My Drag Masculinity Steals the Show in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

To all the versions of myself who haven’t made it to a bathhouse, here’s what to expect. Start with the obscured visibility of a club. Add the purposeful disorientation of a haunted house. Multiply all of that by the atmospheric arousal of scrolling through Pornhub, as most everyone is wearing just a towel. Divide everything by a heightened fear of germs, and the result is what it feels like to gallivant through a bathhouse.

And to anyone like myself who feels universally undesirable—thirsty and nobody’s cup of tea—the most painful part of bathhouses might be the constant, visible acts of evaluation. I’ve been four times—the famous one in Chicago. Whenever I sat down, in front of a TV playing porn or in the psychedelic steam room, I was submitting myself to judgment. Even when I was just trying to watch porn, playing the role of my own fluffer before cruising through the glory hole, I knew that people were watching whenever they wandered by. They were deciding on my worth.

I’m not used to thinking that people might want me. Even the possibility of sight and understanding feels a little hard to name. Speculative, almost, like my worthiness is out of this world. 

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, the characters do unlikely things to jump into other universes. Alpha Waymond gives himself four consecutive paper cuts. Deirdre staples a receipt to her forehead. Evelyn pees her pants. Anomalous, these acts read as absurd.

By this logic, the pair of Asian American henchmen who Verse Jump with butt plugs would never, ever bottom. When the security guard catapults across the room, crotch blurred and legs kicked, his enthusiasm for penetration is supposed to be absurd.

When it comes to gay sex, hetero-patriarchy denigrates bottoming because it positions “the man” as “the woman”—the receptive orifice, the site of vulnerability. Put bluntly, bottoming makes men into pussies, gays into faggots, and Asian American men into—well—nothing.

By default, Asian American men are ineligible for masculinity. At best, our access is conditional—the right body, the right hair, the right voice, the right style. By bottoming, we forfeit an already precarious claim to masculinity.

In the view of Everything, an Asian American man forgoing masculinity is as unlikely and ridiculous as pissing on yourself, as breaking your own arm. Queerness for the film is an unequivocal abnormality. 

Asian American men are undesirable. We are ghostly and illegible. Our undesirability gives us reason to re-invent ourselves in other images, Black or white, masc or femme. In the nowhere of neither-nor, our ghostliness leads us to learn the power of personal style. Presenting as anyone and everyone, we get lost in illegibility. 

Asian American masculinities, failing, are forms of queerness. One way or another, to whatever extent we’re aware of it, Asian American men are doing drag. 

This can be our power. This can be our gift. 

My first time at the bathhouse, I started at the hot tub. Before I knew it, in the midst of so much froth, a Midwestern Oscar Isaac, unambiguously white and unconcerned with skin care, was reaching out to me. Feeling unworthy of touch for most my life, I felt obligated to reciprocate. We were just starting to kiss when he invited me to his room. In that instant, I asked myself whether I was attracted to this person or only caught up in the moment. Thanks to therapy and a loving partner, I was making a decision on the premise of my own desirability. 

I told White Oscar I’m good. I felt bad for leading him on and got my brown ass out of the hot tub. 

Waymond is an icon of kindness. He tolerates Evelyn’s constant derision and disregard. He bakes cookies for Deirdre every time the family goes to the IRS office. And, sticking googly eyes everywhere, he treasures the cute. Through Waymond, the cute, the soft, the weak—all the qualities that render Asian American men worthless in the U.S. sexual economy—transform into such sweet tenderness. Tenderness, at the end, is the family’s saving grace. 

Waymond is who I try to be on my best days.

After the hot tub, I retreated to my comfort zone, or rather, the porn-set equivalent of it on the third floor: the gym. A light-skinned Black man, bald, was working out in the buff. In the middle of reverse lunges, he watched himself in the mirror with the seriousness of a SAT proctor. This rigor might account for his physique—toned arms, thick legs. He stood almost too tall, as if reaching for some desired height. I held my towel at the waist, afraid it would fall off. I approached him like a loser in the lunchroom, deciding whether to stay and, if so, where to stand and how overt to make my watching. Guided by the honorable principle of explicit consent, I walked up to the very naked man. 

Is it okay if I hang out here?

All the spaces here are for public use, so you can do whatever you want.

I felt shamed and put in my place. I went back down to the first floor, floating into the steam room.

Fuck kindness. Waymond—at least, the version of him we see the most—dresses like a little boy. He relies on glasses and a fanny pack. He talks like a strung-out duck. Waymond knows it too, his undesirability. When Evelyn tells him about Alpha Waymond, describing the alter ego as a macho man, regular Waymond squeals, Ooh, I want that!

I felt shamed and put in my place. I went back down to the first floor, floating into the steam room.

Waymond is who I’m terrified of being on my worst days.

The obvious thing to say is that Asian American men are discarded as “feminine” or “effeminate,” and sure, that’s all true enough. Why am I getting a full-sleeve tattoo if not to appear “hard”? (Way more expensive than a breast plate. Permanent too.) Why did I make my Grindr display name “Masc ⬆️ looking” if not to override the assumption that Asian American men are all twinks with tiny dicks and high-pitched voices? 

Reducing our disposability to a hatred of femininity leaves out something key: our particular condition of undesirability. According to NPR, in 2014, OkCupid polled its users and found that Asian American men “fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women.” For the Grindr veterans out there, you’ve likely come across “no fats, no femmes, no Asians.” In season 8’s Drag Race finale, Kim Chi turns the normalized rejection into a lip-sync extravaganza. In the chorus of her song, Kim flips the reasons for her supposed undesirability into a source of power. “Beyoncé, Madonna got nothing on this triple threat,” she sings. “Do the fat, femme, and Asian.”

I’ve been all three at different points in my life—#intersectionality. I was fat until college. As a squishy, Asian adolescent, I often looked to myself like a child. The common denominator between boyishness and sissiness is a soft, almost sexless presence. To achieve the opposite, I’ve hit the gym three times a week for eight dedicated years. Living with all my bodies and so much self-loathing, I message Asian American men now with the fear they won’t respond. In my head, at the least, few of us find each other attractive. It’s hard to hold this assumption and bypass a conclusion of self-hatred. 

On the first floor, in the steam room, I found a corner where two white guys were making out, an Asian American man standing by. He caressed one of them on the back. Knowing better now than to speak, I put my hand on the Asian American. He shook me off and looked at me with disbelief and revulsion. I had crossed a line, obvious and unspeakable. To this day, I feel his rebuke in my body still: a shrinking and a skinning, leaving me tender-bodied like mud.

Putting myself up for an Asian American man’s judgment is like barking up the wrong tree. The tree is the kind growing beside a building’s façade. The tree is a spectacular deformity.

Ghostliness is the condition of Asian American men’s bodies. People see through us as if we were not there—within space without taking any of it up. When it comes to most Asian American contestants on Drag Race, the judges accuse them of lacking personality, as if the queens were all surface and no depth. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the only people I see eating out alone are my fellow Asian American men. It’s no shade. I notice us as one among us. 

Some Asian American men feel so far from desirability that I fear they’re worse than worthless. I find them immeasurable for value. The ones with the bad haircuts who wear clothes instead of outfits. The ones who are chubby, the ones who are scrawny. The ones who look like I did growing up in the Chicago suburbs. My eyes curve around these men like roadkill. I see them; I don’t want to. I see them, but it hurts to. It’s easier on my ego to refuse these men sight. 

To this day, I feel his rebuke in my body still: a shrinking and a skinning, leaving me tender-bodied like mud.

Knowing how I view my own so-called brothers, I never leave the house looking any less than my best. Clothing has the power to make my body available for sight. Almost compulsively, I’ll change whatever I’m wearing until I get the outfit just right. I dare not dress badly. That would cut me off from worth—from what it is to be in this merciless American world.

From the disproportionate number of Asian American men who appear dressed by professional stylists, I know I’m not alone. Our abjection also explains why some of us get swole to the point of absurdity—even of monstrosity. These men’s bodies look like they have something to prove. And they do: the validity of our claim to value.

An icon of transformation, Jobu is a drag queen. Her wigs, her make-up, her larger-than-life outfits—all of it’s so gorg, all of it’s so stupid, stupid in the best way possible. Recall her club-kid teddy-bear number in the final fighting extravaganza. Rewind to her first appearance in the film. She’s masked and in different patterns of plaid. Insert Valentina joke here. The all-white costume with the bagel hair is precisely what you’d get on Night of a Thousand Beyoncés if a queen did Black Is King. @RuPaulsDragRace.

Jobu Tupaki is supposed to threaten the integrity of the multiverse. On a cis woman, the beautiful costumes read as fashion. On a man, though, they would be drag: a disruption to the gender binary and the heterosexual family it undergirds.

Everything leaves room for Jobu to be a son. It barely genders the character of Evelyn’s child. Yes, much of the story’s pathos comes from the mother-daughter parallel. Still, most of the dialogue would make good sense if the child identified as a man. After all, we know very little about Joy. She’s dropped out of college. She likes pigs. She wears plaid, so maybe she likes Nirvana?

In another universe, the Daniels made this deeply felt movie about a mother and a son. In our universe, though, Asian American men are undesirable, ghostly and illegible. With hot-dog fingers, talking rocks, and an Asian American family to boot, Everything is already a monumental gamble.

To center it on a queer Asian American man? One absurdity too many, that would cross the line.

With hot-dog fingers, talking rocks, and an Asian American family to boot, “Everything” is already a monumental gamble.

After the white Oscar Isaac, the Black bodybuilder, and the Asian American tree, I found a gaggle of guys on the second floor. One was a ginger. Another was Asian, bald and an otter. The ginger came soon after I arrived. Before the ginger left the group, he said something to the Asian American, who said something back and smiled.

Knowing it was safe to talk to the Asian American in the insistently non-verbal space, I told him it was my first time at the bathhouse. He took me on a tour. Eventually, we parted ways. I spotted him later, dressed at his locker. I said hi in my towel, told him I was visiting Chicago. He said he was too. He came for work often, he was leaving again that weekend.

Now we know for next time, he said. Don’t come to Steamworks on a Wednesday night.

Hey, you want to take down my number? In case, you know.

He did, and the following night, I ended up at his hotel. Nothing fancy, just one off the freeway. He was on Outlook when I made it to his room. We talked on his bed for a little, lying close enough to resemble a pair of confidantes. When we held each other, it was with something approaching fierceness. Fierceness and desperation, which is to say, longing.

