Purgatory was a place often discussed in my thirteen years of Catholic school, a spiritual middle state where a person must examine their sins and make amends, where a soul must wait. To a group of children, the prospect of waiting seemed almost as frightening as what we’d been told about Hell—we conjured visions of living in the last hour of the school day indefinitely, the final bell and the freedom to leave suspended until further notice.
Maybe it’s no surprise then that I’m drawn to fiction that operates in some kind of middle space, with hope functioning as a central tension, a prayer whispering through the page that the character might pass through to someplace better by the end. Characters examine their own failings or try to free themselves from the sins of others, stuck in someone else’s purgatory.
I thought a lot about waiting while writing Immediate Family, about how much of life operates in a holding pattern. The narrator’s desire to have a child spiritually pins her to the spot, and while she’s stuck there she must ask herself hard questions in the hope that the answers—if they can loosely be called that—might free her.
The books below represent many kinds of middle states: characters may be trapped in grief, political exile, new motherhood, or the neighborhood of their youth. I hope that you find the raw beauty in each of these as I always do—in that unexpected breath of wind at the end signaling, finally, that they might be on their way.
The Copenhagen Trilogyby Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
Tove grows up in a poverty-stricken section of Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district and dreams of becoming a poet. Vesterbro is the kind of place where it seems impossible for a soul to leave, particularly to something bigger and brighter. This chronicle of a writer’s life is gorgeous and haunting, taking readers through a childhood amid Hitler’s ascent to power, through three marriages and several pregnancies, through her rise in Danish literary society, and finally through the depths of her addiction.
This story is told by Gavin, a young boy in a Taiwanese immigrant family of six, but his mother is the character that has stayed with me. She’s trapped in a state of grief, along with the rest of her family—grief and the state of Alaska, with its cold and terrifying beauty. The novel follows the family in the aftermath of the death of one of the children, as each person attempts to deal with the loss in insolation, an isolation felt spiritually and literally while the family tries to make ends meet in the middle of the wilderness.
Nadia is a middle-aged schoolteacher who wakes one day to find that everyone has turned against her and her husband, Ange, and she doesn’t know why. Ange is soon the target of a violent crime and Nadia roams the streets in search of answers, paranoia and fear tracing her steps. NDiaye is masterful in ripping apart genre and reconstructing it—My Heart Hemmed In reads like noir but doesn’t concern itself with conventional plot twists, instead digging deeper into the narrator’s psychological and spiritual reckoning. Only by the end does she recognize the reason she’s been punished, and the reader feels a new kind of existence begin for her.
Elizabeth, a Ph.D. who can’t land a university position, has two jobs that still hardly pay the rent. She plays hooky to read books in bars and cafes, while at home in Brooklyn she has two young girls, a husband, and not enough money in the bank—she and her husband must file for bankruptcy. She sets her alarm for 4:30 am to take long, cold runs through the city, as if it might help to break free from it all. At the heart of this novel is an unsparing exploration of female friendship and middle-class economic precarity, but some of my favorite parts are about how much of life is occupied by the mundane, and how this rubs up against our desire for it to feel differently.
Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore
There have been many ambitious books about the ambivalence of new motherhood in the last decade, but this swift, elegant novel is nothing like them. Over the span of an evening, the narrator recounts the intimacies and anxieties of past relationships, and the construction of these overlapping vignettes creates a kind of mesmeric, dreamlike state, as the readers slowly begin to recognize the revelation she’s moving toward.
If we are talking about women operating in transient spaces, I don’t think a more perfect example exists than Leichter’s novel. In search of steadiness and a place to call her own, a young woman moves from temp job to temp job, filling in for a chairman of the board, for a mannequin, for a barnacle, for a mother, for a ghost. As the novel spins into the surreal, a very real question remains around how our work defines us.
Written in a variety of literary forms—short essays, journal entries, stories—this novel explores the complexities of political exile, and how fragmented life can feel as a result. It’s divided into seven parts, four of which take place in present-day Berlin, the unnamed narrator’s place of temporary exile, as she calls it, from the former Yugoslavia. It’s one of the most poignant and original novels you’ll read on history, art, loss, aging, and the profound effects of war.
Originally published under the title Muriel at the Metropolitan in 1975, this is the first novel to be published by a Black South African woman during apartheid. The literal space Muriel is confined to is her desk, working for a white business. She describes the customers that come in and out, conversations with coworkers, daily life, while also capturing the devastating experience of being a Black woman during apartheid:
“The Republic of South Africa is a country divided into two worlds. The one, a white world—rich, comfortable, for all practical purposes organized—world in fear, armed to the teeth. The other, a black world; poor, pathetically neglected and disorganized —voiceless, oppressed, restless, confused and unarmed—a world in transition, irrevocably weaned from all tribal ties.”
In the end, Muriel frees herself from the job, but she’s still trapped in a world that dehumanizes her. The book was banned for over a decade and brought back into print in 2004 under the title Tlali preferred, Between Two Worlds.
When David Lowery and A24’s The Green Knight hit theaters this Friday, I, a medievalist scholar, was giddy with delight. The film is absolutely stunning, and it’s based on one of my favorite books: the 14th-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The plot of both the poem and the film begins when a mysterious figure, the Green Knight, bursts into King Arthur’s hall and demands that someone strike him with an axe. What can I say: medieval literature is weird.
Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, bravely steps up to the plate, giving him a good whack on the neck. But after he’s beheaded, the Green Knight picks up his own severed head like nothing has happened and tells Gawain to meet him for a fight on Christmas of the next year. What follows is an extraordinary journey across the Welsh wilderness, as Gawain, the poem’s protagonist, chases down the mysterious knight to fulfill his end of a bargain. The film’s visuals are stunning, featuring moody court scenes and sweeping panoramas of the English landscape. And with the wildly talented and unbelievably handsome Dev Patel playing Gawain? For medieval nerds like yours truly, July 30th was like Christmas.
The thing is, in the original Middle English, the Green Knight is unambiguously hot.
Like most great adaptations, Lowery’s The Green Knight takes plenty of liberties to remake an old story for modern viewers, revising plot, themes. Characters’ roles change: Guinevere fades into the film’s background, while Arthur becomes a more prominent father figure. Certain textual nuances, like the poem’s emphasis on clothing and decorative detail, are lost or simplified. Meanwhile, Lowery adds new subplots, like the haunting tale of Saint Winifred. That’s all well and good, and makes for a delightful twist on the original. As a scholar and lover of the poem, however, I do nonetheless have my personal bone to pick: in the film, the Green Knight character is Not Hot. And, according to the original poem, he should be. Very.
Now, calling the film’s Green Knight is homely is no knock to the ruggedly handsome Ralph Ineson, who plays him under so much CGI and prosthetics and makeup that his real face is hardly visible. Instead, we get the clear sense that, in keeping with the film’s dark, supernatural aesthetic, the film’s producers chose to make the Green Knight monstrous rather than babe-material. His bark-covered face is spooky rather than suave.
