Long before time was measured in the way we mark it now, humans have been telling stories about the animals around them. Animals have been our predators, our prey, and our companions—and yet, modern life has pulled many of us so far from the natural world that it’s become easy to think of ourselves as separate from, and sometimes even superior to, the rest of the animal kingdom. In my collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, I wanted to reduce the emotional distance between humans and other animals, and allow readers to step inside animal lives. It is my hope that stories like mine will inspire readers to think of themselves as an integral part of the community of nature.
Naturally, because I love writing from an animal perspective, I absolutely adore books that put animals at the center of their narratives. The books listed below all feature animals as prominent characters. They are funny, they are heartbreaking, they are hypnotic, and they are wild. In some, humanity is pushed to the margins, in others human influence is the center of the story (and in one, humans are replaced entirely by animals). But all of these books, by directing our gaze to the animal kingdom, insist that we humans remember that we are not alone. That our lives, however sterile they may become, are part of the complex and ever-changing fabric of the environment around us.
In South India, in a dry year, an old farmer sits to gaze at a sunset after harvest, when a giant approaches and offers him a black goat. “Only a kind-hearted man can have my baby,” says the giant, offering this seventh, and smallest, goat of a litter. Placing the goat in the old man’s hand, “[a]t first, it felt as if a hammer had grazed his hand; the next moment, he found a flower in his palm.” The farmer brings the baby goat – the kid – home to his wife, who names her Poonachi. So begins The Story of a Goat. What follows is a sweeping story about agrarian life in South India, encompassing examinations of caste oppression and colorism, and the impact of government regulation on villagers, all woven together with Poonachi’s life as a goat. And we don’t see Poonachi as merely a marginal animal flitting in and out of human lives. Rather, her loves, her hopes, and her connections are treated with the same richness as her human companions. I found myself deeply invested in Poonachi and the family that raised her, and I loved in particular how this novel was written so that all of their lives were intimately intertwined. In the end, I saw Poonachi clearly as the treasure she always was.
When the Whales Leave is a gorgeous and dreamlike tale of Nau, a solitary woman living on a narrow spit between a lagoon and the Arctic sea, enmeshed with the earth around her. “Nau was fast breeze, green grass, wet shingle, high cloud, and endless blue sky, herself and all these things at once.” Soon, she falls in love with a whale. Emerging from the glittering water and transforming into a man called Reu, the whale visits Nau every day. And every evening, he returns to the sea and his creature form, until the winter ice approaches and Reu must choose between leaving Nau to travel with his whale kin to southern waters, or staying on land as a man forever. Rytkheu, a Chukchi writer, weaves Chuchki narrative forms into both a reimagining of the origin story of his people and a warning to us all about the devastation that comes from forgetting our connection to our environment. In addition to the moving story of Nau and her descendants, I loved how prominently the landscape was featured in this book. The sea, the dynamic coast, the constant shifting of the ice—all were rendered with such richness that I felt I was there myself.
I am so fascinated by elephants. Every time I hear about their memories, their communities, or their mourning procedures, I want to know, so desperately, what they think about things. To my great delight, while I was reading the thoroughly researched and transcendent The White Bone I felt, almost completely, that I was an elephant. The novel centers on Mud, a young elephant cow who is orphaned at birth and raised by another family of elephants. While the specter of poaching is a persistent and terrifying threat throughout the story, the true richness, and perhaps purpose, of this novel is to render elephant culture in such exquisite detail that we are reminded that elephants, indeed all animals, don’t merely exist in relation to humans. They have complex lives all their own; we all live alongside one another, each of us shaped by our unique experiences and memories. “At the end of a long life you forget everything except who you are,” muses one of Gowdy’s elephants. “Now her hunch is that you are the sum of those incidents only you can testify to, whose existence, without you, would have no earthly acknowledgement.”
If generations of humans have family stories, it seems only natural to me that many animals would as well. In the absorbing, charming, and utterly unexpected Memoirs of a Polar Bear, I was treated to the personal stories of three generations of a polar bear family. The first third of the novel is narrated by the family matriarch, a writer; the second third by her daughter, a circus performer; and the final third by Knut, that famous resident of the Berlin Zoo. I love this book in its entirety, but it is the last section that bewitched me the most. Knut’s growth is paired with a deftly rendered self-awareness that transforms “the milk-drinker” to “Knut” to “I.” I was so struck by this progression that years after reading it, I still remember what it felt like to encounter it for the first time: like emerging from deep water to take a breath. I love imagining what animals might say if they were asked to observe the world as we do. Tawada’s novel fulfills this curiosity of mine in the most delightful and moving way possible.
When I bought my personal edition of Firmin, the book was made to look like a huge bite had been taken out of it, and in all honesty, I bought the book for just that reason. I had no idea it would be one of my favorites for years to come. Firmin, the thirteenth and smallest offspring of a drunken rat named Flo, was born in the shredded pages of Finnegans Wake in the basement of a bookstore in 1960s Boston. Consistently elbowed away from his mother’s teats by his much stronger siblings, Firmin turns instead to eating the pages of the book he once slept in and thus acquires the ability to read. What follows is a story of place, of community, and ultimately of mortality, all filtered through the erudite yet wisecracking rat-voice of Firmin. When asked if he is a pet, a local writer responds, “No man, he’s not tame — he’s civilized.” In this way, he remains simultaneously enmeshed in and outside of the society that he has clambered into. But it is perhaps the fragility of the world around us that is illuminated best by Firmin’s observations. “I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does,” he says near the end. “In fact nothing exists longer than an instant, except the things that we hold in memory.”
Somewhere between stories about animals in their natural spaces, and stories about animals grappling with humanity’s impact on the environment, is a third variety: stories that leave the cities as they are and replace the people with animals. This is the premise of Talking Animals, which lured me in with its whimsy and kept me with its tender portrayal of yearning for meaning in a world that seems determined to render everyone’s life mundane. Murphy’s characters are complicated, flawed, and utterly lovable. Alfonzo, an alpaca employed in an understaffed department in City Hall, lives in a world much like our own. He struggles to relate to his recently widowed father and he feels professionally unfulfilled, all as he becomes increasingly overwhelmed by political corruption and the looming climate disaster. Talking Animals is both funny and touching. One of things I loved most about it is how by replacing humans with animals, Murphy reminds us insistently and repeatedly that we are animals, and the things that seem too remote to touch us are, in fact, right here. “The city is an island and an island is a ship that never sails,” Murphy writes. “The city is a vessel for animals.” And here we are, on this ship together.
If The White Bone takes readers inside the lives of elephants, The Tusk That Did the Damage pans wide to reveal a story about the interconnected lives of a poacher, a documentary filmmaker, and an elephant who, after being orphaned by poaching, rails against his subsequent captivity to become the ominous Gravedigger. Aside from the compelling story and the complexity with which it is rendered, the real gift of this novel is the immediacy of James’s prose. “He touched her warm trunk … its ridges and folds, and the very tip, a single, empty finger with which she had pinched him a gooseberry not two hours before.” James describes the Gravedigger in the moments after his orphaning in a way that orphans readers with him—and does something similar with the poacher and the filmmaker. I love how this technique infuses the novel with empathy, and how this empathy, in turn, collapses the distance between all of the characters.
In a list of books featuring animal protagonists, it might seem nonsensical to include a novel about a woman named Rachel who befriends a sentient rubbery sea anemone-like creature named Borne, and who, along with her partner, feels hunted by a vicious (and floating!) giant bear named Mord in a post-apocalyptic city. But Borne is so much more than this summary would suggest. It is, among other things, a chronicle of Rachel’s discovery that Borne, a product of both human hands and his environment, has a self-awareness and a sense of connection that has developed far outside what Rachel has projected on him. It is, at its core, a story about a truly living thing, and how human efforts to shape that living thing and the world around it cannot rob it of agency. “I thought the animals might be chasing after him, but no, it became clear soon enough: Borne was leading them…All the forgotten and outcast creatures, beneath the notice of the city.” Borne reminds readers that life thrives in the most unexpected circumstances, and that all life is deserving of our compassion.
The Last Wolf by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki & George Szirtes
The Last Wolf, told in a single very long sentence, flows from the mouth of a bereft narrator in a Berlin bar as he tries to explain to the bartender what happened when he was sent to Extramadura, Spain to “immortalize the experience.” In keeping with the bleak suggestion of the title, by the time the story begins, the last wolf in Extramadura is already dead, and the narrator decides to write the true story of its demise. What he uncovers instead is the extermination of the last nine wolves in the area, and even the expert lobero, hired by the wealthy to hunt the last two remaining wolves, finds himself tormented by his role as the hand meant to do someone else’s killing. Reading The Last Wolf mirrors the sense of bewildered sorrow I feel when I realize that we are coming to the last of any species. The last red wolves, or the last vaquitas. How can this be? And like Krasznahorkai’s narrator, I find myself always trying to rewrite the end of that story.
On the 9th episode of the 42nd season of Survivor, I began to see double. To be fair, my viewing conditions were shabby to begin with, (my finger-smudged 13-inch Chromebook), but it was during the tail end of that show when my perception split, producing two vantage points of the same episode. I was comfortable and happy, wooly socks on my feet, durag on my head, Thai takeout in my mouth. And then, suddenly, something that had always been a pure escape mirrored my reality a little too closely, catapulting me back to the present.
The format of a Survivor episode typically remains the same. First, in the Reward Challenge, the tribe competes for a “luxury” item or experience that will build mental or physical stamina—such as a hearty feast, a night at a luxury hotel away from their desolate camps, or a video message from a loved one back home. Next, the Immunity Challenge, where survivors compete individually for protection from elimination, occurs during the final segment, Tribal Council. At Tribal Council, the members of the tribe democratically vote to cast out one member to advance their own individual game and eventually win the $1,000,000 prize. However, this time was different. During this episode, the tribe had been split. This meant two separate Tribal Councils, enabling the second pack of survivors the chance to see who was voted out from the previous group before voting out one of their own.
Two of my favorite contestants found themselves in the second group: Drea and Maryanne—both Black women. I’m always “rooting for everybody Black,” but I was also drawn to their incredibly different approaches to the game. Drea was an extremely strategic player, known for her calm, collected presence and thoughtful approach to navigating multiple alliances. It is because of this that she became an early fan-favorite—Survivor-stans love a behind-the-scenes puppet master. Maryanne, a fellow Canadian who grew up in a town that neighbors my hometown, was quite different from Drea but I adored watching her nonetheless. Maryanne entered Survivor at the age of 24, 11 years younger than Drea, and quickly made herself noticeable for her unflappable enthusiasm and never-ending spirited commentary. Some found her eagerness irritating; most found it endearing. Due to their different approaches, Drea and Maryanne found themselves at opposite ends of the tribe, in different alliances. In fact, prior to heading into Tribal Council, Maryanne intended to vote out Drea that evening, believing Drea a threat to her individual game. All of this changed when Drea and Maryanne, along with the rest of the second group, walked into Tribal Council and saw who was sitting on the jury bench, a throne reserved for those who have been voted out but are required to silently watch the remaining Tribal Councils.
I’m always ‘rooting for everybody Black,’ but I was also drawn to their incredibly different approaches to the game.
