A little over a year ago, I was working as a cocktail server at a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, putting my MFA to good use by writing what I could on my cell phone between rushes. One night, I had an idea for a story and dashed into a bathroom stall to jot down some quick notes. Once inside, I saw I had a new WhatsApp message from my mom. Apparently, she’d been watching late-night TV and this ad came on she thought I might be interested in: one of those companies my professors had warned me about that tries to convince writers to pay them thousands of dollars to publish their book.
For a long time, I kept large parts of my life hidden from my mom. After I came out to her in high school, she’d reacted in unpredictable ways. At times, she was seemingly accepting, playing Madonna around the house or patting the empty seat next to her on the couch so we could watch Ellen. But there were other moments when I was certain she thought I was a monster: the afternoon she tackled my locked bedroom door after looking through my phone and finding a photo of me taken with a drag queen. Or the day she stopped me as I left the house to go out with friends and warned me not to get AIDS. As a teenager, I felt safer, and easier to love, when I withheld anything that might trigger her anger. Essentially that meant avoiding all personal details that would remind her I was gay. I didn’t talk to her about my confusing relationship to gender, about boyfriends, or even about my regular friends, who were mostly queer.
But now that we weren’t under the same roof and she had no control over how I lived my life, as a test I’d begun to share little things about what I was up to, including that I was writing a memoir. She might not have known much about the publishing industry (like that it’s usually the publisher who pays the writer, not the other way around), yet standing in the bathroom stall at the gay bar, reading her WhatsApp message, I felt the kind of support I’d always wanted from her. Could it really be this easy? I wondered. I imagined us as a perfect sitcom family, sitting together at the dinner table, asking her advice about crushes, my career ….
Just as quickly, another thought brought that fantasy crashing down. Thank you, I messaged her back in Spanish, but I gave up on the book. I’m thinking of trying teaching. At work. Call you tomorrow!
I didn’t. Instead, I waited for a week to pass before dialing her number, hoping it would be enough time for her to forget the publishing ad, and the memoir I’d foolishly told her I was writing, and every memory she still carried with her of me begging her to drive us to the library as a kid.
In Manhattan, I carried trays of whiskey sours over my head while dodging messy, heartbroken twinks flailing their arms to Dua Lipa.
My mom worked as a barista at the Orlando airport Starbucks. In Manhattan, I carried trays of whiskey sours over my head while dodging messy, heartbroken twinks flailing their arms to Dua Lipa. Despite the obvious differences, my mom’s life and mine are quite alike: we served expensive drinks to people on vacation. I suspect that when I shared with her my plan to give up writing, my first love, all of the dreams she’d had to give up because of money flashed through her mind: doing hair, opening a Nicaraguan restaurant, traveling—her job at the airport a constant reminder of how little of the world she’s gotten to see. I suspect this because, ever since I told her I was through with the book, she’s done anything but forget. Several times a month, she calls to ask me if I’m writing anything new. When I say no, she says, But you’re the artist in the family! I remember when you were little you were always reading. You have to follow your dreams. And, when you’re rich, you can buy your mama a Jaguar.
I try my best to change the subject. How’s the garden going? You ready for hurricane season? What’d you have for breakfast? Anything to avoid telling her my dreams have already come true.
Not long before I started working at the gay bar, I sent my memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, to a literary agent, who agreed to represent me. The title was meant to be ironic, a phrase I’d borrowed from the doctor who diagnosed me a high-risk homosexual when I asked to be put on PrEP, a medication that reduces your risk of HIV infection. After the pandemic hit New York and I lost my job, I realized how risky my life had actually become: I was unemployed, on Medicaid, unsure how I was going to support myself, or my mom if I had to, because she also lost her job. We were in quarantine, under curfew. Every day I woke up to the sound of ambulances carrying COVID victims to the hospital and fell asleep listening to police helicopters circling the sky.
With an unexpected amount of free time, I threw myself into editing my book, burying my anxiety under the hope that once it sold, I’d have some level of financial security. When I had a solid draft ready, my agent sent it around to some publishers. One by one the rejections started pouring in. I sat alone in my cramped Brooklyn bedroom laughing despairingly as I read about the six-figure book deal a white woman had gotten for writing a novel about Mexican cartels, at the thought that I’d ever be successful, at how silly my dreams were. And then I got an email from my agent: SOFT SKULL LIKES YOUR BOOK! The following week, I signed a publishing deal with an independent press. My advance was hardly enough to buy my mom a Jaguar, but it’s kept my fridge stocked throughout the pandemic. Suddenly my life was slightly less risky.
I’ve wanted this from the moment I discovered being a writer was even a thing. My mom might want it for me even more. The trouble is: I don’t know how to share the news.
My advance was hardly enough to buy my mom a Jaguar, but it’s kept my fridge stocked throughout the pandemic.
Although her message about the publishing ad sent me into a panic, it also reminded me how far I’d come as a writer, even if I paid most of my bills cocktail serving. Throughout graduate school, despite being confident in my abilities and knowing I had a good story, I’d always been skeptical about my memoir selling. I’d had the statistics about what books get published shoved down my throat enough to know it’s rarely the coming-of-age story about a queer child of a Central American immigrant. Strangely, it was those statistics that kept me going. While writing my memoir—in particular the chapters that deal with family—I didn’t feel inhibited by how they might react to the book, because I figured no publisher would ever buy it.
Reading my mom’s message, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to piece together thousands of dollars to get my memoir out in the world through a company that aired ads between episodes of Telemundo novelas. By then, I had an agent. She’d read and liked my book! She had a fancy office in Manhattan because she was good at selling books! Maybe my memoir would sell, I thought. I might really become a published writer. Yet any validation that might have brought me didn’t last, because it meant my book might actually find its way into my mother’s hands.
There are certain things my family doesn’t talk to anyone but God about. We keep our problems within the walls of our house. Perhaps that’s in response to the narratives that are pushed on us as immigrants, as Latinx people, as the working poor. The world demands our suffering, so we smile. Even amongst ourselves, admitting that anything is wrong is out of the question. Should I foolishly bring up trauma, my mom will quickly let me know I’m confused: The only mistake she made raising me, she’ll say, was when she put too much salt in the empanadas for Christmas.
My book is not sad. My mom is not a villain. But I am honest about the complicated journey we shared regarding my life and my queerness. Part of the reason I wrote this book was to untangle the messiness of my upbringing and give meaning to the memories that haunt me. I’m done crying over the past. It’s time to move on. I don’t believe writing is therapy, but spending hours attempting to understand why people did what they did, their motivations, and how they impacted me, helped me reach a place of acceptance and forgiveness. I dedicated my book to my mom because writing it reminded me why I love her and want her to be a part of my life. Maybe if I hadn’t, I would still be angry about the day she tackled my bedroom door. Maybe I would still resent that, after the shooting at Pulse Nightclub a half hour drive from our house in Orlando, the only thing she asked me is if I’d seen the news, as if my universe hadn’t just imploded. Writing my memoir, while not a substitute for therapy, helped heal our relationship.
Part of the reason I wrote this book was to untangle the messiness of my upbringing and give meaning to the memories that haunt me.
I’ve always been purposefully vague with my family about my writing. They’re not big readers, and even if they were, they would read in Spanish, and they likely wouldn’t pick up a memoir. Compared to poetry and fiction, in Latin America, memoir isn’t a hugely popular genre. The combination of those things and my not believing I’d ever get published allowed me to write freely in graduate school without worrying that I’d ever have to deal with the repercussions.
I didn’t wonder if my family seeing themselves reflected through my eyes would put a strain on our already complicated relationships, or if they’d take my attempt to discuss the afflictions that plague many Latinx folk—homophobia, machismo, addiction, violence—as a betrayal. I didn’t wonder, to put it simply, if my uncles or my brother or my mom would be mad at me. And if so, would they forgive me for telling strangers our business? Or would they ice me out like they did when I came out at 16? Over a decade later, there are still relatives who don’t speak to me beyond the obligatory hello at family gatherings, others who constantly tell me I’m in their prayers. It took years for me to learn how to navigate conversations about my queerness with my family. Would my book reopen old wounds and force us to start from scratch?
While I was getting my MFA, the problem of writing about people you know came up often in my memoir classes. If they did something bad to me, I should at least be able to write about it, a classmate of mine once said regarding a story she was working on about sexual assault. A woman who was going through a divorce worried that her memoir would be used against her in a custody battle. I can’t do that, she countered. I could lose my kids. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what you can and can’t write about, another chimed in.
Everyone had an opinion: Always try to find one good thing to say. Change their descriptions a bit and just deny it’s them. You have to ask yourself if writing the story is worth sacrificing the relationship.
Writing the story is what helped me rebuild those relationships, and now having it published might put them in jeopardy again.
I listened with interest, but these conversations always seemed irrelevant to me. I could write whatever I wanted because what I wrote wouldn’t end up anywhere. The moment my book sold, I realized how wrong I had been, and worse, that it was too late to ask myself whether the story was worth sacrificing the relationship. Even if I had asked myself that, there was the added catch-22: Writing the story is what helped me rebuild those relationships, and now having it published might put them in jeopardy again.
Terrified after reading her WhatsApp message about the publishing ad, I did the only thing I could think to do. I told my mom I was quitting writing to pursue teaching. Maybe she wouldn’t Google me. Or walk into a bookstore and see my name on a bright, beautiful cover with the words HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL. Maybe I could publish my memoir in secret. Perhaps I still can, but a side-effect I didn’t expect is that instead of letting the subject go, she’s only become more supportive. It breaks my heart, because whenever she writes me a message asking if I’m doing okay, I want to be able to tell her: Guess what? I did it! I made it. You don’t have to worry about me going hungry anymore. I want to tell her: I wrote about our lives, Mom, and yes, there are some things in this book you might not like, but there is also so much tenderness, like how after you kicked down my door that day and I thought you would kill me for being gay, you climbed into my bed and told me you loved me, te quiero, perdóname.
I want to say: I didn’t write this book to hurt you. I wrote it because I didn’t know what else to do with my hurt. I wrote it because I love you, too. La quiero más. Perdóneme.
I want to say: I didn’t write this book to hurt you. I wrote it because I didn’t know what else to do with my hurt.
I’ve made my career out of words, but right now it feels impossible to speak them. One day, I hope I’ll have the courage to take her to a bookstore, open my memoir to the dedication page, run my finger down to her name, and say: Look, mami, here you are. At the very front. For you.
Until then, I have to think about what’s best for me. My mom had to set her dreams aside because of money, to feed our family. Am I going to set aside my dreams for her, for anyone?
If I could go back and give my teenage self a piece of advice, it would be to wait to come out of the closet until I’d reached a place of safety and didn’t have to depend on my family’s support. I can’t change the past, but I can follow the same advice now: I lost my family once for being gay. I want to wait a little longer before I risk losing them for writing about it.
Gwen Kirby’s collection Shit Cassandra Saw is structured around a handful of women lost to the annals of history, with a modern twist added. There are ancient warrior queens turned contract hitters, cross-dressing pirates, and lady duellists in a Seurat-like tableau.
Like its cursed prophetess namesake, Kirby’s collection is obsessed with the act of seeing as witnessing, but also how the narratives of history obscure the people trapped within it. In most cases, history and the structures it seeds shun those who choose to live beyond its borders, like women hanged for witchcraft or adulterous professors haunted by dead preachers.
And in the case of these unruly women, all dead, do they exist if they remain unrecorded by history? For Kirby, the answer is yes.
The collection’s electrifying opener is instructive: Cassandra offers a rambling list that starts with lightbulbs and washing machines before peeling off into hilarious, bittersweet spite. The Trojans who damned Cassandra are nearly an afterthought—she remains with us to the end. Dead but holding onto the last word, even if it belongs to no one but herself.
What you need to know about Kirby is that she’s deeply invested in hope. That might not be obvious if you only have the title of her debut collection to go on, but look closely and it’s right there in the marrow.
Sometimes, Kirby’s brand of hope looks like teenage potential of the female variety: in “Casper,” summer swelters with theft and convenient but transient friendship, while the protagonist of “The Disneyland of Mexico” yearns for love in all the wrong places. Other times, it’s the gritted determination to endure a baseball game to the end, embodied in the players of “Mt Adams at Mar Vista.” And, often, hope is a rage hot enough to burn a city to the ground.
As 2021 drew to a close, Kirby and I talked over video call about the ways in which women use narrative to reclaim their inner lives, the limits and propulsive power of form, and her ambivalent love for young teenage girlhood.
Samantha Cheh: Aside from the obvious stuff, do you think much has changed for women since Cassandra’s time?
Gwen Kirby: I think not as much as changed as one might wish, or as much as we would like to tell ourselves that they have—while at the same time recognizing how much they’ve changed and how grateful I am for all the ways that they have changed.
I think the story“Shit Cassandra Saw”is really trying to get at that. There’s so many things now, like vibrators and washing machines, all this great stuff—but at the same time, so much still has to be done. A lot of the stories in my collection are contemporary stories about women who are still angry and frustrated, who are still taken advantage of and not allowed to be themselves.
When I wrote “Shit Cassandra Saw,” it was right after the 2016 election. I just sort of let it rip. I let myself play with a historical figure in a way that I never had the confidence to do before, but I started to realize that I was so hungry for stories about women in the past. For women in the past who were like me: angry, funny—just normal people.
SC: I love how the women talk to each other across history. You chose to write about less obvious figures from history. I mean, Cassandra is one and maybe Boudicca, but Gwen Ellis Ferch? That’s pretty left field.