Ralph Ineson barely recognizable as the Green Knight
The thing is, in the original Middle English, the Green Knight is unambiguously hot. We’re first introduced to him at the beginning of the poem, when the Green Knight crashes Arthur’s Christmas party. The narrative gaze dwells on the Green Knight’s huge, muscular body, on his square and thick neck and abs (“swyre” and “swange”) and big long sides and limbs (“lyndes” and “lymes”). He is the biggest smokeshow of his size (“the myriest in his muckel that myght ride”)! His luscious hair is splayed out over his shoulders (“fayre fannand fax umbefoldes his schulderes”)! He’s riding a freaking horse! But there’s something delicate about his good looks as well—he has a slim waist and a taut stomach that is visible through his tight, fur-trimmed, embroidered coat (“both his wombe and his wast were worthily smale”). On and on the description continues, for almost a hundred lines. Sure, he’s head-to-toe emerald green (“overal ener-grene”), but the text doesn’t mince words—in spite of his otherworldly complexion, the Green Knight is a sexy, sexy man.
The Green Knight’s hotness matters, because it shapes how we understand the poem’s emphasis on and relationship to desire.
Call me thirsty, but the Green Knight’s hotness matters, because it shapes how we understand the poem’s emphasis on and relationship to desire, and to queer desire in particular. When I teach Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to undergraduates, my students are surprised to find it “steamy.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is often read, in fact, among queer and feminist medievalist scholars as a text that flirts with sexual transgression. When the poem carefully, intimately catalogues the Green Knight’s good looks just as it does the beauty of its female characters, it gives the reader permission to focus their erotic gaze broadly. This is a text, the poem tells us, where gender doesn’t determine who is worthy of a backwards glance.
In the film, on the other hand, Lowery and Patel construct a distinctly heterosexual Gawain. We meet him in a brothel with a woman in the first scene of the film. Throughout, Gawain’s relationships with women are front and center: he has a female lover in Camelot who does not exist in the original poem, and an adulterous affair with a mysterious seductress he meets on his journeys. Long closeups of the film’s beautiful ladies in soft lighting take the place of the poem’s admiring gaze at the Green Knight.
The lady of the castle hitting on Gawain in the bedroom scenes in the original manuscript
Yes, the film’s Gawain does receive one kiss from a lord of a castle—but he receives the kiss, and without much build up, the moment feels somewhat out of the blue. The film doesn’t really prepare us for the smooch, which ends when Gawain, as surprised as the audience, breaks away and flees the scene. In the poem, meanwhile, Gawain kisses a lord three times, and it’s Gawain, not the lord, who initiates the romance, which has higher stakes than just a chaste peck. To explain: as in the film, the lord of the poem goes out hunting each of the three days he hosts Gawain, and agrees to exchange his daily winnings with Gawain’s back at the castle each night. Gawain’s prizes, however, are somewhat scandalous: each day, the lady of the castle seduces and kisses Gawain. Gawain, quick to uphold his end of the bargain, kisses Lord Bertilak every day when he returns. As scholars like Carolyn Dinshaw have pointed out, it’s implied that if Gawain were to sleep with the lady, he would need to sleep with the lord too, according to the rules of the game.
The poem invites us to see more broadly, while the film’s intervention takes a primarily heterosexual point of view.
In the poem’s universe, it’s later revealed that the Green Knight and this lord—who are distinct characters in the film—are actually the same person in disguise. It also comes to light that the lady conspired with the disguised Green Knight to seduce Gawain, in what is basically an attempt at medieval swinging. So, this major plot twist of the poem, which does not come about in the film, hinges on the possibility of polyamorous relationships and queer intimacy between Gawain and the Green Knight, disguised as the lord. With this subplot, and all the preparation leading up to it, the poem invites us to see more broadly, while the film’s intervention takes a primarily heterosexual point of view.
With this in mind, as much as I enjoyed the film, I’m sad to lose the Green Knight’s sexiness. All adaption, of course, deviates from the original text, and that is well and good. Lowery’s The Green Knight offers us new ways of seeing the story, bringing into focus the pressures of masculinity and the relationship between humans and nature. But it also reiterates a vision of the Middle Ages that is primarily heterosexual—a vision that tells us more about how we think about the past than about how that past actually was. The original poem points us instead to the long history of queer desire, celebrating and playing with the complexity of eroticism and intimacy. The film’s de-sexified Green Knight, meanwhile, downplays the story’s queer possibilities. So much as I enjoyed the film, I invite you also to drool over the original—where the poem’s smoldering glance at the very handsome Green Knight may matter more than Lowery’s version gives it credit for.
Quotes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are from an edition by J.J. Anderson.
Those parts of the domed city were not the city at all—or maybe the parts we lived in were what was not the city. It was not, after all, our city, or at least had not been so originally. It had become, I suppose, our city. Or some parts had. The rest, we stayed clear of. At least most of us did. There were always a few who did not leave well enough alone. We had all seen those parts, seen how they seemed encased in dirty glass or Lucite, semitransparent and flickering walls, rooms and furnishings distorted beyond. When people dared to thrust their hands against the Lucite, they found it was not Lucite at all, but a sort of firm, jellylike membrane. They could slowly push their way through. They let their arms sink to the elbow or even—the more daring—to the joint of the shoulder, then groped around behind that translucent wall, and when they drew their arm free the fingers at its end were often clenched around something. The distorted broken-off leg of a chair, for instance—if that was in fact what it was—a skew slosh of metal, anyway. Or a pen that was a semicircular loop made for hands other than ours. These oddities could be sold—there were those who collected them.
We treated these collectors with as much suspicion as those who gathered the objects in the first place.
There were times, too—rarer these—when someone would thrust a hand through, then an elbow, then an arm, and begin to grope around, only to suddenly be taken hold of by something on the other side of the shimmering wall. From our vantage, we saw only a shape, a vague collection of angles, distantly humanoid in form, take hold and drag the person through. Such individuals never returned.
No one had ever crossed through the wall willingly. They had only felt around, one arm in, the rest of their body out, and drawn objects out. Perhaps these objects were in the form they had been in on the other side, or perhaps in coming through took on some distorted version of their true form.
I was, I suppose, unique. I was an orphan—but there were other orphans among us. My uniqueness was based not on that but on the circumstances of how I became such.
My parents worked together to bring bits and pieces of that other city across. They would take turns pushing through a shimmering wall, watching their arms distort and become a series of angles. They would draw an object out and sell it to collectors. That was how they lived. They always worked together, and as a result always took me along with them.
My earliest memory is this: my parents pressed against a vague and shimmering crystalline wall, one reaching through, the other, legs braced, grasping the first around the waist. I had been placed on a ratty blanket as far away from the wall as possible. I pawed the blanket, found crumbs or bugs on the floor, rolled them around in my mouth, spat them out. And then, after what seemed to me a long while, my parents turned, looking simultaneously terrified and triumphant, an unnatural and pain-wracked object held high in my mother’s hand.
Or maybe this is not my first memory. I saw that scene or scenes like it so many times in the years to come. Sometimes the object was in my father’s hand, sometimes my mother’s. Sometimes, too, they groped around and then, screaming, quickly withdrew, one dragging the other free as, on the other side of the shimmering wall, a being of awkward angles approached rapidly, tried to catch hold of them, and failed.
