Earlier this year, I met a very nice author at a book festival who, upon learning what I did for work, leaned in and asked me apologetically, “Didn’t Electric Lit close?”
“Not on my watch!” I responded, possibly yelled. I like to think that my tone was defiant, even triumphant, but I may have sounded deranged.
Though the author was misinformed, I couldn’t take offense. The survival of all literary magazines, especially magazines like Electric Lit—an independent, nonprofit publication that is completely free to read—is far from guaranteed; every year is a gift.
Because fear is a powerful motivator, I have occasionally pictured a world without Electric Literature in order to pump myself up to write a letter like this one. Electric Lit publishes over 500 writers per year. Their important, moving, funny, weird, and incisive work is read by over three million readers annually, many of whom make visiting our website a daily practice. Where would they go if we pulled the plug? And what would happen to the tens of thousands of short stories, essays, poems, and interviews—from award-winning to viral to niche to classic—championed and preserved by Electric Lit?
Just this year, the NEA was gutted, and grant funding for the arts continues to diminish. Yet with your support, Electric Lit persists as a home for human stories in a country that is increasingly inhospitable to art. While AI is churning out slop, we are one of the few venues that pair emerging writers with experienced editors. And as free speech is under threat, as books are banned and protestors are arrested, we are proud to be a platform for writers of all backgrounds, beliefs, and identities to speak openly, to critique, to create, and to hone their craft.
Simply put, Electric Literature is a gift. A gift to me, who has devoted my adult working life to EL’s mission; a gift to our small but mighty staff, who get to make their passion their vocation; a gift to our dozens of eminently employable interns who gain valuable professional experience; a gift to the thousands of writers who have launched and grown their careers at EL; and a gift to the millions who get to read free, world-class literature every day of the week. Supporting writers and readers costs money—$500,000 a year, to be precise—and we need your financial help to sustain this gift.
Today, I’m asking you to give Electric Literature the gift of another year. We need to raise $35,000 to get us through 2025 and balance the budget for 2026. This is the largest goal we’ve ever set for a campaign, but in these challenging times, we need our community to step up. The world is a better place with Electric Lit in it—let’s fight to keep it that way.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Place Envy by Michael Lowenthal, which will be published by Mad Creek Books on February 6, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly with silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
Here is the cover, designed by Adam Bohannon:
Michael Lowenthal: As a kid, I attended a summer camp whose highest achievement rating, awarded for mastery of various survivalist skills, was called the Pathfinder. The orienteering test involved being blindfolded and then driven miles and miles from camp, where you were deposited deep in the Vermont woods and challenged to hike home—alone—aided only by a compass and half a dozen topographical maps. (How, how, did the camp ever secure insurance coverage?) In prep for the test, I spent hours poring over topogaphical maps, until eventually they seemed a kind of holy scripture, imbued with both terror and the prospect of salvation.
When I saw Adam Bohannon’s early iteration of the Place Envy cover, featuring a map—albeit one of a different sort, more mythological and almost campy—that old, charged image of a topographical map came immediately to mind, and I asked if we might explore it as a design element.
Because Place Envy takes a broad view of the idea of place—as a matter not just of geography but also of identity, belonging, and sexual (as well as spiritual and familial) orientation—the publisher and I worried that a map might come across as too literal and limiting. It was thrilling, then, to see Adam’s savvy, expansive, and visually upending treatment of the element.
By revealing the map only through unevenly spaced cutouts (I think of them as peepholes through which we glimpse a mysterious and fundamentally unknowable terrain), the design suggests that place is often difficult to see and conveys the challenge of orienting ourselves in relation to the world. It’s not just summer campers who struggle to be Pathfinders.
I love especially how the glimpses of the map that we do see reveal so little about their real-world location. Where is this a map of? I have no idea. The one visible word, in the upper left-hand corner, is not legible to me. Its second and third letters suggest a language other than English, and I’m not even sure how I’d google the word, if I wanted to (which I don’t).
Beyond all this high-concept stuff, I also find the design simply beautiful to look at. I’ll be so proud to see it on my shelf.
Adam Bohannon: First off, the title is really great: evocative and open to different interpretations and “readings.” The subtitle does a really great job of supporting that and also providing focus. From my “designer’s view,” the text is about journeys + diaspora + queerness + finding + return. And, every cover design is its own journey, so off we went. This one started out in some completely different places in the first round. Compass roses, uncanny architectures, disruptive imagery, and a 1920 imaginary map called the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland were all starting points.
Like a lot of things in design life, that map ended up being a point of departure. The map was interpreted as being a little too vintage + maybe giving too much J.R.R. Tolkien. But, still, the treatments I gave to that opened up the author’s mind and gave us the idea of topographical maps, which could serve as stand-ins for “place.” Layering pieces of the topographical maps on different textures and colors gave us some options. And we went from a purposeful flatness in those designs to the layered “eye fake out” that we see in the final design.
I was revisiting Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies when I stumbled upon Adam Farrer’s memoir, Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures. I had been looking for a way to come to grips with U.S. politics, particularly with young males who are attracted to the ideology of the far-right. You can find me reading a memoir about as often as it snows in Miami, yet something in the description of Adam Farrer’s book spoke to me. Growing up, I too idolized an older brother and felt pressured by others’ notions of manliness—such as on the day my father asked a teenage me to choose between working with my hands or with my head. So, I ordered Broken Biscuits—unpublished in North America until this November—from a UK outlet.
Adam chronicles his struggles as a young, working class man finding his place in his family, in his town, at school, and at work. There were people in his life who expected Adam to conform to their image of the world, and when he bucked those presuppositions, even in benign ways, Adam endured significant resistance. The simple act of needing glasses to see “placed me among the ranks of the helpless. I may as well have been fitted with a back brace and a note around my neck asking everyone to be kind to me about my chronic bed-wetting.” Or, male students at school hitting him with paper airplanes, one that included an “angry scrawl” that read “fucking queer.”
As the saying goes, I laughed; I cried. Adam’s openness about his life in Broken Biscuits captured my attention as did his literary craft. Rather than unpack his story in a diaristic mode, he takes an episodic approach, focusing each chapter on an event or topic, such as the unflattering encounter with a sex shop clerk when he, in his sexual and social naivete, walked in the front door. Via email, Adam and I discussed his humorous approach to storytelling, his take on memoir—even though Adam thinks of himself more as an essayist than a memoirist—how stage writing influenced his prose, the fact that he didn’t want this book to become what in the UK is called a “misery memoir,” and much more.
