Being interested in celebrity is not something most people like to admit. It’s a waste of time! Crass! Anti-intellectual, even, to be so invested in the lives of people you’ll never meet.But the thing is, as anyone who has clandestinely scrolled down the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame or taken a cursory interest in Taylor Swift’s romantic life will tell you, fame—real fame, the kind that we all implicitly recognize but very few possess—is fascinating.
For my part, I’ve had an almost morbid curiosity about fame for as long as I can remember: As a child growing up in the 00s, I would take every chance I could to catch up on what was going on in the public lives of the rich and glamorous. I did my best to hide my guilty pleasure, but I still whiled away more hours than I could count refreshing gossip blogs and leafing through tabloids. As I got older, that interest morphed into something more critical, and I started to think more deeply about the relationship between us (the general public), them (famous people), and the strange, quixotic social contract we all cosign that keeps them on their pedestals—or in their gilded cages, depending on which way you look at it. And believe me: I’ve looked at it every which way. Ultimately, it’s what led me to write my debut novel, I Make My Own Fun, a satirical examination of celebrity culture and obsession. I wanted to unpick fame as a cultural phenomenon and see what might happen when stratospheric, excessive fame goes unchecked. How might society bend to keep someone famous? What privileges does that level of celebrity really afford someone? And what might they get away with?
That desire to understand fame and the ways we all participate in it has also informed my reading choices over the years. I’m a wide reader—I like everything from searing social commentary to delicious beach reads and plenty in between, but one of the unifying traits among the books that stay with me is a character that feels like they’re spilling out and over the pages, brimming with complexity, or charm, or intensity. Naturally, books about famous people—fictional or otherwise—tend to have this in spades, and I’ll keep coming back to them over and over.
It’s not possible to make a list of this kind and leave out Taylor Jenkins Reid. I had my pick—complex famous women are TJR’s specialty—but I had to go with Evelyn Hugo because the eponymous protagonist has that seismic, dial-shifting fame that is so difficult to capture. The book follows Evelyn Hugo, an elusive, Elizabeth Taylor-eqsue actor, as she opens up for the first time about her rise to fame, her decades in the spotlight, and her infamous seven marriages. This is the book you take on holiday and delay pre-dinner drinks to finish reading: It’s propulsive, emotionally absorbing, and oozing with old-Hollywood delights.
Mariah Carey knows she’s a character, and the title of her memoir conveys a heavy wink to camera. But The Meaning of Mariah Carey is as much a meditation on how she became the Mariah we know today—she admits in the book that she didn’t feel like “her life” would begin until she had a record deal—as it is a study of the sheer resilience needed to get there. Working with the writer Micheala Angela Davis, Mariah takes us through her difficult (often traumatic) childhood, the experience of growing up mixed race in 1970s America, and her emotionally abusive marriage to Tommy Mottola (it’s hard not to see the parallels of that relationship, where she was monitored via cameras constantly, and the height of her fame). It is not at all what you might expect from a celebrity memoir, veering away from gossip and closer to deep self-excavation.
Philippa Snow writes about fame as an art form, and when I first discovered her work, it felt electric. Here was someone writing with such intelligence, such clarity of thought, and infinite wit about things that until that point I’d felt a lingering embarrassment for being interested in. From Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith to Elizabeth Taylor and Lindsay Lohan, the book looks at famous women whose lives mirror each other in some way or another as a vehicle for examining fame, femininity, and the complex relationship between the two. It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me is a biting exploration of fame as performance, whose excellent title is taken directly from something Anna Nicole Smith said in court. Fabulous!
Wuthering Heights meets Ice Princess. Need I say more? In all seriousness, I was wildly entertained by this novel. Following competitive figure skater Katarina Shaw and her childhood sweetheart-turned skating partner Heath Rocha on their dramatic, often scandalous road to the Olympics, it’s a tale of love, ambition, and notoriety. It asks whether it’s possible to have one without sacrificing the others. What this book does well—alongside making reading about figure skating feel like watching it (no mean feat)—is showcase just how many people are involved in making—and keeping—somebody famous. It offers as much a peek behind the fame machine as it does the world of Olympians, and I gobbled it up in one sitting.
Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were two of the most celebrated chroniclers of twentieth century life, including Hollywood and high society. They were also, to use common parlance, frenemies of the highest order. Or were they? Set against a backdrop of LA in the 60s and 70s, Anolik’s biography of the relationship between these two women is wonderfully gossipy. So be warned: If you are someone who believes themselves above gossip, it’s not for you. Anolik herself and her loyalty to Babitz (whom she has written about many times) are also very present in the text—but if you enjoy dipping your toes into the murky waters of second and indeed third-hand tea, then you will have a great time with Didion & Babitz.
As an adopted North Londoner (I moved to this city at 18), I’m a long-time Zadie Smith fan. I love how perfectly she paints my city in all its grey glory, which often serves as the backdrop to her novels, including Swing Time, which moves from London to New York to West Africa in a sweeping, intricate story of friendship, talent, and privilege. The central relationship is between our unnamed narrator and her childhood best friend Tracey, both dancers desperate to use their love of music to leave their neighborhood. But it’s the figure of Aimee, the enormously famous pop star who becomes our narrator’s ticket out of her housing estate, that serves as an excellent commentary on contemporary celebrity and the often posturing philanthropism that come with it.
If you followed the rise and fall of Anna Delvey, German-farm-girl-turned-European-art-magnate-turned-imprisoned-scam-artist (whew!) then you will devour this book. The Most Famous Girl in the World is about Rose Aslani, a first-gen Middle Eastern American journalist who writes an article that breaks the internet, revealing socialite Poppy Hastings to be a scammer. A pace-y, satirical skewering of a very 2020s type of celebrity, this is a mixed-media joyride of a book about society’s fixation on fame and the lengths people will go to get to the top—and tear someone back down.
Emily Henry is the reigning queen of the beach read (she even wrote a book called Beach Read). Often, her novels are about writers falling in and out (and in again) of love with each other, and Great Big Beautiful Life is no exception. But it’s the story within the story that makes this novel a welcome addition to the “books about fame” canon. Two writers are brought together to compete for the commission of the biography of Margaret Ives, the reclusive scion of a great American entertainment dynasty. Think the Coppolas and then magnify them. This is at once a sweet romance and a juicy, emotive story of the highs and lows of a life lived entirely in public view and the complicated baggage we inherit from our families, and yes—I read it on a beach, and it was perfect.
Nonfiction is a strange term, isn’t it? Defined through fiction’s absence, the label offers denial rather than affirmation: What you’re about to read is not false. Yet is it true? According to whom? How do they know?
No universal answers exist for nonfiction—the genre is too sprawling, too catch-all—but examining how individual books answer these questions can reveal hidden patterns. In the case of three recent books, the answers suggest the emergence of a new micro-genre—one where the author explicitly narrates how and why they come by the truths they’re claiming.
Earlier this year, I raced through Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, preferring that slightly girlish, jewel-tone tome to all others on my nightstand. I thought: I haven’t been this enraptured since Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. Then a month later, I came across Why Fish Don’t Existby Lulu Miller and binged it with the same voracious energy.
At first glance, my enthusiastic reaction seemed like the only thing these books had in common. Published over a span of five years—Miller’s Why Fish in 2020, Klein’s Doppelganger in 2023, and Romney’s JAB in 2025—they cover vastly different terrain. Why Fish follows ichthyologist David Starr Jordan through science and disaster. Doppelganger traces a cultural history of doubles. JAB recovers the women who influenced Austen’s fiction. I often start nonfiction with interest, only to feel overfed midway through, stuffed with so many names, dates, and details that I’ve lost my appetite. So the fact that I devoured these three gnawed at me. That gnawing turned into an inquiry: Why were these different? I put them side-by-side, and it hit me: These books aren’t just about forgotten women writers, or cultural doubles, or ichthyology. They’re about the authors’ obsessive journeys into these subjects—journeys launched not from expertise, not even curiosity, but something rarer: a sense of necessity. An instinct that if they can understand this sliver of the world, they might understand themselves.
Each book opens with a personal rupture that sends the author searching for explanations. For Miller, the end of a relationship plunges her into a depression so deep she questions the point of living. In that state, she latches onto the story of a nineteenth-century ichthyologist who rebuilt his fish collection again and again—first, after it was destroyed by fire, then by earthquake. His near-maniacal persistence draws Miller like a beacon, igniting Why Fish’s study on resilience, obsession, and the peril of mistaking drive for moral principle.
Naomi Klein’s rupture is stranger: Years of being confused for the feminist intellectual Naomi Wolf—the “Other Naomi”—devolves into a crisis when Wolf morphs into a MAGA firebrand and Klein begins to receive vitriolic attacks for the “Other Naomi’s” views. In Doppelganger, Klein takes this uncanny doubling as an entry point into a wide-ranging intellectual and cultural investigation of mirrors, shadows, and evil-twin tropes, providing a lens through which Klein probes her own disintegrating identity.
Authority has become less like a marble statue and more like a quilt—provisional, hand-stitched, showing its seams.
Rebecca Romney’s crisis arrives when she encounters a rare Frances Burney volume while appraising a client’s book collection. This spurs the uncomfortable realization that, as a reader, she had reflexively dismissed Burney, along with every other woman writer of Austen’s day. Romney’s reckoning with her own bias propels Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, which, in the course of profiling eight forgotten women writers, probes bigger questions: How did the canon come to elevate just one woman, and how did a feminist like Romney come to accept that winnowing without pause?
Page by page, the books stitch knowledge together from fragments and claim authority through process rather than credentials. There’s a muscly physicality to them; we see not just what the authors uncover but how they uncover it. This is one way nonfiction can cohere: not through a particular subject or discipline, but by showing the reader how truth takes shape.
Research, the accumulation of minutiae, the tap-tap-tap of search queries, form the arcs of these books. The investigations play out in libraries and on laptops. Reversals occur. We sit alongside the authors as they learn their starting expectations were naive, their subjects more elusive than they’d seemed. These are, unexpectedly, detective stories that unfold through primary sources and marginalia. The authors lean into this conceit to varying degrees: JAB features an explicit Sherlock Holmes allegory; all three dangle clues and cliffhangers.
This straddling of memoir, cultural criticism, and detective narrative means these books don’t neatly fit any existing genre. All emerge from an author’s need to make sense of something that won’t stop tugging at her mind. The writer burrows into her obsession like a miner chasing a vein of ore. These shared characteristics are so distinctive that I see the works forming a cohesive group, a micro-genre I’m calling the Obsessive Investigation, in which the author’s intellectual inquiry supplies the book’s structural engine. The pursuit is the story.
This micro-genre is defined not by its glittering surface but by its undercurrent: the deep tow of the author’s inquiry; their need to know and the idiosyncratic research that follows, which itself pushes plot and insight. In the Obsessive Investigations, we see forces that usually stay hidden. Most research-heavy nonfiction conceals the personal circumstances that drove the author to write—the breakup, the identity crisis, the chance encounter that couldn’t be dismissed. We don’t learn what’s happening in the author’s life while they write, even though it inevitably shapes what they see and how they see it. But in these books, those forces are laid bare. This is what distinguishes these works from traditional nonfiction—their willingness to show the author’s subjectivity from the start, and how that subjectivity drives them through facts and source materials to reach particular insights. We have front-row seats to a mind in motion.
This micro-genre’s emergence belongs to a larger cultural shift. As a society, we’ve turned away from institutional expertise in favor of loosely networked, first-person nodes of influence. Authority has become less like a marble statue and more like a quilt—provisional, hand-stitched, showing its seams. The Obsessive Investigation books sit squarely inside this shift. They don’t deliver meaning from on high; they show meaning getting made.
Scroll through your social media feed of choice and you’ll see the ripples: confessional-style #booktok reviews (“This book broke me!”) with the viral power that traditional reviews lack; parents posting child-rearing wisdom learned in real time to thousands of followers; homeowners sharing DIY renovations that spark new design trends. These are ordinary people building authority through doing, redistributing their ground-up expertise through networks that demand no credentials.
Today’s influencers preach and prove a do-it-yourself approach to nearly everything. Including, more recently, intellectual pursuits. Substack, the newsletter platform where long-form writers bypass editorial gatekeepers to build audiences directly, lends itself to this: Take a stroll, and you’ll encounter countless articles on how to research, how to take notes, how to read Great Books, how to self-study intellectual disciplines like art history and philosophy. The generically-named Sarah’s Substack, which typically earns three hundred likes or fewer per post, racked up 22,000 likes over the summer for “How to Start Researching as a Hobby.”
Like those Substackers, the Obsessive Investigation authors are laypeople forging their own paths. Klein and Miller are journalists, yes, but these aren’t reported books synthesizing expert interviews. They’re original inquiries built on trial-and-error, persistence, and hard work. Implicit is the notion that there is no magic to it. Any of us might undertake our own version of the obsessive investigation, if we can muster the motivation and grit.
The Obsessive Investigation books don’t deliver meaning from on high; they show meaning getting made.
Which is not to detract from their accomplishment: These authors have made intellectual inquiries surprisingly readable. I, a serial did-not-finisher, found myself reaching the acknowledgements the honest way: by simply reading all the pages that came before. With alchemical grace, each writer turns mundane research into narrative gold—scouring digital archives, chasing footnotes, finding hidden links. The dangling promise of an insight just around the corner gives these “nonfictions” the propulsive quality of detective work. In JAB, for instance, Romney points out questions that surface as she delves into forgotten writers’ lives and then cuts away, building intrigue and momentum. In Doppelganger, Klein punctuates the tale of Naomi Wolf’s political transformation with anxious reflections from her own life that expose their intertwined unraveling. Why Fish, the most lyrical of the three, drizzles unsettling imagery over the opening chapters, hinting that beneath the plucky, wholesome story of Jordan’s scientific achievements, all is not as it seems. Line by line, the authors let us trail their thinking, reinforcing the sense that we’re intimate witnesses—Watsons, even—to each discovery.
Central to the Obsessive Investigation is the assumption that these authors, none formally trained in their subject, can undertake intellectual inquiries on their own terms. Miller wades through Jordan’s writings—“more than fifty books, all told, and hundreds of other texts”—to find the pattern of his resilience; Klein traces doppelganger motifs through folklore and film; and Romney pores over 18th-century literary reviews. Each writer charts their own syllabus in pursuit of insight. History, literature, and culture become intellectual commons—open territory that anyone with curiosity and initiative can explore and interpret independently, drawing conclusions without prior authorization.
In claiming this intellectual territory, these writers also claim visibility for themselves. Their self-directed research is the story, with the author-as-investigator anchoring the narrative. This approach has roots in works by Susan Orlean and John McPhee, who feature as the narrators of books like 1998’s The Orchid Thief and 1990’s Looking for a Ship. Orlean and McPhee, in turn, refined 1960s New Journalism, which broke with past tradition by foregrounding the journalist’s presence. But whereas Orlean, McPhee, and New Journalists like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe immersed themselves in the social worlds they chronicled, these Obsessive Investigations retreat inward. Their fieldwork takes place in archives and in their own minds; their discoveries are mediated through text and thought rather than personal encounter.
Elif Batuman’s 2010 essay collection, The Possessed, is closer kin. In the essays, Batuman dramatizes her Stanford graduate research on Russian literature. “I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected,” Batuman writes of her obsessions with Babel, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, anticipating the investigative compulsion that Romney, Miller, and Klein would report in their books. But The Possessed diverges in fundamental ways: Batuman, with her PhD credentials, investigated her literary heroes from within the academy’s exclusive tower. And rather than beginning with a personal rupture that demands investigation, she starts with a clear agenda: to reclaim literary criticism for people who love to read, which she does through explorations of the lives of the Russian writers she reveres alongside their works. Yet what makes The Possessed worth considering here is Batuman’s insistence that author biography matters to literary meaning—Elena Ferrante be damned. And not just the life stories of Russian writers, but her own, too. She weaves in her fish-out-of-water adolescence as a first-generation Turkish immigrant in New Jersey, the odd jobs she pursued during her lean student years, her crushes and romances—personal anecdotes that somehow all related back to Russian literature and shaped what she saw in the texts. By making her experiences prominent, Batuman shows thatpersonal stakes can deepen rather than compromise intellectual work. It’s the implicit argument of the Klein-Miller-Romney books as well: The author matters.
Tracing what these books share, I keep coming back to the fact that Klein, Miller, and Romney—and Batuman before them—are all women. Maybe it’s just coincidence: A majority of authors and readers in the US these days are reportedly women, and as a woman myself, I might be over-reading. But these books teach us to be alert to the questions that spring to mind, to worry at threads and see where they lead.
I pulled one such thread and discovered this: In the 1980s, feminist theorist Donna Haraway critiqued traditional intellectual discourse that elevates the voices of white men above everyone else. She called it a “god trick”: the suppression of authorial presence, in which a writer’s voice appears to float above the page like an omniscient, unattached observer. At the time, that posture belonged exclusively to white men; they were the only group whose right and authority to speak was taken for granted. Others—women, minorities—had to prove their authority, defending the narrow ground on which they, as situated, earthbound individuals, were permitted to speak. The “godlike” white men spoke for everyone, while the marginalized writers spoke only for themselves.
