The world of children, aburst with animal energy, strikes only children like me as strange and perhaps a bit vulgar. So we observe. Our lack of siblings makes us unlike our peers. We feel pride and embarrassment at our exceptionalism. Our relationships with our parents tend to be more intense. In nuclear families, our parents outnumber us. We form one leg of a love triangle, and usually we have a favorite parent. We vie with the other parent for our preferred parent’s attention. We know that if both parents are angry at the same time, we have no friend in the home. Only children, if we’re lucky, float through childhood on a double-cloud of parental love. But then, as only children age, we survive our close family. We might find ourselves alone in the world.
Miriam, the main character in my linked story collection Mad Prairie, loses both her parents while she is still in college. She is left vulnerable to bad ideas—her own and those of others. Only children have a reputation for softness, but I’d argue that’s untrue. We engaged with the world of adults early, and that leaves us, if anything, too knowing. Miriam’s greatest mistake is outsize faith in herself. When confronted by structures she can’t understand, in a small town filled with secrets and supernatural energies, she is slow to reach out and find help.
The following seven novels spotlight facets of the experience of the only child—fierce and complicated relationships with parents, friends so close they resemble family, premature adulthood often followed by regression. A good main character is self-possessed, they look at the world around them with a measured gaze and can comment on events in the narrative to add layers of complication or elucidation. Only children make great main characters.
As Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John opens, the titular character is a child who lives on the island of Antigua. She loves her mother more than anything, and nothing pleases her more than her mother’s care for her. Her father, she could take or leave:
“When my eyes rested on my father, I didn’t think very much of the way he looked. But when my eyes rested on my mother, I found her beautiful… what a beautiful long neck, and long plaited hair…”
The novel tracks Annie’s growth from childhood to adulthood, which also, both surprisingly and astutely, reads like the end of a long love affair with her mother. Annie’s father works all day as a carpenter, leaving Annie and her mother to tend the house or bathe together with medicinal bark and leaves.
Annie’s harmonious relationship with her mother is disrupted when Annie’s mother encourages Annie’s independence. She encourages Annie to pick her own fabric for a dress, saying, “‘It’s time you had your own clothes. You just cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me.’” Annie views this suggestion as a brutal betrayal, but then, on her own, she begins to find her mother’s love suffocating. Annie enters school and develops interests beyond her mother—secret friends and possessions her mother would disapprove of, like a collection of marbles won in unladylike competition. As Annie grows up tall and long-limbed and beautiful, she uncannily looks more and more like the mother from whom she desperately seeks liberation.
Bee, the 13-year-old only child who narrates Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is brilliant, which is no surprise considering her parents. Her father, an engineer at Microsoft, delivered the “fourth most-watched TED talk” of all time about a tiny wearable device he invented that lets users move objects with their minds. Her mother, Bernadette, won a Macarthur award for her work in sustainable architecture but now lives a reclusive, phobic existence in the family home, a decaying girls’ school she had planned to renovate. Blackberry brambles poke through the floors, and Seattle’s rains penetrate the roof. After a failed intervention, Bernadette disappears, and Bee determines to locate her.
Just as Bernadette combined readymade materials like salvaged steel beams, trimmings from landscaping, and discarded doorknobs in her buildings, Bee presents her narrative as an assemblage of gossipy emails from parents at the private school Bee attends, meeting notes, press releases, letters, and magazine articles. Where’d You Go Bernadette moves propulsively due to the mystery at its heart, suggested in the title: Where is Bee’s mother? Is she alive or dead? Bee is convinced she knows the answer, and we readers fly through the pages to see if she is right.
While Bee and Annie find love and undivided attention at the center of their small families, Patrick Melrose, the main character in five of Edward St. Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels, faces a much thornier situation. As the first in the novel series, Never Mind, opens, Patrick’s father is methodically torturing ants in the garden of the family’s fancy estate in the South of France. Five-year-old Patrick courts death by jumping on the rotted wooden cover of a well, as vulnerable to his father’s predations as the drowned ants. Patrick’s mother mixes alcohol with pills and buzzes away in her enormous Buick.
Patrick’s father carries his noble title to the marriage, and his mother brings the wealth. Neither offers love. Unhappiness fogs the scene: these are rich people we don’t envy, and we see in hideous detail how alone and vulnerable Patrick is in his home. Never Mind takes place over a single day, during which an act of unspeakable horror committed by Patrick’s father follows Patrick through the decades, and novels, to follow.
The unnamed young adult narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation finds herself at loose ends. Her parents, her only family, died while she was in college, and now, she’s been fired from her job at an art gallery due to frequent naps in the supply closet. She believes in the power of sleep, not merely as a side-effect of depression, but as a goal all its own. She maintains unconsciousness or semi-consciousness for longer and longer periods, with the help of a psychiatrist who makes free with the prescription pad.
Her only friend, Reva, is also an only child, and Reva’s mother is dying of cancer, just as the narrator’s father did. The narrator calls herself an orphan and says of Reva, whom she doesn’t like: “I imagine this is what having a sister is like, someone who loves you enough to point out all your flaws.” The novel takes place on the cusp of 9/11, where the narrator’s personal tragedy and desire to cocoon and emerge reborn is soon to be overlaid by national tragedy, as the sleepy United States of the early aughts wakes up to pain one morning in September.
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson also pairs two young women in their twenties who have a faux-sisterly bond, “something weirder” than friendship. Lillian, the only child narrator, earned a scholarship to a fancy prep school her single mother never could have afforded. Her roommate Madison, heir to a department store fortune and only daughter in a family of four boys, gets caught with drugs. Madison’s father swoops in to offer Lillian’s mother money if Lillian takes the fall for Madison. Lillian cops to the drugs and gets expelled.
Lillian has remarkably low expectations of her loved ones, so she doesn’t take her mother’s, or Madison’s, betrayal personally. Lillian and Madison have stayed in touch through the years, as Lillian landed unceremoniously back in her mother’s attic, working two low-paying jobs, while Madison married a wealthy senator with presidential ambitions and a grand estate. Improbably, Madison now requires Lillian again, this time to help address a unique situation: Madison needs a nanny for her stepchildren, who burst into flames whenever they are angered. This trait is incompatible with her husband’s goal of higher office. Voters like their elected officials to have a normal, non-incendiary family. Will Lillian put aside her own best interest to help Madison? The novel includes an exquisite scene of one-on-one basketball, where years of resentment get worked out on the court.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is, as the title suggests, a contemporary Gothic novel, complete with a huge yet claustrophobic house haunted by a bloody history, young women in peril, and an evil patriarch whose noxious presence seems to seep from the walls. The main characters, Catalina, an only child and orphan, and Noemí, are cousins. Catalina’s aloneness in the world has made her uniquely vulnerable to landing in bad situations. Luckily, she has Noemí on her side.
Noemí travels to the damp, dismal house of Catalina’s new husband’s family and suspects that Catalina’s ill health, originally diagnosed as tuberculosis, has a psychosomatic component. The truth is even darker and wilder. As Noemí’s own dreams grow more and more powerful, she is convinced that she must get Catalina out of the house, but the young women find it extremely difficult to depart. The house, the site of the deaths of hundreds of silver miners, holds supernatural power over its residents. Some families are impossible to escape.
Gary Indiana’s Depraved Indifference is third in a loose trilogy of true crime novels. The first two, Resentment and Three Month Fever, follow the parricidal Menendez brothers and Andrew Cunanan, killer of Gianni Versace, respectively. Depraved Indifference tracks two lesser-known miscreants, Sante and Kevin Kimes, who, fictionalized by Indiana, become Evangeline and Devin Slote.
If in Nothing to See Here, the only child Lillian is victim of her mother’s low expectations for her, in Depraved Indifference, Devin is his mother’s willing accomplice as she grifts her way across the country in a “circus of locomotion and calamity.” Though Devin lives without siblings, he is not technically an only child. He has a much younger brother, Darren, whom Evangeline stashes with various relatives so she can maintain her peripatetic agenda of passing bad checks, faking cancer, setting fires to collect insurance money, and abducting foreign workers to serve as unpaid servants at her homes. The bumper crop of crimes is hard to trace and prosecute, because Evangeline and Devin move so adeptly across jurisdictions. We hear little about Darren because he isn’t useful to Evangeline, and what we learn about Devin shows how lonely it is to grow up alone in the radioactive glow of a brilliant, toxic mother, and how easy it is for the son to follow in the mother’s crooked footsteps.
Sally Rooney breaks new ground for herself in her recent release Beautiful World, Where Are You, when two queer characters finally have sex on-page. Famous novelist Alice and warehouse worker Felix, who are trapped in a typical Rooney will-they-won’t-they, concede to their mutual lust about halfway through the novel when he unexpectedly shows up at her house after ghosting her. They are both bisexual. This scene has a funny little prelude that caught my attention: after work, before going to Alice’s, Felix pulls off into a parking lot at the side of the road, lights a joint, and checks an unnamed dating app on his phone. A man has contacted him: you around tonight? Felix considers responding—types it out, even, might be, whats up?—but ultimately does not, getting back into his car and hitting the road again. Then Rooney writes:
“Approaching the village, he hit the indicator, and then picked his phone up off the dashboard and squinted at it again. There were no new messages. For no apparent reason, he switched off his indicator light and continued driving straight.”
On he goes to Alice’s.
What to make of this short consideration, the implicit question in that almost-turn? Here we have an even bigger first for Rooney’s novels: the first time a man considers having sex with another man on-page, although, of course, “for no apparent reason,” he does not. The sequence above serves as a microcosm of the problem of Beautiful World’s queerness, and exemplifies the problem of queerness in Rooney’s larger body of work: namely, that while the novel flirts with certain queer questions, theories, and antecedents, and casts longing glances after what-might-have-beens, it largely carries forward in the most heterosexual manner possible, deciding against the turn toward more interesting narrative territory, investing and reinvesting in straightness—to its detriment—until the very last page.
This claim may seem unfair, given the identities of the characters in question. But I’m hard-pressed to describe it otherwise. For instance, consider this later scene in the novel, after Alice’s best friend Eileen, and her sometimes-boyfriend and childhood love Simon, have joined Alice and Felix at the rectory where Alice is convalescing after a recent breakdown. Felix asks Simon about his sexuality, whereupon Simon allows that he’s only liked girls “so far.” After, Felix goes upstairs and teases Alice: “You don’t think the three of us could have a little fun together, no?” Alice inquires as to where Eileen would be in all this. Felix tells her, “I wouldn’t rule her out.” They have sex. Meanwhile, Eileen and Simon look at photographs from a recent wedding and then (and I say this with deep regret) make love. “Sometimes I wish I was your wife,” she confesses to him. There’s never any real doubt as to who will end up with who, or even how. But the queer fantasy adds a certain flair, a je ne sais quoi, which contrasts, heightens, and enlivens the heterosexual behavior that follows.
Regarding Rooney’s novels, critics seem to slyly wink at this particular phenomenon without engaging with it, much like the work itself. Reviewing Beautiful World, Where Are You for The New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson writes that “as in Rooney’s previous novels, there are … characters who pair off in a heterosexual fashion but profess a casual queerness.” Ciaran Freeman also describes the protagonist of Rooney’s debut Conversations with Friends as “casually queer.” Reading these reviews, you are left to wonder what exactly it means to be casual about one’s queerness—and yet it is apt. Alice herself writes, in an email to Eileen, “I know I am bisexual, but I don’t feel attached to it as an identity.” In another, she writes, “Everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.” Well, I am willing to articulate it! Rooney has described herself in the past as “imaginatively limited” in her plots and characters; this is never clearer than in Beautiful World, Where Are You, where queerness is stripped of substance, history, culture, and purpose, enabling Rooney, despite all these firsts, to tell the story she already knows how to tell—i.e., a straight one.
There’s never any real doubt as to who will end up with who, or even how.
This goes deeper than a few aborted gay almost-liaisons. Beautiful World, Where Are You is rife with convenient intellectual and narrative gaps that permit the novel to ask queer questions and resolve them with heterosexual answers. For instance: one of the primary concerns in Beautiful World, Where Are You is how to live a life in the crushing unknown of a futureless future. With climate change and mass societal implosion pending, Alice and Eileen often turn to each other with questions about how to go on: “Considering the approaching civilizational collapse, maybe you think children are out of the question anyway,” Eileen writes to Alice, while later Alice muses, “Isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” In such passages, the novel achieves a real sense of urgency and passion that is elsewhere missing. However, these are not contemporary concerns, and yet they are presented by these otherwise brilliant women with no hindsight, no historicity—the straightness of the novel requires that they be infants to so much of the world.