I’ve longed for a man who saw in me the thing most worth holding: himself.

Once, on a plane, because my hair was past my shoulders, the white-woman flight attendant asked if I was an island boy. Once, as I was leaving a Target, a Black fashion designer messaged me on Grindr, saying my asymmetrical, clashing-plaid puffer jacket had caught his eye, and when I said I was from LA, he said he’d known it—was sure I was from either coast. Once, in line at a different Target, because I was wearing a denim skirt, a white woman carrying kitty litter asked for my pronouns. Once, at the nudity-required Korean spa, after I joined the circle jerk in the sauna, I was sexting with the Black man who initiated it, the one I was making eyes at the week before, then to no avail, and he said he’d assumed I was straight. Once, in a circle of queer writers, including a white dude who looked straight out of a J. Crew catalogue, people were passing around poppers, and when the bottle got to me, I handed it to the next person, and the writer who just hours ago had given a talk about radical inclusivity asked if I was even gay. So when I say that Asian American men are illegible, what I mean is this: people aren’t sure how to read us. 

When I say that Asian American men are illegible, what I mean is this: people aren’t sure how to read us. 

On Drag Race, it goes all the way back to season three when Manila Luzon made herself hyperlegible in an improv challenge by basically performing yellowface—and won to the consternation of Black and Latinx queens. (#ShangelaWasRight. #Mostly.) Jump to season twelve. Kahmora Hall, a classic case of “just a fashion queen,” revised Manila’s stereotypical affect for 2020 standards by walking the runway as a literal dragon lady—and received praise for celebrating her heritage. What happens when you don’t make yourself painfully easy to read? In Rock M. Sakura’s case, people said to her face it must be so easy for Asian queens to do drag—because Asian men already look like women. 

My own illegibility started in elementary school with Abercrombie & Fitch. My siblings and I, three fat Asians, clogged the check-out line while whitegirls filled our shopping bags with clothes in the largest sizes. In middle school, I pivoted to Quiksilver. A different image of whiteness—edgier, riskier; an act of dress-up nonetheless. All these years, I put on clothes to fit in, to hide.

In high school, as I got into the habit of running on the treadmill while watching Six Feet Under and Buffy on DVD, I switched to Hot Topic—band tees, mostly. The deeper shift: I was seeking sight for my body. Urban Outfitters came in college. After my sister and my ma moved me into my dorm, they took me shopping on Thayer Street. I tried on skinny jeans for the first time, tugging onto my body what was never meant to fit me.

My post-college years as a high-school teacher, when I started working out with a trainer, began with the classic cool of J Crew and ended with the loud colors and prints of Scotch & Soda. Since then, John Elliott has gotten me into over-sized, Ivy Park into sneakers and women’s wear, and both into the world of streetwear. 

After dressing like other people all my life, I’ve begun to create my own style. I care less now about making sense to other people. I need to be true to myself, a cliché complicated by the fact that who I am keeps changing, always and forever.

I’ve begun to create my own style. I care less now about making sense to other people.

Evelyn’s visual signature centers her in the frame, universes flashing around her. In contrast, Jobu’s makes her the thing changing, kaleidoscoping from look to look. Her enemies frame this mercurial temperament as a sign of chaos, but I know better. People change their style when they struggle to feel at home in their bodies. It can be hard to feel at home in queer Asian bodies.

Jobu can’t stop changing because the world won’t stop questioning. What are you? Who are you? Where are you from? 

In the U.S. racial imaginary, Asian American men can never be “real” men. We are, at best, copies of other performances of masculinity. Playing the part of frat bros or hypebeasts, on the arm of a whitegirl either way, we never quite sink into the role. When we try so hard to be real, getting every detail down to a T, everyone can tell that we’re faking.

Whereas Black men represent hypermasculinity, a threat to white women that white men must neutralize; whereas Asian American women represent the Orient, a fantasy ripe for domination; Asian American men represent a failure of masculinity. Scrambling the gender spectrum with our big legs and hairless arms, furry chests and tiny waists, we fuck gender up.  

We are doing drag.

Neither masc nor femme, neither Black nor white, we don’t make sense within the order of things. 

Not even in Everything Everywhere. Waymond is a joke, even to himself, right down to his name. We’ve also discussed the henchmen, punchlines about taking dick. Gong Gong looks incapacitated for the first third of the movie. When Alpha Gong Gong shows up, he’s knocking out Jobu like Mario Kart. Even sex icon Harry Shum Jr. turns out to be a live-action Disney-Pixar character. All of these men, all of whom are Asian, end up on the receiving end of ongoing humiliation. 

When I’m understood as a failure of a man, I struggle to access desire, the engine of storytelling. When we find ourselves outside the parameters of narrative and value—TBH, of discourse—we’re picking up on something deep: our disqualification from selfhood and community. 

However hard we try, we not only don’t matter but can’t—like fog, like ether. This explains the paucity of narratives centering us in the recent wave of Asian American storytelling. It’s hard to tell stories about the undesirable, the ghostly, and the illegible. 

I wonder how the gag would land if the Jobu whacking a cop with dildos were a queer Asian American man. What it would mean if mother were standing up to patriarch for the dignity of her queer son. How Gong Gong, left alone with his grandson’s partner of three years, would deliver the line boyfriend.

Maybe if the mother’s mission were to save her queer son, the movie would treat us with some kindness instead.

When I’m understood as a failure of a man, I struggle to access desire, the engine of storytelling.

At the bathhouse, the one man who didn’t think twice about holding on to me was an Asian twink. 

Asian, not Asian American. As an immigrant to the Midwest, far from any ocean, I might always loathe Asian foreignness. Usually, my kneejerk reaction is taking a step back, creating distance and therefore difference.

When I define myself as the negation of something—not fat, not femme, not fobby—I’m doomed to police its presence. Hatred is knowing a thing well enough to lash out at its first appearance. Hatred is fucking exhausting.

The Asian twink closed the gap. He gave me head tirelessly; I made a show of all my pleasure. Any time people walked by, even in the pin-prick thrall of a blow job, I thought about the illegibility of our pairing—how the conjoinment of our bodies made a thing newly undesirable. 

I thanked him before we parted ways. I wanted him to know how good he had made me feel. Pleasure and, grounding that effervescence, worthiness.

Introducing Both/And: Trans and GNC Writers Tell Their Own Stories

Posted on by Denne Michele Norris

Dear Readers,

Happy Pride! It’s been a minute since I’ve written an editorial letter, but I’m doing so now to bring your attention to a special project that I’ve been working on at EL. I’m writing to introduce Both/And, a new limited essay series by trans and gender nonconforming writers of color—the first of its kind—and to ask for your support.

Support Both/And

I first had the idea for this series last fall, in the wake of Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special. Chappelle infuriated me; the widespread support he received infuriated me even more. But what incensed me most was how rarely trans people, and especially Black trans people, were given space to contribute to a cultural conversation that targeted us. We were the existential center of a cultural boiling point—and our voices were almost nowhere to be found. 

We were the existential center of a cultural boiling point—and our voices were almost nowhere to be found.

Everywhere I turned, allies spoke up for us. Though vocal allies hold a crucial place in any fight for equality, I quickly realized that many allies are ill-equipped to speak on our behalf. Giving voice to our perspective, our history, what transness is, and what it isn’t—this is work that we must do. And we must be the loudest, most visible ones doing it. 

As a Black woman, I can say with certainty that the Black community would never stand for a cultural conversation about us, that wasn’t also led by us. And yet so few people with powerful platforms—who happily discussed Chappelle and his transphobic rhetoric—invited a trans person of color to their proverbial table to join the discussion.

I quickly tired of what I was seeing, hearing, and reading. I realized that in my position, I have the ability and the responsibility to identify, mentor, and publish trans writers of color. I can ensure that the most vital writing about us comes from us.       

In my position, I have the ability and the responsibility to identify, mentor, and publish trans writers of color.

This year, more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 42 states, and thus far, two dozen of those bills have been passed into law in 13 states. A massive wave of copycat measures based on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill have been introduced, all of which ban classroom instruction around sexual orientation and gender identity. The majority of these efforts target the transgender community, specifically criminalizing access to gender-affirming education and medical care for young people. 

It’s also worth noting that while these bills focus primarily on young people, any rollback of legal protections for the LGBTQ community will disproportionately impact the most vulnerable people in that community: young people and transgender women of color. Right-wing anti-LGBTQ activists have designed these bills with the goal of long-term marginalization. It seems their hope is that by criminalizing transgender identity, they will eventually erase the transgender community writ large.

To paraphrase Michael Chabon when he introduced the 2005 Best American Short Stories anthology, a story is the shortest distance between two brains. In a decade when the transgender community has gained unprecedented visibility in both pop culture and socio-political contexts, the publishing industry lags behind. Books published by trans authors are few and far between, and largely limited to white trans people and celebrity memoirs. 

Both/And will elevate the stories of those at the forefront of the fight for racial and transgender equality

In the 10 months since I became the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, it’s become increasingly clear to me just how much work publishing must do when it comes to elevating the most marginalized voices in our society. According to the 2019 Vida Count, only 6% of literary magazine contributors identify as non-binary, and according to the 2019 Lee and Low Books Diversity Survey, fewer than 1% of publishing professionals identify as gender nonconforming or transgender. 

As the first Black, openly trans editor of a major American literary publication, I know that it’s not enough to be included in the conversation. Both/And will elevate the stories of those at the forefront of the fight for racial and transgender equality, while employing EL’s significant literary platform to uplift transgressive writing. I’m honored to be able to offer the unique opportunity for a dozen trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to be edited and published by a fellow trans writer of color. 

Apart from the editorial work, what I’m most excited about is our commitment to paying each writer $500 per essay—5x our standard rate—and to a hire trans or non-binary editor in a supporting role. 

This is a significant undertaking, one that falls outside our previously allocated budget. Please donate whatever you can today to support this effort. Our goal is to raise $15,000 by the end of Pride Month, and every amount helps. 

Donate Now

On Wednesday, June 15th, President Biden signed an executive order that aims to combat the 300+ anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced across various state legislatures. There’s no doubt that in some way, this measure of progress is the result of diverse people, voices, and stories. In his speech, he reiterated one of his frequent talking points, saying “We’re in a battle for the soul of the nation.” At Electric Literature, we believe that literature has the power to shape public consciousness. Storytelling breaks down barriers in numerous ways; perhaps the most powerful being the building of empathy, an essential tool in such a battle. Help Electric Literature support trans and gender nonconforming writers of color in this fight.