The “god trick” names a tone that has always bothered me—one I recognized instantly but never had words for. It’s that because-I-said-so voice in the literary criticism I read in college—a tone that brooked no dissent, couldn’t even imagine it. It’s less prevalent now but hasn’t disappeared. A recent Emily Dickinson biographer wrote from on high even as he made wildly subjective judgments, like his observation (in reference to Dickinson’s esteem for a Longfellow poem) that the “quantity of mediocre writing she took seriously can be alarming.” (Passive voice—the preferred style of gods.) I recognized it too in some partners I worked for as a young lawyer, who would never concede any limit to their understanding. If they saw something a certain way, well that was the only way to see it.
Which is perhaps why I devoured Klein, Romney, and Miller. They satisfied an unknown hunger for writing that didn’t talk down to me, that treated me as a peer. Unlike traditional nonfiction, these authors center their subjectivity, reminding us that individual perspective shapes inquiry. They present not the truth but their truth. And by laying bare their motivations, methods, and mediations, they invite us to judge for ourselves. It’s a nourishing shift.
But here’s where it gets complicated. As we increasingly embrace the authority of laypeople who show their work, we can—and should—still value traditional modes of expertise. This is not an either/or proposition. Yet our current moment treats it as such, struggling to make space for both. While Klein, Miller, and Romney represent the empowering aspect of our culture’s shift toward bottom-up knowledge, there is also a darker side, surfacing as a blanket rejection of expertise itself.
Respect for institutions is at an all-time low. What once belonged to experts—diets, medical treatments, even how we should live—has migrated to podcasters and self-styled wellness gurus. At the same time, conspiracy theories once relegated to the margins have gone mainstream, convincing many people that the earth is flat, that elections are rigged, that deadly tragedies are staged “false flags.” While such beliefs can be dismissed by most of us as ludicrous, others hit closer to home. Many of us share a lingering suspicion that we’re being jerked around like pawns, even if we bitterly disagree about who’s doing the jerking and why.
In the midst of this collapse of trust, how could we not shrink inward, grasping for things we can control? The pandemic intensified this instinct, training us to trust only our own tight circles, to retreat into family units or “pods.” We’re still reeling from this loss of orientation, and the result is a crippling inability to calibrate our focus—to triage our anxieties, to separate the trivial from the urgent.
The ‘godlike’ white men spoke for everyone, while the marginalized writers spoke only for themselves.
“It has often struck me,” writes Klein, reflecting on her fixation with her far-right doppelganger Naomi Wolf, “that I am hardly the only one who has turned away from large fears in favor of more manageable obsessions.” She faults herself for writing a book about her doppelganger crisis when there are so many societal ills she might have chosen to confront—the climate crisis looms largest. Yet even self-reproach can’t snap her out of her private labyrinth of doubles back to the broader world.
I’m guilty of the same retreat, though in smaller ways. I’ve all but stopped keeping up with the news. Instead, I bury myself in research projects, digging through past lives and cultural histories—terrain that feels safer, more containable than the sprawling crises of the present. Though this questing isn’t ostensibly about our current anxieties, I have a nagging suspicion that it’s born of a desperation for meaning, for a way to understand this self-destructive species we belong to by working backwards.
That shared urge is what draws me to these books: They, too, reach back into history and culture for answers. Miller investigates Jordan’s obsessive resilience to understand her own depression. Klein traces doppelganger myths to make sense of the “Other Naomi” and our conspiracy-addled moment. Romney excavates forgotten women writers to understand how exclusion becomes canon. Each uses the past as a lens for illuminating the present. This intellectual form of inquiry offers a private retreat—and a semblance of control—in an increasingly arbitrary and untethered world.
Nonfiction has long posed as objective truth while masking an author’s motives and methods as if its contents were inevitable. The Obsessive Investigation offers something more honest: a personal perspective, a mind in motion. Therein lies its power. These books meet a hunger that feels distinctly of our time: to follow thought as it unfolds, to see the forces that shape it, to watch meaning being made instead of delivered. They remind us that truth is not a verdict from on high but a composition shaped by the very act of seeking it.
Writing about mental illness is a strange and unforgiving task. The interior reality of a mind in torment resists easy transcription, and the rhythms of psychiatric suffering are nothing like the tidy arcs editors prefer. The “action” of a panic attack or a suicidal thought is intense, but most of the lived experience lies in tedium, fragmentation, and emptiness. Living within a damaged psyche means enduring long stretches in which nothing happens; mental illness, as I’ve said over and over again, is usually boring. Sickness is mostly a matter of slowly grinding away internally, succumbing to deeper and deeper delusion, with the rare moments of action more likely to be pathetic than dramatic. Treatment, in turn, is a quotidian slog of appointments, med changes, waiting, numbing. Those are the moments that most define what it is to have a failing mind: the mundane moments, the ordinary ones. But because publishing demands drama, most representations of mental illness either overstate the thrills or sanitize away the pain.
In my new novel The Mind Reels, I try instead to carry the dull weight of real, unromanticized suffering, and thus sketch the truth of mental illness without ceding to spectacle. My protagonist Alice’s descent into psychosis is not a gothic exaggeration or spiritual revelation, but something prosaic, deadening, and cruel. My hope is that readers drawn to this list will find a clearer sense of what it means not merely to have a psychiatric disorder but to live with a mind that persists in pain.
The books on this list—some fiction, some memoir, some reportage—are my picks for those rare titles that make a noble attempt at negotiating the gap between interior illness and exterior narrative. They don’t sanitize the disorientation, the self-doubt, the breakdowns that follow breakdowns; they resist turning mental illness into a metaphor or exotic spectacle.
Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 classic is a brief, utterly singular work of imagistic memoir. The book details Kaysen’s 18 months spent in the famous McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility that once treated Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, and a roster of other celebrity patients. Reading Kaysen’s relentlessly evocative prose, which dances back and forth between clinical detachment and unbearable feeling, you immediately understand why Hollywood was desperate to option the book even before its publication. Reflecting on the story, you immediately understand why adapting it was so hard: Nothing really happens. There’s a cohort of fellow patients and nurses and orderlies and doctors, many of whom will be familiar to fans of the movie. But unlike in the movie, there is no dramatic escape, no 1960s iconography, no chilling confrontation in the basement. Instead, we spend the book inside Kaysen’s mind, as she unspools what it’s like to question one’s own sanity in lyric, seductive reveries.
Harrison’s debut novel is a spare, elliptical study of postpartum depression and the pressure women feel to perform composure. The unnamed narrator, a Black photographer married to a white husband, describes her spiraling alienation after a miscarriage with language that feels both photographic and dissociative, focused on light, framing, and absence. The book’s fragmented structure mirrors the way her mind refuses sequence; time loops, memory stutters, and even love feels pixelated. What makes Blue Hour exceptional is, first, its intimate and convincing portrayal of a dissolving mind, and second, its refusal to treat recovery as narrative closure. Depression here isn’t overcome but endured, metabolized into a muted attentiveness. Harrison captures the psychic drag of grief so honestly that even beauty feels anesthetized. And in doing so, she relays both a deeply Black experience and a universal one at the same time.
Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves is not a traditional memoir; it opens with Aviv’s own story, but then becomes a tapestry of case studies, letters, diaries, and poems from people who live in the ambiguities of mental distress. Aviv’s guiding concern is not to tidy up complex stories, but to dwell in the blurry borderland where memory fails, language frays, and the self resists easy definition. She lives in the “psychic hinterlands” of illness, exploring eating disorders, depression, paranoia, and religious fervor, all without offering conventional closure or simple moral lessons. Through her own early anorexia, and her struggle with defining what “really” happened, she shows how narratives are always assembled from incomplete fragments. What makes the book especially strong is its reserve: Aviv respects how lives are damaged by illness and by diagnosis, by stigma, by culture, and by the stories we tell ourselves. It’s a book for readers who want mental illness shown in its true porous, unstable reality.
Jenny Offill’s Weather is less a novel of plot than of consciousness, and that consciousness is restless, jittery, and unquiet. Lizzie, a university librarian and mother, narrates in short, aphoristic fragments that mirror her fractured attention. The voice is funny, sly, and tender, but always edged with dread: She frets about her brother’s sobriety, about daily obligations, and about climate collapse and the end of the world. Offill captures a form of modern anxiety that isn’t contained by the self alone but bleeds into global catastrophe, where personal worry and planetary fear become indistinguishable. The novel doesn’t dramatize breakdowns or offer diagnostic labels; instead, it portrays the ordinary psychic toll of living in a collapsing world. By rendering the rhythms of obsessive thought, comic detour, and creeping terror, Weather shows how the contemporary mind is rarely at rest, always cycling between hope, humor, and despair.
Few memoirs have ever been more willing to make the memoirist look unsympathetic than Prozac Nation; three decades after its release, the book’s critics still don’t understand its self-awareness. A raw memoir of depression lived in excess—an excess of shame, despair, and spectacularly fractured ambition. Wurtzel writes of growing up bright, sensitive, full of promise, then gradually being undone by an illness that induces acute panic, long stretches of exhaustion, and humiliations she feels she can’t escape. Wurtzel’s language is blistering, grandiose, and often unbearably earnest. Long passages feel (and are) performative, as critics have charged, but with a purpose: Wurtzel understood that depression makes you pretentious, selfish, and myopic—and that the most unlovable parts of her are the parts she must learn to live with. Prozac Nation doesn’t offer tidy lessons, only a voice that says, this is what it was like. In that willingness to be ugly, the book is an act of great bravery.
In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, sociologist Neil Gong offers a stark examination of mental health care disparities in Los Angeles. Through ethnographic research, Gong contrasts the experiences of individuals receiving public mental health services with those attending elite private treatment centers. He uncovers a dual system where the wealthy access personalized care aimed at rehabilitation, while the impoverished often face minimal intervention focused on containment. Gong critiques the notion of “freedom” in treatment, highlighting how autonomy can sometimes lead to neglect, especially for those without resources. The book challenges readers to reconsider societal values and the ethics of care, urging a reevaluation of how mental health services are structured and who they really serve.
Jamie Lowe’s Mental is both memoir and cultural history, anchored in her own life with bipolar disorder. Diagnosed as a teenager, Lowe recounts manic episodes marked by grandiosity and collapse, hospitalizations, and the long project of stitching a livable life together. Central to her story is lithium, the drug that both steadies and imperils her; she writes candidly about its necessity and its cost, including the damage it does to her body over time, which eventually forces her to leave the drug behind. Interwoven with her personal narrative are histories of psychiatry, profiles of other lithium users, and reflections on how societies define and treat madness. Where so many such narratives come to pat conclusions, Lowe insists on showing the persistence of disorder even in moments of stability. Mental succeeds not by resolving the contradictions of medication, illness, and identity, but by keeping them in full view.
Life at These Speeds follows Kevin Schuler, a high school track star who survives a tragic bus crash that claims the lives of his teammates and girlfriend. In the aftermath, Kevin develops a remarkable ability to run at unprecedented speeds. His newfound talent becomes a coping mechanism for his unresolved grief—and, eventually, a means to avoid doing the emotional work of healing. The novel delves into themes of trauma, memory, and identity, illustrating how Kevin’s physical prowess masks his internal turmoil. His journey reflects the complexities of mental health, where external achievements can coexist with inner struggles. Jackson’s narrative explores the intersection of athleticism and emotional healing, offering a poignant commentary on the human condition and the seductive pull of denial and forgetting.
In The Acid Queen, Susannah Cahalan turns her investigative gaze to Rosemary Woodruff Leary, wife of Timothy Leary, foregrounding a figure frequently obscured in counterculture lore but whose life amplifies the fraught intersections of mental health, psychedelia, gender, and power. Rosemary is revealed not just as a companion to a guru, but as a psychonaut in her own right, someone who tested the limits of her mind in the intersecting worlds of LSD communes, spiritual experiments, and political radicalism. Cahalan, famous for her memoir Brain on Fire and her remarkable debunking of the Rosenhan experiments in The Great Pretender, handles Rosemary’s psychedelic explorations with neither celebration nor condemnation. Instead, she excavates the consequences—psychotic depersonalization, disillusionment, personal betrayal—that accompany attempts to dissolve boundaries of self, to blur mind and substance, especially for women whose emotional and psychological suffering is too often privatized or pathologized. The Acid Queen joins the company of works that resist easy redemption, insisting that the edge of sanity is a lived terrain to understand, often with ambivalence, complexity, and cost.
Rosen’s brilliant book traces the life of his friend Michael Laudor, once a gifted adolescent with outsized ambitions, whose professional ascent was stalled by schizophrenia and whose life as a free man ended in an act of violence. Rosen details his long, intense friendship with Laudor, from their shared Judeo-intellectual upbringing, through Yale, to Laudor’s diagnosis, hospitalization, and devastating final breakdown, which resulted in the murder of his fiance. The book shows how Laudor’s brilliance and ambition exacerbated his illness, how academic success and public acclaim strained his fragile stability. Alongside the personal story, Rosen indicts the mental-health system, examining the shortcomings of deinstitutionalization, the legal limits around forced care, how disability activists have created a culture of benign neglect, and what happens when hope, stigma, and treatment mix. The Best Minds is a portrait not of spectacular madness but of a life gradually unraveling under the weight of genius, friendship, and failure—and it’s one of the best works of nonfiction I’ve ever read.
It is late August of 1943. Elfriede and Anna are in Elisabethenpflege, an orphanage in Schönebürg, only ten miles from Biberach, where they and Lotte had lived with the stern landlady, and sixty miles from Tübingen, where their mother is now hospitalized at a Nazi-run “home for mothers” close to the university hospital while she waits on bed rest for the birth of their brother.
“But I am the older one,” the smaller girl says. Her blue eyes flash defiance, curls radiate from her head. She holds her sister by the wrist. The chubby-cheeked girl by her side towers over her by nearly a full head, but her bottom lip is quivering.
Sister Sabina watches Sister Canysia take a second look at the birth dates in the girls’ files, discreetly counting months on her fingers beneath the surface of her desk. Sabina doesn’t blame her. It’s hard to believe that Anna, the taller girl, is nearly twenty months younger than little Elfriede, whose sixth birthday is coming up next week.
The size reversal is so striking that, for a moment, Sabina wonders if the two girls might have been playing games, exchanging the cardboard name signs hanging from their necks. But no: the driver, who delivered them here from the railroad station in Reinstetten, would have forbidden them to take off their signs. After years of war and delivering small children from railroad to orphanage, he knows that no child can be reunited with her parents unless strict tabs are kept on who is who. Before he met them on the platform, the girls must have been on the train for less than twenty minutes—it’s just a few stops to Reinstetten from Biberach, where their mother’s landlady had put them on. They look scared enough that Sabina can’t imagine them getting bored with being alone on a train and planning some kind of nonsense.
In the weeks that follow, Sister Sabina never again doubts who is the older one. Elfriede doesn’t let her sister out of her sight. No child taunts Anna without repercussions, no adult needs to check that Anna’s teeth are brushed or that her hair is combed. On Sister Sabina’s final round through the junior girls’ makeshift dormitory in the attic, she has grown accustomed to finding Anna in Elfriede’s bed, Elfriede’s arms protectively around her younger sister, holding on, even in the depths of dreams.
Forty-three years later, my parents and I stand in a wood-paneled hall. We have walked through several locked doors to get here. The ceiling is tall, far above our heads. The nurse asks for our names before she leaves through another tall wooden door to fetch Elfriede.
I’m twenty years old, home from college for the weekend. When the call came this morning that Elfriede had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, my mother seemed to come unglued: unable to sit down, pacing between frantic phone calls. Even my father seemed shaken, unsure what to do. I couldn’t imagine getting on the train back to school, couldn’t imagine sitting in genetics class, wondering how my parents were holding up, wondering what they would find. Or whom: Elfriede, the competent nurse? Or Elfriede who glues photographs and magazine clippings all over her apartment walls, Elfriede who rages on the phone, calling her mother Satan incarnate?
“I’ve bought myself a little tiger,” Elfriede says.
I feel my mother tighten next to me, watch the image flash through both our minds: a cub, striped fur, teeth, claws. How big? From where? A wild beast snatched from its parents, bound to grow enormous, all-devouring, a raging flame—
I search Elfriede’s face, the sparks in her blue eyes beneath cropped, ash-blonde curls.
“At the gift shop?” my father asks.
My mother exhales. The gift shop. Stuffed.
Elfriede nods. She says she’s doing well. Very well. So very well.
None of us mention that the police brought Elfriede here. None of us ask about the elderly man she was hired to nurse, and nursed so very well, for months. Has he recovered from Elfriede pushing him, in his wheelchair, through busy streets, to the busy plaza beneath Cologne’s famous cathedral, at breakneck speed, singing, stopping here and there to take off pieces of her clothing, give them away? From watching her dance, naked, beneath the looming towers of the church?