GK: I wish I could say I did all this research and whatever, but I just love history so I try to constantly expose myself to it. I was listening to this podcast where they talked about the first woman hanged for witchcraft in Wales was named Gwen and I was like holy shit! I have this little folder full of women from history, fighting pirates and things. I felt like the historical spine could kind of hold the collection together in a way that it had been missing before. I could lean into my own playfulness, passions and enthusiasms.
SC: It’s really interesting the way in which these women have this deep wisdom, but it’s a wisdom that they know has no place in the world that they inhabit.
GK: I really wanted the book to feel like I had opened up a space for that wisdom. Before, no one was asking that Welsh prostitute what she thought of the world, or how she felt about how men treat her. I just wanted the book to be my own little world for them to speak.
SC: You allow these women to narrate these inner selves within the story, but there’s no impulse to share or explain them to the other characters in the world. Cassandra sees all these things she doesn’t bother to tell the Trojans; Boudicca has this unstated wish to be a man, while Gwen Ellis Ferch has this rich inner life that she keeps secret from her mother and the world.
GK: I don’t think it’s that they didn’t want to share their thoughts and feelings, but there’s a certain feeling with all of them that you would have to earn that from them—and the people around them haven’t earned it yet.
SC: Your characters wield significant control over their stories and their anger, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that most of these women can’t escape death in their stories—Nakano dead from gunshot; Gwen Ellis Ferch hanging at the end of a rope. Even as she describes it as a glorious fight, Mary Read still dies in childbirth. History can’t seem to change.
You can be as empowered, angry or self-aware as you want, but you are still a part of the world. Your choices are still circumscribed—not just by our future but by being alive.
GK: I think that all of those stories get at a melancholy truth, which is that even as these women own themselves, they’re not independent of history. They’re not independent of society. As much as I feel that you can be as empowered, angry or self-aware as you want, but you are still a part of the world. Your choices are still circumscribed—not just by our future but by being alive.
The paths narrow before you as you go through life and there is a kind of sadness but also strength in that they are owning their own lives. In telling their own stories, they are liberated from them. I talk about women so much with this book, but I think that feeling that all the paths behind you have closed is very universal.
SC: Oddly enough, the few men who are in the stories are also trapped by the form and structure of your stories, especially in the hermit crab pieces.
GK: I really enjoy writing stories that feel like they circle back on themselves and accrue meaning, which flash can do really nicely and quickly. You set up this structure that is like a little tiny watch—Boudicca goes up to bat three times and it accrues; or Cassandra just lists objects and it accrues by itself. I like how tightly wound those stories are. They can capture a single moment in a story.
The other thing is I love watching form pushed to its limits and fall apart, like a character starts out retiling a bathroom or writing a Yelp review and it just spirals out of control. That feeling of pressure that lives inside all of us—pushing up against the self and form—that’s pretty central in all the stories.
SC: I defo see it in “A Scene in A Public Park at Dawn” where you have this high octane duel with big emotions and guns going off, but it’s also very tightly controlled. Everything seems choreographed.
GK: I just feel like that’s what life is like. You look at the insane the way the world is right now—how frickin’ hard everything is—but we still move through the world in all of these prescribed forms. We go do our jobs and act a certain way. We act a certain way in our marriages, towards our parents, even as it can feel like everything is falling apart.
In “Scene”, there are all these emotions that are chaotic internally but they’re also going through this dance that’s been choreographed for centuries that allows them to express anger. It’s an outlet and a constraint. I feel that way about form but also life.
Some days, it’s absolutely, freaking maddening to have to go to work while the planet is burning and there are fascists everywhere—but also, thank God I have to go to work! Because if I just sat at home, I would lose my mind. There’s that tension in a lot of my stories between the comfort that form and ritual can give us, and also how much we can feel trapped in that—how much we are trapped in that.
SC: Sort of how your young teenage girls in “Casper” have jobs and shared experience to give structure to the shapelessness of summer, but also the individual wants and desires they never speak aloud.
GK: Yeah, those three girls weren’t together because they were destined to be best friends—it was just sort of a quirk of fate in this small town, for this summer. And they’re also so, so afraid of the things they’re learning about themselves. There are things they really want from one another, but don’t want to have to admit to because to admit that you want a friend or love or someone to like you—it’s to expose themselves in ways that they maybe don’t really have the maturity to do. Or maybe they see that they’re not each other’s right confidant.
SC: Your affection for young teen girls is palpable throughout your work, especially in “The Disneyland of Mexico.” You deal so tenderly with the very specific experience of growing up uncertain of who you should be—not just as a young adult but a female one.
GK: I think those stories are me working and thinking through what my own young adulthood was like. As someone who developed a woman’s body long before she was one, you get this feeling that suddenly you are something to the world that you are not to yourself. Something that you’re not ready to be yet. That was a time that I felt like I had a lot of cognitive dissonance: I wanted so badly to be grown up and the world was treating me that way, but at the same time, I was 12.
You look at the insane the way the world is right now—how frickin’ hard everything is—but we still move through the world in all of these prescribed forms.
I have a very vivid memory of just turning 15, and I was sitting outside after driving training and this group of men just came over and—under the guise of flirting—wouldn’t leave me alone. I was definitely scared, but it’s weird because I was also flattered.. Which is, you know, ridiculous but I wanted to be a woman and I was not. I remember wanting to reach towards the next thing and being really scared and unsure of what that even meant.
I’m fascinated by coming of age stories about girls and the way in which our bodies are changing. Our ambitions are changing. That’s maybe when we first start to really hit some of the hard and fast expectations about womanhood. There’s something kind of pure, wonderful and fascinating and messy about that time of life. I think it’s just really good fodder for stories.
SC: In stories like “Disneyland,” “Mt Adams at Mar Vista” and “We Handle It,” what is very clear is the resilience that young girls have in face of very difficult scenarios. I think it’s a resilience that is very particular to the female experience.
GK: I think those girls at that time in their lives have something of the cynicism that we acquire as we go—or at least, they pretend to wear it. But I also feel like at that age especially, when you see something that’s not right, it’s followed by a desire to change it. There’s this feeling of hope and possibility and potential in the face of the world, which I think is just also a feature of being young,
All of those stories also speak to the way in which teenage girls and women are there for each other—the way in which those friendships are where we find that resilience and hope. We get to have relationships that help us, especially in times like teenagerhood when we’re lost. I do think that’s one of the ways in which patriarchy is worse to men.
SC: There’s a very deep hopefulness and those stories. I always feel that lit fic about young women tends to be characterized by a very deep sense of unhappiness—but there’s so much tender hope in the way that you approach those kinds of moments.
GK: I’m full of tender hope! But there’s a lot to be said for knowledge, as well. When you’re growing up, there’s things about that that are lost forever, but there are also beautiful things that you gain. I’m a hopeful person and when I write, I want that for my characters too, even when they go through things that are hard. That’s how I live with feeling angry and still avoid becoming embittered.
Tuesday evening, Fiona rode the 6 train downtown after seeing Kenji home from the hospital. She’d tucked him into bed and made sure the packet of OxyContin lay within his reach on the nightstand, next to his notebook. He looks terrible, Fiona had thought. Like a wilting jack-o’-lantern left out long after Halloween, a face falling into itself. She didn’t want to admit that she felt afraid. Kenji was thirty-two, six years older than she was. He had cancer of the mouth and throat. On alternating Tuesdays, she and Jasper, her boyfriend—her ex-boyfriend, that is—took turns sitting with Kenji while the chemo drained into his arm. He was on his second round of six-weeks, and skeletal from it. Kenji was Jasper’s best friend, but Fiona had grown to love him, too. Four months ago, Kenji got the prognosis: surgery to clear out as much of the cancer as they could manage, then radiation and chemotherapy. A month and a half later, Fiona learned that Jasper had been sleeping with a woman in his writing program at Hunter. She’d read about it in Kenji’s notebook, snooping around one night while he slept.
It was July now, and Fiona was biding her time. She’d survived her first year at NYU Law, on top of everything else. It had been the most punishing eight months of her life. She and Jasper had come to an agreement about living together through the end of their lease. Neither one was in a financial position to move out before then. Fiona claimed the queen bed; Jasper took up residence on the futon. He owned full access to the TV, but she had the window-unit AC in the bedroom. They exchanged information about Kenji’s recovery and not much else.
The humidity hung nearly solid on her walk from the Canal Street station to her building on Mulberry and Hester. In the lobby, Fiona checked the mailbox marked Lin & Chang. It was empty—Jasper must’ve picked up their mail already. She climbed the five flights up to the apartment, considering how she would tell him that Kenji needed another surgery. He’d lost too much weight. His doctors wanted to put a tube in his stomach so that Kenji could feed himself protein shakes through a plastic funnel. She heard the TV blaring from the hallway. Fiona imagined Jasper parked on the futon, staring vacantly at the extra-wide flat-screen, that outsized monstrosity he’d insisted on buying last fall. He needed it for “research”—plus the Netflix subscription, DVDs in the mail every week—narrative structure, beats and silences. Four o’clock in the morning on Black Friday
he’d camped out in front of Kmart on Astor Place to get the deal that included a free DVD player. She put her key in the deadbolt and waited a moment, gathering herself before she turned the knob.
A soccer match played on the TV, the field a million light pixels of blinding, verdant green. Jasper turned toward her, his face in profile backlit by the brilliant pitch. He asked how it went with Kenji tonight.
“Can you not get crumbs everywhere?” She cast a weary glance toward the bag of Utz chips in his lap. “I saw two roaches last week.”
“Big ones?” He scanned the floor around his feet, as if searching out evidence of the roaches she accused him of attracting. “I haven’t seen any since the exterminator—”
“I have to tell you something, but don’t freak out.” She was still standing by the door with her flats on. “They said he needs to have another surgery.”
“The hell?” he said. “They found another—”
“No, no,” she said quickly. “You know it’s hard for him to swallow anything now.” Nudging her shoes off, Fiona leafed through the pile of mail on the small table next to the door. The Con Ed bill, a couple preapproved credit card offers, a reminder for a teeth-cleaning, and—what’s this? A save-the-date postcard for her friend Amir’s wedding in October, upstate in Woodstock.
Fiona explained what the doctor had said about the procedure Kenji needed.
“A feeding tube?” said Jasper. “Jesus.”
“Are you free Friday? He’s scheduled for ten in the morning,” she said. “Or else I could ask to take off work—do a half day.” Fiona was clerking for an appellate judge this summer, a coveted internship she’d won over other 1Ls in her cohort. The work was demanding and joyless—not that she’d expected anything different—but she was glad for the solid hours of citation research, memo drafting, and proofreading, which kept her from feeling like an object unraveling in six different directions.
“I can do it,” said Jasper. “I’ll go.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.” He turned back to the TV.
Clutching the save-the-date in her hand, she brushed past the futon and into the bedroom. She shut the door and flipped on the AC, then sat down to study the postcard. Amir, her law school buddy, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, lavender silk tie. He grinned sheepishly, as if aware of and slightly embarrassed about his disarming handsomeness. His arm was curled around his fiancée’s waist: Khadijah, a glamorous Black woman who stood half a head taller than him. She was a pediatric resident at a children’s hospital. They were perfect together. Fiona crushed the postcard in her hands.
“Oh shit!” Jasper shouted from the living room, startling her. “Fuck yeah!” She realized he was yelling at the TV. Fiona shook her head. She knew Jasper was scattering potato chip crumbs everywhere. Well, he could sleep with the roaches crawling all over him. She didn’t care.
All she wanted now was to make it through the end of the lease in peace. Less than two months. Fiona didn’t know where she would go, but she would find some place. She’d have to put out feelers soon to see if anyone she knew needed a roommate, to ask for leads on upcoming vacancies. By September, Kenji would be done with the chemo. She’d be back in school, her second year. Maybe she could move into Kenji’s apartment, just for a while. He had a place in Harlem, a spartan bachelor’s studio he’s kept since his time at Teachers College. They could help each other, thought Fiona. Both of them, in remission. The fact that Jasper would hate it made the idea more delicious.
In March, Kenji had told them the news after finally getting what he thought were swollen lymph nodes checked out. The three of them were standing outside a crappy midtown sports bar where they’d just witnessed Cal massacred in the first round of March Madness. There was a Japanese American boy on the starting five, a lanky shooting guard whose last name also happened to be Mura, and Kenji had told everyone at the bar that he was the player’s cousin, spinning a story about youth league booster clubs, aunties who pounded and sold exquisite mochi back home in Gardena. Fiona and Jasper had gone along with it, because every time Mura put up points, someone sent them a round. In the end, however, Mura’s offense wasn’t enough to save the team from elimination. As they were saying goodbye, Kenji headed uptown and Fiona and Jasper downtown, he’d slipped in the news in a quiet, by-the-way voice.
Fiona wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What? What did you say?”
“Throat and mouth cancer,” Kenji said.
“What?” she said again. “But you don’t even smoke.”
Kenji shrugged. They were all quiet for a few moments.
Jasper had been the one to break the silence. “What happens now?”
Kenji told them his surgery was already scheduled for the following Thursday.
“Where? What hospital?” Fiona shoved him. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“I’m sorry,” Kenji said after a moment. “I didn’t know how— what to say—”
“Bro.” Jasper hesitated. “You scared?”
The night traffic coursed down Seventh Avenue, flashes of light in the dark. Fiona was glad for the buzz she felt from all the shots.
“Kenji, do you want to—I don’t know—come over to our place?” she said. “Get another drink somewhere?”
Kenji shook his head. “I still have to finish grading some papers tonight.” He glanced up the street and folded his wool beanie down over his ears, raised his arm to hail a cab. One pulled over for him. “Mura out.” He bumped forearms with Jasper and then submitted to a tight hug from Fiona.
They made love that night with a tenderness they hadn’t shown one another for months, in bed or otherwise.