In No Future, Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argues that straight society’s obsession with the future justifies and maintains the status quo. Marriage, houses, and babies are the machinery, and the rhetorical basis, by which the present condition (e.g., white supremacy, capitalism, the nation state, etc.) reproduces itself forward forever. By Edelman’s analysis, queerness is then the end of all futures: think of the panic over queer parents, the paranoid spectre of the pedophilic gay man, and the world-ending impact of AIDS at the end of the millennium. “Apocalypse in the first person,” indeed. Yet for Edelman, the end of the world is not a bad thing. He writes that queerness is “the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with jouissance),” pointing to the pleasures, politics, and power that become possible under conditions of impossibility. There’s void and jouissance aplenty in Beautiful World, Where Are You, where Eileen gets Simon off over the phone, and then, by “the artificial orange glow of urban lighting pollution,” touches herself until she comes. While reading this, I noted in the margins: straight people really just want to be us now huh! they want to fuck with the anvil of incoming death hanging over their heads!
It’s as if Rooney is attempting to write straight stories queerly. In queer theory, queerness is understood as a liminal, amorphous, unknowable, ungovernable, and even fearful quality, in opposition to the safety and certainty of straightness. What I’ve described above, a sort of queer subterrane overlaid with the rote architecture of straight romance, occurs again and again throughout Beautiful World, Where Are You. The women grapple over a sense of discontinuous present and disrupted time reminiscent of Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of queer temporality; they question what “a relationship with no preordained shape” might be like, seemingly unaware of Sara Ahmed’s work on straightness as a pre-ordinance or mandate for women that shapes, molds, and directs us into particular courses of life. Lauren Berlant characterized this as a rule of genre, wherein heterosexuality, as a genre does, promises its audience certain unfoldings, futures, and endings. When critic Jane Hu writes that “Rooney takes the novel, which necessitates closure—physical books always have to end[ ]—and tests its capacity to narrate inconclusiveness and uncertainty,” she is in a sense ascribing a queer sensibility to Rooney’s greater project as an author. Claire Jarvis, writing about the sex in Normal People for Post45, agrees: “she writes straight characters in a queer world.”
And yet Rooney’s world, which constitutes the form and content of the novel, shows an inexorable tendency toward that most straightening device—resolution.
And yet Rooney’s world, which constitutes the form and content of the novel, shows an inexorable tendency toward that most straightening device—resolution. The prose of the first half or so of Beautiful World, Where Are You is written in a terribly distant objective-leaning third perspective. Spare, choppy paragraphs describe action more so than intent, refusing us access to the characters’ thoughts. They are unknown to us, and each other. Halfway through the novel, when Alice and Felix have sex for the first time, the staccato quality of the writing falls away. The sex scene is written in one single paragraph that goes on for four pages. This formal shift recurs as Simon and Eileen attend her sister’s wedding, and again at the end of the novel, when the two couples finally come together and hash it out. Entire chapters flow without break, every action melting into the next, the previous distance between the characters closing. There is a sense that this is what the characters have been seeking all along—certainly in their trysts, where much of the eroticism derives from fucking without condoms and coming inside one another. If they could physically crawl inside one another, they would. It’s sexy, but it unravels the complexity and possibility of what was previously unknown. There is nothing inconclusive, uncertain, or even unpredictable about the ending of Beautiful World, Where Are You. Spoiler alert: Alice and Felix, and Eileen and Simon, (separately) make it work. There are houses and babies and marriage on the horizon. The messy, queer parts are wrapped up and packed away.
Such pat endings are a recurring problem for Rooney and her queers. In her debut, Conversations with Friends, the protagonist Frances has a close, fraught friendship with her high school ex-girlfriend, Bobbi, though it is conveyed mainly in brief touches, flaring tempers, and old instant message exchanges. Like Alice’s unnamed ex-girlfriend, mentioned only once in Beautiful World, Where Are You, these brief glimpses are rare. Frances remarks to Nick, her love interest, that she has never had sex with a man; I confess that I as a reader did not believe that she’d ever had sex with a woman, either—nor did I believe Bobbi had, as she does not appear to have exes, hookups, or community in general. In the end, they are evolved enough to be “not girlfriends” but something better, “sleeping together” but not having sex, at least not on page. Rooney writes this so confusingly that Hu describes them as “best friends who sleep in the same bed.” In a 2018 profile in The New Yorker, Rooney defended the choice not to give Frances and Bobbi a sex scene, in contrast to the multiple such scenes allocated to Frances and Nick, stating that, “Frances, in her narrative, is exercising a sort of mastery over the people she writes about. She has so much respect and adulation for Bobbi that it felt like she wouldn’t have done that to Bobbi, in some way.” This is of course what every lesbian wants to hear: that one simply respects her too much to admit to having sex with her in public.
In the final chapter of the novel, after a brief period of queer hand-holding, Frances reconnects with Nick. Whether it will go well or not is beside the point; heterosexuality, like all other forms of closure and foreclosure, is more about promises than the actual keeping of those promises. Hu writes that ending Conversations with Friends and Normal People “with lovers separated but always with the specter of future reunion enables Rooney to have it both ways.” After three books, there appears to be only one way. Queerness becomes the feint-of-hand, the trompe-l’oeil, the mechanism by which Rooney’s will-they-won’t-they turns. Which is, frankly, too fucking bad, because straight people are already convinced that queerness exists primarily at their service. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice writes that “markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions.” Heteronormativity is the same.
Queerness becomes the feint-of-hand, the trompe l’oeil, the mechanism by which Rooney’s will-they-won’t-they turns.
Rooney has been described—and has described herself—as a writer of “nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing.” Perhaps this explains the ascetic, verging on prudish, way in which sexuality between women is written in her novels. Certainly there is a lineage here. In Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Lillian Faderman writes that “beginning in the seventeenth century… there is a tremendous literature that focuses on love between women in the form of ‘romantic friendship,’ women who ‘wrote passionate love letters’ to each other, who may even have lived together—such as the Ladies of Llangollen, two Irish women who lived together in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who referred to each other in journals as ‘my sweet love,’ ‘my Beloved.’” At the time, such romantic friendships were socially acceptable so long as they were too pure, too sacred for lust or sex.
In the nineteenth century, women entering the first women’s colleges discovered that they could “become heroes—socially, athletically, intellectually—to one another and thrive in each other’s regard.” Faderman writes that “such admiration and desire often led them to love.” In contemporaneous realist novels like Emma, Lisa L. Moore writes in Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel, “the heroine’s renunciation of her intimacies with other women is the price she pays for the ascension to domestic female power.” It is impossible to read about these women and not think of college friends Frances and Bobbi or Alice and Eileen, who sign their emails to each other “Love, love, love,” “all my love,” and so on. But if the heterosexual couples of Beautiful World, Where Are You can fuck for some 22 pages of the novel, a sure departure from the 19th-century novels to which Rooney’s are compared, then why can’t her queers escape the confines of liminality, suggestion, gesture, and posture to which they are relegated?
What are queer credentials? How does one get credentialed?
It all begins to feel a bit cynical. There are moments in the novel where queerness feels like little more than a rhetorical lever—such as when Nick asks Alice if he’s put her off men, and she replies, “Oh, not just men. People of all genders.” As if nonbinary people exist in Sally Rooney novels! Sure enough, all later conversations between these two revolve around men and women only. This begs the question: what machinery is at play, between Sally Rooney, her publisher, the industry, her readers, and society, that placed that “people of all genders” there on the page? Publishing has garnered something of a reputation in recent years for professed progressivism that serves to mask an absolute minimum of progressive action. A glowing review of Conversations with Friends in The New Yorker claimed, “With her queer credentials and radical politics, Frances is an unlikely protagonist in a novel of adultery, that most clichéd of genres.” What are queer credentials? How does one get credentialed? To me, this carries a whiff of marketing about it. And when we consider the market, it makes sense that lesbian sexuality, queer sexuality, does not exist in Rooney’s novels—it is just a cool thing about you, a queer woman who does not have queer thoughts or desires or hookups, like being a Marxist who does not organize or protest or sabotage or even so much as attend a Marxist book club meeting on campus.
But then, this game of flags and signifiers is exactly what feels most Of The Moment about Rooney’s work. Straight women’s fiction, its adaptations, and its interpretations are increasingly inflected by queerness. At the same time, we are increasingly aware that queernesssells. The question arises of whether queerness is something you are, something you do, or something else entirely—and while this question may feel like splitting hairs, or even like an attack, it has greater political repercussions for queerness as a movement.
There is a certain sense of defensiveness when Eileen writes, in the final chapter, that she wants “to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.” She continues, “To prove it to whom, I wonder.” Good question! Who out there is railing against heterosexual love and care, against the ordinariness of baby-making and marriage? The feminists? The lesbians? Who does Eileen—or perhaps Rooney—imagine reading over her shoulder, pointing out the cracks and seams, the moral or ethical or political failings, in her life’s work?
I’m being combative. Perhaps because it’s me, there, leaning over her shoulder, casting a long shadow. But it’s hard to stomach when queerness is used as a buttress or even an alibi for straightness, propping up effectively straight narratives and effectively straight women, waving flags over a wall to suggest a queer, feminist, and radical existence. As Caleb Crain writes in The Atlantic, “I came to think of [Felix’s] bisexuality as a bay leaf that was said to have been added to the soup, but hadn’t been.” But I like to think that queerness has more to offer than psychosomatic flavor, than small talk, than nostalgic remembrances, and the rare, painful frisson of potential alternity. Do not mistake this as an argument of representation. What I’m describing is a failure in Beautiful World, Where Are You to fulfill its own premises, answer to its own bones, attend to its own ghosts. Perhaps you’re saying to me now, but it’s not that kind of book! You’re right. It’s not.
Imagine that kind of book. Imagine a book where, after Alice, despondent, tells Felix that Eileen cares about her but “it’s not the same”—after Eileen sobs to Simon that “she doesn’t love me … with Alice I’ve ruined everything”—after they appear to each other, atop and at the foot of the stairs, “each like a dim mirror of the other”—imagine a book where, after Eileen says, “I just want everything to be like it was … and for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different,” they do not go off to move in with a boyfriend and write another novel, or get pregnant and marry their childhood love. Where this moving-in-with, this refusal to turn off or aside from the expected road, does not constitute growing up. That sounds like a beautiful world, in another book, in other pages than the ones we were given. If only we’d been allowed to find it.
On the first day of work, I sat at my desk in the bedroom and put on my company-issued Office of the Mind (OotM) glasses, earpieces, and haptic gloves. Immediately I was transported into an office again, in a half-cubicle, a new clean desk, a 55-inch HD curved monitor at my workstation, with coworkers chattering all around me in their cubes, like the old days. All of us wore work clothes, and the pop-up tutorial prompted me to customize mine with a few taps of my index finger and thumb tips. In reality, we were likely in the clothes we slept in, inside our various homes, hiding from all the diseases.
“Welcome aboard,” said my cubicle neighbor, a sales engineer named Murray, a middle-aged white gentleman, who added that he was based in Mozambique, originally from the UK. He had moved to Maputo after getting fed up with Brexit and earned citizenship. “Wanna get coffee?” he added.
“We can get coffee?!” I squawked.
He laughed and beckoned me to follow. We walked across the virtual cubicle floor, turned the corner at the elevator bank, and waited for the elevator to take us down. In my apartment, I had traversed my bedroom and turned into my closet. I could feel my hanged clothes brushing against my face.
“Where did you work before?” Murray asked.
“I was a freelancer for a long time,” I said, taking a step back. I left it at that. I had been a little shocked I got the job. But every multinational needed readable content these days for the search engine algorithms.
“A lover of freedom, eh?” Murray said.
“Until it became too much.” I kicked myself for saying that. It made me sound like a layabout instead of what the freelancer life was really like: doing fifteen assignments one day for $30 each. Then doing zero assignments the next week and eating packaged ramen for dinner. I just felt lucky to have health insurance for the first time in a decade.
The elevator doors opened. The interior was gold-plated. I felt the familiar unbalanced feeling as we descended. How did my OotM hardware simulate those sensations so accurately?