We don’t stay long. This is the only time I can remember visiting Elfriede in the hospital at Marienborn, though she will be brought here over and over again. For years, she will drift from long periods of extreme caretaking into hallucinatory manias. Usually, the police bring her to the hospital after she gives away all her possessions, ending with her clothes. Each time, the doctors release her when she calms down enough that they believe she might stay on her medications for a while. Each time, eventually, there is another phone call from a hospital, or from a landlady asking who’s going to clean up the apartment, to pay for damage to the walls.
Sister Sabina catches a glimpse of Anna and Elfriede as she passes by the portal to the children’s dining hall. Again, Elfriede is standing ramrod straight, her iron grip around Anna’s pudgy wrist. Sabina can see her lips move as she turns to Anna’s tear-streaked face: “We don’t do that.”
Sabina knows the words—repeated each time Anna is ready to join the other children in a folly, a small infraction. Now, as always, Elfriede is serious, unyielding. Sabina steps through the door, scans the dining hall. Elfriede must have just pulled her younger sister away from the other kids, who are spooning soup from the floor. The tall windows are open wide, admitting a warm breeze laced with the cloying aroma of overripe pears. Sun flecks dance across the new linoleum, the white walls. Anna stands next to Elfriede, watching the children with longing. The soup has been the first sweetness these children have had in many weeks. In the midst of this war, the Lord has blessed the orphanage’s orchard with an abundance of late-ripening fruit—more pears than can fit into their supply of canning jars. More even than can be boiled down for thick pear juice, their only reliable supply of sugar.
The puddle of soup on the floor is nearly gone, and Sister Adela has not yet emerged from the kitchen to discover the damage. The older girls in charge of serving the midday dinner must have handled the entire calamity. Sabina feels pleased with them. In this time of lack, a small upset can have large consequences, but the older girls have kept their heads. Most likely, one of them stumbled when they carried the soup kettle from the kitchen. Or the kettle flipped when they tried to set it on a stool that is low enough for them to dip the ladle. They must have turned the kettle upright, then told all the girls to bring their spoons and eat the soup from the floor. They know the linoleum is spotless. Two of the girls mopped it this morning, after porridge was served for breakfast.
Adela steps from the kitchen, raises an eyebrow, then inquires with the two supervising girls, sends them for mops and buckets. She’s preoccupied, has not noticed that Anna and Elfriede are standing by.
Sabina makes her way over to them. “You children should eat!”
Anna, spoon in hand, turns to join the others, but is brought up short as Elfriede’s grip retightens on her wrist. The corners of Anna’s mouth twist in protest as she turns back to her sister, but she says nothing. Sabina looks at Elfriede’s thin, pinched face, feels steel-blue eyes seeking her gaze straight-on.
“No,” Elfriede says. “We don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” Sabina asks.
“We don’t eat from the floor.”
Sabina considers arguing that the floor has just been cleaned, dismisses it as useless. Elfriede’s standards of cleanliness far exceed those of any other child. She will starve before she will compromise. Adela, Sabina knows, will have none of this, will send them away without food. But Elfriede, slight and pale when she arrived, has grown painfully thin in the four weeks that have passed since then. Her cheeks are hollow. Depressions have deepened below her collarbones. The letter from the girls’ father leaves no doubt that he will ask questions when he returns from Russia to retrieve his daughters—which may be months from now. Sabina glances at Adela’s back, then calmly turns toward the sisters. “Come with me.”
She walks the girls down the hallway, into the kitchen by way of the scullery. She takes two bowls from the long shelves lining the walls, ladles soup, places the bowls on the kitchen table. “Eat up quick,” she tells the girls, “and then rejoin your group.”
Perhaps two years after the hospital visit with the tiger, I stood about twenty miles from Elfriede’s hospital at Marienborn, on a grassy farm track by a field of wheat. The field was very flat. It was very silver green. It smelled of summer and it smelled of wind. It smelled of blooming wheat, the semen-like ripeness of pollen on the wind. Just then, in May or early June, it had a sort of even smell—as though nothing could ever change in the cycle of ripeness and yield. The absence of insects and birds echoed in the swish of blade against blade, the hum of the greenhouse ventilators down the road, the cultivator five or six fields over, and in our silence between the words of our guide, a geneticist in jeans, button-down shirt, and sandals, worn with socks.
“This,” he said, his hand pointing, “is the second generation after the cross. Notice how the plants are all different heights, how the awns have different lengths, the kernels different sizes.” He crushed one wheat spike in his hand, then another, thumb grinding against palm. Unripe grains popped from glumes, revealing different plumpnesses, greennesses, grainnesses.
There should have been crickets. There should have been flies and the swallows’ twit-a-twit as they swooped in circles, dove, shot up, beaks filled. Instead, only the hum of the cultivator, only the rustle of one student’s nylon raincoat against another, the shifting weight from one foot to the next.
“This,” the geneticist continued, scattering kernels and chaff, sweeping his arm toward the next neat block of plants, “is the fourth generation, this the sixth, eighth, and, finally, there’s the tenth.” The grass of the farm track slicked and squeaked under our sneakers as we spun. As our eyes followed his hand, the wheat plots became movie frames, a flip-book: The shaggy-dog look of the initial cross flattens out, morphs into crew cuts, the movie’s final frame a battalion of elite soldiers, all of them even in bulk and height.
It was 1988. We were all white. We were in Köln Vogelsang, the field station of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. Yes, we had grown up alongside the children of Turkish “guest workers” in our elementary schools, but few of them had gone on to university, and none were on this particular multiday field trip for a class that was supposed to show us where people with biology degrees might work.
If parents refused to give up their disabled children, authorities would threaten to take their other children away and commit the parents to forced labor unless they complied.
Was it me who asked why? Why breed for ten or twelve generations, a decade or more, to end up with this evenness? The answer was: machines. Run the combine harvester at one height. Sift uniform-sized grain away from dirt and rocks. Cut all plants on the same day, knowing each grain is ripe, holds identical, ideal moisture. Guarantee the mill, the bread factory, this much gluten, this much sweetness, starch, this stickiness, this stirrable-ness, this rise. Identical loaves, batch after batch, bag after bag.
It had been all around me growing up as I raced my bike up and down the road at my grandparents’ house, through oat and potato fields, or later, as I rode horses through summer-scented wheat-wheat-wheat that had, for centuries, made my hometown’s wealth. It had never occurred to me that the oats whose kernels released milky sweetness when crushed between my teeth, the wheat, the potatoes, the sugar beets that scented my town’s air with molasses from the factory, could be shaggy, mosaics of different greens, different rustles, different scents. Köln Vogelsang was the place, the moment when I understood that wheat, like any crop, did not just come the way it was, all one hue, one size, one frame of ripe. That we had made it so.
When I search for official records of Elisabethenpflege online, I find an Erlass, a decree, by Württemberg’s minister of the interior that passed into law on November 7, 1938. It spells out that all of Württemberg’s orphaned children were to be classified into “the following groups”:
I. Mentally and genetically healthy children
II. Physically handicapped children, including deaf and blind children, with normal mental capabilities
III. Children with genetic defects or signs of advanced neglect
IV. Children with severe mental handicaps or psychological pathologies
V. Gypsies and children that resemble gypsies.
I think of what happened to more than five thousand children classified as groups II, III, IV, or V all over Germany. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it immediately passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” which enabled the euthanasia program that was later named Aktion T4. By 1939, all doctors were required to submit questionnaires about patients whom they deemed “feeble of the mind” to Tiergartenstrasse 4, a house in Berlin. There, “expert” doctors hired by the extragovernmental “Kanzlei des Führers” labeled as lebensunwert (unworthy of life) anyone suffering from a disease deemed “heritable,” such as schizophrenia, alcoholism, or dementia. They especially targeted patients who had been ill for a long time, were no longer able to work, and did not have relatives who checked on them frequently. The Ministry of the Interior then sent notes to the caregiving hospitals, asylums, or orphanages that these patients must be transferred to Schussenried or one of many other psychiatric hospitals that were used as “interim institutions” (Zwischenanstalten) for patients that had been selected to be sent to one of only six “killing hospitals” (Tötungsanstalten). Grafeneck alone drew its victims from a network of forty-eight Zwischenanstalten, each of which transported between two and five hundred patients to Grafeneck. A few months later, relatives of the patient would receive a note from these “interim” hospitals that their family member had, unfortunately, succumbed to a disease, usually pneumonia.
The program initially concentrated on children below the age of three, who were killed by injection of chemicals. With the beginning of the war, criteria for selecting patients for euthanasia were broadened, age limits rose rapidly, and gas chambers increased the number of patients who could be killed in one day. Eventually, as so many children began disappearing from institutions where they had been transferred to purportedly receive “improved treatment,” parents grew suspicious. If parents refused to give up their disabled children, authorities would threaten to take their other children away and commit the parents to forced labor unless they complied. Families of adult patients also began to hear of disappearances; many tried to get their relatives released from psychiatric hospitals. In Baden-Württemberg, these Aktion T4 euthanasia programs were carried out through lethal injections in hospitals or through carbon monoxide gas in Grafeneck Castle, less than an hour’s drive from Schönebürg.
Elisabethenpflege was assigned to accept only children in “Group III” of Baden-Württemberg’s 1938 Erlass. But reality might well have been much more chaotic than official Nazi rules: over the course of the war, an estimated twenty million children in Germany lost one parent, half a million lost both—orphanages were flooded with children everywhere. Most likely, the landlady in Biberach simply sent Anna and Elfriede to Elisabethenpflege because it was the closest orphanage that had space.
When I ask my mother if she has heard from Elfriede, she says no. “Not this week, but sometime next week, I’ll ask your father to look through the package that she sent four months ago.”
My mother tells me she put Elfriede’s package in the basement when it arrived. I can imagine where: top shelf, well toward the unlit end, away from the dim window, above eye level, by the boxes of winter boots and heavy binders of old tax returns awaiting the date after which they can be tossed. She doesn’t want to see it when she ventures down for bottled water, for veggies from the chest freezer, for canned tomatoes or extra shopping bags.
“Last time I called, she sounded alright again,” my mother says, “so now your dad can fish out any items that might still be useful to her and I’ll mail them back. The rest he can put in the trash. I don’t want to know about any of it.”
I can guess what the still-useful things and “the rest” might be. Decades ago, Oma Lotte occasionally mentioned the things Elfriede would send her in packages like the one in my mother’s basement now: a hand mixer, a hairbrush, toothpaste, shoe polish—household goods that, if you have to repurchase them every few months, add up for someone who lives on social security. “The rest”: collages of images from catalogs and cut-up family photographs, bizarre junk sculptures, a long letter berating my mother for not caring for my father’s early-stage dementia and mobility problems the right way. Make him drink holy water from the church’s stoup, or cart him to a faith healer Elfriede has just discovered who can heal “anything!!!!” In between recipes for miracle healings, the letter will also threaten that ignoring Elfriede’s advice will mean the devil has closed my mother’s mind. There will be vivid descriptions of what Satan will do to my mother if she does not turn away from him. Most likely, there will be lengthy passages of “proof” that Lotte too was possessed by Satan (or, in fact, embodied him) when she was alive.
I can’t blame my mother for not wanting to look.
Wild wheats are tall and short; green, gold, and red; ugly and beautiful; sickly and strong. Some plants will germinate and ripen early, some very late. Some grains will be full of the best kind of starch for bread, some will be small, low in gluten, a pain to sift and grind, unfit for fluffy, yeasted loaves.
To select against this diversity means to weaken the entire population, to lessen its chance of surviving the next catastrophe. This is why we keep seeds of wild and woolly wheats in doomsday vaults buried at the Arctic Circle deep in rock. This is why we must keep growing old and wildish wheats on farms, where they evolve with downpours, droughts, and wind, with locusts, rusts, and blights.
To grow all your wheat in just one way, to eliminate the ugly kernels, the late or early ones, is to kill your future. The plant with few, small kernels may be the one that resists drought, or insects, or disease. The plant that struggles and lags in too much rain may be the one with roots shallow or deep enough to find scarce nutrients.
All of her life, my mother has been unable to argue. Any tiny discord sends her heart into overdrive, turns her mind to cotton wool, shakes her knees. All of my life, my mother has begged me not to quarrel with my sister, because my mother’s knees are shaking. My mother wants me to keep peace with my sister: peace, peace, peace. My mother says she doesn’t want to hear what my sister has or hasn’t done. She doesn’t want to hear what I want or do not want. She says all that matters is that there is peace, peace, peace. She says there will never be peace in the world unless I make peace with my sister. My mother says all she ever wanted was to get to keep the older sister who protected her.
When I ask my mother what it was like, in the orphanage, her face closes down, the way it always does when conversations drift toward the war.
“Oh, it was hard,” my mother says, and asks, immediately, if I would like more tea.
I shake my head no, willing her not to get up from the table, not to end this conversation.
She gathers cake plates, saucers, cups, then looks up. “But I always had my sister. She was watching out for me. I never felt alone.” She pushes the stacked porcelain to the center of the table.
I exhale.
She tells me how she would crawl under Elfriede’s covers every night, how Elfriede would hold her and whisper in her ear until she fell asleep. She remembers white enameled beds, lined up under the eaves of a large attic, a makeshift dormitory. She remembers the light fading slowly outside the window in the gabled wall. She remembers dozens of little girls, alone, orphaned, traumatized. All around her, children cried from thirst. Many wet their beds. The nuns “treated” bed wetters by giving them bread with salt right before sleep, to “bind the water in the body.” They forbade them to drink.
Against the whimpers and weeping all around, against the dying light, my mother remembers her sister’s warm body, her sister’s arms around her shoulders, her sister’s voice, fervent, confident, a whispered affirmation in her ear: “We won’t have to stay here. We’ll go back home soon.”
Some little boys want to become firefighters when they grow up. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, born in Moscow in 1887, wanted to end famine. His father had grown up in poverty and hunger because, over and over, Russian crops had failed. As a young scientist, Vavilov soon realized that ending famine depends on the ability of plants to resist adversity: drought and flood, heat and hail, attacks by snails and locusts, rots and molds. He read everything he could about the fledgling field of genetics, sure that it might help him to understand plant immunity. As a researcher, he traveled the world, collecting tubers and seeds.
During World War II, hunger threatened not only children, not only soldiers, but also the seed varieties that Vavilov had amassed in his Leningrad institute, sure that this genetic treasure trove would, one day, save humanity from future famines. From September of 1941 through January of 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers besieged Leningrad. Stalin had ordered the city’s art to be evacuated from the museums ahead of the siege—but he provided no aid at all to save Vavilov’s tubers, bulbs, and seeds. Collecting plants had been declared “bourgeois” by the communist regime—a gentleman’s pastime rather than what would be needed to avert famine from ordinary people.
When I ask my mother what it was like, in the orphanage, her face closes down, the way it always does when conversations drift toward the war.
By the time of the siege, Vavilov himself had been arrested and was slowly starving to death in prison. The scientists left behind in his institute understood that the future food security of their people was in their hands. They also understood that they were sitting on a cornucopia of edible grain and potatoes, in the center of a city that would starve.
Vavilov’s botanists armed themselves. They took turns patrolling on the roof, day and night, their guns in full display. They fought mold and rats. The rats, too, were crazed from hunger. They had multiplied because desperate people had eaten most of Leningrad’s cats. Vavilov’s scientists stayed and stayed, tending to the crops in their care all through the siege, without ever eating them themselves. Several of them starved to death as they were tending to the collection, surrounded by bags of wheat.
Based on what I can gather from my grandfather’s letters, Anna and Elfriede must have spent about two months in the orphanage, from late August until the end of October in 1943. In the middle of this, Elfriede turned six—far from her parents. I doubt that there were presents. I doubt there was a birthday cake. Sixty nights of making sure her sister’s teeth were brushed. Sixty nights of whispering affirmations in her sister’s ear as children cried all around.
Eventually, I ask my mother if she will check in with Elfriede about her memories of the orphanage when she next calls.
“Elfriede says she remembers nothing,” my mother reports back the next time we talk. “Except that we were there forever, and that she thought we would never get back home.”
I think of five-year-old Elfriede, in an orphanage full of children labeled “Class III,” desperate children, thirsty children, children who wet their beds and cried themselves to sleep. I watch Elfriede in the dining hall, tall in her shortness, her hand snapped tight around my mother’s wrist: instructed by her father, in writing, not just to take care of herself without her mother, but to watch her sister, to prevent her “follies.” I think of how closely “Group III” in Baden-Württemberg’s 1938 Erlass describes, in terrible words, the many foster children that my aunt will, eventually, collect into her home.
We now know that psychoses can be triggered by childhood traumas like bullying, physical abuse, moving, and abandonment. What marks a manic episode, in part, is grandiosity: The unshakable conviction that you can accomplish anything. Walk on water. Heal the sick. Protect your sister. Pray your mother back to health, your father safe through gunfire and grenades, your sister and yourself onto a train back home. Mania can increase goal-directed activities and reduce the need for sleep. A review article titled “Developmental and Personality Aspects of War and Military Violence,” published in the journal Traumatology in 2003, identifies children between the ages of five and nine as most vulnerable to developing psychiatric illnesses after war; girls are more likely to show symptoms than boys. Maybe human physiology and genes were selected for this triggering, this trait: a switch, activated by extreme stress, that transmutes tiny girls into superwomen who pull their younger siblings through.