Bruce Krajewski: In an interview on Paul Cuddihy’s podcast, you mention admiring Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, in part because of Sedaris’s ability to make the reader alternately laugh and weep, a quality you’ve captured in Broken Biscuits. Does a person ever grow weary of being called “the David Sedaris of the UK”? Why did comedy become an important part of your storytelling?
Adam Farrer: I guess the foundation of it would be that I’m from a family that has always floated through any kind of trauma on a carpet of humor. During difficult times we look for those moments where we can make each other crumple with laughter, which gives us a necessary release and makes enough room for us to talk about the difficult stuff. I wasn’t conscious of this until I started examining my life through writing, at which point it became obvious. The desire for comedy also comes from the way that I established myself as a writer, which really happened through Manchester’s live literature scene. When I began to break through in the mid-2010s, there were live lit nights all over the city where I could grab a 4-minute open mic slot and try out bits of my life writing. I’d get up on stage, tell a story and, to make sure it engaged the audience, engineer a few comic beats. Essentially, I was doing open mic standup bits while hiding behind a Moleskine. That goes some way to explaining it. I got into writing to entertain people and have them feel something. Over time I refined this, tackling more complex ideas. Humor has become my default delivery system for the more challenging ideas. After one of my open mic readings, someone told me “you always bring me right to the brink of tears, then somehow save me with laughter” and I’ve never let go of that idea.
Humor has become my default delivery system for the more challenging ideas.
I crave laughter in particular. During signings on my book tours, one of my favorite things to hear is that someone read one of my books in bed and laughed so much that it shook the mattress and woke their partner. There’s nothing quite like knowing your words are powerful enough to rattle beds across the nation.
BK: You write: “Grown-ups are the great forgetters. Between work, bills, and the varying bullshit that children are trying to tell them, they barely have enough time to eat before they fall asleep in front of the TV and everything starts all over again. So I wandered the countryside for twelve hours a day without them ever stopping to wonder if I’d been abducted or murdered.” Given that you were not the offspring of what are called helicopter parents, did you have a sense that you were, in a way, abandoned as a child? That you wanted more adult attention, less freedom?
AF: The freedom I write about in that part of the book was very much of the time and location, and it wasn’t peculiar to me. Mid-eighties Suffolk offered a very Stand By Me kind of childhood with a wild and open environment to disappear into. When we saw that movie, my friends and I all recognized our lives in it. The difference was that the kids in Stand By Me all seemed to be suffering some form of neglect. My friends and I were all loved and cared for as far as I could tell. We were just given a long leash. I suppose you could say we were free range. Perhaps feral. During those times when I headed out of the house alone though, it was much more about my need for space and distance rather than anything else. I was part of a large, noisy household and occasionally it’d become too much for me. The fact that I could just head out of the house and into the countryside, where I could climb a tall tree or go wading through a river was a gift. If anything, I abandoned my family rather than the other way around. The chapters/essays that bookend Broken Biscuits each look at that same escape impulse but during two different times of life; my childhood and my forties. That youthful freedom to disappear was liberating but looking back it makes me shudder. No one I know would now let their kids have the kind of childhood I enjoyed. The world is probably no scarier now than it was when I was a young, but we know more about it now. By 2025 standards, I could be seen as a neglected child, but it was never that way.
BK: In “The Beautiful Ones” chapter, you tell the reader that your brother Robert said, “You know that if I found out you were gay, I’d disown you,” and one of the book’s epigraphs from your father reads, “I just don’t know why you want to tell people all these personal things”? At that stage in your life was verbal intimacy with other males possible?
We live in a time when standards of masculinity are being dictated to us by deeply problematic men.
AF: That essay focuses on my early teens, a time when I would never have dared discuss anything like that with other men or boys. I had a lot of behaviors and interests that saw me labeled as gay, and in a small rural town back in the eighties that made things particularly tough. My lack of inclination towards sports, my passionate interest in the music of Prince, my multiple platonic female friendships, all this was used by the people around me to question my sexuality. In time, I started to question it myself. I wondered if everyone else was right and they could see things in me that I couldn’t. As far as I was concerned, discussing it would have only made things worse. So, I just held it in until the point during my late thirties when I began writing about my life. Once I started doing that, articulating it, the dam broke. Everything came out. I went from being someone who wouldn’t openly discuss this stuff to being almost unable to stop. It was liberating and curative in that way. If I hadn’t discovered life writing, I think holding in those thoughts would have poisoned me.
BK: Broken Biscuits is, in large part, a meditation on masculinity, arguably working-class masculinity. In “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” you question your masculinity in relation to survival skills. You write, “I’d likely be dead fifteen minutes into the end times.” What do you hope readers will learn from your conjuring of the end times?
AF: Through so much of Broken Biscuits, I compare myself to Robert, who, for many years, was my masculine ideal and I was desperate to emulate. That chapter is the final example of this comparison. Robert was a biker, a street fighter, and as much of a hunter as you’ll find in the UK. He was fearless. Never evaded combat. Felt alive in a fistfight. I could easily imagine him during the collapse of civilization fighting to the death over a can of expired kidney beans. I thought of him as the kind of man I could be if only I was tougher and better. In this part of the book, I’m really poking fun at myself for what I lack based on my definition back then of what a man was. I wanted to kick against that definition. We live in a time when standards of masculinity are being dictated to us by deeply problematic men whose notions of what a man should be are broadly bullshit. There is no typical man, no masculine standard that we should have to live up to. We’re told that men should be bold, resilient, strong, that they should be providers, but based on those standards, my mother is one of the toughest men on the planet. She’s also a great storyteller and, at 75, still works as a part-time burlesque dancer. If I’m trying to emulate anyone these days, it’s her.
BK: How did you decide on the 12-chapter, episodic structure for Broken Biscuits rather than, say, a single chronological narrative?
I tell my friends I love them all the time. With my brothers though, it’s still taboo.
AF: It comes from years of working in the essay form. I started off blogging short personal essays that looked to explore ideas within a tight framework. Later, writing for the stage demanded the same concise thing. When I finally decided that I wanted to work on something longer form with my first book, Cold Fish Soup, I always knew it was going to be a memoir of linked essays. The craft then becomes about sequencing those essays, identifying and amplifying common themes that run through them and adding in callbacks. When Cold Fish Soup won an award, I felt like I was onto something so I stuck with the same format for Broken Biscuits. It’s the perfect form for me because it allows me to explore an idea in a focused way then move on to the next without taking up too much of a reader’s valuable time. All I’m asking of them is “Please give me your attention for a max of 10,000 words. If you don’t like it, maybe you’ll like the next one.” I always liken essay collections to the circus. You may not like the trapeze artist, but maybe you’ll like the clowns or the acrobats. I can’t envision a time when I’m going to ask a reader to suffer through 85,000 words of my clown act.