She didn’t want to let him go. His long black hair, which he wore down that night, spilled over her shoulders. She breathed in his shampoo, but underneath it, behind his earlobes, she thought she smelled something murkier, darker. Even after he dropped his arms, she held on to him, and she only let go after he made a show of prying himself loose from her grip.
The subway ride back home was quiet. Fiona looped her arm into Jasper’s on the walk from the station and felt him squeezing back with his elbow. They made love that night with a tenderness they hadn’t shown one another for months, in bed or otherwise. She felt guilty for only having noticed its absence now. “I’m sorry,” she murmured in the dark, after they’d finished. “I’ve been so busy, trying to keep up with all my school reading—I haven’t been around for you.”
Jasper’s back was turned to her. Fiona pressed her breasts and stomach against him, nuzzled his neck with her nose, her lips. “How are you, baby? What’s going on with your writing?” He didn’t answer her—she figured he was asleep.
“I love you,” she said softly. “Jasper Chang. I love you.”
The soccer match over, Jasper pulled the futon out flat for the night. Lying down, he listened to the sounds coming from behind the bedroom door. The moan of the blow-dryer told him Fiona was perched on the edge of the bed—she never went to sleep with her hair wet, an old superstition she’d made him follow, too—probably wearing one of his ratty T-shirts that she’d long ago claimed for pajamas. Then, the asthmatic rubbery sound of the window being thrust open. Fiona ducking out for a smoke on the fire escape.
Jasper clicked off the local news in the middle of a report from the Bronx—a brick factory spewing orange flames from its windows—and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He lay there, cramped, bitter about the unfairness of it all. So he’d made a mistake. Was she so perfect? He’d never confronted her about it, but he suspected Fiona and her Pakistani friend from law school—what was his name?—liked each other more than the normal amount. Late-night study sessions and whatnot. Had he ever said anything? No way. Wasn’t his style to be so petty, register every little concern. Point being that he, Jasper, could overlook certain things. How could Fiona be so ready to toss out the whole relationship, these past six years? She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t mean it. It was a mistake. A big misunderstanding. They were getting back together, he knew it. She knew it. Kenji knew it, too.
Helen Park. He’d been resentful that their classmates assumed the two struck up an alliance because they were the only two Asian American fiction writers in their year. In fact, Jasper had intentionally ignored Helen’s friendly glances during the orientation events. He’d also made a point to steer clear of Phuong Ly, a poet in the year above, to combat the stereotype that all Asians stuck together. Jasper wasn’t going to be pigeonholed.
He thought Helen was a lesbian at first. She wore her short black hair gelled into spikes, a rotating uniform of loose chambray shirts topped by colorful fringed scarves, and always, some clown lipstick was painted on her mouth, bright tangerine, sparkly purple, and, occasionally, goth- metal black. He made it through the fall without engaging her much, but a month into the spring semester, she’d plopped down next to him at the bar where everyone congregated after workshop and called him out: “You’re avoiding me, right?” Though her lips were parted in a smile, she delivered the line as if lobbing an insult, her eyes glittering. He’d noticed then that Helen had a tooth on the side of her grin shaped like a fang.
“I have a girlfriend,” he blurted out.
Helen snorted. “Relax,” she said. “Girlfriend. Cool. Well, what is she?”
“What do you mean, what is she?” he said. “She’s a law student.”
Helen shook her head. Her hair didn’t move. “No, I mean, like—is she Asian?”
“She’s Taiwanese,” Jasper said. Helen raised an eyebrow. “So what?”
“Why don’t you ever invite her out with us? Everyone else brings their boos and randos.”
“I don’t know, she’s busy.” He didn’t want to tell her that Fiona would find their conversations—about books, writing, their professors—insufferable.
Jasper had long suspected that Fiona wasn’t totally on board with his writing ambitions. The program was designed to accommodate working professionals, but Jasper had insisted on quitting his day job—communications department at a charitable foundation—to fully immerse himself in the MFA. He had some savings and took out a student loan for tuition and living expenses. He’d wanted to chance a higher amount, max out both the subsidized and unsubsidized federal limits, but Fiona had advised against it. What about all your law school debt? he’d said. That’s different, she replied. After I finish I’ll actually— She didn’t finish the sentence, just let the words hang there. He’d been stung by her frankness, though he knew she was only being pragmatic.
“Why’d you ask if she’s Asian?” Jasper said.
“You seem like—I don’t know.” Helen shrugged. “Your stories in workshop—”
“What?”
She shrugged again.
Helen was only a year out of college, the same age Jasper was when he moved to New York with Fiona. That night at the bar, she told him to stop writing stories about white people. He’d scoffed and then they’d argued—“Just because I don’t indicate what race the characters are doesn’t automatically mean they’re white!” “Um, yeah, dude, it reads like that, sorry to break it to you.” “Not true. That’s your own racist reading bias. Not my problem!”—until Jasper realized their raised voices had attracted everyone else’s attention. The others from their workshop stood around the bar clutching PBR cans, staring at them.
Jasper stood suddenly, knocking over his barstool. He tossed down a few bills and stormed out. Helen followed him. They shouted at each other out on the sidewalk. Frustrated, he grabbed her hard by both arms—he thought maybe he would shake her. An alarmed expression crossed Helen’s widened dark eyes. Jasper remembered himself. Then, she was leading him to another bar, where they took shots and kept arguing, but there was laughter in it now, and something else; something more dangerous, Jasper recalled. Later still, when he followed her up the stairs to her apartment on Delancey—Helen was going to lend him her copy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee—Jasper thought: Nothing’s happened yet, and nothing might happen, anyway. Pull yourself together, Chang.
When he got home that night, Jasper took a scalding shower before falling into bed with Fiona. Six years together: Fiona wasn’t the first girl he’d slept with, but she was pretty close to it. Jasper promised himself it was only going to be that one time, with Helen. The sex wasn’t anything spectacular, and her room smelled vaguely like cat piss. The next Monday after workshop, however, they fucked again; then another time, another day of the week, until Jasper couldn’t remember why it mattered, as though he’d somehow believed that cheating on Fiona, if done on a Monday, gave him moral immunity. For whatever reason, to whatever ends, he wanted Helen, and he had decided to let himself have her.
By the time Kenji told him and Fiona about the cancer diagnosis, Jasper had been hooking up with Helen for three months. That week, Jasper couldn’t help but feel pulled back from some precipice he hadn’t known he was standing on. Kenji was his best friend, and Fiona was his girl, still. One day, he was certain, she’d be his wife. He had to stop seeing Helen. There was no romance between them, only the intoxicating fumes of mutual derision, which each accepted for erotic intrigue. That, and their mutual loneliness. Helen made no complaints when he ended things. He returned the copy of Cha’s poetry to her, unread.
The faint line of light under the bedroom door snapped black, and Jasper heard Fiona settle in, the comforter rustling. An image of Fiona’s bare legs, her inner thighs brushing softly against each other, passed through his mind. He missed her, and the missing was tinged with anger and shame. The beginning of a dream cast its net over him: Fiona straddling him on the futon, the gray outline of her body in the darkness of the living room. Her fingertips on his nipples, teasing. They hadn’t touched one another since somewhere near the end of April, when Fiona had found out about Helen, after everything was already over. Kenji’s fault, punk ass with that notebook. But Jasper couldn’t even be mad—dude was fighting cancer, right?
Jasper startled awake at four in the morning, the world still dark. The apartment was suffused with the smell of melted butter and hot sugar, as it was every morning, rising from the Italian bakery that occupied the ground floor. He rubbed his eyes and yawned, tried to float back to sleep, but felt suddenly chilled by the sensation of being watched.
“Fiona?” Jasper rubbed his eyes again. “You okay?” He sat up on the futon. A figure stood by the bedroom door.
“What if,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “What if Kenji doesn’t—”
“He’s doing so good,” Jasper said. “You can’t think like that.” He patted the space next to him. She stepped toward him on silent feet and sank down. After a moment, he put an arm around her.
“Are you crying?”
She shook her head and turned her face toward him, as if to prove she wasn’t, even though it was dark and he could barely see. He shifted, enough to close the small distance between their mouths. Fiona met him there.
They kissed a few times before he pulled the T-shirt over her head. Jasper cupped his right hand over her breast, found her nipple between his fingers, and pinched it, hard. She gave a small gasp. With his mouth on hers, Jasper moved his hand to her neck. Under his thumb he felt her pulse jumping. Her hands were tugging at his shorts. He pushed her down on the futon mattress. All of a sudden Jasper remembered how it was, the frenzied pleasure of sex with someone you loved and who you knew loved you back. He wanted to call her a bitch for how she’d been treating him. He fought the urge to say, I love you—
Jasper stayed silent and kept thrusting, the palm of his hand pressed against Fiona’s neck. He was only doing what she liked—to be brutalized, just a little. Made to acquiesce, pinned down, her vagina slapped and bruised. And afterward, he knew she liked to be held. He tightened his grip around her throat. She whimpered and moaned, writhing underneath him. They moved together in the dark, as one. They generated heat. The air seemed to buzz in Jasper’s ears, the sound of honeybees. He held his breath. He waited for her to come. In another minute, she arrived.
Friday morning, Jasper was dressed and downstairs before nine. Kenji’s surgery, scheduled for ten at Mount Sinai uptown. Outside, the vendors on Mulberry Street were setting up for the day. He strolled past a fruit stand piled high with lychees, clusters of longan, bright pink dragon fruit the size of his fist.
Earbuds in, an old DJ Shadow playlist keyed up, he passed one stall after another on Canal Street selling junk souvenirs: miniature jade figurines, knotted red rope ornaments, novelty lighters and keychains, and those conical bamboo hats. Maybe they were all storefronts for illegitimate businesses. Knockoff designer handbags, miniature turtles, bootleg DVDs. Or something more sinister? Poor girls imported from China, some trained to work at massage parlors, jerking out perfunctory happy endings, others assigned to long hours crouched at the gnarled feet of hardened Manhattan women, scrubbing calluses and sawing off toenails.
He swiped through the turnstile at Lafayette, recalling the time he and Kenji had staggered into one of those shady massage parlors south of Canal with a neon-lit OPEN sign. Three in the morning, they were both faded as hell, elbowing each other forward and knocking over shit in the small front room. An older woman who reminded Jasper too much of his mother ushered them into a dim hallway behind a red beaded curtain. In the end he had backed out. He smoked several cigarettes on the sidewalk while he waited. Kenji swayed out half an hour later, the red from all the tequila shots drained from his cheeks. He laughed, and threw an arm around Jasper’s neck. “Worth it,” he muttered. “God damn. You’re a pussy, you know that?” Then he ran for the gutter and vomited into it, bent over with one hand pressed on the sidewalk.
Jasper came above ground a half hour later at Ninety- Sixth and Lex. Two blocks west, and two blocks north. The surgery building was brand-new and clean-looking. Upstairs, a set of blue chairs lined the waiting room, and a yellowing philodendron relaxed in one corner. Only two of the seats were filled. An Asian man in his seventies, his face sallow and dotted with large brown spots, sat beside someone who must be his son, because the younger man had the exact same face, without the liver marks. Neither one looked up when Jasper shuffled past them up to the glass window at the back of the room. A young white nurse sat typing into a computer. Jasper asked if Kenji had arrived and checked in already.
“Last name?”
He told her, and she thumbed through a stack of papers next to the keyboard. “Philip Mura for the gastroendoscopy?” She looked at him for confirmation over a set of seafoam-green reading glasses.
“The what?” He’d forgotten that Kenji used his English name for official records. “It’s for his stomach.”
The nurse told him the procedure would be done in about an hour and a half.
Jasper sat down at one of the blue chairs. He glanced over at the father and son. If they gave him an opening, Jasper would gladly explain the story. Was it wrong? The thrill he got from telling people his best friend had cancer, and then waited for the glimmer of sympathy in their eyes as he nonchalantly elaborated that he was Kenji’s primary caretaker—well, one of them, anyway.
Jasper planned to write about the whole thing: how the surgeon split open Kenji’s neck to scrape off the tumors, cut out a third of his tongue, and then stitched in a circle of flesh from the inside of his left forearm. Next, the radiation treatments that burned purple scars into Kenji’s chin and throat. That was when he’d stopped talking—hurt to use his tongue, hurt to swallow down spit—and started using the notebook to communicate.
The chemo bags were supposed to be the last thing, poisoning any chances of future growth. But now, while Jasper sat waiting, Kenji was on a table back there. A hole, two inches below the sternum. A plastic tube for funneling liquid food. Weird, Jasper thought. Weird, gross, and sad. A winning trifecta for a short story. Maybe he’d weave in a backstory about the Japanese American internment during World War II. A wound in the chest . . . he groped for a metaphor.
That would show Helen he wrote fiction with Asian American characters. He’d prove her wrong.
He considered calling Fiona. Jasper hadn’t seen much of her after what happened early Wednesday morning. She’d made herself scarce the last couple nights.
The handsome young man in the hospital waiting room peered out the window with his intense brown eyes . . . An intentionally bad line. Jasper smiled, and then looked toward the clock on the wall.
Jasper didn’t expect the wheelchair escort. Kenji had on a Team Japan jersey—the World Cup semifinals were broadcasting later tonight. The shirt hung on him like how it might look draped on a coatrack. Jasper probably had a good forty pounds on him, since the chemo. Even Kenji’s head had shrunk, the most disconcerting part of the weight loss.
“You good?” Jasper asked. Kenji raised a thumb in the air.
Downstairs, Jasper hailed a cab crawling north on Madison. Kenji sat waiting in the wheelchair, squinting against the sun. The cab pulled to the curb, and Jasper took a hold of his friend’s elbow to guide him into the back seat, then shut the door for him. He walked around to the other side and got in.
