Being human—especially as defined and policed these days (clearly, only certain humans are granted full rights)—is rarely enough for those of us who find ourselves on the margins. As a queer writer, I often reach toward speaking with and alongside plants, animals, topographies, and atmospheres—my “queer kin,” as feminist philosopher Donna Haraway writes, and, for Rarámuri ecologist Enrique Salmón, my “extended ecological family.”
When I was writing In the Hands of the River, I wondered: what would it be like to love in the body of a flower—perhaps a violet, or a lady’s slipper? What would it be like to move not through or over, but with and among the ecological world? Granted: being able to write openly about queering one’s body is a privilege. For far too long and far too often, those of us outside the dominant (white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied) identity have been linked with “nature” to distance us from being fully “human.” We are unnatural, they say; we are primitive, bestial, animal. But I am inspired by feminist anthropologist Val Plumwood’s descriptions of her erotic (sensuous, and sensual) encounters with stones, and by former sex worker and current environmental activist Annie Sprinkle’s identity as “beyond bisexual,” meaning, “I literally make love with … waterfalls, winds, rivers, trees, plants, mud,” and more ecological relatives.
I am inspired by creative writers who model shimmeringly queer and interspecies ways of being with the world. Artist and sex educator Caffryn Kelley says, “Queer is a way of choosing a radical openness instead of a fixed identity.” The writers in this list model an openness to fluidity, to the slippery unknowability of relationships and relating (within and beyond the sexual) that feels essential for finding a respectful, inclusive way of moving with this world—and of moving this world’s humans toward more respect and more inclusion.
The first time I read Bunny, I wasn’t sure (for most of the novel) whether to laugh or scream. If you enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or if you are a writer who might have some workshop trauma, or if you’re just curious about how a group of women might call themselves Bunnies, transform actual rabbits into sexy Darlings, and bring knives to secret workshops, read this book. Not only are Awad’s metaphors sharp (when the Bunnies stare at our narrator and her friend, she sees “their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks”), but I guarantee you’ll never look at a rabbit the same way again.
Relevant when published in 2012 and still relevant now, Corral’s first poetry collection moves sinuously between English and Spanish without translation and without apology. He pushes language from a cage to a conduit as his speaker witnesses generations of border crossings and trauma. There are moments I cannot forget, like a lover slipping a live canary into his father’s coffin. And, at the same time, Corral captures such erotic gorgeousness. In an early poem, the speaker licks the honey smeared on the hind leg of a deer; toward the end of the collection, his “breath / tightens around him [a lover], / like a harness,” and after tight lines and constant enjambment, “When I ride him at night I call out / the name of his first horse.”
I slipped Shaffer’s play off a rural library’s shelf, and a few pages in, I was sure some authorities were going to find and punish me for holding this thrillingly homoerotic book. Equus follows a psychiarist’s effort to learn why a teenage boy blinded six horses with a metal spike. As the therapy sessions approach the night of the blinding, the edges between love, worship, and obsession disappear. The boy rides a wooden horse, then a living horse, to orgasm (doesn’t he?). He is led by a girl to a stable for sex, but he cannot stop thinking of his favorite horse. Whether reading or watching Equus, you can’t look away (and you don’t want to look away, do you?).
“How do you survive when they place a god inside your body?” Emezi’s debut novel asks, as we follow Ada, an Igbo and Tamil woman, who is also an ogbanje (or a child who must repeatedly die and be reborn). Filled with gods and multiple personalities who largely narrate the story as a collective “We,”Ada moves from a nightmare-wracked childhood to her self-abuse and trauma as a college student, to the devastating takeover of the spirit Asughara, and, ultimately, to Ada’s efforts, with other spirits, to release herself. It’s so refreshing to have a book that doesn’t explore mental illness through the same (white) tropes. Rather, here, even as an “I,” Ada is “a compound full of bones, translucent thousands.”
Across these twelve magical stories, Guo weaves a world where touch sparks erotic encounters across species. In the first story, “Bloom,” the narrator follows her aunt’s medicinal work at coaxing plants and mushrooms from men’s backs, “like a milky fur,” and works with her aunt to help these men transform completely into flora. Later, in “Acting Lessons,” the narrator hides in the skin of a leaf, then in the skin of a bird, as she searches for (and runs from) her father. In “The Sea Captain’s Ghost,” a sea captain becomes a mollusk, carried by a man who is his ghost. Guo’s dreamlike stories reinvent the body as a profusion, and the resulting we is wonderfully plural and queer.
Gut Botany follows one “gender-non-conforming nebula” of a speaker with a wheelchair as they use poetry to move with waterways and environments, reaching toward communion with the environment to resist heterosexism, patriarchy, and ableism. Sometimes, the speaker is an ancient fish with the “fear of being sheared out of the stream.” Sometimes, a person attempting to find “survivor language” when testifying in a hostile courtroom. Sometimes, a dragonfly who is “segmented multitudes.” Kuppers’s surreal and experimental poetry shows how all ecologies are sentient bloomings of contact. Language flows like water, shimmers like a series of moons overhead, and Gut Botany invites us: “Just speak, walk with me, close the loop.”