My mother says that, one day, the nuns in Schönebürg put her and Elfriede back on a train. She remembers that both of them were wearing cardboard signs around their necks. The signs spelled out their names and the station where the conductor was to make them get off: Schussenried.
My mother remembers seeing her father there, waiting for them, on the railroad platform: one arm protectively around her mother’s shoulders, the other hand securing baby Alfred’s pram. She remembers the gratitude her parents expressed for having found a room in Schussenried, in the house of a couple named Baus, how kind their new landlords were, how my grandparents trusted them so much that they asked them to serve as baby Alfred’s godparents.
Herr Baus worked as a nurse in Schussenried’s psychiatric hospital—the same hospital where patients behind a barred window had dangled a doll made of dirty rags toward Anna and Elfriede months before. My mother remembers hushed conversations. She remembers how Herr Baus would return from work and collapse at the kitchen table, put his head down onto his arms, and sob.
Later, Oma Lotte told my mother that Herr Baus broke down in tears, again and again, as he told her how his patients had disappeared into gray buses with painted-over windows, bound for Grafeneck. I’ve looked it up. Between June and November of 1940, eight “transports” conveyed an estimated six hundred patients from Schussenried to Grafeneck Castle, where they were gassed, usually on the day of their arrival. Grafeneck Castle was the place where gas chambers were first invented and perfected, before they were installed in concentration camps.
After the bus transports stopped, doctors ordered Herr Baus to inject patients with lethal medicine. He said he refused—only to be forced to watch the doctors administer the injections themselves.
Schussenried’s psychiatric hospital, in operation since 1875, is still housed on the abbey’s grounds, though it moved into newly constructed buildings twenty years ago. The train no longer stops at the abbey, but satellite views on Google Maps show a large parking lot: the baroque library and church remain a popular tourist destination to this day. The bars across the windows of the former hospital are no longer in evidence—buildings that used to house patients now host art and cultural exhibits, business meetings for companies, and conventions for churches and special interest groups.
When I ask my mother about Schussenried, she reminds me that we, too, were tourists there, in 1982, when we walked around the immaculate grounds on a trip with my Oma Lotte. I remember the journey, the bright-white buildings, but not my mother’s shock at the missing bars across the windows, the traces of her horror cleared away. Now, over the phone, she tells me how deeply disturbed she was to find nothing to remind visitors of the people behind the bars. The dangling rag doll still haunts her dreams, the shouts from behind a barred window above her head, distorted faces, waving arms. Each time Elfriede is hospitalized, my mother just knows she’s there, behind those bars. Her adult mind understands that her sister never was committed to Schussenried but to Marienborn, a different monastery hospital, in the Eiffel mountains, far to the north. And yet the doll keeps rising in her dreams. To Anna, Elfriede is here, forever here, with the shouting, waving people, the people with big mouths, big eyes, behind iron bars.
Others share my mother’s pain about the erasure of the psychiatric hospital’s terrible history under Nazi rule. In 1983, Schussenried’s protestant minister finally succeeded in having a small plaque installed on the hospital patients’ division of the local cemetery. Ten years later, the artist Verena Kraft was commissioned to erect a memorial to the “victims of euthanasia” on the monastery grounds: a sculpture of concrete pillars and a concrete doorframe, outlining a room made of air, with no walls or ceiling, to signify the utter vulnerability of psychiatric patients. Each year since the installation of the sculpture, officials and community members have held a memorial service for the former patients around this wall-less room.
By the time I stood in the wheat field of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, the institute had been in Köln Vogelsang for thirty years. Before that, it was called the Erwin Baur Institute, and before that, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was then located in Müncheberg, near Berlin. Its director, Wilhelm Rudorf, joined the Nazi Party in 1937, and later the SS. By 1937, he wrote about the importance of plant breeding not only for making Germany independent from imported foods, but also, and especially, for “settling” yet-to-be invaded countries to the east and north. Vavilov’s research team succeeded in preserving the tubers and seeds he had collected through the siege of Leningrad. But when German soldiers marched into Ukraine, Rudorf oversaw the theft of seeds and tubers that had been accumulated, bred, and studied by Ukrainian research institutes. He employed Richard Böhme to oversee 150 women imprisoned in Auschwitz to conduct research on rubber-producing dandelions, seeds stolen from Ukraine.
By the time our sneakers squeaked over the grassy paths separating wheat plots at Köln Vogelsang, Rudorf had been retired from the institute for about twenty years. Yes. Retired. Böhme had been clubbed to death as he fled from Russian soldiers. But Rudorf, his boss, was “denazified” by British forces, with essentially no consequence, and kept his post as director of the institute. From his position, he prevented reemployment of Jewish plant scientists who had fled Germany to save their lives.
Once, when I researched Elisabethenpflege, Schönebürg, I found posted transcripts from the orphanage’s record book. The Mother Superior of the Elizabethan nuns wrote in the book that, at some point during the war, she cut out and burned all pages from 1933 onward to prevent information about newly admitted children from falling into the hands of Nazi authorities. She then tried to rewrite what she could, from memory, years later. The reconstructed entry for February 1940 explains: “The local police want to know which of our wards have criminal tendencies or parents with criminal tendencies. These children are to be listed. They fingerprinted twelve children.”
Others share my mother’s pain about the erasure of the psychiatric hospital’s terrible history under Nazi rule.
The psychiatric hospital in Marienborn where Elfriede stayed was established in 1888 by Cellite nuns as permanent housing for Catholic women suffering from intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. When Hitler was elected in 1933, the sisters at Marienborn were caring for 700 women suffering from epilepsy or from psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or depression. From 1941 to 1943, the Gestapo “selected” 490 of these women to be bussed to the psychiatric hospital at Hadamar, where they were killed by lethal injection, medication overdose, or gas: Anyone deemed “unfit to work,” and hence “a drain on the economic resources or genetic health of the Volk,” could end up on that bus.
The use of the word “selection” by both plant breeders and the Gestapo was no accident.
Five years ago, Elfriede finally agreed to move into assisted living. She says she likes her room, her bed, the food. She has not been hospitalized once since she moved in. Often, her medications, now administered with regularity, make her sleepy, fuzzy-minded, dull. But sometimes when my mother asks to speak to her on the phone, she’ll get a nurse who says Elfriede is busy, singing with the other residents, or in the workshop, making art. Perhaps Elfriede’s prayers saved her from the fires of hell. Perhaps they finally brought her to a place where she’s allowed her scissors and her glue stick, where she sings.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Earth 7by Deb Olin Unferth, which will be published on June 9th, 2026 by Graywolf Press.You can pre-order your copy here.
An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet.
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in Earth 7, her latest electrifying novel, life—and love—persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Earth 7 is the tale of two women who meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth has severely depopulated. Some humans have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that someone in the future may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do, especially if they can do it together?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. Is all matter conscious? Do any living beings die? Earth 7 is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
“Earth 7 is an epic sci-fi masterpiece and a love letter to the totally lush, and shockingly diverse, life-forms of our planet. I adore this book. Everyone who lives on planet Earth should read it.” — Rita Bullwinkel, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Headshot
“An electric, hilarious, and harrowing story of fractured technological identities and interdimensional exile in a shattered future. With her signature absurd genius, Deb Olin Unferth has created a shocking and moving speculation that I suspect breaks new ground in climate fiction.”—Jessica Anthony, author of The Most
Here is the cover, designed by Vivian Lopez Rowe, with original artwork by Elizabeth Haidle:
Deb Olin Unferth: I was starting to write a new book, which meant I was taping newspaper clippings to my wall, images I liked, when I received an envelope in the mail from my friend, the illustrator Elizabeth Haidle. Some years back, she and I collaborated on our graphic novel, I, Parrot. Now, she was making a book with her brother, Paul David Mascot, an adaptation of a science fiction story by Philip K. Dick first published in 1953. The envelope contained several prints of watercolors she was doing for the book. Gorgeous and strange and funny. Lonely, surreal landscapes, a single human walking through. A man boarding a spacecraft carrying a little suitcase like he was getting on a bus. I was especially taken by one of the earth, a rocket shooting off it, zipping around in a few impossible loops, moth-like, skimming and swerving, batting the moon, and flying away. I taped them all to my wall amid the newspaper clippings.
As I wrote the book, gradually many of the images came down. Either I removed them or they unstuck themselves and fluttered to the floor. Soon only a few remained: a man emerging from very blue water. A barren landscape of rocks. A figure perched on a small, capsized boat. Plus, a single watercolor print by Elizabeth: Earth and its springy rocket.
I stared at that handful of images as I wrote and they became the spine of the story. Human, water, rock, sky. Motion, journey. That deep blue outer space.
And Elizabeth’s watercolor became the cover. You can see some of earth’s continents, not precise drawings but a gesture, a quick sketch that to me spoke of our incredible planet and of civilization, all its mistakes, all its successes, the land a shining white, the water a blue gray. Soaring away from it is a single mechanical representative, a little rocket. I love the energy. It feels daring and smart, but also playful and funny. It’s got nerd-girl energy. And it’s philosophical, existential, lonely. Earth’s gravity waylaid, humanity so small. Who is leaving on that rocket and why? Who is left behind, besides earth itself?
The brilliant book designer Vivian Lopez Rowe did a great job. I love the hand-lettered font, how tactile it feels. The orange adds a bold, electric edginess to the design. The words shimmer on the dark blue.
Elizabeth Haidle: The blue background was created with liquid watercolor dyes, and the elements were scanned, cut out, and added digitally. My brother and I collaborated from a distance on a series of images, sending the files back and forth and improving things as we went. It was actually a really wonderful collaborative experience.
After I died, I came back out of the earth. The acolyte asked for my approximate date of death and said, “Wow, you’ve been gone a while.”
It had been hundreds of years since I’d been buried beneath a bunker in Iowa. This was in accordance with the wishes of the church, of which I had been a member.
“It’s been bad,” the acolyte said. The church was just him and a dwindled congregation in Syracuse. He made space for me in a storage area. Iowa was in something called the “radiation belt,” which caused the air outside to glow at night. He was right; it seemed pretty bad.
In the prophecy, a man would emerge reborn from the burial chamber and lead the sect to Jerusalem to await the end days. For the first week I was there, the acolyte didn’t bring it up.
The church had no name. I hadn’t professed. Profession involved a series of statements and dedications to labor in life and in the afterlife for the church. My wife had, but I hadn’t. It had been a point of contention.
Paul asked me questions about baseball games I’d gone to in ’72 and ’73. The church at the time forbade attendance. “I remember the light and also the smell. Boiled peanuts and grass. At one point, everyone was singing. I wasn’t supposed to be there,” I said.
I asked Paul if I could go down into the chamber to visit my wife. “The records from back then burned up in a fire,” he explained. “I can let you in, but I don’t know which one it is. The only reason I know you’re you is because you told me.”
The next night, Paul said that he didn’t know how we’d get to Jerusalem. The radiation belt had worsened, and removing us would be expensive and dangerous. The Syracuse congregation was noncommittal at best. I took that as an opportunity to tell him I hadn’t professed. “I don’t think I’m the person you’re looking for,” I said, and his lips curled in on themselves. “I don’t know how I ended up in the burial chamber. My wife must have cut a deal. I don’t know, I wasn’t there for it.” I meant the last part as a joke, but his lips bit in harder.
A few nights later, I snuck down into the chamber. Paul was right; it was just row after row of unlabeled, anonymous coffins stretching deep within the Earth. I picked one at random, sat on the cold concrete, and bowed my head. Over time the air grew heavy. It pressed down on my neck like a dumbbell, pain blooming as my vertebrae compressed. I imagined their voices, thousands of them. “You’re alive,” they whispered, their tone at turns accusatory and affirmational. I opened my hands. There’s this strange thing where your life can feel like it isn’t fully attached to the background around it, like a piece of paper stuck to a wall with a single short strip of masking tape. When my wife would bring up the matter of profession, I would try to explain the lack of solid attachment, the weakness inherent in it—the tape and the paper and the like. Color would rise in her cheeks and forehead. “At what point,” she’d ask, “are you expecting to come alive?”
“What do the people in Syracuse think about me?” I asked Paul one night. He wiped his forehead. He muttered that the Syracuse congregation had gotten mixed up with another religion. They’d lost the faith, the true faith, and mostly just sat around and sang all the time, a practice they called PERFECT LANGUAGE FOREVER. “How long have you been out here?” I asked, and he just stared back out at the glowing air.
A week passed without sight of Paul, then another. He eventually stumbled from his room, eyes wild, and asked, “When you came back through the tunnel of fire, which angels did you see? In the chamber of judgement, what was the name of the arbiter’s wife?” His face was red and wet. He demanded, “Who sits to the left hand of the throne of god?” I’d never seen him like this, like his sadness was on fire. I told him I was sorry. I didn’t think Jerusalem was going to happen.
“False messiah,” he said, and, “Where’d you bury the real one?” He spoke too quickly to understand. He started shoving me, quick jabs to my shoulder. I didn’t give him any warning. One blow and he was down. I hadn’t realized he was such a thin thing.
He came up in a daze. His eyes were soft like incandescent bulbs. “Alright,” he said, and then he went through the door between his room and my room and down the staircase that led to the burial chambers.
Weeks passed. I have seen no sign of Paul since.
In the mornings, through a speaker in Paul’s room, I hear the church in Syracuse singing. I don’t understand their language, but the shapes of the words, the forms made by human voices—they’re a comfort nonetheless.
I’ve been mapping out the songs they sing. The phonetic pronunciations, the rise and fall of their pitch. I’m making progress to PERFECT LANGUAGE FOREVER. I hear them in my head as I try to fall asleep, mouthing along until all effort leaves me.
There is no greater betrayal than the feeling that the body which houses you has failed you. There’s no estrangement from your own body or mind. You can’t block your own calls or send your ailments to junk mail. When I first learned the possibility that I carried a genetic mutation—the same one that killed my mother when I was a child—I’d never felt more trapped inside an impossible situation.
I sought books by others who had experienced what I was going through and, honestly, back in 2012 the pickings were pretty slim. Out of desperate loneliness, I started a blog without any readers and journaled notebooks of self pity I hope never again see the light of day. But over the past several years, other authors have written incredible stories of how they faced not only betrayal from their bodies or minds, but how this opened them up to new possibilities for themselves.
Now that I’ve written Living Proof: How Love Defied Genetic Legacy, I can see the symbiotic relationship between a physical or mental health challenge and writing one’s way toward new perspectives. When I first learned of my own genetic mutation, I just wanted to know how it would all end. Tapping into creativity in the face of bad medical news can’t necessarily change the outcome. But it offers connections to the larger world, and isn’t that why we turn to stories again and again?
Suleika Jaouad was in college when her battle with leukemia started. In Between Two Kingdoms, Jaouad shows us how her illness impacted her family and the loving, youthful relationship that carried her through her treatment. When she had to be isolated during treatment, she filled her days with painting and journaling. Upon being declared cancer-free, Jaouad takes a road trip around the country, connecting with those who reached out during her periods of isolation. She demonstrates how even when your world feels unbearably small, tapping into your creativity can sustain you through even the darkest days.
A trauma psychologist and pregnant mother of a toddler, Sarah Mandel’s life changes when she discovers a lump in her breast. Almost immediately after giving birth, Mandel begins not only a treatment of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but to imagine her family’s lives going on without her. To her shock, after three months of grueling treatments, her scans show no evidence of disease. Instead of the elation she would have expected upon learning this news, Mandel is left with a whiplash of grief she can’t control. Little Earthquakes examines how illness shakes the foundation of an entire life and forever changes the ways in which survivors face the world. Sarah sadly passed away in 2024, leaving her story as a legacy.
Aileen Weintraub always prided herself on her independence and humor. But when this Jewish New Yorker falls in love with a man from upstate, she surprises herself by agreeing to move to his family’s farmhouse. Their charming life as newlyweds is upended when Aileen learns she must be placed on bedrest four months into her pregnancy. From her bedroom, Weintraub has nothing but time to question the professional and personal choices that led her into complete isolation in a community where she has no social connections. Broken into 38 chapters—or weeks, which is the length of a healthy, full-term pregnancy—Weintraub hilariously and honestly shows us that despite our best efforts, life has its own plans in store for all of us.
It seemed like someone was always dying of cancer in Ami McKay’s family. Otherwise healthy people, often young, saw their lives cut short throughout her family tree. This family curse caught the attention of a doctor after her great aunt told him she expected to die young. Before My Time tells a multi-generational story of the family who led to the medical breakthrough of dianosing people with Lynch syndrome and McKay’s own experience of living with this genetic predisposition to cancer. If it sounds heavy, that’s because it is. And yet, through lucid storytelling and lovable characters, McKay shows the human side of medical research and its impact on future generations.