“Where to, chief?” the driver asked. Jasper gave him the block.
Months before, when he’d confided in Kenji about slipping up with Helen, he hadn’t considered the possibility that Kenji would be angry with him. They were supposed to be boys. Homies for life. They’d been floormates in Unit 3 when Jasper was a freshman, Kenji a third-year transfer at twenty- four—he bought everyone’s beers. Jasper never thought for a second that Kenji would take Fiona’s side of things—he’d been the one to convince Jasper the massage parlor didn’t count as cheating. It was like watching porn, or going to a strip club, Kenji had said about the place on Doyers. Strictly professional. Jasper needed a friend to talk to about the Helen situation. Kenji had scolded him, like he was some immature kid.
And then, Kenji had done the worst: he leaked the secret to Fiona. He swore it happened by accident—Fiona had opened up the notebook and read it without his permission. There was a confrontation, then retreat, which led into Jasper and Fiona’s present stalemate.
He wondered if Kenji liked the chemo days with Fiona better than the ones with him. Did they laugh? Did she tell stories to entertain him while his body swallowed up all that medicine?
Kenji said he was staying neutral; he loved them both. Still, Jasper couldn’t shake the feeling that Kenji had been irretrievably lost to him. He didn’t know when it happened: Kenji belonged to Fiona now.
In the back seat of the cab, Jasper glanced over at Kenji dozing. He wondered if Kenji liked the chemo days with Fiona better than the ones with him. Did they laugh? Did she tell stories to entertain him while his body swallowed up all that medicine? A maddening thought: What if after all this, Kenji and Fiona got together? One time at the gym, Jasper caught a glimpse of Kenji’s dick in the locker room—uncircumcised, and fucking huge.
The cab lurched to a stop in front of Kenji’s building. Upstairs, he helped get Kenji settled into the bed. Jasper checked the fridge: nothing but a Brita pitcher and bottles of vanilla-flavored Ensure. An old stick of butter in the door. He glanced back at Kenji’s sleeping figure before he slipped out quietly.
Jasper called Fiona from the sidewalk outside Kenji’s building. “I want to talk,” he said. He asked what time she’d be home tonight.
“About what?” she said. “Is Kenji okay?”
“About me and you.” Jasper paused. “The other night—” Fiona sighed. She said she’d be home at six.
Fiona met Jasper at the apartment after work, as she promised. She asked how it went with Kenji’s gastroendoscopy this morning.
“Fine,” he said.
“I’ll go up there tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going to ask him if I can stay with him—”
“Fiona.” Jasper’s voice was shredded. “I want to work things out. You know that.”
“The lease ends after August,” she said. “I can probably be out before then.”
“What do I have to do? What do you want me to say?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
They sat on opposite ends of the futon. Fiona faced the giant TV screen, refusing to give Jasper her eyes.
“There’s nothing to work out,” she said. “We already talked about this.”
“Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. Couples therapy. Anything.”
“Two months ago, we decided this was what needed to happen—”
“What about the other night?” he said. “You barely say two words to me for how long, then all of a sudden—”
“What happened to you?” Fiona examined her hands. Her voice was quiet. “You used to be different.”
“I said I’m sorry about— I made a mistake. I told you, it didn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t care about her,” Fiona said. “I don’t care what it did or didn’t mean to you. It doesn’t matter to me.” She stood and paced the room, because she couldn’t sit next to him any longer.
“I’m so confused.” Jasper’s eyes were wet. “I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t understand—I’m still me. I messed up. But I’m still the same—”
“I want this to end. I want to move out and be done with it,” she said. “I don’t know what the other morning was.” She hesitated. “It wasn’t . . . anything.”
“You’re lying,” he said.
She watched him cry, the whites of his eyes turning red. Fiona felt a bitter satisfaction at his suffering, and a tinge of pain for him. She felt embarrassed that she was enjoying this. She didn’t want to enjoy it. She didn’t want to be cruel. But the feeling was there, all the same.
“Don’t do this,” he said now. “Please, baby. Don’t give up on me—what we have—”
Fiona didn’t answer. She stood there with her arms crossed, as still as anything.
“The other morning,” he pleaded. “I know you felt something.”
Fiona shook her head.
“Look at me.” Jasper waited. “Please.” Fiona turned her head toward him and met his gaze. Over the back of the futon, he reached out for her hand.
“I used to think, there had to be nothing left, for me to leave.” Fiona stayed where she was, arms crossed. “And I thought there was nothing left between us. Only Kenji. Taking care of him. Making sure he’s going to be okay.”
“There’s a lot left—there’s us. Me and you.” Jasper let his arm hang down over the back of the futon.
“Not enough,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “That’s not true.”
She sat back down on the futon, next to him. They were silent for a while. She curled her legs up and hugged her shins. “Can you do me a favor?” She paused. “Can you help me shave my head?”
“What?”
“Kenji’s been so down lately, I think it’ll cheer him up.” She paused. “Help him get through the rest of chemo.” Jasper didn’t reply. He sat leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
Fiona glanced over at him. The way Jasper looked at her then, like she was a wonder, something magic, Fiona knew that she would always love him. She’d forgotten that feeling, the pleasure of being seen by someone you loved and who loved you back. For a moment, before she stepped into the future on her own, and the past—their past—closed for good, she reached for him as if through a door, and she held on to his hand. How soft the skin of his palm against hers, how warm and familiar his fingers. How dear he was to her, after all. Jas per had been her first love. He would always be that.
The next morning, Fiona headed uptown to check on Kenji. When she got above ground at 125th, she reached for her cigarettes. Her knuckles brushed against a crumpled ball of paper and it fell out of her purse, landing on the sidewalk at her feet. The save-the-date for Amir and Khadijah’s wedding—she didn’t know why she’d been carrying it around. Fiona bent down to pick it up. She unfolded the postcard, smoothing her thumbs over the wrinkles creased in the paper. When Amir had announced his engagement in an email to their clinic last quarter, she’d replied with her congratulations, and he’d sent back: “You’re next!”
In the last six years, she and Jasper had talked about marriage, and kids, in a vague way. Last year, they’d agreed to wait until after they both finished their degrees before getting engaged. Fiona had once been able to imagine the wedding with confidence. Jane, her best friend, standing up there by her side. Kenji next to Jasper, of course. Now she wasn’t sure about anything anymore. What would happen to her this September, when she turned twenty-seven, without him in her life? A long time ago, she’d pressed Jane for her honest opinion after she’d met him at Fiona’s graduation at Berkeley. “Honestly? You won’t get mad?” Fiona braced herself. “Just kidding—he seems great, Fi. Is he really writing a novel? What does that even mean?” Fiona’s friendship with Jane in the last four years had lapsed into something dormant—last they talked, months ago now, Jane had been dating a woman named Carly, though Fiona couldn’t get a read on how serious things were between them.
She strolled in the direction of Kenji’s building, the sun on the back of her neck, her newly shorn crown. She felt self-conscious and kept touching her head. Were people staring at her? Did they think she was some kind of escaped Buddhist nun? When she passed Kenji’s brownstone, her feet kept moving. She was still smoking the cigarette.
Fiona thought about the notebook. When she’d leafed through the pages that night while he slept, Fiona knew it was a violation of Kenji’s privacy. Still, she felt it was her duty as a friend to monitor his state of mind from week to week. The notebook was part communication tool, and part journal. Kenji had lines copied from Neruda love poems, quotes from Kant and Hume on existential meaning, a series of zen koans and his earnest attempts at answering them. A few entries of recorded dreams. A list of medications. Then she’d come upon a page, just a few lines: Enough about me, what’s up with you? Did you stop seeing that girl? How’d she take it? You okay?
She’d touched Kenji’s shoulder to wake him. Showed him the page. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—but what is this? Is it Jasper?” Kenji had brought his hands up to his face. He took the notebook from her and then he’d thrown it across the room. It had hit the wall with a dull thud.
The novel The School for Good Mothers begins with Frida Liu–a single working mother who is at her wit’s end–having a bad day that culminates in her losing her daughter to protective services. As her punishment she will be part of a new program to rehabilitate bad moms and if she is successful, then and only then can she get her daughter back. It’s a shocking, scary and biting satire of a culture that will not stop surveilling women’s bodies and minds. It’s the kind of book you interact with–yelling What?? Nooo! thencurling into a ball or having your stomach drop at the drama. Tearing through the pages then slamming it shut, afraid of what comes next. Laughing and then snorting because it’s also wildly funny which I’m still so amazed by because how can it be all these things at once?
There is no book I’ve been yearning for longer than Jessamine Chan’s debut novel. I met Chan in graduate school more than a decade ago. She’s the reason MFA programs exist. She’s that mythical person you’re told to find in your graduate program. The one who builds exciting and inviting communities wherever she is. That writer and reader you can share work with forever. Since then, I have been privy to all the ups and downs that come with writing a novel. Then add into the mix having a baby when you weren’t sure you were ready for a baby, when in fact you were writing a dystopian novel about not being sure about having a baby, and it makes sense this book needed time to gestate. But holy shit was it worth the wait.
Chan and I talked over Zoom about parenting, art, identity and power, and just who gets to decide what makes a good mother in an inequitable world.
Diane Cook: Were there questions about motherhood or the future that you were trying to get at by writing The School for Good Mothers?
Jessamine Chan: It’s really hard to put the why of it all into words, because for a really long time, I feel like I was just working out personal questions with the story, because the fear that was driving the writing of the book was really just me being really afraid of having a baby and becoming a mom and taking on that responsibility and changing my life. So I definitely felt like the book was a way to process all that fear and pressure.
I think I also just felt really troubled by modern American parenting culture. Like, even as someone who wasn’t a parent and who was just observing it through my friends who had children, or reading about it in the media, and then reading books about it when I was doing novel research, it just felt so oppressive.
There’s this external cultural pressure, but also all this internal pressure to feel loving and joyful and grateful and patient at every single moment, which just felt so stifling in a lot of ways.
And then I had my baby, and then I was actually living in this hyper-intense parenting culture that I had been satirizing.
DC: And did having your baby affect the direction of the book?
JC: Well, the good thing about being a very slow writer is that it’s almost like the book grew alongside my baby, because I was revising the chapters so slowly that eventually the book and my child were around the same ages. So I could write about babyhood when she was a baby.
And then when she was a toddler, I stole tons of dialogue and also learned about how much a toddler of that age talks, or eats, or how they move. And so, that all got folded into the book. So many of her toddler and infant milestones and memories of her babyhood are woven into the book, I feel like I built a baby memory book within the book. So, instead of finishing her first year baby album, I’m giving her a dystopian novel.
DC: There’s this moment in the book I want to talk about. When Frida is awaiting the verdict on her mothering the Judge–Frida’s judge!—tries to console her by saying basically, Hey I have two kids and four grandkids so, I understand how anxious you are right now. It’s such an awful moment. The kind of thing that slices so deep and is so insidious; this idea that because we have had the umbrella experience–being a mom!—that we understand the ins and outs of every other mother’s experience. She assumes her experience is everyone else’s experience, and if it isn’t, well that’s on them.
This whole dystopian apparatus you’ve set up in this future world comes from a total lack of empathy for, or the ability to relate to, people with different experiences than your own. It struck me as one of the basic building blocks of the book—this inability to see mothers as individuals and only see them as robots that can be programmed to care for their children.
JC: I think what I was trying to get at, with this dystopian school and these oppressive new rules, was the idea that it’s possible for anyone to know better. A lot of people in power believe that they know better, or they know best for a particular family, or what’s best for the child in a particular family.
One inspiration for the book came from a Rachel Aviv article in The New Yorker called “Where Is Your Mother?” which followed a single mom who left her toddler at home alone and then never got him back again.
But what struck me about the article was that the woman was an immigrant. She wasn’t American. And they were judging her parenting, her personality, her way of communication, and her depth of feeling by very American, Western standards—this Western ideal of how a mom is supposed to behave and how tender she’s supposed to be. I just felt so angry on that mother’s behalf. There was this other system coming in and telling her what the standards were supposed to be and why she was a failure. And they weren’t taking into account that she was from a different culture or any details of her personality. She was a person who deserved a second chance, but never got one.
What surprised me—once I started reading about the issue of termination of parental rights and kids who get taken away from their parents—was that it was so much more pervasive than I thought, which was just shocking because it feels like the greatest nightmare of all to have your kid taken away by the government. But that’s happening all around us.
DC: When Frida gets to the School, she notices mostly Black and Brown moms, a few white moms scattered in. So, in this dystopia, mothers are being surveilled, but not all mothers. Like, every mother has done something that they are not proud of or that they regret, right? But not every kind of mom is represented in that place. And so it made me think about who gets surveilled and who are the ones that the state or this governing power thinks needs intervention?
I haven’t had many chances to read about Asian American women being messy on the page… Just being flawed in all the ways that make people more real as characters.
JC: I wanted the book to gesture at the fact that the way that we are surveilled is different depending on race and class. And that we don’t all face the same amount of monitoring from the government or the police. What I learned in the reading I did was that the circumstance of getting caught up with Child Protective Services and potentially losing custody and being dragged through the courts primarily happens to poor Black and Brown women.
DC: She also notices that she’s the only Asian American or Chinese American mom there.
JC: In reality, someone of Frida’s race and class would not typically be caught. So she’s alone and the ultimate outsider. And so that gave me, as the writer, a much broader perspective.
And I feel like I haven’t had that many chances to read about Asian American, or Chinese American women, being messy on the page, and not making the right decisions or being selfish. Or being self destructive and desiring or even having anxiety and depression. Just being flawed in all the ways that make people more real as characters. I wanted Frida to get to be messy.
