into the black water. It was the same way she would gaze at her old pictures, eyes softening wide, as if waiting for something to shift or change, or maybe for a hole to appear, a hole big enough for her to fall into. I could see that she was holding her breath.
I put my elbow in her ribs. She looked up at me with a sharp little gasp.
“Watch this,” I said and stood on tiptoes, leaned over the railing, and spit.
I waited for her to clap me with a cold stare, to grab my arm and haul me back through the crowd. But she didn’t yell, or laugh. She just stood there and watched my saliva silk down through the air toward the water. Our hands clutched at the railing, fixed apart like stubborn magnets.
Over the hum of the crowd I heard her breathe again, clear and even in the salt-sweet breeze.
We watched the water all day, even after most of the other people had given up and gone home, even after the boats that had disappeared beneath us started to return, newly adorned in light.
A piece of paper slides under my door, followed by the sound of shoes clopping down the hall.
Even the shitheel’s walk is smug.
I’m pretty sure I know what the note will say, but I pick it up and read it anyway. It’s a new building memo. This time almost every tenant in the building signed. Traitors. The phrases risk to general well-being and zero tolerance pop out like little hirsute moles. At the bottom is the number for animal control and an extension for our local precinct.
I go to my dresser and take out the necklace box. I bring it to my face and crack it open. I breathe in as deep as I can.
All I smell is clean socks.
Through my window I watch 2-B whistle his way out the door and down the block, then I go into the kitchen and burn the note over the range. My apartment fills with the smell of smoke, black trails of signatures burning. I keep the window closed, locking them in with me, breathing them until there’s nothing in my hand but dancing flecks of ash.
Before I left for college I promised to call Mims every day. We both knew it was a lie, but we went ahead and pretended. It was the polite thing to do. I did manage to call most Fridays before going out with friends or taking weekend trips. I knew she’d be home. She was always home unless there was something special going up at Town Hall or Stern Grove. By then Fred had remarried some young thing named Montana and started sending enough bread so Mims could afford a ticket now and then.
“Montana,” Mims snarled once into the phone, “a perfect name for something big and empty.”
For a while Fred would mail me monthly checks—spending money scrawled in the memo. I sent them back in tiny bits. I didn’t want him getting the idea that I was his to maintain too.
Mims and I kept on all right for a while, a long time really, even after I graduated and moved to New York, trading crisp nights and bay fog for hellfire blasts of subway grates and cancerous curbside snow. If she considered me traitor, she never said so out loud. We did Christmases and birthdays whenever I could swing them. Gradually the visits were replaced by calls, shorter and shorter as we found a script that worked and stuck to it.
Me: How’s things?
Her: Fine, fine.
Me: Miss you.
Her: I you as well.
I promised to see her more. She insisted she was fine all on her own, that, no offense, but she preferred it that way.
Then one day I got a call from someone telling me to take down a number and address where Mims could be reached for the duration of her treatment.
It took me a minute to hear each word, stitch them together. Last I heard Fred was off growing grapes in Mendocino, so I asked how he’d managed to wriggle his nose back in Mims’ pudding. The voice on the other end of line filled me in.
“According to our records, your mother had herself committed. Same as last time.”
This voice probably belonged to a perfectly nice person who was simply doing their job and didn’t deserve what I told them to do to themselves before slamming my phone into the cradle.
I flew out of JFK the next day.
On the plane I imagined what awaited me. I watched the scene unfold again and again, clearer and more certain with each refrain: I would walk inside and there she’d be, just as she had been before, calm, collected, and proper. I’d cross the room and sit with her, only not too close, careful not to take her hand in mine. Then I would say something. The perfect thing. The magic words to make it all okay. I would talk and talk and she would sit and listen and there would always be more to say.
When we landed I got a room at a Holiday Inn for the week, dropped my luggage on the bed, and took a car to the Towers. The place had changed. The sign above the door was painted cheery colors, and the lobby had been dressed in fresh flowers—or convincingly life-like plastic ones—that brightened every corner. It reminded me of Mims’ Sunday getups, and I felt my mouth go dry. Someone noticed me pacing around the waiting room. They handed me some papers, had me sign my name a few hundred times, and walked me down a web of identical halls. We passed the common room without stopping. I peered inside and saw a few people laughing around a card table, and a few more grazing by the sealed windows, but no Mims. Finally, we stopped in front of a door. My guide knocked twice on my behalf then went squeaking back down the hall, leaving me alone. I reached out my hand and pushed inside.
She was in a bed, propped up on a mess of fat white pillows. Her hair was thin and greasy, matted to her forehead, graying at the roots. I must have made a sound because she rolled her head and looked at me. Her eyes seemed to stare right through to the wall behind me, which like all the walls was bare and sickly white. Her hands—could those really be her hands? So vein-riddled, so restless—clutched at the blankets. She looked vacant, and yet exposed. No disguise. No armor. I knew she was waiting for me to speak. I opened my mouth, but shut it again, afraid that I might choke, or scream, or laugh, or say what it was that I was thinking. Out in the hall someone started calling out the name Louise. Over and over, as if trying to conjure them up. Louise, Louise. A last-ditch incantation.
She looked vacant, and yet exposed. No disguise. No armor. I knew she was waiting for me to speak.
Mims’ eyes followed me as I went to the table and switched on the radio; an old AM box that used to live beside her bed. There were no pictures. No keepsakes. No other traces of home. Music leaked from the speaker, throaty with static. A familiar mixture of strings and horns. It mixed grotesquely with the calls of Louise still coming from the hall. I turned it up too high and let it play, grateful for a sound to fill the room.
For a long time we sat and listened, both of us quiet and so still that we were hardly there at all, only the sound and that same smell of nowhere and no one hanging in the air between us.
After a while Mims closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. I let her. I watched her breathe. Watched her eyes move beneath their lids. When I couldn’t watch anymore, I slipped out. Quiet and easy. Halfway down the hall the sounds of the radio and the calling voice faded, and I found that I could breathe again.
I got my things and called the Towers from the airport. I told them my plans had changed, that I had to fly back home immediately. They asked if they could contact me should anything serious come up. I produced a vaguely affirmative grunt, bought a jumbo pretzel, and waited at the gate for my flight home.
The phone rang three days later. It rang again the next day, and the next, regular as church bells. I picked the fabric on my couch until it started to fray. I chewed my thumb down to the quick. I guess I thought, if I don’t answer then nothing can be wrong. As long as I am quiet, and still, and far away everything can stay just as it is. Fine, fine. There would always be time to go back. Time left to say something, anything, the perfect thing.
Then one day the ringing stopped.
That night I opened the necklace box. A shade of her aroma still lingered in the lining, already frail and thin. I breathed in, held her in my lungs until I was dizzy, until little galaxies danced over my eyes. I listened to the noises from the alley outside my window. The hissing and moaning, the million small sounds of things out there, moving in the dark, scrounging for something to see them through the night.
Todd, City Fresh supervisor extraordinaire, comes by my register and slips me a check. Says today’s my last day on the team. Late arrivals, inventory unaccounted for, reports of so-called moodiness from trusted clientele. Asks: is there anything he’s missing? I hand over my name tag. He says keep it, so I leave it on top of the machine by the door, the one that spits out temporary tattoos and handfuls of knockoff M&Ms.
When I get home Jodie is in the alley with the other kitties. They’re all gathered around something, their haunches up, bristling. I step closer and see it, the carcass of a bird. None of them seem to know what to do with it. Each one is waiting for the next to make a move. I grab a plastic cover from a copy of the Times, swaddle its brittle body, and toss it in the dumpster.
The other kitties scatter as a street cleaner belches by. Only Jodie stays put, sniffing at a little stain where the bird had been.
“I should have stayed,” I tell her. “I should have been there with you. To see you off.”
“Please,” Mims says. I picture her disembodied eyes somewhere, rolling. “Don’t be gauche.”
My knees pop as I get down close to Jodie’s face and let her press into my knuckles.
“I wish you would have said something.”
“I didn’t want you to worry yourself.”
I open my arms to scoop her up. She lets me. I’m not sure if I should hug her or throttle her, so I just sort of stand there, holding her, feeling the thin bones beneath her skin squirm against my hands.
“Really,” Mims says. “You must do something about those nails.”
I’m trying to convince myself to sleep when I hear a crash outside my window. Trashcans spilling and rolling in the alley. I think maybe Sissy and the others are wrestling again. People will be mad if they make a mess, so I put on some slippers and head downstairs to pick up and maybe watch them play a while. It beats counting cracks my ceiling.
I come out on the stoop cinching my robe against the wind. 2-B is there, lit beneath a jaundiced streetlight. He’s doing this funny little dance, wheeling his arms, kicking his feet, nearly losing his balance. I wish like hell I had a camera. I think maybe I’ll call out to him, let him know how dumb he looks. Then he swings his foot and it connects with a shape on the ground, fuzzy and dull orange in the half-light. There’s a little whimpering sound and a not so little laughing sound.
I’m not sure, but I think maybe I scream because he jerks his head around and stares straight at me.
“Oh,” he says, words squeezing through his teeth. “It’s you.”
“I saw that, you shit!” I’m trying to sound mean, but I don’t know how convincing it is because he smiles, showing all his teeth, even the tidy bottom row. I’m feeling dizzy and I have to grab onto the stoop railing so I don’t topple over. I manage to look away from his pearly whites long enough to see Jodie. She’s trying to crawl away, back to the shadows of the alley, but her legs keep giving out.
2-B bends down and picks up an empty tin of Friskies. He holds it away from his body, pinching it between two fingers like it’s coated with disease.
“I warned you about this,” he says. “I’m going upstairs and call the landlord.”
He brushes past me on his way inside. I don’t try and stop him. I let go of the railing and go to Jodie, still struggling to stand. She hisses when I reach out a hand to touch her. Her claws curve out. Sharp little moons.
“You okay, Mims?” I ask but I guess she doesn’t hear me because Jodie just goes on hissing, like I’m some stranger. Like she doesn’t recognize me at all.
Pairs of eyes open in the shadows, shining like silver dollars dipped in gasoline. They’re watching me, wide and trembling. It looks like 2-B had a ball out here. I bet he was at it for a while before I woke up. I bet Jodie isn’t the only one he hurt. I feel my face going hot again—shiny, tight, burning.
There’s a brick in the gutter next to an overturned bin. I pick it up, test its weight in my hand, and chuck it straight at 2-B’s second story window.
Glass rains on the sidewalk. There’s a curse from behind the jagged hole in the pane, but I barely hear it because I’m laughing just as loud and as mean as I can. Loud enough that windows come open, framing heads telling me to pipe down. But I can’t. It’s all too much. I’m still laughing when 2-B comes back out on the stoop, his face a deliciously raw salmon pink.
“The police are on their way.” he says tramping down the steps toward me. “I should thank you. You just did me a big favor. I hope they lock you up, you—”
I swipe my ragged nails across his face. They come away with a bit of the skin from his cheek. Blood starts beading on his face before he understands what’s happened. He smacks a hand over his cheek like a bewildered housewife in some old movie, and another laugh leaps out of me.