The Year of the Horses starts with Courtney Maum’s young daughter refusing to put on a sock. But a sock is never just a sock. This beautiful metaphor of being in a life that doesn’t fit right catapults Maum’s journey to examine her growing feelings of depression. When standard medical care doesn’t offer the balm she needs, Maum seeks to remember a time when she felt as joyful as she did on the back of a horse as a child. This book moves back and forth through Maum’s challenging childhood and teen years and her grown-up desire to reclaim her sense of self. By introducing readers to the world of horsemanship, Maum shows us that sometimes wisdom isn’t always about growing older—it can be about giving our inner child (and animal) room to play.
Like many women in their twenties with mysterious symptoms, Joselin Linder faced years of misdiagnoses. Upon discovering a rare blockage in her liver, she reckons with her father’s death ten years earlier and the possibility that she could face the same fate. As Linder pieces together her family’s medical history, she sees a connection she can’t ignore—but also one that hasn’t yet been validated scientifically. Written like a mystery, Linder shares what it’s like to discover, diagnose, and treat rare diseases. She explores the power of genomics, its implications in real-life decision making for people with genetic diseases, and the deeply personal ethical considerations this knowledge forces patients to confront.
Cheryl E. Klein wants a baby. She and her partner try everything for her to get pregnant, and face the physical and emotional toll of infertility, IVF, miscarriage, and breast cancer. After wondering if they’re even fit to become parents, the couple warily enters the world of open adoption, facing the challenges of bureaucracy and the steep financial and emotional risks of potential matches that fall through—all the while acknowledging an imbalanced system in which birth mothers and adoptive mothers can feel as though they’ve been pitted against each other. With humor and irony, Klein laments how deliberate same-sex couples need to be in their desire to grow their families and how this pressure can cause fissures in even the strongest relationships, making you wonder if the life you’ve been working toward is worth its cost.
In the most straightforward, tightest way possible, Amy Bloom shares the heartbreaking story of helping her husband, Brian, end his life by doctor-assisted suicide in the wake of receiving a diagnosis for dementia. She walks readers through her journey of finding a way to honor this last wish as their mutual grief grows. Bloom shows us the beauty and honesty within their marriage as the secret plan they plotted kept moving forward. Throughout the entire story, the reader knows the painful destination they’re heading towards, and yet you keep going, drawn in by Bloom’s humor and warmth. Using Brian’s story, Bloom shows us how challenging it is to make dignified decisions about death, and how sometimes, the greatest love of all is letting someone go on their own terms.
For years, Meghan O’Rourke suffered debilitating bouts of pain, night sweats, brain fog, and the feeling that electric shocks were covering her body. In prose that flexes her poetic and journalistic skills, O’Rourke takes readers through her uncertainty, frustration, and moments of hopelessness in search of wellness. She shows us the doctors who dismissed her ailments; the long, winding road she took in search of understanding; and, finally, treating the tick-born infections and autoimmune disorders that caused them. She offers a glimpse into a world that the medical community tends to avoid, which is what life looks like for the millions of people for whom medicine cannot cure entirely. While the story centers on O’Rourke’s experiences, she puts it in the broader contexts of Western and alternative medicines, and offers insights into ways patients have been treated and let down by both.
Brain on Fire starts with 24 year-old Susannah Cahalan waking up in a hospital, completely forgetting how she landed there. She takes readers through the previous month of strange behaviors ranging from paranoia, outbursts of giggles, lack of hunger, and suddenly becoming unable to do her job. Once hospitalized, doctors aren’t sure what to make of her. Cahalan’s case appears to be a psychiatric one, but over the course of a month, her condition becomes increasingly challenging to treat. As her speech and movement faculties begin to fail, her family refuses to believe she isn’t still in there, trying to return to them. Using her training as a journalist, Cahalan shows us just how hard it can be for an otherwise healthy, young woman to be taken seriously in a medical context, and how easy it would be to slip through the cracks.
Amid rising threats to queer families—including health policies that restrict trans kids’ health care and attacks on marriage equality—I find myself craving books that showcase LGBTQ+ families in an authentic way. Though queer representation has improved in literature in recent years, I still need to actively seek out the types of stories I’m looking for, so I set out on a reading journey.
I was looking for books that portray diverse queer families and all the dynamics they entail. I read stories of queer kids coming out to straight parents, and queer parents navigating raising children. I found books about relationships between queer adults and their siblings. I especially enjoyed books that explore how different cultural and generational contexts influence these relationships.
I was also looking for different definitions of family. The concept of “chosen family” carries deep history and resonance in the LGBTQ+ community, especially for those who have been rejected by their families of origin for choosing to live openly and proudly. I wanted to make sure chosen families were represented in the literature I read, so I sought out books that portray new ways of building family ties and community.
The eight books I’ve collected here span genres and cultures but they all share a nuanced, authentic representation of queer families. Together they create a rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ stories that break stereotypes and show the beauty of all types of families.
This poetic book follows Cyrus, a queer Iranian-American young man, who grapples with issues of loss, family, and identity. After losing his mother at a young age, Cyrus and his father leave their native Iran for America, hoping to start over. As an adult, he reflects on this journey, seeks answers about his mother’s death, and is led to an art exhibit centering a terminally ill woman to whom he feels an unexplainable pull. Along with its fascinating portrayal of Iranian and Iranian-American culture, the novel features two queer characters navigating their identities. Readers can also look forward to an unexpected but very cute queer friendship-turned-romance.
The legendary lesbian writer’s latest comic novel is an often humorous portrayal of queer families, both traditional and chosen. It picks up on the author’s cult-favorite comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which debuted in 1983 and portrays a loosely knit group of queer friends as they navigate love and relationships. In Spent, the characters have aged a few decades and are now living in COVID-era America. The storylines include characters navigating evolving relationship dynamics and polyamory, as well as how the current political landscape and polarization impacts relationships between queer people and their families of origin. Illustrated in Bechdel’s iconic, simple yet expressive style, the book is brimful of diverse queer families—there are queer parents and their queer child; a gay adult and her straight, conservative sister; and many others. All this coalesces into a witty and incisive look at modern queer identity.
This is a beautiful and heartbreaking exploration of queer identity told through the lens of Patsy, a lesbian woman from Jamaica who leaves behind her home and her young daughter Tru to follow a childhood love to New York. Told over a decade, the novel follows both Patsy and Tru as they struggle to find themselves and search for happiness while constricted by traditional views of gender and sexuality. Dennis-Benn’s book explores lesbian identity and gender nonconformity with compassion and authenticity. Told through a mother-daughter relationship defined by queerness and love, as well as geographic and emotional distance, this is a book about family ties both lost and found.
This is an edgy, captivating, astrology-themed book that follows two women who are trying, but not necessarily succeeding, to get their lives together. Emily is a millennial who makes a living running a famous Instagram astrology account and struggles with a dysfunctional relationship with a guy she refuses to call her boyfriend. 40-something Dawn is searching for meaning while navigating a breakup with a girlfriend and a tense relationship with her son, whose needs she never seems to put before her own. Dorn doesn’t shy away from a characters’ lack of likeability, which makes her examination of psychology, queer identity, and surprising familial relationships all the richer. It also contains a shocking plot twist that will leave you reeling.
Evaristo’s novel explores race, sexuality, gender, and how views of these identities have shifted in recent decades. The book follows the lives of a dozen characters, most of whom are Black, queer, British women, as they navigate life’s challenges. Among the storylines is the relationship between Black lesbian playwright Amma and her teenage daughter Yazz, as well as Shirley, a Barbadian-British teacher who grows jaded by the racism she witnesses in the education system, and her conservative colleague Penelope, who makes a startling discovery about herself. I especially enjoyed the book’s portrayal of how lesbian and queer identity has shifted from a focus on women-only spaces to an embrace of gender fluidity and nonbinary identity and the portrait of tensions arising as older generations struggle to adapt to—and at times clash with—younger people’s evolving ideas.
This novel follows four siblings in the Barber family, each named after a month of the year, as they navigate the aftermath of the tragic event that defined their childhood: their father’s kidnapping in Iraq. Now, years later, new developments in their father’s case force each sibling to deal with the possibility that their father is still alive. The sibling set includes two queer characters: June (who as an adult goes by Juniper), a soccer coach about to wed her longtime girlfriend, and July, a college student who is learning about his sexuality and navigating feelings for two very different guys. What I love about this book is that it does not fall into the trap of making the queer characters’ sexuality their defining characteristic, rather sexuality is just one of the multitude of aspects that form an identity.
This romance with a dash of fantasy is a perfect read if you are looking for something heartwarming. It begins with its main character, a middle aged career-driven lawyer named Wallace, attending his own funeral as a ghost. There he meets a Reaper, who takes him to an unusual yet charming cafe that serves as a crossing to the afterlife. The book centers on Wallace’s time at the coffee shop, where he gets to know a quirky cast of characters who spend their days ushering the dead into the afterlife. He discovers unexpected friendship and even romance, and is forced to grapple with the life he led and what he wishes he had done differently. It is a lovely exploration of queer love and chosen family that will leave you smiling.
The book follows the Oppenheimer triplets, born to a Jewish-American New York family via assisted reproduction in the early days of IVF. As the trio grow up, they each navigate different interests and aspects of their identities; Sally’s coming out journey as a lesbian intersects with her brother Lewyn’s burgeoning college romance. They also come to learn unexpected things about their parents, which force them to reckon with topics of loyalty, love, religion, and race. Throughout, the book weaves queer identity into storylines about the ebb and flow of family relationships as characters find themselves, their political identities, and relatives they didn’t know they had.
I.S. Jones is a writer I’ve long respected—her poetry, of course, with its immersive and enchanting qualities, but also her editorial eye and interview work in the series Legacy Suite, in which she speaks with early-career poets. Jones’s debut full-length collection, Bloodmercy—selectedby Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize—is captivating. From the very first line, “Violence is a failure of communication,” I was taken in by the possibility of poetry within such a direct statement. What solidified the work as one-of-a-kind was its propensity towards the grotesque, insisting on its relevance to girlhood.
Bloodmercy reimagines the story of Cain and Abel as sisters, a visceral chronicle of codependency and its consequences. Framed by a striking painting by Shawn Theodore of two Black girls with connected braids who do not look at each other, Jones’s lines never fail to discomfort and to transform. This is aptly captured in the poem “Sister’s Keeper” with the line “I peeled back my skin to unveil a body / Baba would find use in.” This understanding of the self through wound recurs throughout Bloodmercy. Speakers come to the reader in different registers, continually breathing new life into retold events. Jones deepens and complicates a long-known tale into a coming of age, a queer becoming, a processing of abuse, with reverence for the offerings of each player in the Biblical story.
Shortly after the release of Bloodmercy, I met with Jones over Zoom. She eagerly flipped through Bloodmercy as we spoke, quoting back earlier iterations of lines, building a strong genealogy of the work—each poem becoming as much of a journey off the page as they are already on it. We spoke about the grotesque, how she developed a voice for each of her characters, and the advantages of myth-making.
Summer Farah: Bloodmercy has now been out for over a week. How are you feeling?
I.S. Jones: I am feeling everything. I did not realize how emotionally demanding writing a book would be, even after? I always thought—erroneously, I realize—that the heaviest part would be finally getting the book out. When I got the paperback, for days I walked around with my book and just looked at it. From one editor to another, you understand: When you look at a book, you’re looking at one version that exists out of a thousand that didn’t. When I was almost done, I thought I had an ending, right? And then the book told me, no, this is not the ending that I want. Us artists, we’ve always had to claw and push to get the things that we need. I think I believed that once the book came out, I would have to do it a little less, and that’s not the case at all! It’s been a lot of relearning how to negotiate for myself. But also, learning to be perfectly fine walking away from the table if I have to. This book won a prize before it ended up winning the Honickman. I had only been sending it out for three months. I always assumed this would be a year and years, years, years long process. For it to happen so suddenly…When I was thinking about the life I wanted this book to have in the world, I thought to myself, I’m gonna do a big scary thing and pull the book from this prize. Summer, I was in shambles about it! Everything could have been different. I’m super fortunate to have had Elizabeth Scanlon as an editor, and to have the APR team behind me, which has been just so, so, so incredible and dreamy.
SF: I have been picking apart the implications of the opening line, “Violence is a failure of communication” so often since I first read it: violence as a result of failure, violence after communication, violence as a reaction. I like that the book begins with after. The first poem is titled “After the Offering Ritual”; it sets the book up to be a response, an aftermath in this failure. You mention the possible versions of this book, but I’m interested—what is this book the aftermath of?
ISJ: I love this question. It was important for me to capture [a reader] with the first line. A lot of poems that I love build tension very early on, either from the title or the first few lines. We, the audience, are made to feel like we’ve been entrusted with this very intimate moment. Because here’s the truth about human nature: Many of us like hot gossip, you feel me? We’ve been led into something that we weren’t supposed to see. It feels more evocative in that way. This book is heavily based on many movies that I love, that colored my interior world, [so] it was important that the opening poem felt cinematic. All the sections should be equally strong, everyone has different ideas about that, but, if you can’t hook them after the first section, most folks don’t have any incentive to read past that. So, the poems are shaped in that way to bring forth that sense of urgency. I grew up in the Celestial Church of Christ, and so I was trying at first to bring in artifacts from the church I grew up in.
SF: There’s a great payoff as a reader from the tension and discomfort in this book. You are so good with leaning into the grotesque. There’s the peeling of skin, the pulsing of the blood—it’s awesome. I love the cheekiness of the poem “A Lot of Blood But Not Much Mercy” that is quite literally about skin picking, and the undoing of the title through this opening of a wound. I’m interested in this impulse and propensity towards the grotesque—what are your influences in building that image?
Us artists, we’ve always had to claw and push to get the things that we need.
ISJ: I wanted to create a story of girlhood that mirrored my own, which was grotesque. I never killed live animals, but my mom taught me how to open up a chicken, to scoop out the innards. Same thing with fish, too. As I matured, I rejected the conventional expectations and totem poles of desire [of girlhood]—what I mean is that, I wasn’t interested in wearing mini skirts or dresses, or having purses. I hated purses. I wanted to learn how to build cars, and I wanted to have my hands in the dirt. My mom and I would garden together a lot, too. Rot is a large part of this book. I love rot in that it is a symbol of the inevitable aging of time, like, maggots come for us all, rot comes for us all.
There was a story, or a poem, that we read about a lynching my first year at The Watering Hole. This hideous, horrible thing to have lynched this body, but when the poem opened, it’s talking about the light, the early autumn light, and the crisp leaves underfoot, and the morning dew shining off of this recently deceased body. I thought about how marvelous, and how strange, and how delightful it is to find beauty in these places that one would assume would be devoid of beauty. I wanted to bring that to the book. There’s a delight I have in making language around the things that often bring us discomfort. Discomfort is not something that’s a deterrent for me. If anything, the things that make me the most uncomfortable is where the art-making for me begins. I also think about how the grotesque, at least in the context of this book, is a measure of survival. If I am the grotesque beast everyone believes I am, no one will try to hurt me. That way, grotesqueness is almost kind of like a shield.
SF: The joining of things is a major aspect of this book. It’s present in the cover and the title; the poem “Bloodmercy” has the melding of Cain and Abel into Cannibal, into Claimable, this sort of taking of, an adjoining and an ownership. I’m interested in how this phrase, “bloodmercy,” holds the book.
I wanted to create a story of girlhood that mirrored my own, which was grotesque.
ISJ: It feels woo-woo and prophetic, but it’s true that the book told me, this is my name. The name itself has kind of changed meanings. If we were to break down the word “mercy” by itself, it literally means divine gift, right? There’s an implication, etymologically, that mercy is something that only God could give. Blood, obviously, has multiple meanings to it, too, right? It means kinship; it can also mean history. When I think about the biblical implication of [blood], after Cain kills his brother, God says, your brother’s blood wails to me from the ground. Blood also means connection, and it means bond, but it is also a language on its own. What does it mean to always be bound to another person? Even families who maybe break contact still carry pieces of each other with them. No matter how much you might be in disharmony with your family, you are still of them, you know? Bloodmercy. In the book, it’s very clear that the sisters have a borderline codependent relationship. When I was thinking about how to differentiate the voices of Cain, Eve, and Abel, I was thinking about the three modes of poetry. Lyrical. Abel is narrative. Eve is dramatic. If we’re writing this same poem from Cain’s perspective, she’s gonna be rapping a little bit. If we’re writing this poem from Abel’s perspective, she has a lot to say, especially because, canonically, Abel does not have a voice in the original fable. I wanted a single word that evoked the suffocating nature of family. My enduring questions to God.
SF: Could you talk a little bit more about how you developed each speaker?