All life—all matter, really—is connected through water. Consider your body. It might seem contained, but we are mostly made of water and we are always opening to and releasing waters: laughter, tears, sweat, breath. Neimanis debunks Eurowestern myths of individualism, and she shows how we are instead porous “watery bodies.” We are not separate from the environment or other bodies, and recognizing this reorients us toward how we are in the world, and how some bodies control other bodies through waterways. If you’ve enjoyed feminist philosophy, phenomenology, or environmental theory—or if you’re just intrigued by the chapter called “Fishy Beginnings,” with the subsection “Wet Sex” (I was, and it didn’t disappoint!)—dive into this book.
Shipley’s debut poetry collection follows a speaker as he transitions to male, finding his body in sensuous encounters with plants and animals. In the first poem, he declares, “I am / the pig, and you / the hawk,” and amid “skin / pressing in the rubber,” fireworks erupt “like feathers / and blood.” One of the first larger-press poetry collections on transgender identity, Shipley invites all readers who want to become “hollowed out / and bodiless” to find themselves among fur, feathers, and blooms. He is a boy with and made of flowers, as in the title poem, which ends: “my lover is tracing fingertips / around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight / with stitches, each a naked stem, flaring with thorns.”
I first heard Tran’s poetry spoken aloud by them, but in voice or on the page, the thrilling energy of their lines and images leave me breathless. In this debut, Tran’s speaker flickers from dominance to submission to both at once, as when “As the Master opened me—groin hard // against my hips, hands in my guts—I opened him.” In defiance of colonialism, sexual violence, and homo- and trans-phobia, Tran reaches seamlessly across myth and contemporary culture, often surfacing in the erotic more-than-human. “I unleashed my tentacle. I unleashed all my tentacles at once.” Dynamic and powerful, Tran’s speaker declares: “Go round up / your little lambs. / Nothing is safe / from me,” for, “I want / all the flowers / kneeling.”
“Erotic” often means sex, but also means finding meaning through contact—and it’s in this second sense that Weber’s debut collection is erotic and essential. Their non-binary speaker is both “a woman like me / out here alone” but also a body in erotic connection with many bodies of many species. We follow this speaker “to the hour of deer licking between our thighs,” excited in the physical body, and yet in another instant, we are porous “light startled by these bones you’re coming into.” A perspective too often erased from literature, Weber’s non-binary speaker, if you let them (do!), pulls you to where “we are changed to deer at the broken place / following a path to water.”
Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel Lungfish follows Tuck, her husband Paul, and their toddler Agnes as they all squat on Tuck’s dead grandmother’s island in the Gulf of Maine after running out of money.
While Paul undergoes substance withdrawal in the rustic house, Tuck and Agnes survive on whatever the intertidal zone offers up that day—purple dulse, sugar kelp, jackknife clams. Throughout, Tuck struggles to comprehend how it all came to pass: the empty bank account, the disintegration of trust in her marriage, the threat of starvation or discovery. But rather than rage at Paul for sinking their family into uncertainty, Tuck makes treacherous crossings to the mainland with Agnes to scrounge for dollars, and attempt to locate her father. The man, who disappeared years ago, is beneficiary to the estate; if Tuck can’t reach him via the only contact information she has – an old email address – the island will be sold to pay the executor’s fees.
Lungfish is a masterful study of isolation, disguised as a mystery. Gilliss titrates the story to us in short, concentrated vignettes unmoored from time that culminate in an ending as heart-wrenching as it is elegant. The author spoke to me over Zoom about self-definition in parenthood, culturally imposed isolation, and how her book addresses substance use disorder.
Arturo Vidich: Tuck’s husband, Paul, is addicted to an opioid-like substance. Could you talk about how you arrived at addiction as the core issue driving the story?
Meghan Gilliss: The story was born out of the isolation of new parenthood, exacerbated and confused by the isolation of having a family member with substance use disorder. And then also feeling like there was a way to figure out how to move through that isolation using art as a tool rather than using conventional wisdom or advice, or reaching out to support groups. It felt possible to me that by keeping a fictionalized record of, not experiences, but states of mind, I could figure something out. I don’t know why I thought that, and I don’t think it was a good idea! It’s not something that I would recommend to anybody else, but there was value in it in the end for me, personally.
Also, doing the writing, sneaking this time to write, feeling desperate to work on something—there was this faith in art that I had, this ill-advised faith that through the act of writing, I could create a kind of buoyancy to life, build a life raft of sorts. In a lot of ways, it felt like the biggest act of faith, maybe the first act of real faith in my life, just thinking, I’m going to keep pouring my time into this even when it keeps me from doing other things that would actually be more useful, in the hopes that one day it will, in and of itself, become useful.
AV: Useful not just to yourself, but to others.
MG: That would be a nice perk. I hope so. I was going through a lot of really terrible stuff when this book was born, but I was like, this is interesting, this state of mind. Usually, my head is screwed right onto my shoulders. I wanted to share that with others who could relate to it, or understand it. Because until you either suffer from addiction or love someone with addiction, so much is easy not to think about. It felt important to write a narrative that explored that mindset.
AV: There’s a cognitive dissonance you’re describing—of knowing something is wrong, but ignoring or looking away from it, because knowing can completely destroy everything you hold dear.