“It’s the earpieces,” Murray said, as if reading my mind. “They emit electrical pulses that mess with your sense of balance.”
“Wild,” I said with childlike wonder.
“They even sent me a roomier set of glasses because I wear these,” Murray said, pointing to his tortoiseshells. “I’m definitely buying stock in Office of the Mind when they IPO.”
When the elevator doors opened, we walked out into a bustling café. Our coworkers communed, sitting at tables, drinking espresso drinks. Tears came to my eyes. I used to love cafes. Murray and I walked up to the barista stand and ordered cappuccinos.
“How does this work?” I asked.
The barista, a man-bunned and willowy twenty-something white fellow, handed us our virtual drinks, and Murray and I walked over to a table round and sat. In my bedroom, I was on the corner of my bed.
“Try it,” Murray said.
I raised the fake cappuccino to my lips and fake-sipped. The buzz and the taste felt real!
“Whoa.”
“Pretty cool, huh?” Murray said. “It’s all in the earpieces.”
I raised my virtual cup. “I’m going to love working here.”
OotMs were all the rage now. After Nicole was fired from her editorship at that magazine-turned-clickbait-factory, she started in entry-level PR at The Bank, and those larger, more institutional companies were slower to adopt new tech. She was still doing her same old video conferencing and phone conversations. She and I had started dating before The Shutdown and moved in together about a year ago when we couldn’t afford our own places anymore. Our apartment was only 500 square feet so all of my blind roaming while in the Office of the Mind had me bumping into Nicole and/or our things frequently.
“That’s just my partner again in his Office of the Mind,” she’d tell her coworkers on video conference, while pushing me in the direction of our living room, where I would then nearly trip over our coffee table or armchair. The end of my workdays would be filled with random bruises on my shins, elbows, and knees. One time, I went ass over couch and was lucky not to lose a tooth—or worse, break my OotM glasses. These challenges were worth the experience of being part of an actual office work culture, part of something larger than myself. Nicole and I lived in a place with no central heating and drainage so bad that we wore galoshes in the shower and couldn’t even flush TP in the toilet. Our neighborhood had a serious vulture problem from all of the pandemic deaths. We were both supposedly well-employed, highly educated knowledge workers but our $500 espresso machine was our nicest possession. Getting a full-time job with benefits felt like being dragged out of the open ocean onto a rescue ship.
“I’m loving my job,” I told Nicole, taking off my OotM glasses at the end of an especially invigorating workday, both professionally and socially.
“I’m really going to need for you to watch where you’re going and to pay attention to me every once in a while,” she said.
Getting a full-time job with benefits felt like being dragged out of the open ocean onto a rescue ship.
“We could try looking for a bigger apartment,” I pointed out. “It’s only a matter of time before you’re going to be working in an Office of the Mind.”
Sure enough, a month later, The Bank shifted to OotM. Within the hour, she understood. “I love not being in our shitty apartment while being in our shitty apartment,” she said. “I love not seeing you at all during the day even though I live with you so I can focus on my work.”
“Me too!”
I’m not going to lie; our OotMs affected our home life in some deleterious ways. The most obvious one, of course, was that we were both now injury-prone, walking around blind in our tiny apartment, bumping into walls, knocking into each other, flying over furniture. We looked for ways to ameliorate the household danger and found that there was already a sizable and growing repository of online content on the topic. Some were instructional videos from the OotM team like the “How to Person-Proof Your Home” series, which already had dozens of videos, each with millions of views. There were also many listicles like the ones I used to write, with headlines like “27 Things You Need to Do Right Now to Avoid OotM Head Trauma.”
We opted to have padded walls installed like the ones in psych wards. Expensed to our employers, they’re more elegant and fashionable than they sound. There were boutique online businesses that made wall padding in all kinds of colors and textures. We chose shiplap, which looked like wood but felt like down pillows when you slammed up against them face-first. We also got rid of our glass and metal coffee table and replaced it with a bean bag that you could just kick out of the way if it happened to be in your path. (Always humorous to see your colleagues suddenly do a kick in the OotM while they’re walking the halls with you.) Finally, we child-proofed our dining room table, kitchen counters, anything with a hard edge or corner, and we wore elbow and knee pads and bike helmets with our OotM gear.
Despite our stylish, new home mods, when we took off our hardware at the end of a long workday, our apartment looked impossibly drab, our various screens tiny. Our wall-mounted TV was a meager twenty-seven inches. In the Offices of our Minds, they were all at least twice as large, we complained to each other. My work cubicle felt like half the size of our apartment. All the appliances in the office were brand new. We had free food in the kitchen that, even if it didn’t give us actual sustenance, tasted great to our brains. When I’d cook dinner for me and Nicole after work, real food just tasted bland. I wanted the virtual foie gras pasture-raised egg breakfast sandwich from my Office of the Mind. We both began to lose weight.
One night, around 1:00 a.m., thinking about work and trying to get a head start on the next day, I left Nicole in bed and pretended to use the restroom. In our bathroom, I put on my OotMs. The office was at least two-thirds full.
My cubicle mate Murray was there. It was 6:00 a.m., Central Africa Time.
“You’re here early,” I said.
“I can say the same for you.” “Lots to do,” I said.
As I walked around the office, filling my fake water cup in the kitchen and getting a fake bowl of muesli with fake oat milk, all the while doing circles in my bathroom, I noticed tons of people I’d met who said they lived in The City, which meant they were also working at 1:00 a.m.
“You must be on deadline,” I said to Casey, a marketing coordinator who lived in two neighborhoods over.
“Not really,” they said. “I just can’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” I said.
Casey and I went for coffee downstairs. We both knew our fake cappuccinos would keep us up all night.
“My life isn’t great,” they admitted. “I’m single. The pandemics. My brother just died last year from the emu one.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” I said, not saying that I was partnered because Casey was a looker. “Hopefully work can be a distraction from all the horrible things going on outside. For me, it’s nice to know I can come here and be part of something. My life isn’t great either.”
“So you’re liking your role?”
“I am! I got tired of writing those ‘eighty-nine reasons its unhealthy to pee sitting down’ listicles.”
Casey laughed and laughed, the OotM version of their face turning red. Tears were in their eyes. I wasn’t even trying to be funny; I was being honest.
“I was doing deliveries and rideshare driving before the androids,” Casey said.
“It’s all for the best, I suppose.”
“Things worked out the way they were supposed to.”
“Where are you right now?”
“In my bedroom,” they said.
“Pajamas?”
“Been wearing them for months,” they purred, mock-flirtatious.
Even though I knew they were joking, I grew hard. Casey looked great in that fake pants suit and those black ankle boots.
“What about you?” they said, looking down into their fake coffee.
“Seated on the lip of my bathtub.” I didn’t mention that it was still draining the murky water from my nightly shower.
Casey tittered. What a titter.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking myself out of the moment. “I’m just thinking how weird this is.”
“I know, right?”
We laughed.
I heard my name in the distance. From outside the bathroom door.
“Who are you talking to?” Nicole said.
I flipped up my smartglasses, autopausing the OotM, and opened the door. “I’m on a work call.”
Nicole’s brows rose. “Okay.” She didn’t buy that even a little bit. I shut the door in her face. By the time I put my OotMs back on and rejoined Casey, it just didn’t feel right. My heart was beating really fast. I knew I had hurt Nicole’s feelings and that things would be chilly around the apartment for days, if not weeks. And Casey’s feed was jittering, their mouth moving with no audio coming out.
“Hey, I should get back to work,” I said. “This was fun!” Then I turned off my glasses.
When I got to the bedroom, the lights were on, and Nicole was perched on her side of the bed, her back turned to me.
“Sorry to wake you,” I said, sliding under the covers. “I should turn off work notifications.”
She didn’t respond. I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned around, startled.
Nicole was wearing her Office of the Mind glasses.
We didn’t talk about that night as I expected we would. Instead, we both started using the Offices of our Minds almost twenty-four-seven. When we streamed movies after a long workday, we snuck peeks at our smartglasses, darkened when at rest, save for the green lights on the temples. When the lights flashed, that indicated a medium-priority-or-above work message.
At night, I continued to have trouble sleeping, so I retired to the bathroom more often, inviting Casey for late-night coffees. I learned a lot about them. They had grown up in Y— and had always dreamed of living in The City, but now found it disappointing. They wanted to move to S— and was saving up to buy the relatively low-cost real estate there.
Their true passion was music, and they shared a link to their artist page, from which I streamed their songs while I was working. The tunes were a little folksy and twee for my tastes, but they had a lovely voice. They also made and sold jewelry online. They said the time it took to walk to the post office to ship their products was their designated time to be away from the Office of the Mind, when they could see the world with their own eyes. I was impressed by their creativity. Nicole and I weren’t creative. I’d tried to start a novel at least a dozen times, but didn’t have the guts to finish. Nicole was into all kinds of trendy pandemic-borne crafts like mask-masking and goggle-blinging, but she liked to start things and never complete them. I admired Casey for their confidence, their perseverance, their ability to make actual objects and send them out into the real world where they were touched and enjoyed by other humans. For Casey, this company was just a waystation to some better, bigger future. For Nicole and I, our OotMs were it for us, sucking off the teat of companies creating value for society, rather than us making anything worthy ourselves.
One night, Casey gave me a handcrafted gold bracelet, of which they’d snapped a photo with their OotMs. Cool feature: hold your thumb and pinky tips together and the virtual office disappears and your smartglasses turn into a camera. Take a picture of any object from your real life, and OotM converts it into virtual form so you can drag and drop it into your office environment. I wasn’t much of a desk decorator, but Murray, for instance, had framed photos of his family and running medals and all manner of personal memorabilia in his cubicle. I wore the bracelet with my work outfit, and my wearing the gift made them smile.
Casey had become my work spouse.
I suppose I should have noticed that after she got her OotMs, Nicole wasn’t particularly present in our lives either. We were ordering more takeout than ever, sometimes twice in one night if one place was dissatisfactory. Often I would say I had a meeting during dinner when I didn’t, or she would say she had a meeting, and there was no way for me to know if she did. I would hide in the bedroom behind my smartglasses and just be at work, walking back and forth to the fake printer. I went to virtual meetups in conference rooms for channels like #cookingtogether and #socialimpact.
Our OotMs were it for us, sucking off the teat of companies creating value for society, rather than us making anything worthy ourselves.
Casey would be at the channel gatherings too, and we would make fake sushi, bake fake cookies, and feed them to our fake selves. I’d never been so happy. I couldn’t believe that I’d waited ten years to latch onto a legit corporation, wearing my freelancer’s liberties like a badge of honor, instead of what it was: a financial albatross. The company paid me well and gave me community in a time when we weren’t allowed to have community in real life. The degraded state of my home life felt like a small price to pay.
Nicole and I asked each other about work happenings. Higher-ups quitting or getting fired. Re-orgs and their implications for our roles. But the reality was: I didn’t care about her Office of the Mind, and she didn’t care about mine. The only time we seemed to be together was right before we went to bed, and we were both exhausted, eyes bloodshot from being on the glasses all day. We’d now both started to gain weight from all the takeout we’d been eating and the exercise we weren’t getting. We’d stopped grooming because the OotMs automatically groomed our virtual selves. Our avatars were delightfully outdated, fifteen pounds ago. In real life, our hair grew long, all over our bodies. I was sporting a scraggly, patchy beard, which Nicole openly hated to kiss, and she was an incredibly hirsute woman, I’d come to discover. Luckily, we only looked this shitty to each other. I felt horrible about my actual body. I was still attracted to Nicole, but when we made love, I couldn’t help but see Casey in their digitized pants suit and ankle boots, and when Nicole moaned, I couldn’t help but hear Casey’s falsettos and see that smile they gave me when I put on their fake gold bracelet.
After six months at the company, I was promoted. My boss said he’d never seen anyone so committed to our culture and reported that everyone on the team loved me, and I was doing a great job. Nicole wasn’t promoted, but was transferred to a role she liked better: in Corporate Social Responsibility.
On the rare day off for her, Nicole wanted to go for a Plexiglas-covered scooter ride (one of those pandemic impulse buys that we rarely used). Winter in The City had broken, the sky was lavender instead of the fiery orange we were used to. We’d been outside a half a dozen times all year, on each occasion taking care to wear our respirator masks, protective eyewear, gloves, and utility belts that shot out six feet of measuring tape at a press of a button. Nicole understandably felt nostalgia for the outdoors and asked me if I wanted to join. I told her I was too busy at work. After she left, I slid on my OotMs and messaged Casey to meet up for coffee.
