Alice Elliott Dark Writes Women in Their 80s Like Men in Their 30s

Posted on by Jo Lou

Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point is an abundantly generous novel, rich in the love of a lifelong friendship and the beauty of Maine in the summer. It opens with a map of its titular location—a small peninsula where five wealthy Philadelphia Quaker families established summer homes decades ago. Fellowship Point is private property, a fact which drives one of the novel’s main conflicts. What will happen to this sanctuary after the point’s primary caretakers, Agnes Lee and Polly Garner—both in their 80s—die? 

I always relish a map at the start of a book, as I did this one, studying it closely, even though the word it depicts meant nothing to me—yet. But as I read each marked location grew in significance, and by the final chapter I felt as connected to this place as I do to its inhabitants.

Agnes and Polly are old women by any definition, set in their ways formed by their families, by Philadelphia society, by living through most of the 20th century, by leveraging their strengths and coping with their weaknesses. Agnes is a successful author and Polly is a homemaker—each leads a life their friend has not lived. And yet the differences in their world views and personalities spur them both to grow and to change, undergoing personal evolutions that provide the novel’s most poignant revelations.

Fellowship Point may be private property, but as a setting for a novel, it’s open to all. To be invited there, and be welcomed into this deep and lasting friendship—the likes of which many of us will never have—is a gift Alice Elliot Dark gives to her readers. 

Halimah Marcus: Agnes and Polly have been friends for their entire lives, and yet their personal lives look very different. Polly is married with children and no career, and Agnes has never been married, and is devoted to her work. This difference at times is a source of conflict. But I also wonder if it’s integral to the friendship, and in some ways allows it to function.

Alice Elliott Dark: It certainly seemed to me that they balanced each other out, and sort of made one person that we think of now as a more modern person, who has both aspects of life. The fact that they are so different from each other [keeps them] interested. Agnes thinks Polly is much smarter than Polly is treated by other people. Even though Polly is not by any stretch an intellectual sort of person, she’s so insightful and smart. I think they connect on that basis. But yes, they don’t entirely understand each other. They don’t entirely approve of each other. And I think that does compel them towards each other.

HM: There are so many books about female friendship, and maybe there always have been, but it’s a bit of a trend recently. Those books are often about how female friendship is erotic or intense or volatile. But the friendship between Polly and Agnes is much more long term, and quieter, almost like a marriage. Did you think about the ways that female friendships are represented in culture when writing this book?

AED: I didn’t explicitly think about it, but I am aware of how it’s been represented over time, especially in literature. I didn’t want to eroticize their friendship. I think there’s always an erotic element of friendship, but I didn’t want to explicitly bring that out because they wouldn’t have explicitly brought it out. They just didn’t grow up that way. 

Agnes’s sexuality is so different from most people. She never had sex in her whole life, ever. And she doesn’t feel that that sets her outside of the mainstream of human experience. She feels she’s had a very important life experience. 

At one point I really loved reading about Victorian women’s friendships, and how they were always lying in bed together, and embracing each other, and being really physically close. It wasn’t necessarily sexual, it was just very intimate. But I didn’t want to write their relationship like that. I wouldn’t say I was writing against anything. They were so real to me; I just let what happened between them be the way that it rolled out.

HM: I actually found it really powerful to realize—at the end of the book when it’s stated explicitly—that Agnes has never had sex. It’s something I could have understood previously, but I just hadn’t put a fine point on it in my mind. I found that moment moving, because I had never thought of her as a spinster, or someone who had missed out on life, or someone who had missed out on experience. To put it bluntly, I didn’t pity her in any way. I think that part of why I didn’t pity her is because she’s a writer, and because she’s a good writer, and because she’s contributed to the world through her writing. Do you think you could have written a woman like Agnes, with a full life, if she wasn’t a writer?

AED: I definitely could. I had a godmother who worked at a bank her whole life. And she had a life like Agnes. I mean, she was very popular and had a lot of friends, but she never had any kind of romantic attachment at all, ever. It just didn’t come up. When you were around her, you would have been embarrassed to even have the thought yourself, what’s her sex life? She was so complete. I was thinking of Agnes as a person like that. And no, I don’t think it has to be an artist. I think it can just be a person who has a sense of self that is enough for them.

HM: I wondered why you chose to make Polly and Agnes in their 80s, older than you are. Why not their 60s, for example? What was it like to write characters who were in a life stage that you hadn’t experienced yet?

AED: I’ve always just really loved old women my whole life, starting when I was little, and been really fascinated by them. Especially women like this—it’s kind of my fantasy life. Women alone. They’re not worried or destitute; they have money. They have freedom. They still are physically and mentally capable. I’ve known so many people like that, and they are invisible. You go to a party and no one talks to them, no one goes over to them. And a lot of times they’re the most interesting people in the room. I’m always amazed to see how shunted aside older women are, in every culture. There’s a few older cultures or smaller cultures where older women are considered wise, but that’s a rare thing. There’s like a huge wasted resource of women over 70 or over 75, as political actors, as intellectuals. I wanted to show women in their 80s that are like young men who are 30, with the same level of agency, future, potential, everything.

HM: I found the evolution of Polly’s marriage over the course of a novel to be really rich and nuanced. And that’s how her and her husband evolve as individuals, but also how their relationship evolves. And then even after his death, how her perception of their relationship evolves. What sacrifices does Polly make in order to have a successful marriage? What are those sacrifices worth to her and how does she define a successful marriage?

AED: I think she has a very old-fashioned sense of marriage being a commitment in a way that people don’t anymore. Very early in her marriage, she has a moment of real doubt, and there’s a scene where another woman expresses her doubt. Polly’s fascinated because she has feelings like these herself. But at the end of that scene, she just decides, “I’m not going to go there anymore. I’m going to just do this. I’m going to plunge ahead with this, and I’m going to have a baby, and I’m going to be a married person.”

I wanted to show women in their 80s that are like young men who are 30, with the same level of agency, future, potential, everything.

I think what she has to sacrifice is really looking at the reality of who her husband is. He’s a bit fatuous, he’s a bit self-important, he’s a bit all of these things. He’s not a bad person, but he’s not a great person either. And she has to imbue him with greatness his ego needs, and also kind of for her own needs, to be able to do the heavy lifting of a long marriage with children. She had a daughter who died and that’s very, very hard on her. I threw out a lot of pages about that. She’s in a world of men in her house. That’s another aspect of her friendship with Agnes. Agnes is the other female person that she can be with. She doesn’t have that at home.

I think that the cost to her is gross. She has a big growth spurt after her husband dies, but she also has a lot of growth just from sticking with something for a long time, which I think is what people find with long marriages. Everybody goes through a good ten, 15 years when they’re fantasizing about getting out. But if you don’t, then you start to see you’re the mirror of the other person. You see yourself in that mirror: who I am, how intolerant I am, how flexible I am. I think she’s grown a lot just from going through being in that marriage. And that is something that she values.

HM: In that scene you’ve brought up, it’s a lady’s luncheon, and one of them bursts into tears on the couch because she’s entered into this marriage basically having gone from her father’s house to her husband’s house. No one’s talking honestly to one another about what’s involved, or the shock of that. On the one hand, I was thinking, oh, thank God, so much has changed. People enter into marriages with eyes open, and so much more information. But then some of the thornier ego negotiations that happened between Polly and Dick had me wondering, is this an entrenched fact of heterosexual marriage, even today? What do you think about that, in terms of how heterosexual marriage has evolved?

AED: There’s a lot more noise around it, a lot more articles, a lot more of this and a lot more of that. But I think the reality still is that going from being unmarried to being married is a shift that you don’t really expect until you do it. I just had a student who got married this weekend, and she wrote to me the day afterwards and said, I can’t believe it’s actually different. It is like there’s a weird feeling that comes over you. And then the next feeling is, “Who the hell did I marry? I knew this person.” But, you know, you get in deeper, deeper. All those articles and everything, they’re helpful. And talking to your friends is helpful. But you’re still there on your own with someone who just becomes, you know, more strange. I think there’s a strangeness in marriage that I don’t think it’s solved by information or therapy or anything. We’re all strangers. You see the stranger in someone when you’re married to them.

HM: Agnes thinks of herself as a steward of Fellowship Point. Steward is a significant sort of Quaker word because it implies care, responsibility, but not necessarily ownership or control. Even though you are the author and the creator of this story, and therefore kind of owner of it, did this idea of stewardship resonate with you in your writing? Did you ever feel like the steward of this story?

We’re always seeking for things to make sense, for things to coalesce, for things to reveal themselves. And we can do that as writers.

AED: That’s such a beautiful question. I would say yes. What I immediately think about is the hundreds of pages I cut, and that I still feel that they’re part of the book, even though they’re not part of the finished book. The book had four male points of view, which all got cut by the end of the editing process. All of that felt really important to me. I’m thinking of the word shepherd. I felt like I was shepherding all of these pieces together into one pen, which was a book. I never felt like I’m a channel or anything like that. But I’m also not sweating over figuring everything out. Characters come to me, the situations come to me, and it is like being given a piece of land, or given a puppy, or given something where you step into a role of stewardship. You’re not forcing it. You’re not making it.

HM: Thinking about all these hundreds of pages that you cut, while I was reading the book, I would have been happy to read it forever. But there’s this sort of question of the Borgesian map. At a certain point, the novel will be the same size as the life of the characters. It has to restrict itself and put boundaries around the story that it’s telling. It can’t be the same size as a life. When the plot started to really kick in at the end, I felt the art form of the novel snap into place. A novel does have to have some artifice in order to be this thing that we call a novel.

AED: I’m a big fan of artifice. I love Virginia Woolf and I love what she tried to do with interiority. It’s actually, I think, very artificial, but intended to look like thinking and in an interesting way. I think it’s making something exactly like you’re saying. Everything comes, everything snaps together. And it’s so interesting and satisfying because we’re always seeking that in life. We’re always seeking for things to make sense, for things to coalesce, for things to reveal themselves. And we can do that as writers. We can make that happen. I love reading novels where it’s really well done, because it teaches me a little more how to think about it in life. It’s almost like a lesson in how to pull things together, how to draw certain threads of what you’re thinking and let things go. 

As a teacher, I talk a lot about how writing is valuable, whether you are publishing or not, because learning how to think this way, and how to know what to keep, what to let go, what’s important, what’s not important, what’s relevant, is really valuable to just making your life feel very rich and meaningful.

Rihanna’s Approach to Maternity Clothes Helped Me Redefine Motherhood

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Before the vampire, I loved wearing clothes. I saw my wardrobe as a textile collection of myself in all my various fits and moods, and each day, my task was to find the best combination of clothing to wear that would project to the world my current state. I loved getting up each morning and putting on a new outfit, the first ritual of many rituals performed throughout my day. I believed that through my clothing, I could gain a better understanding of myself so that I could move through my days with confidence and precision. The clothing I valued most were the pieces in my wardrobe tied up with meaning. Hand-me-downs from my mother, dresses and shirts that she wore when she was my age. Blouses from my grandmother that I took after she died. Thrifted things that were clearly handmade or well-worn before they found their way to me. Flannels with threadbare patches and mismatched buttons. The pair of Dr. Marten boots my mother purchased for me at my request when I was in seventh grade and that still fit. But when the vampire arrived and my identity and body slowly began to change, so did my wardrobe, and with that change came a profound sense of loss that both startled me and sent me spiraling into a new kind of sadness I was wholly unprepared for. If I could not rely on the confidence my clothing made me feel as I navigated all the changes a body goes through when it is pregnant, what was there to stop me from feeling adrift from my own mental and physical being, swinging between two planes of existence for months on end as I carried my vampire to term?