DC: Do you think that’s partly why she gets caught? She doesn’t fit into a flat stereotype and maybe that made the world take notice and surveil her more?
JC: I don’t necessarily think that was it. I mean, I’ve had white friends whose children are sitting in the car, who run back into the store to pick up their wallet off the counter that they forgot and they come back to the car, having been gone for 30 seconds, and there’s someone standing at their car door saying, “I was about to call the cops on you.” And that is in suburban Connecticut. I wanted Frida to have her very bad day in a world where there’s a lot of those good samaritan phone calls to the police, but not have support in her community.
DC: No one is rooting for her.
The way that you judge a person’s fitness as a parent is always gonna be informed by your experience of race, culture, and class and what you think good and bad parenting is.
JC: I wanted her to be not at ease in her community. Throughout my whole life, I’ve often been the only Asian person in the room. And I guess I wanted to speak to that in some way. It’s so ingrained in my experience of being a person in the world to be the only person who looks like me in the room. Sometimes I’m in a crowded space and I’m sometimes the only person of color. And it’s been like that since childhood. It’s an experience of always being an outsider and always having the slight discomfort of not seeing people who look like you.
I never imagined giving Frida any Asian allies in the School. I guess I wanted to write about race in a way that asked more questions rather than me making any grand statements.
DC: It’s so interesting that the mothers in the book end up taking care of robot babies as a stand in for their real children, because it feels like they’re being taught to be robotic moms. Like, you cannot be a mother without fluctuations and feelings. You cannot be a mother without making mistakes and having to apologize to your kid. I apologize to my daughter often because I do something that I know was human but kind of shitty. You know what I mean?
JC: But I think the feeling bad about the shitty moments is something from today’s parenting culture.
30 years ago, moms had shitty moments and didn’t apologize. They just got on with their day because there wasn’t a culture. Which is part of the culture of motherhood that I’m satirizing—where you not only have to have a perfect house, perfect career, and perfect marriage, you also have to be 100% on point for your child at every moment of the day and love it every moment of the day. And I feel like that’s really oppressive.
The idea of reeducation and parenting classes [in the book], that is from real life. The version I wrote is insane, but there is a kernel of truth in real life where there are court mandated parenting classes and parenting coaches and manuals. And your progress is judged in order to get custody of your kids again. I thought it was so bonkers, but it’s just part of our system.
DC: Even if we all agree there needs to be more room for mothers to define what good parenting is, it seems impossible there won’t still be a limit or line that moves someone from the acceptable to unacceptable category. And so there will always be people whose actual job is to judge and then inform others of where they fall.
In some sectors of American culture, once you’re a mother, that role defines you and negates the rest of your personality or anything that came before.
JC: This book is not proposing answers and I’m not proposing answers. Do I have a way of fixing a flawed system? No. But I think I wanted to call into question whether or not any of those decisions can be made free of bias. Because individual judges and individual social workers are making decisions that will potentially change a family’s life or a person’s life forever. But how can those decisions be made in a vacuum? How can those decisions ever be fair? Because the way that you judge a person’s fitness as a parent is always gonna be informed by your experience of race, culture, and class and what you think good and bad parenting is.
DC: There’s this section early in the book when Frida is waiting to hear about what will happen to her, and she fully expects to get Harriet back because there really is no other possible reality in her mind and she’s describing how she’s gotten her room all ready for her and—
JC: You sent me an email saying, “She stocked her fridge. No.”
DC: It fucking destroyed me. Because, I mean, I’m not spoiling anything by saying she doesn’t get Harriet back then. She has to go to the School to be reeducated. But there’s a couple pages where we learn what exactly the counselors and case managers observed and reported about her. It’s all so contradictory and reading it you get this sense like water funneling and going down a drain. You realize there was no way she could ever do anything “right” in the situation. Because it’s all in the eye of the beholder who already has a judgement or a perspective in which Frida is bad.
JC: There’s this premise that these decisions are gonna be objective, but how can it be anything but subjective?
DC: One thing I loved though is that these characters, who are being punished for their bad mothering, sometimes push back against the idea that they are bad. They think, “There must be something good about me… right?” The only way they get their kids back is to conform to these state sanctioned standards which are totally out of reach, and yet they defiantly hold onto pieces of themselves even though the stakes are so high. Can you talk about balancing their sense of self and their role as moms?
JC: I wanted to explore how Frida holds onto her integrity while being indoctrinated. In some sectors of American culture, once you’re a mother, that role defines you and negates the rest of your personality or anything that came before. The oppressive state standards were my way of taking something that bothered me about our culture and making that feeling literal. So instead of saying, yeah, mothering should be your first priority, the School says “All you are is a mother. You should have no other thoughts or desires besides your child’s safety and well-being.” Which makes the mothers desperately cling to what remains of their identity and keep some part of themselves secret and out of reach.
DC: We talk about being art moms sometimes. Why do so many art moms have such a hard time justifying their work? Do lawyer moms and doctor moms and teacher moms have just as much angst as I do about the time I want or need to spend working versus being with my children?
JC: For me, what’s hard about being an art mom is that the art requires complete immersion and devotion and concentration and so does the human child. And I think what’s hard about the balance is that there’s no set structure for it. I’m sure it’s also very, very hard to be a professional in most anything right now. I’m sure just parents in general are having a hard time. But I think what’s hard, for me, about being an art mom is that I could technically be working on the art all the time.
DC: Yes, me too.
JC: It just requires a different conversation in your head to prioritize the work when the work is art, because the world treats that as not real work. I have found it hard to ignore that message that what I’m doing is a selfish pursuit. And so I constantly have to have the conversation that it is okay to do this thing that the world sees as maybe selfish or foolish and unworthy and to take time away from my child to do that. So it’s a whole other layer of pep talks. It’s just hard to get rid of the guilt. Like I don’t want to feel guilty, I just do. And I can see why all the messages from society are wrong, but the guilt—it’s still there.
DC: What’s amazing is that I found myself succumbing to suggestions in the book about how I should behave as a mother. The school is so certain of their standards that I would start to think they’re right. I’m reading as a mom and thinking to myself, “Wait, I don’t do that–should I be doing that? Like, I don’t talk to my kids in motherese, should I be???” And I’d have an anxious moment before I remember this is satirizing this absolutist thinking about what mothers should be. It’s incredibly potent.
JC: The satire was my way of processing my thoughts, feelings, and anxiety about a generally upper-middle-class and white American parenting culture and all the pressure. I found, and still find, the sheer number of instructions about any parenting task or decision to be overwhelming, so part of the satire was taking the idea of instruction and making it insane.
Through satire and using speculative elements, I wanted to call into question who is making those rules and whether it’s possible to ever have a set of universal standards that’s separate from the influence of race, class, and culture. How can the teaching of parenting ever be truly objective?
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?”, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month, we’re featuring Jenessa Abrams, an essayist, fiction writer, literary translator, and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Check out the 4-week online non-fiction workshop Abrams is teaching about decentering the reviewer, and instead reviewing books through a social and political lens. We talked to her about good and evil, chocolate caramels, and why baking is a writer’s ideal hobby.
What’s the best thing you’ve evergotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Hot, Medium, or Mild
At the start of a nonfiction workshop in college, Cris Beam said: “Before we talk about your work, we need to know how you want us to talk about it. Tell us, on a scale of hot-to-medium-to-mild, what level of intensity you’re ready for.”
The sound of my relief was audible. The suggestion that my feelings mattered, that bleeding out on the page might affect me psychologically, that I could be serious about bettering my craft without sacrificing my safety, was nothing short of life changing. Her care gave me permission to write into experiences of danger with the knowledge that, in her hands, I’d be treated with respect and dignity.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I would not have guessed anyone could misunderstand this assignment so thoroughly.
I would never encourage a student to give up. Writing can save you. It saved me.
A college professor scrawled that on the last page of my weekly creative writing assignment (I photographed it). His prompt instructed us to tell a story from a collective perspective. Usually, weekly assignments were brief sketches, the seeds of something, a few pages at most. But that prompt unearthed something inside me. A story I’d been circling around, really hiding from, emerged when I wrote it from the vantage point of two children instead of one. I turned in an eight- or ten-page story. My professor didn’t comment on a single moment, word, sentence, or phrase in the piece besides his closing assertion that I’d misunderstood what he wanted.
Writing isn’t for your professor. Writing is for yourself and for your reader and for the artform.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
The first draft of a novel is you telling yourself the story.
I read that advice shortly after finishing the first draft of my debut novel. I’d sent the draft off to my agent in a flurry, working on a two-month deadline that meant the draft was really hundreds of pages of ideas, bones, sketches of who my characters were, slivers of what they wanted. The novel was stuck behind fogged glass. You could see the shape of something if you looked closely, but so much of it was still blurry. I so badly wanted that advice to be untrue, but it wasn’t. Very often, our first drafts are singular, magical, delicate sketches of what our stories or novels or memoirs will become, but in the beginning, we’re writing them to figure out what the story is. In some ways, that’s the hardest part. Once we know the story, once we have distance from it, then we can shape it into something meaningful for our readers.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
To me, that question is a bit like the question: Are people born inherently good? Maybe. Maybe not. But I certainly don’t have the power to determine that for someone else (frankly no one should). I do think everyone has a story inside them. The story of why they are who they are. Of what happened to them. That story isn’t justification for violence or cruelty, but it can help us understand them better. I wish more people had the privilege of time and space to tell theirs.
Would you everencourage a student to give up writing?Under what circumstances?
In my senior year of college, I had a professor (see question 2) who, during our final workshop, which doubled as a holiday party at his home, announced to the class that I was not talented enough to be a real writer. Then he coaxed my classmates along, encouraging them to say disparaging things about me. I sat on his sofa, pinching the fat on my thigh, trying not to cry. Then he placed a chocolate caramel—a caramel I’d brought him as a gift—into his mouth and smiled. So, no. I would never encourage a student to give up. Writing can save you. It saved me. Not everyone will get published. But writers don’t write for the sole purpose of publication. At least they shouldn’t. Writers write to tell a story, to make someone feel something, to help them understand themselves better, to figure out what they think and who they are.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
The moment you let someone else into the room, the room stops being yours.
At its worst, praise can artificially inflate a writer’s ego, discouraging them from probing their work and trying to make it better, but at its best, praise can make a vulnerable writer feel like they matter, like their perspective is valid, like even if they don’t conform to an arbitrary style or writing exercise or way of expressing themselves, that doesn’t mean their art is any less important. The best workshops begin with praise, then move into criticism.
Should students write with publicationin mind? Why or why not?
See question 3.
Fear is the crushing weight on the keyboard. Preventing us from facing our shame, our anxieties, our darkness. Write without thinking about how anyone will feel when they read it. The moment you let someone else into the room, the room stops being yours. Stay in that room by yourself as long as you can. Make the thing that only you can make. Then revise the hell out of it.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
There is no one size fits all. In anything. Writing or life. Take the advice that speaks to you and discard the rest.
Kill your darlings: Some sentences sound like velvet, but don’t make you feel anything. Cut them, but save them in a separate document. Tell yourself you’ll use them later. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.
Show don’t tell: There’s no shame in saying something plainly. Abstraction often creates distance. Go ahead and just name the thing.
Write what you know: Write from an emotional truth, but let that truth lead you into spaces that are unfamiliar to you.
Character is plot: I used to refuse to let anything happen to my characters. Their stuck-ness was the story I was telling. It turns out that we’re always feeling and changing and growing and regressing and backpedaling even when we’re depressed and unmoving.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
For me, the answer is baking. I think the best hobbies are ones that allow writers to complete a task from start to finish, preferably with tangible results of their labor, like coarsely salted pretzel rolls or sugared rhubarb tarts. The writing process, from draft to-revision-to-submission-to-rejection-to-re-submission-to-eventual publication is so long, so shapeless, and so often lacking in hope, that having proof, something one can hold in their hands, makes the journey a little easier.
What’s the best workshop snack?
Anything that helps make you feel safe or more comfortable is advisable. My favorite is a box of chocolate caramels (see question 5).
It was my gut, not my mind, that first suggested to me that the films I was consuming represented less a leap for womankind than an interminable box step routine. My feminist hackles had been, for a time, smoothed by the presence of preternatural beauties with STEM degrees in even the silliest movies, like Dr. Jane Foster in Thor, Dr. Grace Augustine in Avatar, and Dr. Carol Marcus in Star Trek: Into Darkness. Indeed, women onscreen are respected for their intelligence and permitted to inhabit leadership roles more than ever. But somehow, I still felt nauseated when I watched these movies because I realized that while women are portrayed as smart and competent onscreen, it is only men who get to have gut instinct. Franchises like James Bond, Indiana Jones, Batman: all revolve around indispensable male leads saving the day—and one is more likely to encounter a franchise based around undead Egyptians (The Mummy) than around actual mothers. Consequently, while Hollywood would like to believe that it is making progress through its representation of smart women, what it is actually doing is presenting a smokescreen that continues to posit the ability and intelligence of men as distinct and superior.
This storytelling trend is particularly apparent in blockbuster films across action and adventure genres, which have grossed over 100 billion dollars between 1995 and 2021. These genres’ broad cross-sectional appeal is largely due to them reflecting commonly held social values back at their audiences—and in turn, effectively helping generate these values—which makes them telling barometers of social beliefs and progress.
Take action spy film Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018). Sixth in the Mission Impossible franchise, it stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in yet another installment of Tom Cruise running, Tom Cruise shooting guns, Tom Cruise leaping off buildings, Tom Cruise driving very fast, and Tom Cruise practicing parkour in scenic locations. Some missing plutonium and biological weaponry also feature. Tom Cruise jumps from building to building, from success to success. When asked on multiple occasions how he will achieve the impossible, he answers simply “I’ll figure it out!” to the point that it becomes a catchphrase. And we, the audience, trust that he will.
