An Anthology That Gives Voice to the Realities of Reproductive Freedom and Abortion

Posted on by Jo Lou

Shelly Oria’s new collection, I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, is the latest in a string of new anthologies that reclaim and challenge the conversation surrounding reproduction. The collection deals with the choice of whether or not to have children, and also explores surrogacy, trans pregnancy, a medical establishment rooted in misogyny and racism, and much more. It’s the kind of book we need badly right now, as it shows us the full richness and complexity of such stories. And of course it comes at a time when lawmakers continue to strip away freedoms surrounding reproduction.

In this book, writers of various backgrounds, sexualities, and genres come together to ask big questions, such as “In a country marked by massive individual debt, inequality, and a profound lack of support and safety nets for women, what does ‘choice’ actually mean?” The collection doesn’t center around abortion, but at a time when the Supreme Court is leaning towards striking down Roe v. Wade, it reminds us that the choice to be pregnant is a personal one. 

Sarah Gerard writes in one of the last pieces of the book: “I don’t need to tell you what happens to women who are denied the right to safe abortion, or what happens to their children.” But unfortunately our country does need a reminder, it seems. Timely, important, and rich in nuance, this anthology is a valuable contribution, one that gives voice to the realities of reproduction, and its subtleties, pains, and joys. 

Emily Heiden: The collection features the work of Black writers, queer writers, and other traditionally marginalized voices. Was this a primary aim of the book, to help right the wrong of the historical silencing of such writers’ reproductive stories?

In this new landscape where people often have to travel to another state for an abortion, who bears the brunt? We know that’s lower income folx [and people of color]. 

Shelly Oria: It was what I knew about this book before I knew anything else—that the majority of voices featured would be from marginalized groups. But to get a bit more specific: as you point out, historically, when it comes to reproductive freedom, POC and queer people and other traditionally marginalized voices were silenced. That kind of silencing is of course tied to deeper questions about whose humanity our culture recognizes. And in the case of people living with disabilities, they were often discouraged from procreating: Cade Leebron’s essay in the book addresses that briefly, and Riva Lehrer’s unpacks a traumatic experience she suffered in this context as a teenager. And yet it’s not just about an awareness of the past, or about the moral and artistic commitment to take corrective action when possible. The need to spotlight all these voices is also entirely grounded in the here-and-now: in this new landscape where people often have to travel to another state for an abortion, miss days of work, figure out childcare for that time if they’re parents—who bears the brunt? We know that’s lower income folx. And we know this type of burden always falls disproportionately on POC. 

I’m answering in this sort of analytical way, but this is also very personal to me. As a queer woman, as a person who immigrated to this country in her 20s, as a writer writing in her second language—and of course as a thinking-feeling-reading-listening human in this moment in time, in this country—I wouldn’t buy or read an anthology that wasn’t radically inclusive and loudly intersectional. So certainly I wouldn’t make one any other way. 

EH: In the book’s introduction, you write that:

“One could put together a powerful book—ten powerful books—filled with stories of abortion or the lack of access to one in today’s America. But I felt drawn to a broader approach and invited writers and artists to respond to any aspect of reproductive freedom with which they connected…”

Given the fact that Roe could potentially be reversed by SCOTUS in June, can you talk about what specifically drew you to a broader approach?

SO: I’ll say first that I think we need way more art that responds to our reproductive freedom crisis, and specifically more books on this topic. Some of these books are likely to choose that more specific focus you mention, and as a reader that thought is exciting to me. But as an editor, I wanted to do something else: I wanted this book to do its tiny part to shape the kind of cultural conversation I’m wishing for, one in which as a society, we recognize how insidious gender-based violence is, and start seeing the various manifestations of that violence as interlinked. If we think, for instance, of sexual harassment and assault against womxn as entirely distinct from the attempts to restrict and outlaw abortion, and of both those issues as distinct from the problem of domestic violence, or even that of pay disparity, then, well, I believe we’re ultimately failing. When we keep the scope of our conversation too narrow, we’re failing to imagine a true alternative to a reality in which the subjugation of womxn and their bodies is the norm. At best, we’re improving whatever symptom we’re focused on in that particular cultural moment. And that’s not nothing. But I want more. I think we should all want more. 

EH: As someone interested in exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centers for the insidious work they do, as I read your story “We Bled All Winter,” I found myself wondering about in particular about the section in which the narrator is a volunteer trained to connect with women. Is this passage rooted in research? I’m genuinely curious. The Pregnancy Verification Form–is that something you saw at such a center, or read about? I unwittingly visited a CPC in Northern Virginia years ago, so am versed firsthand in some of their practices, but not all.

Art in general and books in particular are being called to meet impossible challenges at this moment in time when the world is such a dumpster fire.

SO: CPCs are terrifying, aren’t they? I had nightmares when I was writing that section of the story. I do this to myself sometimes—write from the POV of someone I find scary or creepy, or in this case, someone who’s part of a system that’s scary and creepy. And the experience of embodying that consciousness for a time can be pretty intense. Though really what surprised me about “We Bled All Winter” is that all three narrators turned out to be a lot more well-meaning than I initially assumed or intended for them to be. In some ways I think the piece ended up being this tale about the inevitable tragedy of being human.

EH: In Carrie Bornstein’s essay “Steel Womb,” she writes:

“Sure, he was right, but pregnancy…pregnancy also meant poking the elbow of a fetus inside only to feel it jab right back at me as if to say hello. It meant unlimited milkshakes, second dinner, and cute maternity clothes with the greatest accessory ever sitting right there at my midsection.”

These lines paint pregnancy in a more positive light than many of the others in the book. In a time of climate change, pandemic, student debt, and so on, it’s understandable that reproduction would likewise be fraught. Is it also perhaps important to hear from those who delight in pregnancy—yet who, too, are thought not to know what’s best for them?

SO: I think it is. Surrogacy is one of those polarizing topics; people who otherwise agree on so much might have profoundly different takes on this issue. I don’t presume to have any answers, but I was so moved by Bornstein’s essay, and it offered a perspective the book otherwise lacked, not only in that it’s the sole piece on surrogacy, but in the particular way the essay celebrates pregnancy—without ignoring any of the challenges she faced. So my thought was pretty much exactly what you said: that we should listen to these stories as well. That’s a good place to start most of the time, listening. 

EH: Can you talk about the decision to include multiple genres in the book? (Graphic memoir, poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, etc.) In what ways do you see each contributing to the collective voice of the book? How do you think it would have been different, had it been, say, straight memoir?

SO: With I Know What’s Best For You, one of the first things I knew was that I wanted to take the notion of a multi-genre anthology to the next level, which is why this time we included—in addition to the stories, essays, and poems—a graphic memoir, three short plays, and photographs (by Rachel Eliza Griffiths—these gorgeous photographs that just absolutely wrecked me, and an equally gorgeous essay she wrote to accompany the images). 

Part of this is about inclusivity: if I put together an anthology of, say, essays, then the voices featured can only be of creative nonfiction writers, and ones who feel comfortable writing about this particular (and highly sensitive) topic in essay form. The decision to make a multi-genre book meant that I could invite so many different types of writers, and I could tell them they had the freedom to respond to the topic in whichever genre they wished. 

Another part of this, perhaps, is that I feel very multigenre myself, not only as a writer but as a human—maybe it’s my bi-national, bi-lingual existence, or my queerness, but whatever the source, I feel inspired by spaces that are “both and,” that bring together different worlds. Which is maybe a good moment in our conversation to mention that there’s also an international supplement to this book, I Know What’s Best For You All Over the World, on the McSweeney’s website and also as an ebook, featuring writers and artists from sixteen countries—Argentina, China, India, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Poland, Brazil, many others!—responding to aspects of reproductive freedom in their locale. And the supplement follows the same multigenre format.

Art in general and books in particular are being called to meet impossible challenges at this moment in time when the world is such a dumpster fire—a point of view which is arguably naive, in that it presupposes that art and literature actually matter in some fundamental way… but I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning if I didn’t believe that, so I do, vehemently. For some reason, when we respond to current events and political developments with books, those books tend to be nonfiction or creative nonfiction. There’s something so limiting and limited about that, I believe we can do a better job as a society and as artists responding to anything of importance when we don’t limit the scope of our response to any one genre. 

To me, something about the challenges we’re all living through, that end-of-times vibe, seems very compatible with a multigenre approach, with shaping multigenre spaces. It’s like: who knows what new madness tomorrow brings, but today, if we can all get together, across artistic disciplines, and make our loud, weird, beautiful selves sing in a choir, doesn’t that sound like just the thing to do? 

My Cartoon Turtles Say What I Feel

Posted on by Alex Juarez

“Laramie Time” by Lydia Conklin 

Maggie and I had been living in Wyoming for three months when I finally agreed we could get pregnant. We were walking on a boulevard downtown over snow that was crunchy and slushy by turns, heading home from a disappointing lunch of lo mein made with white spaghetti. The air was so sharply freezing, the meal churning so unhappily through our guts, that I longed to cheer the afternoon. I’d made up my mind the week before, but I didn’t find the right moment to tell her until we were trudging through uncleared drifts in front of the former movie theater. The Christian who’d bought the place for nothing had arranged the plastic letters into rhetoric on the marquee: GOD IS LISTENING GOD KNOWS YOURE ROTTEN. 

“Maggie,” I said, taking her hand. “I’ve decided.” Last week’s test results had exposed her declining fertility. If we wanted to do this, it had to be now. 

She aimed her freckled stub nose at me and studied my face. “Where to get dessert?” She spoke bluntly, the joke of what she really hoped in the deadness of her words. 

“I want to have a kid with you.” I meant the words to sound natural but invested with meaning—inflected emotion on kid and you—those two words the sum total of my future reality. But the sentence bumbled out, awkward, half-swallowed. 

“Amazing.” She spoke flatly, her unseasonable tennis shoes sinking into the slush. Why was she speaking flatly? Maggie had begged me for a kid for years. She should’ve jumped into my arms when I agreed. She should’ve fucked me right there on the boulevard, even though it was winter in Laramie, even though we’re lesbians and fucking wouldn’t help with getting the kid. 

“Aren’t you happy?” 

A tear occluded one eye, but she squeezed it to a slit, squeezed both eyes closed. When she opened them, they were clear and dry. “Thank you. I am happy.” She sounded mechanical. But sometimes she was like that—a sweet logic robot. She waited until we stepped onto the curb on Custer Street to clamp me in a cold hug. 

That was it. After five years of debate. After crying and threatening to leave, after pointing out every child, even lumpy ones, after invoking hormones and decreased viability and geriatric pregnancies whenever worry or resentment surged through her. Not to mention last week’s meltdown over the test results. And now look at her, unsurprised. Maybe she figured I wouldn’t have moved across the country to spend a year deciding not to have a kid with her. But I was unpredictable and stubborn. She knew better than to count on me. 

At thirty-seven, Maggie was three years older than me and beyond ready. I’d wanted to develop my career before motherhood—for the last few years I’d drawn a comic strip about lesbian turtles. Material success with comics seemed an impossibly distant goal, safe because it would take forever. No one bought the Sunday paper anymore and alt-weeklies were dead. And when would a comic strip about lesbian turtles ever hit the big time? Turtles are the least popular type of animal, and lesbians are the least popular type of human. But the strip launched briskly from a shabby online platform, with interest ballooning on social media. People fell in love with the painted turtle with her red dots by each ear and the bigger softshell turtle. People liked their warm, squinty eyes, I guess, their pointy overbites and the way they tried their best—flippers out, balanced on stubby flat feet—to press their plated chests together. The strip got syndicated in the surviving indie magazines and mainstream newspapers in cities like Portland and Portland. The pilot for a TV show had been funded and shot by a new, hip studio, which was considering buying a season. If the studio adopted the show, the turtles would appear on the small screen as black-and-white, stiff-moving cutouts, each character voiced by me, identically deadpan, and we’d move to LA. Whenever I remembered this possibility, I shuddered. 

When the money for the pilot arrived, Maggie had asked to try. For years I’d given the excuse of my career—noble, logical, inarguable, and in the service, ultimately, of family. We needed money for a kid, of course, and Maggie didn’t deserve a co-parent who was harried and drawing in the shadows, sneaking away from milestones to ink in shell plates and beaky mouths. 

Once my career turned toward the light, I had to face my issues that were harder to articulate. My father claimed I’d cried when he first held me, and he took this as a permanent rejection of physical affection. He’d been clear that I was a compromise, that he didn’t want kids. He demonstrated this, most days, by declining to participate. I was afraid my kid would feel the same—discarded, lonely. I’d never trust myself to be ready to welcome a little being to earth, though I was afraid to explain all this to Maggie, afraid she’d think I was loveless at my core. As months passed without my agreement, her frustrations accelerated. 

Sometimes, when I was in a certain mood—a dangerous mood maybe, or cruel—I’d speculate on scenarios where the drudgery of domestic life provided me with a larger, more startling purpose, and I could almost justify making a child in my ambivalence. What if Maggie bore twins, one with my egg and one with hers? Our kids would bond so hard in the womb that it would be like me and Maggie combining in the popular, primal way. Maggie’s pinched-nosed kid stroking her lips like Maggie did, smoothing her T-shirt like Maggie did, laughing in a high keen like Maggie did, falling in sibling love with my kid with dark messy hair and skinny wrists. Did sperm banks provide an anonymous grab-bag option? We could spend years gathering data on the father through the behavior of our child—he must have short eyebrows, he must like cantaloupe with pepper, he must be mean. 

We’d moved to Wyoming at the end of the summer to “think about it” in a neutral zone while we survived off the rent from our subletted apartment in New York. We nicknamed this period the Laramie Time. Maggie had abandoned her career in academic publishing to finish a novel. Our best friend, Arun, a chatty professor, had lured us out west, making the forgotten town with its slouching wood-frame houses and white men who stared at anyone who was not a white man seem cool. He assured us cougars crossed the highway and food was cheap. He secured us free housing from his colleague on sabbatical. 

Maggie had been straight until me, and the idea of Laramie bothered her less. But when I fretted over the move, Arun insisted that the famous hate crime had unfairly stigmatized the town. He watched me closely while he explained that every resident knew that Matt Shepard and his killer had been lovers. The crime wasn’t homophobic or political but personal. As though that made it any easier to digest. 

The colorful clouds and mountains, the antelopes and antelope-crushing brackets mounted to truck fenders, the beef, the clingy community of intellectual and creative semi-youths, they’d help the two of us decide one way or the other. And after three months of working side-by-side on the flower-patterned second-hand sofa, the tension of our future thickening the air and the results of Maggie’s fertility test landing on us like rotten whipped cream to top it all, I’d come around to the idea of creating a tiny third party to cheer us up. 