BK: In “An Inside Job,” your brother Ben goes to prison and tells you, “There are people you instinctively know not to mess with. You have to bite your tongue with certain things. But I know how to play people like that. I know to not push people too far.” This idea of limits haunts the chapter’s conclusion when you write, “I wanted to tell him that I loved him.” But you didn’t, you tell the reader, “because we’ve never been those kind of brothers and we’re not going to start now.” What prevents you, or the rest of us, from being “those kind of brothers”?
AF: I can’t speak for everyone, but for me it’s probably down to a lack of inclination to make myself truly vulnerable. Growing up, the times when I did allow myself to be like this were pounced upon as a weakness, so I learned to hide that side of me. Now I’m older, have lost a few people I was close to, and care less about how I’m perceived. I tell my friends I love them all the time. With my brothers though, it’s still taboo. I was too late with Robert, who took his own life in 2008. Through writing about him in my books though, I learned to better understand and love him. I regularly mention this at my book events, and appreciate having the opportunity to give voice to an idea that, were he around to hear me speak this way about him, he’d likely respond by putting me in a headlock until I apologized. I suspect he knew though. He certainly knew how much I admired him. But I’d have never come out and said it to him. Likewise, I would never tell Ben how much he means to me and how proud I am of him. He only knows I feel this way because I wrote an essay then sent it to him for editorial approval before publication. The last time I visited him at his restaurant, I learned that he’d shown the essay to all his colleagues. So, he knows I love him, his coworkers all know that I love him, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say it to his face. Instead, I’ve placed myself in the absurd situation where I will tell my siblings that I love them, but only in writing that’s published globally.
BK: You’ve made numerous appearances connected to the publication of Broken Biscuits. What question hasn’t been asked yet that you wish had been?
AF: A lot of friends and reader reviews mentioned particularly enjoying “Exposures,” the chapter/essay that deals with my years running a photo lab, so I expected more questions about that. Maybe they were worried asking about it would appear too voyeuristic because it involves writing about the very private moments of strangers. I thought it could have brought up some interesting discussions about the morality of life writing, the act of making real people into characters and where one should draw a line. Questions about whether writing a story is worth the damage it could do. If it’s going to hurt someone, I’d say not. It’s the kind of thing that crops up a lot in my teaching and I think people who write in a memoir or creative nonfiction form should be doing their best to navigate it ethically. I can’t say I’ve always got it right, but it’s not through lack of trying.
Besides death, being canceled might be my biggest fear. Like with death, I navigate this fear by thinking about the concept pseudo-academically, following the case studies as they emerge from my algorithm. I am of two minds when it comes to canceling. One, I am happy when people I think deserve it are canceled. Two, I am uneasy when I’m unsure if they deserved it.
When it came to writing my novel Lucky Girl, tracing a young dancer’s tumultuous relationship with an embattled pop star, I knew my main character would get canceled. An ardent and pseudo-academic fan of reality television, especially Dance Moms, it would be disingenuous to not include the looming threat. I especially wanted to explore how canceling counteracts and complicates coming-of-age narratives. Many coming-of-age stories involve mistakes, but always the kind of mistakes one recovers and learns from. Often, this is not the case with canceling. The subject defends, apologizes, vanishes, and sometimes returns, but never the same and seemingly always for the worse. What does restorative justice in a canceling life cycle look like?
Really, my unease about cancel culture is my unease with the internet, with social media, with being perceived by strangers online. It is why I find fiction a useful tool for exploring this concept, and why I developed this list. Some of these books view canceling as a societal warning while others position canceling as a moral consequence. In novels that center revolting characters like Yellowface’s June and My Dark Vanessa’s Jacob Strane, I am rooting for the Greek chorus of cancel culture to beam the everlasting shit out of them. In other stories, cancel culture is the boogie man behind the unwitting yet likable character, making the reader shout “look out!” down into the pages. All, I hope, add nuance to this tired dialogue. I know, we’re so tired! But it’s worth having this conversation about how we strike a balance between calling out harm and accepting when accountability goes too far. Fiction remains an important way to interrogate the limits and possibilities of public discourse.
Written in the 1950s as allegory for McCarthyism, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a high school curriculum favorite, and I love teaching it to my freshmen and sophomores. The first act sees Puritan girls desperately trying not to be canceled—they’ve been caught engaging in some non-Puritan activities—and they manage to evade the snare by accusing maligned community members of witchcraft. Soon, Salem is undone by a spiral of allegations. Our “hero” is John Proctor, striving to free his accused wife while battling his own moral shortcomings; the protagonist is further condemned in Kimberly Belflower’s 2022 play John Proctor Is the Villian, following high school girls reading the play while an accusation of sexual assault rocks their small Georgia town.
After an affair with a college professor leaves her pregnant, penniless, and alone, single mom Margo turns to OnlyFans. It seems a perfect work-from-home solution for her childcare dilemma; Margo can remain anonymous and make enough money to get back on her feet. But she learns that sex alone doesn’t sell. Margo must devise a compelling alt-ego to attract more viewers, so she taps her ex-pro wrestler Dad. As it turns out, the pro-wrestling world and this new frontier of digital sex work both depend on crafting enticing storylines for viewers. Thorpe does a masterful job comparing these two mediums: Both rely on using your body, yet one is celebrated while the other shamed.
In Lydi Conklin’s debut novel, the canceling comes down swiftly. Set off balance from her eroding career and personal relationships, folksinger Joan Vole goes overboard—to put it lightly—during a performance on stage, causing her to flee New York before the vultures come for her. Joan sets her sights on a remote writers’ camp in Virginia, where it just so happens the students are not allowed access to their phones. Betting that news of her poor actions have not reached the school, Joan weasels her way into teaching, allowing her to lick her wounds before she plans to find permanent refuge on some Arctic island, where she’ll renounce music and live out her days. And yet, her time at the camp with her students and a fellow younger counselor challenge how she exists as both an artist and a person.
Rebecca Makkai’s novel tackles our obsession with true crime podcasts as filmmaker Bodie returns to her alma mater to teach some media courses on films and podcasts. Years ago, the campus was rocked by a shocking murder of Bodie’s roommate, a murder she finds herself unpacking with her plucky students. These Gen Zers cannily intuit the police were quick to condemn athletic director Omar, one of the few people of color on campus. The kids get to crafting a podcast that seeks to crack the case open. In the background, Bodie contends with a more personal issue: Her amicable ex-husband has been accused of sexual misconduct—his culpability is fuzzy, think Aziz Ansari-level fuzzy—but the online discourse seeks to quickly dismiss him, and Bodie along with it. Makkai uses this B-plot to interrogate the main focus of the novel, illuminating the dangers of certainty.