My favorite part of any Survivor episode is the Tribal Council. This is where you witness gameplay at its best: the political wordplay of the survivors as they answer questions from the host, Jeff Probst, the inconspicuous whispering between alliances as they attempt to shift votes, the lies, the backstabbing, the last minute deals! It’s also when you see the tribe’s reaction to those on the jury bench. Typically, I gush at this part because of the juxtaposition between an ousted jury member’s glow up (they get sent to sequester where they have access to real food and hygiene, read: they typically get hotter) with the feeble, decimated remaining members who are ravaged from the elements of Survivor. The drama! The heightened stakes! However, in this episode, my vision split as I saw Drea and Maryanne walk into the tribal council and witness who was on the bench. It appeared theirs did, too.
Drea, Maryanne and I noticed an all too familiar trend: Black contestants voted out one-by-one as soon as the game switched from being team based to individual. As a Black audience member, I instantly picked up on what Drea and Maryanne were feeling when they observed that the first two members of the jury were Black.
At this moment, I oscillated between ‘Brendon the Survivor Fan’ and ‘Brendon the Black Survivor Fan.’ My perspective split, shifting how I absorbed the show. I felt conflicted, wanting Maryanne to make the big move of voting Drea out. At the same time, I did not want to see a third Black survivor voted out, especially one whose gameplay I admired. The feelings I harbored were complicated but ultimately my urge for both Maryanne and Drea to remain in the game subsumed my desire to see strategic gameplay. I wanted them both to stay, even if it would make my beloved Tribal Council less entertaining.
I wrestled, trying to reckon with my two halves and make sense of how best to engage with my favorite show.
I read the concern in their eyes: Maryanne was uncharacteristically quiet; Drea’s expression was stoic and wooden as a calculation raged on in her mind. And then, what happened next was what ‘Brendon the Black Survivor Fan’ anxiously anticipated. Out of instinct and obligation, Drea and Maryanne simultaneously played their own immunity idols to guarantee their safety at tribal council. Neither of them had planned to do so, but seeing the Black eliminated members split their gameplay in two. They were no longer playing the individual games of Drea the Survivor Player or Maryanne the Survivor Player. They were also playing as Black Survivor Players, engaging their own double vision. The disheartening truth, race related or not, was that Drea likely would have been voted out if she had not seen the pattern and had not played her idol. Although Maryanne technically was never a target, she felt pressure to play her idol out of fear of being seen as using her race as a clutch to get farther. Through her emotive response, coaxed out of her by Probst, Maryanne explained the “double consciousness” she plays the game with, competing not only through her own reality as a Black woman but also from the white audience’s perception of her. It’s in vignettes like this where Survivor mimics reality so closely, exposing the burden that Black folks face when advancing ourselves. We must be cognizant of how our actions reflect upon our community.
After the episode, I closed my laptop, an opaque wave of emotion blanketing me.I wrestled, trying to reckon with my two halves and make sense of how best to engage with my favorite show. I had finally gotten the representation that I craved since watching the first season of Survivor as a child in 2000. Now that I had it, why wasn’t I satisfied?
Growing up in the suburbs of Ontario, reality television often felt like a vacation. Or, at least, a more entrancing issue of National Geographic. I glimpsed a life that was out of reach, yet incredibly fascinating. The prevailing reality programs of the aughts presented an idealized vision of western life, an immaculately produced fantasy. In MTV’s Laguna Beach, the fantasy of an alternate adolescence absorbed me, one where privileged teenagers fell in love around bonfired beaches only to break hearts on tabletops in Cabo. The shameless commitment to the performance of “spoiled heir” in The Simple Life amused me, shaping my understanding of “the socialite” today. Finally, the stakes and talent presented in American Idol swindled millions into believing that a popularity contest equaled meritocracy. We searched, week after week, for evidence of the American Dream within the glow of our TV screens.
Today’s reality programs offer less faraway fantasy vision, presenting more of a looking glass focused on the audience’s surrounding reality. As “wokeness,” political literacy and leftist ideology become increasingly marketable, reality television series have swiftly broken the fourth wall to mirror today’s news cycle and the most current political sentiments. Gone are the days where reality television equaled escape. Instead, a good reality series attempts to reflect society, some more accurately than others, and pull focus to urgent issues in an effort to remain relevant during a politically turbulent time. Cultural bombshells such as the 2016 Trump election, the 2017 #MeToo movement and the 2020 George Floyd murder have pushed society’s most established institutions towards rexamination. Producers of popular, long-running programs have altered its successful framework to appease audiences and respond to the pressures of today’s climate.
The fracturing of entertainment to acknowledge audiences’ amplified cultural and political consciousness— across a variety of popular programs—is layered. RuPaul’s Drag Race, notably the competition reality series with the most Emmy wins, attempted to edit out a competitor from all fourteen of its episodes during its twelfth season due to sexual assualt allegations that came to light after filming. Although that queen was still seen in group scenes and the main challenges, the praise she received from the judges and their time in the confessionals was substantially limited in comparison to her competitors. This complicated the viewing experience. The queen was clearly succeeding in the competition, and viewers were only getting half the story. Viewers of the show watched as a disclaimer appeared with the opening credits explaining the contestant’s disqualification and subsequently filled in the blanks as the erased competitor continued to succeed, mostly untelevised. It is easy to imagine that a decade earlier, when television programs operated under a different set of expectations, a program like Drag Race would have continued to feature the disgraced competitor as their strong performance would have made for a better viewing experience. The current cultural context finds its way into the editing room, and influences how and what we, the viewers, consume.
Varner’s rationale for outing Smith is neither relevant nor coherent.
It’s ironic that Survivor, a show that takes place in environments often marketed as untouched by Western civilization such as Micronesia, Fiji and Kenya, displays narratives covered in the fingerprints of Western society. And it’s exactly this that has been the strength and strain of present day Survivor. Singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey once sang “It turns out everywhere you go, you take yourself.” Recent seasons of the much loved franchise have proven that truth, as the identity of the cast members become increasingly politicized within the game.
In Survivor: Game Changers (Season 34th, 2017), millions witnessed a revolting tribal council when one competitor, Jeff Varner, outed another, Zeke Smith, as a transgender man. A nationwide conversation ensued on the nuances of disclosure. Varner’s rationale for outing Smith is neither relevant nor coherent, but the decision for CBS to air the confrontation platformed transgender issues to a large American audience. The result was a sweepingly positive sentiment for Smith and transgender rights. After this, Survivor began to morph from not only being a reality show about people on an island but a vehicle to platform underrepresented voices. Being one of the most watched programs on primetime, witnessed weekly by upwards of five million people, it’s as though its producers (host Jeff Probst also serves as an executive producer) have suddenly realized that the show might possess some molecule of social responsibility.
Since 2020, Survivor’s cast has become increasingly racially diverse, in a way that is exhilarating, with a record number of Black participants competing. This was not only in response to the requests for greater diversity on the cherished show, but also out of recognition that out of 40 seasons, only four of the winners were Black. People of color (along with elders) are often the first to be voted out. With the recent uptick in representation, Black contestants have now felt comfortable enough to vocalize the burden of not only competing as individuals, but also acting as representatives of the Black community. In Season 41, viewers witnessed the first ever all-Black alliance where the Black competitors banded together to look out for each other, even if that meant weakening their individual standings. They valued the collective over the individual.
One could be grateful that CBS, with its influx of contestants of color, is committed to responsibly allowing them to tell their stories. In doing so, Survivor can further humanize minority players and pull focus to underrepresented issues that are emblematic of the systemic challenges beyond the screen. But who does this serve? Which viewers?
It is gratifying to see fragments of myself on my favorite television show, but it’s also grating to see my trauma consistently relayed back to me.
Traumatic stories of race and representation are becoming rote for Survivor—at least in the last two seasons. Big Brother recently featured an all-Black alliance (in Season 23, cleverly named ‘The Cookout’) where members also highlighted the strain of advancing their individual game alongside that of members of their race. It needs to be mentioned that Big Brother US has an extensively documented history of casting blatantly racist players. Its most recent season is under fire for the microaggressions faced by a Black houseguest. Similar to Survivor, the Cookout did not always want to work together, but did so to benefit the collective. In the end, the balance of the dual gameplay – playing as a representative for the Black community and playing as an individual – leaned in the direction of the group. The result? A Black winner. This achievement is synonymous to how the Black community bands together to create a space where one of their own can succeed and crystalizes that idea that reality television is not so much an escape, but more of a microcosm of our world.
How does one engage in escapism TV when it no longer feels like an escape? The editing of the Survivor and the line of questioning from the increasingly provocative Probst, both of which feel opportunistic at best and exploitative at worst, leaves me unsure if a reality television program can truly be both educational and entertaining. It is gratifying to see fragments of myself on my favorite television show, but it’s also grating to see my trauma consistently relayed back to me when I’m trying to unwind and escape. I feel conflicted knowing that my temporary discomfort serves as a moment to educate the white majority.
I have pondered if an all-Black Survivor is necessary: a season where Black contestants can finally compete as individuals and not have to worry about aligning with castmates who don’t serve their competitive interest. As exciting as this is to me, a lifelong viewer, I worry that the winner of the season will only have an ‘asterisk’ next to their name, that their win will be viewed as less of a win when compared to the other forty-and-change winners. As a Black consumer of stories, I have long dreamed of narratives untouched by the white gaze, whether it is through the fictionalized Wakanda in Black Panther or the distant memory of the Black-only social media platform Black Planet. These vacuums are effective when Black folks are involved at the inception. However, in the instance of Survivor, where the institutions are attempting to retroactively diversify and atone for past mistakes, with potentially little or no people of color in consultation, the intentions feel muddled, less precise. Was this the representation I wanted? Representation that feels like a reflex and a vehicle to educate the masses?
CBS is not the only network on board with this change. Bravo, at times, has also opted for education over entertainment. One of the Bravo network’s most popular shows is The Real Housewives franchise, with The Real Housewives of New York (RHONY) as an early fan-favorite. Despite an impressive tenure of thirteen seasons over thirteen years, RHONY failed to produce a single Black housewife in a city where the population is 24% Black until the murder of George Floyd spawned a global outcry for a substantive examination of systemic and institutional racism. In what appeared to be a reactionary tactic in response to complaints of lack of diversity, Bravo introduced Eboni K. Williams, the first Black housewife for the RHONY franchise. However, Williams’ narrative on the show was met with mixed reviews. Although many applauded the network for finally diversifying its cast, plenty of viewers noticed that Williams’ was primarily utilized as an object to educate her white cast members on her lived experience as a Black woman. Throughout the season, it appeared that Williams did not possess the same fluidity as her white castmates—the ability to move throughout the world as “just a housewife” and not be tokenized by her identity. If anything, Williams’ experience was realer and more familiar than anything that had been portrayed on The Real Housewives of New York: a Black woman in America justifying her existence to a class of white women.
Arguably outspoken Black women like Newman and Calaway are routinely edited into the “angry black women” trope, often silencing them.