ISJ: Eve represents my adult womanhood. In the first two sections of the book where Cain and Abel are young girls, Eve interjects often in their sections. I [did that] because I wanted Eve evenly put throughout the book, so that way when we get to the end and we have her section, it doesn’t feel like it’s out of nowhere. There was [also] some connective tissue that was missing that I couldn’t yet see between Cain and Abel. I realized Eve is the crux of all the conflict between the sisters. I realized that that parallels my own life. None of the conflict, at least in Bloodmercy, happens without Eve, right? She’s the reason they’re banned from the Garden of Eden. She is the reason that the sisters repeatedly fight and triangulate, by her unintentional favoritism. By using Eve as the connective tissue, it helped me incorporate her, but also make those clear sections and make the voices different between Cain and Abel.
[With Cain], I wanted to have my childhood self move through this strange new world and make language around it. What is it like to watch the world quite literally form around you? Abel was really the hardest of the voices, because Abel’s only personality, canonically, is that he was martyred by his brother. We don’t know if he was an obnoxious little brother, even though I suspect that he was. Abel’s name quite literally means vapor. It means nothing. It means air. I thought about that immense loneliness. To be remembered as the sibling that got slaughtered. I wanted to take some of that second-born resentment and some of my own language around having been queer very young, but not yet having language for it. All the places where I wanted to negotiate my relationship to beauty, and to ugliness, and to labor, and to usefulness, all of that poured itself into Abel. I realized, oh my god, Abel’s gay! Oh my god, this little girl is gay, wow! It birthed some of my favorite poems in the book, too. What if Abel got to live long enough to see her childhood mistakes? What if Cain and Abel got to live long enough to be adults? I think, for me, that is more terrifying than the original version.
SF: The way you talk about building language as you come into awareness of the world reminds me of the poem “Juice or Milk”.
Myth seems to allow us permission to try to give ourselves a better story.
ISJ: “Juice or Milk” is the oldest story about myself that my mom tells me. A lot of this book, especially Section 1, is governed by my child logic. We would only pray in Yoruba, and so I thought, okay, obviously, we pray in Yoruba because that’s what the angels understand, and the angels send the prayers up to God. I wanted to, in a nostalgic way, capture the first few words I learned in Yoruba. It. Sometimes when people see non-English in a poem, they freak out. For a long time, I almost cut this poem because of that fear, but [I wanted] this book to have an almost home-movies vibe to it, like the intimate videos of someone’s childhood on a very old, grainy VHS. [“Juice or Milk”] is one of those core memories that are on the VHS in the back of my head. My parents would not teach me Yoruba as a child. In part, they were terrified of me having a thick African accent. My parents mostly spoke Yoruba [at home], so that’s what I spoke back to them. When I went to school, as my mom tells the story, during lunchtime, the teachers went around and asked all the kids, “Do you want juice or milk?” And then I said back, “Juice or milk?” Because I didn’t understand what they meant. They called my mom and said, “Hey, I don’t know what language you’re speaking to your child at home, but it’s really important that she learns English.” And so my parents stopped speaking to me in Yoruba after that. I think with most immigrant parents, because they want their child to have the best of everything, they seem to conflate the “best of everything” with being “as American as possible.” Those are not the same thing at all. But then also, my parents are more patriotic than me, and I get it. I didn’t have to labor for my citizenship; they did. Their relationship to America will always be different than mine.
SF: Could you talk about the role myth-making plays in processing these archetypical pressures of the eldest daughter, of womanhood, of specific visions for gender and sexuality, and on?
ISJ: If I imagine myself as Cain, which, technically, I am, I would want to ask my mother, “What was your life like before me?” She can’t say. I always imagined the land of Nod like Nigeria. Sometimes, this self-myth-making is a way of rewriting a history that both made me but had to come at a cost. I think about how there’s this whole part of my mother’s life that she will never tell me about. And poems, in some ways, are a way to make new space in that sort of darkness. Myth seems to allow us permission to try to give ourselves a better story.I think often about my mother in this book and about how she says things that my own mother would never say. But I remember when I had read an earlier version of some of these poems to her, she was really startled by how intensely I listened. When I think about myth-making, I also think about Zora Neale Hurston, as many women of my generation probably do, specifically about how much of her life was about archival work and record keeping. There are things that we have to pay attention to and keep track of. In the Bible, women were not trusted with record keeping. Women were not trusted with very integral parts of history. Even Peter’s hatin’ ass—in the non-canonical books of the Bible, Mary Magdalene was considered one of the apostles. Peter, who was a jealous hater, said to God, “God, you can’t let her be an apostle, you can’t trust her, she’s a woman.” Not like, oh, she did this and she’s a woman. Just, she can’t be trusted. I think about how powerful myth-making can be in that way, right? Not that we can bypass history, but myth-making gives us a new playing field with which to negotiate history upon.
Professor Fulton Mathis’s vehicular misadventure had been devastating for him, but the university had taken it in stride. As long as he could ensure that his duties would be completed with minimal accommodation, the administration would be more than happy to welcome him back to work. In exchange, the university would budget for a semester-to-semester research assistant who’d function more like a personal aid. It was also suggested—not unkindly—that he consider early retirement.
“Given the impressive scope of your professional achievements, I’d expect you to find great success on the lecture circuit,” the first research assistant, Kevin, read aloud to Mathis. It was an email from the dean. “Your precocious appointment to full professor last spring would also ensure a generous disability payout, should you choose to take that route.”
But Fulton was too busy taking in the sonic dimensions of Brodsky Hall to listen to Kevin, whose voice—still a bit reedy, though settling into its depth by the day—denoted a young man in the prime of his youth, the kind more inclined to be crushing opponents in beer pong than sitting through a philosophy lecture. Yet here he was, loping along next to Fulton in rubber-soled shoes with unthreaded laces whose plastic tips tapped the floor as they walked. Fulton regretted rushing his return to campus; if Kevin was to function as his “mobility aid,” then surely he should just refrain from motility altogether.
“Kevin, why did you apply for this job?”
Kevin paused his recitation mid-sentence. For some reason, this necessitated a pause in their walking as well: Fulton stood still, listening to Kevin breathe contemplatively through his mouth.
“I’m sorry, professor. Am I in trouble?”
“What? No. Of course not. I’m just curious.”
Kevin’s sigh was loud and a little fragrant. Fulton resisted a reflexive sigh of his own.
“I’ve never been, you know, the most academically gifted,” Kevin said. “But last year, I heard you on the Jack Render Show and I honestly had no idea that philosophy could apply to life like that. I actually switched my major because of you, Professor Mathis.”
Fulton nodded at the floor and made a noise like Mmh. This admission from a student like Kevin would have flattered Fulton in the past, even served as proof of the validity and far-reaching appeal of his message. But now he just winced at the memory of the “brain strength nootropics” Jack had paid him $2,000 to promote during his follow-up interview, and wondered if there was a young man alive who didn’t stream that podcast.
“So, when this opportunity came up—and I’m so sorry about your accident, professor—but yeah, when it came up I knew I needed to apply.”
Fulton made his affirmative noise again, having become so lost in thought that he’d barely noticed they’d resumed moving through space. Now, Kevin’s rubber plodding generated an echo far grander than its origins, as if the two of them had just shuffled underdressed and unshaven into a medieval basilica. Really, they’d arrived in Brodsky’s high-ceilinged auditorium: stately and uncarpeted, the largest on campus, and Fulton’s dedicated lecture home since the publication of Nonsense Autonomy. Not even fear of the Delta variant could keep students from filling the hall once they’d returned to in-person classes a few years ago. “It seems your flirtation with pop psychology may be the very thing that keeps this virus alive and mutating,” a jealous colleague had sneered at him. Fulton could have quipped back, but it would’ve been too easy: his colleague’s seminars on Jeremy Bentham hardly qualified as superspreader events.
“Here we are,” Kevin said. His voice had shifted into a minor key, the melancholic croak of a thwarted adolescent. “Do you need any help getting to the podium?”
Fulton knew this space better than any on campus. He relished the opportunity to let Kevin fall away, and with him any reminder of his own impairment. He gripped the edges of the podium and paid attention to the electric hum of energy in the room. Students greeted him as they walked past, spoke loudly about things they wanted him to overhear (what they’d read over break, how many of his YouTube videos they’d watched) and less loudly about things they didn’t (who was currently high, who was hooking up with who). His hearing wasn’t so much betteras varied: he cared more about what he heard now, which gave him the impression of hearing more than he had before. When his team of graduate teaching assistants had assembled, he made small talk with them, joked about his accident before they could try to console him over it, relished the opportunity to show up as their all-knowing, if slightly diminished, god. “If you’re going to fuck your life up, you might as well fuck it up to get famous,” Tatiana once said to him. Had she had any idea how prescient she’d been?
After the head TA introduced himself and Fulton and the bubbly chatter of the undergrads was silenced, Fulton began the class the way he always did in the Brodsky auditorium: “Tell me, which of you chose to come to class today?”
Chatter, giggling, a presumable show of hands. He pressed on. “And how many of you chose to take this class in the first place?”
Again, the chatter, the laughter. Fulton let it percolate for a moment, ignoring the head TA’s flutters behind him. “But surely none of you would claim that you’d chosen to be born?”
Now the auditorium was quiet, and Fulton dove in. This particular lecture was well-worn, an adumbrated version of the ninety-eight minute YouTube video that had been the first of his to go viral. The video was more of a rant than anything, its title eminently clickable: “Is Human Stupidity Proof of Freewill?” At first, the comments had been what he’d expected from modest viral fame: he was a pedant, he was a crank, he was saying something other academics were too chickenshit to say. But then had come the high-profile tweets—first from Joy Behar, whom he would never have guessed shared his interests in freewill and compatibilism, followed by another supposedly written by Oprah herself—and after that the praise, fast and strong like a fire hose pointed directly at his face. He was no more a saint than the next assistant professor (he wanted to negotiate an additional raise on top of his promotion; he wanted to stick it to Yale for cutting him loose pre-tenure), but no amount of vanity could make drinking from a fire hose possible. But he’d drunk, and he’d drowned. The affair with Tatiana would have been evidence enough of this, and yet things had turned out so much worse. “The uncoolest of all possible worlds,” as Tatiana liked to say.
But the undergrads couldn’t know the extent of his drowning. To them, this was yet another weird chapter in the life of Professor Fulton Mathis, a plot whose scope had rapidly expanded to accommodate the entire university. And that meant it had to involve more and more of their little lives, their half-formed ideas about books and art, their all-important grades and letters of recommendation. Fulton couldn’t let the enormity of his flagging brand stagger him, so he let the enormity of their youthful ignorance comfort him. The applause at the end of his lecture was no less robust than it had been before, and as the TA announced the homework and the students filtered out, thanking him as they left, Fulton turned to the hovering presence at his right shoulder with a smirk. “See how I can’t be vanquished, Kevin?” he almost said. But it wasn’t Kevin who stood at his side.
“That was wonderful.” It was a woman’s voice, deeper than a fawning girl’s and more even-keeled. “It’s such a treat to meet you in the flesh.”
The way she said in the flesh set the back of Fulton’s neck ablaze, something he would have much preferred to feel in private, though he’d be the first to admit that there was a certain eroticism to public exposure. He stuck his hand out into the void; a soft and slender feminine one received it. He suppressed a shiver.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure we’ve met. Are you a student here?”
“I’m just auditing,” said the woman’s voice. “Artie. Short for Artemis, of all things.”
Fulton arched his eyebrows, smiling. “A huntress,” he said.
She laughed. “Maybe. I think of myself more as a single mom who wants to funnel her alimony into a humanities degree.”
“So the opposite of a huntress,” Fulton quipped, immediately regretting it. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s honest.” Self-deprecating laughter, then the breathy sigh of a beautiful person. He ought to punish himself for making a joke at her expense. “I know it’s foolish, but I’ve always loved philosophy. Not more than my son, of course, and he didn’t choose to interrupt my degree.”
“Then let me choose to be less of an ass,” Fulton said. “Again, I’m sorry. I’m so glad to have you here. I’m positive the students feel the same. Frankly, I find what you’re doing inspirational.”
“You think so?”
Her voice was silken, her question unashamed. No self-conscious avoidance of “vocal fry,” no obvious hesitation over appearances. Here they were: an adult man in conversation with an adult woman who had no qualms revealing the approval-seeking girl inside of her. It was hot, and perhaps she meant it to be. Or perhaps she didn’t. But for Fulton to leave the possibility unacknowledged would be a missed opportunity.
“I know so,” he said. “And my office door is open to you anytime. Really.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been busy for a philosophy professor,” Jack had said during Fulton’s first appearance on the podcast five years ago. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be in ivory towers writing jargon-filled papers no one reads?”
“I suppose so,” Fulton responded. He hadn’t had to force his laugh: the whole situation was so ridiculously surreal, such a delightful fuck-you to the academic middle class and its laughable pieties, the dissertation advisors who would have preferred he stayed a spineless peon trapped in shame spirals for the rest of his career. “I mean, I used to do all that. But I got tired of being forgettable.”
At this, Jack slapped the table between them and brayed his hoarse, muscular laugh. “That’s definitely not your problem anymore, is it?”
Not then it wasn’t. But a decade before, Fulton had been another fifth-year PhD student casting around for a dissertation topic. He wanted to be an ethicist, so he chose to write about freewill and determinism, the equivalent of wanting to become a chef and “specializing” in cheese. The topic’s too broad, his friends told him. That field’s too well-trod for a PhD candidate to say anything worth getting hired about, his advisor had chuckled.
But what none of them had counted on was Fulton’s need. Not just for a job, but for humans to have freewill. So potent was this need that he dug up a dusty old folio at his institution’s library in which were stuffed the letters of a virtually unknown philosopher, a contemporary of William James and John Dewey whose single contribution to the field had been to argue that our actions physically shape the world around us. The philosopher—Cassius Artemé-Feti was his oddly memorable name—hadn’t been saying anything terribly original, aside from a small footnote in which he suggested that “such creative capacity may be the basis for an inductive proof of freewill.” Fulton took this footnote and ran with it.
The ability to effect a material difference in the world through sheer force of will, in addition to the variety of nonsensical conflicts arising from these differences, is proof not only that we act of our own free will but irrationally so, he’d begun his dissertation. During office hours, Fulton’s advisor handed him the first chapter back with a sour expression. The papers were curiously empty of his jagged pen marks.
“It’s too risky,” he’d said. “Fly-by-night. Specious.”
It’s too original, Fulton translated in his head. Clearly written. A breakthrough. His subsequent hiring at Yale confirmed this.
Fulton was a philosopher and not a novelist precisely because he didn’t want to be on the hook to anyone for an explanation of his interests. He found it a strange and somewhat prurient thing, broadcasting to the world the details of one’s life, especially under the unconvincing veil of “fiction.” Had Fulton written a novel instead of that dissertation, it might have been about a thirty-two-year-old philosophy PhD with an impressive CV hired to an Ivy League university, and how that young professor’s sex addiction was fed by hours of porn consumption, and that porn consumption was fueled by dopamine-seeking fueled by the same sense of self-loathing that had likely made him want to get a philosophy PhD in the first place. The character would be named something other than Fulton Mathis, something asinine like Scott or Louis. At the beginning of the book, Scott-or-Louis would swear up and down that he was a great respecter of women, would go on normal dates filled with normal banter and ending in pleasant sex. When the date dressed to leave, she’d give him a peck on the cheek and say, “We should do this again.” Scott-or-Louis would agree enthusiastically, see her out the front door, and then hurry back inside to his office, where he’d strip off his pants and flip open his laptop to watch videos of women being choked and gagged and jabbed and ejaculated-upon. Women dressed to appear very young being assaulted by vile, brawny men and screaming how much they wanted it so bad before their assailants muffled their screams with pillows. Women being gang-banged and “forced to submit” (always the men’s words), women being fetishized and humiliated in every conceivable manner, women being kidnapped and handcuffed and trafficked (THIS IS A SIMULATION, read the title cards at the beginning of these videos, a phrase Scott-or-Louis might repeat to himself like a mantra), women being degraded on the basis of their race or sexuality or ability. The worst of the worst, for hours at a time, the Scott-or-Louis’s grip on reality slipping, his self-loathing increasing with every tortured shudder and soiled Kleenex. Papers ungraded, articles unwritten, faculty meetings missed.
The resolution to this novel would come not from Scott-or-Louis “safely and responsibly” living out his fetishes, as many an online forum member encouraged him to do, but from the application of his analytical skill to the problem of his desire. If he could prove his desires to be something other than brute facts—i.e. things that were inherently, unavoidably, a priori true about him—but choices he was making, however subconsciously, then perhaps he could will himself to choose differently.
In real life, Fulton couldn’t make these choices fast enough. One too many meetings missed, email chains un-replied to, parties unattended. He published his dissertation and then another book, a largely unread monograph about the life of Artemé-Feti, but it made no difference. Too much gooning, as the students would say, and not enough ass-kissing. He was denied tenure. “Of course, you’ve worked at Yale,” the department chair said with a razor-sharp grin. “So you ought to have no trouble getting hired elsewhere.”