“You crazy bitch!” He yips, his voice a creaky hinge on an old porch door. The blood is seeping between his fingers, flowing with lewd urgency. I don’t care. I’m watching Jodie drag herself into the alley, which seems so wrong because she loves the sun. But it’s night, I think. No sun. Just these blue and red lights, coming closer, lighting up the alley, bright as ocean glare. The other kitties have scrammed and she’s all alone now. All alone in that narrow dark.
2-B is pointing at me with his free hand, yelling something. I feel two big hands come to rest on my shoulders. I want to explain, to tell them the little shit asked for it, but instead when I open my mouth all that spills out is:
“Mims!”
I yell it like a bell.
The hands clamp down hard, discovering my bones.
“Mims!”
I yell it like trumpet blast, like a cymbal crash.
I feel my body being lifted, dragged. The broken glass from the window blisters beneath my slippered feet.
“Mom!”
I yell it like a hymn, like a flood. I yell it like a sermon.
It’s hard to breathe with the cop’s arm wrapped around me, pulling me toward those flashing lights, pressing me against the cold metal of his car, trying to cram me inside. I lurch forward against the dense wall of his flesh. He bounces me back like I’m nothing and I crack my head against the side of the car. I feel slow warmth move across my eye as he shoves me inside and slams the door.
There’s a woman in the seat beside me. She’s wearing colorful beads and a sequin dress beneath a nest of hair so tall it presses against the roof of the car. Her makeup is running—glittering blues and blacks drawing downward lines on her face, along her chin, staining her neckline. She’s humming to herself. I think I recognize the tune. She catches me staring, bats stick-on lashes that are coming unstuck.
“How do I know that?” I ask. My voice a nail on a far-off chalkboard.
“C’est Debussy.”
A second, smaller cop twists in his seat, says, “Shut it” through the web of metal.
I try and wink but my eye is filled with blood, tacky and thick.
The car keens as the big cop gets behind the wheel and starts the engine. I can smell his sweat, ripe and seeping into his uniform. My head is floating, my body a vague and distant thing somewhere beneath. The world around me sways. Teeters. Whirrs.
I breathe in.
I can smell the expired freshener hanging from the mirror, the scent of Diet Coke, and too many cups of coffee. I can smell them, the cops. In this same car, day after day. I breathe in and taste the big one’s breakfast: French toast with raspberry jam, even though he’s supposed to lay off the sweet stuff. Bad for his heart, his wife says, and he knows it too. I can feel her skin on his, her cheek dusted with too much makeup. I breathe in and I know her worry, her love for him, and his love too. It’s suffocating. Sharp and big as life.
I breathe in and smell the flowery liquor on the breath of the woman beside be, the scent of other bodies still clinging to her skin; I smell the air outside the window, the sting of urine, the bite of fish scraps turning in the alley; I smell 2-B’s fine clothes, the detergent he uses to keep them stiff and spotless, the same kind his mother used when he was a boy.
I breathe in my building, the aroma of soup that fills the stairwell, the dusty carpet in my hall, the box on my dresser sitting open and empty. I breathe in and Mims is there, just as I knew her: upright before a mirror, tipping ashes that go skating the surface of a porcelain ashtray, swaying to the bleating of a detuned church organ, fingering her pearls. As she was before: skinny and sun-kissed in a pale blue swimsuit, leaping from the prow of a boat to search for shells. As a girl: squirming in the velvet chair of some grand opera house, craning her neck and sucking on caramels, unable to contain her joy. I am flooded with all of her, all at once. Notes swelling, colliding: smoke trapped in linens; dusted skin of plums; long dead lavender crushed between pages; salt on a pocketed shell, stolen from the sea—
“Hey,” I say to my new friend. “What’s the French word for ocean?”
She looks at me puzzled and, I think, a little afraid.
“You know,” I suck in my cheeks and purse my lips. “Where the fishes live?”
Her face softens to a lopsided smile.
“La mer,” she says.
That’s right, I think. That’s it.
I want to run and tell Mims. I want to tell her I remember now. I can bring it to her, that little glass bottle she loves. She can have all she wants, cover herself head to toe. Bathe in it if she likes. I’ll wear it too, move on that same cloud. But I can’t get to her. She’s away in the dark and I’m here in the car and the car is moving. My head is pounding. I lean against the shoulder of the woman beside me. She starts to hum again, and then to sing, blessing the redolent air. I close my eyes and press my lips together. I let myself sway, our bodies ebbing in unison as the car bounces on the road beneath us. Like this, we go, and it’s all right, I think. It’s all right because it’s late now and I’m tired, and anyway, she knows.
Moms are weird. Scary, even. You were inside her. She’s still inside you: seeds of dysfunction planted by even the most well-intentioned, over years of clumsy tending. She was a mere mortal, suddenly transformed into a minor god, blessed with raw human material and challenged to shape it into something as close to perfection as possible.
The extent to which mothers and children are capable of destroying one another is so profound that we, as a species, will probably be writing about it right up until the moment the planet extinguishes us. My new novel Motherthing is just such a story—a dark comedy about a woman named Abby, who’s been lucky enough to marry the greatest man in the world, Ralph. She’s working hard to process her relationship with her monstrous mother, both so that she can be a better mother herself one day, and be an excellent partner to Ralph in the meantime. Her plan is thwarted, of course, when she’s thrust into battle with the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law, Laura, back from the dead to prove once and for all that no one is good enough for her son.
Motherthing is a love story, a comedy, and a horror story, which could probably be said of most mother-daughter relationships as well. We love our moms, sure. Our moms are hilarious, aren’t they? But also our moms can be dark as hell. Like Motherthing, many of the following books don’t fit easily into any one genre, but all of them deal with the unique horrors of creating and sustaining life.
Two years after the shocking suicide of her teenage son, Angela Toussaint returns to the place where it happened—The Good House: an ancient estate in Sacajawea, Washington, passed down by her grandmother, a Creole herbalist who the townsfolk ignorantly regarded as a supernatural doctor. But the tragedy has altered things in The Good House, and in the town as well. Strange disappearances, acts of inexplicable violence, mysterious deaths. The Good House is a genuinely frightening horror novel for true horror lovers about indescribable grief, inherited trauma, and power the past has over us.
Chouette opens with a very funny woman named Tiny realizing that she’s pregnant with an owl baby. Part twisted, feminist fairy tale (à la Angela Carter), part surreal horror (evoked immediately by the book’s epigraph, a quote from David Lynch’s Eraserhead), and sprinkled with just the right amount of heart and humor. In this book, the pregnant woman is a kind of chimera—a creature made up of two distinct beasts. Tiny has special powers, special abilities, but, just like her owl baby, she doesn’t quite fit in. This book makes it heartbreakingly clear that being different isn’t inherently difficult, but rather is made difficult by the failures of society.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
Fever Dream is a marvel, the lovechild of Samuel Beckett and Amelia Gray, and best devoured in one sitting. It takes place in a rural hospital clinic where a woman named Amanda lays dying; a boy named David sits beside her. David pushes Amanda to recall the trauma that put her in the hospital, and in the process opens a vault of maternal dread, body horror, and profound loss. Visceral, thrilling, sad—I may never stop thinking about Fever Dream.
The School for Good Mothers is a nightmarish glimpse into a not-so-distant future in which mothers who’ve failed to meet a certain standard are taken from their children and sent to an abusive rehabilitation center. Chilling, harrowing, and all the more horrifying for its plausibility, this book is about an everywoman fighting to get her child back, and also raises important questions about the limits (or lack thereof) of government control, and the intense pressure society places on mothers.
In the apocalyptic world of Future Home of the Living God, women are suddenly giving birth to earlier, regressed forms of humans. The species is de-evolving, slowly but surely, and pregnant women are at the forefront of its demise. Except for Cedar Hawk Songmaker, an Indigenous woman adopted by well-meaning white parents, whose unborn child might be one of the few “normal” babies left. Structured as letters written by a first-time mother to her unborn child, this book is equal parts funny and grim, making it one of the most heartbreaking pieces of dystopian fiction I’ve ever read.
Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami, translated by Stephen Snyder
In 1980s Japan, an alarming number of babies were left abandoned in coin-operated lockers. Ryu Murakami’s novel is a deranged, genre-bending bildungsroman, about two coin locker babies, saved from the lockers and raised together on a remote island. Though they grow up to lead very different lives, they’re both possessed by finding out the identity of their real mothers, the women who abandoned them to such an awful fate. And, eventually, in gruesome, horrifying twists, they find them.
Molly, an exhausted working mother of two, clutches her infant and her toddler in the corner of her dark bedroom while an intruder may or may not be lurking just beyond the door. The Need starts, and stays, as gripping as its first chapter. As Molly, a paleobotanist working on a mysterious site called The Pit, grapples with parenting’s ceaseless cyclone of labour and guilt and exhaustion and joy, Phillips introduces a menacing stranger who threatens to take it all away. The Need is vivid, creepy, and incredibly engaging.
The Hole by Hye-young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell
When Oghi wakes from a coma, he discovers that he caused a car accident, which took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a lonely widow who is devastated by the loss of her only child. She neglects Oghi, leaves him isolated in his room, and spends all of her time digging up the garden that her daughter worked so hard to cultivate. The Hole is a tense, subtle study of loss, isolation, grief, and the disturbing reality that even those closest to you can be strangers.
Hollywood’s perpetual hunt for literary IP, or intellectual property, has given audiences an ever-expanding library of book-to-film adaptations—some exhibiting more intellect than others. Without the proper care and insight, a book undergoes a flattening effect when transferred from page to screen, as nuance and ambiguity are smoothed over into something that’s easier on the eyes, like a mousy heroine airbrushed into a sex symbol. The recent Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is a case study in howa cinematic retelling can fail to translate the subjectivity and psychological complexity of the written word. Directed by Carrie Cracknell from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow that has all the substance of a SparkNotes summary, the movie favors quotable quips over the potent emotional subtext of Jane Austen’s novel.
The novel follows the reunion of former lovers Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth more than seven years after Anne rejected his marriage proposal at the urging of her family and friends, who felt the naval officer was beneath her station. Now, he’s a successful captain; and everyone knows that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Though it features the author’s signature satire and social critique, the narrative is intensely internal—tinged with an aura of regret, of love lost and rediscovered. Also notable is the fact that Persuasion is the final novel Austen completed before her death. She did not live to see it published.
It’s probably for the best that she did not live to see the Netflix adaptation.
Though it features the author’s signature satire and social critique, the narrative is intensely internal—tinged with an aura of regret.
Soon after the trailer dropped, Janeites took to social media to lament the misreading and misguided Fleabag-ification of Austen, complete with a winking and wine drinking Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot. Speaking directly to the camera, the unrecognizable heroine cracks wise about her awful relatives while cracking a hole in the fourth wall. Devoted readers of the novel also mourned the reduction of poignant passages into memes:
Austen: There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.
Netflix: Now, we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.
In her review in Harper’s Bazaar, Chelsey Sanchez poses the question: “When we lose the beauty of subtext—Austen’s greatest storytelling strength—what else exactly do we gain?” The answer is an adaptation that belittles not only the author’s work but the attention span and interpretive power of the viewer.