Perhaps Alicia Calaway, known for her commanding presence on Survivor (2001, 2004) or Omarosa Newman, infamous for her villain persona on The Apprentice (2004, 2008), have always been discussing, pushing and explaining intersectionality to their cast members and it’s never made it to our screens. When Newman attempted to explain intersectionality on RHONY’s Bethenny Frankel’s talk show in 2013 – granted in her trademark jabby delivery – she was met with boos from the majority white woman audience. Warranted or not, arguably outspoken Black women like Newman and Calaway are routinely edited into the “angry black women” trope, often silencing them in the media while purporting to include them. As reality television catches up to the cultural climate of today, I anticipate that I will become accustomed to the double vision I experience with Survivor, Big Brother and the Bravo franchises. This “twoness” is akin to what civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois termed “double consciousness,” an internal conflict that marginalized folks experience when they possess not only their own perspective but also the ability to peer through white gaze. In my case, I suspect that there will be moments when I watch these programs through my own eyes and then, as programming switches to the political, I will have to decide whether to turn my brain off, remaining suspended in the fantasy of reality TV, or commit to the labor of full engagement. In short, I will have to decide which Brendon to blind.
Whether it’s an escape or a dose of reality, these programs elicit an engrossing swell of entertainment and information, offering a window into a singular person’s perspective that can go on to represent a culture. It’s people on screen representing the people on the couch, with their wooly socks on, eating their Thai takeout. And, I suppose, that is why we have always watched, to see ourselves accurately or aspirationally, tuning in each night in hopes of seeing proof that our experiences are real.
One day, my friend (M/16) comes to me and is like “Dude I just met this girl and she’s amazing and I want to be with her forever.” Clearly he’s coming on a bit strong but his family and this girl’s family have been beefing for ages so I see this marriage as an opportunity for them to reconcile. They want to get married (!!) so I officiate their marriage and it all goes well so I’m like, “Cool! This is going to be great.”
Well turns out it was not going to be great because my friend immediately gets into a fight with his new wife’s cousin and ends up killing him. So now my friend is branded as a murderer and he gets banished from our town. I feel bad that all this shit happened during what was supposed to be like, his honeymoon, so I help arrange for him to spend a night with his wife before he has to leave.
The next day my friend leaves and his wife comes to me all upset because her husband is banished and everyone is telling her to marry this other dude who sucks shit. I come up with what I think is a pretty good plan, and tell her to drink a potion that will make her look dead so that her family leaves her alone. Meanwhile, I’ll send a messenger to her husband giving him a heads up that it’s all fake, and then he can come pick her up and they can just live in the woods together or something. Looking back on the idea I see its flaws but we were under a time crunch and it was the best thing I could think of.
The problem is that my messenger never gets to the husband because he gets stuck in a quarantined house and obviously couldn’t tell me about the delay because like, he was quarantined. So the wife takes the dying potion and all her husband hears is, “Your wife is dead,” with like zero context.
Obviously he freaks out, runs back here, sees his dead wife, and literally kills himself and it’s like, oh fuck. To make things worse, his wife wakes up later and sees her dead husband on the ground and goes through the exact same emotional arc so she kills herself but for real this time. The families end up making amends because of the whole ordeal but there’s still two dead teens and people want to point the blame finger at someone, so AITA for not considering the slim possibility that my harmless plan to reunite two lovers would result in a double suicide?
Dane_of_Darkness
I (M/30) was feeling pretty bummed recently because my dad died and my uncle married my mom (gross, I know). One night, my friends run up to me and are like, “Bro! Come outside right now!” I follow them outside and there is the ghost of my dad! I’m shocked to see him obviously but then he’s like “Listen, your uncle killed me,” and I’m like “????!!!!” and he’s like “Avenge my death!” and I’m like “Ok!” but I’ve never avenged someone’s death before so I’m like, “How tf do I do that?”
I’m super stressed about all this pressure from my ghost dad and now my mom and my uncle are on my ass about being moody and it’s like “all this shit is literally your fault” but obviously I can’t say that. I see a group of actors is coming to town and I’m like, “Ok, maybe I can work with this.” I decide to have the actors put on this fake play of my father getting murdered to see if it would stoke a reaction in my uncle (it did btw, he totally freaked).
Anyway that essentially proves that my uncle killed my father so obviously I’m really pissed. I go to kill my uncle but he’s praying so I don’t do it then because I don’t want his soul to go to heaven or whatever. I guess he saw me because he ordered me to go to England, which is like, such a dick move because he’s not even my real dad. I go to tell my mom how fucked up the situation is but then I see movement behind the curtain in her bedchamber and I think it’s my dipshit uncle so I stab it with a knife.
It turns out it wasn’t my uncle but actually my gf’s dad which, like, I would have had no way of knowing. She’s super pissed at me about killing her dad (by accident!) and my mom is furious and so now I really have to go to England which sucks, but AITA for wanting to avenge my father and not automatically assuming my gf’s dad was hiding behind a curtain in my mom’s room?
good2btheKING
Me (M/35) and my friend (M/36) were returning from battle when we ran into these three witches (all F/200 or something? 300?) and they told me that one day I would be Thane of Cawdor and eventually King of Scotland. They also said that my friend’s son would be king though he would never be king himself which was like, a weird riddle thing. Kind of a strange interaction but, hey they were just three random crones on the side of the road.
We get back to base camp and then the King names me Thane of Cawdor and I’m like, “Woah, weird coincidence.” I’m still kind of suss, but when I get home I tell my wife what happened and she’s like “Omfg you have to kill the king,” and I’m like, “Because three old women shouted nonsense in my general direction?” and she’s like, “Yes 100%.” I’m still hesitant but then she says some really mean stuff so I’m like “Ok! Fine! You win!”
So I go to kill the king and I’m like freaking out and seeing random floating daggers but I do it anyway because I don’t want my wife yelling at me again. I finish the deed and go back to my wife expecting her to be like, “Good job!” or at leastlike, “Thanks!” but instead she yells at me again because apparently I “did a bad job” and “left evidence at the scene” so it’s like a whole thing because apparently I can never do anything right.
Now I’m super anxious because I just murdered someone and also have all these responsibilities of being king, and my friend and his son is still hanging around. This next thing isn’t my proudest moment, but I hire some people to kill them just to be safe. My wife throws a big dinner party but my mind is all scrambled so I keep seeing my dead friend’s ghost. My wife has zero sympathy for me and basically just tells me to suck it up and stop ruining dinner and I’m like, “There’s a ghost haunting me and you’re worried about dinner??” Anyway the ghost finally goes away and I calm down but by that point everyone thinks I’m losing it.
I go to see the witches again and they tell me that no man or woman born can kill me (nice) until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle. That’s basically gibberish so I’m like “Ok, I feel good about the first part at least.” Things are finally looking up for me but now my wife is freaking out and sleepwalking and washing her hands all the time. She ends up killing herself (appreciate everyone who has sent condolences btw) but that makes me super depressed because like, she was mean but she was my wife! So my question is, AITA for doing exactly what my wife told me to do even though it ended in her death, the king’s death, my friend’s death, the death of an entire family, and a period of tyrannical rule in Scotland?
Bard-Knock-Life
I’m a big romantic, so I wrote my girlfriend a sonnet. It was a great concept – I listed a bunch of things that were wrong with her: wiry hair, pale cheeks, bad breath, grating voice, etc. And ok, writing them all out like this, I can see how it may come off as mean. BUT then at the very end I wrote about how my love for her is even rarer than a shallow love for a woman who has rosy cheeks and coral-red lips and bright eyes. I thought it was a clever subversion of a classic love poem because it’s like, babe, you don’t need all those cliché comparisons. Cute, right?
Long story short, she absolutely hated it. Didn’t appreciate my wit. TBH, I don’t even think she read it to the very end (the good part!!) she just ripped up the paper and stormed off. So AITA for absolutely roasting my girlfriend for six stanzas even though I totally make up for it in the seventh?
“Beginnings, Endings, and Other Musical Figures” by Joe Meno
Begin in F♯ minor with a symphony of ghost notes. Why not a concerto that details every known silence? Or the most noiseless overture in all of history? Let the trumpets go mute and the cymbals be still. Let the lull from the concert hall destroy every awkward moment, every long-standing argument, with cannons raging in unheard fury and the closing note being fireworks exploding soundlessly in the sky, so that everything finally goes quiet. What would Mozart have to say to that?
Orfeo is booming through the house. I am struggling to do a single pull-up before work. My sister, Isobel, calls and says she is not feeling well and then asks if I can drop off my niece at preschool. I slowly catch my breath and tell her I’ll be there soon.
I put on my red hat and my winter coat, grab my bicycle, and then pedal toward my sister’s apartment on 95th. I lock my bicycle up and climb the stairs to my sister’s apartment. I make sure my niece is wearing her gold gym shoes and I help her on with her coat. I look over at my sister lying on the couch with her ragged blond hair and can see something in her eyes appears to be off. I ask her: “What’s up?”
“I’m just not feeling so good. Feminine problems.”
“Like in eighth grade when you wrote a love letter to Patrick Swayze?”
“You’re not funny. You’re almost never funny.”
With my eyes, I ask, What’s really going on? but she doesn’t answer. So I take my niece’s hand, and then, once we’re outside, I help her onto the front of my bike.
I go faster than anyone with a three-year-old on the handlebars should. It feels like we are flying. A car from the 1980s pulls out in front of us and my niece, Jazzy, laughs and screams at exactly the same time and it is one of my favorite sounds ever, a profound, musical experience, always in D minor.
When I pull up in front of the dreary-looking day care on 95th, she asks when her mother will be feeling better and I look at her and say I don’t know. I help fix her backpack and then I ask: “What are you going to do today, Jazzy?” and she looks at me fiercely and says, “Run it,” and then walks inside. Other kids move out of her way. I ride off and lose the sound of my gears whirring to the noise of oncoming traffic and wonder what my sister’s expression really means.
Beginning at the age of three, Isobel and I had our own language, first playing music together—my father installing me in front of the piano, while Isobel, at five, was already playing short pieces by Beethoven on the cello. My father would tilt his head toward her, focused on each and every note, the phrasing, how she held the bow. I, on the other hand, was more than happy to exist only as background noise.
When I was eight, I had the chance to play before the Jugoslavian ambassador—a friend of the family—who promised to get me into an exclusive conservatory on the East Coast. My father was ecstatic but the dignitary never showed. A snowstorm had created an enormous traffic jam downtown. I sat on a stool on the small stage and stared at my family and music teacher, Mr. Genarro, gathered together in the front row. Even my baby brother Daniel was silent in my mom’s arms.
On that cold evening, with the wind coming in off the lake, you could hear the doors and windows banging—the opposite of applause. Someone had carved their initials EM on the top of the piano. I imagined all the names that started with E.
As we waited for the next forty-five minutes, I kept my eyes on Isobel, who never looked away. She mouthed knock-knock jokes and folded a bird out of the program my father had gotten printed. What do you call this other than magic or ESP? In the end my father asked me to play, even though the dignitary was not coming. I did as I was told, placing my fingers above the dull white keys, imagining the paper bird swooping above the empty concert hall, as I glanced up at my sister whenever I could. I don’t know if I ever played that way again.
I’d do anything in the world for this person is what I’m trying to say.
I go by the no-name convenience store on the way to work. The same hoods are out front with their conventional, southside Irish-American faces. There are four of them, all in drab green uniforms from the nearby cemetery. The cemetery in Evergreen Park is one of the largest in the western world, stretching on for miles and miles. What does it say about a neighborhood, an entire place, that its biggest claim to fame is that it happens to contain one of the most popular locations to leave your dead? As I open the door to the convenience store, one of the thugs knocks the headphones from my ears.
