This year, Scotland is host to a year-long celebration called A Year of Stories 2022. A celebration of the great storytellers of Caledonia that have set the world ablaze, we will, of course, be harking back to classics like Robert Burns, Muriel Spark, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as the more recent likes of Irvine Welsh and JK Rowling—both of whom have made their salient mark, nationally and internationally. But who’s next in line? Who are some of the cult crusaders of the future—the young lexical butter churners people should know about and be ready to cherish? Funny you should ask, because I’m zesty and chomping at the bit to tell ye!
Me, I’m Michael Pedersen, a Scottish poet who’s toured my books/words the globe over. I just unfurled my first book of prose, Boy Friends, which launched in the UK in July 2022 and arrives in North America in September 2022. Boy Friends is a love letter to friendship, a paean to friends everywhere: those here, there, and elsewhere. Though grief is squat in the belly of this book, on account of the untimely departure of a dearest human, it’s a tome of gooey celebration—for the friends we love to excess, yet still not nearly enough.
And to my Sound of Scotland curatorial credentials? Well, I’ve been programming and curating events in Scotland for the past ten-plus years—for Neu! Reekie! (the prize-winning literary collective I co-founded in 2011), and alongside the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Burns & Beyond Festival, the Scottish Poetry Library, and many more lustrous arts bodies. So, I present below a few words on The Sound of Scotland—as seen from my harbour. These are the writers and word sculptors making vital magics over this side of the pond. Each in the list is coming for North America, if they’ve not already landed. My advice is get ahead of the curve and begin your feasting now. Slàinte!
Roseanne Watt
Watt is a poet hailing from the Shetland Islands who utilises Shetlandic language to craft poetry that vibrates through the bones and thrums in the skin. Her debut collection Moder Dy (Mother Wave), published by Scotland’s own Polygon Books, won her the Edwin Morgan Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her smouldering, susurrus tones ensure these poems crackle into the ears like the best sounding bonfires.
Darren McGarvey
A working-class writer, social commentator, and hip-hop artist who happens to be one of the most adroit public speakers this country has to offer. He’s gone on to produce two bestselling books—Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between Us—and fashioned a mordant live show out of each tome. Between them, the two have been translated into multiple languages, birthed an associated BBC TV series, and earned Darren the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. You can catch him waxing masterfully on the “The Blindboy Podcast” or Russell Brand’s “Under The Skin.”
Hollie McNish
Though born in England, Hollie McNish is Scottish enough for me. She’s regularly on Scottish cultural showcases and is a ubiquitous presence on our live literature scene—trust me, her Glaswegian parents wouldn’t have it any other way. Hollie’s words have been shared many many millions of times across social media and YouTube, she won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and has a Sunday Times bestseller under her belt straps. She’s known to be taboo-busting, sweetly sentimental, trenchantly political, and a favourite amongst mums and parents, for whom she writes splendiferously. To say the world needs Hollie McNish (which The Scotsman, our national newspaper, did) is bang on the bell. The book to check out first is: Slug & Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate.
Janette Ayachi
This Scottish/Algerian poet is one of the most vivifying and vivacious writers on the Scottish scene. A favourite of the Scottish Poetry Library, her most recent collection Hand Over Mouth Music, published by Liverpool’s Pavilion Press, won the Saltire Prize for Best Collection (our Scottish Book Awards). She’s as stylish in person as her words are stirring on the page, and is already working on her first memoir, which is going to be a sumptuous read.
Jenni Fagan
Foremost known as a novelist, Jenni’s debut The Panopticon became a true sensation, adapted for stage by the National Theatre of Scotland and soon to be produced for the big screen. Her most recent novel, Luckenbooth, is a contemporary masterpiece and continues to enthral readers the world over. Not only that, she’s a superb poet, has a history of singing in punk bands, just announced a memoir, and is currently adapting Irvine Welsh’s The Blade Artist for TV at his canny request. Her work gives glorious voice to ancient Edinburgh tenements, to the Devil’s daughter, to the care-home kids, to witches, to all us pariahs and cowgirls.
Malachy Tallack
Another of Scotland’s ace Shetland writers, Malachy has just unfurled a new fishing memoir entitled Illuminated By Water. Available in both the UK and North America, this deeply ruminative, ponderous, love letter to fishing, is edifying enough for the aficionados whilst being gorgeously welcoming to those more entranced by the mystic, meditative elements of the sport. A flag waved also to his around-the-world travelogue-esque memoir, Sixty Degrees North.
Hannah Lavery
Hannah’s currently Edinburgh’s Makar, the poet of the capital city. She also curates an incredible literary festival called Coastwords out in the stunning seaside town of Dunbar—go there if you can, Hannah will keep you right. Alongside her snazzy poetic cred, Hannah’s making an esteemed name for herself as a playwright. Her autobiographical play, The Drift, toured with National Theatre of Scotland, and her second play, Lament for Sheku Bayoh (a pertinent exploration of the tragic story of a Black man who died in police custody) was an NTS, Royal Lyceum Theatre, and Edinburgh International Festival collaborative production. Hannah has been crucial in carving out spaces and stages for writers of colour in Scotland, and her own debut collection (Blood, Salt, Spring) is a triumph.
William Letford
William/Billy came bounding into the literary scene with the moniker “the roofer poet,” on account of the labouring work he undertook on Scotland’s rooftops. This trade gave him a unique vantage on the scurrying occupants and scavengers of the streets below—a bird’s-eye view and poems bursting with brio. Published by the august Carcanet poetry press, Billy soon won a New Writers Award and an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary. His collections Dirtand Bevel are pullulating with musicality, mischief, sword-sharp wit, and gloopy beauty. If the, somewhat hackneyed, “poet of the people” banner was to be revitalised for anyone, Billy would be front-runner to own it.
Young Father performing in Portland, Maine
Young Fathers
Yes, okay, they’re not book writers and that’s bucking the trend of what came before. But it’s a sound you need to hear: Scotland reimagined; the soundtrack of Trainspotting 2; the beat of the street of Edinburgh. Besides, we’ve published one of their frontmen, Kayus Bankole, in our poetry anthology series (Neu! Reekie! #UntitledOne), and they unfurl a concert within the pages of my book. The band has won the Mercury Music Prize and the Scottish Album of the Year (twice), on top of collaborations with Massive Attack. The sermons this band uncage upon crowds are stupendous, and, for a few attuned humans, life-altering. To listen to YF is to be engulfed within a cosmic storm. Pop, hip-hop, krautrock, avant-garde wailing, gospel—they come coruscating into each genre and bursting out the other end.
How do I start this story about friendship and relationships and the power of a good book? If I were any younger, I don’t think I would be able to write this story at all.
It’s about carrying grief for the past quarter-century.
It’s about how, with my second novel Circa (that I dedicated to Susan) having been recently published, it is time to release all the contradictions and remember with love.
There remain three delineations of time in the years I moved as a reporter to graduate student and back to reporter, from Georgia to Florida to Illinois to Hawaii to New York and back to Georgia, in the late 80s and 90s: Before Susan was sick, during Susan’s illness, after Susan died. Then there’s the fourth category: the intervening years.
Before Susan was sick. These are tidbits that I can rattle off, tell strangers without my throat closing up or my eyes burning with unshed tears.
She was in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with my future husband and me. She was pursuing her PhD in social work, ABD (all but dissertation). She was his friend first (but she liked me more ☺).
She was a lapsed Catholic, a big believer in Indigenous rights and native medicine, cared for the homeless and the hungry. In 1991, she and my spouse co-founded the Bouchet Outreach and Achievement in Science and Technology program for at-risk minority kids in Champaign, introducing them to and instilling a love of STEM and science. BOAST as it’s called is named after Edward Bouchet, the first African-American to earn a PhD from an American university. He earned his degree from Yale in physics in 1876. Susan and I spent hours converging on the acronym and the logo. She and my spouse spent hours securing NSF funding to sustain the project long after we were to have all graduated.
She was a lapsed Catholic, a big believer in Indigenous rights and native medicine, cared for the homeless and the hungry.
She loved the Indian food I cooked and mint chocolate chip ice cream and a towering vegetable sandwich called The Dagwood from the newspaper-themed café near my apartment. She loved the arcade across the street from the university, loved the outdoors and frequented farmers markets with me on the weekends, bought gladioli from the vendors and homemade pies and breads from the Amish who’d journeyed from afar to sell their goods.
She loved walking for charity and in the early 90s I had a collection of t-shirts from all the 5K and 10K cancer research fundraising walks I completed alongside her.
She and I hung out almost every day for two and a half years. Then my husband and I graduated and moved away. For the next two years, we talked frequently on the phone. Every time that I spoke to her from O’ahu I begged her to come visit.
“I will one day,” she said. “I promise.”
During Susan’s illness. This is a loop, continuous, unchanging, exhausting, a movie that I cannot help but watch, a movie that I want to stop watching.
In the fall of 1994, I had just moved to New York City and started graduate school for the second time, at Columbia’s School of the Arts. I lived by myself the first year, in graduate housing, in a studio that was 10 x 16 including the bathroom and the kitchen. There were bars on the windows and the only time when direct sunlight filtered through—around ten in the morning.
One day, she called to tell me she had found a new walking partner and they had been walking for the past month, in the mornings. She added that the whole time she’d been walking with him she had inexplicable pain in her knee and an upset stomach impervious to over-the-counter medicine and kitchen wisdom.
I sighed. “Will you please go to the doctor?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I promised my new walking buddy, too.”
The whole time she’d been walking with him she had inexplicable pain in her knee and an upset stomach.
The next time she called, her voice was loud, angry. At first I couldn’t understand what she was saying through her prolonged wails. Then I learned that my 34-year-old friend had leukemia. Acute lymphocytic leukemia. The kind kids beat but adults usually don’t. “I don’t want to die,” she yelled into the phone.
“So don’t,” I said. “Go be the one person who beats this thing.”
There was a valiant effort in the pre-cellphone, pre-email days, getting the word out that Susan needed a bone marrow transplant and needed a donor. Turned out her older brother was a perfect match.
So she had her first bone marrow transplant and she recovered and all was well. Her hair grew back brunette (the shade of her brother’s hair) instead of her lifelong blonde, and she quipped, “Does this mean I’m going to become a Republican, too?” Although she lost her job working for a major-brand charitable organization (because they didn’t want to carry her on their insurance), she had secured a job as an oncology social worker at the local hospital in Champaign-Urbana. The doctors told her that it was possible she could live another five years, more if she took good care of herself and lived a life free of stress. Susan worked even on the days she felt ill (because her health insurance was tied to her job), her boyfriend broke up with her, she had to give away her cat, her medical bills mounted. A group of us, all of Susan’s closest friends, helped out as we could, throwing chili-supper fundraisers and taking over some bills – my husband and I lived far away from her so we decided to take over her phone bill. So she could call whomever she liked and talk for as long as she liked. This went on for a while. A year to be exact.
The second time she contracted leukemia, she called me. Her voice was calm. By this time my husband had moved to Georgia and I was finishing my final year in the MFA program in New York. The doctor shared with her that the leukemia had returned. He had used the word aggressive. Susan’s attitude had changed: “I will go through it again, the pain, the blisters and sores, the hair loss, the nausea. I want to live. But if I don’t make it, I’ll be giggling at you from heaven.”
The doctors told her that it was possible she could live another five years, more if she took good care of herself.
My husband and I took every available opportunity to visit her in Illinois in those years. We took Fridays off, we drove through the night, we redeemed airline points – anything to spend the weekends with Susan, go out to lunch, catch a movie, play pinball at the arcade. One visit, while I was still in New York, I flew and met my husband in Chicago and we drove in a rented car down to the university. We had a fun time, punctuated by naps and takeout, and just before we left, I pointed out the book-bag full of treats and books to read. She was an avid reader. Among her most prized possessions was a letter from Alex Kotlowitz; she had written him after reading his non-fiction book, There Are No Children Here,and he had written back. That trip, I bought her a copy of my favorite book at the time, one I couldn’t forget: The Secret History. I had recommended and gifted that book numerous times. I had re-read that book frequently and each time I still loved it, immersed in the world of the suspenseful story of those college kids. I left it amongst a stack of other books, novels, memoirs, and a book of poetry by my teacher Lucille Clifton.
“You should start this book at the beginning of the day,” I told her, holding up the Tartt novel. “That way you won’t stay up too late. I know you need to get your sleep.”
I remember her nodding, a disbelieving smile on her face.
“I’m serious,” I said, “but if you do get started at the end of the day and you stay up really late, you can call me. It doesn’t matter what the time it is, I’ll answer.” It was Sunday afternoon, and I left.
Sure enough, thirty-two hours later, at precisely 2:37 a.m., the landline rang in my apartment, this one four times the size of the previous place with a picture window overlooking Broadway and West 112th. She didn’t say hello, she merely asked, “Are you asleep?”
I had re-read that book frequently and each time I still loved it, immersed in the world of the suspenseful story of those college kids.
I answered truthfully. “No, I’m up trying to write a story that’s due in the morning and not quite done.”