Was the being the same as us? I wondered. I had seen my father’s arm through the shimmering wall and was uncertain there was any difference in its distorted angles through the wall as compared to the angles of the arm (if it was an arm) of the being or beings that stalked them there. I wondered this only later, when I was seven or eight. My parents were still on a good run, taking just enough from behind each shimmering wall to provide us with another three weeks, or four, or five, of food, of life.
When you are older, my mother told me, you must find a companion, someone just like you, willing to watch out for you as you reach through the wall, and you for her. You must know how far you can reach and go that far but no farther. You must know how to sink your arm to the shoulder joint and then reach even farther without letting your head push through. And then, God forbid, when a being approaches from the other side, to withdraw quickly with the help of your companion. She will tell you something is coming, and she will help you draw your arm free before it is too late.
This was, indeed, what my mother was to my father, until the moment when she was not. Until something came and she did not alert my father quickly enough, or else my father was sunk too deep, or the being moved too fast. Before we knew it, it had caught hold of my father’s arm, and my mother was dragging on his waist, trying to tug him free. My father was screaming. There I was, nine years old, my arms around my mother’s waist, trying to help my mother pull him free.
And indeed he did come free, but without his arm, which had been neatly severed at the elbow, and just as neatly cauterized.
2.
For weeks after, we avoided those shimmering walls. And yet, as time went on, my parents realized they did not know what else to do to survive. Their whole livelihood had involved reaching through walls—they had no other skills. My mother still had two good arms to reach with, and my father one, and as we grew hungrier they decided I was old enough to assist my mother as a lookout. We had to take the risk. We would, we vowed, take that risk as seldom as possible.
That strung us along for another five years, until I was fourteen. And then the same collection of angles appeared behind the shimmering wall, and though I immediately shouted out, it was upon my mother too quickly and pulled her through. My father, holding on to her waist with his remaining hand and forearm, followed after. And I, holding my father’s legs, came last of all.
The passage through was strange, as if my body were being stretched and then reassembled to form a new creature. I could feel my father’s legs, my arms wrapped around them, but then, suddenly, they were not legs at all, and then my arms were not arms at all either. And then my mind caught up with whatever transformation I had gone through, and I could think of his legs as legs again, and my arms as arms, and was unsure what, if anything, had changed.
And then, I lost consciousness.
I was lying on a floor flecked with color, as if mica—though the color floated and spun and moved, which mica as I understood it would not. Things in the world have certain properties, and one comes to understand these properties and what they are, what they mean. One comes to count on things being what they are. And yet, was I still in the world? I did not know. What did I mean by world ? I was barely conscious, to be honest, and unsure I was in any world at all.
Near me was a being who resembled a human in every respect except for being carapaced in light. Does that qualify as every respect? Probably not. He was some manifestation of a human, though not human at the same time. Perhaps he had been so once, but it had been a long time since that was all he was.
At his feet lay the bodies of my father and mother. With a tool or instrument possessing a bright edge of light, he had begun to disjoint my father’s corpse. Both feet had been severed and lay idly flopped to either side of the body—bloodless, the mechanism he had used to sever them having apparently cauterized them at the same time.
Near me was a being who resembled a human in every respect except for being carapaced in light.
As I watched, he cut through one of my father’s legs just below the knee. It looked like the left knee, but something told me I was seeing it wrongly, that it was in fact the right.
My mother was apparently unscathed but equally dead.
When he noticed me stirring, he interrupted his task and spoke. “Hello there,” he said, his voice exceptionally deep and pleasing.
At first I could say nothing. When he repeated his greeting, I found myself mouthing it back to him. “Hello,” I managed weakly. He inclined his head, returned to his task. I could not move my limbs. I could lift my head and look around but little more than that. “Please, do not be afraid,” he said, then severed my father’s head.
“That’s my father,” I managed.
“Not anymore,” he said, and then made quick work of my mother as well.
In the end, the pair of them were less bodies than neat arrangements of sectioned parts, little more than stacks of firewood. Though, admittedly, to start a fire with them would have been very difficult indeed.
“How is it you speak my language?” I asked. He was moving between the pile that had been my father and the pile that had been my mother. He kept removing a portion of one or the other pile and putting it back in a different way, then standing back to judge the results.
“No,” he answered distractedly. “You are speaking our language.” His voice was beautiful, almost unbearably so, and somehow familiar too. It warbled and came to me in multiple tones, as if there were three layers of him for every layer of me.
I blacked out again. I don’t know why. When I came to again, I had crawled to the translucent shimmering wall and was trying, ineffectually, to shove my head through. How long I had been at this task, I had no idea.
The other being was beside me, bending down slightly, a concerned look just visible behind the blaze of light that enveloped his face.
“We are not going to hurt you,” he said. “Did you think we were going to hurt you? We don’t hurt children. We never do.”
“Who’s we?” I managed, through clenched teeth.
“We?” he asked. He gestured to his own chest. “We’re just like you,” he said. “You speak the same language as we do. You think the same thoughts as we do. But we’re not you.”
“Then what are you?”
But for this the being seemed to have no answer.
“Just sit back,” he said. “Relax. It will only take a moment to dispose of your parents.”
I watched it happen, though what exactly it was that was happening was difficult to say. The being moved back and forth between the piles, continuing to adjust them slightly until the one on the left, the pile that had been my mother, began to glow.
A moment later, he lifted my father’s head by the hair and then set it down again. And then the pile that had been my father began to glow too.
“We are sorry about your parents,” he said in that same beautiful voice. “But there was really no alternative.”
Slowly the piles that had been my parents began to quiver. The parts rose into the air, reshaping themselves into human form, with gaps between the pieces. They were teetering, stretched-out beings, assembled of dead flesh ligatured together with light. They moved jerkily, as if compelled by some other force. I watched their eyes darting about behind the carapace of light that had now swallowed their heads. Confused, they seemed to be casting about for something. And then, abruptly, their gaze came to rest on me.
“How interesting,” said the being. “They believe they recognize you.”
Within their carapaces, my parents seemed to be screaming, but I could not hear a sound. Awkwardly, they lurched toward me.
“It would be better for you to go now,” the being said.
And when I still did not respond, unable to move as what had once been my parents wobbled toward me, he reached out and took me by the neck and thrust me bodily through the shimmering wall.
3.
I grew up. Years passed. I chose to forget my parents. I built another entire life around myself, became a respectable member of society. I acquired a wife—or perhaps she acquired me, if acquired is the right word. I lived wholly in the city that was ours, never groping into that other city, turning away from the shimmering walls whenever I encountered them.
Things might have gone on like that until I died, but, simply, they did not. My wife, as had many around us, became subject to a wasting disease, her teeth and hair falling out, her body erupting in pustules and sores. She began to bleed from every orifice, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker. I remained unaffected.
“Kill me,” she begged. “Please, kill me.”
I took her to the treatment center, but we were turned away. No, they said, they would not treat her.
What, I asked the admitting nurse, would it take for her to get admitted?