Yours,

Denne Michele Norris

Editor-in-Chief

Putting the Ethics of a Messy Threesome on Trial

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Acts of Service, a queer barista is struggling to craft a meaningful, real life that balances her ethics with her desires. Despite being in love with her long-term girlfriend, Romi, Eve ends up in a sexual relationship with Nathan and Olivia. She is equal parts compelled and disturbed: Olivia is in love with Nathan. Nathan is Olivia’s boss. And yet, Eve can’t quite condemn the two—the obvious pleasure they provide one another, the attention to which Nathan caters to Olivia, and their total disinterest in the morality of the arrangement challenges her every belief system.

As Eve works to appease the couple, making herself easy, unobjectionable, desirable, a self-critical stream of consciousness begins to haunt her every hook-up. She feels deeply concerned for Olivia, and her newfound role in facilitating this dangerous dynamic. She feels ashamed of the both of them, two queer women who struggle to conceal their indifference towards one another and total absorption in Nathan’s sexual power. And mostly she feels disgusted with the absolute pleasure succumbing to compulsive heterosexuality and the male gaze affords her.

In a community of women she loves and respects, Eve cheats on Romi, tunes her roommate’s concerns out, and undermines her own anxieties over Olivia’s vulnerability. What is it about Nathan that’s so intoxicating? And how can her desire for him coexist with her politics, her belief that cold, educated white men in well-appointed rooms are “out of style,” and knowledge that he manipulates without consequence? Does being aware of power dynamics mean anything if you still succumb to them? Does knowingly entering a trap make a difference?

The novel unfolds as a kind of disquieting trial, cerebral and emotionally honest. Eve is prosecuting Nathan and Olivia’s relationship and thus implicating herself. In turn, she must defend her ongoing decision to follow her feelings, to allow herself pleasure. Ultimately standing trial, in her own mind, before the queer community—to which she owes her sense of place and sense of morality—the experience proves as uncomfortable as it is insightful. 

It stands then, that we readers might be the jury. In bearing witness to the psyche of a woman cracked open before us, her every shame, doubt, and secretly harbored longing empathetically exposed, and balancing it alongside nuanced philosophical and political interrogations of desire, I can only imagine the verdict will be split. 

Lauren Hutton: At the very start of the book, we find out that Eve is looking to believe in something “unimpeachable,” and queerness becomes a kind of faith for her. Could you talk about what it means for queerness to not just be an identity, but for it to also be a kind of ethos or a governing logic for a life? 

Lillian Fishman: The set of anxieties that I had about the social world must have emerged from coming of age as a queer person and it manifested as Acts of Service. But to me, it wasn’t really a story about sexuality or sexual desire or female sexual agency at all. Those things aren’t really central to my worldview. It’s more that I think for me and a lot of my peers, you’re coming up in a society that really emphasizes individuality and freedom. It’s hard when you don’t have a religious background and, for someone like me, you don’t even have—which a lot of people in our culture do—a structure that’s given to you by your family of achievement, or purpose, or family loyalty. I grew up in a lovely family where the emphasis was on pursuing whatever interested you and having this total freedom and independence, which I really appreciate, but it did feel as though there was no structuring ethos in how to approach the world. And I think what Acts of Service is really about is being in that vacuum and encountering this very strong ethos about how to live, which actually isn’t about sexuality at all. It’s just come out of a marginalized sexual community. Frankly because there’s this marginalization of sexual identity, it becomes a community that has values that go far beyond sex; it has to create its own laws. I think Acts of Service was really just about responding to that. It is, of course, about sex, but less so to me somehow.  

LH: No, I think that makes a lot of sense because there was a line that was really interesting to me about how our generation uses complexity as the paradigm through which we live. We’re sort of trying to think intersectionally about everything and I definitely relate to that, that almost choice paralysis you’re describing. And I think in Eve, one of the ways that manifested is that she’s so attracted to certainty. So whether that’s the total goodness she at least perceives in Romi or whether it’s the obviousness of the power dynamics in a heterosexual interaction, she’s very attracted to absolutes. Do you think that’s a product of a generation that is living with so much uncertainty and a way to kind of seek a reprieve from that constant state of doubt and anxiety?

I think when we encounter a really firm, uncompromised certainty in a person, or a society, or a cult, or a wellness community, we know that it’s false.

LF: Yeah, of course. I think when we encounter a really firm, uncompromised certainty in a person, or a society, or a cult, or a wellness community, we know that it’s false. I have an automatic suspicion where I’m like, I know that this sort of completist approach to the world has holes in it, but it is really a relief to accept it for some amount of time; to just relax and ask yourself, what would I do if this was something that I accepted wholeheartedly and I didn’t have to question my decisions or think about whether or not I, the only guiding principle in my life, approve of them, you know?  

LH: Definitely. I was in Costa Rica a few months ago and had this slow sinking realization that I was walking through a cult and I hadn’t realized it at first. It was like this very vegan, white, wealthy, fake empathy, wellness community, and their certainty was such a weird, surreal thing—definitely something you’re suspicious of. But you’re also watching people take such pleasure in it that you wonder, maybe they are thriving. 

LF: No, I know. I’m always resistant to this type of thing, but I’m always intoxicated by it. I think in a way where people around me are wiser to it than I am. The most recent iteration of this is that I’ve been reading a lot of stuff not about crypto and NFT use, but about people who are deeply committed to crypto and NFTs. And it’s a very extreme version of it where when I listen and read about this, no part of me ever says to myself, I should get into this. It’s clear to me that I’m not interested in that and that, in fact, I think it’s very flawed. And yet I look at these people and I know that they’re worshiping a false God, but I’m jealous. I wish that I had your belief and that I could be you. And Eve feels that way about Nathan deeply. She knows that it’s a false God scenario, but she’s like that would be so freeing and exciting and relaxing all at once.  

LH: Yeah, I see that a lot in her relationship to ambition, too. I think we’re used to seeing characters and people who are either ambitious in an idealistic sort of way. I want to be an artist. I want to do something meaningful. Or, a sort of totally bought into the mechanics of capitalism kind of way.  I want to be a crypto bro. I want to be rich. And Eve at least says of herself that she doesn’t have ambitions. Why was it important to her character that she wasn’t traditionally ambitious?  

LF: I think when you read the novel through to the end and you consider it, it is pretty clear that she is ambitious in her own ways. There’s a hunger for an experience. There’s an ambition to be a charismatic, intelligent force. But I think she has so much guilt about the position that she occupies as someone white who comes from privilege. All of the avenues for ambition which are so justifiable and even admirable in people who are making a life for themselves from less are, when applied to her, sort of shameful and greedy. She’s really aware of that. And of course, there are plenty of people who have her exact identity or aren’t gay even, or come from more money, for whom there’s no shame in that at all. But based on her community and her politics, there’s a lot of shame in that. And so I think she needs to separate herself from the identity she was given in that gesture of rejecting traditional ambition. 

Her story is about being released from her anxieties and also from her politics, for better or for worse, by falling in love… because an emotional experience overtakes it.

But I also think for me as a writer, it was really important to distinguish her project and Olivia’s project, because they’re in comparable positions, right? They’re foils to each other in their relationship with Nathan and as queer people who are engaging with the same problem. For Olivia, there’s so much justification in her making art. Her relationship with Nathan, even when it’s potentially unethical, is given a sort of purpose and generosity by the fact that she’s turning it into art. Olivia doesn’t feel that she needs a justification, but Eve views the art as a justification for Olivia’s behavior. And by the end of the book, I needed Eve to come to believe that she doesn’t need to be transforming the experience or offering it to anyone else in order for it to be justifiable and valuable.  

LH: Yeah, I definitely was very intrigued by that dynamic in which being given an identity and economic status that asserts that her life and body are inherently valuable, she’s kind of working to compensate for that in an ethical way. Thinking more about morality, because that’s what’s guiding those choices, I found Eve so earnest and such a likable character. I am thinking specifically about her concern with being good to Olivia, even when Olivia doesn’t necessarily return those concerns and isn’t fixated on Eve’s comfort and happiness in the situation. I was wondering if you could speak to what’s fueling that inner monologue? What shapes her desire to be good, especially to women?  

LF: It’s really interesting that you perceive Eve as earnest and even likable, because a lot of people are having the opposite response to her. They’re like, Eve is so difficult to relate to and her vanity and the way that she responds to Nathan and cheats on Romi, all of these things make her really unlikable. Of course, I believe she’s a flawed character, but I also see her as deeply earnest and not at all jaded. She’s not functioning from a place of cynicism; she’s functioning from a place of genuine searching even when she makes mistakes. 

LH: So what’s driving that desire to be good? Is that an offshoot of a post #MeToo world where we’re so concerned with workplace dynamics in particular? Is it the historic and societal policing of women’s morality that’s conditioned us?

LF: I think that it’s the internal foil of the training we’re given to compete with other women. Eve’s vanity is emerging from that very early socialization. In the scene where she has the fantasy of being in the line up and being chosen among the naked women—that’s sort of her deepest shame point of being cognizant that at an innermost level, she wants to be compared with other women, received favorably, and have other women be—this isn’t the primary goal, but the inevitable consequence of that fantasy—devalued in comparison to her. That impulse in her to constantly be anxious about other women, especially Olivia, is a strong desire to compensate for that gut level socialization. A strong desire to prove not even to them, but to herself, that in her real self that she’s thought about and constructed and her values that weren’t just given to her against her will, that she really does prioritize people’s well-being. Her concrete articulable goal isn’t to live in a world of men who worship her and shit on other women. Of course, that’s related to #MeToo and socialization; it’s her trying to be the person that she wants to be but doesn’t believe that she is.  

Her story is, in a way, one about being released from her anxieties and also from her politics, for better or for worse, by falling in love. Not in a traditional sense and in a very intentionally mediated sense, but it is a story about being released from an idea she has about herself because an emotional experience overtakes it.

LH: See, this is also why I find her so earnest and why I would object to people who think she’s unlikable. It’s that interrogation and desire to reject misogynistic narratives that she’s been given. It feels like people don’t like her because people don’t like women. 