They suggested we meet in the #cookingtogether channel conference room instead. Since I had the apartment all to myself for once, I didn’t bother to hide in the bathroom or bedroom. The conference room had been fully decorated with Casey’s jewelry, like the room was their own store. The fake office tower windows gleamed with sunlight from a clear white sky that I didn’t think I’d live to see again in real life.
“Do you like it?” Casey asked.
“It’s amazing,” I said. “You’re amazing.”
We started kissing. I could feel their lips (and the little buzzes from my earpieces). In the living room, I reclined on the couch, lowered my sweats, and fondled myself with my haptic gloves as Casey laid down on the virtual conference table. We were both fully clothed in the Office of the Mind (a bit of a bummer, for sure, but naturally, solid HR policy). I hovered over them and kissed their neck. I was impressed with how real it all felt. I could feel Casey’s hands on my chest and then down at my hips. Too bad touching each other’s nethers was out of the question. When I tried, my hands disappeared, and I felt nothing but air.
I’d later find out that Nicole had received a work message that brought her back to the apartment early. I heard the door open and her saying: “Where did I put my glasses?” and then a squeal as she saw me with my sweats down, OotMs up.
“What the fuck?!” she shouted.
I ripped off my glasses, took off my earpieces, and pulled up my sweats. What could I say about myself? Nicole stood there in our tiny living room, mask below her chin, goggles off. Her scooter, bared of its Plexiglas hood, was parked near the kitchen counter, which was festooned with takeout boxes that neither of us had bothered to bag up and lug to the trash because it required us to put on our various forms of PPE. Our apartment with the padded walls like a psych ward was nearly empty of furniture because we had gotten rid of most of it. How had we come to this bleak place?
Nicole just shook her head and snapped up her OotM glasses, which were encased in their brushed chrome cylinder on the counter. “I have to take a call,” she growled, before putting on the OotMs and storming toward the bathroom. But with her eyes covered, she didn’t see the scooter she had forgotten to put away and went flying over it. She landed with a thump and cried out.
“Are you okay?” I said, rushing over.
“Oh, oh, oh!” She got to her knees and held her right forearm as it spurted blood. Her still-gloved hand and wrist stuck out from the arm at an unnatural angle. Her glasses had flown off, and one of the lenses had cracked against the hardwood floor near the entrance, the only area of the apartment we had neglected to pad.
I dashed into the bathroom and ripped all our bath towels off their hooks and used them to contain the bleeding. I fired up the rideshare app on my phone and fingered a self-driving car because the ones driven by androids were insufferably rude. I reaffixed Nicole’s mask and goggles, and then wore my own, before rushing us downstairs into the car, which said hello and drove itself to the hospital, which needless to say, no one wanted to visit during multiple global pandemics.
As one might imagine, there was awkward silence on the way. The towels had slowed the bleeding but were sopped through with red. In the back seat, Nicole was on her cracked OotMs leaving a message for her team, telling them that she had broken her arm and was on the way to the hospital and would log in later when her arm was set. She said, “Log off,” and the glasses cleared.
“Take them off me,” she said icily.
I did as told and put the glasses and earpieces in the case and into my sweats pocket, before sliding Nicole’s goggles back over her eyes.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, figuring there was no hiding what had happened. “There’s a colleague at work. Casey. We’ve been having a . . . thing. It’s not real.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Nicole said. She was blinking slowly, and her breathing was ragged and audible. I worried she was in shock.
“Do you need to lie down?” I asked.
“I said: shut the fuck up!”
When we got to the urgent care unit, the medical workers were mostly androids, except for the ones managing the androids. The robots were all muttering expletives under their breaths, and two laughed hysterically as they wheeled out a gurney with an uncovered corpse of a woman whose eyes looked like they’d been taped open, and whose mouth was forced agape by a pair of those big forceps they use for childbirth. Behind their face shields and masks, the human medical workers had dark circles beneath bloodshot eyes. They all looked like they hoped we wouldn’t ask them for help. At the front desk, a young woman in scrubs wept while typing something on her tablet with nitrile-gloved hands.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said to her. “But my partner has a broken arm. Compound fracture.”
The nurse plucked tissues out of a box and lifted her face shield to dab her eyes. “Oh, that’s it?” she said chirpily. “That’s the easiest thing we’ve had to deal with all week. I’ll call an android.”
Just then, one passed by singing, “‘It’s murda. It’s murda.’” Nicole and I watched in horror as it stared back at us with its dead-eyed metal head while its body continued to walk down the hall.
“Can we request a human for this job?” I said to the nurse.
“Oh, that one is a big fan of rap from the 2000s,” said the nurse. “Follow me.” She led us into a closet where she uncovered Nicole’s arm, disinfected the wound, padded the area, and applied a vacuum splint. After the nurse shot Nicole up with a painkiller, we waited in the hallway for X-rays. There weren’t even any chairs. We leaned against a wall. Nicole swayed from the anesthesia.
“Do you want your Office of the Mind?” I asked her, trying to get her to talk to me about anything.
She shook her head, eyes glazed. She just drifted away from me without a word, like we had drifted away from each other.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Bathroom,” she said without turning around.
Her Office of the Mind case vibrated. The lights on the hinges flashed red, indicating an urgent work message. What else could these people want from her? She already told them she was having a medical emergency. I opened the case and put on the glasses. A message bubble slid across my field of vision and disappeared.
“Ok, I’ll leave her,” a fellow named Liam had written. “Will u leave him?”
My legs grew weak. I snapped off Nicole’s OotMs and saw her frozen in the hall, cradling her broken arm, staring at me. For a moment, I thought she was jittering on my OotM feed like Casey had. From the look on her face, Nicole seemed to know exactly what I’d seen.
“I—” she began. Then she just sagged and rejoined me against the wall while I put her Office of the Mind glasses back into their case.
We avoided looking at each other. I watched more corpses being transported down the hall and back. Who knew where they were all going? Probably to the empty meatpacking plants outside The City. I thought of my OotM glasses back at the apartment. How I wanted to put them on and escape into that simpler virtual existence instead of the ever-narrowing one in which we lived. The desire throbbed in my ears and punched out of my ribcage it was so intense. I looked into Nicole’s eyes, and she looked into mine. I suspected we were thinking the same thing although neither of us would ever know for certain.
She put her head on my shoulder and asked, “When do we get to retire?”
For a very brief period of time, I wanted to be a doctor. My medical aspirations were not, however, borne of so noble a desire as to ease suffering—frankly, what I was really interested in was job security. As a pragmatic (if not especially altruistic) college student, it was clear to me that illness, pain, and disability were not aberrations of the human condition but, rather, sizable components of many individuals’ lived experience. Indeed, today, in the United States alone, six in ten adults live with chronic illness, and that number is much higher globally.
And yet, chronic illness and disability are something I see far too infrequently on the page, particularly if what I’m seeking are accurate depictions. Am I just supposed to believe that the characters in my favorite novels are never in ill health? For readers as skeptical as I am—readers, perhaps, interested in more nuanced and realistic reflections of life lived in a human body—these books don’t pretend “healthy” is the default.
When Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman living in unaffordable Bushwick meets Eric online, she’s not discouraged by the red flags: he’s much older than she is, and he’s married. The implications of these facts are the meat of the story, but threaded throughout is the reality of Edie’s body. She’s been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, an amorphous chronic condition that influences her life in small, but disruptive ways. For example, Edie prepares for a date with Eric by not eating for 10 hours beforehand. “I cannot anticipate the overreactions of my stomach,” she says, “so if I think there is even the slightest possibility of sex, I have to starve.” Though Edie’s strange interpersonal relationships take center stage throughout the novel, her health is always present—the background to her romantic foreground. An excerpt of the novel was published in Recommended Reading.
Miranda Fitch is a theater professor living her post-perfect life—that is, after a freak accident steals her successful stage career and leaves her mired in chronic pain, she muddles through her days in a fog of painkillers and resentment. When her student production starts going off the rails, taking her life with it, Miranda meets three strange men in a bar and her horrible luck takes a miraculous turn. But what does a life without pain cost? All’s Well is a dark, painfully funny look at chronic pain and our desire in erasing it.
The protagonist of Catherine Lacey’s second novel, Mary Parsons, is ill and Western medicine has failed her. Her symptoms are excruciating and unmanageable—until suddenly, they aren’t. In desperation, Mary tries an experimental therapy that miraculously works. The catch? It’s unaffordable. In a desperate attempt to pay for her treatment, Mary accepts an acting role as the “Emotional Girlfriend” in a famous actor’s elaborate research experiment. As the gig becomes increasingly demanding, Mary is forced to face uncomfortable questions about love, art, and how much one should reasonably be willing to pay for the absence of pain.
If you haven’t read the book that spawned “the cult of Sally Rooney,” you’ve probably at least some idea of what it’s about: introspective young people in complicated relationships. Two female 20-somethings, Frances and Bobbi, are best friends and former girlfriends who become physically and emotionally involved with Melissa and Nick, a married couple in their 30s—cue drama. But against the backdrop of the quadrangle’s spiraling interpersonal dynamics, the novel is also about Frances’ struggle with the increasingly acute symptoms of endometriosis, as well as depression and self-harm.
Though Megan Cummins’ debut is divided into six sections, each named after various parts of the body (“Heart,” “Eyes,” Lungs,” etc.), it is very much a linked collection. Marie, a woman in her 30s with a chronic autoimmune illness (lupus), is the centerpiece around which the narratives orbit. While many of the stories grapple with the body’s limitations, “Skin” is a particularly compelling look at illness and the difficult choices people with illness often confront. The stories in If the Body Allows It, winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction, clarify the impossibility of divorcing oneself from the physical.
The State of Me by Nasim Marie Jafry
Based on the author’s own experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), The State of Me is unadorned autofiction that follows the protagonist, Helen Fleet, from her diagnosis at age 20 through the aftermath of her illness. Jafry has described her novel as “the antithesis of sick lit,” and indeed, it would be impossible to describe Helen’s experiences as anything approaching romantic. But as much as the novel is an honest, sometimes ruthless exploration of chronic illness, it’s also a story of everything else that might populate a person’s life: love, sex, relationships, and all the “life bits” in between. Helen’s voice, quirky and sardonic throughout, makes for an immersive and compelling read.
Yanagihara’s doorstopper (it clocks in at over 700 pages) is nothing if not an in-depth examination of chronic pain and trauma-induced illness. Technically, the novel follows four male friends over three decades, but Jude’s life—particularly his mental and physical well-being—is the metaphorical glue that binds the quartet together. As the victim of ghastly and vicious abuse, Jude’s adulthood is permanently and profoundly marked by the trauma of his childhood. A Little Life is a difficult read, to be sure, but if you’re looking for an absolutely unflinching look at a life in an injured body, Yanagihara delivers.
In O Beautiful, Elinor is a 42-year-old ex-model from North Dakota on assignment in the Bakken, a career-making offer that comes unexpectedly from her grad school mentor and former lover. Though Elinor lands not far from where she grew up, she is—just as in childhood—often made to feel foreign by local white residents because of her biracial identity. The images in O Beautiful that most stay with us feel like metonyms of a Midwest that is both rapidly changing and refusing change: a gas station with a cartoon eagle on a wooden sign, pump jacks bobbing their heads across a field, a fading mural of a football player, caravans of tourists eager to see what Teddy Roosevelt once saw. Yun raises questions of who has the right to this land, a question that grows in complexity the longer Elinor stays.
Jung Yun’s novel is not simply a narrative about corporate colonialism and corruption, but of the deep divisions between Americans that are fueled by racism and capitalism and which, because they often remain unspoken, loom insidiously in our national consciousness. This book asks us to reckon with how unreconcilable truths occupy the same space—as good a definition for America as any I can think of.
In its thematic considerations of the American Dream, regionalism, racism, and insularity, O Beautiful might be in the lineage of Grapes of Wrath, yet this novel is unwaveringly feminist. Yun, who has been compared to Egan and Gaitskill, writes the leering of men page after page, mimicking what women experience all day long, whether in the oil fields of Dakota or on the streets of New York City. Yun just as insistently considers how women undermine and scrutinize each other, and she grapples with the impulses of competition, distrust, judgement; the women in this book, all too familiar with sexual aggression, never doubt the stories of rape and unwanted touch they hear in the camps and work sites—nonetheless, in supreme acts of cognitive dissonance, they condemn the women who tell those stories.