There was nothing to be done, the nurse claimed. She shook her head. It was not an illness they could treat. They no longer had the proper medication.
But surely, I said, it was just a question of gathering the materials and then the medication could be made again. Again she shook her head. “We never had the formula, only the medication itself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. And when she gestured back at an empty vial, distorted and twisted, I knew the medicine had not come from our city, but from the other one.
I kissed my wife, set off. There were doors in my mind that I had kept shut for so long. Now I opened them. Behind them, I found my parents and all they had taught me. Behind them, I saw again the strange portions of the city. I had seen such a vial before—or had seen a vial somewhat like it, anyway. Where had it been?
I walked idly, allowing my mind to wander. I tried to think like that young boy, dragged along by his parents as they pushed a hand through a shimmering wall. What kind of parents brought their child along for something like that? I tried to recall each wall my parents had approached and stretched their arms into, sometimes my father, sometimes my mother, and what, from my vantage, I had seen through them. I wracked my brain, saw again their sweating faces, their anxiety, then that moment of triumph as they brought an odd and skewed object back through the wall.
And then I realized: I would only have seen the vial so clearly if they had brought it back through the wall. No, they must have brought it out and sold it.
But no, I considered further after clambering out of my despair: I had no memory of the object being in my parents’ hands. And yet I did have a memory of the object, a clear image. Not in my parents’ hands but lying on the floor. Had I seen it myself through a wall? If so, where?
But no, in my memory the object was too close for that, not glimpsed through a wall. No, it was just there before me, at my feet. Or rather, just at the level of my eyes, maybe half a foot away. And then I allowed the memory to continue, and my eyes flicked up to a strange being swathed in light and holding a bright-edged instrument, and I knew what I had to do.
4.
I spent some time trying to find the right wall. I looked at many, dozens, but none seemed right. I tried to be systematic. I would come close and peer through and try to recognize what lay beyond, but each time I could not say for certain that I recognized anything. And then I began to think: Where had that being come from?
The one who had dragged me and my parents through the shimmering wall? He had not been inside the room when my mother first reached in, I was sure of it, and then, abruptly, he was. Perhaps each encased room behind a shimmering wall led to other rooms and these to others still, and these all were connected. That every encased room led to every other encased room, in which case it did not matter which shimmering wall I passed through, as long as I passed through one. Once I was through, I could rapidly look for the object I remembered by moving from room to room instead of groping through the shimmering wall.
At least, that was what I chose to believe.
I had not touched a shimmering wall in several decades, and yet the sensation immediately came back to me. At first the wall resisted, felt almost solid, but then, slowly, it began to yield. With a sucking sound, it drew my fingers in, and then my hand, and then my forearm. The sensation was odd and disorienting, as if my hand were being taken apart and put together in a way that made it something else.
And then my fingers broke through to the other side.
I plunged my other hand in. When it was sufficiently deep, I lowered my head and pushed it through as well. The sensation grew worse, much more intense, and for a long moment I didn’t know what or who I was. The stuff pressed against my face in such a way that I began to lose track of where my body ended and the jelly began. Soon, too, I could not tell if I was moving through it at all, and I lost all initiative to do anything but float, suspended, my legs still legs on one side, my hands something like hands on the other, but everything in between an undifferentiated mass.
How long was I there? Minutes perhaps, or hours, or days. I did not breathe, but I do not know that I needed to breathe. It was as if I were caught between two states and subject to neither one nor the other.
And then something took me by the hands and pulled.
I coughed and a spill of jelly slid from my throat. It lay for a moment in a quivering pool beside my face before, very slowly, vibrating its way back to the shimmering wall. I looked up, my vision bleary, and there, above me, was a being of angles refracting off one another, its body encased in light. He held an instrument whose bright edge was moving downward, toward me.
I lifted an arm to protect myself and suddenly the instrument withdrew.
“Ahhh,” said a voice that was exceptionally, almost unbearably beautiful. “You’re alive.”
I coughed up another lump of jelly. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.
“They never are, the adults,” he said. “Until we make them so.” I managed to get to my knees.
“We’ve met before,” the being said, his brow furrowing behind his carapace of light.
“Yes,” I said. “You killed my parents.”
“Not killed,” he said. “In fact, we returned them to life.”
I was on my feet now, stumbling. “Are you the only one here?”
“Well,” he said. “There’s your parents.”
“But they’re not like you.”
“No, they’re not. They’re not sufficiently there. Except for us, nobody is sufficiently there.”
“There? What do you mean?” He shrugged.
“Because of you,” I accused.
“In spite of us. That they can function at all is a minor miracle.” I glanced around for the vial, any vial. An old swirl of metal, a crumpled wooden box, forks that had twisted on themselves and had their tines bent in every direction. No vial.
I looked for a door. There it was in the back of the room. “Where does that door lead?” I asked.
“How can you still be alive?” he asked. “Is it because you passed through as a child? We never hurt children.”
Perhaps he intended to say more, but by this time I was sufficiently in control of my faculties to strike him hard in the temple and knock him off his feet. The light around his head made my fingers tingle but otherwise did not adversely affect me. A moment later my hand closed around his instrument. I activated the bright edge of light and pushed it deep into his side. I could smell flesh burning.
He grunted. “It won’t do you any good,” he said, and expired.
Once he was dead, the light around him flickered and went out. He looked now like an ordinary man. Remarkably enough, he seemed to resemble me. So much so that I thought at first he was my father. But no, not quite. And then I thought, If not my father, who? Dreading what the answer might be, I quickly turned away.
They were still encased in light and still seemed to be mutely screaming.
I left the body there. I had thought I might feel some measure of satisfaction in killing the being who had killed and then reanimated my parents, but I felt nothing at all. His face haunted me.
I went through the door, and from there into another room, and from there into another. I kept moving from room to room, each ordinary in every respect except for the one shimmering wall that opened onto another place, another city, my city. Sometimes I would see shadows on the other side of the wall. Once I even saw a hand protruding through it and feeling around frantically on the floor, though it quickly pulled back as soon as I approached.
After a few dozen rooms, I found them—the creatures that had once been my parents. They were still encased in light and still seemed to be mutely screaming.
At first they seemed not to notice me, and when I approached they did not acknowledge my presence. But then, abruptly, they did, coming at me and throwing their strange disjointed bodies onto me until I began to feel suffocated and, for my own protection, had to activate the instrument again. Their light went out and they collapsed into dust and were gone. I continued on.
How many more rooms? A hundred? Two hundred? More? There have been so many rooms since that I cannot say for certain, but there, at last, it was, the twisted vial, just as I had remembered it, tipped on its side in the middle of the floor. I snatched it up. Was it identical to the vial the nurse had shown me? No, not identical, but very close. I had no way of knowing if I had found what my wife needed to survive, but yes, perhaps it was so. It was not, in any case, impossible.
And so, vial in hand, I approached the nearest shimmering wall and pushed my hands through, eager to return to save my wife.
Or at least I would have. But the translucent wall was solid. It would not let me through.
I tried wall after all, but they all resisted me. I was trapped. Only then did I notice the glow that had begun to envelop me.
5.