In each of her novels, and especially in Persuasion, Austen uses the device of free indirect discourse, a commingling of first and third-person narration that creates the impression we’re inside a character’s head as they’re taking in their surroundings. The central conflict between Anne and Wentworth stems from their attempt to decipher each other’s feelings after years of estrangement. They can’t speak frankly or privately, at the risk of breaching the rigid decorum prescribed by Regency society. So how else can each determine if the other still loves them? It’s only through a close-reading of minute glances and micro-expressions, and words left unsaid.
Viewed from the lens of modern cognitive science, they’re practicing Theory of Mind, also known as mind-reading: the process by which humans attempt to understand experiences and perspectives outside our own by reading and translating both verbal and nonverbal cues. In other words, empathy. The reader, too, is simultaneously involved in this act of interpretation and imagination, of reading character. Literary critics such as Lisa Zunshine draw on Theory of Mind to examine how fiction conjures the illusion of subjectivity. In her article “Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It,” Zunshine describes the immense pleasure and social-emotional benefits of reading literature. It’s a risk-free trial run for IRL interaction and all its accompanying stresses and uncertainties:
It is as if we are made to feel that we are dealing with a genuinely complex, nay, almost intractable, social situation, but we are navigating it beautifully… an illusion, but a highly pleasing one, that we will be all right out there in the real world, where our social survival depends on attributing states of mind and constantly negotiating among those bewildering, approximate, self-serving, partially wrong or plainly wrong attributions[.] Is this lovely illusion of sociocognitive well-being one reason that some writers persist in constructing such scenes and some readers seek out texts containing them?
One good thing can be said of the Netflix Persuasion: it prompted me to revisit the original book and my first impressions of it. After all, so much of Austen is about reading and re-reading. Looking back at my margin notes, I had the somewhat mind-bending and metafictional experience of re-reading my younger self reading Anne reading Wentworth. The movie also inspired me to dig out a college paper I wrote in 2010, applying Theory of Mind to the novel. Austen describes Anne as “a most attentive listener,” with an “elegance of mind” and a propensity for “quiet observation.” Clearly, the creative forces behind the latest movie adaptation chose to elide these character traits. Reencountering Wentworth after an extended separation, Anne wonders, “Now, how were his sentiments to be read?” Her reflection reveals the mechanism behind Anne’s cognition: a figurative form of mind-reading. The heroine interprets a series of visual signs in the form of glances and gestures, translating them into the language of emotion and intention.
The association between reading looks and inferring a character’s inner state illuminates the principle of Theory of Mind at work in Austen’s sophisticated prose. Take the exquisite subtlety of this scene when Wentworth, recognizing Anne’s fatigue after a walk, insists that she ride in the carriage.
Captain Wentworth, without saying a word, turned to her, and quietly obliged her to be assisted into the carriage.
Yes—he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her which all these things made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment … it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain …
The passage hints at the enduring intimacy between the two, as if they’re speaking a secret, silent language. But rather than translate the riveting inter-subjectivity of this nonverbal exchange—the mutual awareness and understanding that continues to pulse between the former lovers—the Netflix version has Anne limping after a pratfall while eavesdropping on Wentworth. Her need for a ride is obvious to everyone. The whole sequence is more cringe comedy than psychological portrait. Scene after scene, the adaptation chooses shallow dialogue over emotional depth and interiority. In a conversation invented wholly for the film that turns subtext into easy-to-digest text, Wentworth attempts to smooth things over with Anne. Instead, he makes her more uncomfortable. He concludes their stilted conversation with two words that smack of 21st-century irony: “Good … talk.” So much for Austen’s emotional commitment.
Scene after scene, the adaptation chooses shallow dialogue over emotional depth and interiority.
Kara L. Smith remarks in her 2017 article, “Cognitive Embodiment and Mind Reading in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” that “Persuasion captures, and in a lot of ways precedes, the psychological advancements of [Austen’s] time.” Smith praises the author’s intuitive and “truly accurate representation of Theory of Mind as being the imperfect medium through which we interact with others in this complex social world we inhabit.” In contrast with the book’s psychological richness and realism, the film’s screenplay cuts corners, throwing around pop-psychology buzzwords like “narcissist” (Anne describing her selfish sister Mary) and “empath” (Mary un-ironically describing herself). At one point, Mary says she’s focusing on “self-care”—as if she ever thinks of anyone but herself. We’re meant to view Anne as a paragon of insight and understanding, a foil for her family of narcissists. But without passages like the one below, in which Anne replays frame-by-frame her interactions with Wentworth in order to puzzle out his true sentiments, we’re left with a shell of her character.
She was thinking only of the last half hour, and as they passed to their seats, her mind took a hasty range over it. His choice of subjects, his expressions, and still more his manner and look, had been such as she could see in only one light… Sentences begun which he could not finish—half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance,—all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least… She could not contemplate the change as implying less.—He must love her.
Austen emphasizes Anne’s mental process, what today is known as Theory of Mind, through references to her “thinking” and “mind.” Anne assigns greater significance to Wentworth’s silent gestures and looks than to his “choice of subjects” and verbal “expressions.” She’s convinced that “all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least.” The word choice “declared” anticipates Wentworth’s final declaration of love in the form of a letter. But even before reading his confession, Anne is almost certain of her own powers of observation: “He must love her.” In the book’s final act, Austen literalizes the recurring metaphor of mind-reading through Wentworth’s letter to Anne. The sincerity and transparency of his words encourage the ultimate recognition and reconciliation of the two lovers.
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul … I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine.
Wentworth figuratively “speak[s]” through his pen, “seizing a sheet of paper, and pouring out his feelings.” He admits that Anne’s power of perception is stronger than his own, referencing her ability to “pierce” his soul and “penetrate” his feelings. It’s an intimate, even sexually charged, confession of his unwavering love. No surprise, director Cracknell squanders this moment of Anne reading the letter, what could have been an opportunity to play with voiceover or other cinematic techniques to merge Anne and Frederick’s voices and underscore the fulfillment of their longstanding desire to read each other’s hearts and minds.
Like fiction, Theory of Mind relies on the interpretive act of recognizing another experience outside of one’s own.
The resolution of the novel, in the form of the couple’s reunion, suggests the importance of reading as a kind of social-emotional intelligence. Like fiction, Theory of Mind relies on the interpretive act of recognizing another experience outside of one’s own. Reading and translating, both texts and people, are valuable survival skills. Fluency in a symbolic language of looks, gestures, and facial expressions enables one to decode hidden thoughts and feelings. Austen exposes the capacity for reading to promote an alternative form of communication and communion. This is where the novel’s poignancy and poetry reside; and this is where the Netflix adaptation fails. Johnson’s eye rolls and direct address of the audience, in lieu of indirect discourse, are symptoms of Cracknell’s misdirection. Her choices remove any trace of ambiguity or tension. They also reveal the downright Austenian irony of a filmmaker misreading a heroine who is a paragon of close-reading. Austen’s prescient psychological exploration of the twinned processes of reading literature and reading character is lost in translation.
Bringing Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel The Lost Daughterto the screen entailed multiple layers of translation. The first step on the journey was linguistic. Originally published in Italian, the book was rendered in English by Ann Goldstein, the translator of Ferrante’s other works—most notably her Neapolitan Quartet. Goldstein is an invaluableambassador for Ferrante. Even though I speak Italian, aside from a few excerpts, I’ve only read Ferrante in English, via Goldstein.
The Italian title La Figlia Oscura literally means “the obscure daughter.” Shrouded in a pseudonym, Ferrante the author is, herself, obscure. Austen likewise wrote anonymously, signing her books “by a lady.” Ferrante stated in a 2015 essay for the Guardian, “The fact that Jane Austen, in the course of her short life, published her books anonymously made a great impression on me as a girl of 15.” Both authors simultaneously shine a light on female interiority while asserting their own right to privacy and inaccessibility. How does one translate an enigma? First Goldstein and, in turn, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal take up this challenge. As with all translations, there is loss but also discovery.
The most obvious change in the 2021 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter is from Italian to English, and from the Southern Italian setting to the Greek Isles. Ferrante’s narrative voice is also transformed. The intimacy and immediacy of first-person narration is notoriously difficult to capture on screen, as the camera’s presence suggests an external point of view. Gyllenhaal makes the wise decision not to use voiceover, instead employing other film devices to immerse the viewer in protagonist Leda’s precarious mental state. Casting Olivia Colman as the heroine, a 48-year-old professor on her solo beach vacation, is another canny move. With an economy of gestures—a squint of the eye in the bright sun, a slight tilt of the head, a strained smile—Colman communicates a host of conflicting emotions while she observes and later becomes enmeshed with two strangers on the beach: Nina (played by none other than Dakota Johnson) and her young daughter, Elena. The filmmaker leaves space for the audience to note these behavioral shifts and try to intuit, and perhaps understand, Leda’s perspective. This is Theory of Mind or mind-reading in action, and it’s what makes the film so compelling to watch.
Leda’s interior comes into sharper focus as we learn, through a series of flashbacks and present-tense confessions, of her past, including the three-year period when she left her husband and two young daughters. The maternal transgression reverberates in Leda’s body and mind. We see its lingering impact when Colman as Leda literally loses her balance in key moments, physicalizing the unstable inner life that Ferrante/Goldstein telegraph with such force on the page. No doubt, Gyllenhaal’s experience as an actor enables her to elicit this degree of specificity in performance. The film presents Leda in all her messiness as a character worth examining from inside and out.
By training the camera on Colman’s eyes as she watches the mother and daughter playing and caressing on the beach, the director underlines the importance of the female gaze as a driving force in the plot.
By training the camera on Colman’s eyes as she watches the mother and daughter playing and caressing on the beach, the director underlines the importance of the female gaze as a driving force in the plot. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion (the novel, that is), Leda surveys her environment to try to understand the people around her and their motivation. We too are voyeurs, watching Leda transition from passive observer to active interloper. A single act, taking and concealing the girl’s misplaced doll (a recurring and resonant object in Ferrante’s oeuvre), sets the psychological drama in motion. But as much as the close-up can convey, it can’t allow us to see through the character’s eyes or into her mind, to the “racing thoughts and whirling images” referenced on the page. The closest we can get is through the aforementioned episodes of Vertigo, as well as flashbacks to Leda’s days as a young mother (played by Jessie Buckley).
Ferrante simulates time travel and the cognitive process of remembering through prose alone. In a sort of internal tracking shot, we follow Leda’s thoughts and nostalgic associations as she’s walking through the pinewood to the beach on her first day of vacation:
I love the scent of resin: as a child, I spent summers on beaches not yet completely eaten away by the concrete of the Camorra—they began where the pinewood ended. That scent was the scent of vacation, of the summer games of childhood. The squeak or thud of a dry pinecone, the dark color of the pine nuts reminds me of my mother’s mouth: she laughs as she crushes the shells, takes out the yellow fruit, gives it to my sisters, noisy and demanding, or to me, waiting in silent expectation, or eats it herself, staining her lips with dark powder and saying, to teach me not to be so timid: go on, none for you, you’re worse than a green pinecone.