Susan said, “I’m on page 190! I have to go to bed but I can’t put this book down! It’s so good.” She took a breath. “You were right! I should’ve started it earlier. I’m really mad at you right now because I can’t go to sleep because I have to turn the page and see what happens next!”
Two days later when she was all done, we spoke at length about how we loved the book, how well it was written and how immersed we were in the world of Henry and the twins, our protagonist and the others who made up the close-knit group of classics students. Susan and I agreed that the book reminded us of…well, us. How when we were all students together, we lived in our own universe, unencumbered by the outside world.
“Except for…you know, the murder,” she quipped.
After Susan died. This part is muddy and continues to smother my heart. I have to start while she’s still alive.
I was about to turn thirty a week before Halloween, coincidentally both Susan’s and my favorite holiday. She was going to have her second bone marrow transplant in as many years and the last time I called her was just before the operation. She was intubated. Her oldest sister answered the phone in the hospital room. “She’s written you a letter,” she said. “I’m putting it in the mail today.” Susan’s immediate family had requested that no friends come to Minnesota where she was going to have the transplant – that the sight of Susan post-operation often caused the visitors to break down. So my husband and I made no plans to visit.
The sister put the phone to Susan’s ear and I told her that I loved her, that I’d see her soon. I don’t remember exactly how she responded except that I know she made a noise that I took to mean as acknowledgement, reciprocation.
She was going to have her second bone marrow transplant in as many years and the last time I called her was just before the operation.
Three days after my birthday, my husband and I were in California visiting family when the news came in, that Susan had died post operation. There were funeral plans and memorial plans all in the works and we received many calls asking us if we would come to Illinois one last time.
Her memorial was October 31, 1996. The Unitarian church was packed with people from all the facets of Susan’s life – home, school, various works; she was beloved by so many. For example, sitting next to the town’s mayor was a homeless woman Susan had befriended years before and whom Susan stayed in touch with until she left for Minnesota the last time.
My husband sat next to me and wept. Many cried but I was not among them. I kept staring at her photograph, enlarged and framed, resting on a table near the podium where the female minister spoke. In the beginning, my husband and I were asked to say a few words. But the offer was rescinded once the organizers realized we could not arrive early to rehearse.
After the service, we said goodbye to the band of Susan’s close friends and promised to keep in touch. A few months later, we received a cryptic note from one of these friends with a couple of photographs of Susan and a salwar kameez my mother had had made for her in India.
I think about the moment I turned thirty-seven and realized that I was older than her.
Susan was cremated. Those same friends took the ashes and spread them over a lake at a Girl Scouts camp somewhere in Illinois. We were not invited. We do not know where her final resting place is.
When we returned from California and Illinois there was a letter waiting for us in our mailbox. It was from Susan, sent just before her operation, subsequent coma and death. “You are my family,” she wrote. “I love you.”
The intervening years. I think of all that I could not share with Susan. I think about all the times I reached for the phone to call her, and halfway through dialing her number, remembered she wouldn’t be able to answer.
I think about the moment I turned thirty-seven and realized that I was older than her.
I remember the happiness that I felt when I got word the university awarded her PhD posthumously.
I remember how I pumped my fist in the air when I learned that the BOAST program lives to this day, as a permanent after-school resource for minority children in Champaign, IL.
I know that her name is spoken: the food surplus program she started in Champaign about thirty years ago bears her name – and there is a humanitarian award given by Champaign city fathers that also bears her name.
For the past twenty-five years, I’ve been trying to write a story about our friendship. Circa has taken on many iterations and many forms and most of it was lost in 2010 when I lost the bulk of my writing through no fault of my own.
When I finally sat down to rewrite and re-imagine this story a few years ago, I gave the truth a wide berth. I wanted to explore the nature of grief, I wanted to pay homage to all the wonderful, silly giggling Susan and I did; I wanted to think about all the ways people can disappear, and how silence and stoicism can damage the body. So I followed my poetry teachers’ advice and made a myth from a real-life friendship.
I’m telling a story about how to live when your best friend disappears.
A few years ago, I found myself a bit tipsy at the National Book Award ceremony. It was my first—and so far, only—time there. The experience felt grand; it was a red-carpeted “benefit dinner” on Wall Street. People wore tuxedos and gowns. I couldn’t look around the room without seeing a writer I admired: Dorothy Allison, Rigoberto González, Sarah Broom, Jericho Brown. Between bites of buffet-table bread, I sat there staggered that I had somehow ended up in queer literary heaven.
LeVar Burton, the man who’d helped me and many others my age become serious readers, was hosting, and that year another living legend was set to receive a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: author Edmund White. In his wry acceptance speech—preceded by an introduction from filmmaker John Waters who called White a “literary top”—White discussed the struggle of having tried to publish gay fiction pre-Stonewall and even many decades later; how his work was rejected for being both too explicit and too subtle, stating that the “familiar is more threatening than the exotic”; and how it “only” took him half a century to go from one of the most maligned writers in American letters to being honored. The brief speech ended, of course, by acknowledging how far the publishing industry has come both on the page and on stage.
Listening to him say this in such a hallowed hall had a profound impact. I got goosebumps, as if my body was a barometer detecting a change in the literary landscape. I felt it again a few weeks ago, when Malinda Lo won the National Book Award for her lesbian YA novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. And I still feel it, writing this. We’re queer and we’re here. (That my own novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark, is coming out in the midst of this exciting shift is surreal.)
These 13 new titles have got you covered from your last beach read to your first book by the winter fireplace. In addition to big names like Andrew Sean Greer, there are a slew of really exciting debuts: Rasheed Newson, Jeanna Kadlec, Grant Morrison, Jessi Hempel. There are stories of grad students and murderers; trust fund kids and horror movie aficionados; drag queens, missed connections, and unearthed family secrets; high schoolers reckoning with their identities and novelists finding their way home.
It’s 1985 and Earl Singleton III—he prefers Trey—has fled his wealthy Indianapolis family (and a six-figure trust fund) for the less-green, grittier pastures of Manhattan. Presented as a sort of fictional memoir, studded with historical figures and footnotes, Newson’s debut is an audacious, vibrant Ragtime-esque ride through the sordid sanctuary of AIDS-era New York, a book about sex and activism and the power we have to liberate ourselves.
For over 20 years, since 1993, Carlotta Mercedes has been serving time in a men’s prison—during which she had begun living as a woman—and while fate has never been kind to Carlotta, she is, to her surprise, allowed out a year early on parole. But the post-9/11, post-gentrification Brooklyn she reenters throws her for a loop. Set over the course of a Fourth of July weekend, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author James Hannaham’s latest novel is at once irreverently funny and devastatingly sad, a quixotic tale about the queerness of missed time; how, for the most marginalized, the shackles of the past and uncertain promises of the future make dwelling in the present seem impossible.
This lush, unsettling southern noir from the author of Cottonmouths centers on a woman who, twenty-five years earlier, confessed to murdering her abusive stepfather; yet, because his body was never found, she was never convicted. Now, however, human remains have turned up, and Jane returns to her small Arkansas town to atone for her crime, unearthing many other buried secrets.
Paradigm-shifting comics scribe Grant Morrison altered the world of superheroes by applying a post-modern gloss to the cape-and-cowl set. (Their runs on Animal Man and Batman are especially fun). The dense, metafictional thrills characteristic of Morrison’s work abound in their first prose novel, a bombastic rhapsody about a middle-aged drag queen with a flair for the occult who begins mentoring a bewitching young ingenue in the dark arts of disappearance and seduction.
Imagine a mashup of Wayne Koestenbaum and Tommy Pico and you’ll get a sense of this blazing work of metafiction, from the author of the genre-bending prose-poetic essay collection A History of My Brief Body, about a queer Cree grad student brimming with “tweetable despair” who flees academia for the most quixotic of notions: to write a novel, “the beginning of a series of minor but purposeful reinventions.”
The Year of the Literary Sequel continues with Greer’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning romp Less. Our hero, Minor American Novelist Arthur Less, is enjoying a brief moment of reprieve: his writing career is going okay and his relationship with Freddy is also going okay. But when his old ex-lover, the man whose house Less is currently living in, dies, he is left grieving; to make matters worse, he has to somehow find a way to pay many years’ worth of back rent. He agrees to profile a prominent, elderly sci-fi writer, a gig that entails driving the man across the American Southwest. If the first iteration of Less’s adventures saw him bumbling across Europe and Asia, this one finds him even more out of place, a stranger in his homeland. By turns deliriously funny and devastatingly heartbreaking, Greer’s sequel is an always-moving escapade through middle age.
Journalist Jessi Hempel debuts with a wondrous memoir a la Fun Home that cleans out the Narnia-vast family closet. By the time Hempel became an adult, she, her father, and both her siblings had come out as queer, while her mother brought her own dark past to light. Built partly on revelations that came about via pandemic-induced interviews, Hempel paints a moving portrait of filial secrets, of loved ones’ unknowability, of the continual courage it takes to come out to oneself and others, of generational trauma and the salve of togetherness.
Few things are more fraught (and fantastically thrilling) than the relationship between queer people and horror films. Culturally, our community has, as Joe Vallese writes in his introduction to this chimerical compendium of critical essays, been treated as “both victim and boogeyman,” predator and prey, and it’s perhaps this dichotomy that draws us into its campy happenings. Featuring pieces on Jennifer’s Body, Halloween, Candyman, and more, Vallese’s volume is an essential look at how spooky movies so often offer solace through subversiveness.
This we know: Jeanna Kadlec has long been a champion for other queer writers, a steadfast challenger to the many iniquities of the media world, and a delightful live-tweeter of films filled with gay subtext. Now she is gifting us her debut memoir, an achingly rendered story of leaving the Evangelical church and an oppressive marriage, a story of losing faith and finding oneself. Within these pages, Kadlec combines revelatory personal narratives with assiduous cultural criticism, Midwestern wonder with intellectual vigor, to explore how some of the social and spiritual functions of religion can be both abhorrent and illuminative of a new path forward.
Twenty-one-year-old college student Cassie gets hot and heavy with an older woman she meets at a bar near campus, only to discover the next morning that the woman, Erin, is her best friend’s mother, visiting her daughter for Parents’ Weekend. Hijinks and steamy trysts ensue as these two women in the midst of significant transitions pursue a complicated but ultimately palliative relationship. If Wilsner’s first novel—the smoldering Hollywood-set romance Something to Talk About—was a slow-burn, then their latest, known colloquially as “The MILF Book,” is a fun-as-hell five-alarm fire.
Lo follows the National Book Award winner Last Night at the Telegraph Club with an alluring coming-of-age story—billed as a “standalone companion” to Telegraph—about a high school senior whose plans for the summer are upended when topless photos of her circulate on Tumblr, prompting her to spend her last months before college with her grandmother. Initially disappointed, Aria warms to her situation as she gets to know her grandmother’s gender-nonconforming gardener, Steph, who introduces her to the colorful, Oz-like world of San Francisco’s queer community. Lo is so adept at crafting rousing, deeply personal tales of late adolescence set against momentous political backdrops.
In his soul-stirring introduction to this year’s anthology, Alexander Chee refers to the Best American Essay series as “a poker hand laid down in a bet against oblivion”—an apt description of what it has been like to read, to create, and to compile writing in whatever-the-hell epoch we’re living through right now. Chee’s installment celebrates and laments, captures and transcends our current predicaments. It’s also super queer, featuring some of our most illuminative voices: Melissa Febos on the animalism of the female body, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich on the complications of gender and futurity, Justin Torres on what’s found when objects are lost, the late Anthony Veasna So on art and mortality.
Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through August 2022!
Eve, a 28-year-old waitress, knows exactly one thing for sure: she’s got a good body, the kind of body—not that she’s vain or anything—that should be appreciated and utilized to its potential. Anonymously, she posts a nude picture online, which captures the attention of a couple looking for a third. The resulting relationship expands and constricts Eve’s world, opening and closing the doors of her self-perception. Ottessa Moshfegh’s urban malaise meets Raven Leilani’s loquacious eroticism in this provocative novel.
Grove’s debut is a doozy—a mesmerizing 900-page graphic memoir chronicling the author’s arduous gender affirmation process and battles with mental health. The heaviness of the story’s subject matter—dissociative identity disorder, trauma, the limitations and small graces of therapy—is leavened by lighthearted humor, mordant dialogue, and expressive illustrations, culminating in what Detransition, Baby author Torrey Peters calls “a beautiful, vulnerable, exquisite book that offers an uncommonly clear look at a mind coming to know itself.”
From 1929 to 1974, in New York’s Greenwich Village, near the end of Christopher Street, in the place that contains the Jefferson Market Garden, there stood a prison, a detention center housing women and transmasculine people that was “dangerous, vile, violent, dirty, and cruel”—but also a place that became a locus of the local queer community. Among those incarcerated were Angela Davis and Andrea Dworkin, and punishable crimes included everything from murder and larceny to writing a letter with the word “lesbian” in it. In this essential, abolitionist work, historian and author of When Brooklyn Was Queer Hugh Ryan uncovers the stories of this bewildering place and of the people who populated it.