I have lived through one of these cities. Now, I must live through the other. Meanwhile, my wife lies in her bed, suffering, dying. Perhaps she is already dead.
I am nearly done with this record. Once I have completed it, I will lean this notebook against a shimmering wall and wait for a hand to grasp it and pull it through. If you find this and read it, I ask only one thing of you: come back to this wall and push your hand through again. I will place in it this vial, which you must use to cure my wife. Once she is cured, bring her back here with you and convince her to push her hand through. I will do nothing to her, will not drag her through, for I know that it would likely kill her. No, I will only hold her hand for a moment, squeeze it, and let go.
And then it will be your turn. I have treasures beyond your wildest imaginings. If you will do this small thing for me, I will bring them to the wall. You will be wealthy, and powerful too. All you have to do is follow my commands, and trust me.
But if you do not do this, you will have nothing of me. You will have only the bright edge of my instrument, and I will have you in pieces.
It could have been soccer or tap dancing, it could have been Dungeons & Dragons or Model United Nations, but for editor Halimah Marcus and the contributors of the new anthology Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond, what stamped them most profoundly in childhood was the act—physical, emotional, social, cultural, ineffable—of riding horses.
I took the appealing blue and gold book on a short trip to a cabin and, at the first sign of rain, cozied up with it under a blanket, a hot cup of tea nearby. But the blanket was ripped off during T. Kira Madden’s essay on the ridiculous and revered film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken and the tea spilled at the first line of Carmen Machado’s form-exploding feast of a piece and soon I was standing in the doorway just inches from a deluge.
This is not a cozy anthology. It does not snuggle you, or coddle you, or anesthetize you with nostalgia or even sink you with sadness. It spotlights an experience at once profoundly particular—the smells, the sounds, the inexplicable feeling of horse contact—and seriously universal: that thing we loved once that could not be taken with us, the child we were, the girl we were and how being a girl was the worst thing to be; the adult we became, the shame and the silence, the ferocity and the freedom.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Halimah Marcus, the executive director of Electric Literature, about her own horse girlery, how she put the book together and why, how she exploded—because she did—what it means to be a horse girl.
Editor’s note: Halimah Marcus is the executive director of Electric Literature.
Emma Copley Eisenberg:I’m wondering of course where the seed of this anthology comes from. What drew you to writing about horses and to this framing more specifically?
Halimah Marcus: I loved horses and riding as a child and as a teenager. I rode every day from when I was ten until I left for college, and riding—the horses, as well as the community I found at the barn—gave me a sense of purpose and belonging I didn’t have at school. I was raised in a Sufi community, which is of course unusual for a blonde white girl, and made me feel like a misfit at school. I also really bristled at the strictures of religion, which were very gendered and all about modesty and chastity. I didn’t feel truly comfortable anywhere. As a teenager, I also really struggled with body issues and disordered eating. Riding helped me escape from all that: my body, my home life, the restrictions placed on me as a girl.
Riding helped me escape from all that: my body, my home life, the restrictions placed on me as a girl.
Then when I got to college, and finally had a chance to reinvent myself so that I could fit in, I gave up riding completely. I was very self-conscious about it, actually. That’s where the whole “horse girl” thing comes in. Horse girls are meant to be spoiled, weird, smelly. Privileged but unpopular and unsophisticated. I don’t think anyone ever called me a “horse girl” explicitly but I intuited the categories that riding horses landed me in. College was where I began to pursue my intellectual and creative passions in earnest, and always had a sense that riding had no place in a literary life.
Fast forward 15 years. I’m an editor in New York, and I actually long for horses. I long to ride. I began to ask myself what it was all about—if there is actually something to the idea that girls have a greater connection with horses, and wondered if it was possible to disentangle the horse girl stereotype from all the toxic gender stuff, and expectations around race and money. I knew that, from my limited point of view, this would be an impossible undertaking and that the project needed to be an anthology.
ECE:I wanted to touch on two ideas that you just mentioned that it seems like you, in your introduction, and also many of the contributors are grappling with: 1) The resistance to being called a “horse girl” because of its connotations, specifically of uncoolness. 2) As Carmen puts it, that a horse girl would “smell like heterosexuality, independence, whiteness, femininity.” How did these truths influence the way you put the anthology together? Were you looking for points of view that would undermine the horse girl stereotypes?
HM: Calling the book Horse Girls was initially meant to be ironic, but guess what? There is no such thing as an ironic book title, I’ve learned. Because the book is called Horse Girls, I’ve had to identify as a horse girl more now than ever before. I think that’s true for other contributors as well. I don’t think any of us considered ourselves horse girls prior to this anthology and most likely still don’t, but we may still have “reclaimed” the term to some extent, making it more empowering and inclusive.
When soliciting writers for the anthology, I absolutely thought about who the horse girl stereotype excludes and actively worked to include those people. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, for example, writes about how they were never a horse girl because they were never a girl. Braudie Blais-Billie writes about thinking of her and her siblings as “Seminole horse girls,” because there wasn’t a ready-made category of Indigenous horse girls for her to slot into.
ECE: I felt the ambivalence about the term shining through in almost all of these essays, but a lot of pride and tenderness too, and you definitely succeeded in offering a much more complex portrait of horse girl-ness. I’m wondering about formal concerns as well. Horses and horse culture offer certain metaphors as well as textures and rhythms. Did you find yourself writing or reading differently in this project than you otherwise might?
HM: It’s interesting that you should ask about language because so many words, expressions, and idioms come from horses and horse riding. (I think there might be more than from baseball, which is where I assume all expressions come from.) Champing at the bit, raring to go, being blinkered, right out the gate, to muck something out, using a carrot and a stick, being gun shy. I consciously tried to stay away from those phrases, while some other writers had fun playing with them. I also had to balance how much to explain certain horse-related terms that might not be familiar to everyone, and generally landed on the side of assuming a certain level of equine knowledge in the readership, even though I hope the essays will appeal to a broader audience. Context clues are powerful. Even if you don’t know what a fetlock is, for example, I am pretty sure it won’t ruin the essay or even the sentence.
ECE: Another fascinating language moment for me was when you wrote “I was once a horse girl, but I never became a horse woman.” Time, temporality, change, transformation seem at the heart of many of the essays. What does that line mean to you?
The term ‘horse girl’ is meant to make its subject feel ashamed, not so much for liking horses, but for being a girl. Meanwhile, boys who like horses get to be cowboys, masculine icons of America.
HM: The difference between what people generally mean when they say “horse girl” versus “horse woman” is vast. Horse girls are pigtailed brats; horse women are tough, grizzled athletes. The horse women I’ve known—my trainers—have been enormously influential in my life. I can’t tell you how much I looked up to them, how I sought their approval, attention, and instruction. The other people who held that authoritative role in my life were mostly men, and here were these strong, no-nonsense women who no one would dain to call a horse girl. That line you quoted is imbued with a lot of regret, because I quit and didn’t pursue riding as a profession. It’s an alternate path; the life I chose not to live.