While women are portrayed as smart and competent onscreen, it is only men who get to have gut instinct.
Herein lies the catch. Tom Cruise’s character is the story’s hero because of his skill, his intelligence, and his intuition. He gets things right and is ultimately the only one who can save the day because of something instinctual and in-built rather than learnt. Granted, there are seemingly powerful female characters in his story. There is British spy love interest Ilsa Faust; CIA Director Erika Sloane; black market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis; and the protagonist’s ex-wife Julia Meade, who is a doctor rather than a spy, but who still helps defuse a bomb. Yet for all that these women’s professions and witty repartee do to signal them as being intelligent and self-sufficient, they lack the gut instinct that effectively confers upon the male protagonist the role of real leader and hero. Each woman (barring perhaps the arms dealer) finds herself hoodwinked and in need of help.
Take CIA Director Sloane, played by Angela Bassett: she is shown to be a leader, yes, but a cold and rigid one who is surprisingly easily manipulated. It is as though the moment she was written in as a leader, the film’s creators had her exchange any and all stereotypically feminine qualities—many of these useful in leadership roles—for a tailored jacket and an empathy deficit. The film could have made Sloane’s storyline more complex through subtext interrogating why she behaves as she does. Perhaps her rigid attitude stems from the pressure that follows women in leadership roles; the pressure to embody less flexible and more hard-line, stereotypically masculine traits. Regrettably, however, no such subtext is explored.
As for the film’s other female characters, Julia the ex-wife (Michelle Monaghan) is lured into a trap, and although Ilsa the British spy (Rebecca Ferguson) is highly competent, she still finds herself tied to a chair while Tom Cruise engages in a gun fight helicopter chase. The movie tells the audience that these women are competent authority figures, yet its story shows them as lacking the intuition to get themselves out of trouble without a man’s help.
The movie tells the audience that these women are competent authority figures, yet its story shows them as lacking the intuition to get themselves out of trouble without a man’s help.
This pattern is evident across a wide range of action films. The classic starting point for American disaster films, for example, is that of a male protagonist in a strained relationship with a typically ex-partner (female) who experiences a call to action as a cataclysmic event threatens human life and the world. Throughout the film, he will lead his family through various near-death experiences, clutching a blonde primary-schooler to his chest and sprinting towards conveniently abandoned off-road vehicles. When disaster strikes, he knows what to do—making evident that he is not merely the dysfunctional, disenchanted suburban dad presented at the film’s start (and reflected unflatteringly in his estranged female counterpart’s eyes). Rather, the film’s events make clear that he is instinctively and inherently heroic, and that he always had it in him to be a hero, if only given the chance.
The above paragraph broadly describes the emotional plotlines of Greenland (2020), Extinction (2018), San Andreas (2015), 2012 (2009), War of the Worlds (2005 – hello again, Tom!), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), among others.
The narrowness of this pattern is striking, as is the message it subliminally reinforces. Of course there is value in creating escapist fantasies that help celebrate the protective dad qualities and buoy the egos of the straight, typically white men who might identify with the male protagonists of these films. However, the straightness, whiteness, and maleness of these lead characters shows either a lack of imagination in storytelling or an unwillingness in Hollywood to create much-needed variety in action films.
Moreover, the near-identical man-woman relationships central to these films illuminate significant biases underpinning portrayals of gender, gut instinct, and heroism onscreen. Take 2012, where John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis (henceforth Hero Dad), a struggling writer living in a gloomy bachelor pad littered with Herman Melville novels. His former wife, Kate Curtis (Amanda Peet), is polished and put together and operates as the primary child carer. Hero Dad is a mess by comparison, and his ex appears concerned about his parenting skills and general capacity to be a responsible, functioning adult.
The film’s plot makes Hero Dad integral to his family’s survival. He is even rewarded by the film’s end with (spoiler) the rekindling of his romantic relationship with his ex-wife, whose sweet-natured boyfriend is auspiciously crushed to death by heavy machinery at the film’s ¾ mark. The implication is that although his ex-wife appears to be the family lynchpin at the film’s start – to the extent that she could be read as “mean” or “nagging” in her concerns about his abilities, “making” him look bad by comparison – she is ultimately a less valuable parent than he is, particularly during crises. The film also implies through the couple’s romantic renewal that she either failed to see Hero Dad’s true qualities or made a mistake in ever daring to replace him with a new beau.
The irony here is that of all individuals likely to survive an apocalypse, the highly organized, “household manager”-type mother would surely be a strong candidate. Were I in an end-of-the-world scenario, I would be inclined to follow the person who keeps a running list of essential items in her head as opposed to the Hero Dad who can admittedly break road rules with panache, but who fails to notice when food in the fridge has expired. Then again, perhaps that is simply my supposed lack of gut instinct talking.
If you’re a woman, you’ll still be tied to a chair while the man is flying the helicopter.
Whether the action movie protagonist is Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, the Hero Dad of one’s choice, or various other male leads, heroism and leadership are attributed in large part based on gut instinct—a quality these male characters almost always possess. In a field of highly competent female supporting characters, the hero of Mission Impossible is marked out as such because of his intuition. “I’ll figure it out,” he says, and he inevitably does. He does not have a plan; plans are for second-rate heroes and leaders – like women! Because no matter how much you work or train, or repeatedly prove your intelligence, or climb the ranks of the CIA as a Black woman, or go through rigorous training to become a British spy … if you’re a woman, you’ll still be tied to a chair while the man is flying the helicopter. I – a woman, unsurprisingly – do not make the rules.
The association of gut instinct and raw talent with leadership, heroism, and men is yet another sexist barrier repeatedly raised in film and television, as well as in real life. Consider the framing of competence, skill, and intelligence in some of our most famous and prolific film franchises. James Bond can fail physical, medical, and psychological examinations in Skyfall (2012) and still be the only agent who can save the day. Indiana Jones is elevated from “intelligent academic” to “hero” through his devil-may-care attitude and the fact that he is not just some bookish wonk: he is out there learning in the field and exploring (and exploiting) the world! Luke Skywalker spends far less time learning fighting skills than Princess Leia, but for all her training as a warrior and a diplomat, it is she—and not brash, impulsive, preternaturally skilled Luke—who is chained half-naked to Jabba the Hutt.
This pervasive notion that women get to be smart but not natural, instinctual heroes, is perhaps most clearly visible in cultural products such as action films, where heroism and leadership tend to be macho. Women may be present; however, they are usually leather-clad, gun-toting, highly sexualized team members: competent, but not enough to dominate the storyline. Nevertheless, this trope – the downplaying of women’s intelligence and leadership – exists across other genres as well. Think of how in the Harry Potter series, it is second-fiddle Hermione who is book smart, whereas Harry, the hero, gets to have gut instinct. Dig a little, and it becomes clear that the association of leadership with gut instinct and maleness is entrenched across myriad stories.
Indeed, women in stories are allowed to be book smart. They are allowed to be competent and bold: training hard, besting the male protagonist in a duel, then whipping off their helmet to reveal a mane of hair so lustrous it could make a Pantene commercial cry. They are allowed to be indispensable to the hero’s success. But rarely, very rarely, are they seriously considered for the hero or leadership role themselves. They are always a touch off center screen, voicing the narrative prompt “What will we do?”
At this point, one might ask: but what about the women depicted as intelligent, competent leaders? Wasn’t James Bond’s boss played by Judi Dench?
At this point, one might ask: but what about the women depicted as intelligent, competent leaders?
It is true that the representation and presence of women in leadership roles has indeed improved over the past decade in particular. If I want to watch female love interests successfully pilot submarines, for example, I can sacrifice my last brain cell to either Aquaman or The Meg. We feminists love choice. Nevertheless, I would argue filmmakers are often still limited in how they conceptualize female intelligence and leadership. Intelligent female leaders and heroes are too often portrayed as cold women (Judi Dench as James Bond’s superior; Kate Winslet in the Divergent films), highly sexualized women (Lara Croft in Tomb Raider; Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes adaptations), or both (Milady in The Three Musketeers; Elizabeth Debicki in The Man From U.N.C.L.E). Either one is a femme fatale – written not least as a sexual object for the straight male gaze – or a cold #bossbitch archetype; namely, a woman leader who is so powerful and competent that she can only be a rigid, emotionally stunted control freak.
It is interesting to note how real-life prejudices against women leaders are replicated onscreen. Rarely are women allowed to be perceived as both competent, effective leaders and emotionally intelligent humans not blinkered by their lack of traditional feminine virtues, such as empathy and people skills. It is almost like such stories are suggesting female leaders are inherently non-maternal and unnatural, and can only retain power by being horrible bitches! Crazy!
When a story shows a woman as being either cold and powerful, powerful but titillating, or emotionally intelligent and a second fiddle, it reinforces real-life sexist double standards. Even in fantastical scenarios invented for the big screen, we cannot seem to imagine women leaders who are not fundamentally lacking or deficient in some way. Even in storytelling, women are not allowed to have it all. As in real life, the perception in stories that women leaders are fundamentally flawed leads to an erosion of trust. Women leaders cannot be relied upon to save the day. They tick all the professional boxes but there is still something missing. Tom Cruise is chosen to star in an action spy film, again.
As in real life, the perception in stories that women leaders are fundamentally flawed leads to an erosion of trust.
It is rare to see competent, intelligent, center-screen women in film and television. It is rarer still for them to reach the story’s end without being repeatedly sexualized for the male gaze; made hyperbolic and two-dimensional in their cold intelligence; or belittled by being sidelined during an action sequence. Onscreen depictions of women leaders in particular risk typifying a sort of faux feminism: these women are competent, but inflexibly so – a rigidity that often leads to their downfall.
For this reason, it merits highlighting positive examples of women heroes and leaders who take up space onscreen, especially in contexts historically associated with men; who behave effectively; and who are never shamed, beaten, or degraded by their storyline. 2017’s Wonder Woman, for instance, was refreshing in its depiction of a woman in a style reminiscent of classic male hero: protagonist Diana stars in a war narrative, inhabits a highly masculinized hero role wherein she is physically invincible, and is never narratively “put in her place.” Other examples of smart, competent women permitted to unapologetically own their screen time include the eponymous Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess, 1995-2001) and, more recently, the strong-willed Anne Lister of Gentleman Jack (2019). Such characters are noteworthy for being shown as confident and powerful without being punished for it, or at least not in a manner presented as justified – and if they do suffer censure, they always get the final word.
It is also worth noting that these three women characters are all either queer or queer-coded, suggesting greater liberty is permitted to female characters who already canonically exist mostly beyond the male gaze (or at least, beyond the male reach). Given film and television’s increasing acceptance of queer identities, this correlation suggests more effective female heroes and leaders could be coming to our screens. Nevertheless, a limitation of this trend is that these women are potentially “permitted” stereotypically masculine qualities – like heroism, physical strength, and gut-based intuition – in part to uphold heteronormative standards sometimes imposed over queer relationships. Indeed, while these characters’ masculinity offers much-needed positive depictions of masculine women, the emphasis on it simultaneously reinforces butch/femme dichotomies between these characters and their love interests. Such dichotomies can be read as compulsorily heteronormative for implying that in queer relationships in particular, one partner must always embody the stereotypical role of “the woman” and the other of “the man.” I would also argue that storytelling continues to operate within the bell jar of patriarchy if women characters must embody traditionally masculine traits in order to be allowed to lead and succeed in their stories.
That said, although these characters are often recognized for their masculinity, they also exemplify a healthy blend of masculine and feminine qualities – perhaps even providing an alternative template for action films’ hyper-masculine male heroes and leaders. While Diana, Xena, and Anne spend the bulk of their time striding purposely, getting tasks done, and refusing to be belittled or sidelined by other people, their emotional journeys are central to their storylines without detracting from perceptions of them as competent, effective heroes and individuals. They are respected and shown to be both strategically and emotionally intelligent. Barring the fact that two of these women are to varying degrees immortal, and one is a snob: could this be closer to the incarnation and behavior of truly aspirational, human female heroes?
Writing competent female heroes and leaders for the screen should not be mission impossible.
Writing competent female heroes and leaders for the screen should not be mission impossible. If you tell your audience your character is competent and intelligent – perhaps even more competent and intelligent than the brawny two-dimensional action man – then show her leading, being listened to, and getting things right. Have her win the way angsty male, alcoholic test-failing secret agents are regularly allowed to win. Because at the end of the tale, this trend of associating women with book smarts and training smarts – but not instinctual smarts and born-leader smarts – ultimately implies that the place of women really is always one step behind the male hero. Their depiction onscreen suggests their intelligence and skill are learned rather than innate, and therefore quietly lacking and inferior to those of men, and their leadership secret sauce of pure masculine instinct.
Funnily enough, in the months following the emergence of the coronavirus, it was womenleaderswhowereespeciallypraised. What do Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Taiwan all have in common? Proactive government responses to the coronavirus; low pandemic-related death rates; and female leaders. Granted, it is simplistic and essentialist to conclude that female leaders are effective by virtue of gendered attributes: after all, these countries also benefit from being developed and relatively egalitarian, which fosters women in power. Yet, at the very least, this pattern suggests women leaders deserve to be up there with the boys—”born-leader” mentality and gut instinct irrelevant. Indeed, it is almost as if the leadership secret sauce that so many male heroes and leaders possess onscreen is really just an excuse to belittle competent women, and to keep them one step behind a mediocre man.
Women have long shown that they have what it takes to lead, both onscreen and in real life, if only they are respected in their leadership roles as men would be. One does not need the gut instinct of Tom Cruise to recognize it is time we stopped patronizing them.