This single passage by Ferrante, translated by Goldstein, evokes an intricate network of emotionally tinged memories. Here, time collapses and the distinction between past and present blurs as Leda is catapulted back into scenes from her youth. See how her mother’s actions from years before are transposed to the present tense: “she laughs … she crushes …” It’s telling that Leda’s recollection starts with a scent—one of the strongest senses, and one that can’t be captured on film. Texture, too, is suggested through the reference to resin, which brings to mind a sticky residue of the past. Resin can encase things, like a memory preserved—or trapped—in time. Also worth noting is the omission of the Camorra and Leda’s Neapolitan roots in the film. (In the book, it’s implied that Nina’s in-laws have mafia ties, which adds a degree of menace to the proceedings.) “The summer games of childhood” will soon replay before Leda’s eyes through Nina and her daughter, but there’s conflict and crisis on the horizon.
In addition to pulling us into the heroine’s past through her first-person reflections, this scene in the pinewood foreshadows two pivotal points in the story: the first, when Leda is hit in the back by a pinecone—whether by happenstance or human hand is unclear—and the second, when she witnesses in the woods a clandestine kiss between Nina, who is married, and the beach attendant Will (played by Paul Mescal, known for his role in another literary adaptation, Normal People). The pinewood is a site of cognition, recognition, and even precognition. But due to the limitations of the film’s visual translation, the viewer can’t glean the full significance of the setting. We’re left with a hollow husk where the yellow fruit of the pine nut should be.
Through a number of metafictional touches, Gyllenhaal cleverly draws attention to her film’s status and limitations as a work in translation—both linguistic and cinematic. During a dinner with Will when she gets the lowdown on Nina and her family, Leda likens her earlier observations and inferences to watching a foreign film without subtitles. A version of the line occurs in the book, in Leda’s narration: “It was like discussing a film that one has watched without fully understanding the relationship between the characters, at times not even knowing their names, and when we said good night it seemed to me that I had a clearer idea.” The theme of translation is also foregrounded in a series of flashbacks. Gyllenhaal recasts Leda as a literary translator of poets Yeats and Auden into Italian. (In the book she’s a scholar of English literature, including E.M. Forster.) In a crucial sequence, she attends a conference on translation, subtitled “The Art of Failure.” That phrase reminds me of the Italian saying “tradurre è tradire” (“translation is betrayal”) and of the impossible standards facing translators such as Goldstein and Gyllenhaal. A translation is often either praised for being “faithful” or denigrated for being “unfaithful,” a flawed binary that doesn’t leave room for the creative work of interpretation. And what of an adaptation like Persuasion that remains faithful to the author’s plot while betraying the characters and spirit of her original work?
On a thematic level, questions of infidelity and betrayal are at the heart of Ferrante’s original story—a fact which Gyllenhaal highlights with sly precision. The translation conference marks the start of Leda’s affair with Professor Hardy and her eventual, and irrevocable, break from her family. The director delivers another meta in-joke by casting her real-life husband, Peter Saarsgard, in the role of Hardy. In spite of these and other self-aware nods from the director, Michael F. Moore notes the troubling erasure of translator Goldstein from the film, pointing to her name being omitted from the credits. Though Gyllenhaal has since acknowledged and thanked Goldstein publicly, it’s an unfortunate reminder of the translator’s relative obscurity—a “figlia oscura.”
Questions of infidelity and betrayal are at the heart of Ferrante’s original story—a fact which Gyllenhaal highlights with sly precision.
Translation—whether across language or format or both—may be “the art of failure,” but it’s a necessary and worthwhile art, opening our minds to perspectives and stories that we might not otherwise be able to access. But without close reading of the source text, and subtext, translation is futile. In this way, the practice of translation and adaptation parallels our daily, often frustrating, efforts to read and decipher our surroundings. There’s hope in the principle of Theory of Mind: the idea that, if we only try hard enough, we can make our chaotic and confounding world legible through cognition, imagination, and empathy. Filmmakers who take on the heady challenge of translating female interiority to the screen should do so with a sense of reverence for their heroines and a facility with the cinematic techniques at their disposal. They should regard film as an emotive language with a grammar all its own, capable of animating beloved literary works and characters. When directors get it right, they validate the importance of female subjectivity, liberating women from the reductive male gaze—if only for a few hours. Authentic, psychologically complex representation matters, especially in a world where men are preoccupied with judging women’s outsides and legislating their insides.
Being young is an embarrassing thing. I say this as a former young person myself. The worst of it is your teenage and early adult years when you’re trying to figure out who are you. The easiest way to do this is to find out who you’re not. I am not an athletic jock, so I am a book smart nerd; I am not an exuberant theatre kid, so I’ll be a gloomy goth.
Like all of us, writer Hua Hsu is guilty of this. The early parts of his memoir Stay True are about figuring out who he actually is. He has a good idea of who he wants to be: the kind of person who collects records, makes zines. Then comes an Abercrombie and Finch-wearing frat bro, Ken. Despite inhabiting different ends of the social landscape, the two become close friends. When Ken is murdered, Hua is left adrift.
It turns out who you are is not only the identities you dream of and make, you’re your friends as well. At its core, Stay True is a memoir of a friendship—of any friendship: what we learn from others, what we give in exchange, and how it gives shape to the story we tell ourselves of ourselves.
The project of a memoir easily lends itself to nostalgia, so it makes sense to start my conversation with Hua Hsu there. We met via Zoom (as many of us do, nowadays) to talk about the politics of memory, Derrida, the shape of stories, and more.
Eric Nguyen: Stay True starts with memories of driving and listening to mixed tapes. That sets tone of the memoir, a genre that is naturally prone to nostalgia and looking back at the past. Reading about the music you listened, along with the current nostalgia moment with the resurgence of vinyl records and the popularity of ’80s- and ’90s-inspired shows like Stranger Things, it got me thinking about nostalgia, its meaning and its uses. Why are we drawn to nostalgia?
Hua Hsu: Generally, I’m nostalgic. I’m sentimental. I’m a hoarder. I’m an only child, so I just like hoarding things. I have a lot of remnants from the past, souvenirs from life. All that said, I didn’t want the book to feel nostalgic in the sense that I wanted anyone to actually care about my past. When things happen in nostalgia, like you mentioned Stranger Things, oftentimes it’s appealing to us to think that the past was simpler or that people back then didn’t know how bad the world would become. That’s true in an emotional sense in my book. I was writing about the past, trying to capture the granular quality of living in a different time.
It wasn’t better. I mean, I liked it because it was what I knew. But there were many aspects of it that were not better than the present, not more convenient than the present for certain. There was a quality of how we spent our free time, what it meant to feel bored, how our lives could partially be online, but very much not be online. The kinds of conversations and jokes and references we would have to come up with because there was so much time in the day to fill. That was the thing that I struggled to capture. We all are beholden to things that really appealed to us when we were teenagers, because that’s such a formative time in one’s life. Part of what I wanted to capture was that sense of excitement or that sense of how a teenager or someone in their early 20s experiences time, more so than I wanted to glorify the ’90s. But it’s inevitable, because it was a backdrop for so much of this.
I do think that, in general, nostalgia appeals to people, especially if it’s this vicarious nostalgia. I’m 45. I didn’t experience any of the realities in Stranger Things, I didn’t experience life the way these kids experience life. Culturally we’ve reached this point in time where the past is this text that can be manipulated and seems so malleable.
EN: Is there a danger in nostalgia? On the flip side, is nostalgia useful to have?
HH: We definitely live in a moment where the desire to cater to nostalgia feels very much like it’s having this tranquilizing effect. It’s the conversation people have in movies about fan service. The idea that people can’t bear for the universe of Star Wars to be more reflective of our world now, or for there to be a female Ghostbusters. That is the danger of nostalgia; one is just so in love with one’s own experience of the world.
For me personally, I don’t necessarily know. Svetlana Boym wrote this book about nostalgia and part of it is that she’s writing about Russian immigrants, and how Russian immigrants have this sense of nostalgia that’s very different from what a WASP American in the ’50s would feel, because they’re dislocated, so they’re projecting onto this now imagined homeland. And it’s something that then the children inherit as well.
I associate with that, and there’s a slightly painful aspect to it because you’re conscious of how there’s not this continuous lineage linking you to the past. I feel this yearning to know more about my parents or further back through my family lineage that feels like what people would describe as nostalgia, but it’s not necessarily something that could ever be satisfied. That’s probably why I turned to writing.
EN: There’s a scene is in your book, where your parents go back to Taiwan and they’re looking for the stuff that they enjoyed while they were younger. That spoke to the nostalgia that you mention and the dislocation for immigrants. Thinking about lineage and history, the children of immigrants inherit a nostalgia, but it is not their nostalgia.
Personally, if my parents talk about their time in Vietnam, the music they listened to, etc., it’s not a sense of nostalgia that I have, though for them it is. For me, it’s looking back and imagining what my parents would’ve been like. How does the nostalgia of one’s parents affect you as a child of immigrants who is mainly severed from their nostalgia?
HH: That’s so real what you’re describing. I always dread drawing any conclusions about “America,” even if they’re critical, because it bolsters this notion of exceptionalism. I do think that there’s something about the youth of America in the grand scheme of things. It’s such a young country that American culture is narcissistic about its own recent past. Growing up here, you’re inundated with this sense of how things once were. It’s not how things once were in terms of thousands of years of history and language; it’s about how things were in sort of a neighborhood that’s really only 20 to 30 years old. I’m sure this happens everywhere, but the country is obsessed with rebooting itself in order to get back to some imagined place that it once was; it really screws with our sense of the historical past.
It’s such a young country that American culture is narcissistic about its own recent past. Growing up here, you’re inundated with this sense of how things once were.
As someone who grew up here, it’s impossible not to internalize that in some way, the sense that there is something to return to. For immigrants, like my parents, they left something willingly and didn’t assume they would ever go back. Growing up, they would often remember things, but it wasn’t indulging in nostalgia the way young Americans indulges in nostalgia. It was really (I hesitate to say) recovering trauma. There were triggers for emotions or feelings or memories that they didn’t have the time to put language to. They were sensations that they had thought they had forgotten perhaps forever.
And I always appreciated and studied those moments when my parents would have them. They didn’t view themselves as part of “America” to the extent that they thought their stories mattered necessarily. I think that’s why I became interested in writing some of their stories or thinking about how their stories were passed on to me, not as life lessons or as pedagogy, but as a mode of being, a way of behaving.
EN: Your book is filtered through the idea of nostalgia, but the core of the book is centered around friendship, in particular your friendship with Ken, who’s your opposite.
You mentioned Derrida’s reflection on friendship, paraphrasing: “From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them or pay tribute to them.” It’s as if to say that in friendships we’re always looking ahead to a life where they aren’t there and how we might look back.
The concept of friendship that you have in the book is that once you start a friendship, you’re looking forward to that day where you can remember them. So that’s a forward looking. But once a death happens, you’re impossibly going back to how things were, those good feelings. What’s interesting to me here is how that makes for a strange plot line. In a traditional narrative, it’s a movement from point A to point B to point C, and that’s a plot line.
What do you have to say about the timeline of friendship and what it means for the timeline of our internal narrative?
HH: It’s funny that you use the words “plot line,” because in my mind, nothing actually happens in my book. There’s no plot. I mean, obviously things happened, but what happened to me is internal and it’s not an epiphany. I didn’t have an epiphany, even though I feel like I lived one.
The need to impose a narrative meaning on anything or to look for clues as to what could have been, that impulse doesn’t descend until there’s a reason for it to descend.