Feltman’s follow-up to her debut novel Willa & Hesper—a wonderful novel of family, faith, and first love—centers on Morgan, a nonbinary teenager, and their father, both of whom are thrown for a loop when Morgan’s mother, who’d left her husband and child when the latter was an infant, returns to the fold.
A lesbian couple living in Laramie, Wyoming—a town made infamous by the murder of Matthew Shepherd—debates whether to have a child despite being at a crossroads in their relationship. Two tween girls from the suburbs venture into the city to meet an older woman with whom one of them had been flirting online. Conklin’s vibrant stories are populated by people fumbling awkwardly toward the next stages of their lives with skewed perceptions of what awaits them.
After a terrible tragedy, sixteen-year-old Sara flees her hometown for a new life in Los Angeles, where, years later, she crosses paths with Emilie, an aspiring florist who’s trying to outrun her own demons. The first adult book by YA superstar LaCour—whose previous novel, We Are Okay, was a best-selling Printz Award winner—is a heartbreakingly beautiful story about two lost women who somehow find each other and in doing so find themselves.
Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection is a must-read book about butch identity, an impassioned love letter to southwestern desert queers, a meditation on the indefiniteness of gender, and an elegiac and celebratory ode to the legacy of literary legend Jeanne Córdova.
Like Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi, Caine Prize finalist Ifeakandu chronicles the beauty and brutality, the bittersweetness, of queer Nigerian life, and how intimacy can be the warm light against the harmattan haze.
Much to the chagrin of his husband, who is about to divorce him, Kip has barricaded himself in his basement with nothing but a couple boxes of Premium Saltine Crackers; 3 tins of Cafe Bustelo; 21 jugs of Poland Spring water; and his Macbook, which he’s nicknamed Sophia. The reason? He has given himself 3 distraction-free weeks to complete his masterpiece: a historical novel based on E.M. Forster’s passionate love affair with a Black Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed El Adl. But of course, writers can never sequester themselves from their own demons. Donaldson’s debut novel—which alternates between Kip’s story and Mohammed’s—is a delicious and delirious work of metafiction.
As an anthology editor and the blogger behind LGBTQ Reads, Dahlia Adler does so much for the queer literary community; her work has, for years, indubitably made our stories more visible. But she’s as much artist as advocate, an author capable of spinning delightful sapphic yarns, as she does here in this sporty romance between a high school cheerleader and the female quarterback whose sudden arrival throws their Florida community for a loop. Adler’s full-hearted latest shines as bright as stadium lights on a Friday night.
“Even with the best love,” says the narrator of this humorous and heartfelt novel, “you could still wake up one day next to a beautiful man with a beautiful penis and be bored.” From the creator and star of the Netflix comedy Special—adapted from the author’s memoir about being a gay man with cerebral palsy—comes the story of a television writer living his supposed best life (the aforementioned beautiful man with the beautiful penis, a job for which he makes “a dumb amount of money”) who’s nonetheless unable to settle into contentment, a book about the pitfalls and pratfalls of desiring external validation and the importance of self-acceptance.
The author of the seminal queer classic Dancer from the Dance returns with a wide-eyed and wise novel about the ecstasies and agonies of being an aging gay—how disorienting and vast the chasm is between feeling young and looking young, the pains of a still-puerile desire versus the aches of a body in decline.
“[W]hen you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery,” Binnie writes in this newly-reissued dark comedy of dysmorphia, trans women are “at least as boring as everybody else.” While it’s true that the iconoclastic beauty of Binnie’s 2013 novel lies partly in its straightforward nature—a bookstore clerk gets dumped and then fired from her job, prompting a solo sojourn out west—it also brims with uncommonly judicious insight into the emotional topography of trans bodies.
Set in an alternate version of America in which the wedding-industrial complex has become (even more) deranged—like, Midsommar-level deranged—Laskey’s frenetic second novel centers on Robin, a gay academic whose estranged straight friend asks her to be the maid of honor for her upcoming nuptials. Robin is getting her PhD in feminist studies, writing her dissertation on the moonstruck evolution of America’s state-sanctioned wedding frenzy, and sees her friend’s ceremony both as a way to maybe reconnect and to witness the craze firsthand. Yes, it’s Black Mirror meets Bridesmaids, but Laskey’s latest has shades of Jennifer’s Body, too. It’s an absurdist spine-tingler about how societal pressures can so often devour friendships.
For many queer people, the beginning of the pandemic brought with it the eerie and surreal sense of repeating history—the arguably botched, heavily politicized response to COVID-19 reminiscent of the AIDS crisis, the way the marginalized are always hardest hit. We are tasked, writes Osmundson, now as ever, “to sacrifice, in the face of a virus, to care for one another, and yet to never lose sight of pleasure, even when both the present and the future seem impossible.” In this scrupulous and impassioned manifesto, Osmundson, a microbiologist and activist (and podcaster!), looks at the nature of disease—and its impact on individuals and communities—through a distinctly queer lens.
Fitzgerald’s foray into kid lit, 2018’s How Mamas Love Their Babies, was a vital and playfully iconoclastic book that dispelled any myth that motherhood is monolithic, that a parent’s worth as a provider should be tied to capitalistic ideals. Here, too, in this memoir partly about mothering as a queer sex worker, she laments the normative judgements and restrictions placed on women like her while finding solace in existing outside those norms.
Despite being told repeatedly that she has the looks and disposition for modeling, Oregonian teenager Lou prefers to be behind the camera rather than in front of it. But the accidental death of a good friend, as well as her perceived part in it, causes a mental break from her old life, pushing her to escape the Pacific Northwest and embrace a more glamorous life in New York. Like a figure in a glossy magazine ad, Ohman’s debut novel is lithe and invitingly mysterious.
Davis’ enticing debut is a Winterson-reminiscent tale of love and lust on the margins, a bewitching mix of kink and dystopian thrills. It stars Lee, a professional sadist whose topsy-turvy world is turned even more so when they encounter—and are topped by—an alluring, elusive woman known only by the letter of the novel’s title. X is about to be “exported”—what the autocratic government does to people it deems undesirable—and so Lee sets off on a quest to get to her before she could be gone forever.
Chang’s first novel, 2020’s Bestiary, was a magical realist marvel, by turns gorgeous and grotesque. Her words are like hearts ripped right out of bodies: abject, pulsing, full of awe—prose-poetry that is perfectly tailored for the short form. Her collection is a medley of visceral myths, stories of devotion and desire.
After a deep sea dive goes horribly awry, stranding her for months in the murky depths, Leah returns to her wife subtly yet fundamentally changed. What emerges is a love story like no other, a tale of two women trying to tiptoe back into domestic bliss while disoriented by missed time. Armfield’s fantastic first novel is about the pockets of unknowability that pop up in even the longest intimacies, how marriage, like the ocean, is full of “the teeth it keeps half-hidden.”
Devotees of Melissa Febos—which is all of us, right?—will be seduced by this captivating memoir chronicling the author’s ascent from Appalachian girlhood to becoming “LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix.” Belcher’s pen is at once graceful and scathing as it prods the complexities of desire—the ever-present dangers of straight maleness, the sometimes complicated haven of female queerness.
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings in this entrancing portrait of 3 young artists who meet at an elite college at the height of the Occupy movement. Angress so deftly portrays the splendor and squalor of trying to create something great in the face of rampant capitalism, of love and lust in the face of tooth-and-claw competition.
“Every love story is a ghost story” goes the famous David Foster Wallace quote, an apt description also of this haunting, longing-filled nocturne from the author of Bleaker House. Bianca was 14 years old when she died in 1473, doomed to forever drift among the Mallorcan monastery at which she’d perished. It’s there, many centuries later, that she encounters Frédéric Chopin and his wife, the gender-bending writer George Sand, with whom Bianca also falls in love.
Working in media, especially as an assistant in any capacity, means being constantly unable to separate home from the office, not simply in a take-it-with-you way but often in a self-effacing way, an I-work-therefore-I-am way. So it is for Zanne, an ambitious 30-something personal assistant to a movie mogul, whose livelihood and identity is tied too closely to her boss’s happiness. Hart’s effervescent first novel unfolds over the course of one day as Zanne is planning an important party that will either make or break her career.
“As the summer began, I moved to Milwaukee, a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away, I lay on the sun-warmed wood floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.” So begins Mathews’s raw and insouciant debut about a queer Indian-American woman who’s just graduated into the great recession’s aftermath searching for love, friendship, and independence.
The acclaimed author/activist and cultural icon Michelle Tea—whose 2000 novel Valencia changed the game for queer fiction, and whose 2019 essay collection Against Memoir played fast and loose with the rules of autobiography—returns with an often irreverent sendup of the “Fertility Industrial Complex,” and a complex portrait of a 40-ish mother-to-be.
For over 20 years, since 1993, Carlotta Mercedes has been serving time in a men’s prison—during which she had begun living as a woman—and while fate has never been kind to Carlotta, she is, to her surprise, allowed out a year early on parole. But the post-9/11, post-gentrification Brooklyn she reenters throws her for a loop. Set over the course of a Fourth of July weekend, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author James Hannaham’s latest novel is at once irreverently funny and devastatingly sad, a quixotic tale about the queerness of missed time; how, for the most marginalized, the shackles of the past and uncertain promises of the future make dwelling in the present seem impossible.
Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through April 2022!
Fans of Sarah Waters’ historical dramas should take note of this sweeping story set in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, in which Julia, a married woman, runs off with her tailor, Eve, leaving behind the comfort and safety of wealth for the bohemian freedom of life on her own terms.
Spanning nearly thirty years, Jean Chen Ho’s linked story cycle centers on the ever-evolving relationship between two best friends as they weather the hard-partying highs and the lonesome lows of youth, the comforts and frustrations of filial duty, and the often-baffling search for some semblance of stability.
From his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to gay bars and bedrooms, Gomez’s lionhearted memoir chronicles coming of age as a queer, Latinx person, wrestling with a mindset that at once embraces and rejects the trappings of machismo, navigating love and lust in the time of PrEP, and learning how to redefine (and reclaim) pride.
The author of the titanic, tectonic-shifting A Little Life returns with another Big Novel, spanning from the 1890s to the 2090s in alternative versions of New York. Many of the hallmarks of Yanagihara’s past work are here: illness, liberation, finding moments of brightness among the bleakness, quiet lives lived among the overwhelming din of sociopolitical strife.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz sets her inquisitive memoir at the intersection of parental death and romantic love, as the passing of her beloved father coincided with meeting, just eighteen months earlier, the woman she would eventually marry. Yet this is not simply an autobiography or an elegy; as the book’s title suggests, Schulz wondrously explores the myriad ways we process fortune and misfortune.
Hoke’s keenly constructed memoir-in-essays is really a memoir-in-stickers, from the glow-in-the-dark stars and coveted Lisa Frank unicorns of childhood to a Pixies decal from his teenage years. The book also peels back the complicated notoriety of the author’s hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, juxtaposing Dave Matthews’ fire dancer emblem against a truck emblazoned with the words “Are You Triggered?” on its back window heralding the infamous white supremacist march.
Dahlia is a sweet-natured divorcée looking to start over after her failed marriage; London is a salty curmudgeon with a marshmallow heart. The two of them meet as competitors on the set of the cooking show Chef’s Special, and the simmering tension between them begins to boil as the competition heats up. Add to this the fact that London, the program’s first nonbinary contestant, has decided to come out on air—to the public, yes, but also to their father, who hasn’t been the most accepting—and you’ve got the recipe for a delectable, emotionally stirring romance.
Combining fly-on-the-wall reportage, personal experience, archival research, and art criticism, educator and Lambda Literary fellow Ricky Tucker casts a prismatic light on the Ballroom subculture, cultural knowledge of which can so often be a dance between appreciation and appropriation. With kinetically poetic prose, Tucker pries Ballroom’s past and present from white capitalist hands and allows it to be told by the community’s queer and trans BIPOC innovators, offering “a blueprint for the marginalized to find artistic, personal, and professional grounding in a groundless world. It is an observance of struggle and an offering of freedom.”
With her debut Sugar Run, Mesha Maren heralded herself as a highest-order storyteller of Southern noir, a chronicler of queer Appalachia. Here, a young married couple moves to El Paso, Texas, so Alex, the husband, can study the sociocultural significance of lucha libre wrestling; but after he falls in love with the fighter he’s profiling and then goes missing, it’s up to Elana—his wife, harboring secrets of her own—to find him.
The 2019 recipient of the National Book Foundation’s medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters goes meta with this intriguing and inventive novel about a husband and wife who decide to confess all their past sexual escapades, including, on the husband’s part, a love affair with writer Edmund White.
Provocative and candid, this memoir by a founding editor of Bustle examines some of the pains and pleasures of non-monogamous partnership. Fusing autobiography and cultural analysis, Krantz lays herself bare in order to ask questions about sexual agency, bodily autonomy, queerness, and that insidiously thin line between what we want and what we have been conditioned to want.