LF: I think people don’t like her because she is so honest about those qualities of internalized misogyny. She allows those qualities to emerge with frankness, even though she’s so ashamed of them and trying to escape them. Whereas the relatable thing in a novel is for a woman to be sexually insecure and self-critical about her body and to think that other women are more valuable than she is. We expect that even exceptionally beautiful women who other people envy, which Eve isn’t, feel self-critical and insecure in comparison to others. It’s not even just that that’s what we expect, because there is a version of the sexually free agentive woman that we really admire. We’re like, isn’t it so amazing this woman isn’t insecure about herself? But that can only exist without comparison to other women. We only admire that woman if she’s like I love myself because of my flaws. And I love other women for their flaws. And I’d never even thought to compare myself to another woman because I’m so secure.  

LH: Which is a falsity.  

LF: Of course. And that’s one of the biggest pieces of pushback that I got from queer readers, was that that comparative framework Eve has about herself sexually is very unqueer by nature. And it is. When you have relationships with women as a woman, you do have to put aside or overcome or reject or radicalize the urge to compare yourselves because you can’t exist sexually in that space where comparison isn’t possible in the way it is in heterosexual relationships. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to be overcome there. 

LH: I thought it was genius to structure this book as kind of a metaphorical and then potential literal trial. Eve feels at once witness, defendant, and prosecution within this relationship. Was it inevitable for you that this ended in a legal dispute? When did that idea solidify?  

LF: No, it was an idea that I had later on, but I immediately knew it was right. I had been looking for a way that Eve would be forced to reckon with these arguments she’s having internally, and the arguments she’s having with [her roommate] Fatima, and the arguments she’s having with Nathan and Olivia in a context in which it wasn’t a friendly argument. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t private. I needed there to be a venue where she had to actually engage with her role socially and in a larger context.  

The 14 Literary Newsletters You Need in Your Inbox

Posted on by Jo Lou

I get more email in a day than I can keep up with, let alone respond to. 

Most of us do. Collectively, we sent an estimated 319 billion emails each day in 2021. I’d love to know the breakdown of these messages. How many chains of rambling updates between old friends? How many are notes to confirm a long-awaited trip to visit family? My bet is these are in the minority, dwarfed by the vast number of promotions and automations. And I’m basing this on my own inbox. 

That’s one of the reasons why I love subscribing to newsletters. It isn’t the same as a note from a friend, but it also doesn’t require more time than reading—no input, no decisions, and no feeling guilty for inevitably getting behind on responding. Just a prompt to take a few minutes and read about whatever the topic.

Here are 14 of my favorite literary newsletters, the ones that I love seeing in my inbox as an excuse to sit for a minute and think about books, writing, and reading. 

FictionMatters Newsletter Logo

Fiction Matters

I first found Sara Hildreth’s Fiction Matters newsletter through the former English teacher’s Instagram account, which has a similar literary focus, and it’s become one of my favorites. Each Sunday, Hildreth shares smart, quick reviews of books she’s read, comments on literary news, as well as a round-up of what she’s loving, making, listening, or watching. The content is great, but the tone is wonderful—kind, warm, and relaxed, the perfect way to jump back into your inbox at the end of the weekend.

Also, the title here isn’t misleading. The newsletter features mostly fiction, with occasional nonfiction reads and recommendations. Most titles are literary fiction, but Hildreth does read across genres, as well.

Cost: The Fiction Matters newsletter is free, but there is a Fiction Matters patreon community if you’re looking for more.

sweater weather Logo

sweater weather

Electric Lit’s editor-at-large Brandon Taylor’s newsletter contains literary criticism that feels like a thought process, like his explaining an idea or unpacking a reaction and teasing it out to see how it works. 

Besides being a pleasure to sit with, these newsletters motivate me to read more carefully, to consider the media I consume in conversation, to stop breaking my brain scrolling—though if you, like me, aren’t always successful at this, Taylor is an amazing Twitter follow. 

In short: Must subscribe.

Cost: Free.

Electric Literature Newsletters

Electric Literature has three weekly newsletters, each arriving on a different day of the week. The Commuter, which goes out on Monday mornings, is a literary magazine with poetry, flash fiction, and graphic narratives. Each email includes one piece, as well as links to essays related to the broader topic, whether that’s aquatic drama or artistic influence. (Also, I can confirm, this email is a perfectly timed transition into the workweek even when you’re not commuting.)

Recommended Reading, which arrives on Wednesdays, features short fiction recommended by another author. It’s simple, but the personalized introduction to a story—explaining why it resonates, why the writer admires it—is lovely. I don’t know about you, but I tend to pay more attention, to engage more when someone recommends a piece to me.

Finally, the Friday round-up hits inboxes at the end of each workweek. This newsletter contains the best of Electric Literature’s essays, reading lists, and interviews, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything.

Life With Kat

Life With Kat is another newsletter that I found through Instagram. Kat Scrivener’s Instagram account is top-notch bookstagram—snaps stacked shelves, cozy mugs, a cute dog, and new books all the time. Scrivener’s commentary on books is thoughtful and engaging, and as a person living with cystic fibrosis, her perspective on disability representation in both fiction and nonfiction reads is important.

For her Life With Kat, Scrivener has a few monthly series: reading roundups, spotlights on new releases, and reflections on backlist reading. In these emails, Scrivener shares likes, dislikes, hype, and misses. 

Cost: The monthly new release roundups are free, but the rest of the regular newsletters, featuring deep dives into recent reads, are for paid subscribers only, $5/month or $50 annually.

Memoir Monday

Memoir Mondays

This is—surprise, surprise—a weekly newsletter. Every Monday, the email includes a curated list of personal essays from Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, as well as other publications. 

Memoir Mondays was founded by Lilly Dancyger, and it’s currently run by Sari Botton. In addition to the newsletter, Memoir Mondays hosts a quarterly reading series in New York City. Not in your inbox, but a nice IRL option.

Cost: The newsletter is free, but the original Memoir Monday essay publications are for paid Substack subscribers only, $5/month or $50 annually.

BuzzFeed Books

Buzzfeed Books

The Buzzfeed Books newsletter sends out two emails each week. The Tuesday emails round up the best new books out each week. The list is usually broken up by genre—including nonfiction, romance, sci-fi, and more—with descriptions from members of the Buzzfeed team or Buzzfeed Books contributors. 

On Sundays, the Buzzfeed Books newsletter highlights reading lists from the week, like must-reads by AAPI author and audio fiction podcasts for every kind of reader.

Cost: Free.

Lit Hub Daily

Lit Hub Daily features links to essays across the Lit Hub website, including author interviews, podcast episodes, reading lists, cultural criticism, and more. Plus, the email includes links to external literary content, so it’s an excellent one-stop-shop for literary news of the day if you’re trying to stay off Twitter.

Cost: Free.

Dear Reader

Dear Reader

Dear Reader is run by Mumbai-based author and journalist Deepanjana Pal. Each month (or so), Pal shares thoughtful, essay-like reflections on the book she’s been reading over the last few weeks.

One of my favorite things about Dear Reader is that these reflections include not only content and criticism, but also the process of reading these books. In the most recent, for instance, Pal describes her expectations for The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley based on the title, and her surprise reading the first few lines. 

Cost: Free.

bitches gotta eat!

bitches gotta eat!

Writer Samantha Irby’s bitches gotta eat! contains recaps and reactions to articles and essays, shows, movies, and (of course) books. And because it’s Samantha Irby, the writing is energetic and hilarious.

Cost: Free for occasional public posts, and access to all content is $5 per month or $50 annually.

A Writer’s Notebook

In this newsletter, author Summer Brennan shares stories from her work-in-progress research or what she’s been reading, occasionally commenting on literary news, and often writing about living in Paris (“Cough Like a French Girl” is an interesting read, and an unbeatable title). The newsletter includes Essay Camp, writing prompts and encouragement in a community “write-along.” 

The schedule for this A Writer’s Notebook isn’t set, but Brennan sends it out at least twice each week. 

Cost: Free for occasional posts, but access to all the newsletter content is $6 per month or $60 annually.

The Marginalian

Formerly Brain Pickings, The Marginalian is Maria Popova’s newsletter that catalogs, as Popova explains, “a record of my ongoing becoming as a person—intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically—drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling.” 

Heavy for a newsletter, sure. But Popova’s essays about classic literature, theory, art, and science are sharp and consuming, which calls for deep reading, the best kind of break from the incessant din of emails and notifications.

The Marginalian has two subscription options, Sundays or mid-week.

Cost: Free, with the encouragement to donate.

Read More Books

Read More Books is mostly a weekly round up of what Jeremy Anderberg, a book reviewer, has been reading, with brief descriptions and reviews. But the newsletter also includes reading lists for various topics, including presidential biographies for each of our nation’s leaders and reads to better understand Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

If that wasn’t enough, Read More Books also features author interviews a few times a month. 

Cost: Free weekly Friday newsletter, and $5 per month or $52 per year for bi-weekly book review emails, personalized recommendations, and access to the Read More Books slack.

The Austen Connection

The Austen Connection

The Austen Connection is about critical writing about books, literary zeitgeist, application of theory to general media, and, of course, a touchstone of Austen classics. The newsletter that considers connections between Austen’s body of work and modern-day media, including everything from reality romance TV to Michelle Obama’s memoir. 

The Austen Connection goes out a few times each month, and the archive has a backlog of the essay-like email. One of my favorites explores the sexual tension in Austen’s writing, particularly Pride and Prejudice, and Sally Rooney’s three novels.

Cost: Free for posts, and $5 per month or $50 per year for early access to podcast episodes and subscriber-only posts.

Reading Habits

I’ll start with a disclaimer here: Arianna Rebolini’s newsletter Reading Habits is currently paused. But if you haven’t subscribed, I’d recommend making sure you’re on the list when she starts sending it out again.

Previously, Rebolini was an editor at BuzzFeed Books. Her newsletter features brief reflections on current reads, including backlist and new releases, with smart observations and frank assessments. Plus, it contains links to book round ups, author events, essays, and more.

Cost: Free and currently not accepting paid subscriptions.

A Hoagie by Any Other Name Makes Me Just as Hungry

Posted on by Alex Juarez

Tonya 

We want a hoagie. We want a fucking hoagie as soon as we wake up. Danny’s has the best in town. Right down the street. So here’s what we do. We drop Barb off down the T so she can ride into town for work. 

Then, okay. Tony Jr. has to get to school. We drive back, pick him up, ignore the harsh rays of teen misery emanating from him like an oppressive light. Then, well shit. We look at our watch. It’s only eight. Danny’s doesn’t open till noon. Fuck. 