“Fa, your sister talks about how you’re always listening to music. Come on, let’s hear you sing something.”
I ignore them and go inside, walking over to the freezers. I grab a bottle of Yoo-hoo. When I come out, someone gets me in a headlock and I immediately remember why I hate this place.
I’m half deaf. I have to tell you. I have partial hearing loss in both ears. It’s asymmetrical, which means it’s worse in my left. I began losing my hearing when I was ten. I first started missing certain words, then certain notes, then entire frequencies by the age of twelve. In the end, the look of empathetic disappointment on my music teacher’s face was the hardest thing to take. No one knew why or how it happened—if it was from some accident, or from some virus, or was possibly genetic, passed down from generation to generation through my family, alongside mythical stories of Poland and Jugoslavia.
What does it say about a neighborhood, an entire place, that its biggest claim to fame is that it happens to contain one of the most popular locations to leave your dead?
I don’t know any sign language, I’m embarrassed to admit. I don’t like talking about my hearing loss but it makes it easier when other people know. Most of the time I just pretend to understand what everyone is saying.
I work at a high school, St. Josaphat, where I once was a student. No one knows this fact but I do. I find it hilarious and also humiliating, depending on the day. I put on my uniform and ignore the misspelling of my name. In the hallways, mop in hand, I make myself invisible. That afternoon, there are some girls from an after-school club hanging out by their lockers. Two of them see me and whisper to each other in ninth-grade French. I think maybe they recognize me as someone who used to have potential but then I remember no one outside my family cares about classical music. These girls are only laughing at a twenty-year-old person talking to himself, mopping the same spot over and over.
After work, I come home and check on my mother. She has not moved from her bed for the last several days. Ever since she started taking antidepressants a few years ago, she’s been in a dismal haze. I go into our bedroom and find my younger brother, Daniel, drawing in his notebook at the desk. He is thirteen and all he ever does is trace figures from his favorite comics. But in his sketches the superheroes are always doing depressingly real things, like filling out their taxes or crying in the shower. I lean over his shoulder and ask, “What’s this?”
“Captain America. Going to a movie alone.”
“Uh-huh. Why is he doing that?”
“He has a hard time understanding other people.”
“You did a good job with his expression. It looks like he’s very conflicted.”
Daniel nods proudly, his dark hair falling into his face. I put on a Chopin record from my grandfather then and slip the headphones over my ears.
I almost never tell people the truth of my name. Everyone calls me Aleks, which is short for Wolfgang Amadeus Aleksandar Fa. I am the only person I knew who is Polish and Bosnian on our block or in our neighborhood on the far southside of Chicago. The first and second names came from the child prodigy who began composing symphonies at the age of eight, the third from my grandfather who emigrated from Sarajevo in the middle of the twentieth century, and the last from my father, a Bosnian-American who lives several blocks away but who no one talks to anymore. There are three of us, each named after some important cultural or historical figure: my older sister Isobel, after Isobel Loutit—a famous 20th century female mathematician; myself; and Daniel, who was named in honor of the biblical hero who fought the lions. The circumstance of our ridiculous sounding names and the fact that all of us had been raised by well-meaning pseudo-intellectuals to appreciate books and music made us strangers on our block and in our neighborhood.
All of our hair had been cut using the same pair of clippers, each of us standing over the sink. Our skin was olive, less pink. We dressed different—like Eastern European immigrants—in out-of-date clothes my mother used to pick up at Goodwill: T-shirts advertising cartoons that were no longer on the air, generic sneakers found in the discount bins at the supermarket. None of us were allowed to use a computer or the Internet outside of school until I was eighteen. No one in the house had access to a cell phone. Our parents had raised us to think of ourselves as extraordinary, as exceptional, had read us poetry in the crib and played classical music each night as we went to sleep. Our bad haircuts and poor clothing choices only exaggerated these differences—zip-up track suits, turtlenecks and vests, floods with off-color socks. In the end, all I wanted was to be left alone, to live in an imaginary world of classical music.
Isobel stops by the next afternoon and we get slightly high in the backyard, sitting in some icy folding chairs, ignoring the late March snow. We pass a joint back and forth, looking up at the whitening sky. Jazz lies in the snow like she is dead, completely motionless. Isobel turns to me and says: “I’ve been thinking maybe I gave her the wrong name.”
“You do?”
“At the time it seemed like a good idea. But now I’m worried no one’s going to take her seriously. Like her only career option will be an exotic dancer.”
“I think her name fits her.”
We’re silent for a moment and then she says, “It’s worked out for you. Having a unique name.”
“Look at me. I’m twenty and I don’t have shit. I was hoping to finish community college but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon.”
Both of us turn and glance over at Jazzy who is rolling back and forth in the snow, laughing to herself like a crazy person. Isobel glances over at me and sighs and then comes out with it: “I think we’re going to be living here a while. Brian and I have been fighting. He’s trying to run my life.”
I look at her for a long time and say, “Isobel, I love you. Are you sure you’re okay?” She looks away, unwilling to answer. Later we all end up lying together in the snow.
I go to community college because, at the moment, that’s all I can afford. I take all the poetry and music and film classes I can. I have a humanities course, which I am not a fan of. The teacher acts like the twenty-first century has not happened.
That day in class, the professor explains we will be studying the war in Jugoslavia and the history of Balkanization. I raise my hand and say my grandfather is from Jugoslavia and that I personally have many stories about his life there but the prof looks at me like I have two heads and just keeps going with his lecture.
Isobel and Jazz move in the following day, taking over the entire basement. I like to wake up and eat cereal across from my niece, as we make obnoxious faces at each other.
A few nights later, Isobel’s new boyfriend, Billy, comes by. I look at this person across the table and wonder what exactly my sister is doing. Billy tells us that he served overseas in Iraq. In 2008 everyone thought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be over soon. But that just goes to show you. Isobel’s boyfriend is tall and handsome, has an Irish flag tattooed on his neck, a typical southside hood. A piece of his left ear is missing and the bottom part of his left leg was amputated after he stepped on an IED in Mosul. A year later he began selling the Oxycontin and Vicodin he’d been prescribed. He announces this all with a degree of pride none of us questions. I realize then this is the person my sister has been buying drugs from.
Later Billy asks if we want to see his leg. My brother and sister look at him, even though he is not the first visitor to come to our house missing a limb. He rolls up his pants and shows us where the lifeless beige plastic meets the scarred remains of his knee. He passes his foot around and he tells us war stories, about Baghdad and the battle of Fallujah. When the foot is passed to me, it’s hard not to feel like you are holding a part of history, the wrong part of history, the part my family always has to contend with.
Later, after he goes home belligerent and drunk, I look over at Isobel and ask, “Are you serious? What are you doing with that guy?”
“I like him because I can see what’s wrong with him from a mile away,” she says and exhales cigarette smoke through her nose.
“You know you’re not supposed to smoke in here. Mom’s sick.”
“Mom’s been sick a long time. Anyways, who died and left you in charge?”
Both of us laugh because of how funny it isn’t. I realize, in that moment, I’ve given up on my sister, because there’s nothing I can do if she isn’t willing to help herself. I know she says something behind my back but I don’t even hear it.
At community college the next day, I turn in my humanities essay about the history of Balkanization and the war in Jugoslavia. I worked on the essay all week, pulled quotes from different sources, different articles and wrote the essay in such a way as to show how Bosnia was conquered over and over using different-colored fonts—to make clear how it is a collision of cultures, ideas, and overlapping identities, often in conflict. The prof puts on some film I barely pay attention to while he sits in the back, grading papers. After class he tells me he believes the essay has been plagiarized.
It goes how I thought it would go: badly. I try to explain to the prof, to the dean, even to his administrative assistant—who writes everything down—that I borrowed the excerpts and built something new, but none of them are having it. I tell them how Stravinsky borrowed the opening of The Rite of Spring from a Russian folksong and how almost all of old school hip-hop is based on sampling. In return, I am told the college has a strict plagiarism policy and that I am to be expelled immediately. I don’t want to blame history but it is hard not to think about how it might have gone if I had written about fencing or soccer, instead of doing something that mattered. But, in that moment, it felt like my need to be seen as clever had once again ruined me.
When you get kicked out of community college, when you get beat down, who are you going to run to, who are you going to tell? Our wills and fates do so contrary run,that our devices still are overthrown; our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own, or so Shakespeare once said.
The following day, Isobel calls to say she has to work late and asks if I can please go watch my niece in the school play for Casimir Pulaski Day. I put on my headphones, pull up my hood, and go through my CDs, looking for the right composition. What symphony do you play while riding your wobbly bike across the southside as fast as you can in order to avoid getting jumped?
I go with Rimsky-Korsokov, turn on my Walkman, and take off on the ten-speed. Fortunately, the southside ignores me as I pedal beneath its out-of-date signs, some in English, some in Spanish. I do not get jumped looking like a reject from Eastern Europe. I pull up to the elementary school, lock up my bike, and hurry inside.
Someone’s mother kindly hands me a Xeroxed program but I’m too nervous to look. I take a seat in the back of the auditorium. A boy dressed as George Washington is kneeling beside a fatally-wounded Casimir Pulaski. Jazzy’s in the background—I think she is supposed to be an owl of some kind, or maybe a bluebird. She stares out at the sea of faces and folds her hands in her armpits while the other kids sing a song about how Casimir Pulaski’s body magically disappeared. I can see Isobel has made Jazz’s costume out of whatever happened to be on hand—wire hangers, a bathrobe. Another song starts and Jazzy begins to dance like she is in a music video, owning the moment in her teal leotard.
In that moment, it felt like my need to be seen as clever had once again ruined me.
In the middle of the third song someone in the front row makes a comment about my niece’s lurid dancing. I look around and see my sister is nowhere to be found. I realize then that she hasn’t been able to get off work. I collect Jazzy from the cluster of brightly-dressed kids after the final act and we ride over to Cupid Candies on 95th. Both of us stare at each other from over our bowls of ice cream.
“You want another?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Two empty bowls sit before her as she works on a third. I feel glad, suddenly, that I have this time together with my niece. It feels less like a chore and more like a discovery. I realize, over the course of just a few weeks, she’s become my favorite person in the world.
As we’re riding back home and swerving through traffic, I imagine another short musical composition, like that famous bagatelle by Beethoven, note by note, made entirely of my niece’s laughter.
When we get back to my mother’s house, Isobel is nowhere to be found. Later, after Jazzy has gone to bed, I see my sister climb out of Billy’s Cutlass, looking tranquil and ridiculous, and know exactly where she’s been.
At work someone has plugged up all the sinks in the girl’s washroom on the first floor. It takes an hour to clean everything. As I move the mop back and forth, I improvise a sonata, attempting to capture all of my bad feelings.
I come home from work just as the phone is ringing. I pick it up—it’s my niece Jazz’s preschool teacher saying she has failed a test. I say, “It’s preschool. She’s three years old. I mean she’s still learning,” and the preschool teacher says, No, I think there may be something wrong with her hearing.