My sister described listening to the audiobook of Yellowface to me as “being on FaceTime with your terrible friend justifying themselves when they’re clearly the bad guy.” It’s tough (yet hypnotizing) being in June Hayward’s head. Sole witness to literary wonderkid Athena Liu’s choking death, June steals her friend’s manuscript on the plight of Chinese laborers in World War II, edits it to completion and passes it off as her own. Over the course of the novel, June conducts Olympian gymnastics to both assuage herself of guilt and evade condemnation from the Twitter mob, serving as the canceling Greek chorus. Oddly enough, I describe watching June’s plight as sublime—evoking both awe and terror. As a reader, you root for these Twitter handles to uncover the truth, and, trapped in June’s head, you squirm.
Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut opens with a social media storm—it is 2017, and Vanessa’s former high school teacher has been accused of grooming students. This incites Vanessa to reflect on her relationship with Jacob Strane, beginning in a boarding school classroom and turning into what she thought at the time was a storied love affair, one that has colored every aspect of her adult life. The novel jumps back and forth in time, but the 2017 sections I found the most vexing, with Vanessa torn between a fellow victim asking her to come forward and Strane himself, appearing in the present neutered and meek by these accusations. I hoped that as his canceling gained momentum, it would bring justice and peace for Vanessa—but Russell deftly demonstrates how canceling is much more complicated than a deus ex-machina.
Isabel Banta’s debut novel reminds us that canceling existed in the early aughts too. Tracing Amber Young’s rise to fame as a Britney-esque pop star, we see Amber leap from local talent show to girl group and beyond. Meanwhile, Amber navigates real friendships and crushes, complicated by false relationships drummed by tabloids. When Amber is caught in the middle of this, she becomes a lightning rod for the public’s ire. What especially struck me throughout the novel is how, though we didn’t have the term in the 2000s, canceling was a feminine issue—and as a feminine issue, it was generally accepted as the way culture worked. It is Amber’s body and hyper-sexuality broken down by chatrooms and media when she’s caught engaging in bad behavior, not the boyband dreamboat she’s doing it with. Oh—you almost want or hope to say—how times have changed. Have they?
This dark comedy debut by Isle McElroy tackles influencer culture as well as the alpha-male epidemic sparked by Andrew Tate when two friends seek to create a cult that reforms problematic white males. Sasha’s once successful wellness influencer platform dissolves when a guy publicly blames her for his viral suicide. She has little other choice but to say yes when her best friend Dyson asks her to be the figurehead for this cult he’s starting. In The Atmospherians, canceling serves as Sasha’s catalyst into the zany world where man-hordes will either trip over to help or rob you blind, depending on the way the wind blows. Sasha’s task becomes how to influence these men to become, in her own words, more human. Much of the novel explores how we perform, both in social media and real life, and how this performance invents the self.
Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon is an epic page-turner narrative structured around emails (72 in total!) to an ex-boyfriend. The story takes us on a deep dive into the corners of a heartbroken mind while simultaneously negotiating mental health and polyamory. After Ben breaks up with our narrator, a public health worker in New York City, he is bewildered, grieving, searching for ways to make sense of his pain and loss. The context behind this loss deepens its force: the narrator’s husband of 20 years, their two children, the two therapists receiving the avalanche of emails and the backdrop of a contemporary New York City.
In Middle Spoon, we get a close view of the anxious mind at play: the imaginative leaps of jealousy, the intellectualization of feelings, the obsession over details. Navigating this specific breakup for our narrator also means dealing with his own mental health, people’s views on polyamory, his own ideas [of/about] gay men’s sluttiness, as well as the social and political ramifications of structural inequalities as they manifest themselves in New York City. Yes, there’s an obsessiveness in this epistolary saga, and that is its strength: The obsessiveness sizzles with humor and honesty. The pull of the text is visceral because it deals with the very human ways we want to be seen, witnessed, and loved in our pain.
Varela and I spoke about anxiety, being gay while heartbroken, and the very strong desire to be witnessed while we experience loss.
Julián Delgado Lopera: How’s your heart?
Alejandro Varela: Exhausted, frightened, happy, you know. Thanks for asking.
JDL:I loved your book. I was trying to figure out, what is it that I really love about this book?The voice of the narrator is smart, sassy, very self-aware, anxious and, at times, absurd. How did you arrive at this voice,and why is it the best one to tell this particular story?
AV: The book is a love story, a heartbreak story, a poly story. It’s all those things. But it’s also a mental health story. I had this feeling as I was writing it, that I was trying to transcribe an anxious mind—I can’t say that’s super different than what I do in my other books—but the character in Middle Spoon is grappling with mental health issues. And I thought this was a great way to communicate the intensity of the experience, both the heartbreak, but also the way his brain processes emotions and life. The voice is then aided by the structure, because the letters allow him to be . . . I don’t use the word manic here, but he is in a high energy.
JDL: That anxiety to me is an emotional engine for the narrator and also for the piece. What keeps the momentum going is the fueling of this anxious mind.
AV: I think anxiety, which I have dealt with in my life, can be very debilitating and scary and frustrating. But when you’re writing it, and maybe even when you’re reading it, there’s a humor there because the anxious mind, or at least this narrator’s mind, is such a gloom and doom, like worst case always. Everything for him is intense and urgent and scary. But, in the end, it’s just heartbreak. I mean, it sucks, but it is just heartbreak. When I’ve been through this process of heartbreak, all I need is to talk to a few people in my life, and I can see and hear in their voice that they feel bad for me, but they’re also like, okay, and what are we making for dinner? Which could be callous and is actually very grounding because it’s a reminder this is going to pass, I’m not dying. But the anxiety communicates something different. When I was writing Middle Spoon, I wanted so badly for how terrible heartbreak feels to come across. This is heavy, this is real, but then also the fact that the narrator loses control over himself is fascinating to me. I wanted to intellectualize the pain away, because I knew it was not going to be there forever.
JDL:Why is the epistolary form the best way of capturing heartbreak here?
I wanted so badly for how terrible heartbreak feels to come across.