When I first suspected I was pregnant, I remember visiting my father, spending the entire day anxiously anticipating a period that would never come. I was a few days late, and I was wearing my newest favorite pair of jeans, lightwashed denim and baggy in all the right places. I remember feeling strange in them, as if I instinctively knew this was the last time I would wear them for a long time. The sadness I felt about this surprised me. To be clear, it wasn’t so much the pants I was mourning, as it was the way the pants made me feel when I had them on. This was a me that I recognized, a body and a mental state that I felt comfortable and confident inhabiting. The pants were a reflection of my inner self, and the prospect of no longer being able to wear them symbolized for me the shift from a 31 year old woman writer to a 32 year old mother, and I did not know — and still do not know — what that looked like. The vampire had been planned, and each day my period ceased to arrive felt like inching a little closer to a miracle, but the closer I inched, the clearer it became that a wall was about to be built between the me I was then and the me I would soon become.

It wasn’t so much the pants I was mourning, as it was the way the pants made me feel when I had them on.

There are a lot of things that happen to a body when it’s pregnant. It aches and it oozes and it regurgitates constantly. It changes inwardly and those changes are noticed outwardly. It becomes a pot that’s always about to boil over. It distends. For me, those initial days of pregnancy consisted of horrible bouts of vomiting and extreme tiredness that caused me to spiral into a deep, hormonal depression. Although my physical body did not yet show signs of the belly to come, my symptoms were enough to make it very clear to me that I had entered into a transitional realm where it was necessary to check my previous self at the door if I ever wanted to emerge intact on the other side. This realization terrified me, especially when it became clear that the things I had once so loved to do were no longer of any interest to me in the current moment. One of the first things to go was my relationship to my clothes. I wore and re-wore the same few pairs of leggings and tops for days, unable to muster the strength or creativity to come up with anything else.

I have always been vocal to my husband about the importance of maintaining my sense of self after having a baby. I’ve bemoaned the image of myself as a woman eclipsed by the shadow of her caregiving, and at the start of my pregnancy, I felt determined to hold on to what I essentially think of as my essence. For me, being a writer is a core part of who I am. My days revolve around words, so much so that I am unsure of the person I would be if my relationship to my work and to my books ceased to exist. Once, when I worked in a bookstore, I was talking to a coworker about another one of our booksellers who had recently had a baby. I said they were planning on returning to work after their maternity leave, and my coworker looked at me and said, They always say that. It works for a short while, but eventually they leave. At the time, I didn’t believe them, but in the end, they were right. Motherhood has a way of shifting things, of changing all your future plans.

By the time I entered my second trimester, I was surprised and relieved to find that I was beginning to recognize parts of myself that I feared I had lost to the onslaught of the first four months. The vampire was doing well, and I was happy to feel like a person again. However, now I was starting to develop a belly, so I made the decision to commit myself to cultivating a maternity wardrobe that helped uplift me in the same way my pre-vampire wardrobe did. My logic was that if I could maintain a sense of normalcy through the clothing I wore, perhaps this would help me to cope with the drastic changes my body was beginning to show, anchoring me somehow to a sense of self, however small, that kept me from feeling completely disconnected and adrift.

If I could maintain a sense of normalcy through the clothing I wore, perhaps this would help me to cope with the drastic changes my body was beginning to show.


At first, this goal seemed easy enough to achieve. But when my mother and I went out looking for maternity clothes, we discovered two things. The first being that most stores no longer actually sell maternity clothing in the actual store — a fact that feels a bit appalling because how are you supposed to know what size you need for your aggressively changing body when there is no way for you to try anything on? — and second, everything, and I mean everything that was available for pregnant people online all mimicked the same exact style. I am sure there are pregnant people out there who are absolutely overjoyed at the options available to them for maternity wear, and to them I say, I’m happy for you. I, however, am not one of those people, and I suspect that a large number of pregnant people — most likely belonging to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities — feel the same way, too. As I scoured the internet for maternity wear, I found that the dominant trend for clothing seemed to reflect a type of pregnancy and a type of mothering akin to a freshly bathed, white, skinny, blonde woman about to walk naked into a dreamy field at sunrise to birth her babe alone in the presence of God and nature all while wearing a flower chain in her perfect, professionally curled hair. It should go without saying that this woman is absolutely not me.

Looking at these different maternity lines was nauseating. I felt like I was observing, single-handedly, the erasure of a woman’s sense of self before having a baby. Nothing about the clothing being offered was interesting to me. The color pallet was always black, grey, navy, and a mix of light pastels. Patterns were non-existent unless floral, and almost every woman modeling the clothing was white and skinny, projecting the image of a perfect mother-to-be with her hand placed lovingly atop her perfect, tiny baby bump. This image absolutely did not reflect my Japanese and German body that had recently gained a decent amount of pandemic weight even before the vampire and was not looking forward to wearing a floor length, tiered, ruffle sundress that looked fabulous on the website models but would look like nothing less than a tablecloth covering a watermelon on my 5’ 2” frame. I felt like I was going insane. Perhaps the biggest problem with looking at website after website selling nothing but pastel maternity dresses and rompers was that at some point, I eventually started to wonder if this really was what I should be wearing. There really was no doubt that the women in the photographs did look well dressed and put together in their pregnancies. Maybe I could become just like them if I bought a linen romper or striped shirt with elaborate peplum meant to both tastefully cover and accentuate my growing stomach. Maybe in doing so, I would discover the secret to both enjoying my pregnancy and becoming a mother. But each time I would think about giving in to the advertising, a little voice in my head would be screaming at me to stop and think again. Carefully, I asked myself, “Is this what I want my wardrobe, my visual representation of my approach to motherhood and to myself entering into motherhood, to be?” The answer was always a resounding “No.”

In our society the way a person dresses is often one of the first things we use to judge their character.

These images of a pregnant mother were not negotiable in that they only seemed to reflect a woman who is chaste in her clothing choices — which must mean she is also chaste in her lifestyle choices —without any sexuality or sense of self. So often in our society the way a person dresses is often one of the first things we use to judge their character, and so the blandness of the maternity clothes for sale only served to display society’s vision of the ideal mother as selfless, perfect, and ready for anything. What freaked me out most about this was how the maternity clothes on these sites were so one note in their styles that it was hard, at least for me, not to think of them as just another way to push a woman away from who she might have been before the baby, redirecting her to the new role of mother, as if the only way to ensure that women choosing to become mothers did not stray from the path of The Well- Behaved Mother was to strip them of any identifying characteristics by way of their clothing. It’s as if the blandness of the maternity clothes turns the pregnant body into a clean slate where the woman becomes a tabula rasa, washed of her interests and personality so that she may devote herself and her body entirely to the raising of her children.

It was also disturbing that the models were rarely representative of BIPOC or LGBTQ+ mothers, and even on the rare occasion that some of the models were Black or Asian, the main focus always seemed to be on white women. This sort of visual gatekeeping coupled with the purity of the clothing seemed to throw into question just who was most likely to achieve the coveted label of Good Mother. Big name maternity clothing brands all seemed to be suggesting that in order to cultivate that perfect, pregnancy glow not only did you have to portray an image of softness and comfort, but you also had to be a white woman, leaving out a very large portion of the population that does not identify as one or the other or both.

Coming to these realizations was horrifying for me, and each time I found myself searching for new tops to wear over my ever-expanding belly, I became filled with an untamed rage. How was I supposed to dress myself during the rest of this pregnancy, if the only things available to me made me feel like an extra on Little House on the Prairie? And even more frustrating, how was I supposed to maintain my own sense of self if the expectation was that all I could be after giving birth was a mother and nothing more? It turns out, the answer to both of these questions was Rihanna.

Rihanna has been a fashion icon ever since she came onto the music scene nearly twenty years ago. She’s wowed us with her looks throughout her entire career, and she’s created some of the most interesting fashion labels to grace the runways. Her lingerie label Savage X Fenty beautifully incorporates and includes lingerie created for people of all sizes and skin tones. Inclusivity and self-expression are important to Rihanna, so when photos of her pregnancy began to circulate on social media, it was no surprise that her clothing completely redefined maternity wear. The first photo to appear on her Instagram pictured her in a long, hot pink puffer coat and tastefully ripped jeans. The coat is unbuttoned just enough to reveal her growing belly, and strands of jeweled necklaces fall across it like royalty. In short, she looks amazing. Yes, her body has clearly been undergoing some changes, but her style and her sexiness are still 100% intact. She is the Rihanna we know, just pregnant, and she instantly became my role model.

I have followed Rihanna through her pregnancy alongside my own, and I have never been more amazed at a person’s dedication to fashion in the face of pregnancy. Each outfit she has been pictured wearing has been even more fabulous than the one before it. Her stomach is almost always on view, and nothing about her clothing screams “matronly” or “prairie chic.” There is a sense of style here, a woman with tastes and desires and emotions that want to be expressed through the clothing that she wears. In some ways even, her growing belly acts as an accessory to her already-heightened sense of powerful feminism that she has consistently cultivated and expressed throughout her career. My favorite of her outfits is probably the Dior dress she wore sans the dress’s original lining so that her entire pregnant body could be seen through a lacy frock making her look nothing short of a goddess. Recently, she told Vogue, “My body is doing incredible things right now, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that. This time should feel celebratory. Because why should you be hiding your pregnancy?”

But Rihanna is doing more for maternity clothing and pregnant people in general than just celebrating the pregnant body. She is allowing space for us to continue to dress like ourselves, to express our full personalities through our clothing like we did before our bodies started changing. Before her pregnancy, Rihanna has always been labeled as sexy, and for good reason. She has captivated the fashion industry with her bold styles and sensual clothing choices — two things that are generally absent from pretty much every line of maternity wear available today.

I have followed Rihanna through her pregnancy alongside my own, and I have never been more amazed at a person’s dedication to fashion in the face of pregnancy.

Right from the start of her pregnancy though, Rihanna rejected the typical maternity fashions and simply continued to dress as she always has. Naturally, some people on the internet were incensed — aren’t mothers supposed to be proper and decent? — but most people fell in love with her bold approach to pregnancy clothes because it also offered up a bold approach to motherhood. Here was a Black woman who was refusing to give in to the extremely white-centric idea of motherhood and maternity wear readily available to pregnant people, and she was doing it with millions of people watching her. Her choice to be a sexy mother-to-be — one who doesn’t shy away from bold colors and lace and elaborate patterns and form fitting clothes— felt so radical to me on my search for maternity wear that it began to feel deeply political. It was as if her clothing choices were single handedly redefining motherhood to incorporate more than just that perfect yet inaccurate image of whiteness, purity, and virtue, a choice that feels both necessary and radical during this moment in history where pregnancy and the right to one’s own body are dangerously close to being forced backwards in time.

In choosing to maintain her personal sense of style throughout her pregnancy, Rihanna also makes room for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals to come up with their own personal maternity styles that allow them to express their true selves instead of having to choose between neutrally bland shirts and pants or pastel and light denim a-line dresses that make a person look like they are going to a country wedding. She is saying it is okay to not take on the traits of a socially acceptable mom who throws everything about themselves away so that they become nothing more than a sounding board for their children’s lives. She is saying it is okay to still be sexy, original, and maybe, even, a little bit bad. Clothing is just one creative way for a mother to express themselves, and by making the choice to use her wardrobe as a way for self- expression, she gives permission for all creative outlets to be included in the story of motherhood.

She is saying it is okay to still be sexy, original, and maybe, even, a little bit bad.

After seeing Rihanna pregnant for the first time, I realized that I didn’t have to be the blank slate popular maternity brands like Hatch and A Pea in the Pod wanted me to be. I was free to push the boundaries of what a mother, perhaps even a good mother, could wear in preparation for the arrival of her child. Of course, I am not Rihanna, and I do not have access to the designers and stylists that she does who would be able to help me achieve the look I’m going for with such ease, but just knowing that someone out there was pushing back against the legions of horrible light denim overalls and ruched maternity shirts that are either black and white striped or say horrifying things on them like, “Daddy Did it!” was enough for me. So much of a pregnant person’s time before the arrival of the baby is spent wondering about how they will be as a parent. If you are experiencing your first pregnancy, these thoughts are often wild and inescapable. I have women in my life who I can look to as role models for the kind of mom that I would like to be, but there really is no way for me to fully understand what is about to happen once the vampire is born. I’ve read books and attended classes, and though I feel slightly more prepared for my vampire’s birth than I initially did, I am still very uncertain about what I will look like as a mother and a writer, both.