After an anxious misunderstanding, a trans office worker pretends to be pregnant, a white lie that starts to spiral out of control—especially when she purchases an artificial belly bump—and yet becomes “not a false thing” but a “thing that served its own purpose, parallel to pregnancy, not a ghost of it, a different thing altogether.” Elsewhere, an intersex person forsakes a romantic relationship and embarks upon a transatlantic boat ride to pursue a historical figure who they hope will unlock a better understanding of their own self. Comic and melancholy, Thomas’ debut collection (read an excerpt here) is about people preoccupied with their inchoate desires, wanting to feel a sense of arrival with no fixed destination.
Anonymous Sex, edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (Feb. 1)
Featuring stories by Helen Oyeyemi, Meredith Talusan, Edmund White, and many others, this kinky collection of short fiction feels appropriately like a game, an anthology in which the selections are stripped of authorial attribution, leaving readers blindfolded as they make their way through the book.
A rising—ahem—star in the romance world, Bellefleur continues the semi-linked series that began with the bestselling Written in the Stars with this page-turner about a wedding planner fated to confront the one that got away—when the latter turns out to be the Best Woman in the wedding party the former is organizing.
Subtitled “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis,” activist Grace Lavery’s unabashed and tantalizing book queers the memoir genre in multiple senses, taking readers on a wild ride through the author’s multitudinous identities.
The titular heroine of this deviously fun rom-com is a New York photographer desperate for her big break who receives a lucrative offer to take pictures at her estranged stepsister’s wedding. Unable to pass up the big paycheck, Delilah heads back to her hometown in Oregon, where she bumps into Claire, once a member of her stepsister’s mean-girl clique in high school. Claire is also the Maid of Honor in the wedding, and Delilah, a city-hardened heartbreaker, hatches a plan to seduce Claire and ruin her stepsister’s upcoming nuptials.
Lambda Award-winning author Isaac Fellman’s second novel features a tenderhearted romance between the widow of a beloved television writer and a trans vampire archivist—sold? Confessions of the Fox author Jordy Rosenberg calls it “a moving and provocative novel, that caresses the decay nibbling at the hard edges of postmodern officescapes, exposing a sexy, neurotic, cinematic vampire love story bubbling up from the ruins.”
Fake dating is one of the most reliably compelling romance tropes around, one Kosoko Jackson utilizes in all its angsty splendor in this comedy about exes who pretend to still be seeing one another as they attend a big-deal wedding—an event that has huge implications for both men.
Felker-Martin’s post-apocalyptic white-knuckler pulls no punches, an audacious dystopian story—think The Road by way of David Cronenberg—about trans people trying to survive and thrive in a world beset by a plague that has turned those with elevated testosterone levels feral. This is destined to be one of the year’s most talked-about novels.
By night, Claudia Li comforts herself with cozy mystery novels, which also help her bond with her otherwise hard-to-please immigrant mother; by day, she works for a clandestine agency as a kind of “dating detective,” helping clients obtain information on potential lovers, hunting down people who’ve ghosted them on various apps. When a new client turns out to be lying about their identity, it forces Claudia to investigate her own. Pek’s first novel is a whip-smart and super charming techno thriller that feels at once contemporary and classic.
In this dishy memoir, the raucous Tony Award-winning actor, playwright, and gay icon reveals the trials and triumphs behind some of showbiz’s most indelible productions and performances. Past all the hairspray and glamorous stagecraft is a touching story of what it means to live against the grain.
To be queer is to have a love-hate relationship with pop culture; we yearn to see ourselves reflected in media, sometimes even just a tiny glimpse, but that mirror can also so often distort. And where once we were all but invisible, on-screen depictions of female queerness now abound. Into this amusing ubiquity steps internet comedienne Jill Gutowitz, a self-styled “Overlord of Lesbian Twitter” who, both online and in this clever essay collection, traffics in “memes about lesbian movies and middle-aged actresses with a dogged persistence and untethered horniness.”
Febos’ 2021 essay collection, Girlhood, is an essential read on how the patriarchy poisons the well of women’s erotic and emotional lives, a fierce compendium of agency and autonomy that undoes the stories we’ve forever been told about ourselves. Body Work is a sort of spiritual sister to that brilliant book, a memoir-meets-craft-manual that offers guidance on how to tell our own stories on our own terms.
Echoes of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man resound in this deeply profound debut novel about a Latinx professor reluctantly returning to his suburban hometown to attend his high school reunion and care for his father, who has recently fallen ill.
Ginder, a former congressional intern and speechwriter for John Podesta whose 2017 book The People We Hate at the Wedding is currently being adapted to film returns with a political romp about a mother whose Senate campaign is derailed when her daughter is photographed destroying a storefront window during a protest in Paris. She dispatches her son, a chronically single gay man who swore off public affairs and is writing a musical about Joan Didion called “Hello to All That!” Imagine a mashup of Veep and The Other Two and you’ll get a sense of this screwball family dramedy.
Canadian cartoonist Jessica Campbell delivers a gracefully laconic graphic novel about a teen girl in the early aughts wrestling with faith and sexuality. The daughter of deeply religious parents, Lauren begins to question all she thinks she knows about herself when she’s paired with the rebellious, cigarette-smoking wiccan Mariah for a school science project. Campbell’s unobtrusive style makes for a quick read that will nonetheless linger with you long after you turn the final page.
Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by Anton Hur (Apr. 12)
San and Namae are two young outcasts growing up in a rural village in South Korea, two “nothing-girls” who enjoy the burgeoning intimacy of their private time. But after Namae rejects her, San becomes more isolated, retreating further inside herself. Years later, in her twenties, San applies for a job at a flower shop, where she encounters a veritable bouquet of colorful characters. But even after all this time, San, who had fled her village and never returned, can’t shake the memory of Namae.
Stuart’s heartrending, Booker-winning debut, Shuggie Bain, was a richly textured novel about working class Scotland and the enduring love between a mother and son. It was at once lush and uncompromising, doleful and brimming with hope, all of which can also be said of the author’s follow-up, centered on the star-crossed romance between two boys—one Catholic, the other Protestant.
Pushing 40, Merit’s life is at a bit of a standstill: she’s in a humdrum marriage with a husband who’s only half there, and she’s taken some time off from work to care for her new child and to nurture an ultimately unfruitful painting career. She decides to apply for a position at an architectural firm led by the brilliant and glamorous Jane, a woman almost twenty years her senior. But soon the lines between boss, mentor, friend, and something more begin to blur.
True to form, Roem, who made headlines and history in 2017 when she beat an anti-LGBTQ+ incumbent to become the first openly trans person elected to U.S. state legislature, has written a political memoir unlike any other. Inspired by the opposition research she conducted on herself during her campaign, the Virginian delegate chronicles her rise from a metalhead reporter moonlighting as a food delivery driver to a game-changing public official. “It’s possible to live a big and honest life,” Roem writes, “and be successful because of who you are, not despite it.”
Clarisse de Karadec, née Desanges, hurried to the table; the deed to her house was there, where she’d put it the night before, amid the various papers and the enormous heap of envelopes. God, she’d been scared! Joyously she embraced the precious document and set it back down on the table. As she glanced mechanically at the envelopes spilling in every direction that all bore her name written in the same tall, dancing handwriting, she noticed with a smile that they hadn’t been opened. But when she saw that many didn’t have a stamp anymore, imagining that one of her friends must be a collector and was nabbing them while she slept, she couldn’t help but laugh.
Waking up in her house for the first time, she was delighted to already feel at home there: “My house!” she shouted in a radiant voice, glancing around the room for maybe the hundredth time since the day before. “Ravishing,” she murmured, leaning against the wall in order to fully take in the room, “truly ravishing, a bit bare perhaps; I’ll need to buy statues, heaps of statues.” She remembered seeing some recently that were very beautiful… in a park… or in a forest. “Life is wonderful.” If she hadn’t resolved to act with the utmost discretion toward the friends she’d invited to spend a few days in her house, she would gladly have gone to say a quick hello. How astonishing life is, how surprising, wonderful, and unpredictable, she thought. Who would ever have thought, even a few weeks ago, that today she would be in her house! And the sound of the sea that would never leave her, such rapture! She ran to the window, opened it wide, and inhaled the fresh air with delight. That sea she saw stretch before her infinitely, as far as the eye could see, fascinated her. She promised herself that as soon as it was nice out, she would bathe in the sea and bathe in the sun too; her body needed it so badly! In the meantime, she would exercise every morning. She was very proud of still being able to jump like a little girl even though she was more than thirty years old, and she could also climb up a rope like a squirrel on a tree. She gasped; fully dressed people were entering the water. Eyes gazing into the distance, she saw streets, cars, haggard people walking on their own and seemingly oblivious to others. She held on to the window frame to steady herself; they advanced slowly into the open water and then, suddenly, they disappeared. Softly she fell to the ground.
When she came to, it seemed the sun had set. The weather is turning gray, she thought sadly. I need to light a candle, that’ll brighten things up. Comforted by the idea, she got up, slowly crossed the room, and lay down on her bed. If the telephone had been connected, she would have immediately called one of her friends, anyone at all, just for the pleasure of hearing a voice. Luckily there are birds… the sea and the birds, so I’m never alone… She stretched voluptuously, a smile on her lips. Suddenly she thought of what she would have for lunch: caviar, bread, champagne; she jumped up. When she put on her gloves, coat, and hat and looked at herself in the mirror, she was astonished that the woman she saw staring back was her: Clarisse de Karadec. If not for the color of her clothes, she wouldn’t have recognized herself; she was pleased that for some time now, or even longer than that perhaps, she didn’t remember exactly, she never bought clothes unless they were black, mauve, or white. It’s not that she particularly liked those colors, but that’s what she had decided one day, she didn’t know why anymore, and when she tried to remember she couldn’t, but became infinitely sad.
How astonishing life is, how surprising, wonderful, and unpredictable.
In the street there weren’t many people; the rare few were walking quickly through the rain. Clarisse thought they seemed tense, unhappy; that always struck her, out in the street, those faces full of desolation and sadness as though they weren’t, like her, happy to be alive. A bakery full of light and cakes wrested her from her thoughts; she paused for a moment to look in the window and entered the shop. Standing, she gulped down three éclairs, a rum baba, and two tarts. Then she paid and left.
A formation of planes passing over the city made her jump; lifting her head she watched them set off fireworks; it was splendid! She had never before seen anything so beautiful. Alone on the sidewalk—the passersby had taken shelter behind carriage doors—Clarisse, dazzled, admired the shapes in the sky. Then abruptly it all stopped and the sky went dark again. The street seemed sad: always the same stores! the same narrow sidewalks! the same street lights! Always everywhere the same thing! But elsewhere there wasn’t the noise of the sea audible in the distance. Over there was missing that air full of salt and marine fragrance that for her was like a light perfume, a promise of happiness. She was eager now to get back home, to her house, to be in her beautiful room, but first she had to buy the champagne… the caviar… To save time she started to run. At the end of the street she took another street to an intersection; crossing it she reached the store at the corner and entered. It was packed. Waiting for her turn to be served, she examined the vegetables: they were splendid! Tomatoes fat like pumpkins with a skin so fine and soft that it reminded her of baby skin. It must be wonderful to bite into them, but she hated tomatoes. Too bad! she thought. These must be quite good… A pat of butter started to melt before her eyes, spreading over the counter and proving that it must not have been as cold as people were saying. They said it was 33 or 34 degrees—madness! And yet everyone seemed to believe it because they were all dressed in warm clothes! Fortunately she had stopped being surprised by anything some time ago! The butter was now a large waterfall; concerned about the puddle forming on the ground behind the shelves, she bent down. “Can I help you, Madame?” Clarisse jolted back up. The saleswoman, a smile on her lips, was standing next to her. As she was being served, Clarisse de Karadec was moved by how friendly the saleswoman was to her, and the owner at the register too, who, when their gazes met, flashed her big gracious smiles. To repay their kindness she decided she would always buy her groceries in this store. Without worrying about the passersby she jostled on her way and who furiously grumbled through their teeth or called her an old lunatic, she finally arrived in front of her house and felt an immense happiness upon seeing it again. “Life is marvelous,” she murmured, climbing the stairs wearily, “and everyone is so nice …” On the second-floor landing she saw two of her friends; she would have liked to stop and say hello to them, but she didn’t want them to feel obliged to invite her to lunch or dinner, and so she simply nodded her head at them. They responded with a friendly smile and went on their way; her friends’ discreet courtesy touched her and she was glad to have invited them.
Back in her room she saw the wide-open window and the soaked ground. I’m incorrigible, she thought, laughing and leaning over the hand rail to gaze at the sea; but she saw nothing; only the smashing sound of the waves resounding in her head proved that the ocean was still there. There was a thick fog before her, then, suddenly the sea, howling, unleashed, hollowed with grooves, bloated with waves furiously furling and unfurling. Fascinated by the deafening sight, Clarisse de Karadec kept her eyes riveted to the ocean. Body tense and heart alert, with neither a gesture nor a blink she participated in that raging, thunderous unleashing of the sea: “Men might be drowning… Men have drowned,” she murmured. “One day a man drowned… One day a man drowned,” she repeated, with the vague feeling that through these words she would remember; that she had to remember. An immense sadness invaded her heart, and for an instant she was aware that her brain was an abyss into which her thoughts were sinking irremediably. She was suddenly very cold; she left the window and on the other side of the room she lit the small gas radiator that served as her heater.