Jung Yun and I met to discuss her novel in Washington, D.C. near George Washington University, where we both teach. We spoke about the male gaze, white insularity, and the potential of truth.
Annie Liontas: What did it mean to you to dedicate this novel to your parents, who emigrated from South Korea to the United States and “chose a strange and wondrous place to call home?”
Jung Yun: So much of my life as a writer and so much of who I am as a human being was shaped by the fact that my parents chose North Dakota to move to when I was four. I worry sometimes that people in North Dakota will think, “she hates this place and she’s putting the state in such a terrible light,” when really what I want is for this small fictional town in North Dakota to serve as a microcosm of a much larger country and state of affairs. I love North Dakota, it was the making of me as a person. Everything I care about started because I lived there, which is not to say it was a perfect, happy childhood. It certainly taught me to be observant. I like to write fiction about how people treat each other. That’s not a mistake or an accident.
AL:Elinor, your main character, is an ex-model working in journalism. She is half white and half Asian, and though she grew up not too far from the Bakken, she is constantly perceived as foreign by locals who are insularly white even when they don’t identify politically as white separatists. Do you see Elinor’s role as an insider-outsider?
JY: Returning reactivates memories that she finds difficult and upsetting and even rage-provoking. She is an insider at times—that’s why she was sent there, supposedly—but she’s constantly having that sense of belonging questioned by the very people who are her neighbors, her schoolmates, her father’s friends. In actuality, she is an insider in name only: she’s never felt it. That creates a lot of resentment in her that she carries throughout her lifetime. She’s a very elbows-out character, trying to make her own space.
AL: I wonder if Elinor knows what to look at, what to see, because of that?
JY: I think she’s rediscovering how to see. She is realizing she has been looking at things one way for a long time, that she is a product of her community, her culture, especially as her eye goes to the case of this missing white woman. Like so many people, she is conditioned to pay attention to this smiling beautiful face and not really think about all the other faces that you never get a chance to see, that people don’t think about enough, that people don’t talk about. She’s realizing that the way she has been taught how to see is incredibly flawed.
AL:What did inhabiting the perspective of a former model open up to you? How were you able to see the world—especially this world—in a new light?
JY: This was a nod to my twelve-year-old self growing up in North Dakota and thinking my life would be so much better if I were pretty like the other girls. I was too young and too unformed as a human being to understand how twisted that was and how I was aspiring to a very European model of beauty I was never going to fit into. It wasn’t until much later in my life when I started asking “Who defines these standards of beauty?” and “Who does it omit?” and “What does it mean to omit other definitions and ideas and norms of beauty?”
On some level, I was trying to signal a much younger version of myself to say, “It’s all going to be ok, it’s not what you think it is.” And here’s this fictional person who is beautiful enough to have made her living from her appearance, and she is really struggling. Being an attractive person in this society is often seen as an asset, and when you go to the Bakken at the height of the oil boom and you’re surrounded by men, it’s very much a liability. You can’t blend in, you can’t be invisible. You just stand out for a host of reasons you don’t want to, and I thought that was an interesting premise to work with.
AL: The unrelenting male gaze is a real force of threat and tension in this book. We are confronted by it page after page, much the way women in real life, day after day, deal with unwanted male attention.
JY: Putting an ex-model, now journalist, in an oil field filled with men was a way of exacerbating the daily realities that non-models deal with in cities and rural areas and small towns across the country—across the world—clocking every implicit and explicit aggression day after day. It was an intentional way of talking about an experience we’re often trained to ignore. Don’t talk about it, don’t roll your eyes, pick up your pace, quicken your step. Move from the source of it. But you can’t move from the source all the time!
AL: Because it’s everywhere.
JY: Because it’s everywhere. And you shouldn’t have to. I was trying to magnify something that’s very real for women and girls.
We spend a lot of time trying to be righteous instead of doing right.
AL: Did it affect you to write it?
JY: I look back at my own teenage years—there was a point in my life when being whistled at by a guy felt like being seen. That is a kind of conditioning in my 40s I’m still thinking about and working through and deeply concerned about. Elinor is too. She’s looking back at the ways that she leaned into this behavior, not realizing that it hurt her and may have hurt others, too. Did you have that experience, yourself, Annie? Where you liked that kind of attention? Or did you never care for it?
AL: Male attention is the ultimate currency in our culture, so even as a queer woman, you know, you don’t get away unscathed. I have a very different relationship to it now, as you do, because I see the myth of that currency. But in the novel, even as you take up how men and women talk to one another—the implied, the unsaid—you just as fiercely look at how women talk to women. What did you keep bumping up against as you considered how women are socialized and how the women in this novel interact?
JY: I’m thinking about how much smarter our students are. They seem more thoughtful, more open, less judgmental. Elinor is a very judgmental person. She’s very quick to come to conclusions about people. She observes other women doing this, too, and by virtue of hearing and seeing these women, she becomes more reflective about how complicit she is in this type of behavior. She hasn’t been the best ally to other women, women of color certainly.
AL:What about the cost of relying on male violence to remedy the violence of other men?
JY: This is one of those things that Elinor recognizes towards the end of the novel that she’s going to have to live with and think about for quite some time. She knows what she’s doing, she knows what she’s allowing to happen. She is imperfect, even as she is recognizing her own power and role in all of this.
AL: This seems like a matter of justice that is not accessible any other way. There is such a failure to protect women or condemn men who are predatory. In some ways we forgive her, because it’s such a distance to cross.
JY: I was writing this during a period when we were all talking about and thinking about #MeToo. One of the comments I would hear often is, “Not guilty until guilty by a court of law.” It’s like don’t you understand courts of law have failed women, sexual assault survivors, for so long that sometimes excel spreadsheets and Twitter feel like all the justice that anyone is ever going to have? Towards the end, Elinor is grasping for whatever she can even though she knows it’s not right. But that’s how badly systems of government and law fail survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence. It doesn’t work.
Writing the book during the four years of the Trump administration, every day brought something heretofore unimaginable. Here I am writing a novel that talks about the violence done to women, to people of color, and real life is reflecting that back to me in ways that I would not have thought possible at such magnitude and such volume ten years ago.
AL:We feel erasure as an eradicating force in O Beautiful. It is not just that the environment is pillaged or that the landscape of the town changes, or that the place is overrun by newcomers. Women fear sexual assault and sexual harassment, yet often remain silent. There are disappearances of multiple Mahua Nation women from the nearby Northfork reservation, which the media, susceptible to bias, ignores. What is the cost of erasure in a country that has historically employed erasure as a tool?
I don’t understand how people can look at what’s happening and think that there is not something structurally unsound about how we talk about race and gender in this country.
JY: People are so angry. The problem comes when it is the people who have historically been in power who claim not to be seen, not to be heard. It feels like we’re talking in different languages. Do you understand history?Do you understand the values and principles and actions and deeds this country was founded on, and how many people were hurt, displaced, killed. I love this country. Yet it seems that somewhere along the way we lost the word patriotism. It became this other thing, this semi-militant, half-cocked expression. There’s part of me that wants to reclaim it, but I also want to keep asking what it means to care about this country. How we became this, acknowledging the whole truth, what was lost, and who lost what, and who lost more. This country has so much promise and so much potential, and it breaks my heart.
Part of writing this book was thinking about the individual, what one person can do. It’s not a lot. Elinor is making an effort, rather than giving into this hopelessness that I admit I sometimes feel, and she is correcting her own acts of erasure rather than giving excuses for why she behaves the way she does. Sometimes I’m too mad and too frustrated and too tired to try. Writing this book was a way to try.
AL: Elinor is determined to expose convenient falsehoods and unspoken truths, particularly racism and white separatism. What are the convenient falsehoods that you intend to keep writing about in your work?
JY: This idea of the American dream that so many people from immigrant families like ours chase. It’s not accessible to everyone for lots of reasons. This country is deeply racist from its origins. What we see unfolding on Native American reservations every day, every year—missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. I don’t understand how people can look at what’s happening, at how invisible those women and girls are made to be, and think that there is not something structurally unsound about how we talk about race and gender in this country. I’m going to be chasing some variation of these threads for most of my writing life, probably without resolution.
AL: What felt empowering in writing this novel?
JY: Feeling truthful. Being honest. Recognizing that you can be this bruised—and at times broken—person who is capable of acting outside of your pain and anger and frustration. That, despite Elinor having a hard upbringing and somewhat difficult life, she is taking responsibility, and she’s not irredeemable because she’s being honest with herself about her own actions and complicity. In her own flawed way, she is trying to do better. We spend a lot of time trying to be righteous instead of doing right. She’s trying to do the right thing, she cares less about being right. That distinction matters.
I’m drunk on a Tuesday at the old Knitting Factory and stumble into Milano’s, where by chance the MTV Video Music Awards is on. Drew Barrymore presents the Video Vanguard Award to R.E.M. and I am 15 again, pogoing in the mud in Piscataway, hearing Michael Stipe sing for the first time. I wore white jeans and a Corona poncho. I cut off the jeans, chucked the poncho, and wore a Murmur shirt for months. I thought I’d outgrown band worship, but watching R.E.M. on the screen feels as if my childhood had won, as if arty kids everywhere had won. The feeling does not last. Not much later, Hootie & the Blowfish play their hit, “Only Wanna Be with You.” If you were able to establish which songs were objectively awful, this song would be the index case against which all other objectively awful songs were compared. Hootie wears a backwards baseball cap. The Blowfish are all in cargo shorts. As they play, the audience bobs their arms like they’re at a frat house. And then comes the real atrocity. After the guitar solo, the Blowfish stop strumming and raise plastic cups. “We’d like to drink this to R.E.M.,” Hootie says. “If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be a band.” The crowd cheers. The cameras do not cut to members of R.E.M. because if they did, we would have seen their looks of disgust and horror. This is the moment college rock died, in case anyone is wondering. The band plods on, cargo shorts and baseball cap, and my night ends like most nights ended back then: I stumbled outside, hazy, unchanged.
On Realizing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” Has the Same Chords as the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular”
Of course we’re always disappointed on some level, and since of course we know the opposite of logic is regret, by which we mean the act of regretting, and therefore the prototype of heartache are songs about cowboys who sing sad songs, which is to say that for each brainy kid who flips through Edith Hamilton there is a freak who looks for certain kinds of danger, but not the usual stuff, to wit, epic snafus or wrecked careers, we’re talking about the opposite of bluffing, which is betrayal, by which we mean the act of betraying, and a sad cowboy song will always break you down, irregardless of one’s cowboy status, just like the opposite of myth is description, which is to say the act of describing, or why every Greek maiden pulls a double-cross, or every poor god gets tied down to a rock or turned into a cow, to which I would add every barfly I’ve ever met will croon along to Don McLean to drown out a rehash of their fuck-ups, which is to say, short story long, that every barfly to whom I’ve told a joke says they’ve heard the joke before, which is to say the opposite of a poem is just like the ache for one more poem like it.
In American fiction, when immigrants and first-gen characters encounter the U.S., they’re often in New York. Or Miami. Or at Harvard. I love many of those stories—works by Jhumpa Lahiri and Ana Menendez, for example, have long been among my favorites, and I’ve got my own Miami short story in that vein—but there are also fictional immigrants who end up in less glamorous places, ones that aren’t as emblematic of a larger ideal of America’s prosperity and opportunity.
What if the land of opportunity isn’t represented by an immigrant’s view of the Statue of Liberty as glimpsed from a ship gliding through New York Harbor, but instead by a Mauritanian kid driven from the Memphis airport to a dusty crop field in Mississippi? What if your welcome to the new world wasn’t a concrete jungle or the gates of Harvard, but a mannered and provincial white lady on a mountain in Tennessee offering tea? Sometimes, fictional immigrants end up in the rural South—or Southern towns like New Orleans or Atlanta—places as rich in literary history as they are infamous for their insularity. It’s compelling to me, the ways that that region has been, for some writers, fertile ground for fictionally exploring the lives of immigrants or first-generation strivers trying to make it in this country.