I don’t know about any of this. Isobel is at work at Payless Shoes and so we sit in the back of the house and I put on a record. Jazz is busy with a coloring book. I put the headphones over Jazzy’s ears but she doesn’t seem to notice at first. I watch her as I turn the volume up. It takes awhile before she seems to notice. I can hear the vibrations coming from the headphones before she seems to. I turn the music down and both of sit in the silence, the sound of her hands against the paper the only sound in the world.
When Isobel comes home, I tell her about the phone call and the headphones. She just looks at me and says, “I don’t even know how to deal with this right now.”
I know we don’t have much money for testing, for hearing aids or whatever Jazzy is going to need. But we have to do something because I’m tired of just making do. I read about hearing impairments on the Internet all night. The next morning, I drop Jazz off at preschool, borrowing Daniel’s bike without asking. I watch her climb down from the handlebars and I say, “You go in there and show them what you know. Don’t be afraid. You’re as good as any of them,” but she just gives me a blank look and wanders off into school.
When I get home from work, I call around to see how much it costs for a hearing test without insurance. One place says three hundred, another tells me two-fifty. But we don’t have anything close to that.
I look under my brother’s bed the next day and find in a blue shoebox that he has one hundred and fifty dollars hidden beside a notebook that lists all the classic comic books he’s been saving up for. As I’m counting the money, he comes in and tears the money out of my hand.
“What are you doing?” he shouts.
“This is for Jazzy. She needs money for a hearing test.”
“This is for Fantastic Four #4. I’ve been saving up for it for eight months. You can’t just come in here and take my money.”
“Would you have given it to me if I asked?”
He is quiet for a moment and then shakes his head, “No. Probably not.” He scratches the side of his nose and adds, “I happen to like the Fantastic Four a lot more than my family.”
He takes the money out of my hands and shoves it back into the box.
I go by my cousin Benny’s and ask for a loan. He says he doesn’t have any cash on hand but offers me a handful of balloons he has stolen from a funeral home. All of the balloons read “Condolences.” I tie them to the handlebars of my bicycle and feel the front tire trying to leave the ground.
I go by my grandfather’s apartment on Cicero to ask if he can help pay for Jazzy’s hearing test, but he does not answer the door. I can hear him inside playing the cello, his fingers struggling to find the right notes, but no matter how hard I knock, he does not answer. I realize this is how he has survived for so long. I keep on knocking until, finally, he opens the door. He stares at me for a moment as if trying to place where he has seen me before and then waves me inside with a frown.
“Ah, Grandson. Let me get a look at you.” He pauses and then nods. “Oh yes. Of course. I recognize that look. I’ve seen it many times before.”
“I came to ask…”
“You must know I was forced to escape Communist Jugoslavia when I was only a young man of twenty-one. I packed everything I owned into a single suitcase and snuck across the border, never to see my parents or older sister again. I did all of this on my own. Eventually all of us are forced to choose our own fate.”
I look at him and nod and then he murmurs: “I apologize but there will be no handouts for anybody.”
As I am riding back I think of another amazing composition: Why not a concerto that describes the shape of the Big Bang or all of human history? Why not a symphony of only beginnings, with the instruments having to start over and over, one that goes on forever, something that captures the feeling of being trapped by fate only to suddenly break free? To escape all your responsibilities, all the entanglements of family? Where is the musical composition that describes something like that?
When I get home there is an envelope of money on the counter in the kitchen. Inside is one hundred and fifty dollars. I go upstairs and find Daniel at his desk, organizing his comics once again. I ask, “Is this from your comic, the one you were saving for?” and he nods once shyly.
“I also sold some of my X-Men,” he says. “Never liked the artwork.”
I lean over, give him a kiss on the back of his head, and he pushes me away, shouting wildly. I look through some of my old records and do the same, going by a couple record stores, selling whatever I can. In the end, it’s close to two hundred, which is enough to qualify for the payment plan.
On a Wednesday, I bring Jazzy in for a hearing test. It’s not great news. We sit in a soundproof room and the audiologist makes sure there are no obstructions in my niece’s ears, then she places a pair of headphones over Jazz’s ears and plays a variety of tones. Later she asks Jazz to repeat a series of words that come through the headphones, but my niece only says one or two. We get shuffled to an exam room and the doctor—who is old, ancient in a safe white lab coat—explains something to us called autosomal recessive hearing loss and how her hearing loss is possibly genetic and most likely permanent and then discusses how hearing aids or implants would work and gives us answers to questions I hadn’t even thought to ask.
I stay up all night on the Internet looking for information on how to learn ASL and decide even though I have been avoiding it for a long time, I will do this one small thing for my niece. I replay the video over and over until my eyes go blurry.
In the morning I drop Jazzy off at preschool and feel the entire world shift as she hops from the front end of my bike. I immediately miss the weight of her on the handlebars. I hold my hand out and show her the sign for good, by placing the fingers of my right hand against my lips, then dropping my hand into my left palm. She looks away, ignoring me.
“Jazzy,” I say, “look.”
I do it again and again until she glances back at me. I repeat the sign a fourth time and finally, unhappily, begrudgingly, she repeats the gesture before turning away and hurrying into preschool. When I ride off, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I have the feeling anything might happen.
A.M. Homes’ novel The Unfoldingtakes place over the course of two and half months, from the 2008 Obama election to inauguration day 2009. It follows a wealthy industry titan known as the Big Guy who, dismayed at the election results, summons a small group of powerful friends to his Palm Springs home with a plan to “restore” an America he sees as gravely under threat. The self-proclaimed “Forever Men,” who include an American general, a physician, a judge, and a disinformation specialist, concoct a scheme to sow discord at the heart of the American political system, with the aim of eventually reinstalling their brand of politician—rich, white, and conservative—back in power, no matter the cost.
With his family, however, the Big Guy is hardly the powerful actor he appears to be with the Forever Men. His wife, Charlotte, suffers from alcohol addiction and harbors a weighty family secret. His daughter, Meghan, begins to wake up to the dangers of womanhood when she gets lost in the woods near her boarding school; later, she discovers another student was murdered in these same woods. By the time Meghan discovers the secret at the heart of her family’s history, she’s already started to pull away from the notion of American history that’s been handed down to her: white, male, and straight. It’s all serious stuff, yet in Homes’ hands, the events of The Unfolding crackle with wit and humor.
From her home in New York City, Homes spoke to me via phone about satire, how The Unfolding lands in chaotic times, and what fiction can do in our current age.
Carli Cutchin: As a book about a secret plan to sow chaos into the heart of the American political system, The Unfolding drops at an eerily apt time. With everything that’s happened in the past couple years—January 6, the ongoing COVID crisis, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, domestic terrorism, inflation, and most recently, the FBI raid on Trump’s home—the book becomes more relevant with each passing month. And yet, the germ of the book must go quite a ways back for you.
A.M. Homes: The idea that the American political establishment—all sides—has lost touch with the American people has been on my mind for a long time. We have this election cycle planning, and election cycle pitching of how [politicians] are going to fix things, but there’s not any sort of long view of who we are as a country. [This] combined with the rise of dark money. Not just the rise of dark money, but the incredible amount of money that is at the top of the pile, and how that tips the scales—all that has been on my mind for a very long time.
I also feel like there is this surrealism to our lives that has been growing exponentially. The character of Metzger, who talks about the [online] algorithms and how they sell people things before they even know they want them—that’s unfortunately all real. [All of this] is dividing us as thinkers, as consumers, as individuals into thinner and thinner slices, until we only see reflections of some iteration of ourselves.
Chaos is something the government, the CIA, has used as a tool outside of this country for many years. The more you fracture things, the more scared people get, and the more they have to protect their turf. Basic words like “truth” or “democracy” suddenly mean different things to different people. The moment when Kellyanne Conway dropped the term “alternative facts,” [I thought]: All bets are off. This book does live in the world of fiction; my thinking, my work, lives in the world of fiction. But what does it mean when, repeatedly, I can’t even get ahead of [current events]? Traditionally I’ve been able to be at least a few years ahead of the curve of what’s happening.
CC: You’ve said previously that you’re fascinated by the fine line between the public and the private, and this is a through-line in your work. It’s nowhere more true than in The Unfolding. Here, nation and family are linked in a deeply unsettling way. What can the Hitchens teach us about the broader American situation, or about America as it appears in the context of the novel?
AMH: This book is obviously looking at these large-scale themes about American identity, about democracy and disruption, and about power. At the same time, it is very much the story of these people, and this family. For me there was, on a craft level, a desire to try to marry two ideas that are unfortunately traditionally “masculine” and “feminine.” The masculine being the Great American Novel—which I now like to call the “Pretty Good Big Book”—which is a big fat book written by a guy. It looks at the social-political landscape. And then the book written—apparently—by women for women, with a small, intimate domestic landscape. If you look up “political fiction by women,” what comes up is “feminist.” Which isn’t necessarily the same [as political fiction by women]. I wanted to try and weave both of these [the traditionally “masculine” and “feminine”] into one book. And to talk about—Who is this Big Guy, and what does it mean to be the Big Guy? What does it mean when the Big Guy realizes he’s an asshole? And how does the weight and power of the Big Guy play out over two generations?
The more you fracture things, the more scared people get, and the more they have to protect their turf.
Meghan and Charlotte represent two very different expressions of what it means to be a woman at a certain point in time. Someone said to me, “The Big Guy is so different when he’s with his friends, the Forever Men.” Yes, but that’s always been a theme for me: the space between our public and private selves. I love that this Big Guy is in his basement playing war [reenactments] on his ping-pong table, and then he’s playing war with his buddies, shooting real guns with private military contractors in Wyoming. There are different expressions and iterations of us in different places. That fascinates me.
CC: Yeah—there’s a family battle playing out in the Big Guy’s home. He has no control over his family situation. On Thanksgiving, he calls the Betty Ford Clinic where his wife is being treated for alcohol addiction and tries to talk to her, but the staff won’t let him. I think we’ve all had this moment of wanting something from someone on the other end of the line. I really felt his frustration. He’s so helpless in that moment.
AMH: The Big Guy isn’t used to having to navigate that kind of thing. And that’s very real. Certainly among the men I know—men are not necessarily great at doing domestic stuff like calling Betty Ford.
CC: Let’s talk about Meghan, the Big Guy’s 18-year-old daughter. In her own way, she is trying to come to terms with history. For one, the history of her boarding school, which she’s been lied to about. It turns out a young female student was killed in the nearby woods, and the administration covered up her death. Neither she nor her classmates are safe. Then, in the classroom, she’s exploring women’s history. Finally, she’s trying to come to terms with her family history, which is being re-written after the revelation of a certain family secret.
AMH: There are three prongs in my mind to the evolution of Meghan. One was a student who said to me, “Were there any women writing in the 20th century?” This was probably five years ago, from a student taking a literature course that ended with Toni Morrison. And I made a list of women writers and I said, “Can you please give this to your professor with my regards?” And when my kid was little, probably third grade, she came home from school and said, “Mom, were there any women in history?” And I thought, Uh-oh. As you’re growing up you’re indoctrinated into a history that’s very white male-centric.
Looking at Meghan, I was thinking about awakenings and coming to consciousness. All those moments where you realize there’s more to the story in the absolute largest sense than you were ever told or ever had a clue about. I wanted her piece of the story to stretch beyond the boundaries of the known and familiar, but also to involve recognizing the incredible fear and discomfort and anxiety that comes with that. When one goes beyond those places there is that sense of danger, or breaking away from the agreed-upon narrative.