ECE:That’s fascinating that in a way horse women become masculine figures or stand-ins, while horse girls tend to be imagined as the pinnacle of femininity. I’ve got no answers for that, but your contributors explore gender powerfully in this book. I also knew two horse women and they were—horses were not their work, they were their LIFE. Being a horse woman to them was like a calling or a religion, not a hobby, job, etc. It was fascinating.
I’m wondering what surprises cropped up (horse word??) during this process. Did the ways any of the contributors thought about the subject or offered their own insights surprise you?
HM: Once I had all the essays in, it was really powerful to trace certain themes and commonalities across this diverse group of contributors. I knew that for my introduction, I should try to come up with some sort of grand theory of the horse girl, and reading through the book, I kept coming back to this idea of shame. For me personally, and for so many girls, shame is a dominant emotion. That’s how our culture trains girls to feel: ashamed of their bodies, their desires, their sexuality, their origins, their upbringing. Ashamed to be too loud or too quiet or to say the wrong thing. Even the term “horse girl,” is meant to make its subject feel ashamed, not so much for liking horses, really, but for being a girl. It’s dumb because you are a girl. Meanwhile, boys who like horses get to be cowboys, masculine icons of America.
ECE:The idea of shame being a common undercurrent rings very true to me, and at the same time there’s another contradiction there, because you and many others write that being a horse girl offered you freedom. There is also that sort of flavor when we talk about horses and girls of the sexual, the weird myth (maybe this was just at my school who knows??) that you could break your hymen while riding a horse. How do you see sexuality and eroticism fitting into this conversation about horse girls, shame, and freedom?
Anyone who has dealt with feelings of shame and the desire to escape will relate to these essays.
HM: Right, and there’s that rumor that Catherine the Great had sex with a horse. Early on, when I told people about the anthology, many of them asked if Catherine the Great was going to be in it. What would that essay look like? An investigative report of whether an 18th-century empress engaged in bestiality?
This is a little bit of a tangent, but I really appreciate how, in the Hulu series The Great, you see that rumor get started by a disgruntled lady of the court. Because of course, that’s what it was! A nasty rumor designed to hurt the world’s most powerful woman. So yes, it is something I wanted to address. Maggie Shipstead’s essay bravely tackles the Freud of it all, who, as we all know, was obsessed with penises (which he called widdlers?), and likewise fascinated with horse penises for their size, and is therefore responsible for much of this mess.
Less sensationally, it’s quite common for riding to be seen as a hobby with the chief purpose of deferring boyfriends (girlfriends are not even considered by these parents) and sexuality, generally. I know my parents had that motivation.
ECE: That was actually such an eye-opening storyline in The Great and made me see the idea and intent of the horse sex story in a whole new way: that to be with a horse was somehow the ultimate slutiness, which you help explicate above, thanks Freud.
What haven’t we talked about yet that you’d like to touch on? What else do you want people to know about this book?
HM: I wish I could go through and summarize each essay, because they are all so unique and wonderful, but I will restrain myself. Each one is worth reading, and not just for former horse girls anonymous. I think that anyone who pursued something fervently in their youth that they’ve struggled to incorporate into their adulthood will relate to these essays, as will anyone who has dealt with feelings of shame and the desire to escape.
It’s increasingly easy to be somebody else online. More and more people are drawn to catfishing, creating fake accounts, or tailoring their own lives for social media. Whatever the reason behind altering yourself for Instagram, Twitter, or the newest hottest app, it’s undeniable how commonplace it is.
On Instagram, I have 5 accounts. My “rinsta” (real instagram), my “finsta” (fake instagram), a deep finsta (no followers, no following), a sapphic meme page, and a bookstagram. Throughout these accounts I choose which parts of my life to reveal. This continues throughout other apps. I have three Twitter accounts, two TikTok profiles, two Facebook pages, a sea of inactive Tumblr pages. With how influential and consuming social media has become, it’s helpful to compartmentalize across platforms and personas.
While influencing has become a full-time job for those who are rich or lucky enough to turn their identity into a brand, now, even “average” people take their time capturing pictures of their meals, vacations, and partners, to curate envy and attention.
Our online personas are as real as ever. And while it can be challenging to write about ever-changing technologies, these authors address the ways social media impacts our identities.
Sarah Marcus, a once-beloved influencer, gets canceled and left without a career. When she reaches out to her childhood friend, he suggests that she should become the face of his new business venture: The Atmosphere, a cult to cure men of toxic masculinity. The two cult leaders now must venture into the desert with a group of misogynists to see if they have the chops to make the world a better place, when they secretly only want attention and praise.
Korede’s sister, Ayoola, is obsessive. She’s addicted to social media, herself, and killing her boyfriends. After Ayoola’s third boyfriend ends up dead, Korede is frustrated with her sister’s murder streak and upset that she is her accomplice in the cover-ups. Then Ayoola sets her sight on a doctor who not only works with Korede, but is her secret crush. Their identities risk exposure as they test the durability of their sisterly bond.
Hilarious, biting, and embarrassing, this debut novel follows a couple and their distant acquaintance and Instagram crush, Jen. When they run into Jen at the Apple Store, she invites them on a weekend trip to her boyfriend’s house in the Hamptons. Tensions are high as the couple reconciles with their imagined Jen and the real Jen. Complete with adult braces, manifestation, and Jake Gyllenhaal, Morgan portrait of millennials is spot-on.
Anya is a New York City-based fashion editor with a throng of loyal social media followers. However, she is still infatuated with her coworker, Sarah. Though she starts out wishing she could befriend the beautiful and rich women, Anya learns that they are up for the same promotion, and her harmless obsession turns dangerous. Anya decides that the only way to beat Sarah is to embody what makes her so enviable.
When the young woman at the center of this novel discovers her liberal boyfriend is the creator of a popular alt-right conspiracy page, the world becomes untrustworthy. After an unexpected and life-changing event on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the narrator revisits the origins of their relationship. Then, she flees to Berlin, the place they met, to try to reconcile with the gap in her boyfriend’s identity. Complete with catfishing, paranoia, and plenty of plot twists, Fake Accounts is an autofictional answer about how we live with our lies.
It might be impossible to get on the L Train or to tap through an influencer’s story without seeing Trick Mirror. In a series of essays, Tolentino addresses rape culture at UVA, girlbosses, Fyre Fest, and our relationship to social media. In “Always Be Optimizing,” one of the fan favorites of the collection, Tolentino dissects how women use themselves as avatars on social media. While documenting countless hours of our everyday life or “self-surveillancing”, we hand our data to tech monopolies like Facebook and Google.
This novel follows the parallel lives of two mothers, and their linked connection through Instagram influencer Lauren. Beth, Lauren’s wedding planner, is a new mother and her husband has lost all interest in sex, preferring to dote on their baby. Ruby, one of the photographers for the wedding, has a medical condition that makes her insecure, and a toddler she struggles to bond with. Their narratives are occasionally interrupted by Lauren’s Instagram posts and her seemingly flawless life. The three women struggle with dating, love, and their perceptions of perfection, until something has to give.