My book of short stories, The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, explores that terrain, and it emerged from an existing literary tradition, represented here, that feels as if it’s less identified in that way than it could be, even if the books themselves have had a rich life of their own. Here, then, are seven of my favorite books about immigrant and first-generation encounters in the U.S. South:
“[Chuck] studied in all his free moments, but the rate at which he fed himself words was so slow that they weakened and died before having a chance to accumulate, and now, at Sewanee, the rate was too fast. The few words he had were overpowered and swept away. His limited English was mistaken, as it so often is by people who have never been outside their own country, for a limited knowledge of things. But he didn’t bother to dispel this impression. He liked having a hidden advantage.”
In Choi’s novel set in the 1950s, a young Korean man named Chang—who goes by Chuck in America—flees the war at home to attend Sewanee University in Tennessee, where he meets Katherine, a rich young white woman with a history of sexual abuse at the hands of a professor in this small town. Both Katherine and Chuck are written so empathetically and beautifully and with such emotional precision, and as the novel alternates between their entanglement in the present action and their disparate pasts filled with wildly different traumas, it opens up into a larger showcase for Choi’s abilities as chronicler of small-town Southern life and the warscape of Korea. That a writer could be so authoritative on such vastly different worlds and could find such an elegant and heartbreaking way to intermingle them, that is what makes this debut novel such a stunner.
“‘Why are those guys so white?’ Roxanne asks in a stage whisper that is maybe a half-decibel lower than her speaking voice . .. . ‘Shush.’ Against her will, Lydia glances over her shoulder. The men, seven or eight in all, are strikingly white from their balding pinkish pates to their glossy patent-leather loafers, and in the sunshine pouring through the plate glass, they are nearly luminous, ghostly. With beaky noses and hunched shoulders, they huddle over their sweet rolls and coffee like celestial buzzards picking over paradisiacal carrion. These men provide such sharp contrast from Roxanne’s dusky skin and kinky jet hair that Lydia’s pupils dilate perceptibly when she turns back to their own table. ‘Maybe they’re in a club or something.’”
In this riotous and tender collection set mostly in the South, Latinos and white people, Japanese foreign students and other outsiders and ne’er-do-wells find themselves up against an assortment of traumas, rendered with humor and wit but never excess irony.
Whether it’s a teenager attending a picnic of homicide survivors to mourn the gang-related death of her sister’s boyfriend, or a struggling junior college professor—Lydia, in the above excerpt—trying to learn on the fly how to raise her cousin’s baby, here are characters that navigate their hard-luck circumstances in maybe not the best of ways, but in ways that make sense, that bind us to them emotionally, sometimes against our better judgment.
That many of these characters are Latino, and that many live in a Georgia which feels akin to Flannery O’Connor’s or Tayari Jones’s, feels both incidental at times and essential at others. What I mean is, you can’t help but feel how a certain lower-middle-class, Southern psychosphere is present in these characters’ worlds, at the same time that that milieu is simply present, without being thrust in your face as somehow steeped in a heavy-handed tradition of Southern writing.
“Under better circumstances she would have made fun of my car, an oddity to her after years of Alabama pickup trucks and SUVs. “Gifty, my bleeding heart,” she sometimes called me. I don’t know where she’d picked up the phrase, but I figured it was probably used derogatorily by Pastor John and the various TV preachers she liked to watch while she cooked to describe people who, like me, had defected from Alabama to live among the sinners of the world, presumably because the excessive bleeding of our hearts made us too weak to tough it out among the hardy, the chosen of Christ in the Bible Belt.”
They’re not analogs, but there’s something of Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Gifty, Yaa Gyasi’s Stanford grad student in neuroscience whose Ghanaian-Alabaman family has been beset by a host of tragedies. Gifty’s brother has died from addiction to opiates, and her mother has attempted suicide and remains depressed beyond functioning. But more than anyone in the Compson family, Gifty feels like someone to root for. Why? Perhaps it’s her earnest struggles to balance dedication to neuroscience and her Evangelical faith. The book includes beautiful passages where we see Gifty praying, and later rejecting that faith, given what she’s learned of its inherent racism as practiced in Alabama. It also includes much of Gifty’s disdain for her grad school colleagues, avowed atheists who seem so removed from anything like a soulful life.
“She was sorry that the poor man had been chased out of Poland and run across Europe and had had to take up in a tenant shack in a strange country, but she had not been responsible for any of this. She had had a hard time herself. She knew what it was to struggle. People ought to have to struggle. Mr. Guizac had probably had everything given to him all the way across Europe and over here. He had probably not had to struggle enough.”
This is O’Connor’s tale of a Polish Holocaust survivor, Mr. Guizac, “the displaced person,” who finds himself working for a genteel Southern lady in rural Georgia named Mrs. McIntyre. Told in a limited third person that shifts between two white ladies with complex, racist attitudes toward the displaced person that make you wince, this novella reveals the nuanced oddities and mysteries of bigoted white Christians trying to come to terms with the presence of a competent outsider in their midst.
This lesser-anthologized of her works holds up disturbingly well in today’s times, and it’s easy to see a kinship that other writers on this list have with her and her sensibilities. Change Mr. Guizac to a Haitian refugee sent to Georgia from the Mexican border, and this story could easily pass for fiction of our times.
“A girl he didn’t know took him by the arm. You can’t wear the same thing every day. This is America.
America was the burning imprint of a girls’ hand on your arm. America was your one lucky suit of parachute cloth shrinking your skin, burning you.
America was a tinny, watery Sousa march through a tired trumpet in sixth period, and Boubacar attempting to answer it with cascading ripples on a xylophone, to collapse the melody into itself and play it fast, several times, so it could be repeated more often, after the fashion of a Cape Verde band he liked.”
Imagine a Mississippi town where, in the lead-up to 9/11, a Chinese grocer has a crush on a Honduran employee, and a Mauritanian boy—depicted in the quote above—stumbles upon the wonder of the Delta blues, while a Black Ivy League student returns here to find out the story of her great grandmother’s life, and a white landowner tries to help his longtime neighbor quit a gambling addiction fed by the local casino (the new business that threatens the livelihood of the whole area’s population). This is Shearer’s imaginary town of Madagascar, and these are only a few of the characters and situations that populate this wondrous and lush book, a panoramic Mississippi novel that recalls the best of canonical Southern fiction while also insisting that that tradition enter the 21st century, with all its modern complaints and entanglements.
“Q. Mr. Flores Flores, where do you presently reside?
A. At 3422 Ivywood Circle in Atlanta, Georgia.
Q. Is that your permanent residence?
A. No, ma’am.
Q. And what is the address of your permanent residence?
A. I don’t have a permanent residence. I mean, not right now. My brother and I are from Ilopango, in the region of San Salvador, El Salvador.
Q. And when did you leave your home?
A. On September sixteenth of last year.
Q. Why did you and your brother decide to leave Ilopango?”
In this YA novel, Phoenix Flores Flores—a Salvadoran boy of 18—has traveled north through Mexico with his brother and ended up in Atlanta, where he’s battling uphill against a deportation case (depicted above), while his brother remains in a detention facility in Texas. In Atlanta, Phoenix finds unlikely friendship in the husband-and-wife owners of a tattoo parlor that, as one Black character notes, might be the kind of place to fly a Confederate flag.
The main story revolves around the burgeoning relationship between Phoenix—named so because his mother, who left to find work in Phoenix, Arizona, wanted to be reminded of him in what she saw every day—and Gretchen, a white teen who’s been assaulted by a Latino gang member and is working through the trauma related to that experience. As those two dance around their interest in each other, Marquardt explores the contours of a migrant life on the edge. It’s a tender and authoritative story, one that shows Marquardt to be attentive to the larger cultural and legal forces at work in the lives of so many outsiders who find themselves ensnared in the penal system upon arrival in the US.
“‘You should be scared,’ Ahmad said. ‘This one could be for real.’
Zeitoun was skeptical but paid attention. Ahmad was a ship captain, had been for thirty years, piloting tankers and ocean liners in every conceivable body of water, and he knew as much as anyone about storms, their trajectories and power. As a young man, Zeitoun had been with him for a number of those journeys. Ahmad, nine years older, had brought Zeitoun on as a crewman, takin him to Greece, Lebanon, South Africa. Zeitoun had gone on to work on ships without Ahmad, too, seeing most of the world in a ten-year period of wanderlust that eventually brought him to New Orleans and to his life with Kathy.”
Zeitoun is a strange book of nonfiction to read in the wake of what’s happened with the titular character since (feel free to go down that rabbit-hole on your own). But there’s no denying how compelling Zeitoun’s story is made here, how emblematic it is of how a confluence of factors—cultural norms on immigration and the war on terror, unnatural natural disasters—can funnel down into a single, potent blow delivered to those least in a position to withstand it.
Zeitoun, a Syrian with a severe case of wanderlust, ends up in New Orleans. Through hard work, he establishes a house-painting business. During Katrina, he stays in New Orleans to “hold down the fort.” Beyond the first days in which he rows through flooded streets like an angel of mercy saving people from the flooding tombs of their houses, much goes wrong. He’s detained at gunpoint. Imprisoned. Given no means to contact his family, who think he’s died amid the hurricane’s ruins.
The story pivots adroitly between those gripping scenes and memories from Zeitoun’s life before New Orleans, when he was still in Syria, when he was a young man working as a deckhand as his father once had, sailing the world from port to port, trying to find his place, in a time before he could’ve conceived of a life in a place as fraught and beguiling as the South.
Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of heated discourse surrounding a trend in book covers in which many new releases opt for variations of the same colorful abstractions: The Blob. Somehow deemed appropriate for everything from dystopian debuts to literary fiction bestsellers, these indiscernible “blobs of suggestive colors,” as The Week coins them, clearly make for a successful marketing strategy. However, the unintended consequence of making these incredibly varied books appear similar, is that readers are left with little insight into the characters, general mood, or topics a book explores.
We wanted to look at some of our favorite book covers of 2021 from the U.S. and across the pond, hoping to find something beyond the bright blobs. Do readers still respond to abstraction and pigmented color palettes? Is realism making a comeback? To tackle these Very Serious Literary Inquiries, we polled our Instagram followers to discover what they like best. With British versions on the left and American takes on the right, read on to start judging some books by their covers and see what’s resonating with our audience.
While both covers are doing similar things—bright red background, line-art-heavy illustration, food imagery—something is pulling readers towards the American cover’s slightly bolder noodle depiction. Zauner’s memoir is a story of her finding and accepting her identity, from growing up Korean American in Oregon and losing her mother to tackling the role of food in her culture and life. Perhaps it’s the tension of the noodle pull or a font that seems a bit rawer, but readers clearly think the U.S. rendition is the tastier of the two.
The suggestive color blob is a clear winner when it comes to packaging the heart-wrenching story of Vivek Oji, a character who grows up in southeastern Nigeria. The blobs are at least identifiable, perhaps depicting Vivek’s long, grown out hair braided into his cousin Osita’s, with whom he has a close bond. The need for connection, for closeness, is at the heart of this story, where Vivek’s suffering stems from being misunderstood by his loved ones and wider community. Emezi has published prolifically these past few years, and this cover stands out from the previous, more muted color palettes of their Freshwater, Dear Senthuran, and Pet. Clearly, the bold approach is working, especially when paired against the beige realism of the U.K. cover, which reads more like nonfiction to me.
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
The U.S. is on a roll, dominating once again with nearly 70 percent of the votes for the Booker Prize shortlisted Burnt Sugar. The U.K. cover’s use of color feels all over the place when compared to its paired down American counterpart. The plant looks like aloe, the juxtaposition between spiked leaves and healing properties hinting at the tensions within this mother-daughter story, in which a daughter must care for her free-spirited elderly mother despite her mother’s selfishness and negligence throughout her childhood. Illustrated book covers without pictures of people have appealed widely in the past decade, and in this instance, that continues to feel true.
While both covers are colorful and abstract, the greater clarity of the U.S. version makes for a clear winner. Popisho’s cover gives so much more of the story away—the island setting, the magical realism, the mythical characters, perhaps even the sociopolitical tensions explored. While I think the British title might actually appeal more as readers can imagine the whimsy and fantastic nature of a “sky day,” its inability to hint at the plot visually renders this blob of suggestive colors unsuccessful.