The quote you’re talking about from Derrida about how he thinks that there is this element baked into friendship where we are always preparing ourselves for the day when you’ll no longer be friends, whether it’s because you’re no longer friends, or in his case because people die—that idea appeals to me. When we were talking about nostalgia before, I realized that it’s how even in high school I would say, “Ah, I’m sad this moment is almost over because then I’ll start thinking about it as something in the past.” Even though when you’re young, you have the license to never think about these things. You’re living in the moment. And at the time, even though I was this nostalgic, sentimental person, I was very much driven by my own impulses. No need to remember anything, because we’re always going to keep generating new memories, that’s what you’re allowed to do when you’re younger. And now that I teach at a college, I think about it a lot with my students, that the engine of friendship is just pleasure and understanding and fun.
The need to impose a narrative meaning on anything or to look for clues as to what could have been, that impulse doesn’t descend until there’s a reason for it to descend. Derrida thinks our way out of this is for us to look toward the future, even if it’s just one of us. That’s ultimately what I tried to do with the book, to be less beholden to looking to rooting around in the past and look for those lessons and for motifs when there are no motifs. It’s just life. You’re just young.
And that’s sort of a plot. I think that what happens in the book is that I become much less of a ridiculous person. I mean, I’m still a ridiculous person at the end of it. It’s now easier to imagine a future that’s multi-hued, a future that balances memories of great times with memories of sadness. That’s not something that had ever occurred to me back in the 90s, that it was possible to hold both those feelings at once.
EN: You wrote that “friendship is about the willingness to know rather than being known.” The first part of your book is you trying to make your identity, trying to know yourself and what type of person you are or want to be. But the memoir ends with you knowing someone else. There’s this moment in the book where Ken is tying a balloon for a kid and that is kind endearing to you. It’s something you didn’t expect from him. Through that moment, you come to see someone else, these aspects of themselves. It’s like a thesis about friendship. What does friendship mean, especially over a lifetime, even if a person is gone?
HH: It’s a question I think about a lot. Deep down, I always wanted to be known rather than to know, to use the Derrida framing. As you get older, you realize how the things people teach you, whether they’re intending it or not, they become the guideposts. It’s really in those modest acts of decency that we model for each other, that friendship carries on beyond that moment.
I don’t know how deeply I would’ve thought about any of these things had this not happened. Perhaps I would’ve gone on being, in my mind, a good friend but in reality, a very self-absorbed friend. Maybe I still am. I don’t know. But that’s something that I think about a lot, because in some ways I’m still very much living in the past because I teach at a college. I’m always around young people who are also on the precipice of any number of futures.
When I see my students and the ways in which they treat one another or tend to one another, it’s very moving to have that perspective of being older and knowing how weird things can get in your 20s, in that pivotal moment of life. I try not to guide them in those moments and let them treat each other and test out their relationships in ways that are fitting to them. It’s something that I’m always observing, and then referring back to my own life and my own friends. It’s very cheesy, but it goes back to that line from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure that you should be excellent to one another. And the other thing I always tell my students is something that my friend Chris used to tell his interns, which was just, don’t be a dick.
It’s difficult to say anything that hasn’t already been said about Torrey Peters’s debut novel, Detransition, Baby. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a national bestseller, a NYT Notable Book, and named a Book of the Year by more publications than my word count limit will let me include. Not only is it an incredible novel, the success of Detransition, Baby created more space for other trans writers to publish. The novel proved to the publishing industry–deeply conservative and unimaginative in its taste–that writing by trans authors can have mass appeal.
After so much success, the question most readers have is, “What next?” It’s the same question authors ask themselves. Notably, in the obvious way: What the hell am I supposed to write now? But the question tends to arise more often in a writer’s day-to-day life. What do I write about? What do I do with my time? How do I replicate that success? Do I even want to? These questions served as the inspiration for this interview series, What Comes Next?. Every month, I’ll talk to an author outside of the publicity window–that stretch of time where the writing actually happens–about what they’re working on, what inspires them, their routines, and what keeps them returning to the page.
I couldn’t imagine a better first guest than Torrey Peters. In addition to Detransiton, Baby, Peters is the author of The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, both of which will be reissued in revised editions by Random House in 2022. Peters and I spoke in her apartment in Brooklyn shortly before she left to launch the German translation of Detransition, Baby. We talked about writing routines, her entry into writing, touching hot stoves, happiness, cruelty, and deciding what to publish when everyone wants to publish your work.
Isle McElroy: Can you talk a little bit about what got you into your writing career?
Torrey Peters: I was still a better reader than a writer. You read enough and you start to imbibe the rhythms of it. And when it came around to college, I was like, I’m good at this. I think I would have liked to spend my life reading. And being a writer is like—
IM: A close second.
TP: But of course, what it means to be a writer took a long time to figure out. The difference between ‘I want to be a writer’ and all the other different valences of that word is still ongoing.
IM : What do you mean by that? Like moving between being a fiction writer or a novelist?
TP: I mean, there’s how to write, there’s what writing is for, there’s writing as a career, there’s writing as communicating something urgent to other people. There’s writing as narrative, there’s writing as the tracks of thought on a page. There’s writing, which is like, whatever, letters, and then there’s so many different reasons why you might do it, never mind the forms in which the actual product in the end might take. I think that the hard part for me wasn’t “What’s the product gonna be?” The hard part for me was figuring out why I was doing it, who I was doing it for, and why it mattered.
IM: How has it changed over time? Or is it just like a refining towards the same direction?
TP: I think I had two distinct periods. One is where I thought about writing as a kind of craft. And when I thought of writing as a craft, I don’t think I knew what writing was for. I thought if you write something beautiful that is enough. Now, I feel that writing is largely about communicating something urgent to certain people. If you don’t have anything urgent to say, it’s a different thing than if you do. Sometimes I don’t have anything urgent to say, and I have to figure out what am I in those moments when I don’t have anything urgent to say?
IM: Are you still a writer at that time?
TP: In the past, I would have said yes. But I currently think no. I think I’m something else in those times. I don’t know what I am. I’m like a practitioner of something.
IM: Like a doctor who’s not operating or something.
TP: Or like, there’s a chess player who plays against other people. And then there’s a chess player who’s just at home, alone, moving the pieces around. And if you’re just at home moving the pieces alone on a board, occasionally thinking about it, are you a chess player? Or are you just kind of vaguely interested in chess?
IM: Yeah, I think that’s perfect.
TP: And I have periods in my life where I’m vaguely interested in chess. More than I’m interested in playing chess against people.
IM: Artists and writers are famously never in competition with each other.
TP: I’m happy to be in competition when it’s time to play. I wouldn’t shy away from competition. I think competition can bring out a lot. But sometimes I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a thing I’m writing for. I don’t think of it as an identity. So if it’s not an identity then it’s not something I always am. That’s really framed.
IM: I want to step back a second. You were talking about reading and feeling the rhythms of the writers you loved. Can you talk a little bit about what rhythms were guiding your work? Are they artistic rhythms or are they ethical—writers who had something to say when they wrote?
I think lots of things have bad ethics and can be really compelling.
TP: I didn’t used to think about it in terms of ethics. I had a change in how I thought of writing as it moved from a craft to a kind of communication. How ethics meshed with that changed. Now I think that things that are artistically good usually have some sort of resonance with things that are ethically good. And I don’t mean that they’re moralistically good. I think lots of things have bad ethics and can be really compelling. But there’s a coherence to the ethics that finds its mirror in an artistic coherence, and the two usually go together.
IM: So who are some of the authors who you feel like have that kind of ethics, or a philosophical viewpoint, right? Rather than is something ethical in terms of good or bad?
TP: That seems more like morality. [What writers have great ethics?] It changes all the time. I think that’s part of what’s fun. But someone for instance who I think whose ethics are great, but whose morals are not so clear is [Vladimir] Nabokov. There are these beautiful sentences and his ethics are kind of cruel. He has a kind of cruelty in his writing. There’s an inviting-ness and a cruelty to what he does. His writing and his stories are cruel. There’s an ethics and a worldview and a sort of cruel aestheticism to what he does. I don’t think that I do that. But that is somebody who I think of as being coherent in those two poles without necessarily being morally good or morally bad. I’m always looking for that tension in a lot of different writers. Absolutely. I go through real phases with writers where I get enamored of them. And I love them for a while, really deeply, and then I fall out of love and then sometimes come back to them. In the last couple of years, I really fell in love with [Elena] Ferrante. She has an ethics of ferocity that finds its mirror in the way that it’s written. Her characters are ferocious about making choices, constantly making choices and are constantly doing things and having agency. And I feel like that has to do with her thoughts about women’s writing but also it’s an aesthetic thing. That was fascinating to me to find somebody who could write this sweeping four volume epic that maintained a level of ferocity that you normally don’t find in 100 pages. People can’t keep it up for a hundred pages and here it is for thousands. Stuff like that is exciting to me.
IM: I’m really curious about cruelty. I was talking to a comedian the other day about the difference between cruelty and meanness. And we decided that meanness is a kind of love and that cruelty oversteps that and gets to a point of separation. But now hearing you talk about Nabokov, I’m thinking of cruelty as a kind of honesty, right? I wouldn’t use the word cruel to describe your work. Listening to other interviews with you, you talk a lot about the question of who the joke is on. And I think at times you are making jokes at your characters’ expense. That can be seen as, I wouldn’t say cruel, but there is a kind of meanness. So where do you situate the relationship between cruelty and honesty? Is there a kind of honest cruelty that comes through in writing?
TP: Explain to me why meanness could come from love, I don’t understand.
IM: Our divide was that meanness is a lesser form of cruelty, that meanness is almost like high school meanness, where there’s an in group of people brought together by the understanding of what mean things they can say. Whereas cruelty oversteps that into actually trying to harm and hurt someone.
I think of meanness as thoughtless, whereas I think of cruelty as full of malice and pleasure and sadism.
TP: I think of meanness as something that’s ungenerous. It doesn’t have enough. Meanness has a scarcity or narrowness to it. And I think of meanness as coming from a place without thought, that you’re just sort of mean, you’re a narrow person, you’re intolerant, you don’t have anything to give. I think of meanness as thoughtless, whereas I think of cruelty as full of malice and pleasure and sadism. Meanness to me is a lack of life. But cruelty, there’s a fullness to it.
IM: You can hear it in the sounds of the words, right? Like meanness is like a dime on the ground.
TP: I think that the etymology of meanness has to do with—I don’t remember exactly—but a mean lifestyle is a lifestyle without any extras. Whereas I picture Nabokov surrounded by fine things. Sticking pins in insects, watching their suffering. There’s something very alive in that to me and that’s what attracts me to a lot of writing is the fullness of life that a writer can pack into it. Cruelty and malice and sadism exist in the human experience, and what do you do with them? What do you do with the fact that sometimes they can feel good? I think Nabokov is someone who transubstantiates that into aesthetic pleasure. I would say Ferrante can be cruel, because there’ll be a thing where you’re like, Okay, I’ve seen enough of this. And she just is like, Okay, you the reader wants to look away and I’m ratcheting up the humiliation one notch, I’m making it go on another three pages. She’s putting both her characters and the readers through it. What’s great about her is that she will turn around and give you something for having been through it. It’s manipulative, like I acted sadistically to you. And now I’m gonna like—
IM: We get an Ischia page.