When Arun, our sole visitor, was with us, Maggie and I had fun, setting bobcat skulls on our scalps and dancing, playing the same cute girls as always. Those days were the best: Maggie suggesting the three of us drive numbered country roads to Bamforth or Curt Gowdy or Hot Springs, or wander the foothills seeking buffalo while she spun stories about cows with warnings encoded in their spots or swingers sleepwalking over the prairie. Time, for me, dissolved when she got that way, all joy: the pharmacy, the dentist, stopped traffic behind a horse. But when we were alone, she scowled into the tiles, gruff and unpleasant. When she managed to leave the apartment at all, she wandered Safeway, buying cans of beans and desiccated nubs of ginger, gazing with reproductive lust at any man. She’d given up on her novel. She was unemployed in a borrowed apartment in the middle of Wyoming. A kid, I hoped, could bring her back. 

That evening, Maggie and I ate buttered tangles of pasta around a mushroom-shaped ironwork table that was intended for outdoor use. Snow spattered the windows. It was only November and already it had snowed so often that we didn’t point it out anymore. 

“So what should we name it?” I asked, to prove I was serious. Maggie had always taken care of me—financially and otherwise. I owed her this baby. I popped open my hands. “Let’s discuss.” 

She laughed in her snorting way that made my heart lift. Her hand found mine under the table. She squeezed my fingers over and over. “Are we doing Theme Day? All these noodles.” 

Back in New York, we used to sometimes focus all three meals on a color, or a texture, or some knobby vegetable pulled from the Chinatown market. I stroked her fingers so she’d relax her mechanical squeezing. Her hand seized up. 

“I’m serious,” I said. “About the names. You must’ve thought of ideas.” 

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” she said. “It’s not even conceived.” 

I shrugged. “But it’s fun to talk about, right?” 

“Jane,” she said, anchoring her straw-colored hair behind her ear. “Or Michael. I’m sick of all those pretentious names.” 

She returned to her pasta—the subject over, decided. What else would we talk about for however long it took to conceive plus nine months? Wasn’t jabbering about baby names, flapping through giant volumes, revisiting the hijinks of relatives long dead, how a couple worked up excitement over a forthcoming wrinkled intruder? What about Francine? What about Jiminy? What about Puck? 

Maybe she’d reacted so glumly because of the lesbian turtles. Three weeks before, they’d agreed to adopt a gerbil with much more fanfare than I’d offered her. They’d cried. They’d crinkled their papery skin and performed their shell slapping embrace. 

The next morning, I found Maggie pouring coffee to fuel her standard day of calling friends, useless shopping, walks that went nowhere, window sessions watching fake cowboys saunter by. She freelanced, but that only filled a few hours a week, which she stretched out by typing extra slowly. 

“I better finish my work,” she said, a bite in her voice already. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint all the clamoring souls who rely on me.” She splashed coffee into her bowl until it spilled over. 

Maggie admitted to thinking about her novel sometimes while she lazed around, though she maintained that she’d given up, that there was no point pouring your life into some document no one would ever read. What worried me was how she discussed the project of art: miserable, challenging, like she wanted me to quit my comic and mope around with her. I refused to get sucked into hopelessness. My grip on my work was shaky enough. 

I snagged Maggie’s sleeve as she passed. 

“Watch out.” She brushed my hand away to protect her coffee. She looked like a mole, like she always did at this hour, which was sweet. But today she looked worse than usual. The skin at the corners of her eyes was blue, and her cheeks were rough-textured the way they got when she was stressed. I’d hoped my agreement would make her happy. The turtles had hosted a garden party to celebrate their choice, frogs and tortoises emerging from under lily pads to fete the future moms. 

Maggie jiggled her coffee bowl. “Can I sit, please? Am I allowed?” 

“Here.” I pushed away my sketches. She scowled. 

Most mornings I headed straight to my brush and dish of ink. Lately I had conference calls too, and sometimes I was in LA. I had treatments to rewrite and producers to please and animators to supervise. Half of what I did for the show—which the producers had dumbed down to Bisexual Turtles—I did in a trance. Whenever Maggie asked about moving to LA, wringing her hands and fretting about highways and smog and glad-handers talking shop, I told her not to worry. She was such a New York girl, striding through Manhattan in her black coat, snapping her way through editorial meetings while clinging to paper cups of coffee, acquiring her first-choice titles, always. Laramie was a way station, but LA was permanent, and the enemy. 

I’d take my commitment one step further by discussing the sperm donor. The turtles only had to visit Gerbil-O-Rama—the shop that appeared on their shore the moment they needed it. We, on the other hand, had a process to slog through. Why not start? Maggie had abandoned her career and writing and left herself with nothing. Maybe she wanted a kid to distract herself from losing her novel. That was fair. I wanted that for her too. 

I laced my fingers. “So,” I said. “The journey begins.” 

She took a sip of coffee, squinting through the steam. “Excuse me?” 

“So,” I said. “The journey begins.” 

She set her bowl down. “I heard you. I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” 

Had she forgotten what we’d decided? “Our journey to have a child.” 

Brightness flamed over her face, then extinguished. “What did you want to discuss?” 

“We decided to do it,” I reviewed. “We settled on names. What’s left?” 

“To get pregnant and have a baby and raise it to adulthood.” She spared a smile for her own joke. “If something’s on your mind, just say it.” One eye checked me curiously. 

“The sperm,” I said proudly. 

“Jesus, Leigh.” She peered at me up and down. “You’re really jumping in, aren’t you? You’re really on honor roll all of a sudden.” 

“We have to select a man who embodies our values and love. We could have a fun ceremony where friends help choose from the sperm bank.” We’d be leagues more thorough than the turtles, who’d simply reached for the cutest gerbil in the box. We’d invite our Laramie acquaintances to debate dad options. I’d brandish placards with photographs of males and statistics. Did we want a San Francisco engineer who’s Boastful, Fun, and Curious? Or a math teacher who’s Creative, Wry, and Caring? Did we want a soccer buff who enjoys Potatoes, Chats, and Items? Or an oak tree fan with a Meaningful Childhood I Long to Replicate in a Baby Version of Myself? 

“But Arun,” she said, studying me. 

“What?” 

“Who else?” The top of her face shone with anticipation, while her mouth remained downturned. 

“Are you okay?” I inched my chair closer. I longed to embrace her, but she looked prickly. 

“I’m fine.” She kissed me, sending a leak of molasses from my mouth to my core. If we weren’t discussing such urgent matters, if she wasn’t in a rotten mood, I’d have invited her upstairs to hide with me in the covers. 

“Are you sure?” 

“Certainly,” she said, in her professional voice, her hand sliding off my shoulder. “You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?” 

But, of course, Arun was better than anyone narcissistic or desperate enough to peddle their bodily fluids. He was handsome and brilliant, an innovative critic whose mission was to write accessibly and increase public access to literary analysis. And he was our best friend. We’d known him since he was a graduate student in New York. We had endless fun in our group of three, while both of us were also close with him on our own. Still, I was disappointed not to debate. “He’s a start. But wouldn’t it be fun to throw around options?” I was desperate to discuss the decision, to comb through details, to convince myself this was real. Her vagueness, her rush to wrap up, was disturbing. “What about Rudyard?” 

“Rudyard Beechpole? With the lank hair and aging rock star face?” 

“He makes great chairs.” His chairs were carved from blackwood with curlicues whittled into the seats like wormholes. We’d wanted one until we’d seen the price. 

“I don’t care if my baby makes chairs,” Maggie said. 

“I wouldn’t mind new chairs.” I envisioned the apartment filling with increasingly elegant furniture as our baby developed as a craftsman. 

Maggie snorted. “So Beechpole is a contender for you?” 

“Not really.” I said, confused. Arun was the perfect donor. And I loved the names Michael and Jane. “I’ll call Arun now.” 

Maggie looked up with a surprised frown. “Are you sure?” 

I laid my hands flat on the table. “Maggie. Seriously. What’s up with you?” 

“I was just asking.” Her coffee was nearly gone. She turned her bowl, swirling the dregs. 

“I thought you wanted kids? I thought that was the central theme of our relationship?” 

Her voice quieted. “But I want to know what you think.” 

“I said I want to do this. I’m discussing the particulars.” I pressed down until my hands patterned with the table’s texture. “What more do you want?” 

Maggie watched me, eyes pleading. I was terrified to question her further, afraid to unearth what was going through her mind. She got up and turned into the sink, rinsing her bowl for ages after it was clean. Had she only wanted babies so intensely due to my resistance? I watched her until she looked away. 

For the rest of the day, I sketched Maggie in turtle form, finally appreciating my willingness to have a kid: kissing me with her beak, stroking me with her flat foot, dedicating to me the most intricate plate of her shell. 

The weather turned the next week. Instead of dry slate skies confettied with snow, we were icy and windy and colder than ever. The hail gunfired down, cutting at the glass, and even the cowboys stayed inside. We ate canned corn with flaccid carrots on the days we couldn’t bear to trudge to the convenience store and treat ourselves to sad packets of gummy fish and crumbly Wyoming pork rinds. 

Arun burst apart with happiness before I got the words out, gushing that he’d never wanted to raise his own kids, so he’d hoped we’d ask. On my own, I arranged and paid for his genetic and STI tests and hired a lawyer to draft a contract forfeiting his parental rights. We added a clause that we’d welcome informal involvement as all parties saw fit. 

I wasn’t ready for the kid itself, but each step toward the kid was manageable. I consulted with the doctor over Arun’s perfect genetic score, initialing the contract, cutting checks from my turtle earnings. I was giving someone I loved what she wanted, though Maggie remained tepid, greenlighting each step without engaging. I acclimated to her coolness on the subject. Though it worried me in spikes, she’d waded through troughs of depression before. And maybe nothing was exciting when you’d wanted it too long. Maybe she’d burned out getting us to here. When the baby came, surely she’d revive. 

I bought her the thermometer and predictor sticks and vitamins and a logbook, and though she showed no initiative, she used them at my urging, maintaining a record by the bed. She didn’t tell me when her body was ready. But I checked her journal, and when her LH hormone surged, I announced I was calling Arun. 

I couldn’t wait to see him. Arun was sparkly. He would’ve been a star anywhere. He listened closely, as though what you said mattered, he was goofy the way men never are—subjugating himself for a laugh—and he was beautiful: his hair a soft ripple, his cheeks padded with the flesh of a teen. Once he was back in the apartment, the whole endeavor would make sense again. 

Our first two months in Laramie, we saw Arun daily. He worked next to us on the couch after his classes and ate with us at the nineties-style vegetarian restaurant that leaned too heavily on bulgur. We hiked on the weekends without finding trails or paying for parks. We picked any mountain and pulled over on the country highway and marched through sagebrush and over deer ribs until we achieved the top, Maggie clinging to my arm, leaning her cheek against my shoulder and infusing me with love. She gathered treasures: a whistle, a lizard head, a thorn as thick as a fang. I saved them all. 

One afternoon, at the summit of our favorite mountain, all of Laramie squatted before us. While Maggie exclaimed over the prairie, I pictured Matthew Shepard out there on a fence, slowly dying. Maggie asked what I was thinking and I said nothing; it was all so beautiful. 

“I’m cold,” Arun said, and Maggie threw him her tank top as a joke, spinning off like a naked animal into the as pens. He pried the shirt over his head. The straps stretched across the drum of his chest, the cotton nearly tearing, and he called Maggie back, opening his arms. “Look—I’m finally a lesbian.” We laughed until we crashed down into the chaparral. That was the last afternoon Maggie and I were easy with each other. 

The day after her positive surge, I met Arun at the door to our apartment building, by the block glass in the stairwell. His hand trembled as he brushed ice off his shoulder. “Am I early?” 

“You’re perfect.” I sounded like I was hissing, “Let me steal your genes.” 

“Cool,” Arun said. “I guess I should come in?” 

I led him to the living room. Maggie was waiting upstairs. She was too nervous to socialize until the process was complete, but it felt wrong to send Arun off to masturbate instantly. Besides, I liked his company. Here was this thirty-five-year-old man, beautiful and brilliant with a perfect job, fine without a baby or even a girlfriend. He saw a few girls in town and sometimes took trips to LA, returning sunny and fortified. But largely he was the picture of someone who could be happy alone. 

“How’s my Maggie?” he asked. 

“She’s great.” Arun loved Maggie best. Everyone did. She was pretty, like a fairytale girl lost in the woods, but brilliant. Everyone said she should go for a PhD before she got too old. “She’s waiting upstairs.” 

“I forgot what she looks like, it’s been so long.” He scratched the stiff chin of the taxidermied prairie dog we’d all bought on a joyride to Centennial. “If it weren’t for the paperwork, I wouldn’t have seen you either.” 

“Things have been rough.” 

He looked up, eyes big. “Oh, I know.” 

“Can I get you a drink?” 

“Nice seduction technique,” he said. “It’s 2:00 p.m.” 

“How about pork rinds?” 

“I’ll take a drink. By the way, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.” 

I’d been headed to the kitchen and I turned to laugh—Arun always put me at ease, how had I forgotten—but his face, forever photo-ready, had collapsed. 

“You okay?” 

“Just get me a drink.” His tone was steely. 

In the kitchen, I fretted over what to serve. I’d stocked his favorites—beer, Jack and Coke, single-serving cans of a spritzer called Naughty Fruits—but none felt tonally appropriate. I pulled down a bottle of tangerine Schnapps, left over from a Christmas pudding, some bitters, and a novelty soda called Cool Mint Surprise. I whipped these with egg whites, grape jelly, and coconut shavings. The colors refused to integrate, though, and the drink was a bubbling, breathing rainbow. 

Arun took one confused peek at my creation, helped himself to a swig, and grimaced. I wanted to tell him the drink was supposed to be funny. When he swallowed, liquid bulged down his throat. His face squished like he might throw up. 

“Listen,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.” 

Arun gulped more rainbow. Egg white foamed on his chin. “You know I want to.” He threw back another sip and the green layer of the drink splashed his shirt. He didn’t seem to notice. 

“Are you worried you won’t get off or something?” 

He nodded slowly. “I don’t masturbate that often.” 

I held my face steady. “You don’t?” 

“I’m sure I’ll squeeze one out.” 

“Great.” In my comic, Arun was a lanky, long-legged tortoise named AJ who stopped by with sour-cream-and-onion snails and reptile puns. As a Shakespeare scholar, Arun found my comic unforgivably bizarre, though he treasured the small fame it afforded him with queer hipsters on campus. He’d been the most popular character since the beginning, according to the Twitterverse. If AJ isn’t on the show, I’ll slit my wrist with a box cutter, a tween had typed. 

“You guys are good?” he asked, shifting his focus to the ceiling. 

“Of course.” Since we’d moved to Laramie, I’d never seen Arun alone. “What do you mean?” 