The Brits have entered the competition! With a narrow margin, the brightly drawn U.K. cover excels over the stoic and photographic black and white American take. While I love the crisp and haunting marbled arms, one cannot deny that the U.K. version does far more storytelling work. The illustration captures the tension between the environment and an American oil company with the vines seeming almost cleared away to glance at this oil field, the haunting figure caught in the middle. For a book where the fictional setting of African village Kosawa is so key, this scene seems an appropriate introduction to the story.
Our readers seem to like both of these images with almost equal fervor. For an imagined telling of real-life poet Marie de France’s life in which she serves as an abbess for a 12th-century nunnery, the U.K. version squeaks out a victory at 52 percent and it is easy to see why. The illustrated nuns reading or praying are not only sweetly rendered, but speak to a sense of community integral to the story or even the evolving nature of Marie’s role at the nunnery. The bold colors prove transcendent and just a touch more eye-catching than the dreamy, almost Renaissance ceiling style of the U.S. cover, which opts for a more muted version of the blue and gold color palette.
With an apparently rare win for realism, the U.K. cover dominated, and I wholeheartedly agree. In this story of a wife and mother who walks out of her life following the 2016 election, the maudlin interior and stray, lamenting arm perfectly capture the moment of crisis and unraveling this book unpacks. Although both covers hint at the idea of a home—crucial in a book that kicks off with Samantha buying a deteriorating house in Upstate New York on a whim, before she has even left her husband or home—the U.S. version could be celebrating first home ownership with its bright hues and celebratorily hung keyset. The left side allows us to empathize with someone rooted in a place—a political landscape, an aging body, an expected role—that she doesn’t want to be in and that is the work of a successful piece of art.
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated by Anton Hur
It is as easy to fall in love with the details of the U.K. cover as it is the characters in Park’s English language debut. The Marlboro reds and raining boba hint at the book’s exploration of a youthful existence spent in motion, pleasure seeking. While the American rendition shows us the chaos of Seoul and the desire for connection, that work is already being done by the title. The U.K. is simply more generous and specific, prepping us for the complexity and all-consuming nature of a queer, millennial existence, equal parts loneliness and joy.
After a British winning streak, the Americans attempt a comeback with the graphic glory of Nightbitch. An artist with an absent husband feels lonely and unfulfilled in her new role as a mother and begins to transform into a dog— either evolution or deterioration. This feminist take on modern motherhood refuses to look away from the raw, bloody realities of what women are forced to endure, how they are expected to sacrifice and transform, and the consequences of those restraints. The American cover aptly blends the realism of the meat of this story with the suggestion of the dog, the animalistic and fantastic avenue through which this emotional heart is delivered.
The humor and heart of this expansive exploration of gay men’s tendency to self-sabotage comes across perfectly in the drawn American cover. The heart and lifelines on this hand suggest a kind of palm reading, promising us intimate and honest access to these characters and their stories. This playful image transcends the relative unimaginativeness of the British take, which seems a little boring and expected. It feels like it came from the very first day of the design meetings: How do we signal queerness? Let’s make the cover pink. How do we get at the breadth of experience? Let’s collage a bunch of pictures. What about the depth of emotion? Make them black and white. Great, fast-track this to production. There’s just a little more of the book’s magic in the U.S. edition.
Personally, I think each of these covers is beautiful and readers seem similarly split. Both have a powerful but feminine energy to them that sets up this expansive, intergenerational saga of women. Because the book takes us between 19th century Cuba, 1950s Mexico, and modern-day Miami, the sense of place has to remain a bit abstract and the cover must instead indulge in the feeling of the story; the panther pleasantly suggests some sort of feminine pushback—readers just have to indulge to find out it is against the tyranny of men, oppressive regimes, and immigration policies.
There is so much whimsy decoration in the U.K. cover for this historical adventure novel and in this case, more is more. The disappearance of a wife and mother in late 19th-century Tsarist Russia makes for an epic tale, and the intricacy of the British illustration hints at the classic style of this story (think War and Peace) while remaining lighthearted enough to assure readers of its accessibility.
In the closest vote of the bunch, the U.K. just barely claims a victory here and I think it is for all the right reasons. The reserved colors, the unsettling lack of a face, the voyeuristic vantage point—it is all spot on for this highly psychological undertaking. The unseen housekeeper, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, observes and subtly manipulates the Woman in the Purple Skirt as she has an affair with her boss, crafting a powerful reflection on power in the workplace and what it means to be seen and/or desired.
It can be especially hard to design a cover for short story collections, but I actually think both countries nailed this one. Merciless, horrific, and unnerving, the dark background and bold illustration of both looks seem to universally work for readers. Perhaps the U.K. edged out a win for its slightly more modern look, almost magazine-like as it markets uneasy, allegorical stories of women and witches, homemade porn and homeless ghosts, among a sea of other unflinching and haunting plot points and characters.
Americans have the clear winner here and I think it comes down to, as Brandon Taylor might say, the vibes. The Brits went for a more dated look, from the old-timey illustration to the generic font, while the U.S. version seems a little more confident and arresting. A pharmacy on a remote mountaintop is a strange setting made even stranger by the confession-like role it plays for locals who come with stories and seek spiritual healing as much as physical remedies; the mysterious green structure more accurately hints at that kind of surreal space. It also is oddly reminiscent of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, so maybe the all-too-popular vague color bomb will be overshadowed by a new era of single-colored abstractions.
Although another close call, the U.S. cover and its endless thumbtacks takes the cake this round. I think the American cover is doing a lot—it plays with the title while simultaneously getting at the feelings of both a generic office space and an anxious headspace. The novel covers 24 hours in the mind of a young, female worker who has recently been sexually assaulted, balancing the profundities of human emotion with the mundanity of an office to explore how the mind works through a trauma. While the U.K. cover similarly conjures up the workplace with its crumbled-up yellow paper, perhaps the line-art is too cold and generic for a story that plays with form so innovatively and grapples with this #MeToo moment without losing its sense of humor.
The American cover is quite simply the cooler of these two. I feel like I’ve seen the U.K. version before, and it veers too close to colorful blob territory. Instead of any old soldier, the U.S. version gives us this severed hand, a crucial plot point, that looks enchanted or as if it is being showered in bullets. All of this to say, the American version actually speaks to this specific story of a Senegalese man called to fight with the French army during WWI as his trauma leads to strange and violent behavior that ends up putting a target on his back. The U.K. version gives us generic blue blobs and a soldier, so the points are clearly for creativity here!
Another clear American winner comes down to originality. I don’t feel as if I’ve seen the U.S. cover before with its still life qualities and juxtaposed color scheme. The U.K. version, on the other hand, feels like every rom-com cover from the last ten years. It might even do a disservice to the literary nature of this novel about navigating writing and grief and capitalism and love in your early 30s.
When an unsatisfied publishing company assistant gets the chance to potentially assume the identity of a mysterious and successful novelist, she just might take it. I like the anonymity of the American cover and how one line extends into two faces, asking readers where we draw the line between right and wrong or our inner lives and public persona. The U.K. cover has a certain warmth to it, but once again, realistic faces seem to deter the literarily minded.
While the U.K. cover delivers pretty literally in hinting at both sex work and the London Soho locale, there’s definitely more charm and character to the winning American cover. In a story about gentrification, ownership, class, and agency, there’s a certain playfulness to the American rendition. It employs what looks like aristocratic art to touch on ideas of the extreme upper class and their often-unsympathetic view of capitalism’s victims, apparently ranging from exploited and marginalized people to the unsuspecting swan these expensive hunting dogs are set upon.
As a child, the worst mean-big-sister trick I ever played on my little brother was to convince him that I could transform at will into an evil entity named Madame Ruby. The most insidious aspect of this transformation is that I would look exactly the same, sound exactly the same—would, in fact, in every way still resemble his sister—but within, I would be someone unknown with vast, dark powers. I later learned in my training as a psychiatrist that there’s a term for the belief that someone you know has been replaced by an imposter: Capgras syndrome. I find that this is more often the stuff of novels (see Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances) than of my day-to-day clinical practice, but it’s an idea—a fear—that illustrates the uncanny, a concept I find fascinating. In his 1919 essay on the subject, Freud attempts to explicate the uncanny, or unheimlich, meaning literally not homey, strange, or unfamiliar.
It’s this space of the uncanny that most interests me as a writer. In my new collection of short stories, Now You Know It All, I explore that sense of dislocation in the quotidian, the creeping dread that arises when something feels just a hair off. Whether it’s the story of a troubled boy attempting to unleash the villain from an internet hoax onto his party guests, or a smitten student finding more than she bargained for hidden in her favorite teacher’s attic, the stories in my collection often teeter in the place between the natural and the supernatural, belief and disbelief, what we think we know for sure and what gives us a pang of doubt.
Uncanny Lit is decidedly not horror, nor is it exactly magical realism or gothic literature (although obviously, to some extent the edges of these categories blur). It shares with its sister genres a certain breath-holding build-up of suspense along with intrusions of the strange, but I’d argue that Uncanny Lit operates more slyly, through suggestion, and tends to start solidly in the mundane. Each of the collections below offers a taste of this subgenre.
Rooted in the humdrum of jobs and parenting, Bynum’s work still shimmers with eeriness in the periphery. Take for example the wonderful first story, “The Erkling” which takes place at a children’s fair at a school. The setting is both mysterious and not, vaguely threatening and not, while the perspective glides between the mother, with her parental anxieties, and the child, who seems to see a strange, beckoning figure at the edge of the crowd. (An erkling, by the way, is a sinister elf who preys upon children…) If ever a writer knew how to chill without overplaying her hand, it’s Bynum.
What else but pregnancy and motherhood can be simultaneously so utterly familiar and yet so strange? Hunt mines this fertile subject matter in her stunning and spooky collection. In one of my favorite stories, “A Love Story,” the classic it’s-coming-from-inside-the-house trope gets inverted. The main character hears someone lurking outside at night and sends her husband out to check, only to discover the intruder, the one she fears, is a person she’s known all along—and the most frightening thing, “the biggest experiment,” is one she’s already willingly signed up for.
While no one could argue that Alice Munro is underappreciated, I would argue that she might be underappreciated as a practitioner of the uncanny. Once you start looking, you notice it playing a role in lots of her stories. This particular collection includes one of my all-time uncanny favorites, “Save the Reaper,” which operates as a kind of homage to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Eve (a grandmother, as it happens) thinks she’s following a road she recognizes, searching for a spot she recalls from childhood, only to find herself at an unrecognized house, surrounded by a group of menacing characters, one of whom manages to tag along for the ride when she leaves. As always, Munro’s moves are subtle, but this story leaves the reader with a real shiver.
Lesley Nneka Arimah’s wonderful debut collection presses up against the borders of Uncanny Lit from a more decidedly magical realist or surreal direction—something that’s true for a couple other favorite collections that I’m not including on this list (see Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble or Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. Yes, the categories blur!!!). But what strikes me as uncanny in Arimah’s work is the way the strange seems to arrive in the ordinary world with so little fanfare. Take “Who Will Greet You at Home,” in which the fact of women animating babies made out of yarn or raffia or mud is almost unremarkable against the complexities of class and privilege and longing or the symbolic weight of women’s hair. (This one was read and discussed by ZZ Packer on a New Yorker fiction podcast not long ago, if you want to check it out.)
Amy Bonnaffons’ striking first collection is another that abuts the surreal or fantastical, but it’s her deep acknowledgment of uncertainty and her grounding in the material world that makes me include her in the Uncanny Lit camp. Take for example the title story, in which an elementary school teacher purchases a lawn ornament Jesus and Mary who come to life. The protagonist of the story says:
“I believe the world is malleable, that our understanding of it is provisional, improvised, subject to a change of rules at any time; that sometimes the magician pulls out the tablecloth and the dishes all stay in place, and sometimes the magician pulls out the tablecloth and everything is gone, including the table.”
Sofia Samatar’s wildly imaginative collection also straddles several genre categories, but she definitely makes the Uncanny Lit cut. Most notably, you’ll find her story, “Olimpia’s Ghost,” which is a spin on the story of The Sandman by ETA Hoffman, famously interpreted by Freud when he attempted to define the uncanny. (But if that’s not enough to draw you, there are also stories of selkie, witches, alien babies, and more.)
This slim collection of six stories set just after the 1995 Kobe earthquake is nothing if not uncanny. In one of my favorites, “UFO in Kushiro,” a man rocked by the sudden departure of his wife is asked to deliver a mysterious box to a bleak location in the north. This story is a master class on the power of withholding. (If you’re interested, it was read and discussed by Bryan Washington in a recent episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast.)