An immense sadness invaded her heart, and for an instant she was aware that her brain was an abyss into which her thoughts were sinking irremediably.
Now sitting in a chair with a radio on her knees, she listened gaily to a song; nothing subsisted of the tidal wave that had just so deeply unsettled her. With a stunned glance around her room, she declared that she would buy statues, statues that would nearly reach the ceiling… she had seen one that day in a park… she would just find that one… and then she would throw a costume ball… all the men would be naval officers. Radiant, she stood up and started to dance. Abruptly realizing that she was dying of hunger, Clarisse de Karadec pulled out the provisions she’d bought and put together a plate with two slices of ham, a petit suisse, and an egg, then grabbed the bottle of cider and poured herself a large glass. God, it was good! She had no idea she was so thirsty! She poured herself another glass, placed it on the table without drinking it, and sunk her teeth into the ham, which was simply exquisite; she was about to serve herself the last slice when she was seized by a brusque fit of laughter thinking again of the caviar and the champagne. It was so funny, their habit of always giving her the wrong thing! She couldn’t get a hold of herself, tears were streaming down her face, she hiccupped… Once she’d calmed down, she felt a sudden fatigue. With her head hunched over her chest, she remained drooped in the chair with her eyes closed, listening to the gentle rustling of the sea.
Although she had barely slept, when Clarisse woke up and saw that it was nice out, she jumped out of bed and ran to the window. In the blue of the sky, which she deemed as blue as the blue of her eyes, a golden ball hovered immobile in space. She was marveling at the splendor of that globe when suddenly she noticed that nothing was suspending it and that it could fall at any moment; seized with fright she shut her eyes. But suddenly realizing that she’d be able to swim, her fear vanished on the spot. She ran to the armoire, took out a cardboard box, and opened it. There was her bathing suit, wrapped in tissue paper, mauve with a white trim, it was quite pretty; she was not disappointed. She had bought it a few days earlier in Paris, although she hadn’t known at the time that she would be living by the sea. Maybe if I hadn’t bought it, I wouldn’t have come to live here, who knows? She burst out laughing. When she had put it on and looked at herself in the mirror, Clarisse couldn’t believe her eyes: could it be possible that she was this beautiful? It was inconceivable. Head on, from the side, from an angle, from behind—she was perfect! An envelope under her door that she glimpsed in the mirror wrested her from her contemplation. Her heart racing, she bent down for the letter. Maybe it was the letter she’d been waiting for? The tall, dancing handwriting reassured her. But why had she written Desanges instead of Karadec! This error, for which she could only blame herself, left her perplexed for a moment.
It wasn’t a big deal, the important thing was to have the letter. A smile spread across her lips.
I’ll open it with the others, later, when I’m old, she thought gaily, throwing the letter on the table with the rest.
She was about to go out for a swim when she had the thought that it would be much simpler, and also much more agreeable, to dive directly from her window. As she admired the ocean before her eyes, gray and gleaming like asphalt, Clarisse enjoyed imagining the pleasure she would feel soon, in just a moment, as her body slipped between the waves. But was that the only thing she desired from the sea, this pleasure, this joy? Wasn’t there, down in the depths of the ocean, some hidden treasure that she had lost… A strange emotion, a wild, insane, delirious hope took hold of her. “Life is marvelous,” Clarisse mumbled. She filled her lungs with air and with a thrust of her whole body, she jumped.
Avenue de l’Opéra, an ambulance picked up the body of a woman in her sixties, crushed on the sidewalk. She was wearing nothing but a mauve bathing suit with a white trim.
In her first book, Beth Macy chronicled how the Sackler family, through Purdue Pharma, used deceptive marketing tactics to push healthcare providers to prescribe opioids. If Dopesick, now also a Huluminiseries for which Macy served as writer and producer, offered a gripping answer to the question of how the US was plunged into the devastating opioid epidemic that persists today, her newest release, Raising Lazarus, answers the question: What do we do now?
In Raising Lazarus, Macynot only offers insight into the complex web of the Purdue Pharma case, but focuses attention on the efforts of activists who are forging new pathways to healing in their communities. The lack of coordinated national response to the opioid crisis, which has been magnified by the pandemic in irreparable ways, has forced individuals to shoulder the burden of care, often working outside established systems and the eye of the law to provide drug users resources and connection. With her trademark compassion and curiosity, Macy writes to destigmatize addiction and chronicle the trials—and the joys—experienced by communities in crisis as they work toward more hopeful futures.
I spoke with Macy over the phone about the importance of community in care, how she sees her role as a journalist, and how important it is for us to lift stigma from individuals and place shame where it belongs: on the Sacklers.
Jacqueline Alnes: Your book opens with an epigraph from Ann Pancake: “In times like these you have to grow big enough inside to hold both the loss and the hope.” There is hope in Raising Lazarus, but so many weighty subjects too: the opioid crisis, the pandemic, the violent effects of climate change, corporate greed.
Beth Macy: And there’s political toxicity. Like in Charleston, West Virginia, where it’s the worst of the worst, there’s evil on top of it.
JA: Right. What was it like writing into those different griefs as they intersect with one another?
BM: I’ll start by saying that when I finished Dopesick, I was not going to write another book about this issue. The ending of Dopesick was so dark. The person I had followed for two years, Tess, had not only overdosed, but was brutally murdered, in part because of her medical abandonment. It was so dark and unexpected. When you gather story upon story upon story and then it ends like that, it had this build-up effect of me feeling like—and my doctor thinking—I had some kind of secondary trauma. I was like literally, for my health, I’m not writing about this again. And then as I started going around talking about Dopesick and seeing how many people were stunned, like they still didn’t know this all started with OxyContin, they still didn’t know rich kids in the suburbs were getting ahold of it, they didn’t know about fentanyl—I mean this is 2018, but this is a really easy issue not to look at unless you have to. That’s part of the problem. But then, I would hear about these amazing people doing amazing things and I would start to get an inkling.
Like in my home city of Roanoke, Virginia, they finally got a needle exchange started, two years after the state said it could be started. I was at that needle exchange hanging out, and I had this teary moment where I thought, this is what Tess meant when she said urgent care for the addicted. She didn’t know what it was because she had never seen it, but she would have loved this place. People were there with their dogs, they were there just hanging out, some of them were applying for jobs. It was like a food pantry/needle exchange/you could go get Advil/you could sign up for Medicaid. I had that moment and I really dug the vibe.
The second time I went, this nonbinary harm reductionist named Lil Prosperino happened to be passing through town. There’s always one anecdote with each person that just grabs me and with Lil, it was the fact that they bought this abandoned house for thirty dollars at auction and they were going to use that for a safe consumption space. It was condemned. Lil was like, ‘We’ll use it for more than just needles, in the winter we will give out coats and I give out this homemade salve I make. They call me a hill witch.’ I thought, a hill witch, that’s fucking awesome. And then I asked to come witness it and they said, sure, come on!
When you’re with these people, you realize: no one is seeing what you’re seeing. We are seeing the unseen.
JA: How do you write about issues that are so tangled up?
BM: I try to keep it really people-centered, so that the amazing stories I’m witnessing ground the book and have enough narrative juice to keep it going. Also, when I get the opportunity, I can stop, digress, and explain the clusterfuck of why it is this way. I tried to digress often, when needed, but not for too long.
JA: When you were talking about what goes unseen, some of it was yes, me not looking, but also it seemed like there is a historical narrative of shame and harm. In our current system, for example, law enforcement often turns away, because they have to in order for healing to happen; the alternative is abiding by the law, which means putting people in jail.
BM: And oh, by the way, the jail is so far away that you are going to have to be dopesick in the foyer. I’m talking about Mount Airy, North Carolina now. That’s an unseen thing, but they let me see it. It was shocking. I was like, are they really going to let me in that jail? Someone told me, “you’re Beth Macy, you’re a bestselling author.” They are going to let you in that jail because: A) they want you to write about them, and B) because they can’t imagine that the way they’re doing it isn’t exactly perfect. They don’t see that they have their own inherent biases. That’s the way that we are trained and acculturated with Drug War thinking.
JA: You highlight throughout the book that there’s a real lack of a coordinated national response to the overdose crisis. For me, the most hopeful moments in these pages came from places where communities are coming together, sometimes unexpectedly, to provide small slivers of relief. What were some of your takeaways from writing this?
BM: I interviewed Dr. Jerome Jaffe, who worked under Nixon and set up this national set of methadone clinics on demand. The most useful thing he said is that it’s not easy to set up a system of care that the person or the patient is going to find acceptable, but also that the community is going to find politically palatable.
To tell you a story to explain, I was giving a talk in Christiansburg. I’d had some [prior] experiences with harm reductionists and they usually hate law enforcement, like Lil does. But someone named Michelle was describing how she started out of the back of a pickup truck in 2009 posing as a food pantry, and then when they realized half their population was intravenous drug users, they started handing out needles hidden in granola bar boxes. I go back on my career and the best stories are always the people who think the opposite of other people in their peer group. And also, by the way, are kicking ass. What Michelle said was, you have to meet the other side where they are, too. I had never heard a harm reductionist say that.
An example she gave was a bunch of crafters that met at a church in Hickory, North Carolina. The craft circle didn’t want to help them pass out needles, but they volunteered to crochet these bags in which to hold the needles. It reminds people who are drug users of home, because it looks like something your grandma might have made. And Michelle says, ‘Oh, by the way, I even got them to weave in iridescent thread so they could be seen in trap houses and low light areas.’ Michelle has had a ton of success in one of the most conservative areas in the nation meeting people where they are. Her group is biracial, queer, faith-based, and law enforcement loves her because she treats them like people, too. She’s able to make in-roads.
JA: This book made me think a lot about the stories we tell about addiction, and how harmful those narratives can be, right down to the language used. Would you mind talking a little bit about your decision to replace language like “affliction” or “disease” with more person-first terms like “drug users,” “patients,” and “people who use drugs”?
The best stories are always the people who think the opposite of other people in their peer group.
BM: I think it’s really important that we do this. Some journalists still use the word “addict.” When you ask them why, they’ll say, “well, that’s what they call themselves.” Some of them do, not all of them. They are not the ones we are trying to convince. We are trying to convince the general population that these are human beings worthy of care. I think the person-first [approach] is always going to be a better way to go with that.
JA: There’s a recurring theme of silence and gross, maybe feigned, ignorance from the Sackler family that especially enraged me when I read about Richard Sackler responding, “I don’t recall/remember/recollect,” something fifty-seven times during his first two hours of testimony. For you, is the role of journalist to bridge the gap in that absence of testimony? How do you see your role as a storyteller?
BM: I knew the Sacklers were never going to give me an interview, right? I’m sure their lawyers would, but I don’t want to talk to them. They are being paid $1,800 an hour just to be sycophants in my view. They are recidivist criminals. Purdue has pled guilty twice in Federal Court and now they are trying to engineer this sweetheart bankruptcy deal that would allow them to walk away with a huge chunk of their ill-gotten profits. If the treatment part of the book is about the heroes on the ground, I decided that the Sackler part of the book, if you will, would be about people like Nan Goldin and Ed Bisch because they put the pressure on. I would also include Danny Strong, from the Hulu show Dopesick, because that really helped people understand who the real criminals were—and it wasn’t your cousin who got busted for holding a little bit of dope. It’s the people who did this to the country and our so-called regulators who let them get away with it.
JA: You talk about asking your “magic wand question” to different community organizers, drug users, and healthcare providers throughout the book, so I figure it’s only right that I ask you the same: After reporting on this through the course of two books, what do you think would it take to turn the overdose crisis around?
BM: Well that’s why I wrote the epilogue the way I did. If you notice, it’s kind of tonally different.
JA: It is!
BM: My publicist at Little Brown, she did Dopesick, too, so I know her pretty well. After reading it, she goes, “Oh, Beth was in the room for that chapter!” I was like, “Yeah, I might have dropped some f-bombs. I’m pissed off. I’ve been writing about this for a decade, off and on. I give my policy magic-wand bullets near the end, but the real magic wand is the beginning of the book, where you are in the McDonald’s parking lot with Tim and he’s meeting Sam and he’s going to give him this medical help that he has never before had. He’s going to call in this discount prescription at this one particular pharmacy, which took god knows how many steps to set up. But he wants Sam to leave the meeting with two thoughts. One is: You can get better. Sam doesn’t know that, most people with OUD don’t know they can get better. They think they can’t because they’ve been treated so poorly. Forty percent of people with OUD don’t want to stop using drugs because they don’t think they can. We are not making the treatment as easy to access as the dope. That’s one.
And then the second thing Tim says is: Don’t disappear. And what he means is that if you relapse, even if you can’t make it back to the appointment here in this McDonald’s parking lot next week, text me, and I’ll come to you, wherever you are. I’ll come. And so this idea of not just meeting people where they are, not abandoning them, but embracing them. All that time I spent with Tess, and it still took me spending all that time with Tim before I realized that that’s what would have helped Tess. Having this person, this connection, this web of connections that would help her with her housing, help her sign up for Medicaid, all the social supports, and make sure she got help she didn’t have before. She struggled like hell to get that. And when she finally did, she slipped and smoked some weed and got kicked out of the program. We’ve gotta stop putting up so many hurdles for these folks.