AV: The age gap between the narrator and his ex is almost a decade. The narrator has been out of the dating pool effectively his entire life because he married his husband very young and has been with him a long time. In addition to feeling this pain, he is also trying to navigate the rules of breakup. As he says in emails, he just wants to reach out to Ben. He thinks it is ridiculous that they’re not talking. I mean, even if they’re going to break up, they should talk about it, they should process it. At no point does Ben say, “never contact me again.” But our narrator is held back by this idea of boundaries. He could have been reaching out to Ben the entire time, but he’s like, No, I’m going to be strong, and I’m not going to break these rules, I don’t want to be seen poorly.
That is a preoccupation of mine in this life, in this moment. I’ve been young for so long, and I’m no longer young, and I forget that. I could imagine being in a scenario in which I reach out to someone who’s dumped me, who’s younger, and them being like, what you’re doing right now is such an infringement on my safe space and my boundaries. Our narrator has that sort of self-awareness and always wanting to be a good guy, which can be really annoying. The letters were a way to get it all out. And they never affect anyone because they only go to the therapists. And I liked this idea that they were unsent, because then he could write as many as he wanted, and then I could write as long as I wanted to, because they are never going anywhere. So there’s no danger of like, abusing anyone or mistreating anyone. He’s just getting it all out for himself in a way.
JDL:There’s something really interesting that happens with time in these emails that feels very loopy to me. Time is circular here. Towards the beginning of the novel, the narrator writes how he doesn’t want to forget how he’s feeling, the pain he’s experiencing. There’s this constant back and forth between wanting time to pass quickly while simultaneously not wanting to forget. Wanting to dig and unearth memory after memory. The act of trying to both remember and forget, this push and pull, is an obsessive way of keeping Ben alive inside him.
When you are feeling that sort of pain and grief, it’s very easy to feel absolutely alone, like you are in a dream.
AV: There was a very brief moment in the writing process where I wasn’t sure what the time span was going to be for the book. What if this were all one day? What if I really magnified his OCD and his anxiety? What if I just said, this is what happens when you cannot be left in the dark? One of the pillars of OCD is needing all the information at all times to feel safe. But here, there’s uncertainty. The narrator just doesn’t know. He doesn’t really understand why the relationship ended. He doesn’t know what Ben is doing. I could imagine those 72 emails being easily written in one day, but I didn’t want that. I don’t know if I was talented enough to do that. I thought it was important to show a little bit of growth and process, and then you have to acknowledge time. But you’re right. The writing was a way to keep Ben alive. At the beginning, he says he didn’t just love Ben. He loved loving Ben. That whole experience, he didn’t want it to disappear. For the pain to be over, he’d have to stop loving Ben. And so it’s almost like, let’s keep feeling the pain because at least that keeps Ben alive.
JDL:This gets to the strong desire to be witnessed by the therapists, by his friends, his husband. I felt very tender about his need to be seen even though he knows everybody gets a little bit annoyed of constantly witnessing him. The emails are not meant to be read by Ben but there’s an entire audience—the readers—who are witnessing and seeing his pain.
AV: There’s a scene in which he’s in the farmer’s market, and all he wants is to connect with a complete stranger, someone who didn’t know anything else about him, but who knew the experience of heartbreak and could comfort him. When you are feeling that sort of pain and grief, it’s very easy to feel absolutely alone, like you are in a dream. You know people are out there but there’s no way to break out of your haze, and so you feel even more alone. And then it’s scary. I remember once talking to a therapist at the height of grief, we were ending the call and I said, I’m really afraid for the call to end because then I’ll be alone again so I would love to just talk to you for the rest of the day. He started to cry and said, you’re going to be fine, I promise you. And then the call ended. But it was like that feeling, just please someone see this, because if you see it, I’m not alone. I don’t have that particular trait in common with the narrator. When I am going through something, I email everyone in my life, and I say, please come over for dinner every day this week, I need someone. I will cook dinner. Because for me, community is incredibly healing. Writing the book was a way to connect with a lot of people at once. Like you said, it’s a little meta, he’s writing these things that none will see, but I’ve written it as a book for everyone to see.
JDL: Sometimes the narrator would start talking about Ben, but then it would lead into gentrification, and we zoom out and discuss that, and then we come back to bed with Ben. There’s the backdrop of New York, which is where it all happens, and the aspect of public health and social justice claiming space into his memory. How does public health and social justice intersect with heartbreak?
Everything I write, I realize after the fact, is questioning conformity.
AV: It’s twofold. On a very personal level, my background is in public health. I consider myself a public health worker, and my medium is fiction. I see the matrix clearly after studying public health, in a way that makes me so much more empathic and understanding and creative. I’m thinking constantly about how us individuals fit into a larger system. I like to give perspective, but I want to connect with humans on an individual level. I want to constantly remind myself and others that we are part of this grid, like we’re much bigger than this moment. When I’ve been in pain or sad about something, I’m still thinking about what the hell is happening in the country and in Gaza, they’re on my mind all the time. I wanted that to come through in the writing.
JDL:There is so much gay culture, especially gay male culture, that our narrator is constantly negotiating. For instance, his unwillingness to fuck around or have anonymous sex as the gay-male way of forgetting Ben. How much he’s pressured to do it, how much he is constantly thinking Ben is using Grindr to forget him. And one of my favorite parts are the pages we spend talking about top/bottom power dynamic. All of this takes up so much space in his head.
AV: Everything I write, I realize after the fact, is questioning conformity. It’s like I’m constantly wondering what systems are in place for a good reason, and which ones are in place for a bad reason, and which are just lazy because we haven’t questioned them. And the narrator has been in a relationship for 20 something years, has been primarily monogamous, and so he doesn’t have a lot of experience fucking around. He’s questioning a lot of his own preconceived notions around sex and health and probably religion, and he’s feeling envy. It’s funny, only this moment of heartbreak could drive him to question his values.
JDL:Why is that?
AV: He’s so desperate to feel something. He’s willing to be like, the last 40 years I’ve been afraid of casual sex, so I’m just gonna give it a try, right? I like that we follow someone who can be so closed-minded or conservative about this sort of thing, and then see him change and witness what it takes for him to change. It was kind of fun to break apart his life a little bit, not in a masochistic or sadistic way. I mean seeing a life change because of the circumstances, the dire sort of straits he’s in, emotionally lead to life changes.
JDL: The way you’re dealing with polyamory here is very interesting. I noted how people’s reactions to this relationship structure in the narrator’s life were playing out in the narrative. The way, for instance, that Ben was having to be kept a secret, but also how people’s reactions to this structure were affecting the narrator while he simultaneously carries all this guilt with his husband for being such a wonderful supportive man while he is a mess heartbroken over a boyfriend.