MG: Thank you for putting it that way. The question of [Tuck’s] complicity was really interesting to me. She’s thrust into this position where we as readers, or as a culture, demand a certain action of her. Part of Tuck’s anger in this novel stems from the fact that her husband is a victim, and she is actually a monster. She sees herself as a monster and understands that she is seen as such. She feels like a monster. There’s so much judgment that we project on people all the time, particularly families who are struggling with substance use disorder and addiction, and sometimes our choices, and the way that we perceive ourselves as we make those choices, are so surprising and disorienting.
As Tuck moves through her own narrative, she does begin to find her power and her ability to see for herself, which takes her a while to reclaim, deciding what she’s going to see and believe. Other people’s addictions are always mysterious. They’re so messy, and they go so far back, and we only know about other people’s addictions what they want us to know about them, in the end. So, all we have to work with are external facts.
AV: I won’t name the substance Paul is addicted to, because it’s such a reveal, but why did you choose to skip over well-known or conventional drugs like heroin or oxycontin for this obscure opioid-like substance?
MG: It’s a really good question, and one that I was wrestling with throughout the writing. Unfortunately, if you say heroin addict, or whatever, I think people know what you’re talking about. In some ways, it did help protect the book against people assuming that they knew anything. This drug, about which so little is known, only compounded Tuck’s level of unknowingness and the slipperiness of what she’s able to learn. To me, it helped illuminate the individualized complexity of each person’s substance use disorder. Even though so many behaviors of addicts are similar, the circumstances for each addiction are so different, the solutions so different, and so elusive. The fact that her husband was addicted to something that not only she knew nothing about, but the internet knew nothing about, and the FDA knew virtually nothing about, exacerbated her need not to rely on information that was out there, but just trust her own experience of what was happening, and make decisions that were rooted in an understanding that there was never going to be an understanding.
AV: Would this story be possible in a country that has a social safety net in place?
I think we’re always up for slaughter as parents, for sure.
MG: There are a lot of layers of isolation in this story, but definitely one of those layers is culturally imposed isolation. And also the inherited idea I think a lot of Americans are born with, that even if we can’t take care of ourselves, we should be able to take care of ourselves. Tuck sort of invents a lot of reasons for why she’s not worthy of asking for help and I certainly don’t think that’s unique to this character in this book. In some cases, I think this country actually does provide help that’s not taken because we’re sort of taught to be stubborn about it, or taught to blame ourselves for our own failings or difficulties.
But then, in a lot of cases, help is so hard to access. If you’re somebody experiencing substance use disorder, we haven’t figured out how to support that. I don’t know what it’s like in your state, but there are virtually no public or hospital detox centers in Maine. If you want to have medical oversight while you’re putting your body through that, you not only need to be able to pay, but you need to be able to trust people in your most vulnerable moment—people who are making a profit off of you. For a lot of people, that’s a big barrier, whether it’s for financial or emotional reasons.
AV: The experience of your book was almost too real for me. At one point, Tuck concludes: “The belief that I’m good, it’s dawned on me, has been destructive.” Could you talk about what, for you, it means to be a good mother while in crisis mode?
MG: As a parent, maybe more as a mother—I don’t know, I’m sure all parents experience it—you get told you’re doing a lot of little things wrong, from the way you’re doing sleep training, or how much screen time you’re allowing, but beyond that, you move from being a person who isn’t necessarily viewed in moral terms, to being a person who—everything you do is judged. The decisions you make almost become public. They’re up for critique. In Tuck’s situation, I think, she landed herself in a situation that was not of her choosing, which is not to say that she didn’t play her own part in getting herself there. But I think her case is an exaggerated version of the situation a lot of parents find themselves in, when suddenly the decisions they’re making about parenting are viewed in moral terms. We think about Tuck avoiding facing the situation she’s in. If she was by herself, we wouldn’t care one bit. But because she has this child with her, we’re much freer to judge the choices she makes.
AV: She judges herself, as well. There’s a moment where she’s driving with a huge propane tank in the passenger seat, and Agnes is strapped into her carseat right behind it. Every parent has moments like that, where we judge our own decisions. You can suspend the judgment of others, or feel like you don’t benefit from other people’s judgments, but self-judgment can cut so deeply.
Judgment can be harsh, but judgment also can be useful.
MG: Yeah. And judgment isn’t always a bad thing either, right? A big part of this book is the way the feeling of being judged forces Tuck to see herself. She imagines she’s being watched by Sharon, a figure who comes in later, and for her, even when she’s not being seen, just imagining she’s being seen by this third party starts to make her more aware of the perils she’s in and the choices that she needs to make. So judgment can be harsh, but judgment also can be useful. But I think we’re always up for slaughter as parents, for sure.
AV: Tuck’s family seeks refuge from their problems on her grandmother’s island, a place Tuck visited as a child. What was it about that particular geography you found so compelling as a setting?
MG: In some ways, using an island as a setting is the oldest trick in the book. It’s such a trope. There I was, stubbornly writing this book, and rejecting a lot of what I had learned about ways to make writing easier for ourselves. There’s nothing really subtle about using an island as a metaphor. But for whatever reason, it just felt like yes, I’m going to put that isolation in stark view of everything and just let it be bald. But it’s also a setting that I have deep intimacy with, and that I’ve written about again and again in different ways. I also notice, as I get older, the ways in which the island setting is the ideal setting. What is it about myself that is drawn to this isolation and actually doesn’t want to be in that constant conversation with the outside world? It has become a bit alarming to realize that tendency in myself to just prefer to be separate.
AV: What’s next for you?