Rihanna’s approach to maternity clothes has given me confidence that I just might be able to retain certain parts of my former self that I enjoyed, and that I don’t necessarily have to lose them all to the task of mothering. I can still wear my Bauhaus t-shirts with those Dr. Marten boots. I can still attend concerts and watch horror movies and write essays and read books. Yes, my life is going to change, and my time and my priorities will be rearranged significantly, but I do not have to become a tabula rasa. I do not have to give up all that I was before the vampire in order to make room for the vampire in my life. Instead, the vampire will become a part of my life, learning and exploring and sharing in the things we both find interesting, him discovering the world for the first time, and me rediscovering it again through new eyes. I’m not entirely sure what my type of motherhood looks like just yet. Until the vampire is born, I’m just going to have to wait to figure that out. But one thing is for sure, I do know what outfit I’ll be wearing when I do it.

A Novel About the Pregnancy Industrial Complex

Posted on by Jo Lou

Aviva Rosner wants a baby. She tries for two years, to no avail. She dreads the start of her monthly cycle. She gets her husband’s fertility tested. She cuts alcohol and sugar out of her diet. In her career as a singer-songwriter, she puts out an album called Womb Service which, in part, is about yearning for motherhood. She processes her feelings about it all with her shrink, the Rabbi. She gets desperate enough to subscribe to the mailing list of a self-proclaimed fertility guru, who sends messages like “Click here for my Fertile Food Five! Click here for my Recipes for Righteous Reproductive Renewal! Click here for my Fabulous Fertility Facts!” 

And when none of that works, Aviva gets angry—at the medical systems that insist she pump herself full of untested drugs that may or may not help her get pregnant. At the influencers who have children and tout them in color-coordinated, aesthetic backgrounds all over the internet. At other people, who give her unsolicited advice. At comments like, “You’re getting older, you know,” or “Your time will come, don’t worry.” At the way that her body is either viewed as something holy because of its ability to create life or a complete failure, depending on whether or not she becomes pregnant.

Elisa Albert, author of novels The Birth of Dahlia, After Birth, and How This Night is Different, brings a wealth of wit, humor, and righteous rage to her latest, Human Blues, in which she reckons with expectations imposed on the bodies of anyone with a uterus, the predatory nature of the wellness industry, and the ways in which people so often moralize fertility and conception. 

Jacqueline Alnes: Human Blues was pitched to me as being about someone wanting to conceive, but it’s about so much more than that. As I was reading, I kept trying to distill themes. It seems to be about what it means to be a woman and an artist in our time, the push to sell yourself via social media or press and the tension that can create between you and your work. It feels like it’s about the way that questions related to motherhood can be so invasive, in that they’re always focused on the body in some way. 

EA: And your worth as a person.

JA: Yeah! I thought it was hilarious when Aviva whips out the “I’m pregnant” card, even though she’s not. No one pays her much attention until she says, “I need my luggage delivered. I’m pregnant.” And then suddenly the world changes for her. People view her as worthy of receiving help and care.

In my work as a doula, over the last dozen years, I’ve learned that you cannot offer people what they don’t want.

EA: That cracked me up. That first moment when Aviva is at that literary salon and she doesn’t want a glass of wine—because she doesn’t like to drink—and it’s like, “Why aren’t you drinking? What’s wrong with you?” That’s how it started. And then I just thought it would be hilarious to have her somehow validate herself in the eyes of other people. It’s like a fuck off. When she says, “I’m pregnant,” other people go, “Oh, great then. Your womb is occupied? You are A-OK.” And then it just kept unfolding and the opportunities kept presenting themselves. I was cracking myself up, and that’s always a good sign.

JA: What was it like writing about the wellness culture surrounding infertility? The industry seems…predatory?

EA: Totally. A friend of mine had a really beautiful point, and she put it better than I could: while there is this huge, righteous mistrust of the technocratic approach and medical science approach because of all of the violations—ethical, financial, zero regulations, zero long term studies—the other extreme is also problematic, but there is less harm in trying those things. I think for Aviva, she doesn’t trust the wellness guru bullshit, culminating at the end with her mom sending her a book called “Am I The Reason I’m Not Getting Pregnant?” All the psychic stuff, it’s equally problematic, but the profit margins are smaller and the potential negative consequences are smaller. 

It’s like Scylla and Charybdis, trying to navigate and find your way and honor your own intuitive integrity or whatever. But this way feels really violating and wrong and so does the other. How do you empower yourself to inhabit that middle space and refuse either polarity? How do you carve out a space that is authentic and true and safe for oneself without being like, “Ok, I’ll sign up with you.” These are the options we are offered and they are both problematic. The idea that you simply have to decide who you’re going to hand your stuff over to, and then you abdicate and you’re like “Ok, I don’t have to think about anything anymore,” but the truth is that I think we all have to take responsibility for ourselves. That’s a lot of responsibility. It’s easier to hand stuff over to a doctor or nutritionist and close the case. 

JA: And it’s a way to absolve the guilt that is so unfairly placed on someone who is trying to get pregnant or someone who is ill. You see people stuck in these binds and it becomes less about science and the body and a physical thing, and it becomes a moral burden. People look at symptoms and think the person having them is not doing enough to “fix” themself.

Now I think it’s more apt to say [babies are] capitalist fodder. We need mall fodder. Let’s get more people in so we have more consumers… It doesn’t have to be this way.

EA: Which is such a bizarre denial of life. It’s this refusal to accept the limitations of what it means to live in a body that I just find baffling. My first novel was about a girl who was dying of a brain tumor and the whole thing was structured around this self-help book: are you the reason you have cancer?

JA: Oh my god, I have to read this.

EA: It was like, you have to forgive people, you have to let go, and she’s working through it. At the end she dies, but the whole thing is her chapter by chapter letting go. But no! That doesn’t fully work. It is nice to live in a time where there is wisdom everywhere, where trauma medicine is evolved. Like, I don’t want to pray over a gunshot wound or sing a song in place of bone-setting. I don’t want to attempt a home birth with pre-eclampsia. There is a time and a place. We’re all responsible for insisting on some middle place and picking and choosing what’s actually necessary and not letting anyone profit off of ignorance, fear, or brainwashing. 

JA: The noise can feel so loud, that voice that says, “This is how you do it. Come with me. This is how you heal yourself.” It’s so complicated.

EA: It really is. In my work as a doula, over the last dozen years, I’ve learned that you cannot offer people what they don’t want. People have to figure out how to come to some kind of approach themselves. If they seek out support, you can offer it, but you can’t tell somebody who’s been raised on a message that it doesn’t have to be that way. We have familial legacies, cultural legacies, shit held in our psyches that we aren’t even conscious of all the time, directing our feelings. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard a prepubescent person say something like, “Oh my god, pregnancy is disgusting.” And it’s like, wow, where did you get that? Do you know? Are you ever going to question that? Or is that going to be what directs your life? 

JA: When Aviva is kind of angry with another person in the book who doesn’t know their own menstrual cycle, part of me was like yeah, that makes sense, but the other part of me was like, wait a second? I also was never taught these things? I think at one point Aviva calls pregnant people “a holy vessel,” sarcastically, and I think imposing that extra layer of morality on people is a lot.

EA: People with uteruses are a huge commodity because we have yet to successfully grow a human being in a laboratory. That is coming. There are lots and lots of people who firmly believe that it will be a really positive step for humanity because we can separate reproduction from the body. Great, then we’re free. I personally think that when we come up with workarounds for human biology, we often create horrific problems for ourselves. Like sure, let’s go colonize Mars, let’s grow babies in labs. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens. I don’t see that working out long term? I don’t think we are as smart as we think we are. 

People with uteruses are a huge commodity because we have yet to successfully grow a human being in a laboratory. That is coming.

As of now, people with uteruses are the creators of life and if the powers that be want to control us, as they have since time immemorial because we are such a commodity in that regard, the best way to do that is to divorce us from knowledge. If we are ignorant, we are scared. I can’t count the number of menopausal women who have said to me lately, “Oh, I think I’m menopausal. I went to the doctor to have my levels checked.” It’s like, honey, you’re fifty. You wake up soaked in sweat every night and your body is changing. Your doctor doesn’t need to check your levels. It’s so bizarre to me, the need for confirmation from an authority. To what end? Ignorance is endemic, from puberty to death. 

JA: It relates to so much of what’s going on right now with Roe v. Wade being overturned. I mean, part of what infuriates me is that we can talk about creating kids all that we want, but what happens when the kid gets here? There is no universal childcare, no parental support. You’re subject to a whole host of separate legislation that’s making parenthood even harder.  

EA: Back in the day, babies were known in this kind of society as cannon fodder, as in we needed babies to send them off to war. Now I think it’s more apt to say we need capitalist fodder. We need mall fodder. Let’s get more people in so we have more consumers. We need more eyeballs. We need more people going to the mall. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not like this in every country. It’s not like this everywhere in the world. There are places where birth is supported and evidence based. There are places where maternity care is humane. There are places with universal healthcare, a lot more green space, dedicated bike lanes, decent education for everybody. But this country is its own special beast. 

JA: I guess that’s why Aviva’s rage felt so right to me the whole book. She looks at every option and just thinks, that fucking sucks, and so does that, and I’m angry all the time about this system that I’m stuck in. And also recognizing that she’s extremely privileged within the system!

EA: Aviva doesn’t want to live in a world where everyone is out for themselves. She’s angry about the acquisitional, consumerist vibe. You’ve got to have it all. It’s brutal.

Never Marry a Man with a Human Mother

Posted on by Alex Juarez

Xífù

I don’t mean I want her to die. I’m just saying, what kind of woman pretends to kill herself six times? I’m saying that she loves to pretend. Some women are like that. They don’t know what real means. Like that neighbor I had back on the island who pretended she was pregnant for three whole years. Her belly was a sack of guavas, all lumps, and she really thought no one would be able to tell. One of the neighborhood boys punched her in the belly to prove to his friends she wasn’t actually pregnant, and all the guavas came rolling out the bottom of her dress and down the road. Juice sprayed everywhere and greenmeat jellied between her feet. And that woman cried about it too. She cried so hard and so long that the sea came forward and punched her out for spending so much of its salt. Some women will mourn anything, even things that haven’t been born. I know a story about another woman on the island who impregnated a goat. In the dream, the woman masturbated—don’t believe anyone who says she’s never touched herself, she’s probably touched herself with all kinds of things, a karaoke microphone, an assortment of vacuum-cleaner attachments, a fake jade statue of Guanyin—and then offered her salted palm to her goat, which licked it clean with its tongue. 

Three months later, the goat got big in the belly and the woman cut it open. Inside, there was a baby. She raised it all by herself. The baby walked on all fours for its whole life, even when it was a girl, and you can imagine what the boys thought of her. They probably mounted her like a dog on the street. The goatgirl had a baby every four days, I swear. That’s the story I heard. And she ate grass too. Her mouth was always grazing the ground. What I always wanted to know was what happened to the goat after it got cut open? How did they cook it? Kebabs? Goat dumplings? Spit-roasting the whole thing? 