AV: When I started writing the book, I didn’t intend for it to be poly. But while I was editing it, I embraced it. I’m very happy to talk about it, but it really was so focused on the grief part. You’ve heard of peps? Progressives except for Palestine. Well, I would add, I know a lot of progressives, except for public school and except for polyamory. For some people, the discomfort with polyamory is around them immediately putting themselves in the place of someone left behind. People that I’ve encountered who are opposed to polyamory [are opposed to it] because they see themselves as being mistreated. As in, in this situation, they identify with the husband immediately and say, well, there must be something wrong. They can’t even imagine being comfortable or safe enough in a relationship or with yourself for this relationship structure to be okay. It’s so foreign. And, in a way, the narrator is having trouble with it, but he’s justifying it to himself. The narrator didn’t decide he wanted a poly situation. What he decided was that he wanted Ben to last, and then it was suddenly like, oh, this is poly. He should have read the book first, but he didn’t. And so he’s figuring it out as he goes. And in his way of trying to fit in, which is back to the conformity, he’s like, Well shit. Now I’m going to be in this unorthodox structure that makes me stand out. So he’s making a case for why it’s normal and healthy, like he’s selling it to the reader because the logic is, if you accept this, you accept me.
JDL: Why is the humor so important for this book?
AV: Because he can get professorial. Also, yes, respect to OCD and anxiety, but it can still be annoying on the page. So the humor, which, by the way, comes naturally to me. Someone asked me the other day if I do a humor pass on my writing, and I don’t, but I think the humor makes the rest palatable. The narrator first disarms you, and then annoys the hell out of you, and then he’s endearing. I believe, I hope, because he’s not easy to tolerate. But it becomes easier if you can laugh, right? If you can laugh a little bit while this is all happening, I think it makes it much easier. We’re talking about reparations in one chapter and then sexual assault in another, and it goes down a little bit more smoothly with humor.
An excerpt from Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
The first time I met Sid she was on the dance floor in a silver and gold tube dress pulled over her head except it wasn’t just a dress because the fabric went on and on and somehow she knew the exact spot on the dance floor where the light would shine right on her or that’s how it felt when she was writhing inside this tube of fabric, pulling it up and down, a hand out and a hand in, and then her face exposed in harsh white makeup and black lipstick with long glittering eyelashes and then she rolled onto the floor, she was crawling or more like bending but also she was completely still in the bouncing lights and all this was happening on a crowded dance floor at the Limelight while I was sipping my cocktail and I didn’t know what I was seeing I mean it felt like this went on forever, how many songs, it was like there wasn’t even music anymore just my body inside the fabric peeking out and then she pulled the dress up around her neck like a huge elegant collar, and underneath she was wearing a gold bodysuit with a silver metallic skirt that flared out, with ballet slippers also painted gold and she walked right up to me and said what did you think.
And I had no idea how she even saw me but I must have mumbled something because then she took my hand and said let’s go upstairs, honey, and I thought we were going to the balcony but we went up the stairs in the back, and at the top she kissed the door person on both cheeks and then we went inside.
And there was a whole other dance floor there, the club inside the club, and she guided me over to the bar and said: I can’t believe she’s gone.
And then she said it again: I can’t believe she’s gone.
And then she looked up at me and started laughing—oh honey, she said, I totally thought, I totally thought.
And then she just stopped right there. I didn’t know if she thought I was someone else, or if she thought—I really just didn’t know.
She said what are you drinking, honey, but she didn’t wait for my answer she just ordered two vodka sours with grenadine, I loved the color and after I took one sip I knew this would be my drink from then on. She poured some coke out on a coaster and then handed me a straw, and I made sure just to snort half but she motioned her hand like you take the rest, and when I was done she handed me a big flat round pill and I swallowed it with the vodka sour.
I was a little worried because I was already a bit coked up and alcohol and coke mess with ecstasy but I definitely knew not to turn down free drugs, I mean wasn’t this what was supposed to happen in New York?
Sid, she said. Sid Sidereal.
Terry, I said. Terry Dactyl.
And she touched my back, and said: Where are your wings?
I could feel them right then. It was the way she touched me. Like she was drawing my wings on.
One by one, the others came upstairs and took their magic pills—I didn’t know anyone yet, but when they saw me with Sid it was like we were old friends.
Sid was so high that her eyes would roll back whenever she wasn’t speaking, and I was ready to go there. Jaysun Jaysin kept petting her coat like it would take her to heaven or maybe she was already in heaven. Bleached curly hair with dark roots, eyebrows dyed green, and she was wearing a big ratty faux-fur coat and maybe nothing on underneath and she touched my nose and said: Twins. I looked at her nose, and noticed her gold septum ring did match my silver one, and everything in her eyes. And then String Bean arrived in clown makeup and ruffles, platforms that made her so tall that everyone had to look up to her. And CleoPatrick, with a giant red Afro and tattered ball gown. And then Tara and Mielle, in matching suits and bleached hair with spit curls like Jazz Age style-dyke twins.
And eventually Sid said: Is everyone ready? And we all went downstairs to the coat check and Sid picked up a box with her coat, and then we went outside and jumped in two cabs—I didn’t usually take cabs in New York because I was still in love with the subway but here I was with Sid, Jaysun, and Cleo, all of us squished together in the backseat and Sid said Christopher Street Pier and then soon enough we were there, one cab and then the other like we were in tandem.
And I’ll be honest here and say that I hadn’t even been to the piers before, I mean I saw Paris Is Burning in high school when it played at the Egyptian, and then of course everyone started lip-synching to Madonna and practicing those moves, but that was about all. It was late, and I didn’t see anyone voguing, but there was music, and just as we started walking out onto the pier this queen ran up behind us and said Esme!
And Sid turned, and this queen said girl, I thought you were dead.
And Sid said: I thought I was dead too.
And this queen said: Oh honey I’ve missed you and your messy makeup.
And Sid said: My messy makeup can’t compare to you.
And then she put her box down, and opened her arms, and the two of them were jumping up and down and Sid said oh Monique. And right about then I started to feel this pounding inside and I looked around to see if everyone else was feeling it too, and Monique said so are these your children or did someone get lost on the way to the circus.
What was I doing wasting my time with the dead white men of the Core Curriculum when I could be so alive right here with tranny shoulders.
Monique was ready to read each one of us, and we just stood there in the way it takes a while to react when the X is really kicking in and when Monique got to me she said girl, you’re as tall as me and you’ve got them tranny shoulders so why the freakshow makeup—and it felt like I’d been waiting for someone to say tranny shoulders all my life, yes, what was I doing wasting my time with the dead white men of the Core Curriculum when I could be so alive right here with tranny shoulders the air on my skin so much air and that current going through my body my eyes yes my eyes and lips yes lips and tongue, and there it was, language, when I said: Takes one to know one.