He shrugged at the ink on my wrist. I hadn’t slept, so I’d drawn all night. “Your career.” 

This startled me. The issue with Maggie had always been kids. Everything else was perfect—the sex, the conversation; we both loved hiking and rice and audiobooks and begging bakeries for fresh bread at 4:00 a.m. Neither of us cleaned refrigerators or harped on dusting. The lesbian turtles had the same sole problem. In one strip, they gazed into each other’s beady eyes and whispered that they wished baby tur tles didn’t exist, that eggs couldn’t gel in their ovaries, or that reproduction was automatic or mandatory, so no decision was necessary. “There’s just that one issue between Maggie and me,” I’d told friends. “That one hitch.” 

Arun relaxed against the cushions. “I mean, think about it. Your comic goes viral, it’s bought by some hip feminist studio, you might get a bigshot writing gig in LA?” 

“She’s supportive.” 

“No kidding.” Arun leaned forward, elbows on knees. “But think about it, Leigh. What’s Maggie doing?” 

“Right now? Waiting.” I dropped stiffly into a chair. With no one to confide in, I hadn’t faced a hard truth in months. 

“No, honey. She quit her job. She’s editing, like, ten pages a week for some startup.” 

“But that’s her choice.” That last night of Maggie’s novel, she’d typed feverishly since predawn. She’d requested a stay on dinner, then another. As bedtime approached and we still hadn’t eaten, she shoved her laptop off the couch. “It’s all made up.” Her fingers fluttered on the air. “Completely fake.” Panic flickered in her eyes, but her body sagged in relief. Maggie’s novel was a drug. She’d worked on it constantly, miserably. She was a great writer—this was obvious even from her goofy road trip yarns—but writing made her miserable. 

Arun watched me. “Do you really believe she’d give up?” 

“It was sad, yeah, but she said she wanted it.” Guilt tugged at me. I suppose I should’ve tried to change her mind. I’d been too relieved to have my girlfriend back. 

“Meanwhile, teen girls are coming over your turtles on Snapchat. And she’s doing nothing. You really believe that?” 

I should’ve worked through the abandonment of her novel, ascertained Maggie was all right. I should’ve offered to read her book, or at least assured her I believed in her. We hadn’t talked about ourselves in ages. The kid question had subsumed us. If we discussed her novel, or LA, we circled back to kids. But I understood, with Arun’s disapproving gaze settling over me, that I should’ve forced the issue. 

“That’s why this is good.” I gestured at Arun, accidentally aiming at his groin. We both grimaced. “Really, though. I’ve done what I wanted to do. And now I can do this.” Instead of this I almost said what Maggie wants to do. 

Arun shook his head. “I should shut up.” His face softened like it would at a child. “But she’s still working on her novel, Leigh. She has been all this time.” 

My body tightened. “What do you mean.” 

“It’s going well,” he whispered. “Really well. So you don’t have to worry.” He leaned back and nodded, as though waiting for me to leap from my chair and dance. 

“Oh.” My mouth stayed frozen. Maggie had been lying? Sneaking off to write? When? While I was asleep? When she was pretending to freelance? When I was in LA? I saw her waking at four after I left for a business trip, indulging in fifteen hours of writing, twenty, forsaking meals and snacks and the bathroom, her eyes burning dry, thrilled and alive. I’d understand if the work was going badly, if she wanted to turn the corner before she shared the news. But Maggie couldn’t write around me, couldn’t celebrate. Because of the turtles, or something else. “I knew that.” 

Arun raised his eyebrows. “Did you?” 

“Of course she told me. And I would’ve noticed anyway. You think she could hide that?” The words sent a crack of pain down my neck. We’d drifted so far apart. I’d failed to recognize creative euphoria in my own partner, living beside me in the middle of nowhere for three months. What was wrong with me? I cleared my throat, trying to sound natural: “Can I ask you something?” 

Arun nodded, watching with concern. 

“Why don’t you want to raise kids?” 

Egg white shone opalescent on his chin. “You want to know?” 

“Of course.” Nothing he’d say would change my mind. I’d heard all the arguments. I’d made them myself—global health, overpopulation, climate change, career surrender, drudgery. I hated chores. I hated shopping. I only liked one in a hundred kids—those were tricky odds. I didn’t want kiddie barfing diseases. I didn’t care about advancing my genes. I didn’t want Maggie’s body to change. I didn’t want to read a book about parenting. But everyone said once the kid was born, you were happy. 

“No one would admit they made a mistake,” he said. “By having a kid, I mean. There’s too much investment.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” I’d thought of that. 

“That’s not why I’m scared, though.” 

I should’ve ended the conversation—Maggie was waiting—but I had to ask. “Then why?” 

“My nephew,” he said, “lives in Queens. When he was four he escaped his bed. He opened the front door and stood outside until a bus stopped. He got on the bus and rode into Manhattan.” 

“No.” Arun exaggerated all the time for laughs. 

“He did.” Arun set his empty glass on our steamer trunk. “My brother and his wife were asleep. They think the bus driver was high, but I bet everyone thought Sunil was with someone else. He rode over the Queensboro Bridge and into Midtown. He got off at Lincoln Center. Seriously.” Arun wore that hurt look he got when he feared we didn’t believe him. “Later people said they wondered about the kid. But no one did anything.” He rolled his eyes. “New Yorkers, man. No offense.” 

Arun had forsaken New York to live as a pure Westerner. “Hey,” I said. “I’m in Wyoming now.” If I’d found that kid I would’ve scooped him up and ferried him to safety. I would’ve made him laugh in my arms until his parents claimed him.

“Anyway,” Arun said. “This lady found him.” 

“Phew,” I said. 

“No.” His face darkened. “It’s not good.” 

Arun never talked about his family. His parents were nasty to him and, I suspected, abusive. Part of his love for Laramie was that there were only two planes a day into town. You saw one dangling in the sky and knew your visitor was on board. No one could sneak up on you out here. 

“They went to a play.” Arun frowned. “I guess it had some weird stuff. A man dressed as a wolf, some naked kid, a stone people handled. It was a festival entry—the script isn’t published. I’ve checked. I’m sure you would’ve loved it.” 

“So they saw a play,” I said. “So?” I liked the idea of a kid at a play: head bobbing at knee level, following me to museums and parks and afternoon pubs. Having a kid didn’t mean we were doomed to languish in pits of plastic balls. 

“And we could figure out what he saw, right? We could find the script, interview audience members. But what gets me is the time around the play. Like what kind of person— and not to be sexist, but what kind of woman—sees a four-year-old lost in Midtown Manhattan and doesn’t call the police? Instead she takes him to a goddamn play.” 

I looked at the ceiling. Maggie must be angry we were taking so long. Stress impaired conception. I pictured the wrinkles around her mouth deepening. I was afraid to face her, afraid of the girl who’d lied about her brilliant novel. 

“Something bad happened. Sunil wasn’t the same after. He turned into this mini-adult. He didn’t bounce around like he used to. You don’t understand—he was a puppy before. These questions and silly voices all the time—even in timeouts he’d dance in his corner—and then, nothing. And it wasn’t just the play. He didn’t understand the play.” 

“You think she molested him?” My heart skipped. I hadn’t met Sunil, but I pictured him anxiously eager, little hands grabbing the air, clowning as he bounced from foot to foot. “We’ll never know.” A moody expression bled over Arun. “Because he doesn’t know, but it affected him. He can’t tell us. Did she touch him? Did she say something? Did she show him a picture?” He gripped his knee. “Whenever I think of having kids, I fall into that panic. I know it would never happen again, but a thousand situations like it would. Little moments, sure, but I can’t stand the idea of letting the kid loose to live a private life.” He shook his head. “That spooks me.” 

“I get it,” I said. 

“I shouldn’t say this crap to you.” He raised his tumbler. “Your rainbow juice made me do it.” 

I lifted my water, and we clicked glasses. 

“But it’s okay—you’re not paranoid,” he said. “You haven’t had my family.” He didn’t know about my father, how I’d been unwanted. My story was pathetic in the face of the darkness he’d just shared. 

“You’ll be a beautiful mother,” he said, regret wet in his eyes, whether for his own childhood or his missed fatherhood, I couldn’t tell. 

I had a flash of wishing I’d been Arun’s mother. No, Sunil’s. I saw a hairy, upright beast lurching across the stage, a boy too shy to seize the sleeve of his chaperone. When it came down to assuming responsibility for a floppy body, loose in the world, I was sure I could be flexible and resilient, that I could put a little person first. Not only that I could do it but that I wanted to, and not only that I wanted to but that I had to. 

I sent Arun upstairs with my laptop and a glass vial. I should’ve checked on Maggie, but the news about her novel, and Arun’s story, had me jittery. I lingered between my office, where Arun produced the ingredient, and our bedroom, where Maggie lay. Both rooms radiated tense silence. 

I could picture my child, finally: small and dark-haired, strolling with me at the foot of the mountains. She was real to me now, so real I was afraid to touch the air at my hip for fear of grazing her head. But when I pictured life with her, Maggie wasn’t with us. I saw myself and the child, or the child alone, or another figure between us. Arun, even, but not Maggie. I’d told myself our relationship was perfect, and I hadn’t worried enough when the freeze set in. But she was writing away in secret, while pretending to be depressed—or she really was depressed. Maybe the novel was going well and she was sad she couldn’t share that—because of my success, or because of competition between us, or maybe the novel was about us and she didn’t want me to know. Whatever the reason, we couldn’t survive like this. 

Losing both her and that dark-haired kid was a double punch in the gut. I loved Maggie. And I loved the kid already so much, ridiculously much, and she’d never even breathe. Now I understood what I’d lost: a girlfriend and a little person in a jasmine-flavored yard in Los Feliz, pulling vines off the house and training them up jacaranda trees, drawing with a sleeping baby’s sunlit face pointing up at me from a cozy sling. The hot red loops of nostrils, the mouth sealed with no reason to ever cry, the smell of sweet bread rising from that golden scalp. 

I braced myself to tell her. But then I put it together. After I’d agreed to have kids, Maggie had never raised the issue once. She didn’t want a baby, or she’d come to the same conclusion I had and was afraid to tell me. So maybe we were on the same page. Maybe we could be okay. 

The door to the office opened. One of Arun’s hands protected his crotch while the other extended the vial. 

“Don’t look at it,” he said. “That’s too weird.” 

“Thanks,” I said. “You can go.” 

He looked at me, wounded. “Just like that?” 

“I’m sorry.” I wanted this whole sad attempt over. “Please, Arun.” 

“Okay, fine.” He’d hoped to be part of the family maybe, though he’d signed his rights away. “So long as you aren’t mad. About my story or whatever.” 

Of course I was mad. “I’ll call you.” 

I held the vial with two hands as Arun thumped down the stairs. The plan had been to keep the fluid warm and draw it with the syringe. I opened the bedroom door with a shaking hand. 

Maggie was stretched naked on the bedspread. Her tawny hair covered her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. She smelled like sun-soaked hay: dry and hot and safe. This person had lied to me. She was happier than she could admit; she was thriving. My heart lifted for her joy, even if it was separate from me. 

“Hi,” she whispered. 

Warmth filled me despite the underheated room. I hadn’t encountered Maggie like this—lips melting, skin relaxed and smooth, breasts flushed pink—in weeks. I’d forgotten her body ready for me. “You okay?” I whispered. 

“Can’t you tell?” 

She lifted her arms and I dropped into them, the vial still clutched in my fist, heating it with all my might. Maggie’s velvet skin was exactly right, her skinny limbs curving around me, the ache of her breath on my forehead. “What changed?” I asked. 

She pulled her head back. She was glowing. “I had to know you’re serious.” 

The vial cooled between my fingers. How had this sludge been so recently inside a body? She wanted a baby. 

“You were testing me?” I flashed with fuzzy, distant rage. 

She tipped her head back. “Don’t talk. Just touch me.” 

I was so grateful to be back with her that, even as a barb of anxiety drew through me, I hung above her, our bellies grazing. I saw Sunil in the dark as a man-wolf stalked the stage, seeking someone familiar. The turtles’ gerbil, so sweet and easy that he could never exist. He might be the only baby I’d ever create. But I couldn’t do it with Maggie. Not the silence and manipulation and lies. Not with a kid. 

Tomorrow I’d tell her what I was about to do. We’d fight, in a subdued, broken way, and we’d be over. The enormity of what I’d done wouldn’t hit her for days, when she’d call me, furious. I’d leave her without a job or a girlfriend or a kid. I already knew how our end would play out, and I’d be right. 

I drew the semen into the syringe. But before I pushed it into Maggie I aimed the tip down and pressed the plunger, freeing the sperm under the bed. Our baby, soaking into the carpet, my only chance, as it would turn out, and hers too. A shudder shook through me. I dipped the syringe into her and then I lay on her body, focusing on her dusty mammal smell. 

In “This Is Us,” the Sentimentality Makes the Art

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Once, during a tense graduate school workshop, an older, venerable professor lambasted a student’s paper as being “too sentimental.” The student asked what the problem was with sentiment, to which the professor replied, “It’s not the sentiment. It’s the sentimentality.” These words were meant to settle the argument. Sentiment was fine; sentimentality—and the overabundance of unfiltered emotions it entailed—was not. Artists should be disciplined. Artists should be critical. Artists should be impartial, even about their own emotions, which should be interrogated, deconstructed, and sometimes outright dismissed. There was a clean-cut division between sentiment and sentimentality, which, as serious writers, we needed to understand. 

I carried this notion with me for years as I tried to sharpen my rather nebulous definition of “high art.” It was a lesson that, in 2018, shaped an essay I published in Electric Literature about the NBC drama This Is Us. I was (and still am) a massive fan, but four years ago I simply did not consider the show high art. I felt its sentimentality precluded it from qualifying. 

In 2022, I would like to retract my statement. 

This Is Us does interrogate emotion; its artistic merit is because of, not in spite of, its sentimentality. The story dissects its softer side and emerges with a refreshingly non-cynical take on the consequences of staying on the sappy side of life.   

For the uninitiated, This Is Us follows the lives of three siblings – Kevin, Kate, and Randall Pearson, known as the “Big Three” – and their mother, Rebecca. The show mostly takes place in the present, but each episode features flashbacks that directly link past events – both good and bad – to the people the Big Three have become today. This can be a weak point; themes are occasionally so heavy-handed even die-hard fans cringe. More often than not though, This Is Us delivers, the trajectory of how a given character got from Point A to Point B logically sound and emotionally resonate. It’s formulaic, but it makes for good TV, and This Is Us has never shied away from convention. Rather than dodging tropes that might attract the ire of critics, This Is Us embraces its status as a plain ole’ satisfying story. 