My tongue recoils from the bitter taste. I put the dropper back in the bottle and set an alarm to go off every three hours, trying to distract myself from a body buzzing with anxiety. I type and scroll more, reading that despite scientific studies suggesting otherwise, high doses of Vitamin C will also work. I have some on hand, so I choke the chalky pills back in fistfuls.
Please don’t be pregnant, please don’t be pregnant, I chant until my period comes,praying to any god that will listen.
“There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference,” Ophelia says in act 4 of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to no one in particular. In her mad scenes, she gives away flowers: rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, and rue. Of them all, she only keeps rue for herself.
According to John M. Riddle, provoking an abortion was rue’s “most recognized use in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages.”
I like to imagine that, earlier, Ophelia ran her finger down the ledger of a receipt book, coming across a recipe from antiquity under “Rue (ruta graveolens)”:
A little bit of heaviness lifts, just for a moment, as she closes the book and goes out to the garden.
Please don’t be pregnant, please don’t be pregnant, she prays.
I have been responsible for my fertility since I became sexually active, before Plan B was available over the counter and Abortion on Demand began serving certain states. Unlike the early modern women Ophelia represents, I’ve been able to alter my body’s chemistry. I swallowed hormones at the same time every day. I implanted a device into my arm. I inserted a ring into my vagina. I fought to wrap guys’ dicks up in latex.
When desperate, though, I looked up herbal remedies for fertility control and unplanned pregnancies—much like people who could get pregnant in early modern England.
I swallowed hormones at the same time every day. I implanted a device into my arm. I inserted a ring into my vagina
I am not the first to argue that Ophelia’s reference to rue suggests an intimate knowledge with fertility control and, consequently, premarital sex. There are a few notes and articles on the topic, vehemently contested by scholars who forget that, while characterizing young women in Shakespeare like Ophelia as virginal, Shakespeare himself walked down the aisle when his wife was three months pregnant. My own experiences with “rue,” however—with herbal abortifacients and the feeling of regret and repentance that accompanies them—are why I noticed that Ophelia keeps some rue for herself in Hamlet, of all her flowers. They’re why I noticed she calls it a “herb of grace,” one promising a kind of divine intervention. They’re why I noticed she says she wears her rue “with a difference.” If we read Ophelia’s trajectory in Hamlet as informed by the threat of an unplanned pregnancy, her desperation becomes more palpable, her flowers more resonant.
Attending to how pregnant people like Ophelia “bring down flowers” in Shakespeare reminds us that people have sought early and late term abortions across time, and that this search is represented in the most canonical of authors, of texts. These “historical touches across time,” to use medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw’s phrase, offer insight into what abortion might’ve been like in Shakespeare’s day. The desperate, panicked search for information, the dark vials containing the promise of a different life, the communities that harbored and disseminated this knowledge—these touches are particularly important in a post Roe v. Wade world, when pregnant people will be forced to turn to the kinds of remedies available before the medicalization of abortion. What’s more, many of us realize that overturning Roe v. Wade is an attempt to revoke people’s—especially young women’s—control over their desires, their bodies, their futures. Ophelia felt the dangers of this enterprise.
Abortion wasn’t illegal in Shakespeare’s England, like it is in some US states today. Historian Carla Spivack argues that abortion before quickening (when a pregnant person first feels their child move) was not even considered a serious moral crime. Abortion was a threat only to the extent it allowed for, or concealed, illicit sex. Alex Gradwohl argues, however, that the rise of Christianity and church teachings to channel desire through reproductive sex and marriage ended the “moral neutrality” found in classical texts regarding abortion. Still, as a method of fertility control for married women, for example, abortion was not even within the purview of the law.
The options for early modern people fearful of an unplanned pregnancy were limited, as they had no access to medical or surgical abortion. In one of the few explicit references to abortion we have from the period, Christopher Marlowe—one of Shakespeare’s rival dramatists—lists off different methods to end a pregnancy in his Elegies 13 and 14 (c.1600). In these poems, the speaker’s beloved, Corinna, “rashly” casts out “her womb’s burden.” “Why with hid irons are your bowels torn? / And why dire poison give you babes unborn?,” the speaker asks, outlining two options to do so. The “hid irons” tearing “bowels” conjures more modern images of wires and coat-hangers—the “dire poison” the herbal remedies people used in the case of an unplanned pregnancy.
Abortion was a threat only to the extent it allowed for, or concealed, illicit sex.
Scholar Frances Dolan argues that when pregnant people in early modern England “bravely took control of their own fertility” they depended, predominantly, on “traditional knowledge of the herbs in their garden.” Herbal abortion is now steeped in stigma, as journalist Maya Lewis reports, but until the invention of hormonal birth control in the 1960s, and the increase in surgical abortions after Roe v. Wade in the 1970s, it was as good an option as any to end an unwanted pregnancy. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, a safe, medical abortion was never a guarantee, especially for low-income individuals without clinics in their vicinity. I certainly did not have hundreds of dollars to spend on an abortion in college. Herbal abortifacients promise a cheaper, more accessible alternative, whether they deliver on this promise or kill you in the process. These herbs—rue, black and blue cohosh root, cotton root bark, mugwort, Queen Anne’s lace, pennyroyal—have been used across time and place, before surgical abortion became legal and safe for some of us.
When I found myself fearful of an unplanned pregnancy, I turned to the internet, but early modern people like Ophelia would’ve turned to receipt books, household books that held medical and cookery recipes, for ways to “bring down the flowers.” In Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene(1609), for example, a young wife asks another whether she has “excellent receipts” to keep herself from bearing children, to which the woman responds, of course she does—how else would she maintain her youth and beauty? “Many births of a woman make her old, as many crops make the earth barren.” As Jonson represents, these recipes were often written by women, passed around within female communities.
As a kind of knowledge production women could participate in and share secrets through, receipt books were threatening to male physicians, who often appropriated knowledge from them for medical texts. Fearful of women having control over their fertility and thus sex lives, physicians like Andrew Boord refused to list certain purgatives in his treatise, The Breviarie of Health (1547), lest any “light woman” willfully use them to induce abortion. Nicholas Culpeper, similarly, admonishes readers in The English Physician or The Complete Herbal (1652), “Give not any of these to any that is with child, lest you turn murderers…willful murder seldom goes unpunished in this world, never in that to come.”
The garden Eucharius Rösslin references in the very title of Der Rosengarten or The Rose Garden (1513), one of the best-selling gynecological manuals of Shakespeare’s time, is a reference to the “Physique” garden in which midwives grew, nurtured, and gathered herbal remedies such as rue. Rösslin chooses to frame this medical text with a (terrible) poem—a ballad entitled “Admonition to Pregnant Women and Midwives.” The poem knits the pregnant female body with the rose garden, ending with the promised “admonition”: “Such roses which your hands do take / Will come in time before God’s face.” These shrill warnings demonstrate that pregnant people taking their fertility into their own hands using herbs and plants was common practice, despite physicians’ attempts to obscure and police this knowledge.
Receipt books were threatening to male physicians, who often appropriated knowledge from them for medical texts.
In an interview with me, doula and herbalist Chelsea Wall of Black South Apothecary described male physicians’ appropriation of this kind of gynecological knowledge as devastating for patients’ autonomy and a more nuanced understanding of herbs’ relationship to fertility control. Wall had a “constellation of concerns” as an herbalist in a post Roe v. Wade America. From botched and incomplete herbal abortions to the shortage of—even criminalization of—herbs used for other ailments, such as mugwort, to the continued stoking of fears and misinformation about herbalism “planted by history, nurtured by the medical industrial complex.” But Wall was especially concerned with how herbalism continues to be discussed without nuance, either discredited or romanticized. While she unilaterally asserts that “medical abortion is still the best option available” to pregnant people looking for an abortion, Wall lamented the “compartmentalized world view” that makes it difficult for us to accept herbalism at its best, as a set of holistic practices that span history, geographical space, and practitioners who value their patients’ autonomy.
In Shakespeare’s plays, herb-women, hothouse managers, and angry mothers offer a glimpse of what role herbalists like Wall might’ve played in early modern England, those well versed in herbal medicine who valued pregnant people’s autonomy. In Shakespeare, herbalists act as foils to masculine rule—a burgeoning medical industrial complex and misogynist visions of chastity. These female communities have agency over young women’s sexuality that men struggle to match. In Pericles, for example, Shakespeare introduces audiences to a “herb-woman” who runs a brothel, a professional whom a male character says, “sets seeds and roots of shame and iniquity.” This woman is named by Shakespeare for her expertise, a particular way of managing sexually active women. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare goes as far to name a character, an executioner, “Abhorson” and, as scholar Mario DiGangi persuasively argues, the pregnant character Mistress Elbow’s presence in a brothel that doubles as a bathhouse is especially threatening given gynecological manuals’ advice to pregnant people, then and now, to avoid extreme heat as it can cause miscarriage. Shakespeare also makes an explicit reference to abortion in act 4, scene 4 of Richard III, when Richard asks, “Who intercepts me in my expedition,” and the Duchess, his mother, responds, “O, she that might have intercepted thee, / By strangling thee in her accursed womb, / From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done.” These threatening women curse the murderous male children they gave birth to, run brothels and hot houses, and offer alternate avenues away from pregnancy, parenthood, and judgmental male physicians.
Notably, in Hamlet, Ophelia is completely bereft of this kind of community, the kind of community Wall described in her interview with me and that Hannah Matthews writes about in “Abortion Takes a Village, Too,” the “safe and sustainable communities” that “will keep showing up for one another, no matter what.”
In Shakespeare, herbalists act as foils to masculine rule—a burgeoning medical industrial complex
In Hamlet, Ophelia’s rue is tangible, both her sorrow and her flowers—perhaps because her entire character is defined in relationship to her chastity. Audiences watch as Ophelia is discarded by the titular character and desperate, “wedged between senior males” to use Coppélia Kahn’s suggestive phrase—men who ventriloquize her desire and her sex life. Her brother, Laertes, waxes for 34 lines in an early scene on why Ophelia must not “unmask her beauty” nor open her “chaste treasure,” her “buttons” or “bud” to Hamlet. Her father enters shortly thereafter and repeats these admonitions.
Ophelia, to her credit, responds to accusations she is having premarital sex with Hamlet not with assurance and denial, but with complaint of her brother’s hypocrisy: that he not show her the “steep and thorny way to heaven” while he, himself, treads “the primrose path of dalliance.” This wit, her exasperation, here, has been erased over time, in interpretations of her as a delicate, chaste, helpless maiden, paintings of her lily-white body floating dead in flower-filled water, productions that position her as a nonsensical, hysterical subject, an ornament to be pitied. Throughout Hamlet, Ophelia pushes back in subtle ways, suggesting she’s not as “chaste”—in all senses of the word—as her legacy implies.
“To a nunnery go, and quickly too,” Hamlet infamously tells Ophelia—places that housed pregnant maids in early modern England. “Shall I lie in your lap?” he asks her, sexually harassing her during play-within-a-play. Some of the very first words Hamlet speaks about Ophelia in the play are, “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” addressing her as a sexualized mythical figure, one who’ll remember his sins in her prayers.
My own experiences with overbearing authority figures and their hypocritical policing of my desires are how I know how ashamed Ophelia must’ve felt, picking her rue. My own experiences with self-absorbed men, boys like Hamlet—with once-affectionate-suddenly-absent lovers—help me recognize Ophelia’s attempts to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust in the play. They help me recognize her rue, her loneliness, her isolation, her desperation.
Ophelia, to her credit, responds to accusations she is having premarital sex with Hamlet not with assurance and denial, but with complaint of her brother’s hypocrisy
Because of how Ophelia is treated throughout Hamlet, Gertrude’s eventual description of her death—the way Ophelia finally does “bring down the flowers”—is especially devastating. As studies show, adolescent pregnancy is a risk factor for suicide, and though rue is, as a recent medical study by Aref Hoshyari et al. (2014) confirms, an effective abortifacient, it is less effective and far more dangerous than surgical or medical abortion—and can easily end up poisoning a person. The queen tells audiences that Ophelia falls from an “askant” willow tree from which she tried to hang “fantastic garlands.” Her garments, “heavy with drink,” pull Ophelia down to a “muddy death.” When Gertrude describes Ophelia “clambering to hang,…” there is, in this phrase that begins a new line of iambic pentameter, a pause—however brief, enough of a hint that Ophelia might’ve been clambering to hang more than her garlands. Although Gertrude claims Ophelia fell, a Gravedigger later questions Ophelia’s right to a “Christian burial” when she “willfully seeks her own salvation.”
As Marlowe writes in his abortion poems, “tender damsels do it, though with pain; / Oft dies she that her paunch-wrapt child hath slain.” All circumstances considered, it makes sense that there is no future for Ophelia, or any child she might be carrying, in Denmark, in the poisonous, rotting world Shakespeare creates.