MG: I have a project, a collection of connected short stories that are set in my weird little neighborhood during the first year of COVID.
that isn’t a metaphor. i miss each flicker the way you skirt a train
just in time to pillage what’s left behind: crushed coins
tucked for luck, to flip or plink a tip. whether wishes squeezed
from zinc or blunders looped in home movies, my highs
are contagious as bee stings, so i catch what i can keep.
if Ganymede's story is one of divinity, i am Dionysus fresh
out of rehab—worshippers bent before me with robes reduced to rags,
my thyrsus strewn in some storm drain i can’t reach, honey
crystallized white as a bone wrapped in wilted ivy. Ganny is well-versed
in refusal with a wink, snickering while i fail to snatch
my lonely wand among the grate’s graveyard growing vines & rust.
is there a wrong way to pronounce mocktail? Ganny seems to relish sketching stories with scorn
each time i try to order. when there are no gods left
to serve, i will serve myself. once, i loved a woman whose crown
now floods the night sky, or so i’m told. i’ve been searching for her
ring of stars to light my way home since my chalice turned green
but i’m stuck still on barstools, kneeling in back alleys
where i tempt myself with even the dust motes that refuse to land.
i’ve granted hands that gave gold to everything
in reach, but what’s the use in any trove when a lover’s mercy
glitters but won’t glow? hell, even immortality
has its limits. born cutting my own teeth on curbs, i’ve never seen
heads actually roll, so i flip the severed crown
flattened in my pocket quick to kiss
my palm before it bounces through the rusted grate
where a glint simmers & i squint to glimpse
a dim spark. a scorched stone. a dying star.
with his producer holding him up, Charlie Parker records “Lover Man” drunk off a quart of whiskey & all the birds find their way home
wake up, beloved. beloved, wake up.
the car alarms are singing again, the white bell
-birds & thrushes tantamount to harmony.
it’s a song i’ve known well, creeping
through my lips like a jewel thief.
i don’t know what to do alone
with all this incredulity, small as a fist
balled in a baby’s mouth. beloved,
you have a brand new face again & i can only afford one
act of kindness toward strangers a day.
i wake at midnight when the vultures arrive to accept
the gristle that slips through God’s fingers. a fine day
for a day full of breakdowns. i will leave behind
earthly matters, slink into my crocodile suit
not of cotton-polyester blend but an actual crocodile
scales bouncing light like mirrors, bona fide diamond
-shaped snout terrifying children along west 4th street.
my zipper is in plain sight. why doesn’t anyone
pull it? it strikes me
i am never this alone when i’m alone.
in a swamp where stones skip
without the pitch of human hands
an Egyptian plover feasts on what’s leftover
in a crocodile’s teeth, a cleansing of past harm
more quid pro quo than mercy. beloved,
my heart is taking up too much space
in my ribs again. it’s the devil
that loves me, a love
as funny as real love. beloved,
the bakery truck is outside again, flour
blooming in the street like a flock, its grace
almost measurable. beloved,
the birds are back again, perched everywhere
within earshot, sopranos synced & sharpened
like frayed wires freshly twined. beloved,
i found my face, clean as the shower drain
in a monastery. i’ve shed enough scales
music like loose change fills our pockets
we can fool any parking meter. let’s tear down
good cheer from the halls
of our high schools, wear shapeless
sheets & haunt open houses, get stuck
on a winning streak, fly someplace
we deserve each other.
The old reading room in Irvington, New York was a glorious Gilded Age folly, filled with heavy wooden furniture cracked by decades of use, opalescent turtleback Tiffany lamps, a card catalog the size of a small car, and piles upon piles of dust. History, constrained safely in the pages of old and untouched books, went there to be forgotten—as did I, hiding there during my shifts as a library page, trying to eke out a vague eroticism from primers on Greco-Roman art, the only books I could find that listed “homosexuality” in the index.
It was nineteen-ninety-one or two or three, and I was trying to prove I existed. In the shadowy library stacks, I searched for myself, and those books were transmuted into mirrors by the dim slanting light of the early evening sun. I was Zeus, Elagabalus, Kalamos, and Karpos. I lived a hundred lives, one minute transforming into a bull, the next kissing a boy – equidistant fantasies, equally unreachable from where I stood. In those classical myths I saw myself, a modern homosexual, rendered fetchingly in period drag.
I can’t help but feel a rush of love for that fey child, groping towards something he’d only glimpsed in dreams.
I was wrong, of course. Those pages? They were no more mirrors than I was a god. They were windows, but I had not yet learned to see beyond the seductive ghost-self the glass offered me. In other words: I let what I was looking for obscure what I was seeing. And yet, in that moment, that mirage was my salvation.
In reality, I was at best a tenderqueer Narcissus, as of yet deaf to the polyphonic echoes of history. That I didn’t end up with a fetish for gleaming white marble or bone-dry paper is a small miracle. Instead, in a sort of limited way, I began to love history, or at least to see its potential to be something other than the rote memorization of names and dates and kings and wars. Every journey starts somewhere, and I can’t help but feel a rush of love for that fey child, groping towards something he’d only glimpsed in dreams.