Rather than dodging tropes that might attract the ire of critics, This Is Us embraces its status as a plain ole’ satisfying story.

When I first fell in love with This Is Us, my father had been diagnosed with late-stage idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given a fairly bleak prognosis in terms of life expectancy. He was 61, not young, but also not so old, and one of the healthiest people I had ever seen—a remarkably dexterous sexagenarian who regularly out-ran and out-lifted me at the gym. The diagnosis was flabbergasting. I needed a show that helped me tap into my repressed grief, and This Is Us fit the bill. There are songs I can never listen to again without sobbing – “Our House,” “Moonshadow,” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” and I’ll add “The Circle Game” to this list after the penultimate episode – but I never thought of This Is Us as self-reflective.

My father is, somewhat unbelievably, still alive—the recipient of a double-lung transplant—and yet the scope of my grief hasn’t shrunk. In fact, since around March of 2020, it has grown profoundly, and I probably don’t need to tell you why. My affection for This Is Us has evolved into outright obsession. As the show enters its final season, I spend hours each week reading the latest hot takes, overanalyzing AV Club reviews, and browsing subreddits dedicated to debating character motivations and dissecting subtle details for potential foreshadowing. In 2022, the show’s sentimentality began to feel deeper and smarter, more like a conscious artistic choice than the natural state of a soap-ish primetime family drama. 

It’s not just the fans who are sentimental about the Pearsons. In-universe, the Pearsons are sentimental about themselves, have a habit of mythologizing their family’s history to the point of delusion. The foundation starts to crack during a storyline about Kevin’s stint in rehab, which climaxes with a showdown in family therapy during which the Pearsons directly confront the darker side of the late Jack Pearson’s legacy. When Kevin’s therapist asks Rebecca why she refuses to discuss Jack’s alcoholism, she defends herself by saying that she doesn’t want her husband’s memory tainted by focusing on “the only thing about him that wasn’t perfect.” Of course, viewers know that Jack – alcoholism aside – was never perfect. Here, we begin to see the sinister side of Rebecca’s sentimentality. 

Maybe the most unsettling episode in recent history was season six’s “Saturday in the Park.” While most fans think of this as the nerve-racking saga of Kate’s blind toddler getting lost outside, I found the B-plot even more disturbing. Elementary-aged Kate, Kevin, and Randall lock their babysitter in the bathroom after she slights Kate, prompting a drunken Rebecca to pontificate about how beautiful it is that her children banded together. This is juxtaposed with a scene of an adult Kevin and Randall intruding on an argument between Kate and her husband, wholly inappropriate behavior given this is a nuanced conflict between two grown adults navigating deeply personal marital troubles. In this context, Rebecca’s monologue becomes more unnerving than uplifting. She’s teaching her children to enable one another, giving them sloppy justifications for their own bad behavior.  As a viewer, there was a moment where I found myself thinking, “My God, what is wrong with this family?” 

There was a moment where I found myself thinking, “My God, what is wrong with this family?”

A lesser show would have left it at that. A lesser show would have let viewers linger in this dark headspace gawking at dysfunctional people glorifying their own dysfunction. This hypothetical dark, gritty version of This Is Us would serve only to deconstruct mawkish family dramas by smugly revealing the Man Behind the Curtain, teaching us a lesson about the fallibility of memory and the dangers of romanticizing the past.  

Reader, I am so tired of watching that show. 

Thank God This Is Us is smarter than that! Thank God This Is Us understands that the Man Behind the Curtain solved the ailments of those who sought his counsel even after being exposed as a fraud.  

In my 2018 essay on This Is Us, I talked about Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a memoir about the death of Didion’s 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo. I called the book “brazenly unsentimental”, which it is. However, at the time I erroneously took “unsentimental” to mean “anti-sentimental,” which Blue Nights is not. In the book’s second chapter, recounting her daughter’s wedding day, Didion notes Quintana made “sentimental choices”: cucumber and watercress sandwiches in memory of her sixteenth birthday party, leis in place of bouquets because of a childhood trip to Honolulu. After repeating “time passes” twice, Didion begins to speculate about what the phrase even means – “Could it be that I heard it more this way? Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even, ‘Time passes, but not for me?’ Could it be that I never believed it?”

I recalled Didion’s words while watching “The Night Before the Wedding,” after Randall gives a frankly terrible speech that ends with, “In moments like this, when you’re around all your favorite people, celebrating a really special day, time does slow down ever so much.” 

This Is Us, I’ll concede, does sometimes cross a threshold where its sentimentality negates its merit, morphing into the kind of story that likely turned my professor off sentimentality. Some of the analogies – a leaky faucet foreshadowing a failed marriage, new glasses a metaphor for distorted memories – feel a little too preachy. Most recently, an episode wrapping up Kevin’s love life turned what could have been a nuanced storyline about a later-in-life romantic reconciliation into the stuff of Hallmark movies. I thought “The Night Before the Wedding” was verging into this territory as Randall’s speech was not – as his wife tells him – “equal parts sexy and depressing.” It was poorly written and trite, but it turned out Randall knew he was spouting bullshit. The show takes a darker-than-expected turn when Randall brushes off his wife’s praise, saying, “Mom’s sick. I can see where it’s all headed now. And it’s all headed there so fast. What are you supposed to do with that?”

This Is Us, I’ll concede, does sometimes cross a threshold where its sentimentality negates its merit.

There is no satisfactory resolution here – another phrase Didion repeats throughout Blue Nights, especially in regards to what to do with her memories. In the New York Times Book Review, writer and critic Cathleen Schine calls Blue Nights “an elegy to the void,” a memoir written from the vantage point of a person well-aware that daylight always fades. Yes, even for you. Yes, even if you try to savor the moment so that time passes less aggressively. For Didion, Schine notes, memories do little more than leave her grappling with her daughter’s now painful immortality. Didion says “sentimental choices” with grief not as a rebuke, but because Quintana’s wedding is a memory she no longer wants to remember, a reminder of how inadequately she appreciated the moment when it happened. Didion has seen the void, has reached a point where sentimentality no longer serves her any practical purpose. When Randall stands on the cusp of this same space, his wife pulls him back. She responds to his rhetorical question with, “Only thing you can do, baby. You dance.”

Had I heard this line in one of the show’s weaker episodes, I would have gagged. It’s corny, it’s inadequate, it’s – god forbid – sentimental. But in this context it exemplifies This Is Us is at its best – those moments where the void squares off against relentless sentimentality. Sometimes, rose-colored glasses do little more than make the Pearsons ignore past trauma and fight their present demons bare-fisted. Other times, their pink-tinted world helps them at least attempt to adequately appreciate the moment, even if – eventually – they’ll realize that they didn’t, and that it all went by too fast, and that time passed for them despite believing, on some level, that it never would. There’s no satisfactory resolution to Randall’s crisis, which is why Beth’s response gets a pass. She would not have offered a better answer by virtue of being cynical. Here, feeding the delusion isn’t a maladaptive coping mechanism, but a way to give fleeting happiness some much-deserved brain space. 

This Is Us knows its characters are guilty of romanticizing the past but the show is less interested in deconstructing its tropes and more interested in exploring why there’s a seemingly never-ending appetite for this particular brand of story. The narrative’s driving question is why—why are we sentimental creatures at all? Lately, I’ve been less interested in cynical narratives and more interested in stories that do not shy away from their own sensitivity. I am inundated with enough cruelty in reality. Why drag it into my stories? 

Over the last two years, I have seen things I never thought I would see and am bracing to see worse in the future. I have seen relationships I thought were indestructible shatter. I have seen healthy, happy people either die or become severely debilitated due to COVID. I have seen politicians do little-to-nothing in response to an encroaching apocalypse, often rolling out more Draconian cruelty in response to the fallout of our present conditions. In Los Angeles, where I live, it is now functionally illegal to be unhoused. At the same time, I have gotten closer to the people with whom I’ve endured the last two years, and I’ve noticed our sentimentality about one another sometimes distorts reality. In our rapid-fire group chat messages, we’re all playing assigned roles, our personalities shoehorned into archetypes. We abandon some nuance, to be sure, but it’s comforting to create a nest of character types. It’s not all delusion. Whatever part one plays, the tropes we fill didn’t manifest from thin air, but came from very real aspects of our personalities. It’s an elevated state, a Platonic ideal we’re trying to emulate because mythologizing ourselves helps us appreciate what we have before it’s gone. 

I take a cue from the Pearsons in this regard.

The show often makes its points with parallel narratives, and it bookends its first and last season to underscore one of its most vital themes. A story that spans generations shows how coping mechanisms hold different values over time. Sometimes, the Pearsons’ unabashed displays of emotion result in poor decisions and hurt feelings. Other times, it brings them closer, the reason I can think My God, what’s wrong with this family? while simultaneously loving them. In season one, we see the Pearsons sanitizing the memory of their late father in a dysfunctional fashion. In season six, we see them sanitizing Rebecca – who is dying of Alzheimer’s – in a more strategic way. What was unhealthy for the Big Three in their 30s serves a logical purpose in their 40s and 50s. 

In season six’s “Taboo,” Rebecca gives an emotional speech on Thanksgiving night, commanding her children to forge ahead with their lives and be fearless. Rebecca is the Wise Old Matriarch here, but long-time viewers know she hasn’t always been the best mother. She has done some things – most notably, lying to Randall about his birth parents – that border on unforgivable. But she’s not a monster, and we’ve seen her children confront their issues with her, have watched them work things out as much as they possibly can. I feel less frustrated watching the Big Three sanctify their mother than I did watching them sanctify their father as Rebecca is about to die and they have an opportunity to say goodbye. Maybe this is the time to treasure her rather than focusing on her imperfections. 

One of the most memorable speeches in This Is Us comes from a season one episode. After Rebecca’s stillbirth, Jack receives a life lesson from Dr. K, a kindhearted OB-GYN who delivers his own version of the saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Dr. K extracts the adage’s fundamentals in a more true-to-life fashion, curtailing its more Pollyanna aspects as not to deny Jack his grief. Dr. K doesn’t tell Jack to make lemonade, but to make “something resembling lemonade,” a small but important distinction. He acknowledges that the quest for silver linings won’t save us from the void, but it might at least give us some cushioning. 

The quest for silver linings won’t save us from the void, but it might at least give us some cushioning.

I thought of the lemonade speech in the final half of season six, as we watch the Big Three act out their interpretation of Rebecca’s advice. The show could have ended on a dark note, Rebecca’s illness a catalyst for the Pearsons going their separate ways. Instead, the Big Three pursue their own versions of a happy ending in light of an unfathomable loss, making something resembling lemonade from their ruins. By shoehorning Rebecca’s untimely death into a life lesson of sorts, Kevin, Randall, and Kate lived their lives without her a little less fearfully. 

I think what my professor missed in putting a firewall between sentiment and sentimentality is that one can interrogate one’s emotions without having to dismiss them. I no longer feel my connection to This Is Us precludes my ability to think critically about it. I no longer feel ashamed for loving its characters as much as I do, or for tearfully telling my fiancé once night that I felt proud of Kate Pearson like she was a real person. I no longer think sentimentality is a sign of intellectual weakness so much as a byproduct of understanding our mortality, and that any story delving into heavy themes runs the risk of becoming sentimental. This Is Us leans in, does not condemn or celebrate sentimentality, but instead presents it as a double-edged sword—both constricting and constructive, both illusory and grounding, neither folly nor virtue, but a simple fact of life. 

Your Spring Reading Horoscope

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Editor’s Note: Your Reading Horoscope was created by McKayla Coyle, who is the usual author of this column. They will return for the next installment.

Spring has finally sprung, and you know what that means—it’s reading in the park season! But with so many great new releases to choose from, how do you decide which one to keep in your tote for spontaneous outdoor reading when the sun peeks out? That’s where I come in. Read on to find out the perfect book for your sign this season, and know that you can trust what I’m seeing in the stars because as a Cancer moon, I’ve got the emotional intuition for astrological predictions, as a Libra rising, I care enough about making you like me not to mess this up, and as a Capricorn sun, I have literally never been wrong about anything in my entire life (just ask me).

Aries

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

Playful, impulsive Aries is sure to see something of themselves in Acts of Service, which follows Eve, a young queer woman who, in a rash moment, posts her nudes online despite being in a monogamous relationship. This act leads her to entering a polyamorous affair that raises questions about sex and desire Eve struggles to answer for herself. This provocative, daring read is sure to hold even Aries’ fleeting attention.

Taurus

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

A vampire artist hungering for connection and the indulgence of delicious food is about as Taurus as it gets. A sharp exploration of colonialism, mixed-race identity, and misogyny make the book’s vampire metaphor even more striking. This modern tale of appetites and art is sure to delight any Taurus. Read our conversation with Claire Kohda about vampirism’s legacy of colonialism.

Gemini

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Because A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the most Gemini books I have ever read in my life, The Candy House—a “sibling novel” to Goon Squad—is a no-brainer pick for Geminis. This book checks off all the Gemini boxes. Delightfully juggling multiple perspectives so you’re inside all the drama and never get bored? Check. A clever exploration of the technological age? Check. Good writing that will keep you engaged and make time fly? Check. And because I know Geminis hate nothing more than having to choose, this sort-of-sequel to a Pulitzer Prize winning book by a beloved author is about as close to having it all as you can get.

Cancer

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

My dear, sweet Cancers, do I even need to explain why this book is for you? I’m pretty sure you’re already sold on the title alone, but in case you aren’t, let me add some color: longing, heartbreak, and idiosyncratic characters with names like “Spider Dick,” all set against a backdrop of California’s Central Valley. This book is all lyrical heartbreak, each story like pressing your thumb into a bruise you didn’t even know you had. Bieker perfectly captures the soft, painful core of what it means to be human: the desire for connection and a sense of self, the sharp sting of being let down by love, and the lies we tell ourselves when it hurts too much to see the truth. It’s the perfect read for when you want to feel a little less lonely in a sometimes lonely world, or just want to be in your feelings (Cancers, I’m looking right at ya). If you need any more convincing, let the book speak for itself: you can read “Fact of Body” in Recommended Reading, a story from the collection about a boy and his mother living out of a car while selling dream catchers along a toxic beach.

Leo

Let’s Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Between a mother determined to win a seat in the Senate, her son writing a musical about Joan Didion, and her daughter in the news for protesting with extremists in Paris, this is a family in which every major character is either trying to be or unintentionally becoming the center of attention—sound familiar, Leos? A hilarious and touching novel about family and politics, Let’s Not Do That Again is full of characters that Leos will see themselves in and come to love.