It was a noxious thing to say—in the academy’s illustrious past, scholars had threatened bodily harm over much less—but it wasn’t untrue. Fulton was snapped up with tenure by a well-funded state school after just a few months on the market. The salary was generous and the hiring committee obsequious, but he missed the pleasure of teaching so many unrealized versions of himself. Also, his laptop was a wreck of m-preg and bukkake videos. He had made no progress towards claiming his agency. He feared addiction and compulsion were the best and only models for human volition. Addiction to God, compulsion to confess. Addiction to history, compulsion to revolutionize. Addiction to tits, compulsion to film oneself wearing a silicone rack and sending it to open-minded women on kink sites whom his r/NoFap interlocutors noxiously termed “like-minded community.”
There’s a Nietzsche quote about needing chaos in oneself to give birth to a dying star, a quote Fulton might have remembered had he not been busy going full nihilist-Superman less than a year into his second job. Sex with grad students. Sex with one undergrad, then another and another. One of them published an alternately scathing and adoring LiveJournal post about him and then swiftly deleted it; another left to “visit her grandma” after a semester and never came back. Glasses of gin, palmfuls of Adderall, night-long Pornhub binges: Eiffel tower; spit on dick; spit roast whores; workplace orgy; workplace abduction forced orgasm; DD/LG Thanksgiving; Mormon threesome; Mormon abduction; sissified bimbo bitch; castration sissy hypno; big ass hentai teen. For this state of affairs, he could’ve blamed the not-Yale-ness of his surroundings, the devaluation of reading among his students, the general decline of the humanities, the vitiation of liberal democracy, the obvious failure of the American experiment. But these things only further robbed him of his agency. In a just and free universe, the kind of universe Fulton actually wanted to live in, who else ought to shoulder the blame but himself?
It was in this mood that he began speaking truth to power on YouTube, decrying not his own content consumption habits but the state of political discourse and the “cultural chaos” that had taken grip over America: “We’re living in rubble, but there’s one good thing we can surmise from that fact. We made the rubble, which means we get to change it.”
By the time the Mischievous Will was under contract, he was a bestselling writer in several languages, a guest on popular podcasts and a wearer of bespoke suits. The university was struggling to keep him. And while fame didn’t cure his obsessions, he was happy to find it transformed them. The grimy laptop stayed closed, his home office unoccupied. In their place: well-compensated speaking engagements, multi-city book tours, over a million YouTube subscribers. No more student affairs or sex dungeons: such things struck him as boorish and adolescent, especially given the caliber of woman now available to him. Women who were themselves famous and influential, who brought up the chapters on sexual indiscretion in his books over drinks after his speaking engagements, who told him with knowing smirks that his research corroborated their lived experiences. Women highly adult and adventurous in ways he’d always dreamed of being. Women like Tatiana.
Tatiana Abramov was a decade older than Fulton and held an endowed chair at a prestigious university where she’d rubbed shoulders with many of his heroes. In fact, she was one of his heroes, a rockstar scholar of ancient philosophy who required all her PhD students to learn ancient Greek and then take her seminar on Plato’s Republic in the dead language. She and Fulton met at a sold-out event at her institution during which he wore a headset mic and shared with a young and restless crowd his Six Ideas About God and Authoritarianism. She’d just been profiled in the New Yorker, a story about how her ex-husband (and ongoing colleague) currently lived in the garden apartment beneath the house she now shared with a twenty-seven-year-old woman and a rotating cast of sexually available young idealists. Fulton had read the profile with a kind of sweltering thrill, and then dutifully purchased a copy of her latest book, The Ethicist’s Non-Monogamy.
When he saw Tatiana in the signing line, he thrilled again. She set both his books down in front of him, smiling demurely.
“If you could make both out to T-A-T—”
“I know who you are,” Fulton interrupted her. “What kind of philosopherwould I be if I didn’t know your name?”
Fame, or at least its implication, is a powerful seduction tool, one that worked both ways for Fulton. He signed her copy of his book, and she signed his copy of hers. Then they left the grad students to clean up the auditorium while they had dinner together, which became drinks, which became more drinks and two blunts with Tatiana’s wraithlike Czech girlfriend as Tatiana’s ex-husband watched what sounded like an episode of Home Improvement in the garden apartment. Then came the sex: first with the girlfriend, whom Tatiana referred to as “my little Soviet satellite,” and then without her (though not without the double-wide swing). Fulton missed his flight back home. Instead, he rented a car and drove five hours, arriving back just forty minutes before the start of his Monday seminar. Luckily, he didn’t check his phone until after he’d taught, because he had ten texts from Tatiana and none of them could be safely viewed in his place of work.
This cycle—the heated texts, the driving, the sex—repeated itself about once a month, sometimes twice if he was desperate, for a year. Fulton found himself both ferociously consumed by the intensity of it (a feeling he quite liked) and, perhaps stupidly, falling in love. Tatiana had assured him that she was a total relationship anarchist, meaning that she had no primary partner and placed no limit on the amount of partners she maintained nor the feelings she allowed herself to develop for them. But even then Fulton couldn’t quite ascertain his place in her web of connections. Would it throw a wrench in things to tell Tatiana that he loved her? Or would she say it back?
Towards the end of a particularly lusty summer, Fulton packed among the paddles and gags in his overnight bag a handwritten note in which he confessed his love for Tatiana.
Towards the end of a particularly lusty summer, Fulton packed among the paddles and gags in his overnight bag a handwritten note in which he confessed his love for Tatiana, his delicious obsession with her body and mind, and vowed to resolve the distance between them. He could wrangle a lectureship at her university, in her department, where they could duck into storage closets and empty offices after faculty meetings.
When he arrived at Tatiana’s brownstone, it was to find her at the kitchen table toggling between her phone, a lit joint, and a bottle of vodka. Her hair was unwashed, and she wore sweatpants and a faded sweatshirt that read BROWN CREW across the chest. Fulton set his bag down, and zipped his letter into the front pocket.
“It’s a travesty,” she said without looking up.
“What is?”
He sat down across from her and made to rub her back, but she shrugged him away.
“The foolish little satellite has broken off the mother ship.” She took a long, crackling inhale from the joint and then passed it to Fulton, who followed suit. “She says I’m bad for her. She’s gone to live with some pigheaded physics student.”
Fulton chuckled. “They’re all like magpies, aren’t they?”
Tatiana glared at him, eyes flinty even as they were filling with tears, and he realized he’d said the wrong thing.
“I love her, Fulton,” she said. “I left my husband for her. I gave her this.” She gestured to the exposed brick walls of the kitchen they were sitting in. “And for what? Little brat pisses it all away.”
I would make such better use of it, Fulton thought, but knew better than to say. “I hate to see you hurting,” he said instead. “What would make this better?”
Tatiana told him she needed a moment to consider. During this moment, they each consumed two shots of vodka and finished the joint.
“I want her back,” she said at last. “I want to go to that stupid apartment building and knock on her door and tell her to come out right now, because I love her.”
Fulton was pouring another shot. “A display of affection. Like in Say Anything.”
“What?”
“An American film, made during the perestroika years. But I’m saying yes, I know what you mean.”
He did his shot, and then poured her one, after which she looked at him giddily. “And perhaps we can say to her that we’re a package deal? That Fulton Mathis is joining our polycule” —she pronounced it pollicool— “and so she’s with you as much as she is with me?”
Fulton flushed and nodded. He was very pleased.
Tatiana clapped her hands together and fished her phone out of the pocket of her sweatpants. Fulton poured them each a final shot, listening as Tatiana said, “Hello? Melkiy satellite? Well, I’m glad you answered, because we’ll be over in the next fifteen minutes.” The girl was still making distressed noises as Tatiana hung up.
“Come on,” she said to Fulton. “We’ll take my car.”
Fulton understood then that he had a choice to make. He could have told Tatiana that she was drunk, and that that they ought to give up on the girl and stay home together. He could have begun kissing her, pulled off her sweatshirt and distracted her with the equipment in the overnight bag. He could have told her that he was drunk, and that she could do what she wanted but he would stay put, perhaps have a shower and a nap so he’d be fresh for her return. But maddeningly, none of these options presented themselves to him. Not as a mounting anxiety that cut through his intoxication, nor a nagging suspicion that there was something better he ought to be doing.
Instead he looked on in a state of dreamy hypnosis as the future folded itself into the present, feeling for all the world like he was watching a celebrity chef fold cheese into a soufflé instead of standing by as the greatest mistake of his life unspooled before him. By the time he’d decided to accompany Tatiana to her girlfriend’s house, he was already getting into her car. By the time he’d plugged the girl’s coordinates into his GPS, they were already knocking on her flimsy door. And then the girl had emerged onto the fire escape, her sweaty and shirtless beau behind her, and both of them were shouting that this had to stop, that they were going to call the cops. Tatiana stamped her foot, her rail-thin body quivering, and shouted back in a Slavic language only the girl could understand.
Should Fulton have said something? Done something? Of course. But could he? Debatable. These events seemed to be happening before he understood himself as part of them. Therapists would subsequently describe this as trauma and dissociation to him; he would describe it as unmitigated freewill and incoherent compulsion back to them. And it wasn’t until he and Tatiana were back in her BMW and she was hurling foreign-language insults out the window that the lag between the recent events of his life and his consciousness of them began to bother him. It would have been helpful, for instance, to know that Tatiana was turning the wrong way onto a one-way street instead of dimly realizing that she’d done it sometime before fishing for her phone, which he could see ringing persistently from the floorboard. It seemed an eternity after Fulton apprehended all this that he finally began saying, “Look up! Jesus Christ, look up!” But she didn’t. Instead: a mighty crack and a great spray of metal and glass and Tatiana’s voice distant, fading, vanished. And then Fulton saw nothing at all.
Of course Artie was the first to come to Fulton’s office hours. She wanted to meet outside of class regularly. He barely held office hours anymore—his TAs took care of all the administrative busywork of running a class for him—but now he informed Kevin that he wanted to be on campus at least three times a week, drafting the coltish young man into an arcane conflict. You know, they’ll put me out to pasture if I don’t make an effort to show my face around Brodsky as much as I can. Never mind that it wouldn’t be a few missed office hours that the university could use as justification for forcing Fulton into early retirement: if they really wanted to quarter his handsome salary, they could cite the dwindling speaking engagements, the stalled publication record, the fading-from-relevance, and then put him on “extended medical leave” until he died.
So Kevin arranged with his other (very irritated) professors to leave class early or arrive at class late so hecould unlock Fulton’s office door and then retrieve Fulton from his rideshare, after which Fulton sent Kevin to heavy-breathe in the hallway so he could have the pleasure of thrilling to Artie’s feather-light steps alone. Her greeting, “So good to see you, Professor Mathis!”, then a series of little scuffs against the hardwood: she must have been wearing ballet flats. Fulton was not so old that he hadn’t known plenty of women in his own generation who’d worn them; he’d just missed being an “elder millennial” by a handful of years, a fact he never would have known had Artie not told him. Apparently, she was only a decade his junior.
“Having a kid in your twenties ages you, I don’t care what they say,” she said with a laugh.
“But surely there are advantages to being a young mom, like having more energy?”
That glittering laugh again. He could see its contrails on the insides of his eyelids.
“Energy is about the only thing I still have going for me, against all odds. That and my looks.”
There it was: his helpless surge of arousal. She spoke like they lived in a different time and place. And most alluringly, she only did this when his door was completely closed. Then they were sealed off together, in a fish tank or a dreamworld, someplace unimpregnable and free of judgment. He asked her about her academic interests and she told him about the abandoned graduate degree, the dissertation-that-almost-was. After that, their conversations slipped into an easy intimacy: her divorce, his accident, the pitfalls of single motherhood, the academy’s bluster.
“I feel like people don’t take me as seriously as they should with all the makeup I wear, but I can’t help it, I love wearing it,” she said.
“I don’t know if this is weird of me to say, but I don’t want Joey to have any frail men in his life. Just decisive, strong ones. Smart ones. Of course you know the type,” she said.
“It took four years after the divorce until I finally felt liberated enough to start sleeping around. Is that a normal timeline?” she asked.
He was impressed with her that he hadn’t needed to solicit these statements, and with himself for not asking her to elaborate on any of them. Instead, he pushed breathlessly past each surge of arousal to professional matters, enjoying the game he was sure she was playing.
“Tell me about your academic interests,” he said. “I would love to help you return to dissertation work.”
Artie was ambitious, he was delighted to find. She wasted barely any breath on being deferential —So sweet of you, with your busy schedule!—and dove right in: she was interested in consequentialism. The best indicator of an action’s moral goodness was its outcome, she believed, and she wanted her research to concern outcomes. What was a “good” outcome, and who was its beneficiary? Could an immoral act be justified if its outcome were deemed “good” enough, as in utilitarianism? Was it better to measure outcomes on an individual basis, or could a standard code of conduct be inferred from a large sample size of acts and outcomes?
“Watch out, Kant,” Fulton joked. “The huntress is coming for your metaphysics of morals!”
When their dynamic turned overtly sexual, it took even Fulton by surprise. Artie said, “Do you think I have a shot of getting into the PhD program?” and put her hand on his knee.
“Any PhD program would be insane not to let you in,” he breathed, and twitched as she walked her fingers up his inseam. “We’d be very lucky to have you.”
“You don’t read the applications, right? So you could help me with mine?”
So charming that she was concerned with conflicts of interest even as she pressed her hand into his crotch. So sweet of her to think that even if he could read PhD applications, he still would.
He called Kevin in to tell him that office hours were over. Artie here was applying to the PhD program, and Fulton needed to help her get her application started over lunch. Silently, without so much as a mouth-breath, Kevin held open the office door and then locked it behind them.
“Should we get takeout?” Fulton asked as she led him to her car. He could have proposed going straight to bed, but maintaining the façade of gentlemanliness meant maintaining the façade of lunch.
“We should,” she said, which surprised him. “From the new Thai place. And let’s get wine.”
Had his life ever been this easy? Had he really lost so much, if this is what he gained? He felt as if he were living in a dream. Wine poured, pad see ew steaming, her knee kept brushing against his, her laughter like a windchime stirred by his humor and insight. Then there was her hand on his thigh again, her plate pushed aside, her mouth on his. He kissed back vigorously, led her ploddingly to the bedroom. She laughed again, he was practically sweating with how much he wanted her, how mercifully stuck-together the broken pieces of him now felt. To want and be wanted: that was the whole point of everything! The whole point of being alive!
Their congress was bubbly, even a little innocent. It reminded him of his adolescence, though not in a bad way. (He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been reminded of his adolescence in a good way.) Both of them spent and slippery afterward, he felt sure he was right about her. He’d held her hips, run his hands up and down her sides while she moved against him, cupped her breasts, groaned spectacularly and seen great, giddy bursts of light all the while empirically determining that she was slim, strong, hairless and about two or three inches shorter than him. Her face, which he traced as she slept in the crook of his arm, was soft-skinned, with a little upturned Protestant nose and lips full and moist. He guessed they were pink; all the most beautiful women he’d been with hadn’t rouged their lips, had known that it was pink and not red that commanded attention, that could melt the resolve of the most powerful figures in any room.
Eventually he slept, too. When he awoke, it was to her kiss. She wanted to do this again.
“I want that too,” he replied. “Very much.”
That semester, which Fulton in his sightless fugue had originally believed would be the first few months of the end of his life, proved instead to be the second time he ever fell in love.
He and Artie spent whole weekends together, eating at odd hours and having sex on odd surfaces. She liked many of the same films he did—Videodrome, Boogie Nights, No Country for Old Men—and spoke enthusiastically during the moments without dialogue, something he allowed her to do even though he could still remember each scene clearly: Ha, he drinks so much milk in this! Ugh, it’s so creepy the way the TV just seems to grow skin. Oh my god, this moment when Marky Mark just looks at himself in the mirror!
Fulton himself could have been Mark Wahlberg then, favorably assessing his youthful reflection. But then why assess, contemplate, analyze when he could feel, with every aspect of his being, Artie’s life-brightening presence buzzing around his home? She was beautifying things, she told him: a checkered throw for the couch, a milk glass vase with fresh-cut flowers, a piping hot tray of brownies (his favorite kind, with marijuana). All this was nice, but it was her appetite for kink that really mattered to him. She was more vanilla than Tatiana—another way to look at it would be “less deranged”—but still playful. He liked her tastes.
“I put a little mic next to the bed,” she told him, lips close to his ear. “A little one, so we can listen to ourselves again after the fact.”
Indeed she had, and what incredible recordings they were! What had he done to deserve such a gorgeous freak? Fulton considered all sorts of arcane possibilities: Was this some kind of cosmic rebalancing after his accident? An abstruse message that he ought to pursue the Good with more commitment and rigor? Could he actually have lived a past life before this one, in which he’d been a far worthier person than he was now? He had to pay it forward, of course, by satisfying her sexually and promising to meet her adolescent son and ensuring her entrance into the PhD program. He was reminded of the last line of a fairytale he’d read as a boy, in which an aging queen is turned into a withered witch after denying her subjects bread: One is never too old to learn that all actions have consequences.