I have often thought about Ophelia’s rue and abortion in Shakespeare’s England in the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I’ve been thinking about fear, about feeling entirely out of control while attempting to gain what little control I could over my body. I’ve been thinking about the desperation that comes with having nowhere to turn, the desperation I hear in Ophelia’s mad speech—when she keeps some rue for herself. In a post Roe v. Wade world, these feelings will be more widespread, more palpable.
In one way or another, I’ve managed to plan my pregnancies, plan parenthood, over the course of my life. I can’t speak to the efficacy of any attempt I made with herbs; it was too early to tell what caused the bleeding—and experts warn against these kinds of remedies—but I’ve always found a way out of pregnancy scares. I have yet to find a light relationship to my fertility, however; sometimes it feels like sex is inextricable from fear and anxiety, even if I have far more methods at my disposal than Ophelia did. One thing I know is that, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, my relationship to sex and desire feels heavier. It’s not just that overturning Roe v. Wade will decimate access to safe abortions—it’s that the relationship young people like Ophelia form with desire, sexuality, will be marked by fear.
I know that the urge to make Shakespeare relevant in any given context is why he continues to take up so much undeserved space in our classrooms, theaters, and cultural imagination. This is far from the first article to put Shakespeare in conversation with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. In a recent Hill article titled “Abortion and the Supreme Court: An American Tragedy,” for example, author Joseph Chamie stages the end of Roe v. Wade as a Shakespearean tragedy, the last act to be decided. “If William Shakespeare were alive today,” Chamie writes, “he would likely write a play about abortion rights and the Supreme Court of the United States.” Alternatively, when cast members from a recent production of As You Like It wanted to speak out outside Roe v. Wade, they received an email from university representatives instructing them not to: “We feel unplanned post-show talks on politics will detract from the work you are doing on telling the stories of William Shakespeare,” it read.
I just add to these conversations that, depending on how you read Hamlet, Shakespeare might’ve already written this play—told this story.
One of my favorite stories about my great-uncle, Tío Roy, involves an argument he had with his first wife. (Or maybe she was his second. Or one of his girlfriends. My late tío had a long and interesting life.) Tía Whomever was complaining he spent too much time with his family and away from her—admittedly, we are a closely bound clan, a fact Tío Roy was only too happy to illustrate. “Mira,” he said, “I can’t help it that my family’s like this.” He held his hand up to her face, showing her his fingers pressed tightly together. “Yours? Yours is like this.” He spread his fingers wide as a starfish.
My relatives repeat Tío’s story often; we laugh and mimic the gesture that has since become family canon. But as a writer, I come back to the emotions beneath it. You are like this, but we are like this. The individualism of fingers spread, the unity of them together. Those two concepts, individualism and unity, seep into the fabric of who I am and what I write. And when I wrote The Last Karankawas, my debut novel about a close-knit community of Filipino- and Mexican Americans in Galveston, Texas, those concepts seeped into the form as well. My novel, you see, is made up of short stories. My tío’s hand with those fingers closed tight.
Linked story collection. Novel-in-stories. Story cycle. Mosaic, kaleidoscope, Greek chorus. A book comprised of multiple tales and narrators has almost as many names; I promise you I have heard and probably used them all. (White male) American writers like Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner are often credited with popularizing the form in the twentieth century as a way of depicting places—like Winesburg, Ohio or Yoknapatawpha County—through the collected stories of the people who exist there. Even now, it’s common to see story cycles bound together by a shared place (see: my novel and Galveston). But scholar Sandra Zagarell described the nineteenth-century village sketchbook, a predecessor to the story cycle, as a “narrative of community.” To which I say: hell yes.
Narrative of community makes room for people connected by concepts other than place. Communities like my Filipino and Tejano families, whose connections exist beyond location; or those whose bonds to a place have been disrupted by colonialism or slavery or migration or disaster. What literary form can better depict the ties that bind communities like ours? A single narrator, even an omniscient third-person voice, shows only one fractal of the larger image, or it keeps us at a distance. But individual stories woven and layered—we see the whole picture, we can live within them all. A novel in many voices can show not just a place but a culture, not just a shared setting but a shared history and identity and blood. We can pass down individual tales while also telling a greater one. When my family talks about Tío Roy, we laugh; we spread our fingers wide and close them back again. We weave his story with ours, and speak them both.
Below are seven books with multiple narrators, each carrying the voices of a community of color, and, interestingly enough, each also a debut. Some are called novels, some story collections. Some have chapters or fragments that are clearly and thoroughly linked; others are bound by only the barest, Easter-eggiest thread. But each bursts out of the gate brazenly, beautifully straddling the border between novel and story collection—becoming something neither, and maybe something more.
In Washington’s searing story collection, the obvious link is place: sprawling, frustrating, fascinating Houston, Texas (nothing but love, H-town). Each story is named for a different neighborhood or street—Shepherd, Alief, Peggy Park—but the city’s hold on the book goes deeper than setting. The Houstonians depicted here are diverse, often from marginalized groups: Black or Latinx, immigrants or natives, many identifying as LGBTQ+. Though all from different neighborhoods, they navigate similar struggles with sexuality, identity, family, or circumstance. An immigrant seeking work is taken under the wing of a drug dealer; the residents of an apartment complex witness a love triangle gone wrong; two friends find a chupacabra near Buffalo Bayou. Woven through the book is a linked series that includes the titular story, featuring a young, unnamed gay man, the child of a Black mother and a Latino father, coming of age in the Houston he calls home.
Urban Indians, as the opening prologue of Orange’s extraordinary novel identifies them, are the lifeblood of this book told from alternating characters’ perspectives. The dozen-strong cast includes scrappy Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and her newly sober sister, Jacquie Red Feather; Dene Oxendene, an artist working with a grant to record Native stories; and Tony Loneman, a young man whose life has been defined by fetal alcohol syndrome. Shifting between points of view (from limited third-person to first and even, it seems, to the voice of Orange himself occasionally), the characters weave together in surprising ways. Their lives spiral closer until they converge on the Big Oakland Powwow, and then collide in a startling climax. Through Dene, as well as the multiple-narrator form itself, Orange unflinchingly depicts the ways Native stories have been silenced or lost, and the painstaking effort it takes to bring them back to the spotlight.
Early in the first story of Fajardo-Anstine’s exquisite collection, a character tells his daughter, “Sometimes a person’s unhappiness can make them forget they are a part of something bigger, something like a family, a people, even a tribe.” He is speaking of the girl’s wayward mother, but he could be speaking of many people in these stories, or of the external forces working relentlessly against them. The mythos of the American West—fevered, flawed—looms large over the Colorado setting here, but Fajardo-Anstine’s Latina characters of Indigenous ancestry are survivors, moving forward amidst struggle and loss. An eighth-grade girl watches along with her town as Native artifacts from a nearby site are publicly unearthed; an elderly woman packs up her home after a fatal break-in and reflects on the ebbs and flows of her life; and in the title story, a grieving young woman remembers her magnetic cousin, closer than a sister, the latest casualty in a family beleaguered by violence. That family, the Cordovas, appears repeatedly throughout the book, just one of the intricate ways the women in these stories are bound together.
In eighteenth-century Ghana, beautiful Fante girl Effia marries a British governor and moves into Cape Coast Castle. In the dungeon below Effia’s new home sits her Asante half-sister Esi, a captive awaiting transport as a slave to America. Thus begins Gyasi’s blazing, many-voiced novel, tracking the sisters—unknown to one another—and their respective family lines across two continents and many, many years. The beauty and cruelty of Gyasi’s twin narratives lie in their parallels, the way the individual experiences of Esi and Effia’s descendants serve as warped reflections of each other. The stories we get—snippets of the characters’ lives—are frustratingly short, cut off by violence or staccatoed by circumstance, migration, and politics. Yet Esi and Effia’s lines continue, generation by generation, until they weave together in a present-day chance (or fated) meeting. The connections between the characters go beyond just their shared families. In brief yet rich stories, Gyasi depicts how trauma is passed down over centuries, how struggles and strengths can be inherited.
The sudden disappearance of José Victoriano Arteaga—patriarch of a wealthy Mexico City family—is the catalyst for his family’s fracturing in Ruiz-Camacho’s electric linked collection. After horrific clues emerge about José Victoriano’s fate, the Arteagas scatter across the globe. Each story examines the ripples of that incident from a different angle, whether it is Arteaga’s grandson learning to swim and bear the new weight of grief in Palo Alto, California; his mistress, anxious and left behind in Mexico, forced to reach out to the Arteagas for news; or his son, a new father himself, wandering the streets of Madrid with his sick dog. Ruiz-Camacho plays with voice and time, as well as setting, in each story, moving around the world and across the branches of this uprooted family tree. Buoyed by their privilege yet isolated all the same, the scattered Arteagas’ unity lies in their shared unraveling, how their father’s loss defines the new lives they must build without him.
Perhaps Hero de Vera is the protagonist of Castillo’s unflinching yet tender first novel, the saga of a Filipino family forming new roots in the United States—if so, it’s simply because we spend the most time with her. The close third-person voice carries us along with thirty-something, disillusioned Hero for the majority of the book; we watch as she adjusts to Bay Area life, slips into the role of caretaker for her precocious young cousin Roni, and dodges questions and memories of her recent past in the political tumult of the 1990s-era Philippines. But two crucial segments secure this book in multiple-narrator territory, and both are in the second person. In the prologue, we learn the untold story of Hero’s aunt Paz, a feisty Pangasinense woman whose years with the de Veras and in America have sapped her spirit. (“You’ve been foreign all your life,” the narrator says of Paz, the you. “When you finally leave, all you’re hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.”) And the second-person voice appears once again in a later section, this time whispering the inner thoughts of Hero’s girlfriend, Rosalyn. Even the title—a riff on Filipino native son Carlos Bulosan’s foundational 1946 text, America Is in the Heart—situates Castillo’s narrative as part of something larger, a striking and singular note in an ongoing song.
“Jeanette, tell me that you want to live,” Carmen begs her daughter, who is crumbling under addiction, in the opening sentence of Garcia’s hypnotic novel. They are just two of the titular women whose lives are shaped by migration and displacement, trauma and loss. In fractured vignettes that span from nineteenth-century Cuban cigar-rolling factories to an ICE detention center in Texas, Garcia moves back and forth in time between Carmen and Jeanette, as well as three generations prior, to Carmen’s homeland of Cuba. Garcia also ties their matrilineal family to another mother-daughter pair in Miami, immigrants from El Salvador whose lives will be inextricably bound to Carmen and Jeanette in ways they can’t foresee. Deftly moving across space and timelines, Garcia depicts her characters’ complicated lives from their own perspectives as well as those of their mothers and/or daughters; she spotlights the many stories lived by Latina women, the histories spoken and the many left unsaid.
Initial Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment
At the unemployment office, we all wear heavy coats or grip them to our chests as though we’ve been instructed not to lose them. I got an email, I explain to the security guard, referencing a letter I never received. The appointment is mandatory, I tell him. The place, painted a sick green, makes me think of a hospital ward—the uniformed guards awaiting a sign like orderlies attending the newly recovered or the ones who will not be discharged. Mandatory? asks the guard.
Down the hall, past the bulletin board, a woman sits at a low desk behind a high counter.People wait in line to hand her their forms, which she assaults with a rubber stamp. Whatever else happens in this building, I believe, she is the one to authorize it. The woman gives me a form to fill out. I reach for a pen and find a tear in the lining of my coat pocket, like a worry I’d forgotten was there.
In the waiting room is a woman in a knit cap, cradling a clipboard. She wants to know whether we have the same form. Supplemental Questionnaire, I read. Additional Information in order to determine Program Eligibility. There’s a list of questions and a series of boxes: Yes, No. Check all that apply. TANF, SNAP, GA, RCA, SSI, SSDI, exhausting TANF within two years. The answers, the form says, are voluntary.
The woman has never heard of TANF, she tells me. Her whole arm disappears inside her purse while she looks for a pen. She was supposed to come last week, but she couldn’t, she says, because of her cat. She believes he heard her voice at the end, because she saw him move his mouth. Just slightly, she says. You know hearing is the last thing to go?
Someone enters the waiting room and tells us to follow her. We’re to finish filling out the forms at a table. There are others seated in this room and the sound of sniffling. There are more questions on the back of the form. Are you a Displaced Homemaker? Do you lack basic skills? I put down all shifts.
The woman returns with a man, who picks up our papers and hands out packets. She tells us we’re here because we’ve been randomly selected. There’s not a specific reason for it, she says.
She wants us to know about the resources they provide, such as free workshops for dealing with job loss. I try to think whether the term applies, like the loss of a pen from a torn coat pocket or the woman’s cat—lost!—or a child. I write down less than eleven or no larger than sixteen but I don’t catch what this refers to. Then the woman describes a program called SEAP.
In fact, I was fired. Someone from HR took me into a room and closed the door. The woman adopted a mournful expression as she talked about becoming a leaner, more efficient organization. This was a place that employed dozens, maybe hundreds of people, and I was flattered to think I’d been singled out.