Virgo

Body Work by Melissa Febos

This may seem like an unconventional choice for Virgo, but hear me out! Hardworking Virgo can have a hard time making time for pleasure if it doesn’t feel productive, so this combination memoir/craft book—full of thoughtful, intimate musings on the writing life that doubles as craft advice—is the perfect way for Virgo to make time for pleasure reading under the guise of “working.” And because Virgos have the tendency to be their own harshest critic, I would argue this book is essential Virgo reading for writers and non-writers alike: Febos is a healing kind of writer, who shows her readers how to bring their craft to the next level and embrace their hardest truths. Febos’ ode to radical truth telling and self-acceptance offers Virgos the perfect assignment: to practice embracing their perfectionist selves while lending themselves more kindness and grace in the process. Read our conversation with Melissa Febos about how writing trauma is an act of subversion.

Libra

Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

The Zodiac’s #1 aesthetes need to get their hands on Portrait of a Thief, an art heist novel based on a true story of Chinese art stolen back from Western museums. Not only is it a fun thrill-ride of a novel, it’s also a beautifully written, thoughtful exploration of Chinese American identity and the impacts of colonialism. Libras love nothing more than the combination of art, beauty, and intellect, and this book is sure to satisfy on all levels.

Scorpio

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

As passionate lovers of both love itself and all things supernatural, Scorpios are sure to be enamored with When We Were Birds, a love story set in Trinidad between a man forbidden from touching the dead, and the woman who protects and communes with them. Intense love, spirituality, a bridge between the living and the dead—this book couldn’t be more Scorpio. Read our conversation with Ayanna Lloyd Banwo discussing the book.

Sagittarius

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

For the adventurous and intellectually curious Sagittarius, Scattered All Over the Earth is made for you. This novel has a lot of fun exploring the origins and meaning of language, travels across several countries, and is the most joyful novel taking place in a dystopian future I’ve ever come across. Sags will find themselves enamored with this novel’s playful expansiveness, and its ability to engage with heavier themes like climate change and identity without taking itself too seriously. It’s also the first of a trilogy, so if you love it as much as I know you will, there will be more where that came from!

Capricorn

Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

Capricorns—my people, my loves, most neglected and mistreated of the Zodiac. Let me tell you something: I know the pain of being a Capricorn who seeks any sort of horoscope at all. We are so woefully misunderstood! I’m here to save you from a lifetime of bad horoscopes that treat us as like uptight sticks-in-the-mud, and I will not be recommending you something super self-serious or boring or work-related, because I know—like you all know—that we’re serious enough in our work life to allow ourselves some fun when it’s time to read. That said, my recommendation to you is Little Rabbit, which is as far from boring as it gets. An oft forgotten fact is about hard-working Capricorns is our love of blowing off steam with serious, down and dirty sex. Caps are literally the definition of business in the streets, freak in the sheets. A book about a queer, woman artist that takes both her artistic ambitions and sexual desires seriously is Capricorn through-and-through. So go crazy, my friends—this is my gift to you. For more recommendations of the sexy, literary sort, check out Alyssa Songsiridej’s list, and while you’re at it, indulge in this booktail (spoiler alert: it’s scotch-based which is, in itself, very Cap).

Aquarius

Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde

For my revolutionary, world-healing Aquarians (Aquariuses? Aquarii? Look, I’m here for my star-reading talents, not my astrological grammar skills), Eleutheria—a combination dystopian/utopian novel about a woman who grew up in an apocalypse-fearing bunker home and is now dead-set on joining a collective that vows to stop climate change—is a perfect fit. This novel has everything an Aquarius loves: railing against corruption and the authoritarian government, an exploration of colonialism, and even a whole subplot about freeganism. Read an excerpt of the first chapter over at Recommend Reading.

Pisces

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Time travel and moon colonies, but make it auto-fiction: Sea of Tranquility is Pisces all the way. As if the title alone weren’t on-brand enough (sea! tranquility!), I know Pisces is sure to love the tenderness inside of these pages, the emotional resonance with our current pandemic moment, and the vastly imaginative settings and disrupted timelines. If you’re already an Emily St. John Mandel lover, you know the deal. If not, then let this book be your introduction to an author I know any Pisces will get down with.

​​Elif Batuman on the Tragedy of Heterosexual Dating

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Either/Or, Elif’s Batuman’s follow-up to The Idiot, Selin is now a sophomore in college, returning to Harvard after the summer she spent chasing her aloof crush, Ivan, to Hungary. Now Ivan has graduated and Selin is left searching for a connection to him, which, in his absence, she finds by analyzing their past interactions through the lens Freud, Breton, and Kierkegaard. The mental contortions Selin performs to apply misogynistic texts to her own heterosexual missed connections drives the novel, as does Selin’s pursuit of sexual experience and writerly insight. 

Either/Or by Elif Batuman

Over the course of Either/Or, one actually witnesses a mind blooming, though not without misstep. Selin is funny, curious, and charming, though she is often oblivious to people’s feelings, including her own. She is ambitious yet directionless; impulsive and incautious, yet prone to overanalysis. The result is one of the most fully realized characters I have encountered in fiction, dazzling in her flaws and contractions. 

All this got me thinking about the so-called “unlikable” character, a term so obtuse and tired, I loathe to evoke it here. I realized something obvious, reading Either/Or, which is that for me—and I suspect for many others—“unlikeable” actually means the opposite. Every friend I have ever loved has been unlikable in their way, stubborn, or narcissistic, or demuring, or defiant. Loving someone for their unlikeable traits is the basis of friendship, what makes it really stick. Likeable people are boring, anyway, and make for bad fiction.

Two volumes deep in Selin’s mind, not only do I like her, I feel like she and I are friends. “Selin’s going through a lot right now,” I told some actual real life friends when opting out of after-dinner drinks to go home and read. “She needs me.” Fortunately, we’re in it for the long haul. In an interview for The New Yorker, Batuman mentioned she’d like to write a novel about Selin in her 30s. I’ll be here for her then, too.

Halimah Marcus: Either/Or is a continuation of your first novel, The Idiot. Were there any expectations of a sequel that you wanted to either fulfill or subvert?

Elif Bautman: The decision to write a sequel was more about what was going on at the time and less about the decision to write a sequel. The Idiot came out right at the beginning of 2017; 2017 was #Metoo and 2018 was the Kavanaugh hearing. It was a time when people were thinking again about Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky. And now Britney Spears. I think a lot of women were describing things that had happened to them in their past and using words that they hadn’t used before, like rape culture and patriarchy. 

The literature that I was really into was super heteronormative. What role did that play for me?

I wanted to see what it was like in that space with the feelings I had, but without the vocabulary that I have now. Because when I look back, I see some of the decisions that I made or some of the things that I accepted, and I kind of wish I had been more critical, but I wasn’t. I wanted to unpack what that felt like. 

HM: That’s really interesting. Your have a character that’s in this academic environment, and in theory should have access to the ideas of feminism and the attendant vocabulary.

EB: Exactly. While I was editing The Idiot, I met the woman with whom I hope to spend the rest of my life. I only dated men before that. It made me think so differently about so many parts of my identity, not just gender identity, but actually the extent to which I identified with literature, because the literature that I was really into was super heteronormative. What role did that play for me? 

So I was doing a lot of reading, and the stuff I was reading was like, you know, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, where she talks about the discourse of romance and how it’s sustained by novels. And I was reading “Compulsory Heterosexuality” by Adrienne Rich, which made my head explode. “Compulsory Heterosexuality” is from 1980, and The Dialectic of Sex is from before I was born. I was like, how did I not know about these things? I had access to all of the best education anyone could have. I was curious, and yet, insofar as I knew that these things existed, they didn’t seem appealing to me. So another part of why I wanted to write this book was to show Selin being introduced in to feminist ideas. I want to help readers be able to question their own lives. What are the narratives that they might be accepting?

HM: Reading The Idiot, a lot of my excitement came from the romantic plotline between Selin and Ivan. Are they going to sleep together? What’s going to happen? And then reading Either/Or, that’s kind of taken off the table. Ivan is not physically present. He’s an absence. I almost had to retrain myself, because I picked up the book wanting a resolution to this romantic plotline. And then I realized, “Oh, no. That’s not what’s going to happen.” That was so exciting to me, because I think it’s realistic to how these kinds of infatuations—or desires, or unrequited loves, or whatever you want to call it—play out. They’re not consummated, or they remain one sided, and then that person redirects their energy. So I saw Either/Or as the story of coming out of the infatuation of The Idiot. I’m curious if you think infatuation is a fair way to characterize Selin’s feelings for Ivan.

EB: I really like how you just described it. I mean, this is something I see through after years of therapy, but the relationship with Ivan is—I don’t want to say indoctrination—but it’s really trying to inhabit a certain ideology that Selin is trying very hard to be a part of. She doesn’t quite get the point of penetrative sex, and as she does it more, she starts to understand it more. And she’s like, “Oh my God. I feel just like when I watched and understood a Shakespeare play.” It’s a feeling of self-congratulation, of finally getting the great universal thing. 

The temptation is to think of yourself as having been really stupid, and yourself now as knowing a lot more. I’m just as stupid now, I just have better information.

A lot of the relationship with Ivan was about that. It’s all very exciting. But another part of what’s exciting is that she recognizes what’s happening to her as part of a plot from the kind of book that she most likes to read. I really like what you said about how it’s more realistic that that relationship wouldn’t be consummated, and how people redirect their energies. There’s a quote from André Breton about making one real person out of lots of people. When you write a novel about a first love, the tradition is to consolidate a bunch of people into one experience. In Either/Or, there’s a violin teacher, and there’s Ivan, there’s the first guy she has sex with, and then the first guy who she has a lot of sex with. They’re all different people. There’s a tendency in narrative to consolidate things. Whereas, it’s actually learning to perform a social function, over time with different people. I think that that’s a really interesting part of romantic life that we don’t really talk about, because we overvalue the connection with one individual person.

HM: There’s a point in the novel where Selin takes decisive action to have sex and things start happening. Or, in the language of the novel, the thing starts happening. Does this shift from analysis to action constitute a liberation from the compulsory heterosexuality you’re talking about?

EB: No, I don’t think so. Adrienne Rich describes it as a complex of forces that works in all of these different ways—some of them are overt and some of them are covert—to redirect women’s energies from themselves and each other and towards men. Even when Selin takes action, she’s very much taking action within the world of compulsory heterosexuality. It’s a decision that’s made in concert with and in reaction to her friendship with Svetlana. There’s even a conversation between them, where Selin’s like, wouldn’t we save a lot of time and angst if we just dated each other? And Svetlana is basically like, it doesn’t work that way; love isn’t a slumber party with your best friend. It’s like, love has to be penetration and domination. It has to be hard, and it’s childish to try to escape those things. That’s a kind of indoctrination that Svetlana and Selin do to each other and to themselves, and they do it from reading. There’s definitely a change in going from reading and thinking to actually doing things. I agree that there’s a kind of liberation in it, but I don’t think she gets outside of compulsory heterosexuality very much in this book.

HM: Svetlana at some point encourages Selin to see a therapist, and Selin says, “How was a therapist going to help me see things more clearly, when he didn’t know any of these people, and couldn’t know anything other than what was told to him, by me: a person who apparently didn’t see things clearly?” 

It’s interesting to me that she is so invested in her power as a narrator of her own life that she can’t conceive that someone could see something that she didn’t intentionally reveal or try to convey. That someone can see around her. Do you see her as an unreliable narrator, or as complicating the traditional understanding of an unreliable narrator?

EB: I think the short answer to that is yes. When you get to be in your 40s, you start to think about the time in your life when you were in your teens and 20s, and you see all of these mistakes that you made. I think that’s the reason I called the first book The Idiot. The temptation is to think of yourself as having been really stupid, and yourself now as knowing a lot more. But that’s actually quite an uncharitable way of thinking about our younger selves. I’m just as stupid now, I just have better information. What I wanted to do was to go back into that state, and show why everything Selin is doing seems to her like a good idea, and seems like the only correct thing to do. But I really didn’t want to make it look like she was being stupid. I wanted to make it seem like she was drawing the correct conclusion that she had from the information that she had at the time.

An unreliable narrator, in a way, is less about the narrator than what you want the reader to do. If you’re writing an unreliable narrator, it means that you want the reader to draw a conclusion that the narrator didn’t draw. And in some basic sense, I do want the reader to not agree with everything that Selin concluded from that time. So in that sense, I think of her as unreliable.

HM: For example, in a memoir, you may have a subjective narrator, and the reader may see things that the author is not intentionally trying to present. But I think that a memoirist is going to be less aware of that possibility than a novelist, who can triangulate a relationship between the narrator, the reader, and the author. I’m wondering how you leverage that triangulation, or if you do so deliberately.

EB: One question I get asked is like, “Well, this is about a daughter of Turkish immigrants, and you’re a Turkish daughter of Turkish immigrants. So, why don’t you just write a memoir?” And I think that’s a great answer. I think of a memoir as memorializing your experience in some way. And with this book, it felt more like an imaginative exercise. 

HM: As the title suggests, Selin is really into categorization. There’s Kirekegaard’s idea of ethical or the aesthetic; she talks about whether something is a form or if something is a content. Another key rubric she uses is whether something’s interesting or boring. That’s very important to her. How does this either/or, black and white ideology help her and and how does it hinder her? And more broadly, I’m curious about which parts of her personality you see as immature, if any.

EB: That’s a really good question. Today, I think that the idea of either an aesthetic versus an ethical life is deeply bankrupt. It’s something that only a really broken man would have thought of. As I was writing this book I was reading about the childhood experiences of people like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and they were all horribly abused. A lot of Western philosophy that we’ve inherited are the coping mechanisms of abused little boys. And we’re stuck with them now. 

Simone de Beauvoir wrote “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” which says you can’t actually be free while other people are unfree. You can’t do whatever you want if you don’t have people to do it with. It’s like you have your day off and everyone else is at work. So you’re always trying to free yourself at the same time as freeing other people. It’s a project that’s ethical and aesthetic at the same time. You can’t make up one rule that always works for everything.

A lot of Western philosophy that we’ve inherited are the coping mechanisms of abused little boys. And we’re stuck with them now.

There’s no way of talking about it without sounding insufferable, but the thing that people call the hetero-patriarchy or whatever, that’s like the idea that, I can have this room and in this room, pure thought is happening and no bodily stuff is happening. There’s no garbage. Everything bad has been put somewhere else. There’s no one manufacturing anything. The manufacturing is taking place somewhere else. No cooking is happening. The cooking is being done somewhere else. And it’s just pure mind. That’s what sustains racism, sexism, classism, the pillaging of the environment—it’s this attempt to separate pure reason from everything else and denigrate the body. And that’s how misogyny happens, because men take the spirit for themselves and say, all women are the body. All this stuff strikes me as really toxic and poisonous. 