We go home. We make some coffee. We catch the news. But something’s grabbing at the edge of our mind. Coffee’s in hand. What could be wrong? We are uneasy. Then, the propulsion to clean. 

We are in the bedroom. The window’s a sky. The air a lemon. 

A hoagie goes by many names. Submarine. Sub. Hero. Grinder. Spukie. Italian sandwich. All the same fucking thing, we think. 

We open the closet doors wide. We enter the sartorial forest. 

Our arms open and close as we pull fronds from the closet onto the bed, building mounds of cotton, polyester, elastic, and silk.

We’ve been unemployed since the boss went bankrupt. The labor exhilarates. As do Barb’s blouses. Her skirts. Her dresses. Her stockings.

Barb has a lot of shit, we realize. Our items are a measly pile of worn cotton boxers. Stiff work pants. Thick denim and plaid. Flat, heavy boots. 

The blouses are smooth. We run our fingers across them, cutting through ripples of fabric that feel like Barb’s newly shaven shins. Tingles slide across our spine. 

The cotton skirt is light, flexible. Its stretch is a soft meow. Imagine ourselves, we laugh, wearing this blouse, this skirt to the job site, our yellow safety hat in hand. We spot Barb’s heels. We smile. We imagine ourselves in skirt, blouse, heels, and hat. We’re holding a hammer. The boys are next to us. We form a straight line, hammering nails one by one in song. 

A hoagie goes by many names. Each one feels different as it rolls off our tongue. We say hoagie because that’s what our father and our father’s father said. But there’s hero. And grinder. And spukie. And then, we remember. Po’ boy. Gatsby. Blimpie. Cosmo. Zeppelin. Each with its own history. We love saying them all. 

Hell, okay, we think. First, our jeans tumble off. Our white tee falls to the ground. We slither into the blouse, admiring the deep burgundy—no, we see in the light, it is oxblood—the tiny buttons disappear between our thick fingers. It barely fits. We cannot button it. The smooth fabric sliding against our skin is a deep breath. 

We zip the skirt. The elastic expands to accommodate our waist. We feel the same as we felt the first time we saw the never-ending blue of the ocean. An incomprehensible expanse suddenly in view. 

We shake our head. What are we doing? We are still, timid. We are afraid but happy.

We tilt our head, only slightly, toward the mirror hanging on the wall. What do we see?

A full beard, neatly trimmed. Intact. Yes, the hairline is, sadly, still receding.

We laugh a little. Then, the tears are a hot sweat, caught by the thick brush of our face.

We say, Tony, you’re beautiful. You’re beautiful! 

Bread. Meat. Cheese. Vegetables. Condiments. 

A hoagie has many names. Every one is delicious. We are hungry for them all.

Chest covered in matted swirls. Blouse pinched beneath the arms. We see ourselves clearly. The garments do not fit. Yet, we are a vision. 

Have you ever seen your wife from afar, we wonder to ourselves, surrounded by strangers across a wide room? Do you know the feeling of your heart opening whole when you spot her, a beautiful, unexpected planet in your orbit suddenly made new by distance? 

That’s how we feel as we glimpse ourselves in the mirror. We are softness. We are stretch. We are hero. We are grinder. We are po’ boy. We are zeppelin. We are spukie. We are sub. We are blimpie. We are cosmo. We are chocolate melting on your tongue.

Our Favorite Essays by Black Writers About Race and Identity

Posted on by Jo Lou

It’s fitting that two of the first three essays in this roundup are centered on examining the Black American experience as one of horror. In a year when radical right-wing activists are truly leaning in, we’ve already seen record numbers of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the very real possibility of the end of Roe v. Wade, and more fervent redlining measures to keep Black people (and other marginalized communities) from voting. Gun violence is at an all time high, in particular mass shootings.

Since the success of Jordan Peele’s runaway hit film Get Out, there has been a steady rise in films depicting the Black American experience for the fraught, nuanced, dangerous life that it can be. This narrative isn’t entirely new, but this is the first time these films have gained critical acclaim and commercial attention. The reason is simple. Whatever the cause—social media, an increasingly diverse population—America can’t run from itself anymore. Our entertainment is finally asking the question that Black people have been asking for generations: In America, who is the real boogeyman?

Naturally, the discourse and critical analyses must follow suit. But it doesn’t stop there: the essays on this list span far and wide when it comes to subject matter, critical lens, and personal narrative. There are essays about Black friendship, the radical nature of Black people taking rest, and the affirmation of Black women writing for themselves, telling their own stories. Icons like Michelle Obama, Toni Morrison, and Gayle Jones get a deep dive, and we learn that we should always have been listening to Octavia Butler. This Juneteenth, I hope you’re taking a moment to reflect, on America’s troubled legacy, and to celebrate the ways that Black people continue to thrive.

Modern Horror Is the Perfect Genre for Capturing the Black Experience

Cree Myles writes about the contemporary Black creators rewriting the horror genre and growing the canon:

“Racism is a horror and should be explored as such. White folks have made it clear that they don’t think that’s true. Someone else needs to tell the story.”

Modern Narratives of Black Love and Friendship Are Centering Iconic Trios

Darise Jeanbaptiste writes about how Insecure and Nobody’s Magic illustrate the intricacy of evolving Black relationships:

“The power of the triptych is that it offers three experiences in addition to the fourth, which emerges when all three are viewed or read together.”

I Was Surrounded by “Final Girls” in School, Knowing I’d Never Be One

Whitney Washington writes that the erasure of Black women in slasher films has larger implications about race in America:

“Long before the realities of American life, it was slasher movies that taught me how invisible, ignored, and ultimately expendable Black women are. There was no list of rules long enough to keep me safe from the insidiousness of white supremacy… More than anything, slasher movies showed me that my role was to always be a supporting character, risking my life to be the voice of reason ensuring that the white girl makes it to the finish line.”

“Palmares” Is An Example of What Grows When Black Women Choose Silence

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, writes that Gayl Jones’ decades-long absence from public life illuminates the power of restorative quiet:

“These women’s silences should not be interpreted as a lack of understanding or awareness, but rather as an abundance of both, most especially the knowledge of what to keep close to the vest, and the implications for failing to do so. They know better than to explain themselves, their powers and their origins, their beliefs and reasons, their magic. These women are silent not because they don’t know anything. They are silent because they know better.”

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” Showed Me How Race and Gender Are Intertwined

For the 50th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Koritha Mitchell writes how the novel taught her that being a Black woman is more than just Blackness or womanhood:

“I didn’t have the gift of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality,’ but The Bluest Eye revealed how, in my presence, racism and sexism would always collide to produce negative experiences that others could dodge. It was not simply being Black or being dark-skinned that mattered; it was being those things while also being female.”

The Delicate Balancing Act of Black Women’s Memoir

Koritha Mitchell writes about how Michelle Obama’s Becoming illustrates larger tensions for Black women writing about themselves:

“In other words, when Black women remain enigmas while seeming to share so much, they create proxies at a distance from their psychic and spiritual realities because they are so rarely safe in public. Despite the release of her memoir, audiences will never be privy to who Michelle Obama actually knows herself to be, and that is more than appropriate.”

50 Years Later, the Demands of “The Black Manifesto” Are Still Unmet

Carla Bell writes about James Forman’s famous 1969 address, The Black Manifesto, and its contemporary resonances:

“But the Manifesto is as vital a roadmap in our marches and protests today as the day it was first delivered. We, black people in America, remain compelled by the power and purpose of The Black Manifesto, and we continue to demand our full rights as a people of this decadent society.”

You Should Have Been Listening to Octavia Butler This Whole Time

Alicia A. Wallace writes that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower isn’t just a prescient dystopia—it’s a monument to the wisdom of Black women and girls:

Through her protagonist Lauren Olamina, Butler has been telling the world for decades that it was not going to last in its capitalist, racist, sexist, homophobic form for much longer. She showed us the way injustice would cause the earth to burn, and the importance of community building for survival and revolution. Through Parable of the Sower, we had a better future in our hands, but we did not listen.

The Book You Need to Fully Understand How Racism Operates in America

Darryl Robertson writes about Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and its examination of the history of overt and covert bigotry:

“While How to Be an Antiracist is an informative and necessary read, it is his National Book Award-winning, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America that deserves extra attention. If we want to uproot the current racist system, it’s mandatory that we understand how racism was constructed. Stamped does just that.”

I Reject the Imaginary White Man Judging My Work

Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts turns to Black writers as inspiration for resisting white expectations:

“…it doesn’t only matter that I’m a Black woman telling my story. What matters is the lens through which I’m telling it. And sometimes, many times, that lens, if we’re not careful, can be tainted by the ever-present consciousness of Whiteness as the default.”

Toni Morrison Gave My Own Story Back to Me

The incomparable literary powerhouse showed Brandon Taylor how to stop letting white people dictate the shape of his narrative:

“That’s the magic of Toni Morrison. Once you read her, the world is never the same. It’s deeper, brighter, darker, more beautiful and terrible than you could ever imagine. Her work opens the world and ushers you out into it. She resurfaced the very texture and nature of my imagination and what I could conceive of as possible for writing and for art, for life.”

Art Must Engage With Black Vitality, Not Just Black Pain

Jennifer Baker writes that books like The Fire This Time give depth and nuance to a reflection of Blackness in America:

“These essays provided a deeper connection because Black pain was part of the story; Black identity, self-recognition, our own awareness brokered every page. Black pain was not the sole criterion for the anthology’s existence.”

When Black Characters Wear White Masks

Jennifer Baker writes that whiteface in literature isn’t a disavowal of Blackness, but a commentary on privilege:

“Whiteface stories interrogate the mentality that it’s better to be white while examining how societal gains as well as societal “norms” inflict this way of thinking on Black people. Being white isn’t better, but, for some of these characters, it seems a hell of a lot easier, or at least preferable to dealing with racism.”

Traveling South to Understand the Soul of America

Posted on by Jo Lou

In South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry, an Alabama native, returns to the South and meets with Southerners to chronicle their stories, past and present—from Henry Bibb, an enslaved man from New Orleans forced to rub salt brine into the bleeding back of a whipped woman, to a white civil war re-enactor at Harpers Ferry, to Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes.

Perry describes how from its founding the United States was “experimental and innovative as well as invasive. Resourceful even. But any virtues were distorted by a greater driver: unapologetic greed, which legitimized violent conquest and captivity,” stratifying the nation into a caste structure of “citizens, second-class citizens, non-citizens, and those who are cast so far beneath every other category it as though they are seen as non-persons.” She argues that our collective understanding of what it means to be an American is intertwined with the South—when we pay attention to the South and its history, we are better able to understand America.

Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of seven books, including Breathe: A Letter to My Sons and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.

We spoke about how viewing racism as a Southern problem keeps our society from progressing, recognizing the targeting of trans kids as a pattern of oppression, and how Gen Z brings her hope.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: In the opening chapter, you say, “Race is at the heart of the South and at the heart of the nation…yet racism is described as belonging to the South, a region that is viewed as backwards.” How does this view that racism, that backwardness, is inherently of the South, keep us from progressing as a society?

Imani Perry: It’s strange because it’s almost like the South is that bad place down there, like an absolution for the other regions. The ways of doing—the exploitation, working people to death, the enclosures, the holding people captive—all that starts with trans-Atlantic slavery and and the colonial project. It is mastered in some ways in the South, but it flourishes everywhere. As a consequence, if you just say, well, that’s a Southern thing, then there’s no obligation to respond elsewhere. It also then becomes this defensive posture—the South is racist. And in some ways it becomes this détente of different parties, none of whom adequately address the issue of white supremacist practices.

DS: In this book you unearth myths of the founding fathers. Can you discuss why it’s important to expose the racism of our founding fathers, especially in this present moment?

It’s almost like the South is that bad place down there, like an absolution for the other regions.

IP: I’m at a moment in my life where I’m very skeptical of national myths. All nations have national myths, told to encourage patriotism and loyalty, but also to create for people a sense of themselves. Even the environmental crisis is fed by mythologies. Like this idea of a shining city on the hill, nothing could destroy it.  Some of the founding fathers are deployed for this myth, and they were people who were deeply involved in a profoundly unjust order.

If we actually, instead of mythology, turn to truth and the complexity of these stories and the tragedy in the building of the nation, then we actually have the possibility of building something closer to being in right relation with each other. 

Even though we don’t have slavery and Jim Crow, we have the residual effects, the practices where we are willing to actually treat large numbers of people in our world as though they are not fully human, whether they’re incarcerated, whether they are undocumented, whether they’re houseless all of these ways of being comes from that foundation. We tell the story fully because it helps us look at who we are now. Maybe this is why we’re okay with this, with completely excluding people, because this is the way that founding fathers behaved.

DS: You noted that the Moral Majority was born in Virginia and you said that’s not incidental, later noting how whiteness became an article of faith and that lynching burning, beating, raping and humiliating all became matters of faith in the white evangelical church. How do you see this reflected currently?

IP: Part of the moment we’re in, the book burning and banning, the idea of cutting off the moral imaginations of children, specifically white children, is an effort to destroy the possibility for white children to identify with anybody who’s not born in a very particular white Christian genealogy, which is an ethical matter. We want people to have the capacity to find inspiration for how to be in the world for everyone, but there’s an effort to shut that down. The targeting of trans kids and their families feels very similar to me to the trajectory from the anti-civil rights movement to the anti-choice movement—there’s a pattern of treating people as a kind of threat that has to be destroyed at all costs and to build an upset of laws around that destruction. It’s really important to understand the pattern.

One of the things I always bring up is Protestants didn’t really care about abortion until the waning civil rights movement. That was a Catholic thing. Abortion protests were actually drummed up to create a moral panic.

DS: You visited Parchman, a prison located on the site of a former Mississippi plantation. You discussed how the labor there is akin to slavery, but that the cruelty is not slavery, but being caught up in a system like slavery when you were by law free. Can you discuss how prisons are constant reminders of the past in the present?

IP: In the South, it’s really apparent because so many prisons are on plantations. I’ve been going to them in one way or another all my life. The landscape is the same. So much of the labor, and the conditions, the sweltering heat and the bugs and the inadequate nutrition—it’s like a repetition of that relationship to the land, but it’s also the composition of who is in prison. On the one hand, the prison farm looks like a plantation. On the other hand, pre-civil war, the prison population was not Black, but Black people were enslaved. It’s a feature of emancipation that prisons become Black spaces. There’s also the Jim Crow echo in incarceration and then there’s a couple of pieces. One is that often prisoners are doing labor that is essential for so many institutions, but is essentially unpaid. I work at a university—I assume like many universities, our chairs come from prison labor. We are taking advantage of this labor that we don’t have to see. That’s classically part of the structure of the transatlantic slave trade and slave plantation culture. Then there’s the injustice, the intensity of the correlation between illness and trauma and who winds up incarcerated. The fact that there’s not a direct connection between wrongdoing and punishment and who gets punished is based upon who is subject to surveillance—that’s totally racialized.

DS: You explore whiteness, how it is not a monolith, how whiteness as an identity can be fickle, how it is policed carefully, how white folks in the South are exploited by other whites, how white Americans were taught that if they expressed solidarity with exploited Black people, they would lose what DuBois termed as the “wages of whiteness.” Did your thinking about whiteness change as you wrote this book? If so, how or how not?

I don’t think that literature is organizing, but that literature can do the work of inspiring organizing or providing information that is meaningful for organizers.

IP: It didn’t change as much. What I had to struggle with is that I’m a movement baby. I was socialized on the left. I was always taught to think about exploitation of white labor alongside the logic of white supremacy, to understand white supremacy is dividing the labor force politically and alienating oppressed people from each other. But in working on the book, I had to bring together my emotional account with white Southerners, which has a wide range—there’s moments of terror, moments of rage. And then there’s moments of absolute tenderness. The intimacy piece is just real, there’s just a closeness, even in places where Black and white people don’t talk to each other much. There are parts of the South where we’re so similar, there’s an ease. That is part of the story that is harder to get to, but it’s really important to understand, because there’s potential there too. 

DS: You interacted with Bob Zellner and Tom Gardner, who worked alongside your parents during the civil rights movement.

IP:  The stories of white people in the movement were really important for me to include. It was interesting just to talk to them, because they also were people who were punished for their decisions and they sort of had to remake their lives. 

DS: When you’re talking about the wages of whiteness—I’ve been thinking about this for years—part of the code of whiteness is to be silent. Because if you speak out, you will be punished.

IP: It’s a thing that doesn’t get talked about because there’s so much critique— appropriate, right?—of white saviorism. But that’s a different thing. But because of it, any discussion of what it means for a white American to decide “I don’t want to be part of the project of white supremacy” is silenced. Not to say it’s worse if white people are punished than when Black people are punished. But to say that’s part of how whiteness actually functions, is it makes it not okay to identify with non-white people at a deep level. We have to be able to identify that. 

DS: When you were in Montgomery, you took part in this day long workshop on #MeTooHBCU with Tarana Burke and Yaya Blay and you asked the question, what do we do with #MeToo on the grounds of the lynching tree?

IP: One of the things that I have grown to understand is that there’s this sexualized racial violence—both the sort of mythologies of the Black male rapist, but also the sort of institutionalized rape of Black women on the plantation that continues in the context of Jim Crow and domestic labor. It’s also important to understand that the habits of sexual violence and secrecy and lies have expanded beyond what we think of as the larger racial logic, and are part of our lives at an intimate level in our families and our communities, so to be there and understand that the sexual violence that happens on an HBCU campus is hard to talk about because of the protection of Black cis men from these longstanding stereotypes.

There’s generations of sexual violence. That is part of what the structure of Southern living was, that has shaped people, that wounds people. That is something that we all have to unlearn collectively. We have to open up those conversations. Part of what I’ve learned is that race is present even when it’s not present, white supremacy is present, even when it’s not present, in terms of how human beings have learned to be with one another, at the most intimate level, and that makes it really hard to talk about, but we have to figure out how to have this conversation despite all of our completely reasonable skepticism of policing and prisons and regimes of punishment.

DS: You note that folks want to act as though Black power started in New York and Oakland before listing how so many people came from the South, which led to a discussion of how in Misssissippi Chokwe Antar Lumumba is the mayor of Jackson, and you now have a state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. Can you discuss?

IP: Part of the turn towards the end of the ’60s, is some members of SNCC become Black nationalists. Some folks are really focused on the development of local political power, in Lowndes County, Alabama, but also in Mississippi, and then there are folks who go international, like Bob Moses and his family. They were trying to figure out not just the relationship to Jim Crow and trying to dismantle it, but were also thinking about colonialism and economic exploitation. 

Often young people don’t get the turn to political representation. It wasn’t, as some people think, this deeply assimilationist thing—it was actually having a stake. Particularly in a place like Mississippi where dispossession could be complete disenfranchisement. The NAACP was part of the building of political infrastructure. People tend to think the NAACP is a more mainstream organization, which it is, but it was also really involved in these local councils and the development of Head Start, and this vision of what having some autonomy in one’s community would mean, and also wanting some land and some control over the land—that’s a radical conception in the South that people don’t necessarily see. 

DS: Your book concludes in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd when protests were occurring worldwide.

Even though we’re all wounded, and after the trauma of the past two years, against all odds, you do the work that moves us into doing better.

IP: These moments of reckoning happen and they seem quite fleeting, but they still matter. If they’re not transformative, they’re at least warnings for us collectively to pay attention to what’s happening. Even if it doesn’t yet push us all into gear, there’s something about sort of the past horror and the ongoing horror that is important to confront. I started early in the book, talking about Puritans and Jeremiad sermons and the end of the book is in a sense a Jeremiad sermon too, which is if we don’t do something, this thing is gonna be over in a more devastating way than we can even contemplate. Environmentally, but I also mean the violence, right? We have more guns, the Klannishness, the hatefulness, and the desire to undo the transformations of the 20th century that got us a little bit more humane. 

I don’t think that literature is organizing, but that literature can do the work of inspiring organizing or providing information that is meaningful for organizers. That it can be the work of moral witnessing, which is what I hope to do with everything that I write. It’s hard to be hopeful, but you gotta try. Because it’s better than the alternative.

DS: That was my question. I have a hard time feeling hopeful. What brings you hope, or does anything?

IP: Young people, like these Gen Z people, the ones who are politically engaged—I feel so admiring of how unflinching they are. They are going to call out every injustice and unfairness. They’re not willing to make concessions on ethical matters and I find that incredibly moving. It’s courageous—the kind of courage I don’t know that I have seen. 

I often don’t feel hopeful or experience hope as a feeling but I experience it as a responsibility, as a doing. My mother used to say this to me—”You have to act as though society is free even though it isn’t.” Even though we’re all wounded, and after the trauma of the past two years, against all odds, you do the work that moves us into doing better. 