While Mami works the hotel rooms, Susana, la vecina and our babysitter, talks mad shit, says Dad doesn’t pay child support because of what a banshee Mami’s become, says Mami doesn’t know how to Mami, “Look at how she doesn’t even comb your pelitos,” “Look at how she lets you paints your fingernails like a girl,” “Look at how you can still see the dirt under your nails como un cochino,” says Mami is built like a garbage dumpster and how she and I need to stop eating and talking all that junk.
I tell Susana her face and hairdo are como un Chow Chow, and her face snarls and she bares her teeth, proving me right, and she yells for me to get out of her house. On all fours, I bark at her, pant, and skedaddle.
I don’t tell Mami because she has enough to be mad about and plus I want my eleven-year-old freedom. Nobody notices when I stop going over and Gull starts coming over.
Like Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown, my buddy Gull slouches everywhere covered in grease, Dorito crumbs, and probably piojos. He smells like socks. Gull’s his name because of an eye that wanders around birdlike. He strays the streets like the holy callejeras of La Virgen de Guadalupe Avenue. Swishing them bird hips. I want that type of freedom: to be a gull.
On the nights Mami has no mornings to wake up for, she brags about her body to the phone.
“I’ve got that Coca Cola bottle shape,” she whispers to a man, who is not Dad, who is not the man who called me a faggot when I was eight and then never returned.
I wonder if she measures herself in ounces or liters as she sardines her body into a dress fashioned from Goodwill curtains. Rhinestones trace the floral pattern. Mami presses on lashes, paints her lips and lines her eyeballs but honest to God no matter what she puts on she always looks like big-butted Rosie the Robot to me. Mami’s government name is Rosalinda. She glides out of the bathroom, out of the living room, out of the house. The screen door slaps, and I look out to make sure wheels haven’t replaced her feet.
Gull and I turn to each other. We make robot noises and giggle and kiss and fly away.
Remember My Dinner With André? Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sit down for a dinner during which, among other things, André Gregory opines at length about his weirdo experiences at the radical fringe of experimental theater.
Now imagine, if you will, a film called My Dinner With My Dinner with André’s Wallace Shawn, in which someone—let’s say me—has dinner with Wallace Shawn, and Wallace Shawn proceeds to tell me everything André Gregory said to him in the original film.
Would it be a celebration of the ways in which stories are transmitted through our culture, or would it be an unhinged mess, hovering on the edge of madness? We’ll probably never know. (On the off chance Wallace Shawn is down for it, I’m available.)
Years ago, I was on the verge of abandoning the draft of what would become my novel Mouth to Mouth. I’d been wrestling for a long time with the idea of a relationship between a drowning man and his rescuer, but I kept hitting dead ends, unable to settle on the right point of view. Then I reread one of the books on this list and it cracked the whole thing open for me. The way forward, I realized, was to embed the act of storytelling into the story itself. And so, in Mouth to Mouth, the successful art dealer Jeff Cook unspools the story of his rise to our unnamed narrator, a former college classmate he hasn’t seen in almost two decades, thereby transforming a first-class lounge at JFK into an impromptu confessional.
Nested narrators have been around since the dawn of storytelling, one storyteller passing on a story they heard from another, mixing direct and indirect dialogue as they repurpose it second-hand, but the following books take the technique to a whole other level, whether to splinter the idea of a central voice, question the nature of storytelling, rupture the forms we’ve become accustomed to, or, as it were, to make the novel novel again.
Juan Preciado, the narrator—initially, at least—of this surreal masterpiece, comes to the town of Comala in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, having promised his mother that he’d make the journey after she died. He finds the town abandoned. A straightforward opening belies the narrative complexity that follows, as the book shifts from Juan’s narration to another “I” (Pedro Páramo himself, in the past, which is not immediately obvious), and then into a third-person omniscient that lets everyone in the village, past (inhabitants) and present (ghosts) have their say. Rulfo claimed that the novel’s structure was “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time,” which while likely confounding the casual reader, yields sublime rewards for the dedicated one.
This second novel from Austria’s pre-eminent rant-meister is narrated by a doctor’s son following his father on his rounds through the gloomy and treacherous countryside, calling on one patient after another, all of whom suffer from various horrible ailments. For 80 pages or so, it’s a parade of grotesques, then doctor and son arrive at the local castle, Hochgobernitz, where they encounter the suicidal insomniac Prince Saurau, whose unhinged philosophical monologue dominates the next 80 pages. How unhinged? At one point, Saurau quotes, verbatim, passages from a dream in which he watches his son writing. The debut of what would become Bernhard’s trademark style, Gargoyles answers the question: What would Heart of Darkness be like if Conrad had let Kurtz take over halfway through?
Opening with an author’s note which declares that Pi Patel’s survival narrative will be told in the first-person, but that “any inaccuracies or mistakes are mine,” Life of Pi announces itself from the start as an act of literary ventriloquism. Martel deploys his frame narrative paradoxically, both to buttress verisimilitude—as many novelists have done before him—and to undermine his protagonist’s narrative. In doing so, he spins an old-school tale for modern times, one that reminds us that some fictions are worth believing.
Jacques Austerlitz, transported as a child from Prague to England in 1939, raised as Dafydd Elias by a Welsh couple, recovers his identity and comes to terms with his past, including the fates of those who were left behind, in this atmospheric and meditative masterpiece from the late German writer. The nameless narrator, a contemplative and diaphanous figure, encounters Austerlitz several times over 30 years and listens to his harrowing story. In summary, indirect dialogue, and direct dialogue, Austerlitz’s voice and experience permeate the book and—crucially—the narrator as well. Why Sebald uses a narrator rather than letting Austerlitz tell his story directly is a question without a simple answer, but the narrator’s somewhat permeable presence is integral to this unique novel.
A chronicle of the personal and creative evolution of Tancredo Pavone, an aristocratic Sicilian avant-garde composer, Infinity consists entirely of an unnamed narrator’s interview with Pavone’s former manservant, Massimo. Pavone’s eccentric soliloquies, faithfully recreated for the narrator by the unflappable Massimo, shine with profundity and humor as we bear witness to a guy bearing witness to a guy bearing witness to them.
An encyclopedic patchwork of fiction, essays, and meditations, Nobel laureate Tokarczuk’s co-called “constellation novel” is narrated by an unnamed Polish writer averse to putting down roots anywhere in particular. Reading the first chapters, one might expect Flights to develop as an extended autofiction or a memoir-a-clef, but it isn’t long before the form ruptures and admits a panoply of narrative modes. Some chapters are thick with indirect dialogue, others are written entirely in first-person from different characters’ perspectives. The writer-narrator reappears throughout, but it’s Tokarczuk’s twin themes of travel and wonder that make this wild miscellany cohere.
Faye, the narrator of these three novels—Kudos to Cusk for breaking the nameless narrator mold—is a recently divorced writer and mother of two boys about whom we don’t learn much in the way of biographical detail. She proceeds through the trilogy as a kind of non-detached oral historian, taking in the stories of the regular people she encounters and relating them to us, verbatim at times, indirectly at other times, always with a piercing attention to detail and a generous intelligence. More than any author on this list, Cusk commits to passing the mic, and the result is stunning. It’s not hyperbole to say that she’s discovered a new way forward for the novel.
In early 2016, I started compiling a list of books I was anticipating by women writers of color because, as a reader and occasional critic, I was having trouble finding such titles. If I was coming up short, I thought, then others surely were, too, and maybe it would be useful if I published my findings.
That first list became one of Electric Literature‘s most-shared pieces of 2016, and before long, to my surprise, I heard it was helping inform other publications’ books coverage, teachers’ syllabi, and book prize considerations. Since then, I’ve put together such a list every year with Electric Literature; meanwhile, I continue to hope that publishing and American letters will become so fully inclusive as to render this effort obsolete. We’renotthereyet.
About the methodology: these are some of the 2022 books that I, personally, am anticipating, and the list is front-loaded toward the earlier part of the year, as there isn’t as much information yet about books publishing in the fall and later. The term “of color” is a necessarily flawed label with ever-adapting nuances and interpretations. And though I love and require poetry, as a novelist and essayist I’m less aware of what’s to come in poetry, so here I address only books of prose.
If I’ve missed a title you’re excited about, please consider supporting it by preordering it from your local independent bookstore, placing a hold at your library, telling others about it, or all of the above. These are difficult times for so many people, very much including writers, booksellers, librarians, and the bibliophiles who work in publishing.
In a lifetime of loving books, I’ve perhaps never been as thankful as I have in recent years for the light that books can provide. Please join me in celebrating the books coming our way.
This debut novel about a group of young women of color in Queens is narrated in the bravura, underused first-person plural. Alexandra Kleeman says Brown Girls is “seething with raw, exuberant life,” “an epic told in the register of the yearning, vivid experiences of its characters.”
Chan’s debut is about a Chinese American mother placed by the state in a government reform program for “bad mothers.” Carmen Maria Machado says it’s a “terrifying novel about mass surveillance, loneliness, and the impossible measurements of motherhood.” I initially heard about this novel in Midtown Scholar, a gorgeous bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and have looked forward to reading it ever since.
In the months following Hurricane Maria, a Puerto Rican radical who’d left her children to be raised by their Brooklyn grandmother returns to their lives after they’ve become adults: one child a beloved congressman, the other a wedding planner for powerful people in Manhattan. Jaquira Díaz calls Olga Dies Dreaming “an unflinching examination of capitalism, corruption, gentrification, colonialism, and their effects on marginalized people.”
I have long maintained that there aren’t nearly enough books centered on the intricate, fascinating complexities of close female friendship, and I’m so glad to learn that Ho’s novel Fiona and Jane follows a deep friendship between two Taiwanese American women. I must read this book. Publishers, please give us more books about friendship.
The author of I’m Afraid of Men, The Subtweet, andGod Loves Hair—all three of which are Lambda Literary Award finalists for, respectively, transgender nonfiction, transgender fiction, and children’s books—returns to nonfiction with this meditation on change. Elliot Page praises the book as “a deeply generous and honest gift to the world.”
I’m fairly new to being an aunt, and, unsurprisingly, one of the great pleasures of aunthood has been finding and buying books for my little niece and nephew. This children’s book from the marvelous Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López, is about siblings who, trapped inside on a dreary day, use their imaginations to fly.
Harris is another writer whose insightful work I’ve followed for a while, and I’m thrilled that her debut memoir, This Boy We Made, about motherhood, racism, and disability, will be here soon. Nicole Chung says, “My rule to read everything Taylor Harris writes has never failed me.”
The many admirers of Yanagihara’s previous novel, A Little Life, will be delighted about the advent of this new novel, which Michael Cunningham calls “a transcendent, visionary novel of stunning scope and depth.”
Manifesto is a memoir from the formidable, Booker Prize-winning Evaristo that addresses her childhood as one of eight siblings, experiences with Britain’s first Black women’s theater company, and queer relationships. In The Guardian, Kuba Shand-Baptiste calls the book “a rallying cry.”
Hernandez is a Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec environmental scientist, and in Fresh Banana Leaves she discusses and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and land stewardship practices, alternatives to the ongoing eco-colonialist destruction of this earth, our only home.
James, a founding editor of Shondaland.com and a former prep school admissions officer, has written a memoir of her experience as a Black student at a mostly white prep school. R. Eric Thomas calls Admissions “a crucial account for our moment—asking and answering the question of how power is held, shifted, and grasped after by even the youngest in our society.”
Thom’s advice column in Xtra, “Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse,” is rich in grace and wisdom, and now she has a children’s book, For Laika, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching. The picture book is about an orphaned stray dog who ends up traveling toward the stars.
When I read Wang’s first novel, Chemistry, I was on a plane ride, sitting in a middle seat, and I had no tissues in my handbag. I remember all this because the book moved me so profoundly that, stuck in that middle seat, lacking tissues, I couldn’t stop crying. Her new novel is about an ICU doctor, and Sigrid Nunez says it’s “incisive yet tender, written with elegant style and delicious verve.”
The exhilarating Allende has written a historical saga in epistolary form, and it takes place during the upheaval of the First World War, the Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression.
I fervently love Perry’s writing, and if you’ve had the luck of reading her brilliant work, you probably do, too. If anyone can help us better understand the soul of this heartbreaking nation, it’s Perry, and I can’t wait to read South to America.
Fu’s fiction is mesmerizing, and her new book is a collection of fantastical tales featuring sea monsters and haunted dolls. Lucy Tan says “each story is spectacularly smart, hybrid in genre, and bold with intention.”
Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker (Feb. 8)
Novelist and poet Ojeda’s Jawbone takes place at an elite Catholic high school, and incorporates a secret society, a hostage situation, and dangerous rituals. According to Andrés Barba, Ojeda “has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart.”
An anthology of otherworldly, speculative, and ghost-filled stories from Latine writers including Lilliam Rivera, Claribel A. Ortega, Daniel José Older, and David Bowles.
A monk and his twin travel across Mongolia to try to find the reincarnation of a great lama in this new book from the novelist, playwright, and poet Barry.
I first came across Huerta’s writing in 2009, and have since eagerly anticipated her debut book. The Lost Dreamer is a fantasy inspired by Mesoamerica, and is about seers resisting an ancient patriarchal state.
Here is what Toni Morrison said about Hubbard’s previous book, The Talented Ribkins:“for sheer reading pleasure Hubbard’s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself.” I mean, damn. Hubbard is now back with a story collection centered on a Black community in a southern suburb.
“Red Paint is a miraculous book,” says Elissa Washuta, and Melissa Febos calls it “an ode to healing and to healers, told by someone who intimately knows both.” This autobiography by LaPointe, a Coast Salish author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes, incorporates punk rock aesthetics, spiritual practices, and a search for home.