CC: Meghan has a lot of spunk. I love the scene where she’s in the swimming pool in Phoenix with one of the Forever Men, Eisner; they encounter each other before Eisner and the Big Guy start working together. There’s this interesting sexual tension between them, despite the fact Meghan is 18 and Eisner is in his 40s. It was one of my favorite moments. It’s not a very #MeToo sentiment to have on my part.
AMH: I think it’s human. As a young girl there are those moments where there’s some guy who’s older than you, and there’s that frisson. Something could happen, but the good news is, it doesn’t happen. Eisner doesn’t take advantage of Meghan. Which is a compliment to him.
In these [January 6] hearings, it’s fascinating to me that all of these women have come forward. That’s Meghan, that’s absolutely Meghan. They are incredibly brave. Part of how they were able to come forward is that men in the room never thought they were a threat. They didn’t notice them. They were irrelevant to the men. They were witness to all kinds of things. Looking at Liz Cheney—she’s put her political career on the line, and has stood up for basic truths. All that speaks to the evolution of women in these places.
CC: There’s this ominousness in The Unfolding having to do with race—race as the elephant in the room. It seems to me that the Forever Men are, whether they say it or not, reacting to a Black man becoming president. Their elaborate plans to disrupt the system and sow chaos are a response to that.
The idea that the American political establishment—all sides—has lost touch with the American people has been on my mind for a long time.
AMH: Two of the very big threads in the book—and right in front of us right now [politically]—are racism and sexism. I personally find it cool that the book doesn’t come out and announce [the themes]. I wanted to tell this story, and give this illustration of how we evolved to this point, through the lens of the Forever Men. My good friend, the writer Randall Kenan, who died in September 2020—he just keeled over in his house and died. I feel he died from all of this. From having to witness it all, live through it, and represent himself [as a Black man].
There are a lot of people like the Big Guy—his obliviousness not only to his privilege but to the narrowness of his experience and the bubble he lives in. There are many, many people living in [those bubbles]. Racism and sexism are very much at the core of what we’re looking at right now.
CC: The Forever Men are very concerned with preserving American history, on their terms. But this isn’t the only meaning of “history” that appears in the novel. Toward the end, the “old man” character whom the Big Guy meets at a New Year’s party muses, “I’m telling you that our balls are in the water; our balls are going under . . . we are history. Old white men. We’re done. Finis.” These old white men—the Forever Men—may fixate on history, but in another sense they are history, whether they acknowledge it or not.
AMH: The Obama election—I bought a new TV. People poured out into the streets celebrating. To think about it from the other point of view—for some people it was terrifying. The idea of a Black man being in charge was terrifying. A lot of what we’ve continued to see was the evolution of that [reaction]. It’s not Obama per se, but it is the idea that as our country moves forward, the demographic shift, the number of BIPOC communities, of women in power [grows] and for a generation of older white men, that’s terrifying.
CC: The Forever Men wield the term “democracy,” but their plans are anything but democratic. It occurs to me that for them, “democracy” is a way of saying “white men in charge.”
AMH: Yes. It’s all about, How do we preserve “our America”? That America is gone, but there’s a lot of fear [among white men]. That’s what’s so interesting and complicated about what’s happening now. So much of what is driving things is a fear of people losing their place.
CC: This is a big question, but I imagine you’ve given it some thought over the course of your career. In an era like ours, what can fiction do? Why write a novel?
AMH: The first thing it can do is prompt conversation. That’s the thing I’m looking for. I don’t presume to have answers, I don’t presume to tell a perfect story. Even if [readers] say, What the hell was that?—if it shakes their understanding of how they see themselves, or how they look at the world around them, or even the questions they think to ask, that’s a piece of it. Grace Paley, who was my favorite teacher ever—people were saying to her, “Oh, do fiction writers have a moral responsibility?” and she would say, “No more than a plumber has a responsibility to do a good job.” And I think on the one hand, that’s true. But I also feel like—I want the time I’ve spent to be of consequence.
What can fiction do? It can scare us. Hopefully it can motivate us to engage, whether it’s in talking or doing more. Someone said to me the other day, “I know you thought this book would be funny, but there are parts of it that just aren’t funny.” And I thought, Exactly. There are parts of it that just aren’t funny. I’ve tried to balance the use of humor [with the serious], because if I can make you laugh, I can cut deeper and get in further. I wanted to push those Forever Men into the land of Dr. Strangelove. I didn’t want to be writing in reaction to the world around me. I wanted to get out ahead of it.
CC: Satire is very powerful. Whether it’s on a late-night show or in a book, there is something satire can do that information can’t.
AMH: Yes, something fact alone doesn’t do. If you break the surface tension by making someone laugh, you’re able to go to another level. The other piece of it is, as we see on late-night [shows] all the time, if you can make a joke that asks people to acknowledge the absurdity of things, it’s a double check. That serves to validate the strangeness of people’s experience.
Even before Kellyanne Conway mentioned alternative facts, we had already lost track of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I had always prided myself on being a fiction writer, except for when I am actively writing nonfiction. When my books come out in Europe, people get it: [the books are] funny and not-funny. Here it’s [supposed to be] one thing or the other. You can’t be funny not-funny. This book is very funny not-funny. What might have been funny yesterday is not funny today, because it might have happened—this morning.
Whether you refer to it as “hot goss,” “spilling the tea,” or attempt to sound refined by using “talk of the town” (we’re looking at you, The New Yorker), everyone loves a good juicy story, especially those involving schadenfreude. We delight in the downfall of our friends and strangers because, for a little while, we can forget about our own mistakes (and some of us, yours truly included, make a lot of those). So, when The Podglomerate approached me last year about hosting a podcast covering literary gossip (which would become Missing Pages), I was intrigued—especially when they presented an initial slate of ideas. I mentally rubbed my hands together with glee, eager to record something light while I finished working on a book that is less so. (Mark your calendars: Life B: A Memoir will be released by Counterpoint Press in May 2023.)
As I worked with the production team on Missing Pages, we all realized that to simply tell these stories as narratives of wrongdoing wasn’t just superficial, it was doing a disservice to our listeners, who, like most readers, have little knowledge about how the book publishing industry works. Each anecdote we examined deserved deeper examination, including analysis of the original situation, interviews with those involved and subject-matter experts, and reflection on how current and former aspects of the book world affect these stories.
Does that mean we wrung these juicy stories into dry husks of facts? Hardly. There’s structural inequity, and then there’s personal bad behavior. No amount of stress at work can account for pretending a beloved family member is dead just so you can eke out a promotion (that is, unless you’re writing an episode of Seinfeld). Sure, it’s tough out there, but when you have to resort to setting up an OnlyFans account in order to pay back your publishing advance, perhaps you haven’t made the best choices. In other words, Missing Pages has plenty of tea still to spill from our very full pot.
That full pot inspired my list. Below is a list of literary scandals from the past several years that are still boiling hot, and also bring up questions about the way we look at books, art, authors, and culture in this troubled—and gossip-ridden—world.
When My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, appeared in 2014, everyone knew “Elena Ferrante” was a pseudonym, and, as the linked piece from Entertainment Weekly indicates, that the author wished their real identity to remain unknown. In 2016, however, a fellow Italian writer, Claudio Gatti, “exposed” Elena Ferrante as a woman, a reclusive translator. The real scandal here was not anything Ferrante did or didn’t do, but rather Gatti’s digging through years of financial and real estate records to “prove” her identity. He got a severe whipping on The Twitters although that probably didn’t bother him one bit. Worse, he tried to infer that the “real” Ferrante couldn’t have written her books without editorial support from her husband. At the time, Ferrante said being “outed” by name might deter her from writing. One of her older novels, 2005’s The Lost Daughter, has already been made into a stellar film starring Olivia Colman, and the Neapolitan Quartet has been made into a highly regarded television adaptation. Will we see new work from Ferrante? Only time will tell.
For anyone who might need catching up, TERF stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” and refers to people who deny that transwomen are women. Not a good look if you ask me, but plenty of high-level authors seem to believe it’s just right for them. In 2014, JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame declared her support for an Australian woman named Maya Forstater, who was fired from her job for sending tweets that were deemed “bigoted.” (Sample Forstater tweet: “men cannot change into women.”) Meanwhile, in 2017, superstar novelist from Nigeria Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie declared, “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women,” a statement that resulted in a deep rift across the years with Adichie’s one-time protegee, writer, and trans person, Akwaeke Emezi.
Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican woman and her son attempting to migrate illegally to the United States, triggered backlash early when the book launch-luncheon floral centerpieces featured decorative circles of barbed wire. The wire, of course, was part of the book jacket design, but it’s also a clear symbol of the border fence meant to prevent immigrants from entering the country. Classy, right? The insensitive decorative choice launched a thousand diatribes. However, the backlash ultimately went much deeper than table decoration. Rightfully, Latinx authors and readers object to the inappropriate cultural appropriations, including reductive caricatures of Mexicans, made by a non-Mexican author.
We’d be remiss not to include blockbuster novel Where the Crawdads Sing, recently adapted as a major motion picture by Reese Witherspoon, because its author, Delia Owens, has long been associated with the mysterious death of an elephant poacher in Zambia (trust me; you have to read up on this to really understand). Owens, 73, is a wildlife scientist and conservationist whose protagonist, a lonely girl named Kyra who grows up obsessed with animals in the marshes of North Carolina, might be her doppelgänger. Kyra has something else in common with her creator, too: they’re both implicated in murder cases. For Kyra, it’s the death of a local quarterback; for Owens, it’s the 1995 murder of an elephant poacher in Zambia, a case also involving her estranged husband Mark Owens and their son Christopher Owens. In her novel, Delia Owens can wrap things up neatly, but in real life, her involvement in the crime remains unresolved.
If you were an aspiring author and received an email from someone at “penguinrandornhouse.com,” would you catch the typo amidst your deep excitement at hearing from someone you thought was an editor? You say yes, but plenty of other authors, agents, editors, and publishing execs were caught out by a Simon & Schuster UK employee named Filippo Bernardini, who conducted a high-level manuscript-phishing scam so that he could . . . Well, we don’t really know. I mean, he couldn’t, and didn’t, sell the manuscripts—that would have required using a proper email address. Was he just collecting manuscripts as trophies? When he was arrested in January 2022 at JFK airport, Bernardini alone was indicted; S&S UK was not involved in the case in any way. Will we ever know what the manuscripts stolen, which included works by Margaret Atwood and Ethan Hawke, meant to him? This Vulture article provides clues about his ego, need for attention, and obsession with authorial fame, but no one except Bernardini can speak the truth. Alas, that might mean he’s working on a memoir while in prison.
Novels that involve the #MeToo movement are hot, but that doesn’t mean they should be hot off the pages of someone else’s book. When Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel came out in 2020, it was acclaimed as an authentic perspective of a high school student groomed by her English teacher for a sexual relationship that turns sad and tawdry. But even more tawdry were the accusations from Latina writer Wendy C. Ortiz, who read My Dark Vanessa and recognized its plot as “eerily similar” to her 2014 memoir Excavation. Ortiz also raised concerns that Russell’s story, which is told from a white woman’s point of view and covers themes similar to those covered in Excavation, was given robust marketing and publicity support, while Ortiz was told her memoir was “unsaleable.” Ultimately, it was revealed that Russell’s novel was based on her own experiences as a teenager, and that she had not plagiarized Ortiz’s memoir.