Selin’s doing all the right things; she’s thinking. She’s really engaged. She’s having the right intellectual experience that a student should be having. I do think that these binaries that students get are ultimately kind of toxic, but that’s the elaborate thought structure that she has to play with. And she gets a lot from playing with it, from thinking about it, and she’s able to deconstruct it later. 

I’ve been thinking about the Audre Lorde line about how you can’t use the master’s tools to take apart the master’s house. There might be ways in which that’s true. I’m sure there are. But I think there’s another sense in which, whatever tools you’ve got, those are the tools. Even if they’re bad, and even if they were used to create an edifice that ultimately you want to take down, they could still help you take it down.  

HM: Ivan is very absent from this novel. Selin’s reading all these texts, like “The Seducer’s Diary,” and Freud, and she’s seeing The Usual Suspects, and she reads him into all these things. After reading “The Seducer’s Diary” she says, “The emails Ivan and I had exchanged, which had felt like something new we had invented, now seemed to have been following some kind of playbook.” And then in The Usual Suspects she relates to “the sense of discovering a total deception…the fact that deception itself was specially tailored for one other person.” All this leads her to ask her friend if Ivan is an evil person. So I’ll ask you, somewhat facetiously, is Ivan evil?

EB: No, he’s not. I actually feel strongly about that. Though it really seems to Selin that you could just be this diabolical person. The epigraph to The Idiot is this quote from Proust about how when we’re young, people seem like gods and monsters. Not to spoil, but there’s a point in the novel where Ivan writes her an email where he’s more honest than he has been, and he says something about how Selin always reminded him of his mother. And she gets this glimmer of, “What if I made Ivan feel the way that my mother made me feel sometimes?” Ivan is just as stuck in his own childhood stuff, his own disenfranchisement, his own need to prove his independence and his selfhood. 

It is kind of the tragedy of straight dating dynamics; it’s a tragedy for both of them, but it’s worse for the girl. They’re looking for different things; the girl is really looking for commitment. This isn’t in the finished version, but in an earlier draft Selin reads that horrible book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The girls are looking for this kind of connection and love and the boys are looking for some kind of adventure and specifically to not get tied down. And for the girls, the ability to have a boy commit and be the boyfriend is what gives her an ability to save face in front of her friends and to not feel ashamed that she’s being used. And for the boy, the ability to not be tied down and to not have committed to something is what enables him to save face among his friends. It’s this huge starting obstacle that every straight couple eventually gets over in some way. But what a big stumbling block.

Is My Husband Having an Affair With Me?

Posted on by Alex Juarez

The Complex

It’s a warm Sunday afternoon when I notice myself moving in. Through the window I watch me, in my favorite exercise gear, carrying bags and directing movers across the building’s central courtyard. My husband uses a trolley to shift boxes, his navy cap shielding his face from the sun. Our son, just old enough to help, wheels suitcases along the concrete path, while our daughter runs back and forth, carrying messages between us. In this way, my family moves into the apartment three doors down from ours, then goes about our daily life.

Over the next few weeks, my family moves into other units, occupying every apartment in the complex. As we do, I begin to spot differences between us – differences in age and style, in energy and manner. Together, we form a patchwork of former lives and possible futures; but we are all, unmistakably, us. We share features that never change: the mole on my neck; my husband’s unusually tall frame; our son’s lone dimple; our daughter’s dark, curly hair. We bring furniture and belongings, items I recognize, like the coffee table my father made in a woodworking class, or the Hockney print we had been given as a wedding gift. My husband agrees that this is odd, but refuses to talk about it, even as I sit on my balcony and drink wine as I observe myself doing the same.

In 12B we are the same age, but I have short hair, dyed bright red, I wear jumpsuits covered in vibrant patterns, and my husband has a large tattoo snaking its way up his left forearm. In 2C and 10D our children are teenagers, their features giving them away, in 9A they are the toddlers I once cared for, and in other units, I come to realize, we don’t have children at all. But my husband and I are always together. In 5C and 7D we are the oldest I can find, maybe by thirty years, our hair greyer and our movements slower. In 7D we seem content, and in 5C, bitter. 

One afternoon, walking by the ground floor window of 3A, I glimpse my husband in the kitchen cooking an elaborate meal, something he used to do before work consumed his waking hours. On the balcony of 4C, I see myself tending to plants I cannot name, indulging a hobby I’ve never explored. Sometimes I hear my younger upstairs neighbor on the phone, having heated arguments with my mother about my decision to study photography, somehow living out moments I have already experienced. I sense myself lying on the bed in the room above, imagining the incredible life that is yet to come, readying myself to leap into the unknown. But I know how dangerous and disappointing this will be.

Us parents begin to speak, briefly, in the corridors, passing each other as we take our trash out, or on our way to our cars. We ask few questions, keeping conversations simple and gentle, like we’re afraid we might break something. There’s a fragility to our encounters, always inside the block: I never see myself outside the building.

I can’t tell if we’re all as obsessed with one another as I am, trying to gauge where our lives have taken the right or wrong turns, or where we might yet direct them. But I need to know which life is the one I really wanted, which is the one I now want, and whether these are the same.

I once bump into myself exiting 11A, where I wear muted linen in earthy tones and carry myself with a lightness I’d forgotten I ever had. It’s early in the evening, and the air is filled with the charge of a night that is still young.

“I love your outfit,” I say.

“Thanks,” I see myself reply. “We’re attending a gallery opening.”

My husband also emerges from the door of 11A, carrying a bottle of champagne and running his other hand through his hair, the way he used to when there was enough to bother.

“Is the opening for some kind of work?” I ask.

“Oh, we don’t really work, per se,” he replies. “I invested in a friend’s business and, what can I say – we got very lucky.”

I watch myself nod, smoothing out a crease in my loose linen shirt. “Now, we’re both really just focusing on our art.”

I hate myself more than anything.

My husband begins to work longer hours, and so do I. I wonder whether it’s ourselves we’re evading, or whether it’s each other. Even before we saw ourselves move in, we had been spending time apart.

He’d been drawn into an obsession with amassing items and career milestones, things I had never cared about and mistakenly believed he didn’t, either. Maybe he hadn’t, in the beginning, but he did now. I constantly disappointed him with my inability to feign enthusiasm for his latest household purchases, like stick vacuums or stereo systems, enabled by his dedication to his job.

At the same time, he would always find last-minute reasons not to join me as I left for a hike, reasons to stay at home with our children and leave me alone to experience nature. I would look at them on my way out the door, smiling at the small group of three on our plump gray couch, surrounded by modern art and even more modern technology, ready to fill their worlds without me.

Even now, when I ask him to join me on the balcony, my husband doesn’t like to watch our family. He prefers to pretend we don’t exist outside of our own home. For my husband, we are people to avoid.

Late into a night where the moon casts a soft glow over the courtyard, light catching on harsh concrete edges and shifting leaves, everyone has gone to bed. Standing alone at our window, I see myself leave my home and sneak to another unit. As I look on, the shadows against the blinds reveal the fumbling beginnings of an affair with my own husband.

Then, this older me, one who has seemed sad and dejected, sneaks from the door of 3A, the home of the husband who cooks. I watch myself cross the courtyard, taking the long route around to avoid the lights that cut sharp through the night. I try to guess what this husband sees in her, what he doesn’t see in his own home.

I think about whether my husband would cheat on me with myself, or whether, some day, I might grow tired of his habits and flaws and seek comfort and passion in the arms of another him. Maybe I would pursue the husband I see in 4C, older but calmer, gentler, more playful with our children. Or I might find solace with my husband in 11A, who knows without question that the world will be ours and still looks at me with desire. But maybe the woman I see in 4C is the one my own husband will find, with her gardening obsession and a singing voice honed through leisurely afternoons. He might prefer me in 12B, radiant and playful, with no need to shift attention away from my art. I wonder whether my husband has also somehow witnessed these moments between ourselves, and whether he’s had these thoughts about himself, or about me.

As I watch this unfold through lengthening nights, not just between me and another husband, but between several other mes and other husbands, I become jealous of myself: of the thrill of avoiding the suspicion of my husband while lusting after my husband, a husband I might prefer; of having the boldness, the confidence, to act so openly, to leave my children alone in my house and engage in such risky behavior when my children are also in the next room. I see myself, young and thrilled by the idea of being alive, seek out my husband with gray temples and tough skin, and I remember how I once wished my husband were more content, more competent, more steady and supportive. I ask myself which combination of us is the right one, at the right time; I ask myself whether such a combination exists.

I also witness the arguments, the days of coldness and avoidance. I see the confusion and despair, the faces wrecked by fresh recognition and understanding. My husband asks me to stop watching, stop listening, but he doesn’t want to know what I’m observing. I’m unable to bring myself to participate, but unable to look away from the excitement and despair of decisions I will never make. I need to understand what these decisions mean.

Then, in the chill of winter, pink edges of sun outlining the facades of nearby homes, I watch as a truck appears and my family moves out. More trucks arrive, are loaded, and drive away, until I, my husband and children are gone, all of us, and only my husband, my children and I remain.

In the morning, after a restless sleep, I walk out my front door and into the hallway. A long mirror lines the wall, and I catch sight of myself as I walk past. I stop and stare, wondering if I am the one I think I am.

The fluorescent bulbs lining the ceiling flicker, darkness thrust upon me and then withdrawn, as I watch myself appear and disappear.

7 Books That Show a Different Side of Horse Girls

Posted on by Jo Lou

There is a certain kind of horse girl who likes their horses imported, warm-blooded, and tacked by someone else. I am not that woman, and my horse people aren’t, either. When I decided to return to horseback riding as an adult on a freelance writer’s budget, I touched a pitchfork long before a saddle and horse manure became my trademark eau de parfum. Along my journey back to horses, I met the kind of women who could birth a foal and exercise three green polo prospects before they’d even caffeinated; women who take “no” as an annoyance, not an answer.

In my memoir, The Year of the Horses, these women are friends and mentors, but they are also idols: if I still had a school locker, I’d replace my posters of Kirk Cameron and Luke Perry with photos of the ladies who taught me how to polo wrap, rollback, gallop, and believe.  

If you like your horse girls show-ring ready and unfamiliar with a scoop shovel, this list isn’t for you. From Texan barrel racers and rifle-toting horse trainers to a Kentucky princess with leftist leanings that could get her kicked off Daddy’s will, these titles celebrate a new breed of horse girls who are dirty, daring, and feminist as hell.

Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeanette Walls

In the fictionalized follow-up to her mega bestseller, The Glass Castle, readers meet the rough and tumble horse-breaker Lily Casey Smith—a woman who survives disasters both natural and manmade, rages against misogyny, and fights prejudice to become one of the best horsewomen in western Texas.

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan

This Pulitzer Prize finalist tracks two influential families fighting to dominate the Kentucky racehorse business. One is local royalty; the other, descendants of enslaved people. Trouble and violence await right out the gate.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

When a wealthy white woman takes in a Dominican Fresh Air Fund child named Velvet from Brooklyn for the summer, she introduces her to horseback riding—a privilege that Velvet can’t pursue without deepening the already problematic relationship with her host.

Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks

An enslaved but gifted groom on the eve of the civil war, a gallery owner haunted by a 19th-century equestrian oil painting and two Smithsonian scientists—one of whom is studying the suppressed history of Black horsemen—all come together in this sweeping exploration of racial injustice by Pulitzer Prize-winning Geraldine Brooks.

Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love With an Animal by Sarah Maslin Nir

Horse Crazy is a love letter to horses and a deeply researched tribute to her fellow equine fans. Nir contrasts her journey from loneliness into belonging on horseback with the careers of everyone from the famed horse whisperer Monty Roberts to the Randall Island-based urban cowboys George and Ann Blair who gave free riding lessons to hundreds of inner-city students previously excluded from the sport because of its high cost. 

Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond by Halimah Marcus

You’ll come for the names in this collection—T Kira Madden, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, just to name a few—but you’ll stay for the kaleidoscopic angles on everything equestrian. Elitism, body shaming, plastic horse conventions, barrel racing as a Black Texan—the ups, the downs, the painful falls; all of it is here. (This anthology is edited by Electric Literature’s own executive director Halimah Marcus, and I have an essay in it as well—but don’t let that keep you from saddling up for this standout collection.)

Favorite Trails of Desert Riders by Doni Hubbard

This 1991 publication is hard to find a copy of, but the payoff is worth it: photograph after photograph of early Palm Springs as an equestrian Valhalla when “The Desert Riders” roamed. Comprised of a surprisingly diverse group for the 1930s, Native people, Mexican immigrants, Hollywood starlets, and politicians rode together weekly to partake in club wagon breakfasts, dicey canyon crossings, and well-deserved shuteye under a massive sky of stars. A touching tribute to the much beloved, alternative form of transportation known as riding horseback.

I Developed An Eating Disorder. Then I Became Pro-Choice 

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In the hills of Appalachia, my mother volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center where she offered desperate women diapers, ultrasounds, and prayer. These centers were associated with our church, set up to offer assistance to women tempted to seek abortions. I was born into a fundamentalist Christian family in the socially conservative state of West Virginia. In elementary school, I held pro-life signs in picket lines. I performed in a gruesome short play entitled “The Sanctity of Life” where I gave voice to a fetus pleading with her mother to continue her pregnancy. At the age of twelve, I made a covenant to guard my virginity until marriage, and I was dutiful in this vow. 

On the surface, I was a well-behaved Christian girl playing by the many rules my culture had set before me. Privately, though, there was no concept I understood more fully than that of my body, my choice. My restrictive environment had unwittingly given birth to a problem: an eating disorder. And no one understands the concept of bodily autonomy like a person who has struggled with restrictive eating.

I went on my first diet at the age of seven. After eating a spaghetti dinner, I evaluated my belly in the bathroom mirror and decided it looked similar to the midsection of the pregnant pianist at church. Even as a young girl, I had insight into the duplicitous ways pregnancy and motherhood were discussed in our community: supposedly celebrated, but in so many other tangible ways, punished. Eavesdropping on the conversations of my mothers’ friends, I learned that the women who sought assistance at the pregnancy center were pitied, at best, despised, at worst. And I knew that the help they received in the form of complimentary hygienics and counseling were not enough to substantially lighten the load of motherhood, an undertaking that our pastor frequently referred to as “the hardest job in the world.”

The women who sought assistance at the pregnancy center were pitied, at best, despised, at worst.

I kept my diet secret, lest it encounter scrutiny. I told my mother as she packed my lunch for school that I would like for her to begin sending me salads. “I want to start being more healthy,” I said. Healthy, a safe and innocent goal, one that if I were to hear expressed by a precocious little girl today would cause me great alarm. In the 90s, though, the pursuit of health had not yet been interrogated, and this aspiration was something all the adults in my life would have considered good.  

Years passed. My dieting morphed into disorder–many of the textbook behaviors, all the cliché obsessions. 