I’d never met an out gay person; would not, in fact, meet any until college. Of course I knew queer people – cousins who lived with their “good friends” for years; my butch, unmarried Aunt Alice; and one (1!) closeted teacher in each K-12 school I attended: sporty Ms. G, the elementary school gym teacher; androgynous Ms. T, the middle-school science nerd; and buttoned-up Mr. D, the sweater vest wearing English teacher, whose commitment to a kind of Mr. Rogers-esque asexuality did nothing to end the rumors that dogged him in our high school.
In the world of flesh, gay people were few, sad, and hidden. In the world of paper, we were everywhere, and sometimes gods. Occasionally those two thoughts brushed against each other, and I’d feel a burst of static. It was the same feeling I had when the priest at CCD explained that homosexuals were intrinsically disordered; spiritually bent towards evil. I was lazy, I talked a lot, and I hated it when my peas touched my potatoes on the dinner plate – but evil? That seemed far-fetched.
I was told we were nowhere in the past; now, queer people were everywhere in the present.
I learned, over time, to listen for that static, to search for the places where what I’d been told and what I knew rubbed incompatibly against each other. Haltingly, with little understanding of what I was doing, I began to excavate those secret spots – poorly, like a crackpot archeologist, who finds the bones of a dinosaur and declares it a dragon.
Those white marble statues I lusted over? They never really existed, at least not the way I knew them. The Romans painted them garish colors in hideous combinations eroded by time. What was beautiful to them made no sense to me.
(There was a lesson there, but I wasn’t yet ready to learn it.)
Down the decades, that static between the world and me dissipated. My body followed my soul out the door of the church; Ellen and Laura Dern made out on primetime; and everyone (and my cousins) came out. Homo- and transphobia still existed, of course, but that sense of absolute dislocation from reality ebbed with every year.
But around the time I started research for my first book, a queer history of Brooklyn, the static – or something like it – quietly returned. It was different now; muted, defuse, multidirectional. Before, queer people were nowhere in the present, and soI was told we were nowhere in the past; now, queer people were everywhere in the present, and it seemed we had been everywhere as well – passively waiting to be discovered, exactly the same as we are today, with the same thoughts, desires, cares, identities, and worries, just dressed in petticoats and togas and shendyts.
I’d have believed that when I was 15; I’d also have told you that Rusted Root was the best band in America.
The harder I looked for those historical homos, however, the more I had to squint to see them. There was always some detail in the way, some aspect of their life that I had to ignore, or downplay, or “interpret” to make it align with our modern ideas of being gay or trans.
There were of course queer people in the past, filled with same-sex desire and cross-gender identification. But the further my research took me, the less those desires and identities added up to an overall picture I understood. The building blocks were the same, but the final construction was very different.
In particular, as my research crossed the divide from the 1900s to the 1800s, I began to see a different way to assemble all the pieces of queerness; what late Victorians called “The Invert.” In so doing, I began for the first time to truly understand history.
Allow me to digress here for a moment.
Victorians believed in – and built – a world sharply divided cleaved in twain by sex, both physically and metaphorically. Victorian lives were highly homosocial: aside from the immediate family, men were expected to spend all their time with other men, and women with other women. This physical separation was necessitated by, and paralleled, the inherent metaphysical differences between the sexes: Men were strong, rational, and sexual; women were weak, emotional, and chaste.
In this world, a man could publicly profess his love for another man, sleep in the same bed with a man for years, and have a man describe his thighs as being “as perfect as a human being could be,” and still get married and become the 16th President of the United States (Here’s looking at you Abe). Far from being condemned, love between men was celebrated. It was the Platonic ideal of Platonic ideals.
[NB: Plato fucked men.]
In this world, most people that we today consider gender normative homosexuals (or bisexuals) probably didn’t understand themselves as particularly different from people we consider gender normative heterosexuals. The bright dividing line of sexual orientation, which we today see as the first order question in all issues of desire or sex, did not yet exist. Heterosexuality did not yet exist – could not yet exist. There was no normative sexual identity that men and women could share, because they were so inherently different. Sexual orientation had not yet been gerrymandered out of gender; what a man did with another man was one piece in his larger ability to conform to Victorian gender expectations.
There was no normative sexual identity that men and women could share, because they were so inherently different.
Thus, all queer identity was understood as a disorder of gender – and of sex. Much as sexuality had not yet been cleaved from gender, gender had not yet been cleaved from the physical body. In fact, Victorians thought that all aspects of what we call personality directly correlated to your body, and vice versa. If your lips were thin, you were probably a liar. And if you violated gender norms, your body was surely improperly sexed as well.
Thus the Invert: improperly gendered and improperly bodied. A third sex.
This might sound ridiculous to modern ears. But think of all the aspects of your body that could be judged outside the norm for your sex, if that mattered: your weight, your height, your hairiness, the pitch of your voice, the shape of your jaw, the swing of your legs as you walked. Look hard enough, you’ll find what you’re told to see.
Certainly, my middle school peers were capable of diagnosing everything from my skinny fingers to my wrong-blue shoes as “girly,” and they didn’t have an entire field of pseudoscience backing them up. I used to think those kids were stupid, unable to understand the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality. Now, I see them carrying the heavy water of inherited legacy ideas, the stubborn conceptual entanglement passed down from our Victorian forebears.
Knowledge never dies, it simply evolves, internalizing vestigial structures like a human fetus absorbing its embryonic tail. Thus, to know why we are who we are today, we have to better understand who we were yesterday. The more I understood the invert, the better I could understand the homosexual; the more I understood 1898, the better I could understand 1998; the more I understood them, the better I could understand me.