That’s why I told my daughter not to marry a man whose mother is alive. Best if the mother is a goat or dead. That’s the only requirement I have: Don’t marry a man with an origin. Set his family on fire. But she tells me it’s okay, that she’ll marry no one’s son because she’s a lesbian, and I’m so jealous I could kick her in front of a car, the way I once did to the neighbor’s pit bull when it shat maggots on my feet. There aren’t even any cars that come down our street anymore—they stopped coming since the police roadblocked the strip mall. They busted that massage place in the plaza, said it was full of Chinese prostitutes. I called the newspaper to clarify: I’m Taiwanese. I used to work there. At night I slept with all the other women, some from the mainland and some from the island and some from other islands too small for even the sea to know them. We slept in that hot back room, folding away all the tables and knotting together like a litter of pigs. The tatami mats were plastic and gave me rashes, but sometimes it was okay too, sometimes I liked hearing those women breathing all around me, all the heat in our bodies enough to burn down the building. 

I ask my daughter how you even become a lesbian and she says, first, I have to reject the male gaze. So I tell her the story of my father, who couldn’t see except for the shadows of things. She says, I’m not talking about literal sight. But I am. I’m talking about literally being seen. Like the time before my daughter was born when my husband caught me dipping my finger into the toilet after I’d peed in it. I licked the finger clean. Thing is, I was told that that’s one way to make sure you have a daughter. A neighbor told me that, the same neighbor who got caught shoplifting eggplants. Told her, Eggplants aren’t even good. Anyway, I got a daughter, didn’t I? A daughter who doesn’t have to worry about her mother-in-law moving in like mine did. I swear, that woman cut holes in my clothes and pretended moths did it. I’ve never had moths. I kill those motherfuckers with my own bare hands. I clap them down like wannabe angels and crush with my heels their brittle haloes. 

I once threw a pencil at a fly and pierced it through the heart, if flies even have hearts. My mother-in-law saw me and said that was my aborigine blood, that habit of skewering things alive. And another time she picked up all my dishes after I’d washed them and said they weren’t clean enough. They’re clean enough to see your ugly face with, I wanted to say. Almost told her, Go eat out of your own ass, that’s all your mouth is good for. She tried to move into the bedroom with me and my husband. Said some fei hua about how her room down in the garage was too close to the kitchen, which has a microwave, which will kill her with its rays. Wanted to microwave her head until the brain-yolk dribbled hot from her ears. The first time my mother-in-law pretended to die, she staged a fall. She went into the kitchen and wet the floor and threw all my plates to the ground. Those plates were what I brought here from the island all those years ago. Everyone told me not to take fragile things onto a plane, because they break. Something about air pressure or the sky’s weight. But all the things I packed were breakable. I brought a glass ashtray that my mother once threw at my father’s head. It hit him in the eye and now he can’t see the meat of things. He can only see their shadows. So that he could see where my hands were, I had to shine a flashlight on them, cast their shape on a wall. I keep the ashtray to remind myself I have a shadow. Sometimes you can’t tell what’s a body or what’s a shadow. For years I stepped around this big spot on the sidewalk I thought was water or piss or something. Turns out it was the shadow of a tree I hadn’t looked up to see. I look at the ground more and more these days. Better to keep your eyes where your feet are. 

Anyway, my mother-in-law lay down among all the things (mine!) she broke and pretended she’d fallen on the wet floor. Fallen doing what? The woman doesn’t do anything but follow me around all day and tell me to take her to the dentist. Claims she’s got teeth cancer, sometimes jaw cancer. Is there even such thing? For all I know, I’ve got jaw cancer. I ran to my mother-in-law and helped her up, but I could see there was no bruise on her. The only thing she’d done was bite her tongue a little, and it wasn’t even bleeding. I’d give her my blood to bleed with, that’s how generous I am, but she’s never been hurt in her life. After that, she insisted on walking around the house using a broomstick as a cane. I’ve seen that woman jump three feet into the air to smack a mosquito with her hands. One night I saw her drop the cane and run to the TV so she could catch the opening scene of her soap opera, about an empress dowager controlling her puppet son. You see how fake?  

I could push her feet into a pot of hot water and boil them till they rise like dumplings. I could scalp her and then wear her skin like a swim cap.

Then the second time she tried, it was with a rope. She tried to hang herself in the pantry, except when I opened the door, her feet were still on the ground. Sure, the rope was around her neck and tied to the rafter and everything, but the pantry’s only four and a half feet tall and she was just standing there, leashed to the ceiling. She even tried to pretend she was choking by sticking her tongue out and making these coughing sounds, but when I asked her what the hell she was doing, she paused to say, I’m killing myself because you are a bad daughter-in-law and what will my son think when he finds out I’ve killed myself because of you how bad he will feel how much he will regret marrying you choosing you you bitch. I said, If you can say all that while hanging yourself, you’re going to live. And the third time was the worst. She stole the neighbor’s kiddie pool and filled it up in the yard and pretended to drown in it. Except she didn’t fill it up enough and there was only about a knuckle of water in there, and when she thrashed around, most of it splashed out of the pool and then she had to continue pretending to drown in nothing. She flopped facedown and tried to be dead, but the whole pool deflated from the weight of her body—let me tell you, she’s got hips like hams— and as the air came out, it made a farting sound. Instead of dying, it sounded like she needed to shit. The fourth time was also a drowning, except this one was in the bathtub. I heard her filling it up and I was ready this time. As soon as she got into the tub with all her clothes on, I burst through the door, said, Not while I’m alive, and dragged her out by the hair. Turns out her hair is not very strongly attached to her scalp, so I ended up tearing out a lot of it, and she cried for almost a month about it, told my husband I was abusing her and now she’d have to wear a wig. I know ways to abuse her, and none of them involve her hair. I could heat up a frying pan and press it to her face until the skin sizzles and all her features melt together into an abstract painting. I could push her feet into a pot of hot water and boil them till they rise like dumplings. I could scalp her and then wear her skin like a swim cap.

All my friends say what I’m dealing with is nothing: They have mothers-in-law who have locked them inside the garage on 105-degree days, that have put manure in their food and claimed it was the recipe, as if they have ever used a recipe. The worst thing is when some of them convert our children into loving their nainais better than they love their own mothers. That’s when you have to tell your daughters the truth of everything that’s been done to you, all the times you were told you were a bad xífù for eating with your head bent over the bowl, for shopping at Nordstrom Rack instead of going to the temple, for overstuffing dumplings into testicle-looking things. So what if I like them big. And then you tell your daughter all the stories in history about mothers-in-law who beat concubines to death with a chamber pot, mothers-in-law who rip themselves open by shoving their sons’ full-grown heads back inside themselves, sometimes up the wrong hole, a mother-in-law who wakes you up at three in the morning so that you can drive her to the emergency room because, she claims, she’s pregnant at the age of seventy-seven and is having a baby right now, it’s inside her, rolling around like a juiced grapefruit, it’s sour and screaming, and when you finally get there, an hour later because she tells you there’s a shortcut even though the only direction she knows is toward the church, it turns out she has kidney stones and you’re going to have to pay for their removal, out of pocket, and the rest is debt you’ll have for life, and when the doctor rolls her into surgery, you tell him, Please just let her die on the operating table, or Please pretend to operate on her but leave the stones inside her, make her feel the birth-pain of passing those blessed pebbles through her body. 

But the doctor doesn’t listen, he removes them and then stitches her up and she loses basically no blood, and she goes home the next day and tells you it’s your fault for using too much soy sauce in all your dishes, even though the reason you add a spoonful more is that she told you in the first place that nothing you make is salty enough. The fifth time she tries to kill herself is when she walks out to the highway—without her cane, of course—and steps in front of an 18-wheeler, except by some miracle, the 18-wheeler stops right before it hits her and there’s an eight-car pileup and we see her on the local evening news. It’s a physics-defying miracle, how an elderly woman who is terribly neglected at home—because of course she has to say that on TV—has been saved thanks to a trucker’s quick reflexes and the benevolent will of god. She’s being called a saint in certain comments sections, and I might have left a comment or two as well, all of them about how people aren’t really supposed to live forever, in other eras they would be dead by seventy-seven, and being pulped by an 18-wheeler is actually, I imagine, a very merciful end, and it probably leaves a beautiful piece of blood-art on the highway, kind of like a mural you can only see from above. 

They even interview her for the World Journal, and of course she tells the reporter she doesn’t blame her daughter-in-law for not taking better care of her, because how can a woman like her, at her age, be valued in a world like this, where old women are seen as burdens? But god had said oth erwise; god had held back an 18-wheeler and said, You are worthy of my love and intervention. I almost strangle her in her bed after that. I stand over her in the dark and think about it, just think about it. The sixth time, I tell my husband it’s all his fault. He should have been immaculately conceived by a goat. Every man loves his mother milk-sour. I tell you, my husband never once took my side. One time my mother-in-law told me I’d overcooked the fish, but that fish was so soft inside it almost dissolved in the light. And my husband said nothing to defend me, even though he’d eaten half the fish himself, and my daughter the lesbian only knows enough Chinese to say, I don’t want, thank you. Like a damn cricket, she says it again and again. I want her to tell me my fish is done perfect. Look how the bones disrobe. This woman tells me I can’t cook a fish? I’ll cook her. Later she says she wants the master bedroom because the garage is full of outside-air, and outside-air is full of toxins that are souring her, can’t you see how her neck sags, how her breasts are hard as potatoes, how her tongue is purple? I want to say, Your neck sags because you’re an old shit-sack, your breasts are hard because you don’t take them out to breathe, your tongue is purple from that time you bit it instead of dying. 

Being pulped by an 18-wheeler is actually, I imagine, a very merciful end, and it probably leaves a beautiful piece of blood-art on the highway, kind of like a mural you can only see from above. 

I don’t say anything about the fish, and I don’t apologize either, so that night she puts her head in the oven but forgets to turn it on. I come downstairs in the morning and she is asleep, drooling, with her head poked into the oven. I ask her where she learned to do this oven thing and she says she’s been reading, even though I know that woman is illiterate. She’s one of those peasant women who’s so short she looks like a pack animal from afar, a body built to carry things. I’m a better mother to her son than she is. That’s what marriage is, motherhood, except the man doesn’t do you the courtesy of growing up. I tell her, Next time just swallow the insecticide we keep on the shelf in the garage. She looks at me angry, because I am supposed to say, No, don’t die, we need you, your son needs you, etc. I bend down really close to her face and say, The oven is electric. Then I tell her, The way gas works, you could have killed everyone in this house. Is that what you want, to kill your own son in his sleep? 

And that’s when she stands up, a foot shorter than me. It’s morning and my daughter is waking up. I can hear her in the next room, walking around without socks on even though I tell her you can die that way. I like to be awake before she is. I’m glad she won’t have a man. Better not to be a mother. It leads to many suicides, I should tell her. My mother-in-law starts telling me this story about how she didn’t know she was pregnant. The night her son was born, she thought she was having gas. She was alone. But then my husband slipped out of her like a fish and everyone said, Kill it. That’s when she left for the island, the baby dragged behind her in a net. I call her a liar. I won’t forget the time she caught my husband washing a dish and called my own mother in Yilan to complain how I wasn’t doing my duty as a wife, how I made her son clean in his own home, how I threatened him with a back scratcher into rinsing that dish, and of course my mother believed this and called to tell me I would never grow skin, as if, as if my husband has ever washed a dish, as if he’s ever washed anything but his own dick, and even that not very well. 

The problem is this, I tell my daughter: Mothers grow up married to their sons, but we’re born knowing our daughters will leave us. Not because we want them to, but because we never had them, not really: They belong to the men we give them to. Men, they belong to everything, including themselves. This is what I say: We should separate all mothers and sons at birth and grow them in different dirts. Make the sons grow up alone. And mothers, we’ll be fine in our own rooms. Give us a window or two, a view, curtains that open into morning. All those times she almost killed herself, she didn’t know death isn’t like a man: It won’t just take you anytime you’re on your back. When she finally dies, I won’t pretend I’m not happy about it. But I’ll buy her a good burial, a full funeral. I’ll give her an urn with a name on it, which is more than her family would have done, her family who doesn’t even name their daughters. That woman answers to nothing. I can’t even pray her dead, because the gods don’t have her listed in any directory. When my husband dies, I’ll bury him beneath her. And I won’t mourn then either. You can have his bones and the moths they’ll become. I joke now with my daughter, not that it matters to her, since the only men she’ll marry are women, and two women together probably cancel out, become nameless. I point at the sky. The sun, I say, and laugh. When choosing a sun to see by, make sure it’s got no mother. The moon, that’s the mother. Her eye is always open to watch her sun. It’s not really a light, my daughter says about the moon, it’s a mirror. But mirrors, I tell her, are more dangerous than anything. A mirror’s only meaning is to multiply. To duplicate. To duty. The mirror doesn’t change what is shown to it, not unless someone shatters the glass, and that would be you, my daugh ter, the fist to my ribs, the one who will never become the moon. 