TP: I like a writer willing to do that. You know, whether I’m willing to do it I think depends. I think I was crueler than I used to be. The Masker is a cruel book. It’s a cruel story. I was doing something with our cruelty. Whereas now I don’t have the stomach for it.
IM: I relate to that. A lot of my early work strives for aesthetic cruelty. We can call cruelty a kind of attention, too. I’m thinking of that Nabokov story, “Symbols and Signs,” where someone’s pulling their dentures out and they look like tusks. That is a gross level of detail. It’s clear that he has looked so deeply at this thing, but it seems cruel to describe someone in that manner. Can you talk about that evolution of moving [away from cruelty]? Why do you think you’re not as invested now? Is it just where you were emotionally?
TP: I think it’s like—I’ve heard that older people are happier than young people. And that seems weird, because their bodies have more pains and have probably suffered more and stuff like that. But that generally older people are happier because they have learned over the years to mentally not touch the fire. They’re like, if I think about things that are horrible all the time, then I will feel horrible. After 50 years of touching the stove or whatever, eventually they just don’t touch the stove. For me, the excitement of touching the stove and watching the smoke rise at my own expense and watching other people look at me in a horrified way—that impulse has diminished. I’ve done this, I understand how it works. I don’t want to touch the stove anymore. And then there’s a part of me that occasionally will be like, “Well, have you gotten soft?” But like I’ll touch the stove when it’s necessary but I’m not going to touch the stove for fun.
IM: I’m thinking of “touch the stove” also as sort of an authorial drive, too. I could be extremely glib in my comparison but there’s a certain style of writing that is touch the stove writing, that is either confessional touch the stove and then also political touch the stove, where we need to engage with this political subject and that becomes a form of stove touching. And then there’s the personal, in which I am confessing this personal reality which is its own messy stove touch.
TP: And then there’s Nabokov who is aesthetically grotesque.
IM: He’s holding our hands to the stove. He’s not going to do it himself. To switch gears, but if you’re not [touching the stove], what drives you to write? When you were talking about having something to write or having something to say, where does the question of having like, a personal touch the stove [moment arise]? Where in the art does it need to happen? And do you think that it needs to sometimes happen in the art and does that drive your desire to write? Or does that drive one’s desire to have something to say?
If I can just say the shameful thing, in a strange way, we will have gone through this thing.
TP: I think that usually when I have something to say, it’s because something is unresolved. Usually, I feel that lots of things that are unresolved for me are unresolved for others. So in something like The Masker, there was a lot of shame, a lot of cross-dressing, it was about sex and gender. So I just wanted to speak about shame. Shame is so much about what is unsayable. If I can just say the shameful thing, in a strange way, we will have gone through this thing, and we will come out the other side and feel liberated from it. For a long time, I think the cruel things I was doing had a lot to do with shame. And I don’t feel as driven by shame anymore. I sort of wish I did because it was great material.
IM: Blame Brené Brown.
TP: You know, I get mad about stuff. Usually it’s when some way of thinking that I’m expected to partake in doesn’t feel good to me. And that way of thinking creates an internal tension in me. And that tension needs to be resolved somehow. And usually the way it’s resolved is through all sorts of feelings, like I walk around mad, or I walk around irritated, a lot of negative feelings. So sometimes I want to rant, there’s this desire to express myself, there’s an urgency. But then, of course, I’m just ranting at people. They don’t enjoy that. There’s no catharsis in it. So there’s this tension inside of me and the work is transmuting that tension into something that other people also relate to. I try to make them feel that tension and we feel it together. I’m alone when I write but the magic of reading and writing means we unravel a lot together. But if I don’t have anything to unravel, if I don’t have tension, if I’m just like, check out these words—that’s a valid way to write too, I guess—but I think writing is hard and if I don’t have that tension that moves me to do it, it’s maybe for a paycheck, maybe for validation. Generally, though, there are much better ways of getting both paychecks and validation than writing. That reminds me of a professor of mine who once said, upon reading something, it felt like it was easy for this person to write it and he didn’t like work that felt like that. And I’m constantly feeling that way. I was talking today about why everyone hates on Sally Rooney. And I think it’s that she makes it look easy. I actually think her work is filled with tension and she’s expressing a lot of it in a lovely way, but there’s the resentment that this is easy for you, you haven’t suffered.
IM: Connected to that, like, it’s about a year and a half since Detransition, Baby came out. How have you felt about the reception and conversation? Those tensions that [drove the book] are so ancient to you—when the book came out, they were already ancient, and now they’re even more ancient. At this point, do you feel you were successful in bringing those tensions to the surface for people to discuss?
TP: I don’t know. I think because I’ve just gotten every single possible reaction to it there’s not a consensus. Some people think it’s too radical, some people think it’s assimilationist, some people think it’s banal, some people think you need a PhD to read the gender theory. There are strong reactions but there’s no consensus. I can’t really know if people got that tension, except that they seem to have an emotional reaction to it. Whatever emotional tension I had seems to have been translated to a bunch of people who got all emotional when they read it. Oh, it must have worked. But how that particular emotional tension diffuses its energy inside of a person once it’s been transferred is much more unpredictable than I had expected. But I can’t be in the business of deciphering those reactions anymore. And that’s one of the things I liked about the Sally Rooney book is that she must have it so bad. Everyone in the world has an opinion about her. And that is what the third book is about, trying to resolve all that. I’m trying to imagine how much tension must have caused that book to be written and then the skill to make it look easy writing under that much tension? That’s not really answering your question, but just some thoughts.
IM: Evasive answers are the best. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in reception? I also had a chapbook come out before my novel came out. So there’s a sense of having a secret thing that you wrote when no one was looking. Your early books are going to be republished by Random House, so how are you feeling about that work now that you are known for this novel that came much later in your career?
TP: Those early books provoked really strong reactions in people. People were really upset by The Masker, they had strong reactions to those first two books. But they were on a scale that I could manage. Everybody who was mad about The Masker probably had my email. Yeah. And everybody who was inspired by Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones got a T4T tattoo. So I understood the reasons why people reacted in certain ways. And I think the difference is quantitative that has become qualitative. When water boils, you can’t put the steam back in the pot. And in those first two I could watch the water in the pot. And in [Detransition, Baby], the steam was everywhere.
IM: Is that shaping how you’re continuing to write?
I’ve had a hard time clearing the decks in terms of other people’s opinions to figure out what I have to say right now.
TP: I spent a lot of time trying to pretend I haven’t read the reactions to Detransiton, Baby. They can have a really chilling effect on me as a writer. They push me around in all these subtle ways, where if I write something very edgy, am I writing this in reaction to all these conservative things that I’ve read about myself? Or likewise, if I don’t write something edgy is it because the people got to me? And then meanwhile, is a question of edginess versus not edginess one that I picked up because of all that happened. I’ve had a hard time clearing the decks in terms of other people’s opinions to figure out what I have to say right now. What is the generative tension in my life right now? And how do I do it in a way that’s artistically worthwhile and not just because like, Oh, this is a moment I could capitalize on. Or any number of reasons that are fear based, like this is my moment, I got to do something with it or if I don’t do this right, I’ll be a one hit there. Those things are generally bad reasons for me to write. They make me feel bad.
IM: That’s the tension of an entire career though. How are you going to keep finding inspiration?
TP: I love the idea that one day I’ll quit. I probably won’t, but most of my daydreaming isn’t about writing. Most of my daydreaming is about lots of other things. And as I talked to somebody recently, it was really interesting. I was complaining about [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez. And I was saying, he wrote this perfect book when he was like forty, and then he seemed to be really cool. He hung out with Castro, he punched Vargas Llosa. And when he was in his 70s, he started hanging out in Martha’s Vineyard and wanted to be friends with Bill Clinton or he was friends with Clinton. And after the Monica Lewinsky scandal he wrote a public letter that was like, Why my friend Bill had to lie or do what he had to do. I don’t remember how it was actually written or translated. And I was like, that guy he totally lost what was cool. And this person I was talking to, who speaks much better Spanish than I do, is an expert in Latin American literature and she was like, No, I think he figured out that nothing really matters and he had gotten to a place where he had forgotten that stuff matters. He was like living in this thing where everything was kind of like a joke to [him]. And I don’t know if that’s true. I actually think she’s wrong. And that he actually just bought his own myth. But the idea that he transcended to a trickster god is much more appealing. That he’s a trickster god scampering around Bill Clinton is much more beautiful as opposed to the grumpy old man holding on to his legacy and selling out everything that was beautiful about him.
IM: The writers I love most are the tricksters. I’m thinking like César Aira or Robert Walser. Do you know the story of Walser? The apocryphal story of Walser is that he was a young Austrian writer, celebrated, writing 12 hours a day. And in his early 30s, he checked himself into an institution where he lived for the rest of his life. He was famously asked near the end of his life, “Did you come here to write?” And he was like, “No, I came here to be mad.” After his death, they found what they called the Microscripts, stories written in German on the backs of postage stamps and other materials. I remember like ten years ago, New Directions announced they were publishing a translation of the Microscripts, and I was so excited. I was like, Yes, I’m finally going to see what this guy was writing when no one was watching. And so many of them were about women’s feet. And it makes me think about what someone writes when they are only writing for themselves. For him, it was these weird things, for César Aira, it’s his automatic writing, doing his page a day and doing what he wants. Those are like fascinating figures for me because they’ve figured out a way to [create careers] by not taking themselves too seriously.
TP: But also that writing is horrible to read. The process is interesting. What’s interesting to me is that they transcended being a writer but the rest of us are still treating them like writers. If I ever transcended being a writer, then I actually want to transcend. I don’t want to transcend by writing shit that actually nobody wants to read. It’s cool that he wrote about feet.
IM: Yeah. It’s pretty bad.
TP: I don’t want to read postage size notes about feet. Feet are wonderful. To me, they actually don’t have anything to say. And that’s fine. But then don’t say anything.
IM: Walser is different from Aira, because Aira is still like publishing. And Aira seems like a roll of the dice. Every six books, something really great happens, but it never seems intentional.
Most of the game is like kicking around the ball and then you have like 20 seconds of brilliance but the most is kicking around the ball.
TP: [Karl Ove] Knausgård had a thing about that. Like kicking around—sports metaphor, trigger warning—it’s like kicking around the ball in soccer. Most of the game is like kicking around the ball and then you have like 20 seconds of brilliance but the most is kicking around the ball. I do think that but there’s a part of me that’s here for the 20 seconds of brilliance. I’m not here for kicking around the ball. But I guess kicking is working your way towards figuring out what to say.
IM: Yeah, another sports metaphor, I remember Terrance Hayes talking about practice—I think he played college basketball—so said practice was what he loved most rather than playing in games. That’s when you could try stuff, when you could do interesting things. And the game is a published book, where everything is stone.
TP: Yeah. That’s what I’m trying to figure out now. Because I have an opportunity to write stuff that doesn’t matter. It’s the first time in my life that people will publish crap [that I write]. And it’s tempting.
Pretend you had to sell it, this life
you’ve been given. Watch how
quickly the term thyroid goiter becomes
scenic esophageal overlook. Hypertension
becomes a live demonstration of the heart’s
amazing high-volume pumping capacities!