Lockwood, one of the hailed “Poet Laureates of Twitter,” Logs On for this experimental and unusual novel. When the narrator goes viral for the tweet, can a dogs be twins, she lives in the Portal, musing about trivialities and memes. However, midway through the narrative (formatted as a series of short paragraphs), she is jolted back to reality. Suddenly, the world of the Portal and her Internet virality don’t matter in the face of personal and familial tragedy.
Since she was young, Tara has lived with her foster “Mother,” a controlling and vindictive woman who isolated Tara from the world. Tara’s only escape is through a YouTube family’s vlogs. While watching those videos she is able to feel like a part of their family, and when they make a post looking for an intern, she applies. However, after gaining the job and getting closer to the family, she discovers the young family isn’t as perfect as they appear.
Charlotte McConaghy’s novel Once There Were Wolvestakes place in the Cairngorm mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland where wolves are released to reestablish packs in once-native territory. Right now, a similar narrative is taking place across the Great Lakes and the western United States, causing a parallel friction among residents, landowners, and farmers.
I was initially attracted to this book for two reasons: McConaghy’s use of endangered animals as a means to tell another human-centric story (first example: her bookMigrations) and the fact that I seem to write a lot about wolves in my day job; however, this book is far more than an old wolves’ tale. Instead, it illustrates what it’s like to be an outsider—from both a human and animal perspective—and the level of healing and acceptance it takes from within to be accepted and to accept yourself.
I chatted with the Australian author over Zoom about Utah’s infamous Pando tree, the importance of rewilding, and how science and the arts should merge to share critical messages—like climate change—with the world.
Kristen Schmitt: Wolves are a hot topic whether it’s because of delisting efforts in the U.S. or the usual round of depredation and livestock conflicts that flare up everywhere. Once There Were Wolves centers around that livestock aspect as your main character, Inti, and her team reintroduce wolves into an agricultural area of Scotland. How did you come up with the idea for this story?
Charlotte McConaghy: I would say that I’m pretty passionate about conservation and the environment. How I initially came to the story was actually through reading. I found this article about Pando, the trembling giant, which is the oldest living organism on the planet. It’s a single tree that has genetically identical shoots that are the [other] trees with a huge connected root system under the ground. Some scientists believe that it could be nearly a million years old. It’s survived an extraordinarily long time until now. And it’s dying. It’s our impact on the environment that’s killing it.
So, I was reading about this amazing, beautiful, ancient thing and then at the bottom of the article, there’s this very casual mention of the fact that this is solvable, it’s save-able, if we just reintroduced wolves to the forest because the wolves would hunt the deer and, therefore, the deer would stop eating all the shoots of the tree and allow it to actually grow. However, even though this was kind of a perfect, elegant solution, it would never happen because the farmers and the hunters of the area wouldn’t allow it. I immediately was enthralled by this idea. And all of a sudden, I had the whole book in my head. I knew exactly what it was going to be. I went for a walk and by the time I got back, it was fully formed. I knew that I was going to write the story of the woman who made this happen, who was reintroducing wolves to save a dying forest, despite all the pushback.
What drives us to do this to our planet, to our environment? Is it of our own sense of shifting away from wildness and our fear of wildness? How do we revert back? Is there only one way to rewild the landscape, to rewild ourselves too?
KS: Because the primary story takes place in Scotland, but also touches on Alaska and parts of the American West and you live in Australia, did you have previous personal experience in those places? And why was it important to bring those other places into the story?
What drives us to do this to our planet, to our environment? Is it of our own sense of shifting away from wildness and our fear of wildness?
CM: I know it does seem a bit odd having an Australian writing a book about wolves given their enormity. I’ve always felt like my kind of life aesthetic doesn’t quite fit in Australia. My heritage is Scottish Irish, so I have a bit of a cold climate pull and I always felt drawn to that part of the world. Australia just doesn’t thrill me, particularly in this case with a slightly noir sort of storyline. And I really love wolves, but I wanted to also be true to that idea of loving something that you haven’t been entirely raised around. So that’s where the Australian-ness of Inti’s character and that outsider idea comes from.
In terms of choosing the settings, Scotland felt really right to me because there’s this really interesting conversation going on there about reintroducing wolves and what would happen if they did. It’s a really big debate. There’s a lot of forces on both sides at the moment. I wanted to also introduce other landscapes that deal with wolves because it felt important that my main character be experienced in that. So, Alaska was one of those. Yellowstone was another and I, of course, visited there. British Columbia was where her dad’s from. I spent a lot of time in Canada as a kid so that kind of also felt natural.
KS: In the book, there was an underlying theme of fear being viewed as a weakness from both Inti’s handling of wolves and her handling of people. Why?
CM: Well, I think that’s part of her shell that she’s built around herself and possibly part of her wounds. It’s something that her mother has tried to instill in her—a sense of, I guess, toughness because her mother really does see it as part of her job [Inti’s mother is a homicide detective]. She sees the worst that humanity has to offer each other. And she gets concerned that Inti’s too soft and vulnerable, so she tries to teach her to find this toughness.
These traumas that Inti’s suffered causes her to do a pretty major flip and start to believe in her mother’s teachings, which is that you have to be tough in order to survive and you have to expect the worst because then you can guard against it. Ultimately, I don’t think that’s the message of the book. I think Inti comes to realize that there’s a space in between being completely open and vulnerable and being completely closed off and tough. I guess in some cases, fear keeps you alive and that’s also true of the wolves. The fear of humans is important to them because it does keep them alive, but that’s something that Inti finds really heartbreaking in a way because she wants to have this deep connection with them. But she can’t make them too familiar with her because it endangers them. I hope that fear is something that she’s able to let go of by the end.
KS: Mirror-touch synesthesia allows Inti to feel not just what her twin, Aggie, is feeling, but also pretty much everyone else in town. Was this condition something you were aware of or witnessed prior to writing about it?
Fiction allows us to access a deeply emotional space around an issue that we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to go to when we’re reading science texts.
CM: I have a much milder, slightly different synesthesia, which is, essentially, that my memory works by connecting color and texture and shape. And I never knew that was unusual. It was just normal for me and then I read about it and I started to learn that that’s actually not how most people’s brains work. Then I listened to this episode of Invisibilia and I was fascinated with the most extraordinary thing. I knew that I wanted to somehow write something about a character with that condition and took a few books to work it out to who that would be. It felt very, very right for Inti because the whole theme of this book is about empathy and connection to others. And, you know, she kind of gets overwhelmed by the amount of forced empathy that she’s forced to feel and tries to close herself off from that. It’s that kind of journey to realizing that this can be a gift if she can see it that way. I liked that it was something that she could share further intimacy with her sister, but then be at the mercy of it with everyone else.
KS: Like a benefit for some, but not quite for everyone else.
CM: Yeah. It can be quite a dangerous thing, really. And reading about the people in the real world who have it, they have to find that balance between danger and this extraordinary kind of experience.
KS: What do you want people who read this book to learn or understand who might not actually be aware of all the layers that rebalance an ecosystem? What do you hope that they get from reading about this type of subject from a fictional standpoint instead of via an ecology textbook or a political lecture?