And Monique shrieked, and held out her hand, and I got on my knees and kissed it, and she said oh honey I’m not a lezzbian but I do like the attention. And then when she was done clocking all our outfits, she said: So what’s in the box.
And Sid said JoJo.
And Monique gasped, and stepped back, and she was so dramatic about it that at first I didn’t realize what was happening, but then she and Sid hugged again, and this time there were tears, and I got a chill up my back even though it wasn’t cold, not really, was it, I mean a second ago I was sweating and now I was cold and I knew this X was going to be good but also I felt like this wasn’t what I was supposed to be feeling, even if I could tell we were all feeling it, and maybe that was the point.
And Sid said I came here to tell Estella, and Monique said she’s with a date. And Sid said JoJo wanted her ashes in the river.
And Monique said that bitch stole a hundred dollars from me, twice, and then paused, and said: Not that I hold it against her.
And Sid said could you tell Estella for me. And Monique said what’s in it for me?
And Sid pressed something into her hand, and Monique held a baggy of coke up to the light and said oh honey you know me, you know me too well, and then she kissed her on both cheeks and we were off.
And when I say we were off, it wasn’t exactly runway it was just the only way to walk, all together now, walk, and at this point my eyes were rolling back and I was licking my lips and holding someone’s hand, feeling that clamminess, we were all bodies and wind and the cars going by—me and Jaysun, String Bean and Cleo, Sid and TaraMielle—they went by one name together I didn’t get it the first time but I got it now.
We walked down the West Side Highway until we got to another pier, I don’t know how long we walked and I don’t know which way because I’ve never found that pier again or maybe I found it but it didn’t look the same so all I know is when we got there it was just us, just us in the sky, the sky and the air, the sky in the air in my body inside this coat and we walked out to the middle of the pier, and Sid opened the box, and I’d seen this before, the ashes in a box like this or a big glass bottle or a beautiful urn or sometimes just a bowl so you could touch with your fingers, yes there were chunks of bone but on ecstasy it felt like I was part of this ash, this water, this bone, this air, the sky, this breath, it was all of us.
Sid handed out paper cups and maybe I was thirsty but the cups were for the ashes, each of us filled one up and we walked out to the end of the pier, the thing about the Hudson is it’s always wider than you think and you’re looking out at the skyline but it’s Jersey. The lights, I said, look at all the lights and everyone nodded their heads, we were there, in the lights, I could feel it.
And Sid said before we get this party started, I want everyone to know one thing, and we all turned to face her, and she said: Don’t ever call me Esme, okay? Sid, Siddhartha, Sadie, CeCe my Playmate . . .
And Jaysun said: Come out and play with me.
And Cleo said: Do you know what that bitch said to me? She said . . . No, never mind.
And Jaysun said: What.
And Cleo said: No, no, I don’t even want to say it . . . Okay, she said: you look better as a boy.
And we all gasped. And then String Bean hurled her cup of ashes way out into the water just like that, and then she did some kind of om shanti thing, blessed be, she kept saying blessed be blessed be blessed be, and I definitely didn’t believe in any kind of blessing but my eyes were open wide. Cleo said JoJo’s the bitch who taught me to walk, and she turned to show us, and so we all turned and there it was, New York, New York—New York, New York and JoJo I mean Cleo was walking with New York, she was walking with New York but leaning to each side because New York was heavy in those big platforms that weren’t tapered so they looked kind of dangerous and right then I realized I needed to get the ones like String Bean’s with the wedding-cake effect, and when Cleo turned she almost tripped but what was wrong with falling, we were all falling another way to fly and some of the ashes flew out of her cup and when she got to us she said see, I still don’t know how to walk, and we can all blame JoJo. And you could really see the glitter in her eyes—I tried to hear the ashes land but what do ashes sound like, just the water and the cars and the music, I mean it was the sound of the water against the piers or maybe metal slamming a buoy but it was music now.
TaraMielle sat down on the ground and we sat down with them and that’s when Jaysun started crying and Sid put her arms around her and then we became one big mass of breath and oh and oh and ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and I wanted to say this is the best way to celebrate death. But I couldn’t say that, could I? And just as I was thinking how did we even get here, when we were at the Limelight, suddenly it was like we were at the Limelight again because Sid pulled the tube dress over her head and down to the ground, there was so much fabric she was in the tube and I realized that earlier was a rehearsal because here it was again one hand out of the fabric toward heaven, and one foot out of the bottom toward the water beneath the pier and the way she could roll over herself, twisting around I mean everything was fluid and brokenness and this was a dance for death, I knew it now.
And then String Bean started waving her arms and Cleo was twirling around and around and then I threw my ashes into the air and they fell down on us as Sid was pulling one arm in and then pushing one arm through, like each part of her body wasn’t connected to anything, just floating on its own, her face peeking out, just one of those gold eyelashes and then back into the fabric, it was like we were all in the fabric we were inside we were inside we were inside we were inside-out.
In ninth grade, we had an AIDS awareness assembly and I was prepared. My mothers were dykes and most of their friends were fags who had been partying at our house for my whole childhood and now they were dying, one by one they were dying I mean one day they would be dancing with that disco ball and the mirrored walls in the living room and then we’d be at a memorial at the park or the Arboretum or at someone’s apartment where I’d never been before.
When I was five, my grandmother died of brain cancer, but I’d only met her once when we flew out from Seattle to visit her, and when we were getting ready to make the trip from Boston to Nantucket my mothers said let’s play dress-up. I already knew they weren’t going to let me wear my favorite pink dress because they wouldn’t let me bring it, and they said I couldn’t even wear my hair in pigtails, not until we got home, so I watched them get dressed instead. They were wearing wigs and makeup that made them look kind of like Charlie’s Angels and I knew Eileen didn’t really like that show but we watched it every week at Jack and Rudy’s and all the queens were obsessed. Eileen and Paula looked at each other and then at me and said isn’t this fun but I could tell they were tense. When we got to my grandmother’s house, she didn’t look scary like I’d expected she just looked like an old lady who pinched my cheeks and said my my isn’t he a beauty, just look at those curls.
I was focused on the glass panda sitting on the table in the entryway, I’d always loved pandas and my grandmother noticed and said Melody, please wrap this up for my grandson, isn’t he a prize, and she took my head in her hands and said oh, let me get a good look at you again, my my isn’t he magnificent.