You must take up embroidering
the truth with the same fervor
eligible debutantes used to tackle
parlor needlework for bachelors:
if nothing else, at least you’ll possess
one marketable skill. Take me
for example. I could offer you
early morning anxiety attacks
or, if you prefer, passions
that unfailingly rouse you from sleepinto the horizon of opportunities cresting
each new dawn. Necessity makes
salesmen of us all. So your bathwater
phosphoresces? So your sky wraps
its smog fingers around the throats
of sparrows, pigeons, starlings
to drop them on the sidewalk?
Miracles by any other measure!
What changes when the year of unemployment
becomes the era of unlicensed afternoonsfrom which the very milk of freedom is harvested
for nourishment? Would you be more
interested in plantar warts or flesh-made
pearls? A friend’s betrayal or the dramatic
unmasking of a villain that restores
the currency of loyalty among companions?
You’ve got to practice. You’ve got to
sell it, again and again and again
and again. This is how you buy it back
every time. You buy it back.
Here I go, pitching again.
A man walks into a boatyard
and buys enough rusted chaff
to build himself an ark, constructed
board by board from blueprints
but with updates, you understand, narrow
enough to squeeze through culverts connecting
the Los Angeles River, with enough dystopian flare
to feel acceptably ironic in polite company, a little
Mad Max, a little Matrix, all the party guests wondering
whether he had the whole thing done by 3D printer until—
bam. Rapture. Bam. Floodwater. Bam. Everyone
with their champagne flutes begging
for entry. And here come headaches of a new
and different kind. Let’s say the man is me,
the ark is mine, my partner and I, suddenly,
bouncers to the most exclusive cruise
in the apocalypse. Just don’t ask her to guard
the door. Did you know she once wept
on a city street corner for the palm tree planted
alone in its plot? The one leaning, almost as though
it were lonely or excluded, toward the adjacent yard
overflowing with trees, the whole group of them
rubbing their leaves, just flaunting it—
that togetherness. This is why a retinal scan
will be required to board. Better to mechanize
entry to the ever-after. If that sounds cold
you’ve never run interference between
the person you love and the person they become
when overfilling the coffee filter with grounds,
clogging the garbage disposal with unfinished rice,
stuffing the trunk with clothes for donation,
their shirtsleeves dangling
dangerously close to the tire well.
Leave it to her, the ship would be straining
with freight. Some café barista caught
in the rain. A dozen stray cats. Every dog
in the pound. The guy next door
tuning his electric blue Gibson
at two in the morning. The Gibson. Rats
up from the sewer. A park full of pigeons.
Succulents saved from their waterlogged
window box. Perhaps I’ve been too stingy
with my list, too recalcitrant with my heart,
its porch light left dark after hours. Perhaps
she understands what I pretend not to know:
we’re sailing into an ending. When the time
finally arrives, we’ll trust the rickety seams
of our craft. I’ll open the doors. She’ll place
her hand on the wheel to steer.
It’s been 3 years since our last masquerade, we’ve missed you all and we are so ready to party. Yes, it’s official: the Masquerade of the Red Death is returning. This year, it’s on October 21 at Littlefield in Brooklyn.
If you want to know how to come to the party, you can find out all the details here. (Snag that early bird price…tickets are only $50 until September 30, then $75 after that.) But if you’re wondering why you should come, well—say no more. Here are the top ten reasons to get your tickets now, and make your friends join you.
Pandemic fiction is having a moment.
And we’re here for it! At this year’s masquerade, we’re honoring excellence in pandemic fiction with all kinds of events, giveaways, and even special appearances.
Free books!
We’re stocking up on the best of pandemic books from our sponsors, just for you to take home. Or, you know, crack into in the middle of the dance floor, if that’s your thing. We won’t judge.
Mingle with writers, readers and other literary New Yorkers.
Drink, dance, and talk books with Brooklyn’s best readers and writers. At the party, you can expect to see some authors of amazing pandemic books, including Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers), Jim Shepard (Phase Six), and Gary Shteyngart (Our Country Friends).
It’s spooky season.
It’s getting colder out, and our powers are growing. October is the spookiest season and we’re fully in favor. The dark, the gothic, the macabre: say no more. The Masquerade gives you a chance to embrace the spooky fall vibes, before Halloween even happens.
We’re over the sweatpants era.
Okay, not really. We’re still loving our comfiest clothes BUT any reason to break out a new outfit is absolutely welcome. The dress code is red and black attire, so get your vintage gowns, your impractical shoes, and your campiest accessories out of storage and out on town. Even all black pajamas would fit right in! Get inspired with some outfit photos from 2019.
You get a mask! And you get a mask!
Included in your ticket price ($50 if you buy a ticket before September 30!) is one fancy mask for you to use (the kind you actually want to wear). That’s right, you don’t have to craft your own (although you totally can) for a night of anonymity. Plus, it’s really an investment in your future costumes if you repurpose your mask for Halloween weekend.
A photobooth!
We know the real reason to all get dressed up is to get a good pic for the ’gram and we’ve got you. That’s right…there’s a photobooth. Your IG followers aren’t ready for all the photobooth pics you’re going to be posting.
We know you wanna dance with somebody (us).
Whether you’re up on your trending TikTok dances or not, we promise the dance floor will be going strong all night. DJ “Nice Deal” (aka Ryan Chapman) will be spinning all evening, so get those dancing shoes ready. It’s like the most fun dance you went to in high school, but this time, everyone else is as book-obsessed as you.
You’ll get free access to our virtual salons.
Aside from the real, IRL masquerade, your ticket gets you into our virtual salons (which are otherwise $5 for EL members and $10 for everyone else), including one on “The Craft of COVID in Fiction.” You can hear renowned authors talk about the challenges and opportunities of writing about (and during) COVID. So dust off your pandemic novel draft and get inspired!
And last but not least, it supports an organization you love.
Aside from being the fall’s best literary party, the Masquerade is also EL’s annual fundraiser! We’re a very small non-profit—entirely women-led and women-staffed—operating on a shoestring budget and we rely on donations, memberships, and yes, this masquerade, to pay our writers and our staff. By buying a ticket and attending, you’re supporting our vision of making literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. In a year where so many literary magazines have shuttered, what could be better than getting dressed up (and partying hard) for a good cause?
As an editor and writer working in an industry that has historically failed to integrate (or even acknowledge) disability experiences, I was thrilled to receive an announcement that the Ford and Mellon Foundation had selected this year’s recipients of the only national fellowship devoted to supporting disabled artists.
The Disability Futures Fellowship supports twenty disabled creative practitioners whose work advances the cultural landscape. Each fellowship includes an unrestricted $50,000 grant, totaling $1 million for the cohort overall. Now in its second round, the initiative addresses field-wide problems in arts and culture, journalism, and documentary film, including: a dearth of disability visibility in the cultural sector, lack of professional development opportunities accessible to disabled practitioners, and the unique financial challenges facing disabled artists and creative professionals.
Of course, one initiative is far from enough in terms of addressing the serious inequities and access barriers that disabled artists face on a systemic level. That said, Disability Futures is a glorious example of one step in a promising direction. This year’s cohort of Disability Futures Fellows includes a number of talented writers, four of whom—Kenny Fries, Wendy Lu, Naomi Ortiz, and Khadijah Queen—generously agreed to answer my questions about their creative lives and work, and how both are influenced and augmented by disability.
Wynter K Miller: Can you describe your personal journey toward becoming an artist and how that journey was influenced by disability?
Kenny Fries: I started my journey as a playwright but always wrote poetry. In the late 1980s, I started writing poems directly about/from my disability experience. These poems, as well as my poem sequence about the early days of HIV/AIDS, The Healing Notebooks, became the foundation of my first full collection, Anesthesia. It was then that an editor who couldn’t publish poetry asked if I would be interested in writing a memoir. I did. A different editor acquired and published Body, Remember in a two-book deal with Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, the first US multi-genre anthology of disabled writers writing about disability, which I edited … I’ve been writing creative nonfiction ever since.
Wendy Lu: I can’t remember a moment in my life when I did not want to be a writer. I wrote a little bit about disability in college, but I was still figuring things out and had a lot to learn. For my graduate school project, I spent months developing a photo essay and writing an accompanying article about what navigating the dating world is like for women with muscular dystrophy. That project eventually got published in the New York Times in 2016. It was my first byline there, and one of my first major stories about disability. I’ll never forget the day that it appeared in print.
After graduate school, during a fellowship at Bustle.com, I started writing about disability more regularly. My editor knew that I had an interest in disability issues and asked (in a low-pressure kind of way) if I wanted to write about my own disability. I started writing essays and articles about the intersection of disability and a variety of topics—education, health care, entertainment, etc. I covered disability from many different angles based on what was going on in the news; in doing so, I carved out a disability beat for myself. The stories I wrote about disability often got some of the most traction, and I received responses from disabled readers who finally felt like their issues and experiences were being represented in the media. This showed me two things: one, disability is a vastly underreported area, and two, there is a significant audience for stories about disability (and how could there not be, given that around a quarter of the US population has a disability?). By failing to cover disability adequately, media outlets miss so many important stories and leave so many readers and viewers behind. I’m determined to help change that.
After my fellowship, and like many people with disabilities, I faced obstacles during the job-hunt process. Sometimes I would think, “So I’m good enough to speak at this huge national event about my journalism for free, but not good enough to hire for a full-time job?” Finally, I joined HuffPost as an editor in 2018. Aside from editing, I did a lot of disability reporting, I helped shape the newsroom’s style and standards (mostly on disability coverage, but on other topics, too), and I started giving trainings to different newsrooms and journalism organizations. I pursued more ambitious reporting projects, including a package on Disability Pride Month and a big story on the discrimination doctors with disabilities face in the world of medicine. I was really fortunate to work at a newsroom that saw my disability as an asset and with colleagues who embraced me for who I was—that should be the norm, but it’s not. And it’s true: Being disabled has only ever made me a strong reporter and editor.
Being disabled has only ever made me a strong reporter and editor.
Now I’m at the New York Times, and it really feels like things have come full circle. The Times is where I published my first story on disability in 2016, and I’ve learned so much since then. I continue to learn every day.
Naomi Ortiz: As a disabled child, my body was immobilized due to casting. I felt sometimes like an anchor in a chaotic sea of children running and playing around me. I spent my time observing ants crawling across the pavement, sun rays streaming through clouds, and how plants were thriving or dying on the playground. Staying in one spot made me more accessible to listen and talk with other kids. At a very early age I was learning about human nature—violence, pain, joy, kindness, and power dynamics—from these conversations. As soon as I had words, I began making up poetry to process what I was witnessing. I think the sensitivity I bring to my writing, poetry, and visual art was chiseled and shaped by the gift of being in one spot for long periods of time. Disability has offered me an opportunity to really develop relationships with particular physical places, and with people who share their inner lives.
WKM: On a systemic or industry level, what are the biggest challenges you face as a disabled artist working in the United States? Are there issues or areas that you see as critical to address in terms of improving the status quo?