Stories About Growing Up on the Reservation

Posted on by Jo Lou

Morgan Talty’s The Night of the Living Rez is a searching and honest collection of short stories following a young Penobscot character named David and his coming of age on the rez, where community, family, and tradition are as fraught with colonial entanglement as they are forces for healing. 

With hyperreal and welcoming prose, Talty examines questions like how Natives heal from ongoing colonization, Native invisibility and family dysfunction—but what I loved most about this collection was the way it renders what it feels like to look for your place in the world and not know what it is, or how to find it. To feel like there might be no place, in fact, or at least not one that feels exactly right. 

In each story, I felt like I was interrogating the night with Talty’s characters, both running from and towards myself. Both surprisingly and inevitably, The Night of the Living Rez is where I found I could best meditate on the struggles Natives face today; this is because Talty writes his characters from a truly honest place.

Honesty is important to Talty, and in the following conversation, we discuss the power of honest stories to inspire transformation, from problematic medicine men to creating accurate representation of who Indigenous people are today. 

Editor’s note: Click here to watch the video component of the conversation between Chelsea T. Hicks and Morgan Talty about their short story collections A Calm and Normal Heart and Night of the Living Rez.

Chelsea Tayrien Hicks: I was delighted to find commonalities in our stories, like the way we both included notes on spelling in our respective languages, and we both also dramatized filmmakers who come in wanting to depict the culture for their own profit. I wanted to ask you about your own intentions in engaging these two areas, both the language and the attraction outsiders have to wanting to tell Native stories. Was there anything you were hoping to address, and what were you hoping to do with these inclusions? 

Morgan Talty: I also was delighted to see that! It was assuring in a strange way, like these motifs are, on a broader scale, recurring in real life and have something to say when we use them in our own work.

For me, tribal communities are dealing with internalized colonization, and we’ve moved away from that ‘us’ to ‘me’ mentality.

I was deeply interested in these characters and their emotions, and getting close to them allowed me to tease out ideas about representation and even “being.” Not necessarily what it “means to be Indian,” but what it means to be a human being who just so happens to be Native and thus the colonial history that is part of their chemical make-up. I think it would be irresponsible for me not to explore those types of intentions around language, trauma, legacy, inheritance, and so on. I will admit—there are writers out there who can do it better, but still—I felt a deep responsibility to illuminate these ideas. 

CTH: In “Half-Life,” I was fascinated with David’s growing sense of tension between personal responsibility and social pressure. I thought his transforming question about his using [of drugs] was a brilliant way to move him toward a breakthrough. He goes from asking How did we get here? to How did I get here? And how do I get out? His we-to-I reversal reminded me of this saying I’ve seen on Native beading, something like “I to we, me to us.” That saying is meant to promote the concept of decoloniality, but community-mindedness can also have a shadow side. I felt that the judgment and self-righteousness in the community contributed to David’s addiction as much as his own trauma and internal process. Did you think about shadow aspects of community as you wrote at all, and were you hoping to show some of the challenges of tight knit community life? 

MT: Absolutely, and I’m super happy to hear you saw this. For me, tribal communities are dealing with internalized colonization, and we’ve moved away from that “us” to “me” mentality. I’m speaking super generally here, but I feel like most tribes valued the collective over individuality—that, to me, is a very Western idea, even when we consider the great thinkers that shaped the West’s mind. I don’t have to tell you this, but the government’s use of colonial tools like blood quantum, for example, are sinister, and have caused so many contemporary problems, especially adding more friction between this “I” and “we” dichotomy. I feel like my drawing attention to this was important. Dee ultimately says something like, “How do we get out of here?” and maybe the question should actually be:  “How do we come back together?”  

CTH: One topic I desperately want to write about is expressions of Native masculinity—whether problematic, transforming, or healing—but I feel that I’m not the one to do so because I’m not a Native man. All through reading these stories, I was closely thinking about the different ways your characters embody ways of being a Native man. Frick, who I would call a problematic medicine man, has this line in the title story where he’s drinking and he “…had that man-stare looking down on a woman…” and Fellis treats his mom horribly, which makes David angry but he doesn’t really know what to do.

Do you have thoughts on Native masculinity, how it is transforming or not? And what do you think Native men like David did or are doing to stop cycles of abuse? 

We think about the tribes whose councils were all women, but when white men couldn’t get what they wanted, they introduced ideas of paternalism and patriarchy that completely reversed the roles.

MT: To talk about this, I have to bring up the fact that it was mostly women who raised me: my mom, my sister, my aunts. Men were there, sure, but I never really gravitated toward them. As a boy, I had a deep suspicion about men. How could I not? Having been so close to women growing up, I was able to see—and feel somewhat—the pain they experienced at the hands of men, physically and emotionally. To me, Native masculinity is a product of western masculinity—that internalized colonization. We think about the tribes whose councils were all women, but when white men couldn’t get what they wanted, they introduced ideas of paternalism and patriarchy that completely reversed the roles. Today, I feel like we’re still somewhat in that place: where Native men have taken on that patriarchal view. But then, as you ask, what do we do to stop this cycle of abuse? I feel like it has a lot to do with reclaiming not some specific gender roles, but reinventing what it means to live outside the boundary that colonialism has created, that boundary over which runs rampant the violence enacted against Native women. Men—including myself—need to be better, need to do better. 

CTH: You dramatize racism in a rez border town, from the bank that doesn’t recognize David’s tribal ID to the newspaper that maligns the rez teenagers by making the white man who harasses them into a seeming victim in a crime. For me, this brought up the fact that Native issues are either not reported on by the popular media, or these same issues are misrepresented. Would you say a bit on how you think about representation in literature, and if it can make a difference in real life issues? 

MT: I definitely think it can make a difference. I think it’s our hope that government officials or people in positions of power read, and if that hope is true, then we are exposing them to stories they may not necessarily know about, stories concerning Native issues. I feel like every President and governmental personnel should be required to read diverse literature. I’m serious! I feel like even in law programs, there has been much more emphasis placed on reading literature, which undoubtedly shapes those readers.  

CTH: We both wrote stories that engage guilt, but I was struck with the searing way you showed jealousy and denial. Fellis hates Meekew for going to college and acting white, while David’s mom can’t accept reality and both enables Frick’s abuse and neglects David, also contributing to Bedogi’s death. You depicted denial so clearly in the way she misremembers her own actions and misplaces her guilt onto David. What, in your opinion, makes for the most honest story? And do you think David achieves the honest telling he set out to? 

MT: My hope is that David does achieve that honesty! It’s certainly something I wanted to do. To me, the writing that is best able to capture that feeling of honesty is the type of writing that dares to reveal its characters’ horrible traits, and not for any shock factors. I mean, sure, from a craft point of view this seems obvious, right? Making sure our characters are flawed. But I feel like it goes beyond this simple craft element and has a lot more to do with the writer really trying to get at the heart of that flaw—again, going beyond an attempt to create a shock factor. Honest writing, to me, is writing that dares to explore the dangerous for the sake of bettering ourselves. 

CTH: There’s this beautiful line from “In a Field of Stray Caterpillars” describing Fellis’s eyes as:

“… droopy and soft yet sharply focused, as if the electrical currents searing across his brain had awoken something, something that had rested for far too long and was now awake with a dedication to look through Fellis’s eyes and relay to the brain everything as pure sparkle and gold, even if what it saw was only a cold waiting room with bland white walls and old magazines…”

You write a spectacular long sentence, and I have to tell you I am a passionate fan of this form. Do you have a particular love for the long sentence? I’d love to hear some of your thoughts, in terms of what they can do, and of course any sentence-crafting literary influences. 

MT: Long sentences are just fantastic. They’re so hard to write, but they’re so rewarding. Like, when I draft a long sentence, it’s so much fun going back through it and making sure all the details are ordered in just the right way, and making sure the sentence should even be a long sentence. I feel like long sentences somehow break rules—when reading a long sentence, I almost always feel like time no longer exists, like all that there is is right there on the page, and nothing more. I mean, this is true for shorter sentences too, but the long sentence, when it’s right, has the authority to command your attention and is basically saying, “This is important.” 

A Post-MeToo Novel About the False Promise of Female Empowerment

Posted on by Jo Lou

The unnamed narrator of NSFW begins her story by telling us she’s in a toxic relationship with the city of Los Angeles. She hates it; she loves it; she never wants to leave. This opening confession sets the scene for a riveting workplace drama in which the narrator attempts to climb Hollywood’s unforgiving ranks at a well-known television network. A fresh college graduate, she initially holds tight to the feminist ideals her mother instilled in her from a young age. But as rumors of sexual misconduct begin to swirl, the narrator realizes that maintaining those boundaries may not be as easy as she once thought. When her trust is broken and familial loyalties are tested, the narrator will be forced to redefine her understanding of success and decide once and for all what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of empowerment.

Throughout NSFW’s incisive and painfully resonant narrative, Isabel Kaplan raises crucial questions about the nature of complicity and what we are willing to do—or overlook—to get ahead. It’s also an unexpectedly funny book, given the subject matter, and features frustrating, complex, and profoundly human characters who’ll crack you up one moment and make you want to hurl the book across the room the next.

I spoke with Kaplan over Zoom about the trap of toxic relationships, the suffusive anonymity of temp work, and the slippery definition of empowerment in the era of #MeToo.

Abigail Oswald: There are a few references that ground the early pages of NSFW in late 2012—notably before the fall of men like Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes. What led you to set the story in that timeframe, and how did the #MeToo timeline factor in?

Isabel Kaplan: I started writing it in early 2017, and at that point it seemed to me that Trump’s election was a fundamental shift, in the sense that faith in institutions, and the ability to make change from within flawed institutions—that faith was shattered. I started questioning institutions, and also my own complicity in systems that I had thought I was fighting. #MeToo broke as I was writing the book, and I finished it, you know, “after” #MeToo, in whatever we’re calling it—the post-#MeToo era. 

I worked as a TV assistant in those years, so those were years I knew well. Broadcast networks had such dominance over the market, and this was a moment when streamers were encroaching. The idea of what is a broadcast network? An old, creaky institution? Is this the Titanic, and we’re all looking for big, exciting dramas in the middle of a collapsing system? Or is there something that can be changed and rejuvenated? And to me, that felt like a good parallel to the idea of other institutions and larger systems and longevity. And whether things can be changed, or if broken-down institutions need to just be destroyed.

AO: One of the overarching themes of NSFW is the choice (or lack thereof) to stay in negative situations. This applies not just to the narrator’s workplace, but also her codependent relationship with her mother, an unfulfilling romance. She even opens the book describing her love/hate relationship with the city of Los Angeles itself. Can you speak to why the narrator remains in these environments that increasingly take a toll as the narrative progresses?

IK: In the immediacy of living through any experience, no matter how complicated or messy it is, for lack of any other clear alternatives, it’s hard to extricate yourself.

I think of the frog in boiling water analogy—the idea that if you put a live frog in a pot of cold water, and then slowly raise the heat, it won’t jump out. I thought a lot about that, this idea that you can think that you’re doing okay, and you can think that things are better than they could be, and that you have it all under control, and that because things are better right now than they have been in the past, that means it’s okay. I wanted to play with, you know, how far can you push it until you crack? And then what? Once you crack, what are the alternatives? 