In 2022, another high-profile debut novelist, Jumi Bello, had a title coming out from the stellar imprint Riverhead—but was dropped when editors discovered that not only had Bello (who struggles with mental illness) plagiarized, but she had plagiarized from established authors, including Carole Maso and venerable (and deceased) author James Baldwin. Bello wrote about her actions and challenges for Lit Hub, but unfortunately that essay was retracted because parts of it were, ironically, plagiarized from plagiarismtoday.com. The story continues to unfold; its most interesting part may not be the author’s mistakes, but rather the publisher’s last-minute recognition of significant plagiarism in the manuscript.
Biographer Blake Bailey was riding high when his account of novelist Philip Roth’s life hit bookstores, and felt comfortable enough during interviews to mention Roth’s bad behavior toward women, stating that it was all part of a great artist’s time on earth. But when Bailey that same year was accused of sexually assaulting two women (one rape is alleged to have taken place upstairs at literary critic Dwight Garner’s home during a book party), his publisher, W.W. Norton, halted shipping, distribution, and further printing of the Roth biography. In June 2022, Skyhorse Books announced it will be publishing Blake Bailey’s latest book . . . on cancel culture. Wheel in the sky keeps on turning . . . and who knows, a Missing Pages episode on Skyhorse, which has an incredible track record of publishing books no one else will, might be forthcoming.
Bear with me for a moment as I share personal information. I’m in a writing group. (Maybe you are, too.) Never and not for one second would I consider poaching any of my fellow group members’ work or ideas, and, because we are in a supportive, professional group, I don’t think of their shared conversation as material. Your mileage may vary. “It’s all material” is a common writerly adage. But when someone in your writers’ group announces a huge personal decision, and then you use that decision as the basis of a short story that you get published, and continue to discuss in a gossipy group email . . . well then you are a Bad Art Friend. All of this went down in a group formed through Boston’s Grub Street Writers Center. Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson were acquaintances from Grub Street, and when Dorland decided to create a private Facebook group for support in her decision to donate a kidney, Larson was included as a member. In 2016, through a mutual friend, Dorland heard that Larson had given a reading of “a cool story about giving out a kidney.” The gloves were now off, scalpels drawn: Dorland wanted to know why Larson had based a story on Dorland’s donor act when Larson hadn’t even seemed to care about it at announcement time. (There are a LOT of hurt feelings in this story. I highly recommend the above NYT link if you want to piece it all together.) Larson wrote, “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.” Dorland and Larson’s brouhaha has inspired so much discourse that an anthology called “Bad Art Friend: Stories from the Writing-Group Trenches” has to be in the works.
Jonathan Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories follows a Jamaican American family of mixed heritage that migrates to Miami in the 1970s. Trelawny, the second of two boys and the main character in most of the stories, is about nine years old when he begins to seek clarity on one burning question, “Am I Black?” It’s a question put upon him by the constant perusal of his brown skin, by a system that dictates how race is determined, preconceived notions of what a Jamaican looks and sounds like, and his mother’s noncommittal answer to the question—“you’re a little of this and a little of that.” His brother, Delano, is more direct: “You’re Black, Trelawny. In Jamaica we weren’t, but here we are. There’s a ‘one-drop’ rule.”
While Trelawny accepts his racial identity as Black, race is at play in other ways, and the question follows him through college and into early adulthood. When Trelawny graduates college and returns to Miami from the Midwest, the tanking economy makes it difficult for Trelawny to find meaningful employment. Desperate for a way to survive, he takes on questionable jobs, including one advertised by a white couple seeking a Black man to serve as a voyeur, and he finds that race not only excludes him from opportunities but presents other options for individuals to exploit his Blackness.
Escoffery was born and raised in Miami, and we spoke recently about how growing up in Miami serves as the foundation for his stories.
Donna Hemans:I’m intrigued by the title and the many ways you explore survival. There are hurricanes, homelessness, political violence in Jamaica, childhood bullies—all things the characters survive. And in “Odd Jobs” Trelawny is pummeled by the family of a woman who hired him to slap her. Can you talk about the idea of survival and what it means to the immigrant family and the generation of children born in America to immigrants?
Jonathan Escoffery: We experience these things quite differently. When you’re Black in America, there’s a different kind of experience from the generation born in the U.S. I was a very proud, patriotic child until America began to tell me that I wasn’t its ideal son. That sent me on a kind of exploration. If this isn’t where I belong, then where is it?
I’m part of the generation that’s surviving what it means to be in America when it seems like there could have been another option for us to not have to deal with this kind of racist system. It’s all the systemic problems that we deal with that affect us in very individual ways, that prevent us from rising to the top of certain careers, or at least may have us striving to feed ourselves in the ways that Trelawny does. He follows the playbook for upward advancement. He goes to college. He does well in college, and he still finds himself outside of what’s been promised to people who work hard in America.
But there’s also surviving your bad decisions and your obsessions. If you look at Topper who certainly made mistakes and he’s failed in ways—and there’s the question of whether he has failed Trelawny—but also he has built a business that was successful for a while. He’s able to build his dream house. So in those kinds of more material ways, we might see him as actually quite the success.
DH:“Pestilence,” begins: “The first and only plot of American soil my parents purchased together was plagued, as was the house they built atop it. The millipedes blackened our front steps, made Mom tap dance from car to welcome mat. They crept up pipes, bursting from bath drains at our most vulnerable moments, their dark bodies startling against the porcelain white.” Do you look at this “pestilence” as a metaphor for the family’s American life?
I was a very proud, patriotic child until America began to tell me that I wasn’t its ideal son. If this isn’t where I belong, then where is it?
JE: I took that particular metaphor because the house I grew up in had all of those animals. There’s nothing that I wrote that was made up. And it was largely a one horse town when my family got here. The wildlife was pretty wild. I’m down in Miami, right now and I can see the lizards we had as children. The new generations of lizards have come in and eaten them and there’s always an invasive species that is descending upon this town. It’s cyclical. There are plagues acting as plagues upon the land. The developers are part of that. In terms of metaphors, it’s operating in that way. Something is always coming for this family.
DH: Sticking with the idea of loss, Delano loses his business and that’s tied to the economic downturn. There is the hurricane, of course, that destroys Delano’s childhood home and the house is sinking. There’s also the loss of family. So how do you look at these losses? Are they based on the family’s own failings or are there external factors, like race, affecting them?
JE: I think it’s a mixed bag. They’re taking what they’re given and sometimes making them better. That might just be a reflection of my worldview. Growing up, my parents said, “Don’t get caught up in the politics of the U.S. The system will actually tear you down. Just stay focused on you; don’t get involved in all these larger conversations.” This was my parents not that long after they migrated here. There’s a kind of short lived advantage to ignorance in a sense. I don’t think you can run the full marathon based on that ignorance, but you might make some good time in your sprint with that kind of ignorance.
Even with Sanya, there’s some similarities with my parents. After those 30 years go by she threw in the towel and she said, Yes, I am a Black woman. I do recognize that. And I’m going to peace out of America because this particular set of problems that it comes with, it’s just not worth it.
But Trelawny doesn’t have to take on all of these terrible jobs. In the final title story, he doesn’t have to go and meet with this couple. He’s just addicted to making his life difficult. His life has been made difficult for so long that he’s replicating that and maybe a little bit addicted to his own hardships and trauma.
DH: In “In Flux,” Trelawny asks a question that brought him back to Jamaica. “Among your friends, do people tend to think about or talk about their ancestral roots? Pre-Jamaican, I mean.” He is concerned about whether his peers look to England or West Africa as the motherland. Why is this important to him?
Miami is a place where people wear their prejudices on their sleeves much more than other cities I’ve lived in. Here people are quick to tell you their prejudices.
JE: He’s had these multiple experiences. He’s had the experience in Miami, where people keep saying, “What are you?” They keep accosting him with this question and when he tries to answer they’re very disappointed in his answers and they contradict his answers. And they say, “No, you look more like this. So you must be that or you sound more like this. You don’t sound Jamaican. So how could you be Jamaican? You look more like you might be Dominican, Puerto Rican.” They don’t really accept his answers.
So he takes up others’ obsessions. When he has the opportunity to actually be in Jamaica, he’s wondering if he could just feel that comfort level that the rest of his peers seem to feel. But what he’s finding when he’s in Jamaica is that even though he would very much love to be able to step into the identity of being unquestionably Jamaican, not thinking about where he belongs, he finds that he is within a kind of colorism. There’s a certain class perspective that he does not share. He’s noticing the ways in which he may not be able to actually fit within this group, as much as he would like to. Largely that is because he was born in America and he’s grown up American to an extent, and there’s not much that’s going to change that at this point in his life.
DH: How does Trelawny reconcile his racial ambiguity and the different ways he is treated?
JE: By the end of “In Flux” he’s solid in his Blackness. He’s Black with mixed ancestry. But it’s also never going to be so simple to others who are going to identify him however they happen to see him. He has a very different experience in the Midwest versus Miami. And I think that’s because in a place like Miami, people carry the way they see race from whichever nation they came from. Most of the population is not made up of white Americans. It’s mostly Latinx population from all over. And he has to respond to that and the other Caribbean attitudes towards race.
He’s had a lot of experiences in Miami where they’re saying, “I will give you more of a chance because I see you as not Black or not fully Black.” And he’s not latching on to that. He’s no longer interested in that kind of parachute away from Blackness.
DH: You talk about racism in Miami—some of it subtle, some of it overt. Can you imagine the book or these stories without that brand of racism? Is that brand of racism a characteristic of Miami?
JE: I really wanted to write the book that I never saw in the world. If I tried to write any other story it would feel false. It would feel like a poor imitation of something I had read and not aligned with my lived experience. People have written wonderfully about more overt racism that you might expect in the U.S.
Most of my presumed readers will not have grown up in Miami and won’t be aware of this brand of racism. I had to be brave about what I had experienced and hope that this would be understood. It’s 100 percent part of Miami. Miami is a place where people wear their prejudices on their sleeves much more than other cities I’ve lived in. Here people are quick to tell you their prejudices. They don’t let their prejudices get in the way of who they marry. But they will tell you what they think of a given group.
DH: I can’t help but think that the focus on survival and race all tie back to the idea of belonging. As a child, Trelawny wants to belong—whether to the group of Spanish-speaking friends at school or the group of Black children. He wants to fit in. Are those two ideas intertwined to you?
JE: Trelawny tries to belong to anyone who would have him. He wants to be uncomplicatedly American. He wants to be the classic American boy. Everyone is telling him he is not that. He finds people who look like him, but when they hear where his family is from he is rejected. He starts to feel that he hasn’t connected to his heritage. Where do I belong where I can fully claim this is my heritage? What he finds is that there is no place. Maybe that’s my pessimistic view of belonging. But I’m also open to the idea that Trelawny is too obsessed with these things. Maybe he is hypersensitive. What I wanted to demonstrate is that it is not coming from nowhere. People are putting this on him. He’s not given full membership to any group.