Your New York number, the woman says now, which is important, I guess. She’s going to show us how to fill out the next form and the first thing she explains is the date. There’s a place to list your activities each week. You have to do three. A man on the other side of the table, drumming the air with a pencil and sniffling, says, This is every week? Every little question, says the woman, is in the handbook. Will the handbook be provided? wonders the woman in the knit cap.
These city agencies are all the same. The rooms hum with a hidden logic, the scrubbed floors and drop-ceilings only the visible signs of a far-reaching purpose. You stand in line or you sit in sticky vinyl seats, waiting for someone to call your name, waiting for someone else to find you in the system—the system, its distant, gleaming points of data like a gnostic cosmogony. I have a talent for this sort of waiting.
Years ago, I remember, I took some paperwork to the courthouse, where I went through a metal detector and up to the sixth floor, through one or maybe two intake windows. The trip took all day and I had to pay for parking, and I don’t remember now what it was all for, but I do remember the amount: two hundred eighty-three dollars. I wonder whether this is what it’s like to swoon into the arms of God.
When my name is called, I’m led to a cubicle occupied by a woman wearing a lavender shirt, which matches her lumbar pillow. Her computer monitor is propped up by a ream of paper, like her keyboard, which rests on a pack of brochures. She wonders whether I have any digital experience. What I want to know is what counts as experience. Swiping? Refreshing the feed? The long slide, at the end of the day, into sudden intimacies with strangers, swallowing their plausible fictions, offering whatever they’re looking for, broadly, online? I think of a number and say, Seven years.
There are other cubicles in this room and others with coats on their laps answering questions about how far they’re willing to travel for work. I see the woman in the knit cap talking to someone while she goes through her purse. I recognize the gesture of digging and digging for something that won’t put an end to the feeling.
She’s found something for me, says the woman in lavender. The job summary includes data metrics and producing regular traffic reports. A clear and likely internal candidate has already been identified, it says.
The woman prints out another form for me to sign. There are two of these forms—they’re the same; sign twice—that list Work Search Preparation Activities and Work Search Activities, along with Additional Next Steps. Do I have to apply for this job? I ask. If you do three things each week, she says, you’re good.
Now the woman in the knit cap across the room is standing to leave. I think of what she said—how hearing persists beyond consciousness even—and wonder what her voice meant to the dying cat. Dull comfort, maybe. Proof of endurance, like the beating of your own heart. A line dropped below the surface of the animal’s undoing, down through a narrow channel to stir an ancient, inner sea.
The woman hands me back the form. Where I’ve written fifteen, she wants me to put down twenty-five. I tell her that twenty-five isn’t true, but she says on the paperwork you have to comply.
Is it true, I ask, that I was randomly selected to come here today? What about the people who weren’t selected? The woman in lavender can’t say. Many will be chosen, she says.
I remember a room where I waited once at a place called The Healing Project. The walls curved like the shell of an egg, and the man at the front wore white. He began by talking about taking a bath. He told us to put our hand on the center of our chest and inquired, What is your heart telling you? Then we drew large circles in the air with our arms. The arms are an extension of the heart, he said. I pictured my arms beating the air like wings that hinged from my chest. Thirty more seconds, he said. By then my arms were trembling and my shoulders felt like stone slabs. Ask your heart, the man said. I beat my arms in the air with the others seated cross-legged on the floor. I asked my heart, and what it told me was about tremendous loss.
The novel Perpetual West explores how hiding our secret, most authentic selves from those we love can plunge us into a world of loneliness and precariousness. A young married couple, Alex and Elana, move to El Paso from West Virginia, neither of them quite knowing what selves they carry within. Alex, adopted from Mexico by Christian missionaries, crosses the border into Juárez, the city of his birth, to “be etched into a more precise version of himself,” and where he ultimately meets lucha libre wrestler Mateo. It may not be love, but the heat between the two men is undeniable, and the lifeblood of the novel. It is also the source of its danger, as Mateo is targeted by Neto, the nephew of the Juárez cartel who, at any cost, intends to conscript Mateo for his roster. After Alex disappears, Elana, awake to the human tendency to hold on too tightly or too loosely, comes home to find the bed as she left it, pajamas strewn. It’s obvious her husband hasn’t slept home one night since she left. Maren’s carefully placed artifacts—pajamas, a knife, an untouched hamburger—suggest not only that we hide in plain sight, but that on a long enough timeline, that sequestered self will emerge.
Lucha, like marriage, is both real and fake, entertainment and political theater. Lucha declares that “Every type of manhood is a stunt,” and watching Mateo fall in love with the sport in Juárez, despite the growing threats he faces, is one of the novel’s most vivid strains. While lucha is informed by American wrestling, it maintains distinct regional traditions; exoticos, for instance, engage in genre bending, and the rural north is desperate for a hero. The novel, in its exploration of the sub-culture, is critical of consumerist culture even as it acknowledges disparities in wealth that extend beyond the U.S. border and the ensuing human impulse for possessions, luxury, comfort (“I eat at McDonalds,” Mateo tells us, “I’m friends with cops”).
Deeply erotic, necessarily violent at times, constantly grappling with the political and moral stakes of the U.S.-Mexico border, Perpetual West argues indifference might be a kind of cruelty, but love is willful recognition.
Annie Liontas: I’m always curious about how secrets operate in a marriage or union, and I think you are, too. In Perpetual West, we see both Alex and Elana suffering, but separately and in isolation. Of course, the novel is interrogating how they withhold core pieces of themselves. But they’re even dishonest about small stuff—for instance, they both smoke, but each keeps that fact from the other. How do the little omissions create the life lie?
Mesha Maren: That was specifically one of the things that realized: I was the in-between, I knew what they were both doing. They were both telling me that they were smoking but not telling the other. That’s not even something you really need to hide!
What I became really interested in is the dishonesty between these characters. I was thinking a lot about when young people enter into a very intense relationship and don’t actually have a full sense of who they are yet—the kinds of pressures they put on themselves. It can be true of us at any stage in our life, but I think particularly when we’re in our early 20s, it’s worse. I was so hard on myself back then. I didn’t really know myself that well, but I thought I should. I would construct all kinds of artificial rules, and then break them and then have conversations with myself about it. Elana and Alex put more pressure on themselves than they do on each other, but they think the other is doing it. Elana thinks that Alex would be upset if she decided she’s not going to focus on school because in her mind that’s been the glue for their relationship. And, likewise, it wouldn’t be an easy conversation, but I think Alex could have a conversation about his sexuality with Elana, but he’s harder on himself than she probably would ever be.
AL: So what mask does Alex wear?
MM: When we meet him, he says—somewhat to himself, but definitely to everyone around him—that he has shed his upbringing more than he actually has. He acts as if he’s moved past his very religious upbringing and has this new identity that he found in college, but I think he hasn’t actually done the work to know himself quite as well as he pretends. He wears a mask of someone who’s got it together. He excels in school and he doesn’t want to engage with the fact that he was quite damaged by certain aspects of his upbringing. He wears a mask of being in a good place.
AL:Tell us about lucha libre. How is lucha a national conversation about power and corruption even as it is a form of sport and entertainment for the culture?
MM: I’ve always been interested in professional wrestling. I went to a couple of really small professional wrestling events in my hometown in West Virginia when I was growing up and then didn’t engage with it a whole lot until I turned 21 and moved to the border. I had moved there to be near a woman who I was falling in love with. She ended up leaving me for a professional wrestler.
On a surface level there’s similarities between small-time U.S. professional wrestling andlucha libre. But I think the difference is the way that the culture embraces it. What I saw in Juárez and later when I was doing research in Mexico City was that it can be so many different things for different people. It’s a national sport, but it is also theatrical. You’ll go to a small event and there will be women in their eighties, babies, people from every background there. It really is this cathartic space for people: they can shout at the bad guys, they can cheer the good guys. They can let their voices and bodies be big and loud in a way that might not be allowed for in other spaces. And the referee plays this weird role, always on the side of the bad guy but pretending he’s not.
I started to see all these parallels to political movements in Mexico and also in the U.S. Here was a way for people to engage with corruption and the faces that politicians put forward. That might be hard to do when you were literally talking about politics, but when you talked about it in terms of lucha libre, the conversations could be had. I would argue there’s a certain amount of theatrical queerness to it, too. There are the exoticos, who openly embrace that aspect more than other wrestlers. There was a period of time, probably in, the ’50s and ’60s, and maybe early ’70s, where the exoticoswere more of a homophobic joke, where the audience was kind of laughing at the idea of feminine men. But I think that’s shifting. There are a lot more exoticos who are out in their day-to-day life, and who are using it as a tool to celebrate.
AL: Both Alex and Mateo feel connected to Juárez. Mateo explains that you’re either born into it, or you’re chosen by it. What do you think it is about Juárez that calls to them? Do you have such ties to a place?
MM: Part of what draws people to the city has to do with it being a border space, a liminal space. It’s a space of possibility, but it’s also a space people are often told that they shouldn’t love, that it’s just a space to take things away from. After NAFTA in 1994, multinational corporations came in and said, oh this is a great space to build factories and find cheap labor but it’s not a space for the people who owned those companies to spend time. It’s not thought of as a space of culture. And so people who do grow up in Juárez, or who adopt the city or are adopted by the city and spend time in it, always come up against this question of, why do you love it? Being forced to grapple with that makes people love it more.
If I’m going to engage with a culture that I did not grow up in… then I have to be aware and very active in my empathy.
When I moved down there, I was living mostly on the El Paso side but spending a lot of time in Juárez. I expected it to feel totally foreign to me, and it did in certain ways. I mean the landscape was very, very different from Appalachia. And I was still learning Spanish. There were these surface-level differences, but pretty quickly I saw something at the core of this place. The best answer that I’ve come up with is that it’s hard to love, but there is something very unique about it. That feels like West Virginia to me, too—a place where a lot has been extracted, a place you’re supposed to exit from.
AL: You describe the US-Mexico border as a “moral stopping point.” What are the inherent complications of writing about Mexico as a United States citizen? What did writing this book allow you to confront in American culture and how we perceive that kind of liminal space?
MM: Even now I have a lot of questions about whether or not it was something I should even do, and how to go about writing about Mexico and Mexican characters in a way that feels right. At first, I was just going to write it from Elana’s point of view because I felt like I had more authority to write from her perspective, but her story wasn’t the only story that I wanted to tell. I kept coming back to the time that I spent in Mexico, how I was the age that Alex and Elana roughly are. Being there really opened up for me the terrible ways in which the U.S. treats Mexico and treats immigrants. But also there was something more complicated than that. There’s this way in which the communities on both side of the border are knitted together that I wasn’t aware of. I wanted to figure out how to write into that space of new awareness that opened up in me.
I read “Back to Empathy,” an essay by Kwame Dawes where he talks about empathy and imagination. And I started to think about empathy as a muscle. Like, all right, if I’m going to engage with a culture that I did not grow up in and in an area where that I came to and spent some time in but that I do not claim, then I have to be aware and very active in my empathy. And when I decided to write it from three different characters’ points-of-view, some things started to open up in my mind.
AL:We see Elana similarly concerned with bodies. She consumes books and denies herself food. She hides her anorexia, just as Alex hides his queerness. Throughout the novel, Elana grapples with a lineage of women who are at times seen to be weak in their acts of denial and self-sacrifice, while at other times their declarations are viewed as acts of radical protest. In this framework, how can we understand Elana’s relationship to her body?
[The lucha libre show] is this cathartic space for people: they can shout at the bad guys, they can cheer the good guys.
MM: At a certain point, earlier in the process, my editor was really craving more of an arc where Elana would be cured or an ending where she was no longer struggling with anorexia. I didn’t feel like that would be true for her. Her relationship to her body has to do with who is close to her and who is not—her father and Alex, but also, her mother who is not there. She’s never really allowed herself to work through her emotions with her mother, and she has some anger towards her. Looking at women’s extreme relationships to their bodies as being radical is a way of beginning to engage with the questions around her mother’s own choices with her body. She can’t, at the point when we’re spending time with her in the novel, come at that head on. She struggles to think directly about her own body, but she likes to look at other historical figures or writers or artists and their relationships to their bodies, and I think that really probably is part of her healing.
AL: Do you have a favorite lucha libre wrestler?
MM: I actually reconnected with the wrestler who stole my girlfriend all those years ago. His name is Pagano, the Pagan. He’s an incredible wrestler and he’s also just a really wonderful human being and was very generous in allowing me to interview him and spend time with him as I was working on this book. So in a personal way, but also a sportsman kind of way, he’s really fun to watch.
My third novel, The Force of Such Beauty, follows a retired athlete who marries a prince—a Common Princess, in the parlance of the quiz. Over the almost five years that I spent drafting it, I read dozens of princess stories for research, from sensationalist unauthorized biographies of real-life women like Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles to the classic short tales analyzed in the seminal The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man by Swiss literary theorist Max Lüthi. When I was asked to share what I’d gleaned about the harm these stories might do to women, the answer was simple—one long series of trick questions. What princess stories ultimately offer is the lie that princesses have choices, when really, they have none. Castles might look like luxury hotels, but in truth, they are impenetrable prisons designed to protect the State above all else. Princesses, bound to lives that prioritize only their reproductive labor, are their most glorious prisoners.
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.