I was interested in exploring that claustrophobia and the way that claustrophobia descends, in that she’s not seeing alternative models of other ways to be. I think it’s really hard to hold onto the theory that you can have a fulfilling romantic relationship, for example, or a work life with boundaries, or an adult relationship with a parent who doesn’t recognize any boundaries. You can intellectually want that, and think that you are pursuing something intellectually, but in your actual lived experience, it is much harder to assert any of the needs you have. I wanted to really dig into the idea that we walk around doing things that are bad for us all the time, telling ourselves, “It’s not gonna hurt, I’m strong enough, I can do this.”

AO: There’s that bit about how she doesn’t like needles, but she thinks adults aren’t “supposed” to be afraid of needles, and then she starts sticking herself with needles as part of a weight-loss injection treatment. This idea that not only can you adjust to something that initially made you uncomfortable, but it can even become routine.

We walk around doing things that are bad for us all the time, telling ourselves, ‘It’s not gonna hurt, I’m strong enough, I can do this.’

IK: I think it’s an illusion of control. If she’s piercing herself with needles, she’s doing it, and she’s in control. There’s this illusion—delusion—that as long as you’re the one doing it and you’re the one making those decisions, that it’s not being done to you, you are not being oppressed or circumscribed in any way. She so deeply wants to believe that she’s claiming agency in every aspect of her life. That she’s pursuing a career, and it’s independent—even though she knows that she got her foot in the door with her mother’s help. That she’s pursuing a romantic relationship, and that’s what she’s doing as an adult—even though she doesn’t really like the guy. She’s pursuing agency, and she thinks that the injections, the workout classes, all of the things she deals with at work are in pursuit of empowerment. I really wanted to explore that idea: What does empowerment look like? Does that just trap us all? 

AO: The narrator’s mother is an interesting, complicated character. She’s a prominent feminist attorney who’s taught the narrator much about sex and consent, but sometimes in practice, her actions can be contradictory to her maternal guidance. She also arranges the narrator’s job at the network. Would you say the narrator’s mother and her influence ultimately help or hinder the narrator as she tries to make her own way in the world?

IK: What was interesting to me is that it’s both. There is no good or bad or who has the right values or the wrong values. She both helps the narrator a lot and hurts her a lot, and that’s what makes it so complicated. Because if anyone were ever only good or only bad, it would be really easy to navigate relationships. You would draw the line against anyone who’s terrible, and keep in your life anyone good. It’s really hard when the person who’s loved you so much and supported you so much is also causing a great deal of pain, and when that love feels deeply conditional in a lot of ways. 

I was interested in exploring the different generational approaches to gender and power. We’ve seen a lot written about that recently, especially as there are so many women of my mother’s generation who fought hard and made incredible progress. The question is, was it a circle? Did we just travel in a loop? And with the erosion of women’s reproductive rights, and everything horrible happening in America today, it’s increasingly clear what endures.

I wanted to show two different sides of the age and power and career-stage experience. On the one side you’ve got the narrator, who is young and in her first job, and on the other side is her mother, who’s been at this for decades and is facing different concerns about whether her best work is behind her, whether she’s still relevant, whether there’s a place for her. And I think both of those are two different ways of responding to a situation. [The mother] wants to stay in the game, and the narrator is trying to get in the game. So there’s the question of what you’re willing to do in order to play the game.

AO: There’s that moment where the narrator is recounting an overheard conversation, and she says the female network president’s sexist comments actually hit her harder than those of the male chairman. What’s at the core of the narrator’s feelings in that scene?

IK: When you’re raised to have such low expectations of men—like, the bar is on the floor for good behavior—it means that the barest courtesies read as acts of respect, and that’s really problematic. In that same scene, she hears her boss not make a sexist comment and is inclined to think, “Oh, what a good guy,” as opposed to, “That’s really the absolute least.” He didn’t call out anyone else for saying anything bad—he chuckled and said nothing—and that counts as good, because there are so many worse things he could have said.

I’ve always expected more of women. And the baseline behavior that I think of as decent—or did think, I’m trying to shift my mindset as well—for men is just so much lower, because so many of them were doing and saying such outrageous things, that just refraining from saying outrageous things comes to seem like “What a good boss! What a great boss, he hasn’t commented on your appearance! You’ve got a great boss!” 

There’s this illusion—delusion—that as long as you’re the one doing it, that it’s not being done to you, you are not being oppressed or circumscribed in any way.

And that’s terrible, and that allows a bunch of shitty men to just keep climbing up the ladder because none of them are doing things that are so bad that they seem worth calling out, and I think that’s the other problem. We’ve come up with a lexicon for discussing really bad, heinous things, but in this day and age I think it’s easier to address the issue of your boss grabbing your ass than it is to address the issue of your boss just making you a little uncomfortable all the time, but not in a specific way. And I think until we can figure out how to talk about those people, too, we’re not gonna have real change, because it’s not just the people who are actively groping you. 

I think #MeToo has affected the number of men who think they can forcibly kiss young employees in the office—I do think it’s changed that. But I think there are still plenty of male bosses who are making their subordinates feel very uncomfortable in sort of harder-to-identify ways that none of them are going to come forward about, because what would be the benefit? 

AO: There’s a running theme threaded throughout NSFW about the ways in which girls are often taught about sexual violence before sexual pleasure. The narrator notes that she understood what rape was before she even really understood sex; she also recalls taking self-defense as an elective in school. What sort of lasting effects does that have? Was your own experience of girlhood similar?

IK: The self-defense stuff is something I thought about a lot over the years, because I went to an all-girls school that prided itself on empowerment and feminism. Self-defense was the most popular P.E. class and you couldn’t take it until ninth grade, which seemed at the time like, “Oh, you’ve got to wait till you’re an older student.” And now, looking back, like, those are 14-year-olds. These are 14-year-old all-girls school girls, many of whom have not even been kissed. We did have the men who came in the padded suits, and we were videotaped every week. I found one of my self-defense DVDs and watched as I did this weird roleplay simulation of an attack in front of the parents. At the time I knew it was weird, but only now that I’m further out can I see just how wild that is, that all of the parents came to watch us be attacked, mock-attacked. It’s so strange. 

But at the same time, I don’t think it gave me any delusion of safety out on the street, you know, in dark corners and alleys. It didn’t lead me to take any other risks. I never felt safe. It did probably give me help dealing with an innocuous drunk person on the sidewalk who’s making sketchy comments, knowing what to do then. But I think what was easy about those situations is that it was always a “bad” guy, and it was always someone you didn’t care about hurting, because you were told to hurt them. You were told to throw them off you, and you were told not to worry about how much damage you caused, because they were your assailant.

I think there’s a false message being given that it’s easy if you know the moves and you know what to do, then you’ll do it, as opposed to acknowledging that, if it’s someone you know, you may not wanna heel palm them, or knee them in the groin, or grab and pull their balls, for fear of, you know, what’s gonna happen next? Is it gonna be way worse than whatever I’ve started? Or there’s a sense of, like, you don’t know how far this person is going to go, so it’d be easier to just not inflame the situation. In those classes, you’re supposed to attack right away. But in real life, you wouldn’t put your fist in someone’s eye socket right when they get a little too close to you, because then you’re the violent one. 

I think that was where the interest in that came from. It makes you hyper-aware of weird power dynamics in a way that’s not necessarily helpful. I don’t know that it was harmful, but I think if you tell girls that they’re empowered enough, they’ll think, “This is what empowerment looks like.” And it becomes much harder to untangle that really knotted ball of string where they realize, like, “This is not empowerment. I am acting exactly in the way that I was told to act within a specific set of expectations that I was told is what empowerment looks like.” And that’s just a different, kind of slightly less oppressive cage. But still a cage. 

AO: I thought it was interesting that we never learn the narrator’s name. It feels like her anonymity takes on an additional layer of meaning in a story like this—one that deals so much in rumors and whisper networks. It also speaks to the transience of temp work, which is how the narrator begins at the network—that perpetual hope that people will begin to learn who you are. Can you talk more about why you made that choice?

IK: The point you make about temp work is very, very apt. Temp and assisting, you’re not a whole person. The very definition of the job is you’re reaching out from the office of someone else, and your individual identity doesn’t matter. Any individuality or specificity to you gets subsumed and you only matter because of your boss. But also, you could be replaced immediately. It really affects the mindsets of people emerging from industry. You’re not encouraged to be a person. You’re somebody’s extra limb, and you’re supposed to be watching out for their every need, but nobody is making sure any of your needs are met. 

[Temping and assisting,] you’re not encouraged to be a person. You’re supposed to be watching out for their every need, but nobody is making sure any of your needs are met. 

I think that mirrored the experience that the narrator is having in so many different other spheres. Also, that’s not specific to her—that’s specific to anyone who has a boss and feels like less of a human. And I think the longer you do it, the more it seeps in. You can start off thinking, “I’m not gonna let my individual autonomy be compromised by this.” But if it’s what you’re doing day in, day out, it does. It becomes who you are, and I think your ability to see outside gets warped and distorted. 

Beyond that, I wanted to make it feel very intimate. I wanted to keep the reader inside her head, seeing it from the inside. The mother’s not named either—no one in the family is—and I think that gave it a sort of intimacy, hopefully. I wanted to explore who she is inside versus who she’s projecting, and who she’s trying to be, and the fact that she’s floating on different desks and so needs to be different people at any given moment, and therefore is constantly unprepared, because you can’t be. 

But we’ve designed all these institutions in a way where you’re supposed to be able to sit down and it’s, “Suddenly I’m this person today.” That’s what it means to temp, to just be someone else. And so much of what it means to temp is you’re not doing a great job—you definitionally cannot do a great job. You have no resources or knowledge that you’re coming in with, and the goal is to just not mess anything up. It limits how much you can do on your own, and you get seen differently just based on who you work for. Over the course of the book she climbs up, and she sees the difference in treatment, and I think it’s hard to navigate that without internalizing it and without taking it personally, even though it’s not personal at all. 

It sounds contradictory, but I wanted to write a funny book, and I wanted to write a funny book about sexual harassment, because I think that the line between what’s funny and what’s horrible can be fine, can be a very blurry line, and I think that humor is also a really great coping mechanism. And the fact that if you can turn something into a joke, can you make it not have power anymore? And how does that come back to bite you later? 

10 Novels and Memoirs With Recipes That You Can Cook Along To

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As a teenager, I loved to hole up in my room with my mother’s back issues of Gourmet Magazine and read through recipes I had no way of making: Florentine boar ragu! Spaghetti with ramps! Vietnamese spring rolls stuffed with bean thread noodles, wood ear mushrooms, grated carrot, and ground pork shoulder! (Ruth Reichl really believed in us.) At other times, I’d read through cookbooks as though they were novels, and this at a time when the majority still came with nothing but a paltry three-page insert of the most beautiful dishes, which were somehow never the recipes you actually wanted to cook. 

Thankfully recipes are no longer a niche interest; in the era of social media, it feels like we’re all constantly browsing through and sharing recipes. Even my friends who cannot, or by some perverse principle will not, cook themselves an egg will send me links to recipes with excited emoji faces. 

I’m hoping this means we can finally embrace novels and memoirs that include recipes. Doing so has historically been seen as a little bit hokey, the purview of “women’s lit” or cozy mysteries rather than literary fiction or books by men. This view misses the point. In books like Heartburn by Nora Ephron or Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, recipes are included as cultural artifacts. They tell the story in another form. I’d argue that this is actually a more exciting and more contemporary reading experience because it allows the readers to connect with the book beyond the written text in a sensory and tactile way. 

Below, ten books that include recipes from Stanley Tucci’s memoir to Lara William’s imagined bacchanal.