That panda is the one thing I have of hers—a clear glass paperweight with those dark panda eyes, and pink and red and blue flowers growing inside its belly, it looks like there’s water in there too but I guess it’s just glass. I still love that panda, the feeling of its weight in my hands, but now I know we were visiting my grandmother to prove that her dyke daughter was worthy of an inheritance, I was the proof that she had finally done something right. We got the inheritance, which paid for us to move out of the Biltmore and into our new house on 12th right by Volunteer Park and when I had an asthma attack on the first night and had to go to the hospital we moved back into the Biltmore while all the carpets were torn out, the floors stained, and the walls bleached and repainted and the windows replaced and I even got to choose the colors for my bedroom walls—bubblegum pink, with lavender trim—so when we got back a few months later it was a whole new place.
So my grandmother was the first person I knew who died, even though I didn’t really know her, but she was the only grandparent I ever met—my grandfather died before I was born, and I never met my other grandparents because they kicked Paula out of the house when she was sixteen after she got caught making out with her friend in bed and that was the end, just like that, when I was little I didn’t understand how parents could be so mean when they were supposed to take care of you, and probably I didn’t understand death either, but when my mothers’ friends started dying in the ’80s I understood more.
They just got really skinny and their eyes got scared and then they were gone.
There were no platitudes about heaven or a better place or anything like that, they just got really skinny and their eyes got scared and then they were gone, like Peter who was standing on the card table in his gold platforms and gold pants with matching gold bomber jacket unzipped to show off his muscly chest, holding the disco ball and saying I’m Atlas, I’m Atlas, and Paula who was DJing said Peter get down. And then I heard he was in the hospital, he had thrush and pneumonia and maybe shingles, I would hear the words and look them up in the dictionary I mean I knew what pneumonia was but I didn’t know why.
So I was ten or eleven when it all started, and then it didn’t stop.
They kept dancing, though, and I kept coming down from my bedroom in the early hours of the morning to sit on the sofa and cuddle with these dancing queens and their cocktails and pills and visits to the bathroom to powder their noses. My mothers gave me my own cabinet full of potions in the kitchen so I could join everyone, and I would make elixirs out of pomegranate juice and St. John’s wort tincture or damiana and kava kava and lemon balm and lemon juice, and I would sip my potions in sparkling plastic cocktail glasses with all these queens dancing in the living room while Paula reigned from her DJ table, hair dyed and spiked out or permed and asymmetrical, makeup in bright colors forming shapes across her face or swirls and curls around her trademark cat eyes. When I was a kid I thought Paula was the rich one because every day she came home with a new hairstyle and some wild shiny outfit, but that was just because she was the receptionist at the hair salon so she was the in-house hair model, and after work she would stop at Chicken Soup or Value Village, and Eileen might have looked plain in her burlap or denim or cotton jumpsuits, dark curly hair pinned back with barrettes, but everything was Liz Claiborne and she shopped at the Bon although it didn’t seem like anyone noticed the difference in those spinning lights with Paula playing Donna Summer or Nina Hagen or esg or Kraftwerk I mean everything felt like magic except when someone suddenly looked sad on the sofa all alone staring at the lights and I would go over and we would stare at the lights together.
I still remember the first time some girl at school said everyone had a mother and a father, not two mothers, and when I asked my mothers about this Paula just laughed and said oh honey that’s nonsense, you have two mothers and a whole roomful of fathers, don’t you. So when I was little my fathers would hold me in their arms and tickle me and lift me up to the spinning lights and I would get giddy until I fell asleep on the sofa and someone would carry me up to my bedroom and I would sleep for the rest of the night. When I got older I would go to bed like usual, but as soon as I heard the music I would run downstairs in my favorite silky robe and a tiara, and everyone would call me their little princess, so I was a princess among queens.
Technically maybe they were my fathers, even the ones who didn’t seem like men at all, they were somewhere in between or beyond but that’s how my mothers got pregnant, it was their sperm in the turkey baster—did all those queens get together for a sex party first, or maybe just one by one jerking off in the bathroom, of course it wasn’t just one time I mean the details of the story changed but what didn’t change was that all the sperm was mixed together so if this worked out then no one would ever know who the father was.
When I was little, my mothers told me they both got pregnant together, no men involved, but once I realized half of me couldn’t have come from one mother and half from the other they told me it was Eileen who gave birth to me but they were both my mothers and I could tell they were nervous about this but I was relieved because I thought they were going to say Paula, there was something about our connection that felt more physical, but once I realized it wasn’t her this kind of balanced things out.
So by ninth grade it already felt like all my friends were dying, like this had been going on forever and it would never stop, and I know they were my mothers’ friends but I grew up with them way more than with other kids. I didn’t understand kids, so I would climb trees, I liked the way you had to really focus to get somewhere but once you were there you didn’t have to focus at all, and at the AIDS awareness assembly I thought we would all share stories of friends we’d lost, so I was surprised when it was just about which bodily fluids contained HIV and how we were all at risk so here’s how to put a condom on a banana and I knew all that, I mean there were condoms and pamphlets about safe sex all over our house. But at school everyone laughed at the banana and then their questions were weird like can you get AIDS from kissing someone on the cheek or what if you cut yourself and no one was around and you only had a dirty sock to wipe it off, could you get AIDS from a dirty sock that really really smelled and then someone said I feel sorry for the AIDS victims but it isn’t their fault, and that’s when I raised my hand.
I said I have something to share, and the teachers nodded, and I took out a list that I’d prepared ahead of time because I didn’t want to get nervous and forget anyone. I started with Peter, and how he used to shake the tambourine—he would run all over the house singing shake shake shake and I would run after him. And Marty, who used to cut my hair at home because of my asthma so I didn’t even have to go to the salon we would do it in the kitchen and he specialized in curly hair so he always got it right. And then his boyfriend Tommy who didn’t look sick but then I started seeing the sores on his neck and wrists and back, my mothers said they weren’t always painful but they really did look like they hurt. A lot of my mothers’ friends had the sores, some of them would try to cover them up with makeup but you could still see. Like Cammy who taught me the eyebrow trick and the secret ways to do contour and how to always use lip liner if you wanted your lips to stay that way. Or Ansel who used to wear the prettiest dresses and hold her hand like a microphone and do these elaborate dance numbers while I would try to learn the moves but I just couldn’t keep up.
I wanted to say more, but the bell was ringing so I looked up to see if it was okay to keep going and the first thing I noticed was that everyone was completely quiet, I mean not even the boys in the back were making jokes anymore, and as soon as I stopped I could tell there were kids who were about to cry or maybe they were already crying and the teachers looked shocked too, especially the PE teacher who everyone said was gay, so she must not have been gay or why would she have been shocked, and I didn’t know what to do so then I stopped talking.
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.
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