Fulton was no witch; he knew that part of keeping a good thing going was evincing gratitude for it. A thing as good as this one might require a wholesale readjustment of his perspective, including his ethics. Was a world all that bad which could give rise to someone as good as Artie? His dim view of freewill, that it was only exercised stupidity, now struck him as crotchety and Hobbesian. Someone could choose, as Artie frequently did, to ambush her lover at work and kiss him in his office; someone could choose to learn how to cook a delicious risotto, or to apply herself to the study of ethics so that she might write sentences as incisive as this one: If a moral agent must choose among a peculiar set of hypothetical consequences without the benefit of a test case, then said agent may be inclined to recast both selfish and selfless behaviors as merely “original.”
The day he resolved to tell her he loved her was a crisp one in the depths of fall. He’d finally built up the confidence to walk with a cane to campus—Brodsky was only a quarter mile from his front door—and he imagined he was doing so among a small forest of changing leaves. With a vividness so sudden it shocked him, he saw the afterimage of a leaf he’d found in the yard years ago, its veins a deep mauve and the skin a highly saturated umber. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about color.
He hadn’t realized he’d stopped moving until he registered the voice in front of him. His name, pronounced fool-ton. It was Mrs. Vazquez, his next door neighbor.
“My god, you scared me,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Fulton.” She was a cheerful old woman, with a granddaughter who’d be attending the university next fall. He wasn’t used to her voice sounding this dour.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She sighed, sucked her teeth. “Well, you know, I wasn’t going to say. My husband thinks I’m a busybody.”
Fulton laughed. He knew a thing or two about this dynamic.
“But if he isn’t here, and it’s just me bumping into you when I’m gardening, then he can’t judge, can he?”
Fulton rested his cane on his shoulder and folded his hands. “No, he certainly can’t.”
“Ah, well fine then.” He could feel Mrs. Vazquez approaching the short row of hedges that separated her yard from his. Her voice became low, a little strained. “Fulton, there is something wrong with the woman you’re seeing.”
Fulton’s eyebrows shot up. Had it been anyone else—a colleague, a conference friend, his speaking agent—he would have wanted to slap them. But this was Mrs. Vazquez, he reminded himself. Nothing more than a sweet elderly woman prone to old world theatrics. He would indulge her, he decided. Allow himself to be entertained.
“Oh?” he asked. “How’s that?”
She leaned in so close he could feel the sting of her peppermint mouthwash. “She comes around here in a car and just sits there. At the end of the driveway.”
“Well, she visits me often.”
“Ah, that’s it though! These times she doesn’t visit you. She sits there, doesn’t go in, drives away. And one time, Fulton, in the nighttime, I swear, she wasn’t alone.”
Now she had his interest. “Maybe she was with her son? He’s a sophomore at the high school.”
“No, no. It was another woman she was with!”
He knew it was eye-rollingly predictable of him to think it, a vestige of the goony manchild who would have given anything to be airlifted out of New Haven and dropped into his favorite porn, in media rut. But wasn’t it also a little hot, to be spied on by a woman? And with Artie and some mystery woman as the voyeurs?
But wasn’t it also a little hot, to be spied on by a woman?
“Do you spy on me?” he asked Artie later that day. They were working on her PhD application, and she had just finished reading aloud a section on marital infidelity that heavily cited The Mischievous Will.
“What?” The question was followed by a brusque rustling of papers.
“Are you into voyeurism? Is that something that might turn you on?”
“Jesus, Fulton, is there a way we can maybe not talk about sex right now? I know I’m the pot calling the kettle black here, but I really do want to make some headway on this today. The deadline’s in two weeks.”
“I’m sorry.” He sat up and forced himself to sigh noisily, which he did whenever he wanted to ignore his desire. “I was just thinking of it because Mrs. Vazquez next door said she saw you watching the house from the end of the driveway with some mystery woman. Of course I was curious. But it’s not a big deal.”
He would have dropped it then and there, would have happily dug back into speech acts and consequentialism, had he not heard a birdlike tremulous noise that he realized was Artie crying. He rushed to her, knocking his calf against the coffee table in the process, and felt supremely satisfied by the opportunity to hold her close, stroke her hair as she wept into his shoulder. When she finally peeled herself away, her voice was smaller than it had been before.
“I’m sorry. This is so stupid. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Not at all. You can tell me anything.”
“That’s Anita. My half-sister. We work together. She’s actually the one who got me the barista job at Barnes and Noble.”
All this time, and he’d never asked her what she did for work. In fact, he’d asked her very little about herself. Fulton felt naïve, self-recriminatory, and resolved to do his best to conceal his embarrassment.
“I wanted to introduce her to you, but I changed my mind.”
“Why was that?”
“Oh, Fulton, this is so pathetic. That was the night after her husband gave her a black eye. She’s been staying with me now, trying to get her kid back. He said he was taking Charlotte to his parents’ place in Pennsylvania, but she hasn’t heard from any of them in two weeks.”
“Oh my god.”
“Exactly.” She separated from him, drifting towards the fireplace. “It’s such a bad situation. I was so overwhelmed. The only thing I could think to do was come here and talk to you, because I trust you. But then I realized how that would look.”
“Would look? What do you—?”
“Come on, babe, you know what I mean. Your broke girlfriend telling you some sob story about her broke sister? You’d think I was trying to take advantage of you. I don’t want that hanging between us.”
He knew she’d said something after Come on, babe, but he didn’t hear it. Babe! The sweetest, sexiest, thing you could call another person. The kind of nickname he associated with young lovers, hands slipped into each other’s back pockets. What he’d be calling Tatiana now, if she were still alive.
He found his way to her again and shepherded her into another hug, this one more sensual than the last.
“You don’t need to worry about how anything looks, Artie,” he said. “I love that you trust me. I love you. Just tell me what your sister needs, and I’ll help.”
He felt her body melt into his before she began shaking harder with sobs than she had before. So smart and funny, so unbelievably sexy, and she trusted him with her vulnerability! Fulton was moved, but even more so, he was surprised. For not only had he told a woman that he loved her, a first in his adult life, but he’d promised to do something good immediately after. Something charitable and selfless. Had Aristotle been so right about love, that it has the power to completely transform the lover? Was it finally time to put musty old Artemé-Feti and his loathsome view of the human heart to bed?
When Fulton took $500 out of the bank later that day to give to battered Anita, it was Artie’s body he was thinking of: seducing it, holding it, petting it. And mere hours later, he was doing all three.
The semester sped by, something semesters rarely did in Fulton’s experience. He lectured. He helped Artie get her PhD application in on time. He listened to Kevin read his emails out loud and dictated curt responses to the various beleaguered administrators who now saw Fulton’s full-time salary as excisable overhead. He had sex, lots of it.
And he gave more money to Anita: $500 here, $700 there. It was the least he could do, and Artie was excited to tell him what a huge difference it was making in Anita’s life. That these small sums could do so much for someone else filled him with a vigor he didn’t know was possible, a kind of full-body relief at the idea that true ease and delight had been staring him in the face all along. And here he’d thought these things were permanently out of reach, the remit of the truly virtuous. Who knew that even he, erstwhile viewer of wretched content, slavering lover of the female form, could also access them? All he’d needed was for one of those females to step out of the screen and love him back.
A few days before winter break, he told Kevin to call him a rideshare to the credit union. In the spirit of the season, Fulton wanted to withdraw a cashier’s check of $5,000. A gift for Anita and Artie both.
Kevin’s response was an uncharacteristic grunt.
“Sorry, what was that?” Fulton made no effort to filter the severity from his voice.
“Sorry, Professor Mathis. I, um, I’m like, trying to get rid of all the spam here?”
“What spam?”
There was a tense semi-silence. All Fulton could hear was the soft ding of the web client deleting emails and Kevin’s grunts of embarrassment.
“What are you doing, Kevin? You’re deleting a lot.”
“We can also get a screen reader for your office desktop,” Kevin began, then caught himself. “I’m really sorry, Professor Mathis. I know you said that’s not a priority now. It was dumb of me to bring that up.”
“Just tell me what it is. You sound like someone’s hung you up by the toenails.”
Fulton waited while Kevin squirmed. At last, the boy caved.
“Penis enhancement, penis enlargement, dick performance juice,” Kevin said thickly, as though reading from a teleprompter at gun point. “Stay stronger harder faster longer. You’ll never be alone—”
“Okay, okay. Thank you, Kevin. I get it.”
“There’s like forty of them, Professor Mathis. And they keep coming. And it’s from a private account, weirdly?”
“What account?”
“Cassie one-one-eight at Gmail.”
That seemed odd. But then what did Fulton know about spam? He tried to recall the e-scam and fraud training he’d completed once five years ago. “Just block it. Report my account hacked.”
“I have, professor.” Kevin’s voice cracked. “Like, five times. But then it just comes from a new email. Some variation on the Cassie address.”
“I don’t have time for this, and neither do you.” Fulton hoped Kevin would be flattered by the idea that Fulton found his time valuable. “Just take it to campus IT.”
Later that evening, Artie was so excited about the $5,000 that she wept again. She planned a family dinner for after the holidays, one where Fulton could meet Anita and Artie’s son, both of whom already held him in very high regard.
“I just want to be able to introduce you all when I’m not so jumpy about getting into the PhD program,” she said. “I’ll be a nervous wreck until February.”
“There’s no need for you to be, but I understand,” he said. “Perhaps you and I can ease that stress together this Christmas?”
No such luck: Anita’s daughter had finally been located, and Artie and Anita were going to Pennsylvania to get her back. Fulton wasn’t about to get in the way of that, plus it was his money that was making such a crucial trip possible. So he spent winter break listening to their homemade audio porn on his phone, daydreaming about Artie’s body, and contemplating marriage. He would take on her student loan debt, her son’s college debt, if it meant he could spend the rest of his life being transformed by her love. And he would wait as long as she needed to hear her say I love you back.
There was little snow that year and even less ice, so he felt emboldened to take walks around the neighborhood whenever the need to be with Artie struck him. He lost all sense of time, his internal clock ticking loudest at the oddest hours, his body surging with animal cravings for her. There was something pleasurable about being lost in the funhouse of desire, something that appeased the submissive in him. He didn’t know where the night ended and the day began. He didn’t know where he ended and shebegan.
One evening after half-eating some microwaved chicken strips and doing nothing to escape the widening gyre of his carnal fugue, he was shocked to practically bump into Mrs. Vazquez on the street.
“Fulton!” she exclaimed, ever the worried grandmother. “You haven’t shaved!”
He rubbed his chin, chuckling. “Indeed I haven’t. But I like to grow out the beard in the colder months. I think you probably know this by now, Mrs. Vazquez.”
He expected her to laugh with him, but she just clucked. “It’s nearly nine at night.”
“That late?”
“My husband tells me not to say anything.”
There was something about the rare severity of her tone that made his shoulders stiffen. “Then maybe you shouldn’t.”
“He says you’re a famous man, I shouldn’t burst the bubble. We watched you when you were on the talk shows. So intelligent! You should go back on.”
He shifted from one foot to the other. “I doubt they’d have me now.”
He’d hoped the statement would make her pity him, give her a hitch of embarrassment, but she plowed on: “Fulton, I’m a God-fearing woman. I believe in doing what’s right. You are a great man, a thinker like Octavio Paz. You have the ability to help many people. So I will help you: the woman you are seeing is a thief.”
This again. “Mrs. Vazquez—”
“Ah, please wait for me to finish. I’m not saying she stole anything. She is a time thief.”
“Mrs. Vazquez, I’m getting cold,” he lied.
“She’s wasting your time, Fulton. Maybe she’s wasting your money, because you’re in love.”
“Alright, enough!” He stamped his foot, a juvenile gesture that he decided to pretend hadn’t happened. “I understand you’re concerned for me, and I appreciate your concern. But you have to understand that this is my private life, and I really would prefer my neighbors not being involved in it. When you stand at these hedges and look down my driveway and see my girlfriend sitting in the car with her sister, perhaps you’re the one spying on—”
“Sister?” Mrs. Vazquez’s laugh was loud and bitter.
“Yes, her sister. Half-sister, actually. Who happens to be in the midst of a very difficult situation with her ex-husband.”
“Not a sister, Fulton.” There was her peppermint breath again. “And not a woman with a husband. There’s a word for her in Spanish. Marimacha.”
“I’m going home.” Fulton was petulant. “I’m going inside. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Not a wife, with a shaved head like that. Not a sister, the way she looks at your girlfriend.”
But Fulton had decided not to hear these words. In his mind he was already inside, pouring himself another Scotch.
And that was how he managed to get through the rest of the break: by imagining himself ahead in time, having already lived the less-important chunks of life that lie between him and the far more important swaths of life he was to live with Artie. This worked surprisingly well, for no sooner had he decided to do it than she was back from her trip to Pennsylvania, and no sooner were the two of them back in bed generating fantastic audio than she learned from the university that her PhD application had been among the most impressive they’d received that year, so impressive that the committee not only wanted to offer her early admission, but a generous fellowship as well.
“I can’t believe it,” she said over Thai that night. The pad see ew had become their go-to dish for both celebration and sentiment.
“Well I can,” he said. “And you should. I spoke to the chair, and he said yours was in the top one percent of applications we’ve ever received.”
He was lying about speaking with the chair. Last semester’s curt email about rectifying Fulton’s “spam problem” would be the last communication the two men would have outside of a disciplinary hearing. But Fulton knew her application front to back, and he knew it was true. Plus he loved feeling her warm to the statement, hearing her shy giggles from across the table.
She told him she felt bold. She wanted to “do things to him” now, things she’d been too timid to try before. Not only was he game, he had a few suggestions.
What followed was pure ecstasy, a scene that could have been ripped from the more tasteful annals of Fulton’s stash. She strapped him to the bed so tight he couldn’t move, with a hood over his head so snug he couldn’t speak, and spoke to him as he submitted helplessly to her ravishing: “You’ve shown me so much, babe. Given me so much. I just wanted to see what I could do, you know? How far I could take it. My education, that is. My joy, my growth. And you’ve given me that chance. You’re such a noble person. I’m so lucky to know you.”
When she was nearly done with him, she ripped the hood off and asked him if he was willing to modify his thesis. Was it in fact human virtue that proved the existence of freewill, not stupidity?
“Yes!” he shouted, but it sounded more like Mmf! from behind the ball gag. And he lay there prone, spread-eagled, waiting for release. But her hands leapt from his thighs, and she laughed.
“Be patient,” she mock-scolded him. “There’s no real pleasure in instant gratification.”
It was easier for the university to place Fulton on permanent leave when they had credible grounds for dismissal, and those credible grounds were as follows: first, an explicit home video emailed from his address to the sixty-four-students in his spring lecture class, plus the philosophy faculty and staff listserv. The video was filmed from above, Fulton gasping and naked-faced beneath a lithe woman in a fetish mask, one Artie had worn at his insistence. Next, Cassie118’s entire penis enlargement canon forwarded to the same set of addresses. And finally, Fulton’s insistence, less and less convincing with each repetition, that he’d been maliciously hacked.
Would Fulton have preferred to skip the endless inquests and investigations and college-wide Title IX hearings? Certainly. Would he have preferred that Artie answered his calls and texts, that Kevin vouch for him about the hacking, or that someone by the name of Anita was actually employed by the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble? Yes, yes, and yes. Would he have preferred not to learn that the contents of his Roth IRA, managed via an app on his phone, had mysteriously dwindled from a high six figures to a low four? Obviously.
But what choice did he have? Who was he, the man who’d once told Jack Render’s fifteen million podcast subscribers to “kick fate in the ass,” to slink from the consequences of his own actions? Was he a real man, or a peepshow creep so fetid with the stenches of guilt and self-loathing the evidence of his perversion all but wafted off him? No, better to admit that he’d been an autonomous agent—a stupid autonomous agent, for there could be no other—who’d also been acted-upon, victimized by a criminal sociopath. His new obsession became understanding the warped contours of his situation. He would sit through hearing after hearing if only he could learn more about who she’d been, get some insight into her motives and methods. And, perhaps most stupidly, discern if any of what passed between them had been real.
Eventually the police department got involved, and as “Artie’s” aliases and SSNs proliferated, Fulton felt smug. What weighed heavier on the scales of Justice? The testimony of a public intellectual who’d just happened to be led astray by his all-too-human vice, or the actions of a criminal? A lesbian criminal who seemed to love hopping towns with her partner and running small cons, who hadn’t held a single real job in her life? Her real name was Martha Causwell, and having a son was pretty much the only thing she hadn’t lied to Fulton about.
“That and college,” the police chief told him.
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah, weirdly enough, we were able to trace her back to the university. She spent a few semesters here, but it was years ago. I don’t know if it was your department.”
“Oh, god,” Fulton blurted, and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to occlude his memory. “Oh god!” he repeated, staggering from his seat and stumbling down a linoleum hallway, heedless of the police chief’s objections. Because as sudden and vivid as the leaf had been in his mind’s eye appeared the image of a girl’s face, young and blonde and sharp in class. Wholly devoted to him when he chose her. An undergrad, the one who’d gone to visit her grandma and never come back. Who’d cried in his car, he recalled now, over her missed period. Why hadn’t he bothered to find out why she left? Oh god. What was her name?
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