KF: In order for disability to become de rigueur in publishing there need to be so-called “gatekeepers” who are disabled and who also have a stake in disability culture. Also, having intersectional identities, as I do, makes it more difficult for publishers to figure out how to market my kind of work. The disability experience often calls for new forms that don’t follow the predictable narrative of overcoming one’s disability. My work is hybrid, increasingly based on extensive research while not leaving behind my personal experiences.
NO: Anticipating and valuing difference would radically reshape the participation of disabled artists/writers in the arts. For the industry to anticipate that people move differently through spaces, require interpreters, or even need opportunities to take breaks from stimulation during events, would mean the construction of much more open and accessible performances, festivals, readings, etc. Announcing that an event, or that an opportunity, is open to anyone, doesn’t mean that it is. It takes learning about access, anticipating that a lot of folks in any given community need disability accommodations, and then valuing the contributions of disabled folks, in order to pull off a true community event.
In Arizona and the US/Mexico borderlands, arts are under-resourced overall, which ensures that most arts spaces are inaccessible. I wonder how many other disabled poets are unable to read at open mic events or show their work in local galleries because of access barriers? We need better exposure to art created by disabled people, especially those who are also undocumented, queer, young parents, etc., because the lens they are offering contributes to conversations the rest of the country needs to engage with.
It’s frustrating to note that the obvious barriers are still extremely problematic and segregate disabled artists. However, a more subtle barrier that I come across often is pacing. There’s a pace tied to professionalism that is extremely fast. Last week I got an invitation to be on public radio and because I responded six hours after the invitation came in, I missed out. Typing is an extremely laborious process for me due to the technology I use. It doesn’t mesh well with social media. There’s a very ableist assumption that if you care about your work, and sharing it with others, then you are constantly connected and available via email and social media. I produce deep and thoughtful work that is grown from a pace that is slower and intentional. I would love for that kind of professionalism to be respected.
There’s a very ableist assumption that if you care about your work, and sharing it with others, then you are constantly connected and available via email and social media.
Khadijah Queen: I think for neurodivergent folks, it can be difficult to do the kind of networking required of people in creative fields. Another challenge is applying for grants and other funding. The forms required are onerous, often inaccessible, and difficult to customize or tailor when it comes to communication about the work. Hard deadlines, while I realize they serve an important purpose, aren’t always compatible with certain disabilities.
WKM: Could you share more about current/upcoming projects you are particularly excited about, and/or your artistic goals for the future?
KF: My next book Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust is about Aktion T4, the Nazi program that mass murdered disabled people. Excerpts from the book have appeared in the New York Times, the Believer, and Craft, and also serve as the foundation for my video series, What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?
I’m currently curating Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, the first international exhibit on queer/disability history, activism, and culture, which opened at the Schwules Museum Berlin on September 1, 2022 and runs through the end of January 2023.
I’m finishing a three-year project, Disability Futures in the Arts, a series of fifteen essays I curated, edited, and introduced, published by Wordgathering. I’m in the midst of editing the third and final cohort (funding was part of a three-year multi-project grant). The fifteen essays span a diverse array of disabilities, media, and nationalities. The final cohort will be published in December.
And I’ll soon be collaborating with fellow Disability Futures fellow Alison O’Daniel on a film based on my poem sequence In the Gardens of Japan.
KQ: I’ve almost completed a longtime prose project, am in contract negotiations regarding a book of criticism, and am slowly fleshing out a collection of travel essays. I’m going to Kenya in December—it’ll be my first trip to Africa, and my excitement level is in the stratosphere.
NO: Over the past ten years especially, I’ve noticed a lot of changes within the ecosystem, and yet, when I’ve looked for art or writing that speaks to the experience of climate change or climate grief, I’m often confronted with extremely ableist analyses. The problem of climate change is often defined as sickness or disability, and the answer as restoration or cure. The solutions presented are uniform, like going zero waste, with an assumption that it can work for everyone. But, for example, I am a disabled person in need of plastic cups. I am also an environmentalist who is concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. In my new book, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (forthcoming from Punctum Press in 2023), I explore how climate change impacts my relationship with place, expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist, and reimagines what being in relationship with land can look like.
I researched my first book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, because I was curious if self-care could be one tool for the activist communities I was part of (and also excluded from) to build creative capacity. Sustaining Spirit was the book I needed to address burnout when I was working within social justice movements. I feel the same way about Rituals for Climate Change. It’s the book I couldn’t find about the difficult and often unanswerable questions posed by climate change in the US/Mexico borderlands.
WKM: Who are the disabled artists you most admire or that most influence your own work?
KF: For me, Adrienne Rich was the most influential disabled writer. I ‘outed’ her as disabled by including her work in Staring Back, which led to a wonderful correspondence, which I wrote about when she died. Today, I look to my long time comrade Anne Finger, an inventive and important writer of both fiction and creative nonfiction. I will sorely miss Susan R Nussbaum, who died recently. Susan was one of the sharpest, and funniest, writers. Her plays, such as No One As Nasty, and her novel Good Kings Bad Kings, are must reads.
WL: There are so many great disabled journalists who are doing similar work and whom I admire. At HuffPost, I worked with Elyse Wanshel to train reporters and editors to cover disability issues with accuracy, respect, and sensitivity. Cara Reedy does a lot of disability reporting trainings as well. Sara Luterman has done significant reporting on disability and caregiving at the 19th (as well as many other places). Eric Garcia at the Independent knows so much about disability politics and policy. Read Keah Brown on anything related to pop culture and the intersection of disability and Black identity. Amanda Morris, who was the inaugural disability fellow at the Times and now works as a disability reporter at the Washington Post, has written so many fantastic stories across the disability beat. I also want to shout out journalists focusing on disability locally—people like Emyle Watkins, who leads the disability desk at WBFO, and Hannah Wise, who is a regional audience editor at McClatchy and who developed a toolkit for making news accessible. I’ve learned a lot from all of them. Following their careers and their work makes me feel less alone and motivates me to keep going.
NO: Finding other disabled poets and visual artists has taken a lot of work. A lot of big poetry or art databases don’t have search terms for “disabled” or “disability.” I came to disability culture more through nonfiction. Harriet McBryde Johnson’s book, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life and Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract by Marta Russell were some of the first books I read from a disability perspective. Then there were artists I was reading that I didn’t know were disabled, like Audre Lord and Gloria Anzaldúa. Work by poets such as Meg Day, Laura Hershey, and Stacey Park Milbern is deeply moving and encouraging.
No one makes art truly alone. Most of the poets and visual artists who influence me have been my peers—people I found through political organizing who are also artists. My friend Rachel Scoggins is an amazing multimedia visual artist. After seeing her work, I’m inspired to dig deeper in the creation of my visual art. I met Marlin Thomas when I was eighteen and we spent years sharing our poetry with each other and co-writing pieces. When I came across a fellowship for disabled poets, Zoeglossia, I gained life-changing access to a community of disabled artists. I love work like Stephanie Heit’s new book, Psych Murders, which talks about living with psychiatric disability versus a forced narrative of overcoming or resolution wherein disability disappears. Contemporary disabled artists are claiming disability in a beautiful and powerful way.
Additionally, my cultural communities don’t often get a chance to hang out and be featured together. There’s an upcoming issue from Apogee that is a collection of Latinx disabled poets that I’m really excited about.
KQ: Alice Wong comes to mind; Lydia XZ Brown, whose blog post (about using more imagination in our language so that we can stop relying on cliché and ableist metaphors and phrases) I teach in all of my classes; Octavia E Butler; Morgan Parker; L Lamar Wilson; Douglas Kearney; Sheila Black; The Cyborg Jillian Weise was very generous in inviting me to spaces where disabled folks are the majority, and providing a model for being disabled out loud, unapologetic, doing the often-thankless work of demanding that public spaces provide access. Henry Winkler, with those Hank Zipzer books I read to my son when he was in elementary school.
There are also many poets and writers whose work influences me greatly, whose friendship means a great deal to me, and who do not feel comfortable identifying publicly as disabled. I want to acknowledge that the stigma still exists, persists, and causes stress and unnecessary harm.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sir Lewis Hamilton, the world champion Formula One driver, who has gone on record saying he has dyslexia and ADHD. As I’ve struggled to adjust to my ADHD diagnosis, which came just last year, I’ve tried to incorporate his dynamic approach to social difficulty and professional challenges into my own toolkit. He responds with such grace, power, and refusal to surrender to bullying or despair, in fact surpassing himself in class, influence and achievement. Some might say he’s not an artist but I disagree; he’s a musician, protecting that part of himself for the most part, like I do with visual art. He’s collaborated with fashion designers, worked on films, and even started a special commission to help make Formula One more accessible behind the scenes for young people who’ve been historically underrepresented in the sport both in the car and behind the scenes in the factory. Definitely a creative person to admire and emulate.
WKM: What advice would you give to other disabled artists working in your medium?
Find your community, whether they be writers or not writers. Take risks. Scare yourself with your work.
KF: Know your literary and other creative ancestors. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so to say. You are part of a long lineage of disabled writers and artists, many of whom are still alive. Find your role models, whether from the past or present. Find your community, whether they be writers or not writers. Take risks. Scare yourself with your work.
WL:Find people in your workplace who care about the same things you do, who want to improve disability coverage and the overall news industry. Ask if your company has a disability ERG, or maybe even start one yourself. If you’re a freelancer or otherwise work solo, there are a lot of resources (National Center on Disability and Journalism, for instance) and ways to connect with other journalists online. (Don’t know any other disabled writers? Check out DisabledWriters.com.)
I tend to hear from a lot of disabled students who want to become journalists, including people who are switching careers later in life. I often tell them that even though there’s a lot of pressure and expectations around getting the perfect job right after school, so many people do not follow a linear path. (I worked in recruiting before I went to journalism school.) Take whatever time you need to prepare for your next step, and it’s OK to veer off if you need to help pay the bills, take care of family, take care of yourself, etc.
Recognize that there’s always room to learn and grow. Just because I am disabled doesn’t mean I know what it’s like to have every other disability. Be open to being surprised, and report and edit with empathy.
Believe in yourself! Don’t say no to yourself before someone else tells you no. There are already so many barriers for disabled people working in journalism; don’t let yourself be one of them. Set boundaries for yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need, whether it’s a higher fee for a freelance article or a mental health day at work. Learn to say no if you can. And if you’re not in a situation that’s ideal, start to take baby steps toward finding something better. And then, if and when you’re in a position to do so, pay it forward.
NO: We live in this fascinating reality where it often feels like something doesn’t exist unless it’s been documented online. Sharing art through social media and other online platforms can be an amazing way to share one’s work and to create connections with other artists. However, it can also draw us into a state of comparison. There are artists I follow who produce and post amazing work every few days. I love being able to engage in their art but sometimes it also can make me feel insecure about going so much slower.
Advice that I give other disabled artists is to really take time to engage with and value your own work. This may or may not mean taking some time away from the online worlds we’re part of. I swap work for feedback with several disabled and nondisabled artists/writers. One of the gifts from these kinds of relationships is having someone deeply engage with a poem, an essay, or visual art piece that I’m in the midst of. It’s an opportunity to talk through my process and where I’m struggling. I’m also offering them that same support. I think having a deeper relationship with my work, sharing in slow and meaningful ways with others, helps me to not be so attached to how many “likes” I get. It makes my work more meaningful to me.
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