Novels

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron didn’t go to great lengths to hide the fact that her debut novel is a fictionalized account of her divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein, who had an affair while she was pregnant with their second son. Ephron’s stand-in, Rachel Samstat, shares many of Ephron’s qualities—her wit, her uncanny power of observation, and, perhaps most notably, her obsession with food and cooking. “I don’t think any day is worth living without thinking about what you’re going to eat next at all times,” Ephron famously quipped.  

For Rachel Samstat, food, love, and memory are all bound up together. She makes potatoes for every man she starts a relationship with—”I have made a lot of mistakes in falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them”—and the end of her relationship is just as productive on the gastronomic front: as Rachel’s marriage falls apart, she cooks.

Ephron included many of Rachel’s recipes, which lean towards comfort fare: there is a deep dish peach pie, buttery mashed potatoes, and bread pudding to feed a crowd. Ephron famously loved sharing recipes, and if doing so in a book was considered low-brow or silly, it’s hard to imagine she cared. 

Supper Club by Lara Williams

The protagonist of William’s debut novel is Roberta, a woman who’s internalized the societal expectation that woman should be small, quiet, and restrained in all their appetites. When Roberta meets a free-spirited artist named Stevie, they set out to reclaim their appetites by holding a supper club that quickly turns into something akin to a gorging, sweaty, drunken, bacchanal.

Food is one of Roberta’s most complicated desires. She has that kind of obsessive attention to food that often comes from starving (think of being around a slice of hot, melty pizza when you’re waiting for dinner) and so the recipes in Supper Club aren’t classically formatted but rather written as Roberta’s painstakingly detailed descriptions of how to make dishes like kimchi, sourdough, and spaghetti puttanesca. The lack of structure feels fitting for Roberta, who is trying to break free of any kind of established rules, but it’s also a nice reminder that recipes are rooted in the tradition of simply watching others cook. 

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

From the time she is little, Eva Thorvald has a “once-in-a-generation palate” and a startling culinary ambition; at ten years old, she’s growing hydroponic habaneros in her bedroom and selling them to local restaurants. She prefers vegan blueberry ice cream to birthday cake. Eva grows up to become a world-class chef, and Kitchens of the Great Midwest is her story, told through the eyes of her community, with accompanying recipes. 

Given Eva’s prodigious gastronomical talents, it’s initially surprising that the dishes are unfussy Midwestern fare, the kind you’d find in homemade church cookbook. (Which is where Stradal found them; he mined a 1984 cookbook released by the First Lutheran Church in Hunter, North Dakota for inspiration.) But as we’ve come to appreciate our national canon of semi-homemade recipes (especially during the pandemic), it also makes sense: Pat Prager’s peanut butter bars—a no-bake mix of chocolate, peanut butter, graham crackers, and suga—are kind of genius. 

Search by Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is both a critically acclaimed novelist and a James Beard Award-winner for feature writing with recipes, so it’s no wonder she decided to combine her two talents in Search. This warm, quirky novel is the ‘memoir’ of Dana Potowski, a restaurant critic and food writer who joins her church’s search committee for a new minister with the idea that she’ll chronical the process for a book (with recipes, course). Search feels like what might have happened if a food writer ended up in the writing room for Parks and Recreation; the oddball committee always offsets their searching with good meals, and the candidates for new minister at the progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California include both a microbrew master and a self-professed eco-warrior witch. The recipes are as eclectic as the committee, ranging from escarole salad with favas, mint, and pecorino to wet brisket. 

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

These days Southern food is treated with respect, if not a certain cult of veneration, but there was a time when dishes like skillet cornbread, buttermilk biscuits, and fried green tomatoes were dismissed as uninteresting, unrefined home cooking. One author who challenged this view was Fannie Flagg, who included these recipes and others in her 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Café. 

The novel is primarily the story of Idgie Threadgoode, the tomboy daughter of a well-known local family who falls in love with an older woman named Ruth. When Idgie saves Ruth from her abusive husband, the two create a home together at the Whistle Stop Café. It quickly becomes a haven for their fellow outcasts of early 20th-century Alabama. There is a sense in Flagg’s novel of food as emotional nourishment but also of regional cooking as empowerment; dishes like fried green tomatoes are a way the clients of the Whistle Stop can identify as part of their broader community, even if that community doesn’t always welcome them back.

Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune By Roselle Lim

When I lived in San Francisco, I did a lot of food shopping in Chinatown, where you could find markets that offered an unparalleled combination of freshness and price point. Take my husband’s favorite fish store, which looked more like a pet shop than a fishmonger. All the fish and a few crustacean were still alive, swimming in their tanks. You pointed to what you wanted and it was killed, cleaned, and packaged on the spot. Roselle Lim brings this neighborhood, and its dedication to good food, to the forefront of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune. 

The novel begins when Natalie returns home to San Francisco to deal with her estranged mother’s death. She learns that she’s inherited her grandmother’s long-abandoned restaurant in Chinatown and, being a chef, she decides to revive the space, though in its current shape it’s little more than a dusty, dirty relic tying her to a past. Things get a semi-magical turn when a neighborhood fortuneteller tells her she must cook three recipes from her grandmother’s cookbook for her struggling neighbors if the restaurant will succeed.  

Lim’s book is light reading, but she takes the food seriously. When, for example, Natalie makes drunken chicken to help cure her neighbor’s ailing marriage, you get every detail of the process, from the scent and texture of rubbing spices into the chicken to shredding bright ribbons of cabbage and lettuce for slaw. 

Memoirs

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

British writer Dolly Alderton’s memoir touches on a lot of themes with intelligence and humor: growing up, female friendship, loss, and the grit you need to get through your twenties. (See also: the problem with using sex and partying as a means to find yourself.) However, her most serious point might be the importance of drunk food. 

For example, when Dolly and her friend AJ come home from the club where they’ve been kicked out for being too drunk, she makes a Got Kicked Out of the Club Sandwich, which has a twee name but—as those of us who has passed through our twenties understand—may have literally saved her life. She makes a hangover mac n’ cheese that’s an ode to cheese (or cheeses, she uses four). I love that this book won the National Book Award in the U.K., where it was also a bestseller, because Alderton is a wonderful writer who challenges the idea that young women who tell their story are navel-gazing or self-indulgent, and also because we’re finally giving drunk food the acclaim it deserves.  

My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss

If it seems obvious now that we’d be interested in following a young woman as she cooks recipes cut out of the newspaper, then one person we have to thank is Luisa Weiss. Weiss began her blog, the Wednesday Chef, in 2005, with the idea that she would chronical the dishes she was cooking for herself in her tiny New York City apartment. This seemingly simple project—and the proliferation of others like it—helped normalize the idea that young women would want to cook for themselves out of personal interest, desire, and hunger.   

My Berlin Kitchen is Weiss’s memoir; born in West Berlin to an American father and Italian mother, she grew up splitting her time between Berlin and Boston after her parents divorced. The lingering sense of cultural dislocation hounded her throughout college in the States, a year abroad in Paris, and publishing jobs in New York City. When she finally settled in Berlin, it was with a sense of coming home. Her cultural multiplicity is our gain on the culinary front. My Berlin Kitchen includes recipes from Weiss’ various homes, including braised chicken from New York and omelette confiture from Paris, but the best recipes are the classic German dishes like Pflaumenmus, a tender, yeasted plum cake. It makes you wish Weiss would write a book of Classic German Baking. Luckily, she did.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg

Like Weiss, Molly Wizenberg started her blog Orangette in 2004 as a way to chronical her life through the lens of home cooking. Her atmospheric writing style and frankly uncanny ability to cook exactly what you want to eat won her a James Beard Award for best individual food blog in 2015.  

Though Orangette is no longer live, Wizenberg runs two restaurants (Delancey and Essex, both in Seattle) and has written two memoirs. Her first, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, focuses on her early life, including how the trauma of losing her father to cancer led her off the path of academia and into the world of home cooking and writing. The recipes she includes are representative of her style, food that is somehow both homey and refined, like what a chef might cook on a rainy weekend morning; banana bread with chocolate and crystalized Ginger, or meatballs with pine nuts, cilantro, and golden raisins.

Taste by Stanley Tucci

In the first phase of the lockdown, Stanley Tucci became famous for mixing a negroni in his living room. Sure, we were hard up for amusement, but the pleasure he took in crafting a perfect drink radiated through his wife’s phone—she was filming him in their living room—and established him as a man who loves food. Tucci’s recent memoir, Taste, tells the story of his life through food, starting with his childhood in Westchester, where his Italian grandmother made and bottled her own tomato sauce, and through his film career, including food-focused films such as Julie and Julia with Meryl Streep and Big Night (which, coincidentally, is also a novel that pairs each chapter with a recipe.)

Tucci is a published cookbook author, so all the recipes in his memoir actually work, but, with no offense to his British wife’s roast potatoes, the most exciting inclusions are all Italian, from a light spaghetti con zucchini alla nerano from the Amalfi coast to a hearty, cheesy baked pasta called pizzoccherie from Lombardy.

This Apple Watch Is Clearly the Boss of Me

Posted on by Alex Juarez

Solo

My Apple Watch is my conductor, 
tells me to stand when I need standing, 
reminds me to breathe when I forget,  

vibrates when it’s time to turn 
on Main Street, my hands on the wheel. 
I pass Osprey nests in the Audubon. 
  
My Apple Watch is a grade-A listener, 
and I sing to it as I drive through Westport.
I am my Apple Watch’s eyes, describing 

all that I see: stone walls crumbling, 
a farmer on his smartphone, three cows 
next to a green-black barn, 

a dahlia nursery, $5 to cut your own poms. 
My Watch chirps to me. My package 
has been delivered.

While we hike 
to the graffitied World War II Lookout Towers, 
My Apple Watch counts my steps, 

and I teach it how to find the Honeysuckle’s 
sweet dew drop, how to smash a Rosehip 
to collect the seeds for tea. 

My package is a body pillow. 
We stop at an ice cream shack,
and I get two scoops of Blackberry, 

both for me. 
My Apple Watch has 5 bars,
but somebody is yet to call.

Perennials

The winter flattened 
our flowers, leaving 
proud stalks as straws 
for Earth to suck. 
They always come back. 
Our winter gardens, 
the defrosting of frozen leaves 
like TV dinners. 
Such loyal followers, 
pushing with alacrity 
the words love me 
I’m back 
as a white crocus 
this time, like a fragile 
china cup sticky 
and filled with honey, 
though last year I thought 
you were what: a rock, 
a rose, a dewy lover 
who woke with April sun. 
Inveterate habit, 
this reincarnation, 
these perennials 
popping up through the snow. 
Don’t they know 
we abandoned them once?

8 Novels About Dealing With Difficult Neighbors

Posted on by Jo Lou

What, if any, responsibility do we have to the people who live near us? Especially the ones we don’t particularly like, those who may have insulted or ignored us, trapped us in kitchens and cocktail parties with overreaching inquiries, indulged their petty prejudices at our expense, or implicated us in their close-knit cruelties and the psychopathologies of their everyday lives. Does proximity imply duty? After all, we generally don’t get to choose our neighbors any more than we get to select our family members. This is the question I wanted to explore in my novel A Gracious Neighbor.  

The protagonist of A Gracious Neighbor, Martha Hale, is an affable wife and mother who lives in an affluent neighborhood of well-tended lawns and high expectations. Her clumsiness at penetrating the social circles around her has made her lonely, and so she’s thrilled when the glamorous Minnie Foster, a former high school classmate, moves in next door. However, Martha’s determination to pick up where they left off becomes a preoccupation with Minnie’s life, and she undertakes a series of well-intentioned but perilous measures to save her would-be friend’s reputation.