Clare Beams’ marvelous and unsettling debut collection epitomizes Uncanny Lit. Take the opening story, “Hourglass,” in which schoolgirl narrator Melody arrives at a boarding school that promises “a transformational education.” The headmaster, preoccupied with his quest to shape his young charges, is both beguiling and sinister, and by the time his “special project” is revealed, you’ll be left with a pit in your stomach. Beams picks up where Shirley Jackson left off in these nine weird yet weirdly moving stories.
I love Rebecca Lee’s collection so much partly because, much like Alice Munro noted above, she taps into the uncanny through a staunchly realist angle. Despite this realism, there’s still the looming feeling of threat in the shape of all the difficult human unknowns, all the reversals that can affect us. In the title story, for example, the question of whether a woman has survived an attack by an actual or metaphorical bobcat is muted by the late-night arrival of a strange woman at the door—like the answer to a question the narrator was not yet prepared to ask.
To hear Weng Pixin tell it, Let’s Not Talk Anymore started out as a kind of “fuck you” move after a particularly bad fight with her mom but—as these things tend to go—it gradually transformed into a project to locate herself within the moth-eaten story of her matrilineal line.
Moving back and forth across a 100-year span, the graphic novel depicts snapshots from the lives of five generations of women from Pixin’s family, all aged 15—from her half-mythic great grandmother Kuan, to an imagined daughter in 2032—as they navigate the hostilities within and without the home. The result is a family history riddled with recurring themes: separation, sexual assault, and emotional isolation. Mothers and daughters stewing silent in their anger, each of them hoarding pain like heirlooms for the next generation to inherit.
There’s no telling where things are happening, but the characters are clearly shaped by the cultural and social mores of a traditional Chinese upbringing in Southeast Asia. Though many of these standards have changed over time, the reticence to express true, deep emotions remains. Time and again, these characters resort to anger as their only recourse, unable to cope with the unacknowledged pain sitting within them like a stone.
The novel is deeply invested in the theory that every act of violence—emotional, physical and verbal—has its roots in something undeniably human. In seeking out the truth in the probable lives of her mother and ancestors, Pixin uncovers a road to healing and something that feels a lot like freedom.
Samantha Cheh: I did notice a stark difference in the registers of dialogue in Let’s Not Talk Anymore. On one end of the spectrum, you’d have characters saying very mundane things, like what do you want for breakfast? Let’s go to the field—but then there’s the other side. Characters explode into anger, and language becomes extremely emotional and hurtful. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between mode, no gaps between them.
Weng Pixin: I was particularly thinking about my own experiences growing up with my mother. My dad was away for work a lot of the time, and so she was a primary caregiver. What I remember the most from my upbringing is that when she gets really mad, she doesn’t make a lot of sense: in the words that she used, in what she’s telling me about why she’s mad, in what she’s planning to do. Now, as an adult, I began to realize that I’m working with a mother and a person who has a lot of difficulty trying to explain why she’s upset. If we think carefully about it, that ability to remain calm requires many sets of skills, and I can now see that she had no ability for it.
Those gaps that you describe between these extreme outbursts and the plain language of everyday life—I think those are the conversations, questions and answers that we can ask to get to know each other better. Not to feel what the other person is feeling, but to develop a vocabulary to describe our full human experiences. I think that’s severely lacking in the Chinese Asian parenting culture, and that was what I was perhaps keeping in mind while I was approaching this graphic novel.
SC: I feel like what you’re describing is an ability to process emotions that most of our parents are not equipped with; they can be so reactive. Of course, they came from a very different world, one I am keenly aware is characterized by suffering, but it’s developed in them a kind of eternal survival mode. Tunnel vision. There’s so much emphasis on survival that the quality of life really suffers.
WP: Yes, and I don’t blame them. It just doesn’t make sense to do so when it was a completely different generation, era, and context. There is a scene where Kuan’s mother gives her the porridge, but saves only the porridge water for herself. Later, somebody told me that porridge water has more nutritional content, but the point is it’s not a balance between getting more nutrients or vitamins or energy. It’s “what do I do to survive to the next day”; not “what do I do to live well.”
As a child and teenager, I blamed my mom a lot. I just hated her for just the kind of parent that she was, but through working on this comic, I realized I had never thought about the possible life she came from. I had heard stories, sentences here and there—maybe from her sisters, or whoever is chattier—but not from her because she’s very quiet.
They were just concepts I didn’t really understand, but with comics, you’re thinking in visuals. You have to find a way to put an image down to accompany the concepts. For example, when I was painting my mom missing her dad who left her very abruptly at a young age, I had to ask: What does her dad look like? Would he be sitting very far away from her? What would that be doing while he’s in his daily life? In the process of thinking and putting down those pictures, I got to kind of experience or feel a little more about what it was like to live in her shoes somewhat.
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SC: I can imagine her reticence to share those stories must have hurt quite a lot.
WP: I think I understood the hesitation to share more, but it’s also weird because my dad is very chatty. In the family, he’s like the black sheep because he’s so verbal. His communicativeness makes him come off as very forthcoming and straightforward and honest, and because of that, I’ve never felt bothered if he doesn’t tell me something.
I wanted to show how when you carry your own pain, if you don’t give yourself the opportunity to process it—or if you don’t even have the ability to do so—the pain will stay inside of you.
On the other hand, my mom’s uncommunicativeness bothered me because there’s this protectiveness or defensiveness. I read her not talking as not trusting me, or her misreading my questions as invasive when they’re more inquiring. But when I thought about that attitude in relation to where she came from, I realized that what I saw as defensive was maybe a sense of helplessness at my questions.
My dad is so communicative, but even he has difficulty expressing himself—she generally struggles with communicating, so talking about her day-to-day life? Sharing things that seem simple and basic to us? It’s difficult for her. My theory is that she came from an environment that is way more repressive than I can possibly imagine, so talking is a very big challenge for her. In that sense, my questions to her weren’t just, can you tell me this? It was more, can you be this now? Someone that is completely not you? That’s why she reacted with the desire to protect herself because what I was asking of her, she felt like she couldn’t do it.
SC: When you began connecting the dots between your mother and her past and how you were brought up, did it change the day-to-day experience of your relationship with her?
WP: Yes, it definitely did. Halfway through making the comic, I saw that in our in-person interactions, I was a lot less frustrated or reactive because I was putting myself in the space of trying to be in her shoes more. From doing this work and from reading research on her generation or time, I became very aware that she didn’t have a lot of opportunities. She’s been influenced not just by society, but also her mother’s messaging that women have to get married and bear children. If we go a bit further, as a child, she also didn’t have the opportunity to learn how to express herself. Just like what she did to me.
Working on the comic helped me get the barest shape of where she really comes from, and made those ideas a lot more concrete. And once they were concrete, I found that it made no sense to remain angry at her for who she is. All I see now is a person who—with the limit of skill set that she has—came out as this individual. To ask more of her would be irresponsible and selfish on my part, and by the end, the main anger towards her dissipated.
Also physical space apart also helped make the mother-daughter relationship have some opportunity for repair.
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SC: Reading the novel, you do get the sense of reparation. With your art, you’re filling in the fissures in the relationship between you and your mother, but also within yourself. I saw some of that with Kuan’s weaving and Mei’s sewing.
WP: For me, art has always helped. With my mom’s upbringing, I was continually discouraged from talking, from expressing myself, from telling her that something is troubling me. It came to a point where I wouldn’t even ask her for advice or anything. I just felt like she was the most unsafe person to consult because I would just end up feeling hurt or disappointed or—even worse—betrayed. For a very long period of time, I was largely a very quiet individual. Not just because I was shy, but mostly because I felt that whatever I say, it’s gonna be wrong—because that’s the lesson I picked up from being with my mom. Everything that I say is met with a very negative outcome. I learned to keep quiet in order to survive.
With my art, I was able to process a lot of things that I felt I didn’t dare do with words. It’s been healing in a sense of just being able to let something out. It sounds disgusting, but it’s just like diarrhea. Like mental, spiritual diarrhea. Art provided that lovely toilet bowl for me to share the love. [laughs]
SC: There are a lot of like images that recur for me in the comic, motifs like absent fathers, sexual predation, separation, and weaving. Certain scenes clearly speak to each other across time
WP: I was trying to show how trauma gets passed along and affects the way we relate to another human being—and how that can get even more pronounced when this relation is between a parent to a child. For example, Mei, my maternal grandmother, is sexually assaulted and she deals with this trauma privately because she just had no space to tell it to anybody in this society, not even her adoptive mother. To make it more confusing, her adoptive mother treats her like slave labor but also takes care of her. It’s a very strange message for somebody to grow up with: the person that provides for you essentially doesn’t care about your well-being, but you have to trust and rely on them.
I learned to keep quiet in order to survive. With my art, I was able to process a lot of things that I felt I didn’t dare do with words.
The thing to remember is that these characters are adolescents, and what adolescent has the amazing ability to differentiate how much to trust someone or pull back, all while still needing them to survive? That’s why, with that kind of upbringing, I felt it was possible that she can then find somebody, get married, and then unconsciously reenact that same pain and trauma on her children because she’s just unaware of how much they have taken over her.
I really wanted to show how the minute you carry your own pain, if you don’t give yourself the opportunity to process it—or if you don’t even have the ability to do so—the pain will stay inside of you. And whoever that you meet next will get it in some way from your lack of ability to attend to them, because you haven’t attended to yourself.
SC: The funny thing about getting older is that you can now recognize all the ways your needs weren’t met, all the gaps that were left by the adults in your life. If you could go back, would you?
WP: I think that question is interesting because on the one hand, I would definitely always say yes. Would I have benefited if I had a parent who was attuned to my needs? Of course, yes. It wouldn’t make crying feel shameful, it wouldn’t make feeling some things or encountering some experiences outside of home feel weird or scary.
The thing I’ve always struggled with is what my art would have been like. Would I have content? Would it have been interesting? Would the non-pain and non-challenge have yielded something interesting, art-wise? That’s the part I have no idea how to answer. I hope so, but the reality is that my art has been derived from challenges, pain. Things that confused me, things that have upset me. I’ve always been provided for physically, but I think it’s more the emotional landscape of myself that has been a big struggle to make sense of. I wish I could say that my talent and skill would have yielded art that was just as good, but I cannot claim that.
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SC: Actually, at times, reading the novel was a little bit difficult because there was not always a lot of distinction between characters. They look and often feel very similar.
WP: It was just as confusing in my head, and there was no interest to get them to look distinct. Partly because of the cartoony style, but I remember kind of thinking I don’t really need them to be so distinctive. I kind of want it messy and confusing. The only structure the reader can grasp onto is the year that’s been written down because that’s just the way my mind was. I have no picture of how my great grandmother looks, of her living space. I have no visual. There’s still tons of missing things. I imagine for most people, when you’re trying to recollect a memory, it’s visual; it’s experience, it’s the feeling. All that is missing because there’s no stories.
SC: I love that by imagining the shape of Kuan’s possible life, you’ve kind of woven for yourself a sense of continuity that you didn’t have because of all those gaps in your history. Now with this complete work, is that emphasis on remembering still important for you? Why?
WP: Why do we need to know our history? Why do we need to know the past? In one sense, it’s to help give you a stronger sense of where you’re from, and the kind of values or belief system that you come from. Not that you in the present necessarily need to follow, but you just have a better understanding of your origins—and I don’t, from my mom’s side of the family. I don’t have a great grasp of where I come from, in that sense.
I can tell you from my dad’s side that I know that my paternal grandmother was really into business, and she had a father who was an opium addict. She was from Hong Kong, and that immediately made me feel I have kinship with this country even though I don’t live there. It sounds kind of corny and cheesy, but it’s almost like, oh this is a connection there, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It also shapes a bit of how we look at our future.
In knowing our history we find out more about ourselves. I know my art comes from my maternal side because all my aunties painted before they got married. My mom still draws when she’s on phone calls, but the sad thing is that she dismisses herself. When I was a kid, I visited my maternal grandmother’s house and I saw the paintings that each aunt did, as well as my mom, so that came from them. That’s why I made up the story that my great grandmother loved to basket-weave when she was free, and my grandmother loves to sew. I just imagined I came from this line of women who made art in private and nobody sees it.
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