I was living in a world where even a whiff of sexual desire between men would see you branded as a faggot for life.
Who would I have been a hundred years ago? It’s impossible to say for certain, but in the Victorian world, a feminine gay man, a butch lesbian, a trans man, and a trans woman – opposite corners of our modern identities – could all have been considered (and considered themselves as) inverts. Their desires for certain kinds of sex with certain kinds of people would have been noted, but they wouldn’t have added up to different identities.
On the other hand, a man who had sex with men, but was otherwise properly gendered, wouldn’t necessarily have been removed from the realm of normal manhood. For instance, in 1896, when a famous boxer named Young Griffo was arrested for raping a 12-year-old boy in his training gym on Coney Island, the judge in his case pronounced upon sentencing that Griffo was simply “careless and full of animal life…without sufficient self-control to restrain [himself].” Griffo wasn’t aberrant – he was exuberant. Men were expected to be hypersexual, and if a properly gendered man, away from the cooling touch of asexual womanhood, went overboard, committed rape or homosexuality or almost anything else, that was an unfortunate side effect of their peak manhood. As is largely still true today, rich cis white guys could do whatever they wanted.
Reading about Griffo smashed the mirror I thought I had found in the past. One hundred years after his arrest, I was living in a world where even a whiff of sexual desire between men would see you branded as a faggot for life. There was something that united us, a commonality that sutured through time to bind Griffo and I together – that was undeniable. But it didn’t make us the same, and it suggested that our worlds were more different than I had ever understood. What changed in the years that separated us?
Well, everything. But the prime mover was urbanization. In 1800, only 6% of Americans lived in urban places, by 1900 it was 40%, and today it’s over 80%. Urbanity took a wrecking ball to the American way of life, then reassembled the pieces into something entirely new.
By the late 1800s, and increasingly in the early 1900s, sexual scientists were aware of these divisions among deviants.
In these new American cities, the separations between men and women broke down, from casual contact on ferries and trolleys, to the exciting new world of “dating” for teenagers and young adults. In cities, marriage became less important to economic and social survival. In cities, you could leave your family or religion or name or gender behind. In cities, you could encounter new ways of being and moral codes, and even if they didn’t change your own, they suddenly put it in a new light – as one possibility among many. In cities, the people we call “gay” began to see each other, and in seeing each other, recognized themselves as a people for the first time in American history.
This surely happened many times in many places before it was codified into words like “homosexual.” In the 1850s in Brooklyn, for instance, Walt Whitman chronicled a world of working-class, mostly white men who had sex with men, and in his poetry, he defined their existence – naming them “comrades” or “comerados,” calling their love “adhesiveness,” and urging them to exchange as their singular token of affection the calamus flower, a common river reed shaped like a big dick (and named after Kalamos, the tragic queer Greek youth with whom I too had identified).
By the late 1800s, and increasingly in the early 1900s, sexual scientists were aware of these divisions among deviants, and tried their own hands at defining what a queer person was or could be. They were keen to winkle out “where” queerness was located – in the body or the mind. Thanks to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality development (that our experiences make us who we are, not the shape of our lips) the belief that our identities map perfectly onto our bodies was rapidly falling out of favor.
When Freud moved sexuality into the mind, and separated it from both sex and gender, there were two critical implications for our developing new ideas about queerness:
If queerness was in the mind, not the body, then improperly sexed bodies had to be classified as a unique phenomenon; as did people whose bodies were not “improper,” but who wished they were; and people whose queerness had nothing to do with the shape of their body – our modern queer trifecta of intersex, transgender, and homo/bisexual identities. As well,
if queerness was in the mind, not the body, then normality was rendered invisible. Everyone could see who an invert was, but a homosexual? They could be anyone. Thus it became incumbent upon heterosexuals to constantly prove their heterosexuality, further driving a wedge between queer and straight culture – and pathologizing all homosocial love as an indicator of, or a step towards, homosexual love.
Decade by decade, I watched America build the conceptual cage I had grown up in. They banned gays in the military (when “consensual sodomy” was added as a punishable offense to the Articles of War in 1920), in movies (with the Hays Code in 1930), and in New York bars (with the creation of the New York State Liquor Authority in 1934). Once homosexuality had been driven completely out of the public sphere, it was easy to declare it a “sociopathic personality disturbance” (the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1952) and “criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” (President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, 1953).
I cannot see the future, but by clearly seeing the past, I know in my soul that the future can be different.
By the time I was born, we’d so effectively defined and demonized homosexuality, we’d forgotten the world had ever been different, or that it could ever be different. That forgetting was a necessary part of the new regime, because ideas of normality always rest on ideas of naturality, and if we can see the human hands constructing an idea, how natural can it be?
This is why I write queer history: Because I cannot see the future, but by clearly seeing the past, I know in my soul that the future can be different – will be different, cannot help but be different. There is no historical constant except change. I study history to glean our rate of acceleration and angle of impact, to see what where-we-have-been implies about where-we-are-going.
And we need that knowledge today. Something is breaking apart; perhaps America, but certainly something more fundamental than our enfant terrible empire: what it means to be queer. The mutants are mutating again.