8 Books about the Delights of Delusion

Posted on by Jo Lou

Delusion, when used as a literary device, is just another word for truth-seeking. Facts are not truth. Characters with irrational thinking have usually given the facts a try, and are frankly unimpressed. Instead, they develop an extreme conviction that, held up against the traditionally accepted facts or reality, seems ludicrous. Even dangerous. 

Yet I would argue that most of us, in real life, labor under one delusion or another. The belief that hard work leads to success. The faith that so-and-so loves us. Even when proven wrong—even when we are ruined by such things—we stubbornly believe. We want to believe. Nursing a myth can keep us alive.

Delusion, especially the obsessive variety, may lead one to certain doom, but often a delicious doom, full of discovery. My list concerns books with characters who, for better or worse, sink into their own world to find something beyond the narrow existential experience society has deemed acceptable. Bonnie, the main character of my book, One’s Company, attempts the same by submerging herself into the alternate reality of a vintage sitcom to escape her own past. She wants to be other people, live other lives. Whether she knows it or not, she is trying to heal herself. For her, delusion is necessary. Maybe it is for all of us. Perhaps it is only through transcendence, or escape from this human trap, that we will ever approach happiness.  

Comemadre by Roque Larraquy, translated by Heather Cleary

This book is brief and life-changing. Broken into two parts, we meet a doctor in the first half who is intent on finding the exact moment of death and in the second half, an artist quests to achieve total artistic transcendence. Both seek to understand this human bag we’re living in in shocking and farcical ways. This book understands that the only way a person can seek reason and rationality is to go beyond all reason and rationality.

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

The main character of this book is obsessed with the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, Treasure Island, and when she ends up living back with her parents after some parrot-related hijinx, her obsession ripens into delusion. Her voice is strong and relentless, and she is very! Serious! About it! Some people find this book funny, which it is, but it’s also a risky book that’s full of domestic minutiae amid the madness, which I wholeheartedly admire.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori 

Like many breezy-sounding songs from the 1970s that are actually about suicide and societal unrest, Earthlings has a very conversational tone that belies the out-there plot. Two children are convicted in their belief that they are literal aliens not of this earth. It gets weird.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

“You’re not my type!” Lise, the main character, screams this phrase at other people as she hunts for someone to assist in her own annihilation. The plot of this book unfolds over the span of a couple days in an unnamed European country, and follows erratic Lise as she searches for The One.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms

Untold crimes! Bizarre sightings! Inhospitable landscapes! Romantic delusions! Fear delusions! Islands! Really, everything a reader could want in a novel about a fugitive on an uninhabited island that is suddenly overrun with tourists. It’s best to know as little as possible going into this book so you can be completely taken in by the fever dream.

Mrs. March by Virginia Feito

This book concerns those quiet, small lies we tell ourselves every day that can shape an entire life. Written in third-person, this book has a timeless quality that feels refreshing in the current first-person-obsessed literary landscape. The title character goes on a mission to understand her writer husband’s, um, creative licenses with her life and character. We get a peek into the day-to-day happenings of a woman deep in denial.

One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello

This story starts with a man realizing that his self-perception differs from how others perceive him, and he spends the rest of the book deeply disturbed by this knowledge, fixated on what one’s “true” identity is. His circular arguments are the building blocks of the plot, if you can call it that. This story also has, in my opinion, the best book title ever conceived.

Sea of Hooks by Lindsay Hill

This novel is strange and beautiful, written by a poet, and I think more people should read it. The main character is not delusional, but his mother is, as well as his father, and they are the two people who shaped his life.  Set between two timelines, his childhood in San Francisco with his mother and the present day during a pilgrimage to Bhutan, Sea Hooks is about a man trying to find peace and closure.

If you read it, please contact me. I have been waiting to talk with someone about it for a few years now. 

I Found Creative Inspiration in Bridezilla Wedding Stories

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

A few years ago, the internet lit up with a story about a bride nicknamed “Canadian Susan,” who demanded her guests fork over $1,500 each to help bankroll her wedding to her childhood sweetheart. The details were exquisite: A psychic had convinced her to choose the more expensive venue. Her role models were the Kardashians. When her GoFundMe raised just $250, she canceled the wedding, dumped her fiancé, and threatened to leave her young son for two months to go backpacking in South America.

Did the pandemic change me? Or have I always been obsessed with “news” about family fights? I’ve read more about messy weddings—from proposal to nuptials to dismemberment—than any human should. I’d like to think it’s because as a novelist, I seek out the far reaches of human behavior, the wildest possibilities for interpersonal drama. That’s what novels can do, push characters to the extreme so that readers can feel the consequences of risky decisions without ruining their lives. I’m naturally shy and conflict-averse, but rubbernecking at others’ train wrecks, I learn how to live in this world.

A few weeks after Canadian Susan’s story made the rounds, my editors at St. Martin’s Press emailed to ask if I’d be interested in writing a novel about Facebook groups devoted to “wedding shaming.” Susan’s rant might not have gone viral had it not been posted in one of these private groups, where wedding guests convened to complain. From there it was leaked to Twitter, where Chrissy Teigen shared it, at which point every news outlet in the Western world joined the fray.

My work was to understand the plight of others, not project myself onto the page in a variety of disguises.

I took a few days to think about this. I’d been a journalist for almost 20 years, so getting an assignment was not new to me. But being assigned a novel? I hadn’t realized that was a thing. I’d thought a novel was supposed to be a pure expression of the heart, a singular and sacrosanct opus. Or could I find inspiration within a topic offered to me, the way I do with magazine features?

Reader, I said yes.

I have not written about my life, either in fiction or nonfiction. I still harbor the belief that I am not special, my story not interesting enough for fiction. That my voice does not matter. As a child and teen, I had to believe that, because if I had tried to cultivate personhood, it would have been extinguished.

My father was a successful man who imposed his way of living on me and my brothers. Work was noble, self-expression was self-indulgent, and feelings were weakness. I had to protect my sensitivity to keep it alive.

Writing, therefore, became an attic where I could stow my real, vulnerable self, as my body blundered blind through the world. But my stories were disguised, even from me. They have always been about other people.

Instead of writing about my experiences coming out of the closet at 22, for example, my gay characters dated and married women until their forties or fifties. Another came out and, after a terrible heartbreak, went back in.

My undernourished self extended to all my relationships. I censored myself to be palatable, didn’t challenge others or put my needs first. I ended up attracting more than my share of emotional vampires who saw what they wanted in my silence and used me to prop up their egos.

My first published novel, Carnegie Hill, was inspired by a friend who served on the board of his Upper East Side co-op. I was intrigued by the idea of an apartment building as a container for a novel and by the structure of a co-op, that unique living situation in which everyone has financial and emotional stakes in everyone else’s home. 

Then my friend received a terminal diagnosis, and he became demanding and embittered. I recognized the profound horror of his situation, but we couldn’t talk about it, or anything, without fighting. I had cleaved to him because of his sensitivity and insight, but now he used his intellectual heft to flatten me. Beneath the weight of his need, I could no longer exist. I had unwittingly recapitulated my childhood, with an understudy playing the role of the father.

When his personality changed, so did the novel. I imagined characters whose privilege hindered their ability to cope with the vicissitudes of life.

Though the idea had come from my friend, every emotional challenge the characters faced was something I too had been wrestling with—most notably, how to get one’s needs met in relationships. The finished book was a map of my psyche that only I could decode. I was present in the story, just hidden.

The most common question I’m asked at readings is what in my life inspired the book. Which character is me? That’s like handing me a smoothie and asking me to point out the strawberries.

But I don’t think inspiration must come from within, which is to say that the well-worn rule of thumb “write what you know” is just one way to go about it. “Write what you don’t know” can make for some fascinating literature. Toni Morrison told her students not to write what they knew because they didn’t know anything. Kazuo Ishiguro, Meg Wolitzer, Richard Ford, Philip Pullman, and many others don’t believe that well-worn advice, either.

“Write what you don’t know” is also conveniently easy for someone afraid to put himself on the page.

In a fiction-writing workshop I teach at NYU, we examine and write from three kinds of inspiration. The syllabus begins with personal stories, work that reads like autobiography, even though it’s not. Then we move to works that draw from other works of literature, because books gather a literary patina rubbed off by contact with the canon. The third and final section of the course spotlights inspiration from the news—for example, Emma Donoghue’s Room and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

In my case, I was trying to understand Canadian Susan and other brides who behaved badly.

Countless novels have been inspired by tragedies, and the novelist’s work is to infuse these terrible and incredible events with humanity. In my case, I was trying to understand Canadian Susan and other brides who behaved badly. The hero of the story, I realized, had to be a bridesmaid who put up with them.

Of course, I have never been a bridesmaid. The few times I’ve been a groomsman, my worst pain point was getting fitted for a tuxedo.

But I research obsessively. Rarely do I write a sentence without confirming details or definitions—and, as I’ve mentioned, I devour all the tawdry wedding stories that grace my feed. I spoke with dozens of former bridesmaids and read every bridal guide I could find.

I quickly realized that I had been shielded from a LOT. 

I knew that signing up for bridesmaid duties often meant buying and wearing a satin dress that can never be worn again. And that it might require a couple dozen hours of crafting. I didn’t know that women have to give an extra gift at the bridal shower. Or that bridesmaids usually pay for their own hair and makeup, mani/pedi, jewelry, shoes, and special undergarments. Or that they often plan multiple gatherings, a parade of celebrations for the bride. And that more parties are being invented all the time: the bridesmaid proposal, for example. All to satisfy the evolving American fantasy of the perfect wedding.

In the novel that resulted, The Bridesmaids Union, Iris Hagarty creates a secret support group for bridesmaids on Facebook and dishes about her spoiled sister’s bridal antics to her new online friends. I filled the book with wedding horror stories, both from online “news” and those many interviews with friends and family. 

One bride asked some of her bridesmaids to sit during the ceremony, to balance out the sides. Another asked a friend to be a backup bridesmaid in case someone dropped out. Multiple brides requested weight loss from their entourage; one had a meltdown because a bridesmaid got the wrong haircut. I heard the baffling “no kids” rule again and again. Bridesmaids were conscripted to provide professional services like graphic design and hairstyling for free. A tyrannical groom insulted his fiancée and the wedding vendors on his wedding day. A bride never forgave her bridesmaid for skipping the wedding because her father had a heart attack.