But here’s one component that characterized my disordered eating that was not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): I was obsessed with reading about my own pathology. Perhaps even more than I was fixated on my body’s size, I was preoccupied with finding an answer to the question of why I was so centered on my body in the first place. 

I’d learned that women were born to submit to men, that my ultimate purpose in this life was marriage followed by motherhood.

I read secretly–like I did most things that mattered to me, things that I did not want taken away. It felt, quite acutely, that the eating disorder was all that I could ever possess or accomplish that would ever truly be mine. In daily sermons, I learned that my desires were symptoms of my depravity. To want too much revealed a sinful heart, and so I tried to conceal my passions. As a girl in my religious context, I felt limited. I’d learned that women were born to submit to men, that my ultimate purpose in this life was marriage followed by motherhood. I felt able to narrow my desires in the present and my dreams for the future–that is, as long as I had my eating disorder to keep me company. 

As a teenager, I quietly logged onto my parents’ desktop computer to find names of books about eating disorders. I deleted my search history immediately afterward, memorizing titles and authors for my trips to the downtown library. I felt shame checking out these books, like the librarian would realize what I was as she scanned each title. 

I had a method for hiding. I found the one book I was actually interested in. Then, I gathered other books that I had no interest in at all. Inspirational romance novels. A popular YA book. A “how to” about gardening. I tucked the book about eating disorders in the middle of the pile, front cover down. I held my breath as the librarian scanned each title, hoping she wouldn’t linger, or worse, make a comment about my choices aloud.  

Many people with eating disorders describe communing with books rather than people. In an episode of This American Life from 2021 entitled “Secrets,” Susan Burton interviews women whose eating disorders were the biggest thing in their lives they never spoke about. 

“My main experience is that I read other peoples’ books about it,” one woman says. “I don’t talk to other people about it.”  

Pain associated with the feminine experience is commonly dismissed or belittled. 

Each interviewee describes profound loneliness in this secrecy. Nearly all confess to a fear that, if they were to share, others would think of them as shallow–an example of how pain associated with the feminine experience is commonly dismissed or belittled. 

This retreat from the body into the mind is a logical one. The practice mirrors the disorder’s pathology: a fixation on keeping the mouth shut, an obsession with escaping the flesh, because, perhaps, you are in a place where it is not safe to be a body.  

I read Lori Gottlieb’s childhood diary turned YA-novel that detailed the interiority of a young woman consumed by a diet-turned-wrong. I devoured Steven Levenkron’s depiction of the stereotypical anorexic (white, -cis, female, upper-class, and thin) cured by the (loosely autobiographical) white, male savior therapist in The Best Little Girl in the World.  I checked out biographies of fasting girls, starving saints. 

But it was Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted that resonated with me most fully. The book’s soft white cover centered a black-and-white figure of a sad-looking girl in nineties denim. A neon green strip raced down the side of the paperback’s binding. Written at the age of twenty-three, Hornbacher’s memoir details a chaotic adolescence vacillating from bulimia to anorexia and back again. Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, it was one of the key texts that characterized the 90s memoir boom. 

Hornbacher was the epitome of the trainwreck girl. To a casual observer, I—with my quiet disposition and long denim skirts—was the opposite of her. Still, I was enthralled by her self-deprecating humor and manic prose. I was interested in the gruesome details of her disorder, how very ugly it was, and of course, I was drawn to the specific and shocking lists of numbers. 

I was drawn to disappearance because it was precisely what I had been told I, as a woman, needed to do.  

Most significantly, though, I was entranced by her unflinching takedown of the patriarchal institutions that seek to police and control women’s bodies. I had never considered that the desire to micromanage my body may have been due to living in an environment where female bodies were so closely patrolled. Hornbacher’s words sparked a revelation in me: perhaps I was drawn to disappearance because it was precisely what I had been told I, as a woman, needed to do.  

After checking out Wasted from the library a half dozen times, I found a way to secretly order a copy of my own. The book arrived in a box with two other books–for school, I told my mother with put-on nonchalance as I rushed with the package to my bedroom. I kept Hornbacher’s memoir hidden under my bed, beneath a stack of Christian living books and my Bible. For most of my life, my media had undergone explicit scrutiny. My parents utilized a resource put out by the fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family called Plugged In that provided comprehensive moral reviews of popular music, television, movies, and books. I knew that Hornbacher’s memoir would certainly be cited as contraband.   

Throughout high school I read Wasted before bed each night. It was part of my nighttime ritual. After the journaling of calories and the completion of several hundred sit-ups, the chewing and spitting donuts, the leg lifts, the Bible reading–after all of this, I would retrieve Wasted from its hidden spot beneath my bed to indulge in just a few pages. This was my devotion. 

“When I was nine, and indisputably a virgin,” Hornbacher recounts, “I stood in front of the mirror sticking my little belly out, wondering in panic if I might have gotten pregnant from playing doctor with a little boy when I was five, and if I was still pregnant, how would I explain it to my parents? What would they say?” 

Hornbacher was not pregnant at the age of nine. She was, however, by the age of fourteen. Without any sort of formal sex education, Hornbacher learned about sex by simply doing it. 

Hornbacher asks her friends, hypothetically, what would you do if you found out you were pregnant? Would you consider an abortion? “I casually fished for opinions,” she recounts, “a unanimous no, ringing with the righteous certainty of Catholic girls who’ve never had sex. Abortion is Wrong, we all agreed.”  

One paragraph later, though, nature made the choice for Hornbacher. It happened during dinner one evening, as she played games with the food on her plate. A snap, small, like the snip of a thread. She excused herself to the bathroom where she found herself doubled over, pale, and shaking. Then, the sharp stabbing. 

“Well. That was easy,” she says. “I remember standing up on the toilet when it was over, lifting my skirt up, and looking at the blood coating the inside of my thighs. And then I remember getting distracted. I turned to one side and scrutinized my butt. Fat ass, I thought. Pig.” 

I realized that restricting a person will never actually make them do what you want them to do.

I read this scene over and over. I understood, deeply, the fear of pregnancy. And I identified intimately with her own distraction, the myopic obsession with one’s own flesh in the midst of (in this case, another) life falling apart. 

And though I could not imagine myself in Hornbacher’s predicament–so terrified was I of sex, of men, of desire–I empathized with her fear. The fear of your body betraying you, of judgment, of growing large against your will.  

I thought, this is what I would do, too. If I had a miscarriage today, I would look away from the blood, and think about the size of my butt, instead.

And then, a snap occurred in my own brain. In the same way no one could force me to stop the calorie counting, the meal skipping, or the relentless exercise, I realized that restricting a person will never actually make them do what you want them to do. Often, it results in the opposite. When you reduce someone’s agency, a person often acts against themselves. You can’t force somebody to carry a pregnancy against her will.  

And that’s when the conversion happened: that’s when I became pro-choice. 

We will all make the decisions we are bent to make, regardless of an outsider’s opinion about our situation. 

I did not publicly identify with this label–not at first. Once, I broached it with my mother: I think I believe in a woman’s right to choose, I said one day. She tried to reason with me, Bible verses, biology–maybe she even attempted to meet me halfway, showing sympathy toward women who might want to make that choice, specifically if they were victims of harsh life circumstances. But there was no rationale that could overcome my lived experience, that deep knowing that there is no freedom without choice, that we will all make the decisions we are bent to make, regardless of an outsider’s opinion about our situation. 

When I was a girl, our home number was associated with the pregnancy center where my mother volunteered. Occasionally, I answered the cordless in the kitchen to hear the voice of a fearful woman asking for assistance in crisis. Sometimes, I imagined the face of the woman on the other end of the line. I saw her as Other, as someone that I, in some sort of birthright, could never actually become. But if my adolescent eating disorder gave me a gift, it was this: it gave me the eyes to see my own frailty. It made me realize the impossibility of perfection, the necessity of grace, and the humanity in having a net waiting after we all inevitably fall. 

Ada Limón Honors the Sacrifices of Our Ancestors

Posted on by Jo Lou

The most elusive prize for poets of any kind, at any time or place, is endurance. It’s not something poets can specifically work toward or ever claim for themselves and, if achieved, it may not even be in their lifetimes. To capture that elusive quality of being a poet who endures is up to many factors, but ultimately falls upon the readers—that wider anonymous audience—and not from any conferred award or the luck of tapping into a specific historic cultural moment. It comes from the combined uniqueness and familiarity of the poems themselves and sometimes even from the bodies of work built from years of widely reading and writing.

Therefore, using the term endure for a poem or poet is certainly not something to bestow lightly. It is, however, an accolade I feel no hesitancy in applying to Ada Limón. She is a poet of both studied and innate talent and with each poem, each carefully crafted collection, Limón has gifted us with an oceanic well of wisdom, intertwining our humanity with the natural world we live within. The Hurting Kind, her latest offering, is a powerful meditation on relationships with love, loss, family, friends, interlaced with an equal intimacy with the land, trees, plants, and animals. Anyone can see themselves in these poems but, more importantly, they can sense the lessons of our ancestors and the grief we must reckon with collectively, together, if our species will survive ourselves and continue to endure.

I had absolute pleasure of talking to Limón about her new book, fighting back against being forced into prescribed boxes, as well as learning about a forthcoming collection of essays on trees she’s currently working on.

Angela María Spring: The Hurting Kind, like much of your work, is a conversation; a conversation between poet and reader, between humanity and nature, conversation between the cyclical changing seasons both literally and metaphorically, a conversation about what we desire most and what we must learn to accept. What is the most important conversation you, the poet, want to have with us, the readers, in this particular book?

We are all part of a community, we’re all connected.

Ada Limón: We are all part of a community, we’re all connected. And sometimes we work so hard at trying to fit in somewhere to find our community, to figure out what it is that makes us connected. I think if this book is saying anything, it’s saying: you’re already connected. You already have all that you need. And it’s in everything that’s come before you and it’s in everything that’s going to come after. It’s the Earth and it’s the animals and it’s the plants and that is our community. I think so much of our lives are spent searching. I think if this book is saying anything, if it’s saying anything to me and saying anything to my readers, it’s that: we don’t need to look, it’s already there. 

AS: I do love that the language of your poems is so conversational to really powerful effect, such as the line “In between my tasks, I find a dead fledgling,/maybe dove, maybe dunno to be honest” in “Not the Saddest Thing In the World,” because you stop and dwell in it. We don’t put things in our poetry without intention so you’re stopping the reader on purpose. But it also leads us to the ever-present question of “accessibility” that the poetry pundits cannot seem to shake. It’s a sort of trap, maybe even a gaslighting technique, to look down on narrative poetry, especially since so many Black and Brown poets have been narrative (with more BIPOC poets publishing, that has finally become obviously untrue). 

How do you resist this gaslighting and politicizing of your own work and what advice can you give to younger poets who find themselves mired in this same muck of white, colonial perspectives forced upon them and their work?

AL: I think it’s really important right now. It’s important, always, but I do feel like one of the things that we have to be very wary of.

I was just having this discussion at Butler University in Indianapolis, which was that we really have to be careful about the commodification of pain and trauma within our work and what is required of us from outside of our community, and sometimes from within our community. I feel like we have to make sure that we’re giving ourselves permission to have the same type of freedom that any artist could have, an artist of any background. It’s really important to not just hang onto the joy, that’s important, and we need that for so many reasons, for survival, for resilience. But it’s also as a rebellion, you know, but I think that if by showing our whole self. What we’re doing is making an argument for our complete and beautiful humanity. When we fall into the trap of only talking about our trauma or only talking about our political situation because those are the poems that get attention or those are the poems that win prizes or those are poems that the white community really reacts favorably to, I think we have to be very concerned with not only whether or not we’re giving ourselves freedom as an artist to write whatever we want, but also whether or not we’re giving ourselves freedom as a human being to have all and hold and contain all of the spectrum of human emotion. 

It’s a dangerous thing any time we fall into a trap of listening to what other people require of us—and again, that can be from inside or outside of our community—and I feel like every time I’ve been asked to fit into that mold, any mold, I find myself sort of all elbows, I want to push it and push against it. And that’s not to say that the work in exploring trauma and generational trauma is not really important. But I do think we need the other work also to balance us out; that work of joy, survival, that work of daily-ness. So there we’re saying, I exist in a day-to-day, momentary, casual being that moves through the world just like anyone else. I think that’s really essential to not just artists, but to anyone who’s trying to live in this world that wants us to only be our short biography, only our identity. What is our identity? I’m very curious as to why we always feel the need to limit our identity. I like my identity, my identity is a lot. It’s many, many, many things. It’s Latinx but it’s also Irish, it’s also a human being living on this planet during the Anthropocene at the height of a tipping point for our planet. All of these things are part of us, and I feel like any time we limit ourselves, we’re putting a cage on our soul and I think that if poetry wants to do anything, it’s to allow ourselves to be free. 

AS: That’s the decolonial work. I’m always wanting to know how does everybody do it in their own way. 

We have to be careful about the commodification of pain and trauma within our work and what is required of us from outside of our community, and sometimes from within our community.

AL: Part of that work is really for me. It’s like it’s saving me and I have to do it in order to feel like I’m honoring this world. And that is a big thing when we talk about what is required of us or expected of us or what kind of box people want us to fit in, I don’t think we realize how much we also have it in our head. I don’t think we realize how much we also have it in our head, that it’s not just like someone saying this or someone accepting a poem or not accepting a poem, but it’s deeply ingrained in our bodies, in our soul, in our hearts and our brains, and that’s the stuff you have to slough off. That’s the stuff that’s with you when you’re alone writing a poem. And that’s hard work.

AS: You wrote something in a social media post that I cannot get out of my head: that you were writing an essay about trees that went on and on you didn’t want it to end and I wondered if that was perhaps how trees communicate. I kind of laugh at myself because I think writers over 40 who live in a more nature-heavy environment and tend to write about the land, trees become more and more important. Do you think we need to begin to decipher the language of trees, if it’s even possible? Basically, tell me all your thoughts on trees because I honestly think each tree is a poem and we just need to listen and watch to see it unfold.