DH: When I think back a little bit on some of the things that I’ve read about how millennials view the world because they’ve gone through so much, I wonder if that is tied to the way Trelawny views his circumstances?
JE: He’s definitely in that place where he thinks he should be furthering the success of the family. He’s on a trajectory to do worse than his parents despite the fact that they went through the hardship of immigration and getting used to a new society. I think that a lot of us feel that way. For a very long time, I felt that way. It seems like it’s just too late for us to really achieve much. Trelawny definitely holds some of those views. He holds more of those views than Delano, who for the first time is starting to wonder about possibilities and maybe the lack of possibility, whereas he was probably more optimistic about how life was going to go up until about 2008 or so.
DH: Some of that is tied to the fact that he was also the favorite son. Right?
JE: He feels firm in his footing and he has the support from his family where Trelawny never did.
There are very few things in the world that we at Electric Lit love more than bookstores, but one of those things is pets. We are absolutely obsessed with our furry friends. It only stands to reason that to our minds, there is no greater place in the world than a bookstore with a pet. Bookstore pets are one of life’s greatest gifts, and there is no better way to browse books than to do it while a dog weaves between your legs or a cat snores softly on a bookstack that you dare not rifle through, lest you disturb the sweet angel’s slumber. We put feelers out to our followers on social media to discover bookstores that feature special cameos by their literary critters. Below is a list of bookstores across the U.S.—many recommended by our readers!—where you can experience two of life’s greatest joys: browsing books and snuggling pets.
Wild Rumpus takes the notion of bookstore pets to a whole new level, by featuring what is basically a full-fledged petting zoo, with cats, fish, birds, rats (the intentional kind), and chinchillas. Primarily a children’s bookstore with a small selection of adult titles as well, the concept for the store comes from the book The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer, which removes the boundary between the inside and the outside, leading to the store’s aesthetic vision: starting as a relatively traditional bookstore in the front, and designed to look more and more like the outdoors as you move toward the back of the store, where you’ll find their many pets. Their website features absurdly cute bios of several of the animals, and they even have a YouTube channel where you can watch feeds of what the pets are up to when the humans aren’t around to keep them in check (while it appears they haven’t posted new videos in quite a while, the catalogue is well worth watching for your fill of cute bookstore animal antics).
Located in Park Slope, Community Bookstore is Brooklyn’s oldest bookstore and a fan favorite amongst locals. While the well-known and beloved cat, Tiny, sadly no longer resides at the store, fear not! There is still a little creature who spends its days in the store’s backyard: the less fluffy but just as adorable John Turturtle. Personally, I love an unconventional bookstore pet, and while I’m sad that Tiny no longer graces the stacks, I’m quite pleased to see this handsome turtle getting some love in the literary world.
Inside Parnassus Books, co-owned by Ann Patchett, there are not one, not two, but six dogs gracing the store with their presence. Each dog has its own job description, ranging from the essential Assistant Co-Owner (granted to Sparkman “Sparky” VanDevender) to the slightly more specialized but no less important “Connoisseur of Cardboard,” Barnabus Lynch. While not all six dogs are working the sales floor every day (the hardworking pups need days off too!), you’ll typically find at least two or three of these industrious, four-legged friends about the store. They also have their own online magazine, Musing, where you’ll find staff picks, author interviews, a blog written by Ann Patchett herself, and the extra special “Shop Dog Diaries,” where you can hear a little bit about the lives of the shop dogs (they’re shockingly good writers—who would’ve thought?). And as an added bonus for all you Ann Patchett fans, you can buy signed copies of all of Patchett’s books in store.
The Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood has long housed pets, and is currently home to two fluffy felines, Apollo and Zeus (aptly named for a bookstore called Iliad). A used bookstore with primarily literature and art titles, they have a wide selection of books to browse as well as couches where you can sit and read. If you’re lucky, you may just find yourself with a cat hanging out with you while you flip through your selections—according to the Iliad’s website, Apollo and Zeus are “very sociable,” which bodes well for getting some good cuddles in while you’re there.
At MacIntosh Books + Paper, you’ll find a large selection of books alongside stationary and cards, and, most importantly, the adorable Mr. Brady, a handsome, big-eyed tuxedo cat. If you find yourself on the island of Sanibel, you’ll want to stop by to pick up some books to read on the beach and to give Brady some pets while he lounges on one of his cat beds throughout the store or stretches out on a rug.
Cupboard Maker Books is a great place for people seeking not only a good book to bring home, but a feline friend of your own! Here you’ll find not only the three current cats-in-residence—Annika, Mouse, and Zak—but adoptable cats as well. As firm believers in supporting both indie bookstores and animal rescues, a hybrid between the two is basically a dream come true. Stop by to help used books and adorable cats find their forever home.
Bart’s is a charming part-indoor, part-outdoor bookstore with an aesthetic that is—to my eye and apparently the eyes of many bookstagrammers—pretty hard to beat. And, of course, the adorable Simone, a sweet gray cat who can be found roaming the space, only increases their Instagram aesthetic by a factor of a million (I don’t make the rules). With its vast number of outdoor shelves featuring a wide selection of books—from rare and antiques down to 35 cent specials that can be purchased on the honor system by dropping your payment into a coin slot on the door—and numerous spots to sit and read, Bart’s is the kind of place you could spend a day just hanging out at.
Twice Sold Tales in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle features no shortage of books or cats. With six cats—Lily, Buster, Hardy, Screamer, James and Eleanor—who take up residence in the store, Twice Sold Tales is to cat lovers what Parnassus is to dog lovers. With so many books and furry friends to choose from, you’re guaranteed to have ample opportunity for quality cat time while you browse the used and rare books. It’s the perfect spot for our variety-loving bookish friends.
Recycle Bookstore; San Jose, California
Ender!
Recycle Bookstore in San Jose is—true to their name—a used bookstore that is also a great spot for selling or trading your books. And, of course, it is also a great spot for hanging out with cats. Emma and Ender are two extremely fluffy bookstore helpers who want to buy your books (or at least, sit on them). And because they are truly dedicated to the bookstore cat lifestyle, their secondary location in Campbell, California, is home to their own cat, Max, as well. Stop by to buy, trade, sell, and pet!
At Georgia’s oldest bookstore, you’ll find three cats who are eager to help you shop: Dante, Poe, and Savannah (according to their Instagram, there is also “one store ghost” which I’m not sure counts as a pet, per se, but it is definitely the most interesting bookstore resident I’ve encountered in my research). This store has a very distinct style with books and antiques housed in pharmacy cases, and you’ll find used books in the basement “bookcellar.” Eclectic, unique, and delightful, Horton’s is a neat spot to check out for the aesthetics alone, made even more of a must-see by merit of its ample kitty selection.
Pillow-Cat Books not only has a bookstore cat (the eponymous Pillow Cat), but is also the only bookstore on this list that specifically sells only animal-themed books. It is an animal bookstore with a bookstore animal. Animal bookstore-ception, if you will. The adorable Pillow can be found helping out around the store, and inside you can browse books of all genres and ages: they may be new, used, or even antiques, but one thing is for certain: all of them will feature an animal of some kind. Stop by for all your animal needs—from cuddles with the real Pillow to literary adventures with the animals between the pages.
Split Rock Books; Cold Spring, NY
Georgie!
At Split Rock Books, a family-owned bookstore run by a husband and wife team, you’ll find a sweet little ginger cat named Georgie lounging around (and on) the store’s displays. For New Yorkers looking for an escape from the city, swinging by Cold Spring for some nature and a visit to this adorable indie is highly recommended. What could be better for a weekend refresh than some time out of the city, at a bookstore owned by former New York City booksellers, buying some books and hanging out with their sweet cat?
The tried and true sad-girls-in-New-York-City genre has been around for ages: Esther Greenwood descending into a haze of depression during her magazine internship in The Bell Jar, the titular star of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie risking it all for a new wardrobe and financial freedom, and of course, any one of Edith Wharton’s heroes and anti-heroes, scheming and manipulating their way through New York society. Since then, the trope has been evolving with the times and expanding to reflect the ever-changing nature of the city.
My graphic novel, A Career in Books, follows three sad girls in New York City, working their way up the ladder of the book publishing world. They listen to the Marie Antoinette soundtrack on the G train, they sob at Shake Shack, and make regrettable decisions in K-Town soju bars. In short: classic sad girl in NYC shit.
If you’ve done all of the above—or simply love doing so vicariously, here are 7 contemporary books about women who eschew meaningless platitudes or glitzy portrayals of the city. Instead, they choose to acknowledge and reckon with the very real struggles and stressors of living in a metropolis determined to devour their psyche. Whether they cope with this with the help of their friends, an unhealthy work-life balance, terrible romances and vices, or all of the above, these sad girls claim the city as their own, one subway cry at a time.
A rallying cry for the sad brown girls of the city, the book follows a group of girls from Queens as they navigate their immigrant families, their professional lives, and their diverging paths out of childhood. The multiple voices form a collective portrait of a generation of women who have complicated relationships with their mothers, money, careers, and hometowns. This is the sad girl gang I’ve always wanted.
The book’s protagonist, Isa Epley, embodies everything I wanted to be at 21: gorgeous, confident, and pleasure-seeking. But even she finds herself bogged down by sad girl feelings, and it’s only exacerbated by the tenuous relationship she has with both her best friend and her finances. Like any intensely close duo, they have their fair share of toxic dependence and blurry boundaries, but not even the most incisive therapist can convince them to give up the friendship. All of which, of course, makes for the best stories.
I have a vivid memory of reading this book in line at the Trader Joe’s on 14th street, so enthralled by the opening chapter that I completely forgot I was packed cheek by jowl with hordes of New Yorkers stocking up on kale gnocchi. A common denominator that makes sad girls sad in these books: money. And Min Jin Lee hammers this home in the best way possible, following Casey’s winding path after college, where her expensive tastes lead to soul-sucking finance jobs, beautiful hotels, and an increasing distance between her childhood in Queens.
Sad girls often escape to New York City in search of reprieve, and more often than not, the city only further complicates things. In Plum Bun, light-skinned Angela passes for white and tries to take on this identity in New York, away from her family and childhood. Spoiler alert: she eventually escapes to another city, making this book a part of one of my other favorite genres: Sad Girls in Paris.
Give me a sad girl who is also obsessed with her career and uses it to shield herself from personal dissection, and I’m all in, baby. Weike Wang is the chronicler of Sad Asian American Girls, and Joan—an ICU doctor wrestling with the death of her father, her tumultuous relationship with her mother, as well as racism and misogyny during the height of the pandemic—is a sterling example of this.
When Penelope returns to her home in Brooklyn, she finds her neighborhood completely unrecognizable due to gentrification and fresh family dynamics. She is forced to reckon with this onslaught of changing relationships: her mother, miles away now in a different country; her father, sick like she’s never seen him before; and her neighbors, now replaced with wealthy strangers.
Who says sad girls can’t also be funny? Or violent? Or thoughtful? Or shocking? The Chinese American characters that make up the stories in Jenny Zhang’s book are all of the above, painting a portrait of immigrant life in America that avoids anything we’ve seen before. Whether they’re in grade school or they’re grizzled mothers, the story’s characters bear witness to the tumultuous time that is girlhood, set in the confounding background of their adopted home country.
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