You’ve noticed it, I’m sure: new labels you don’t understand – or understand so instinctively it takes your breath away. Unexpected enemies and strange allies; new, almost unimaginable allegiances (ex. Harry Potter & the Death Eaters). The perpetual questioning of the self suddenly yielding new answers. A vibe shift, as they say, as totalizing as it is inexplicable.
But not unprecedented.
What cities did at the end of the 19th century, the internet is doing now: allowing commonalities to develop into identities. In particular, it’s connecting those left out of our 20th century sexual schema – those whose desires aren’t coterminous with their sexual orientations, or whose genders aren’t binary, or who aren’t stable sexual subjects, happily spending their entire lives in one category at all. Not surprisingly, it is the least understood and accepted letters in the LGBT spectrum – B and T – where we’re seeing the most growth and exploration.
Much as “homosexuality” and “being trans” came from, and partially overlapped with, the concept of “being an invert,” these new categories rest uneasily inside and next to our current ideas. For instance, in our 20th century schema, bisexuality is often imagined as a sexual orientation that is attracted to “both” sexes. The 21st century idea of the “sapiosexual,” however, moves desire away from the physical body, to assert an identity based around attraction to the mind. This could function like classic 20th century bisexuality, but it doesn’t have to. “Sapiosexual” allows us to imagine a person whose sexual orientation is homosexual – they are attracted to physical bodies like their own – and also attracted to people of any sex/gender based on a different set of criteria.
And what we can imagine, we can be.
If I had to hazard a guess about where “queer” is going, it would be this: a movement away from “identity” understood as a stable, life-long category, which is the same (or largely similar) experience for everyone inside it; and toward an understanding of “L,” “G,” “B,” and “T” as clusters of common pathways, which may express sexuality or gender in ways that appear similar from the outside, but are functionally different experiences from the inside. Imagine a group of roads paralleling through the same landscape for a while, but coming from different starting points or headed toward different ends – a superhighway of sexual beings, some shifting lanes throughout their lives, others traveling one path forever.
We’ll find that the barrier between ‘homosocial’ and ‘homosexual’ is thinner than we’ve imagined.
Sexual orientation won’t disappear as a concept, but it will have to share the market – it’ll be a piece, rather than the piece, that determines the desires we feel and the sex we have. We’ll find that the barrier between “homosocial” and “homosexual” is thinner than we’ve imagined, for some of us at least.
More defined existence will be carved on the current borders between “feminine gay man” and “trans woman,” and “masculine lesbian” and “trans man” (perhaps in the way that ballroom culture already emphasizes the unity of these identities, rather than their disparities; perhaps through a delineation of non-binary identities; perhaps in some other way entirely). Physical sex will become more a la carte (“will you be having a penis with those breasts, ma’am?”) and more genders will be named based off these physical arrangements – producing, of course, more sexual orientations.
What do I predict? We’ll fractal ever forward, and hardly ever notice the change. Fifty years from now we’ll be something new, and the children will look back on the early 21st century and reduce our lives down to echoes – seductive, partial, inaccurate, nourishing, and perhaps prophetic reflections of who they have become.
I hope to be there for it: a dinosaur; a living-fucking-fossil; proof of what was and what isn’t anymore. I hope to be incomprehensible to Gen H, or whatever we’re up to by that point. I hope our world is so far in their rearview mirror that I have to explain our basic concepts to them, like homophobia and rearview mirrors.
But even if I’m not, by writing our history down, I hope to be their window into a past that lets them see their present more clearly.
If you follow any writers or readers on social media, you’re probably familiar with the artwork of Christine Rhee. Earlier this year, I started seeing reposted images of Penguin Classics with quippy, tongue-in-cheek celebrity photos. A Property Brother on the cover of Dickens’ Bleak House. Julia Fox smiling maniacally on the cover of Bulgokov’s The Master and Margarita. A still of Dakota Johnson correcting Ellen Degeneres on The Ellen Show as the cover of Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans.
Smart, hilarious, and all thanks to Brooklyn-based graphic designer Christine Rhee. For the last year, she has been working on a few different book cover design series, the most recent of which combines the aforementioned orange and black Penguin Classics jacket with celebrity photos.
I corresponded with Rhee about her book cover artwork via email. We discussed how she found her initial inspiration by loaning books to her friends, how she chooses the classic and contemporary literature she works with, and how our collective perception of books shapes her pieces. Rhee was also generous enough to share her favorite book cover designs from the series.
Ceille Clark-Keane: On your Instagram, it seems like the first fake cover is a recognizably contemporary fake cookbook with your (adorable) cat on the cover—but it also seems you were approaching covers playfully in earlier posts before posting the first fake NYRB covers of celebrity memoirs. What inspired you to start creating the fake book covers, and where did you start?
Christine Rhee: I don’t remember the first one, but I generally made them for friends when I loaned them a book. The first fake book covers were actual printed covers. I’m a designer, so I found that it was really helpful for me to make little design projects for myself that were fun and quick to knock out. It helps me a lot when I’m feeling stuck or blocked.
CCK: Does your design process differ when you’re creating a physical piece of art for a friend, as in these cases, versus when you’re creating an image for a social platform (and therefore primarily for digital consumption)?
I’m always interested in value aesthetics, what aesthetically makes us think that something is valuable or high brow versus what signals to us that it’s not.