AL: I love that you think that; I think that, too. Sometimes I’ll look out and go, oh, I know I haven’t looked at and praised my hackberry in a while, I better go out there and give him some love. Or like when I was talking about that sense of community, my trees feel like my family, right? When I say mine, they’re not mine, I’m in their space, but I feel like it’s really important to not only like name, which I talk about naming, right, that importance of naming, but then there’s like the other part of it, which is, to not name, but just to feel. I really feel what it is to stand with a tree and I’ll tell you, I can be in my most chaotic, in my most suffering mind, and if I can be near a tree or sit near a tree or put my body near the bark of a tree, I am like, oh, right. I am so small and so unimportant. That kind of decentering of the I is so beautiful and really refreshing, in which we don’t have that very often, you know? We’re told we have a list of things to do, this is what you do. We’re also told, you’re unique and special and you have all these things and I’m always like, but not really! I’m not. We’re all in this. I’m not any better than this tree. In fact, I would argue that’s more important than me. Maybe it is an age thing, maybe it is a nature thing, but I do think it feels like what trees do for me is remind me first of all of that connection, that we’re connected, I feel connected to them and I hope they feel connected to me. But also there’s a there’s a lot of them in our life. They’ve been with us forever. If you start to think about like your first tree, it starts to unravel and you realize that, oh, this has been part of my community, and these are part of my teachers. This is part of where I have learned to say that this is part of why I’m an artist. It’s because of staring at trees and what the trees have offered back. It sounds maybe out there, but that’s truly what I believe. 

AS: In your acknowledgments, you thank your stepfather for helping you think The Hurting Kind could really be a book, and I think about the collection structure in the poems, how they come together in a brilliant seamlessness, which considering what you said about you thinking of it as one long poem absolutely makes sense. I know that these past years have been full of so many personal challenges that we can barely even guess at, let alone glimpse. So I want to thank you for persevering to give us this beautiful collection and also like to know if there was some backstory of how the collection came to be. 

AL: The poems were written over the last five years, so they’re not all written during the pandemic because The Carrying came out in 2018 and of course, it was probably at the press in 2017. So if you think about that, this has been at least four or five years’ worth of work. That said, one of the biggest hurdles that I had to overcome was I really wanted to put in so much that I had worked on and, here’s a thing, I’ve written way more than this in this book and they didn’t fit. A lot of them were projects like ekphrastic poetry I was asked to do for MoMA but it’s a poem for Frida Kahlo, one of my heroes, or a poem for Leonora Carrington, the Mexican surrealist. I wanted to write all these and include them but every time I looked at it, I [realized], this isn’t the collection for this.

Those poems will exist in a different collection but I had to really recognize that this work was doing that work of interconnectedness. It was a work about honoring the plants, animals and ancestors, and I felt like if I if I wasn’t true to that it would feel like, oh, now we’ve gotten to the fourth section where she’s put in things that she’s written, which is totally fine, and I love books that have disparate themes and are just a lot of poems, I love that, too. But I think this book, for me, felt like it really did need to be a long poem. It needed to be that sense of ongoingness, a little bit of the decentering of the self, the deep eye of watching. Then I also felt like the moment the seasons came to me and that it was seasons and not a narrative arc, I [knew], that’s it. That’s how this works, it’s not about “I have gone through this,” it’s that “this is happening,” and that was really important because it had to be also the sense of ongoingness that what is a cycle that continues without me being in it? It also what happens when you finish the book and return to the beginning because what comes after winter, but spring? So it’s like that sort of opening and then it was, oh, right, if this is about more than me, then let this cycle of the seasons become its engine. And once that happened then I knew the book was almost there. 

“Severance,” “Severance,” and the Dissociative Demands of Office Labor

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The design department at the tech company I worked for was suffering from a morale problem. Management saw the writing on the wall; our big happy work family was on the verge of a smashup. One afternoon, we received an email from the director informing us that the company was excited to offer a new paid benefit: reimbursement for an online personality test. A set of simple questions would teach us how we could best thrive in adversity and give us empathy for each other’s unique challenges. The email included a link to a website and concluded with a grinning emoji. 

We’d ushered our whole selves into work and discovered that those selves were lonely, sad, frustrated, and furious.

But the website offered two versions of the test, one for “business” use and one “personal,” and our boss hadn’t mentioned which was sanctioned. My colleagues and I spent a good 15 minutes of company work time debating between them, finally deciding that the personal test would offer the broadest insights—it was twice as long—and weren’t we the same people regardless of physical location? Wherever you go, there you are, we figured. But answering those questions and receiving our personalized diagnoses turned out to be more than a team-bonding exercise. It was an awakening. As we read our results out loud to each other, we realized that we had opened the portal between home and office, transgressing the boundaries that kept us focused and manageable. We’d ushered our whole selves into work and discovered that those selves were lonely, sad, frustrated, and furious. It was uncomfortable, but we couldn’t talk about anything else. Over the next year, all but one of us left the company, more than a few in rage or in tears. There are infinite reasons to leave a job, but I remember the collective turning point as the day my coworkers and I stepped out of our friendly work personas and into our full humanity. We could never go back to a productively compartmentalized day working for that company again. 

If a personality test is a nudge that collapses the personal and professional, a polarizing national election is a powerful stirring, and two and a half years of a global pandemic is an ear-splitting, earth-shattering alarm. Two beautifully crafted pieces of narrative art from different moments of this tumultuous historical moment capture both the horror and the haunting of contemporary work culture: the 2022 hit Apple TV+ show Severance and the unsettlingly prescient (and unrelated) 2018 novel of the same name. Through the fictional lens of extreme speculative scenarios—that somehow become more plausible by the month—both narratives illustrate the tempting lure of productive white-collar distraction in a chaotic world, the price of the dehumanizing dissociation that it demands, and the recognition that finding deep meaning and purpose in our relationships with each other can free us from a life lived half-asleep. 

In Severance, a novel by Ling Ma published a year before COVID-19 emerged, Candace Chen is an employee at NYC-based publishing conglomerate Spectra. She goes through the motions of office life even after a deadly pandemic descends. Candace first discovered work to be a source of comfort when her mother became ill with Alzheimer’s (“It took my mind off things”), and after the death of her parents and one numbed-out summer in New York, she returns to office life to find meaning—or at least something to do every day. As the news of “Shen Fever” trickles into the world around Candace, she holds fast to her job as a way to make sense of her existence, becoming a kind of corporate automaton: the last worker in the office, if not the entire city. By day she performs her now-meaningless tasks, and by night she walks the streets taking photos of the new world for her photo blog, aptly titled “NY Ghost.” Everyone Candace encounters is either fleeing for safety or suspicious as to why she’s content to perform the dance of employment long after the music has stopped. But to Candace, the office is safe, the only place in her life that has been a reliable source of emotional regulation and accomplishment. Candace is a millennial and a first-generation immigrant through and through. For her, like so many born into this era of political and social turmoil, work is “its own consolation.” 

Shen Fever turns the infected into the walking dead of capitalism: wordless creatures doomed to perform the same routines over and over.

Candace’s daily agenda, as she describes it over and over throughout the novel, is all-too-relatable to anyone who has faced down a sad desk salad: “I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.” When she decides to break things off with her overly idealistic boyfriend: “I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.” When she finds out she’s unexpectedly pregnant from that same ex: “I didn’t know what to do, so I pushed it to the farthest corner of my mind. I went to sleep. Then I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.” If you haven’t already guessed, Severance is a zombie story.

Shen Fever turns the infected into the walking dead of capitalism: wordless creatures doomed to perform the same routines over and over. They apply face creams, set dinner tables, try on outfits, and drive cabs ceaselessly until their bodies waste away from starvation, their to-do list ambitions unrealized. But in Severance, author Ling Ma questions whether Candace is sick too, trapped in a lonely and dissociative trance that she mistakes for relief. The comparison is not lost on the character, either, but she can’t quite change her habits on her own. It’s Candace’s unborn child and the future that she starts to imagine for them both that gives Candace the determination to live a full life of her own choosing. As her pregnancy progresses, Candace feels the baby flutter inside of her, gives her a name, and imagines a fulfilling relationship outside of the transactional exchange of labor for survival. As Candace leaves the office for the last time, she notices a billboard she hadn’t before: “Life is knowing what you live for.” She has finally found a love worth staying awake to experience. In Severance, the comfort work offers is a numbing agent, and while the world is scarier without the drug of productive routine, it may also be more full of hope.

The 2022 TV series Severance is a zombie tale too, with a “body horror” twist. The show is named for the brain surgery required to work at a mysterious tech company called Lumon—like Severance’s Spectra, it’s a word that summons an ironic sense of bright possibility, “Arbeit Macht Frei” for the corporate prisoner. The severance procedure segregates employees’ memories by location, effectively splitting employees into entirely different people when they’re at home and at work. Watching the show, I was transported back to my former design department, my finger hovering over the Enneagram “buy” button. If my colleagues and I had been severed, there would’ve been no question as to which test to take: in the office, we would’ve been “innies,” with no relationship to our homebound “outies.” The company would have surely been more satisfied with the results of our tests, and I couldn’t help but imagine that we employees might have been grateful for the clarity. 

The premise of Severance is not that a nefarious corporation turns people into zombies. It’s that we choose to undead ourselves as a treat. Along with a fat paycheck, dissociation is Lumon’s enticing sales pitch to potential employees: never experience the drudgery of labor or the sting of emotions during work hours again. The innies of Severance don’t know why their outies have chosen a segregated life, but as viewers we learn the motivation of one worker, Mark S, who became unable to perform his teaching job after his wife’s sudden death and finds a path back to productivity through Lumon. By pressing pause on his pain for eight hours a day, Mark can make a living again with the added benefit of a spa day for the brain. And honestly, it doesn’t sound so bad to sleepwalk through a job for a lucrative fee. Writer Emily Gould joked on Twitter that she’d “totally get severed if it was PT, like, 15 hours a week.”

The unavoidable truth is that someone still has to live through the work day; labor is never free.

But the unavoidable truth is that someone still has to live through the work day; labor is never free. In Severance, innies are the enslaved undead, wandering Lumon’s windowless purgatory, muttering the company’s mantras, and moving numbers around on a screen to earn woven finger traps and melon parties. One severed worker, Helly R—who turns out to be a dissociated shell of a Lumon executive—goes so far as to attempt suicide. But after learning of Helly’s pain, rather than allowing her to quit (a euthanasia of sorts), Helly’s outie records a cruel video message condemning her to continue existing in a body that doesn’t belong to her. “You are not a person,” the woman who looks exactly like Helly R tells her as an explanation.

The sheer panic of realizing you don’t have bodily autonomy resonates well beyond office walls in 2022. As state governments and the Supreme Court continue to make clear that women and trans people, in particular, are property of the state, their bodies to be legislated and controlled against the will of the individuals who inhabit them, it has become harder and harder for workers to ignore the terrifying world and do our little Zooms to make enough money to pay for the rising cost of rent, healthcare, and other essentials to human life. Yet it is more and more urgent to corporations that we close our eyes in the service of productivity, hitting quotas and yielding profits before the economy tips into recession. Companies and business leaders are pushing workers back into offices, writing op-eds about the value of the physical workplace and crafting new policies that chain employees to their desks. Other companies are trying out the carrot method: throwing parties, hosting concerts, and handing out high-end swag to those who can retrace the steps of their commute after years without one. But these tactics aren’t new. In Severance, Lumon’s genius is to contain the dread of the people, not stamp it out. In real life, some corporations have attempted to do something similar many times over.

Before the pandemic, I took far more than that one personality test at different jobs, memorized corporate values, crafted reusable fun facts for endless ice breakers, and escaped many rooms with my colleagues in order to reshape myself into an appropriate work character. It’s surprising how easy dissociation becomes when it’s aided by physical compartmentalization. I was encouraged to leave my mood at the door when I swiped in with my smiling badge. The tech companies I worked for decorated their offices with optimistic flourish, giving me far-reaching views of the city and wearable proof of belonging—pins, stickers, t-shirts, even shoes. But once the pandemic struck and we were confined to our homes, non-surgical severance became harder to pull off. All of a sudden, my work self and home self were shoved into the same space—the bedroom that served as office, gym, preschool, writing studio, and cafeteria—with no breathing room between parenting, meetings, and an eked out creative life. There was no corporate bus to act as a decompression chamber between worlds, no work uniform to armor myself with for professional battle; I only put on shoes to walk the dog. Moment to moment, I felt confused about my priorities. I was stunned to hear my own voice telling my daughter no, I couldn’t eat lunch with her because I had to discuss the optimal size of boxes on a screen. In meeting after meeting, I clicked “camera-off” to hide tears collecting in my eyes, threatening to ruin the curated tone. I stopped showing up for virtual team-building games, but fell sick with guilt when my absence was noted. On the hardest days, I even told coworkers that none of what we made mattered. The fact is, maybe it did matter and maybe it does, but not to me anymore.

In the show Severance, “reintegration” is possible but excruciating, sending employees into an existential tailspin. In my life, the collapsing of worlds felt like I was losing my mind, like my carefully assembled illusion of control was shattering over and over as I spreadsheeted my way through unprecedented times. I missed the peace of dissociation, but I was incapable of pulling myself apart to get the job done any longer. I physically couldn’t smile when I was angry, I couldn’t form the word yes when I meant no. My exhaustion and rage bled through the work day, staining everything; all I had left for my daughter was excuses. Because I was lucky enough to have the support system to do it, I quit my corporate job and reclaimed my ambitions for myself, my creative work, and my family. I needed to forge a different kind of relationship to work. Like Candace Chen escaping New York in Severance the novel, I didn’t know what was next but I knew I couldn’t go back.

The question of how much of ourselves we must give up to work is an essential one.

The tragedy and possibility of a zombie story is that there is no single villain. In the novel, Candace’s sometime-mentor sometime-captor Bob points out the rules of the undead narrative. “One zombie can easily be killed,” he tells her, “but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat.” Bob is right. We may all be work zombies, lured and forced into semi-consciousness by the brutal financial realities of our age and economic system, but it is critical to remember that we are all in this together. As we’ve seen in the exhilarating recent unionization movements within industries like publishing and tech, the true power of labor is built by the collective. And I’m certainly not the only one calling it quits on my work persona. When record numbers of Americans are leaving their jobs and rethinking the sacrifices required to make a living in this country, the question of how much of ourselves we must give up to work is an essential one. Perhaps the greatest virtue of both Severances is that they externalize a too-often internal debate, capturing the poetry and violence in the struggle towards both inner and outer unity within a society that wants to split us apart. And both narratives suggest that dissociation is—at least in part—a trick of self-hypnosis that we can choose to shake ourselves out of. If we can vow to stay present together in the midst of true disaster, then maybe there is hope for the future. Like Ma’s novel, the first season of Severance ends with a cliffhanger. Mark S, Helly R, and the other innies hatch a plan to wake themselves up on the outside, inhabiting their outies’ forms long enough to fumble towards the truth. The show ends as they are each pushing against the foreignness of the real world to claim their right to self-determination. Will the innies survive reintegration to take down Lumon and the dead-eyed oligarchs controlling the rest of their world? Luckily, the show has been renewed for a second season so we may find out soon.  But here in the real world right now, we can learn from the innies’ bravery and Candace’s determination. No matter how uncomfortable change may seem at first, we each have the power to shake ourselves out of old and mechanical patterns, connect with the people and ideas that deserve our time and effort, and finally make work work for us—not the other way around.