Robert P. Jones says that this debut, a mythic love story about outsiders who meet in a Trinidadian cemetery, “more than sings, more than beams,” “the kind of story that makes you want to spread your arms open wide, embrace the sky, and take flight in your own little way.”
In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, a Mexican healer named Ximena Salomé finds passion with an Irish immigrant, John Riley, who is fighting on the American side of the conflict. A story of dangerous attraction from the splendid Grande.
Vagabonds! takes place in Lagos, among people and spirits whose existence is outlawed. “A feast of a book, a marvelous ode to spirits and outsiders that is irreverent (and painfully funny) while being serious enough to drill a hole in one’s chest. There is nothing in the world like this book,” says Lesley Nneka Arimah.
Chou’s campus satire about the misadventures of an anxious Taiwanese American PhD student has been praised by Raven Leilani for addressing “the private absurdities the soul must endure to get free, from tokenism, the quiet exploitation of well-meaning institutions, and the bondage that is self-imposed.” Alexander Chee says, “I often held my breath until I laughed and I wouldn’t dare compare it or Chou to anyone writing now.”
A father calls his son to Lahore to cover up the violent death of a girl, but the son finds he can’t obey his orders. “Ahmad has managed to meld fast-paced, intelligent noir with a devastating portrait of the true costs of ambition and desire,” says Maaza Mengiste.
A Métis woman adopted by white parents goes in search of her history and birth family. “Probably Ruby reminds us that our stories are acts of survival,” says Kelli Jo Ford, and that “grief, too, can be a gift.”
Vivian, a lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients in a psychiatric hospital, starts unraveling after a family reunion. The novel is “violently funny,” according to Myriam Gurba, and Deesha Philyaw says it’s a “raw, brilliant, and unforgettable” debut from a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow.
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English takes place between an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit. They meet at a Cairo café and fall in love, and then violence irrupts into their romance.
A Chinese girl named Daiyu is kidnapped and smuggled across the ocean to the American West of the 1880s. Anti-Chinese hatred is sweeping the country, and she has to learn how to survive.
A young woman named Marina Salles wakes up dead, transformed into an aswang, a creature of myth out of her Filipina grandmother’s old stories. This cast-off woman can now access the hearts and memories of the people she’s known, in a debut that, according to Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, is “fueled by a wild, jagged energy and an exuberant mixing of cultures and a narrator whose frank, poignant voice will keep echoing in your head.”
Take My Hand is the third novel from the New York Times-bestselling Perkins-Valdez, and it begins in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973 with a nurse who works at a family-planning clinic. Celeste Ng says the book “is an unforgettable exploration of responsibility and redemption, the dangers of good intentions, and the folly of believing anyone can decide what’s best for another’s life.”
I’ve waited impatiently for this novel since hearing Hua read from it more than a decade ago. A village girl named Mei who becomes Mao Zedong’s confidante and lover finds herself playing the role of a Cultural Revolution hero. “How to negotiate the maze of the Forbidden City? How to escape? An intriguing and suspenseful story,” says Maxine Hong Kingston.
A biracial philosophy student reluctantly takes a job at an internet company in Silicon Valley. I’ve been curious about this book for years, and Rachel Khong praises it as “the optimal novel for the strange times we find ourselves in … droll, incisive, and moving.”
A history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop, starting with Phillis Wheatley and continuing through Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, and other musical luminaries.
Guillory, whose books are unfailingly a delight, has reimagined a tale as old as time, in this case with a novel about an overworked junior employee in publishing who travels to the house of a prominent, jaded writer—a beastly writer, one might say—to convince him to deliver his long-delayed manuscript. Difficulties ensue, then comes an unexpected love.
A queer woman writer meets an older man, a loud, domineering choreographer, at an artists’ retreat in Maine and has sex with him. She keeps seeing him, and her desire intensifies, perhaps to excess. A debut exploring questions of agency, lust, power, selfhood, and art. (Alyssa Songsiridej is the current managing editor for Electric Literature.)
This is another novel I’ve awaited a long time, and it is indelible, a brilliant epic about a Dalit immigrant who becomes terribly, unimaginably powerful, and about what happens to his child. The Immortal King Rao is something new, and it astonished me.
Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth (May 10)
In Bitter Orange Tree, Man Booker International Prize–winning author Alharthi alternates between the life of Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, and Bint Amir, the woman Zuhour has thought of as her grandmother, and who has recently died. James Wood says Alharthi has “constructed her own novelistic form.”
Essential Labor is a manifesto and reflection on the emergency conditions of caregiving in America, an emergency whose magnitude and importance should be, but isn’t yet, plain to every person in this country. Garbes, author of the excellent Like a Mother, interrogates and reports on what mothering is and what it could be.
This debut story collection about immigrants and refugees includes stories that have received a Caine Prize for African Writing and appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and Zyzzyva.
Verónica, a high school student with hip dysplasia, auditions to work at the Mermaid Cove, a kitschy attraction where mermaids perform in giant tanks. Her plans change when she learns what her parents have been hiding from her about her body. Sylvester has deservedly received an International Latino Book Award for her previous work.
Natera’s debut follows a Dominican family in New York City contending with the gentrification encroaching on their neighborhood of twenty years. Angie Cruz says, “Neruda on the Park is the book we need and the reason I read.”
From a previous Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, a first novel about a Black woman who stumbles into a scandal in the Oakland police department. According to Ayana Mathis, the book is “fierce and devastating, rendered with electrifying urgency by this colossal young talent.”
For fifty years, Dr. Kwak, an obstetrician and Korean immigrant, has worked at a hospital in a small Minnesota town. One day, a letter arrives that upends his entire life. From the trailblazing author of Finding My Voice and Saving Goodbye, among other books.
A pair of old friends, both Asian American women, turn a counterfeit luxury handbag scheme into a spectacularly successful global business, a success threatened when one of the two women vanishes. Longstanding friendship, fake luxury, and elaborate theft, in a novel Claire Messud calls “sly and thoroughly compelling,” and from a writer whose previous novels have been utterly captivating—yes, please.
A novel with vast reach, spanning five generations of a family living in the American West, from the acclaimed Fajardo-Anstine. Emma Straub says, “this indelible novel shines its big light on the Lopez family so brightly that I could draw a map of their breath.”
Three formerly tight-knit college friends reunite in Lagos for an important wedding. In the intervening years, there have been ruptures, distances, and other significant changes, and the days before the wedding build to a crisis. “The bonds between women—as friends, and across the generations—are the jewels that make this story shine,” says Tayari Jones. I would like to read this immediately.
Having read an early excerpt of The Leaving, I found Bello’s writing to be lyrical and potent, a feat. In this novel about a legacy of trauma and mental illness, a woman records messages for her unborn child.
Chung’s writing and editing are a great gift to us all, and in Body Language she teams up with the also wonderful Matt Ortile to edit an anthology about embodiment, race, desire, illness, and more, with essays from some of the most exciting writers publishing nowadays.
Of the books mentioned here, The Man Who Could Move Clouds is the only one I’ve already had the great luck of reading twice. This is a virtuosic, groundbreaking memoir of Rojas Contreras’ tremendous family history of curanderos, ghosts, powerful women, and healing abilities, and it has shifted my understanding of perception and loss. It is also often wildly hilarious.
From the bestselling writer of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a memoir of growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Chicago, and about everything from a childhood as a pariah to white feminism to loving comedy.
The author of the magnificent America Is Not the Heart has written an exploration of the ethics and politics, especially the racial politics, of our reading cultures. I want to know everything Castillo has to say about this, and her wide-ranging book includes deep reads of anime, Peter Handke, and the art of the mixtape.
Subtitled as a book of laughter and resuscitation, this associative book has at its center the author’s relationship with her daughters, in a debut described by the publisher as an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
The Women Could Fly is a dystopian novel in which women, especially Black women, can be tried for witchcraft and must either marry by the age of 30 or sign up to be officially monitored. A book with echoes of Octavia Butler and Shirley Jackson.
A memoir from the phenomenal Wong, a disabled activist and director of the online community Disability Visibility Project. The book will be a collage of essays, conversations, graphics, and commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists.
During her childhood, Cassandra Williams’ little brother disappears in an accident, and as she grows older she starts seeing her brother in her everyday life. I’ll jump to read anything Serpell writes, and all the more so with a novel about grief and memory and longing.
I’ve loved everything I’ve read of Sexton’s intricately nuanced, large-hearted work, and this National Book Award-nominated, NAACP Image Award-winning writer is back with her third book, this time a retelling of Fiddler on the Roof. Having had the chance to see part of it in advance, I’m deeply excited to read the rest of it.
Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker (Oct. 4)
Baker has been named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch “Superstar” because of her extraordinarily generous work “championing diversity in publishing.” She has also edited Everyday People: The Color of Life, a short story anthology, hosts the podcast Minorities in Publishing, and edits for Amistad Books. In August, she will publish a debut novel that takes place set in an alternate version of Queens, where the fate of juvenile offenders is decided by their victims and survivors.
Though I am not a horse woman or cow person, I recently found myself writing an American Western. Pity the Beaststarted innocently enough—as a short story unfolding on a ranch in the northern U.S. Rockies with people in cowboy hats and boots, horses and cows. Westerns are fun to write, and I was hooked, ignorant though I was. As the short story moseyed toward novel length, and as the characters packed a mule train and saddled up and out into a huge imagined mountain range on horseback, I started reading books about survival journeys through a variety of harsh and wild places. Many were American Westerns too, some very new.
These books were, of course, useful to me in thinking more deeply about landscape, the cold-hot-hungry-thirsty smallness-of-self realizations that actual wilderness imposes. I knew some of this already. I’ve lived in very wild places for most of my adult life. I walk alone in remote desert canyons every day now, mountain lions certainly-sometimes looking on from cliffs, bears in Alaska before that when cell phones weren’t a thing. But the excellent fictions I’ve listed here were even more helpful to me in how they explored internal wildernesses, mappings of psychic and spiritual paths from Lostness to (some kind of) physical, moral or existential Foundness.
You’ll notice that many of these books, like mine, center around orphans, widows and widowers, the abandoned, the dazed, the shunned, the outcast, and lots of women folk. The physical and moral stakes are high in all. As in all great journey literature of the past (think The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings), the travelers in these books must all navigate landscapes and mindscape through confusion, despair, rage mixed with love, elation and terror in order to live.
If you don’t know Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, you should find this classic. Tayo is a WWII vet who returns to his New Mexico pueblo, ruined by modern existence and war. Across a devastated desert landscape, Tayo’s psychic journey weaves over mesas, into canyons and caves and through uranium dumps. Via myths, poems and witches’ songs, the book asks how did Eden die? And how can we live on if or when we see the truth?
In the Pulitzer finalistIn the Distance, a young Swedish immigrant arrives on the American West coast alone and in search of his brother lost in transit. In a meandering path across the west on horseback, on foot, sleeping under rocks, Håkan ricochets through a labyrinthine landscape peopled by the bizarre and audacious, quick-on-their-feet con-men (and women) all striving for their daily bread and more by any means necessary, perhaps the most enduring of American credos. I like to think Diaz’s characters could be the great grandparents of the characters in my novel.
In the Story Prize winner Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins’ modern-day Nevadans (I am one of them these days) are the true inheritors of the Old Wild West. In the short stories they populate, her characters are adapted to the harsh landscape. They are misfits, Manson followers, and missing persons. They inhabit brothels, dig desert debris of auto accidents, are quasi-prisoners in desert hideouts, seek out sparkling high rise casinos in Vegas where bad things happen. Watkins writes controlled chaos, dread and hope with the same virtuoso lines, wit and boldest of all feminist vantages.
In Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx can achieve more in three pages than other writers can do in a book. Beware. These stories are such impressive feats, they can prevent one from putting pen to paper. Proulx loves windy, hot, frigid Wyoming, portrays the West and its stoic inhabitants lovingly in her razor sharp prose. Here’s part of her love, though: she draws the ugliness too, the stupidity, blindness, roughness, the down-and-out stench of cow hands, the wink and cheap perfume of barmaids with the very same immaculate slicing edge.
Train Dreams follows the life of an orphan (turned almost-murderer, turned childless widower) across America in the 20th century post-Wild West. He wonders if he is cursed as he lives hand-to-mouth, wandering the western states his whole hardscrabbled lifetime as a railroad worker, a bridge builder. The novella captures American history through one man’s typical and (mostly) non-self-pitying experience. Johnson’s elegant prose is worth the read, while the content makes one scratch her head about the American Dream.
Outlawed is a genre-busting, gender-busting, Wild West myth-busting story, wherein the famed Hole-in-the-Wall Gang of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming are all actually a bunch of barren women. They’ve been “outlawed” by their communities and families back home for the sin of being childless. They seek a Utopian home of diversity and acceptance. They will gunfight if they must. They seek science over myth as North turns the Western on its head, as well as the telling of history itself.
In The Night Watchman, the families on the Turtle Mountain Cherokee Reservation of North Dakota attempt to hold on to their lands, homes, community and culture as Congress seeks to nullify their treaty, terminating their band. Their journey is to Washington and back. Based on actual legislative and activist events, the characters must maneuver through a wilderness of hostile federal bureaucracies, unfair working conditions, poverty and bigotry. It’s a David and Goliath fight, guided by the wisdom of traditional myths, helpful magical beings, hard work, boxing fundraisers, babies, friendship and deep faith in themselves.
I loved The Bear for its planetary scale and fairy tale vibe. I thought of a mythic, feminist version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—a last man standing story, but the last man is a girl.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