Canadian Susan and her $1,500 admission fee didn’t make the cut: Everyone had read that story already.

I thought this new novel would be a different enterprise from Carnegie Hill, one in which I assembled others’ stories as a journalist would, like a puzzle. My work was to understand the plight of others, not project myself onto the page in a variety of disguises.

But here’s the surprise—though in retrospect, it’s not surprising at all—the book is fully me, no matter how much material I found from other sources. My feelings osmosed into the characters, via a literary possession I suppose I can’t help practicing. Every conflict is shot through with my own struggle to inhabit my life. Iris vents on the internet because she doesn’t think her friends want to hear her true feelings. She fails to stand up to her parents, who believe they know what’s right for her and her son. She can’t set boundaries with brides and boyfriends and ends up feeling drained and flattened by connection. Through the novel, she learns how to claim her power and speak her mind. In other words, how to exist.

Day by day, I’m learning that too.

The Cost of Achieving the Indian Dream

Posted on by Jo Lou

Pankaj Mishra’s return to fiction, Run and Hide, depicts the emotional and social costs exacted by the relentless drive for self-advancement and material progress on the inner lives of individuals as well as nations.

The novel traces the intertwined trajectories of Arun, Aseem and Virendra—three students of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), described in the novel as a gateway to the “richness of the world”—whose separate attempts to escape their humble origins mirror the aspirations of Indian society after superpower status in the neoliberal world order of the late 20th and 21st centuries. However, in their eventual failures to escape—and in the damage they inflict on themselves and those around them—Mishra’s characters attest to the degradations visited by the neoliberal order on those left behind, and its fragmentation under the pressures of caste, class, and religion.

Pankaj Mishra brings to the examination of individual lives the trenchant analysis and socio-political awareness with which he dissects the shortcomings of colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism in his brilliant nonfiction works, such as From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger. In his fiction, this critical analysis is permeated with tender attention to the inner lives of his characters, the details of the everyday degradations they attempt to leave behind, and their complex situations as both agents and victims of progress and its discontents.

I spoke with Pankaj Mishra over email about the human cost of the drive for self-empowerment, and the critical yet compassionate insights afforded by literature.

Pritika Pradhan: Run and Hide is your second novel in twenty years, after several nonfiction books. Could you tell us what inspired your return to fiction? Does fiction, with its close attention to individual lives, enable a different kind of freedom and focus than that of nonfiction? 

Pankaj Mishra: Yes, absolutely. I would say fiction enables greater freedom than nonfiction, since your imagination is no longer constrained by verifiable facts and nonfiction protocols. From the time I started out as a writer, I found myself meditating on the role of humiliation in personal and collective lives, and the recourse to pseudo-remedies of self-expansion and ethnic-racial chauvinism. This theme became more and more urgent as the years passed. Today we recognize it in a range of phenomena—from Putin’s assault on Ukraine to the global cultures of inequality and demagoguery.

However, I felt that I had not written or could not write about the way the promise of self-invention, the craving for success, wealth and fame, and the experience of failure and frustration, had decisively altered individual subjectivity. I had written about the role of ideology in public lives, and in politics and economy, but not about the way ideology reshapes private lives, gives fresh content to individual hopes and a new focus to human consciousness. I had written about the new individual freedoms—economic, social, sexual—suddenly available to billions of people, but not about the way the pursuit of those liberations caused fresh losses and traumas. The list of things I had not written about, and which could only be written about in fiction, kept growing and mocking me. At the same time, I was aware that only the form of the novel could unite the intellectual and imaginative modes of comprehension, and I had to go back to it at some point.   

PP: Meritocracy and self-advancement take a high moral and emotional toll, from the childhoods lost in pursuit of academic success, to the self-destructive quest for sexual gratification and financial success by Aseem and Virendra respectively. What do their failures reveal about the world they are attempting to navigate? 

Much of the disastrous political outcomes that we see today are a result of the promise of meritocracy being revealed as a fraud.

PM: I think that much of the disastrous political outcomes that we see today are a result of the promise of meritocracy being revealed as a fraud. It has become too apparent that those who are wealthy are constantly increasing their wealth and passing on their advantages to family and friends. With the “winners” so clearly taking all, social mobility has been revealed as an illusion. And people who believed in it and sacrificed much for a better future are naturally enraged today. No one wants to be or be seen as a loser. But I had already written about the “left-behinds” and their resentments in my non-fiction. In Run and Hide, I wanted to explore the hidden costs of self-remaking among people hailed as the “winners.” The kind of Indians who run the big tech companies in Silicon Valley and the big banks and hedge funds in London, New York, Berlin and Paris, and who are still deeply marked by their Indian pasts and the wider Indian background that still exists of extreme deprivation. 

PP: Arun traces three different paths of escape: Virendra as a billionaire Wall Street hedge fund manager, Aseem as a novelist and leading media personality, and Arun himself as a translator. How do their choices and goals connect and complement each other? 

PM: What is common to all three characters in my novel—hedge-funder, magazine editor, literary translator—is not only their background of deprivation, but also their new landscape of endless temptation, which emerged only after 1990, and in which all three men get lost in different ways.  I wanted to describe both the great external and internal changes of the last three decades of globalization and, as these characters swam into view, I felt I could achieve at least some of my goals. Virendra, of course, is a recognizable icon of a meritocratic society, though he is still unable to break free of his early experience of degradation. With Aseem, a novelist and host of literary festivals sponsored by oil companies and fashion houses, I wanted to explore how literature, or an idea of literature, came to be implicated in a global Americanized culture whose main self-organizing principles and goals—success, wealth and fame, or intensified communications—have long been explicitly in conflict with art, the life of the mind, and progressive politics. I am haunted by a recent photo in which the feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Henry Kissinger are bantering at a festival organized by the Financial Times. This confluence of murderous power, mainstream journalism, literary celebrity, and progressive causes is truly unprecedented, and very representative of our age. In this pseudo-glamorous and hectic new setting of global literature, someone like Arun is seen as a kind of failure, a loser, though of course it was through quiet, sustained work of his kind that most writers in the past defined themselves. 

PP: In contrast to his batchmates, Arun chooses a path considered economically and culturally marginal, as a translator of Hindi fiction living in a Himalayan village. How does Arun’s work as a translator between languages connect to his role as a narrator and observer of different social contexts across time? 

With the ‘winners’ so clearly taking all, social mobility has been revealed as an illusion.

PM: I made Arun a translator rather than a writer for a very specific reason. The translator plays a crucial role in the transmission and reception of literature; this figure is uniquely placed to observe different social contexts while personally remaining invisibly tangential to them. And I think that if you are translating from an Asian language like Hindi, you become aware of the sheer otherness of the experiences—of the caste-shadowed, lower-middle-class, semi-urban lives—that the literature in those languages describes. You also recognize the unassimilable nature of the literature you are translating from, and its great distance from the literature produced in the rich countries of the West. You become aware of the deep intellectual inequality that exists between languages and literatures internationally—an inequality that metropolitan globalizers deepen while claiming, with their literary festivals and international prizes, to forge a “flat world” of “world literature.” 

PP: Arun’s life as a translator in a Himalayan village has some similarities with your own experience as a writer who lived in a similar environment for several years. How did your experiences shape your depiction of the lives of Arun and his classmates? 

PM: I have become more aware over the last two decades of how different my experience of the world—whether of a Himalayan village or of lower-middle-class austerities and hungers—is from most of my contemporaries in Anglo-American journalism and literature.

I think writers and journalists now tend to live in cities or large towns, or certainly far from villages. Living in a small place, you also come into contact with a wide variety of people from different classes and castes, as well as epochs—so many people in India still inhabit, mentally and emotionally, a pre-modern world. For a writer, such rich and diverse material constitutes a great privilege, and I would like to think that I have used it responsibly.  

PP: Gender is also a key marker of difference in your novel. The two main female characters—Arun’s mother, and Alia, the woman he loved—are diametrically opposed in their backgrounds and outlooks, and yet both are damaged by his self-withdrawal. What do their trajectories reveal about the changing spaces for women, and the exploitations and humiliations they continue to face? 

PM: In what remains a man’s world, the spaces for women can seem to expand, but this progress can be deceptive. This is certainly true of the two women in my novel. The first—Arun’s mother—is a clear victim of a brutally patriarchal system. The other woman, Alia, is untouched by older oppressions; she is elevated by class and wealth into the progressive global elite. Nevertheless, she remains beholden to men for her identity.

However, I wanted to explore through my male narrator, not so much as gender inequities, as a feeling that many men know and are unable to articulate. At the end of the novel, which is addressed to a woman he has wronged, Arun talks about the “shame” he feels, the “shame of being a man.” The novel is organized as the confession of a male character chastened by his moral failures, around this feeling that I, and many other men I know, often have—of living in and benefitting from a man’s world, of pursuing explicitly masculine goals of power, with often open disregard for other genders, not to mention species, while usually remaining well-positioned to escape the consequences of our actions. Over time, such male privileges begin to seem grotesque—hence the intense but inarticulate feeling of shame. 

PP: Run and Hide is rich in literary references, from Chekhov to V.S. Naipaul. Characters read—or misread—literature for guidance in their lives. How does literature, with its possibilities of “subtle perceptions and attentive prose” (to borrow Arun’s words) offer guidance in a rapidly changing and inequitable world? 

PM: I think modern literature usurped religion’s role in offering moral and spiritual guidance very early in the 19th century. And it is impossible to deny that great literature expands and sharpens our consciousness of ourselves, other people, and the world at large. This is indeed the great function of literature, if it has any function at all.

However, excess identification with writers or their characters can be harmful—and writers themselves have been alert to this. Flaubert makes the novel’s Madame Bovary reads a dominant influence on her poor choices. In his stories, Chekhov mocks the identification with Turgenev’s idealistic characters that many Russians of his time tended to have. Chekhov is critical, too, of the then flourishing cult of Tolstoy. In our own time, Naipaul, with his myth of the self-invented writer from nowhere, has offered a very seductive model to many readers and writers from the Global South. Of course, there are, in reality, several Naipauls: the productively tormented artist, the ideological journalist, and the puerile provocateur raging against Muslims, women writers and homosexuals.

In my own novel, a misreading of Naipaul’s fiction encourages Aseem into self-aggrandizement. This is because he is looking for clear answers rather than complexly posed questions in literature; he has become blind to the perpetual ambiguity in human affairs that Naipaul, or any great artist, always evokes.