CR: Not very much. The only thing that really changes is who the audience is and thinking about it as an image versus an object. I don’t do a lot in terms of setting it up as an image, it’s still very object driven. I want it to feel real, like I had just left the book on a table.
CCK: Could you describe your process for creating these covers? Do you have a complete vision for the series, like the Fake Books for Men and the Taschen art books, or do you start with a specific book? You’re clearly a reader as well as an artist, and I’d love to know how that informs this project.
CR: Generally, I think of it as a series first. When I start a series, I try to have some sort of thesis that I’m working through. I’m always interested in value aesthetics, what aesthetically makes us think that something is valuable or high brow versus what signals to us that it’s not. I like to pair two things from opposite sides of that spectrum and see what comes from it. The current series is obviously classic literature coupled with tabloid celebrity culture. The first books that I think of are ones that I think make good case studies. Sometimes, they’re books that I’ve read, sometimes it’s about how I think we collectively perceive a book, and sometimes it’s just a play on the title. I do like using popular books because they usually make great case studies. There’s more of a relationship there. The more obscure the books and the images get, the harder it is to see the thesis of the series.
CCK: The way the impact of the pieces hinges, at least in part, on collective perception of the book explains why the series feels at once accessible and like a reference in a TV show—it feels like you’re a part of an in-group who “gets it.”
CR: Thank you! The way I see design is that it is a visual language. We’ve all been trained to understand it, whether consciously or unconsciously. I am making the things I post sound very serious but I also really enjoy jokes and play. There’s no right way to engage or understand any of the things that I’m making.
I think of book covers as a movie trailer or a billboard. It’s to get your attention and get you to engage.
CCK: I wonder, do you notice trends in popular book covers, in certain kinds of classics, or in books by men versus women?
CR: Definitely. Sometimes it’s frustrating to me, and sometimes I think it’s my own biases. This is a bigger question than I think I can answer right now. A trend that I like right now, that I am seeing, is covers that are striking and/or beautiful in a way that feels new. It’s just an object that I want to acquire. I could stare at the cover of The Copenhagen Trilogy book for hours. The cover is by Na Kim. I’m obsessed with the collaging of the eyes. It’s so deceptively simple but so much is going on in that image. It’s brilliant.
CCK: How do you think the design and the packaging shape our collective perception of the works (if at all)?
CR: I should note that I’m a designer, but not really a book cover designer. I’ve never really designed a book cover that wasn’t for myself or a friend. I can tell you what I think, but it’s definitely an outsider’s/consumer’s opinion. I think of book covers as a movie trailer or a billboard. It’s to get your attention and get you to engage. It seems to be on a sliding scale on how much it relates to the book inside. This is not to criticize any designers—when the cover doesn’t relate, it seems very much on purpose, going after a specific customer. It does feel a little cynical though. The cover is part of marketing and trying to maximize sales, which doesn’t always speak to the experience of reading what was written. I would like to believe that the initial impression doesn’t sway my reading experience, but I’m not sure if that’s true for me. I think maybe other readers are able to ignore it.
CCK: What’s one thing you hope that viewers take away from your series?
CR: It shifts with time. In the beginning of a series, I hope viewers understand what I’m trying to do. Overall though, if you’re entertained or if you enjoy it, I’m happy. I can (and sometimes I do, unfortunately for my friends) speak endlessly on what I am trying to do, but once it’s out there, it’s not for me anymore.
Rhee’s designs are certainly out there—she has more than 5,000 followers on Instagram. But whether the pieces are ultimately for Rhee herself, or for her many fans, I was still curious about the designs she likes best. During our email exchanges, Rhee was generous enough to point to the cover designs in her series that she gravitated toward or enjoyed working on the most.
Here are a few of Rhee’s favorite pieces (plus a couple of my own that I couldn’t resist including):
Rhee points to this Murdoch cover featuring Ben Affleck, gazing at the ocean looking exhausted. (This checks out—odd to have no iced coffee in an Affleck tabloid photo.) “To me,” Rhee shared, “it’s the best example of what I had intended on doing. The later ones get a lot looser but that sort of always happens.”
In her Fake NYRB series, Rhee reimagines some amazing celebrity memoirs republished under the prestigious imprint, complete with the recognizable design. “Fake NYRBs was really fun for me,” Rhee said. “I did it during COVID lockdown and I got to e-meet and reconnect with a lot of people that I admire. NYRB was really good-natured about it.”
This is my personal favorite, and I had to sneak it in. The tabloid photo Rhee chose is Fiona Apple delivering an off-the-cuff acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, in which she told viewers that the world of fame is bullshit and not worth looking up to. Iconic, and an amazing choice for A Short History of the World.
Rooney’s novel reimagined for men. I love how the color scheme isn’t completely different from the US cover of Rooney’s novel—yellows, browns, blacks. Rhee points to this cover as her favorite in the series. “For Fake Books for Men, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends ended up being surprisingly silly. I’m always happy when that happens.”
A design series that engages so brilliantly with tabloid culture wouldn’t be complete without a Kardashian reference, and this one is amazing. The stark white background and black-and-white wardrobe in the photo Rhee chose makes sure the “little” women are front and center. I’ll leave you to consider who would be Jo.
If you’re interested in seeing all of the Fake Penguin Tabloid Classics designs, the Fake Books for Men series, and more, you can find and follow Christine Ree on Instagram @monobrow_ny.
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.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