Fred Rogers, the beloved sweater-wearing icon of the 1968-2001 children’s television series “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” once said, “Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered, as a matter of course, just one kind word to another person.” It’s a beautiful idea that I hope everyone adopts. But because most of us don’t live in such utopias, I think we’re fascinated by stories that remind us of home: where people often behave badly, where the grass isn’t actually greener on the other side of the fence, and where we don’t really know what’s going on behind our neighbors’ doors.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Set in the author’s real hometown of Shaker Heights, Cleveland, a carefully planned idyll, Little Fires Everywhere explores how a seemingly well-behaved “progressive” community reacts when a bohemian outsider, Mia Warren, and her daughter, Pearl, move into a rental house owned by the Richardsons. The latter are the quintessential Shaker Heights family. Elena and her husband have money, successful careers, a lovely home, and four children they assume will grow up to lead equally flourishing lives. The youngest, Izzy, however, is hell-bent on destruction. “Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.” When the Richardsons’ and Warrens’ lives begin to intertwine, they also begin to self-destruct. Thanks to Izzy, the Richardsons’ house is literally burning down as the story opens, but there are plenty of other themes catching fire throughout the novel: racism, motherhood, wealth disparity, and friendship. The narrative itself is a slow burn, but the characters are complex, well-developed, flawed, and realistic.

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

I devoured this gorgeous book the week it was released, and had such a desperate hangover when it ended that I couldn’t read anything else for a fortnight afterward. Along with their new wives, Brian Stanhope and Francis Gleeson, two rookie Bronx cops, move into neighboring homes in a nearby town. Two of their children, Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born the same year, become best friends, and then more than that. But on the cusp of teenagerhood, a tragic event forces the Stanhopes out of their home, and Kate and Peter out of each other’s lives. The narrative follows the two as they reunite, struggling to put the traumatic past behind them as they lean into the headwinds of the future.

Not only is Keane’s writing sublime, but she never succumbs to sentimentality. Her characters are flawed, nuanced, and relatable even at their worst. She invites us to look carefully around the low-lit corners of these families’ homes and hearts, never passing judgment, but allowing us to decide for ourselves who to root for. In the end, I rooted for them all.

Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

I was hooked on page one by the description of the aptly-named Wilde family: Gertie, a living Barbie doll with uncool “mom-cleavage,” hot-tempered Arlo who smokes Parliaments on the front porch, and their weird kids, Julia and Larry, who cuss and fart in public. When they move into a fixer-upper on uptight, tight-knit Maple Street in Long Island, their presence begins to erode their neighbors’ fragile illusions of safety and peace in a newly unstable world. A sinkhole—both actual and metaphorical—opens up in a park during a neighborhood party that the Wildes weren’t invited to but attended anyway. This “hungry” cavern consumes a child, and with her goes the civility that had been a feature of the enclave. Suddenly, the street is awash in malicious, infectious gossip that turns neighbors against one another and propels the narrative through mob mentality, social pressure, climate crises, and the perils of American suburbia to its dramatic conclusion.

This literary thriller was riveting and unsettling in the best possible way, and I love that, like me, Langan chose to set her story in her own neighborhood. To do so is risky, because some residents of any real community would be offended by anything less than a best places to live ranking in a magazine. (One outraged reviewer said, “I am shocked by the heinous treatment this author gave to the town.”) Sorry, neighbors: writing about a profoundly familiar place is a great way to excavate the deepest truths about the imaginary people who live there.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Set during a single 24-hour period in another picture-perfect and very real neighborhood, this time New Canaan, Connecticut. The area was highly desirable during the ’70s; a modernist hotspot made famous by the so-called Harvard Five, a group of architects who moved there in the 1940s and filled it with sleek, Bauhaus-inspired houses. The town is still one of the most affluent communities in the U.S. (it’s currently ranked 88th in the nation with the highest median family income). But as is true in so many wealthy areas, the happiness of its population seems inversely proportional to its opulence, and the characters in The Ice Storm are no exception.

It’s a stultifying Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, the Watergate scandal is on the color set every night, the Vietnam war is winding down, and the sexual revolution is heating up. The Hood family is simmering in individual pots of self-loathing and self-destruction: depressed dad Ben is having an affair with a neighbor, mom Elena is emotionally withdrawn, daughter Wendy has discovered the power and pleasure of drugs and sex, and son Paul hides from the world within the pages of his comic books. By the time the titular ice storm arrives, the characters are well into their familial meltdown. The writing is beautiful (if excessive), and Moody’s nihilistic view of a certain slice of American suburban life, people’s obsession with sex and status, and the breakdown of the nuclear family (and relationships in general) is searing.

The Husbands by Chandler Baker

A recent study on housework trends from the University of Michigan (the Panel Study on Income Dynamics) revealed that husbands create an extra seven hours per week of housework for wives, but wives save husbands from approximately an hour of the same. Not so in the too-good-to-be-true neighborhood, Dynasty Ranch, where the women wear the pants and their husbands wash and iron them.

Nora Spangler lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, Hayden and young daughter, Liv. Pregnant and exhausted, Nora struggles to balance her successful legal career and possible offer of partnership with domestic duties, time with her child, friendships, and whatever self-care she can squeeze in. When she and Hayden decide to look for a larger home, they discover the exclusive and intriguing Dynasty Ranch. Just how did these wives train their husbands to be so helpful and submissive? That’s the fun part. If you’ve read Ira Levin’s 1972 satire, The Stepford Wives, you’ll have an idea. The reality that informs this feminist and domestic thriller is sobering but Baker uses it to great effect imagining what it would take for women like her overworked and exhausted protagonist, Nora, to actually have it all.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

New parents Anne and Marco are invited to a small dinner party at the home of their next-door neighbors, Cynthia and Graham—but their baby is not. When their sitter cancels at the last minute, Marco persuades Anne to take the baby monitor and leave six-month-old Cora asleep in her crib, promising to check on her regularly. When they arrive home at one in the morning, the door is open and the infant is missing. Although the identity of the kidnapper isn’t well concealed, this is a compelling whodunit, and a perfect exemplar of the adage that nobody really knows what goes on behind closed doors.

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

It isn’t just the setting of this book that makes it relevant to a book list about neighborhoods; it’s that the neighborhood itself—using a first-person plural POV—is the narrator. Like the disembodied group of boys narrating Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, this collective voice lends a strong, reliable perspective to a story in which one set of neighbors is pitted against another in a battle over a dying tree and a secret romance, racism and class differences.

Widowed Valerie Alston-Holt, a professor of ecology, and her bi-racial, musically-gifted son, Xavier, are living a tentative happily-ever-after in picturesque Oak Knoll, an allegedly close-knit district in North Carolina, until Brad Whitman and his wife, Julia, and their two daughters, Juniper and Lily, move in next door. Brad fells all the oak trees on his lot to build an oversized house and swimming pool, damaging the root system of the majestic, beloved tree in Valerie’s yard. Things get even more complicated when Xavier and Juniper fall in love. This novel beautifully explores  the challenges of living side-by-side when, for so many reasons, neighbors can’t see eye-to-eye.

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy

Set in Loughborough Junction in South London, The Room of Lost Things tells the story of an aging dry cleaner named Robert and Akeel, the ambitious young man who plans to take over the business from him, as they spend a year working together to ensure the handover goes smoothly. There’s a large cast of secondary characters, most of them Robert’s customers, representing the diverse and chaotic character of London. The narrative flows gently and poetically along, a moving paean to both the setting and to the countless people that we come into contact with on a regular basis but don’t really know.

Queer Love Poems for Wherever Your Heart Is

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Love is love… is love. But that doesn’t mean “love” means or feels the same every time you experience it. Celebrating LGBTQIA+ love means acknowledging all the different types of feelings we have, whether it’s romantic love for a partner, love for our community, love for ourselves or even love for a specific place. These poems celebrate queer love, whether that love is sweet, bittersweet or somewhere in between. 

When You’re Feeling Wildly, Exuberantly in Love, Read Andrea Gibson’s Love Poem.

Love Poem contains all the agony and ecstasy of early love. From Gibson’s epically romantic declaration, “You are the moon when it blooms for the very first time” to their brutally honest line, “It’s true when we argue you make me wanna rip off my nose, bone and all,” this poem celebrates both the highs and lows of a giddy new love affair. 

When You’re Feeling Grateful for Your Lover, Read June Jordan’s Poem for My Love.

This poem tells the sweet story of two lovers, safe inside and marveling at their relationship:

I am amazed by peace

It is this possibility of you

asleep

and breathing in the quiet air

Poem for My Love showcases the gentler and calmer side of love; the poet is at once thankful for and in awe of their romantic relationship. 

When You’re in Love Even as the World Collapses Around You, Read Mark Doty’s Turtle, Swan.

Telling the story of two men in love, Turtle, Swan describes the fear of aloneness and isolation, using the example of being unable to find your partner in a darkened movie theater:

I saw straight couples everywhere,
no single silhouette who might be you…

By the time the previews ended
I was nearly in tears— then realized
the head of one-half the couple in the first row

was only your leather jacket propped in the seat
that would be mine. 

The poem, which was published in the late 1980s, also touches on the grim reality of the AIDS epidemic, ending in the urgent entreaty, “I do not want you ever to die.”

When You’re Painfully in Love, Read Carol Ann Duffy’s You.

As the narrator states, “Falling in love / is glamorous hell.” This poem is for those times when, try as though you might, you cannot get that particular someone out of your mind – and out of your heart. The narrator opens the poem by lamenting, “Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.” You shows that love can be unstoppable and beyond our control.
                                                       

When You’re in Love from Afar, Read Donika Kelly’s Love Poem: Mermaid.

A more mysterious kind of love emerges in this poem, in which the narrator is a siren seated upon a rock, admiring the mermaid on a ship’s mast. She tells her beloved, “I have claimed this rock, / which is also your heart,” and in a true act of love, bears witness to the mermaid’s experience:

I am a witness 
to the sea and the sun, to your body 

lashed to the mast.

This surreal poem shows that love can sometimes transcend our very reality.

When You’re in Hot, Sexy Love, Read Natalie Diaz’s Waist and Sway.

This erotic poem celebrates the beauty of the female form; from “The curve and curve of her shoulders” to “hips that in the early night / to light lit up,” the narrator holds nothing back in extolling her lover’s virtues. Wait and Sway dives deep into the hot July night these lovers spend together, with the narrator making the beautifully sensual revelation, “[T]he salt of her burned not long on my tongue, / but like stars.”

When You’re Feeling Love for Yourself, Read Nikki Giovanni’s Walking Down Park.

In this poem, the subject is not altogether romantic love, but the love people have for themselves, which is especially important for queer and BIPOC individuals. The narrator reminds readers of the important lesson:

it’s so easy to be free
you start by loving yourself   
then those who look like you   
all else will come
naturally

When You’re in Love in New York City, Read Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You.

Having a Coke with You is one of the most popular queer love poems, and for good reason. The narrator knows that the smaller, simpler things – such as sharing a Coke – are just as romantic, if not more romantic, than the big events and trips to scenic locations. 

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time

Sharing an experience (big or small) with a loved one is celebrated in this sweet love poem. 

When You’re in Love with New York City, Read Alex Dimitrov’s Having a Diet Coke with You.

Echoing Having a Coke with You, this poem provides a modern, funny and sincere reimagining of the classic poem. The narrator admires the city while also acknowledging his own romantic mishaps (“If you look up / the billboards are sexy and American, / letting you forget all the cruel things / you’ve said to your boyfriends”):

I’ll never get over the fact
that the buildings all light up at night,
and the night comes every night
and without regret we let it go.

Just as when you’re in love with a person, being in love with a place – especially one as alluring as New York City – will keep your heart constantly blooming, again and again

When You’ve Stopped Being Afraid of Love, Read Timothy Liu’s The Lovers.

This short but powerful poem illuminates the fearfulness the narrator has about their romantic future during a suspenseful tarot card reading. 

I was always afraid

of the next card

the psychic would turn

over for us—

In the end, the narrator realizes that their romantic relationship contains “every card in the deck”—or rather, it contains the multitudes of experiences and feelings that exist now that they’re found true love.