CM: That’s the amazing thing about fiction. It allows us to access a deeply emotional space around an issue that I think we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to go to when we’re reading science texts or hearing these really politicized views about things.
My hope in writing about this stuff in a fictional way is to allow people access to something deep within themselves that they can take the time to really think about and reflect on how they feel about something because I think all this climate change is a hugely emotional space. Once we start to realize that there is so much grief involved in what’s happening, we can allow ourselves to admit that it’s okay to grieve and it’s okay to love things that are wild and may not love us back. I hope that this provides an avenue to hope and feeling energized and wanting to come out the other side of it, actively pursuing change.
And I do think that the two pillars of fiction and nonfiction need to support each other. There is this incredible work being done by conservationists, by scientists, but they can’t do it alone. They need help from us—from the arts—because the arts have amazing power to affect change and to really inspire people. I hope that this would go some small way to making people aware of something and also making them feel connected to it emotionally.
1. So I was thinking today about that cup of black coffee you left sitting in the fridge because you said you can’t—no matter what—throw away good things. Even if they are of no use to you anymore. You gave me old clothes from your closet, each piece costing over fifty dollars, still with their tags. I think you are going through a meltdown and you think you’re just spring cleaning. We agree, with the wave of a hand, to not talk about this. Sometimes I wear your off-shoulder sweater and pretend I’m you, if that means I’m less me, because you’ve got the kind of confidence none of the other women in our family have. Fifty-five and now again single, you go shopping in the gaps of time you used to call me from the car saying, “Your uncle now has a fad for Home Depot and he’s been in there for two hours.” I wear your sweaters, which are baggy on me, and hope the world will want me a little more.
2. In public, people stare at us together: a middle-aged woman and a twenty-two-year-old. We laugh unrestrained, yelling, “Ya Allah Ya Allah!” as we catch our breaths. I realize now they are probably afraid of us, speaking in a language so unbelonging to an Ohio suburb. You never care how others see you. You open up to the world fearlessly like a child. “I don’t give two pooping shits what people think,” you say, always repeating words for enough emphasis. This is how you use English, since one word is never fierce enough for you. When Uncle divorces you, you curse him out in Arabic, then in Spanish, and then in French. I watch you, with wide eyes, as you tell him over the phone that he is a butt asshole.
3. Womanhood is a flimsy thing, thin as dog ears. One day I’m driving, music high, in a tight new top, singing so hard that other drivers turn and smile in my direction. The other day I’m sobbing, unsure how I got between my hangers in the back of the closet. Then I remember. I was looking for the watch you passed down to me, which I stupidly lost somewhere in the arms of my closet. I miss the feeling of it in my hands, the cold silver that blinks back at me. I don’t know why I’m crying over losing it, because I haven’t lost you and that’s more important. Maybe I’m crying because I’m shocked things can be lost so easily, when they’re handed over with care.
4. No feeling is final, wrote Rilke. You hang this quote above your bathroom sink on an index card, in your handwriting.
5. One evening we joke about your boobs. Compare them to watermelons. “I’m juicy,” you tease. You love being a woman. You love beauty. You look out from your balcony at the view and comment, “Life is so beautiful, in small moments between the mess.” It’s been two weeks since the official declaration of the divorce. Your son, my cousin, will die in a year. But we don’t know that just yet, how loss will continue to come for you. Sometimes, mid-conversation, you stop and close your eyes, as if an aching has arrived and you are waiting for it to pass. I want to ask if closing your eyes works. I close my eyes hoping to shut the pain out, but that is when it mercilessly opens.
6. No feeling is final, wrote Rilke, but he didn’t know you. How your feelings will always be there, taking on different shapes. I’ve seen several shades of grieving from you, all reflected on your face—Grey: when you were shocked he left you. Red: when you decided to work so hard you laughed for hours out of exhaustion. Creme: when you decided that memory is like an object on the menu. You can choose what to forget. Decide if you want the ketchup in the memory or on the side. If you loved the person sitting across from you, or if you didn’t.
7. On a Saturday night, you take me out for a drive. I try to come up with excuses for my sad face, and then decide to just tell the truth. “I feel very alone,” I say. I feel very silly saying this; how the endings of my little romantic relationships are nothing compared to the weight of your divorce. But you take my words seriously: “I understand, habibti. It all just takes practice, carrying it all.”
8. And then, later, you decide to add with sass: “Besides, men are just hemeer. Like my husband. I’m better off adopting a hamster.” We laugh until we choke on our spit.
9. At an outlet mall, I look up to find my ex window shopping, examining a suit. He has his usual face, unimpressed. I immediately wish you were here with me, to tell me what to do. How every part of me wants to take him into my arms as if he never left, but I know better. I know the wanting is not a wanting for a person, but for anything that will suppress the wanting itself. He looks up and catches me looking. I don’t turn away. We wave to each other. A million conversations run through my mind, but I am late to pick you up for a doctor’s appointment. The wanting, like all things, will soon die out. I dig for my keys and go.
10. We sit in the balcony of your apartment, open to the main road. There is a lovely garden in the center, with a sign commemorating a child named Sam. You made me tea the way I like it; mixed with warm frothy milk and honey. Reminiscent of hot days in Cairo when I visited you there. You are moving back soon, perhaps to revisit your single life or scout a new one. Quietly, we count the balconies of other people, each apartment holding so many lives. “How many lives do you think are in there?” I ask quietly, counting each balcony with my finger. “One,” you answer. “It will always be one.”
So often, trips bring out our boldest, most adventurous selves, infusing every experience with a what-happens-in-Vegas vibe. That’s what makes vacations such fertile soil for suspense authors: When we’re enjoying ourselves on the trip of a lifetime, we might become a little too trusting of strangers or stumble into scenarios we wouldn’t dream of back home.
My new thriller, We Were Never Here, begins in Chile’s Elqui Valley, where two globe-trotting best friends are enjoying their annual reunion trip: exploring bone-white churches and sweeping vineyards and jungly patios where they dance to local tunes and mingle with cute strangers. When a vacation hookup goes south, my tourists have no choice but to kill a backpacker in self-defense and bury his body in a remote patch of farmland, setting off a sequence of consequences that threatens to destroy their friendship, their freedom–maybe even their lives.
These seven fantastic thrillers also feature Americans who head abroad expecting pleasure or relaxation—but who get far more than they bargained for:
When Miriam Macy receives a surprise invitation to join six strangers on a luxe private island off the coast of Mexico, she can’t believe her luck. Surrounded by miles of open water, though, she watches as a series of accidents takes down her fellow visitors one by one. This creepy, clever thriller is a brilliant modern send-up to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
Three newly single friends plan a girls’ trip after bonding over their difficult splits. The perfect weekend sputters to a stop when their car breaks down, stranding them in a mountain town that forces them to reckon with the pain they hoped to leave behind. When one of them vanishes after a wild night out, they realize a sinister force might be pulling the strings of their “unplanned” detour. With intricate plotting and truly shocking reveals, this thriller is both an addictive page-turner and a brilliant examination of female friendship, shame, and betrayals.
In this tale of twisted female friendship, Alice Shipley’s settling into life in Tangier when Lucy, her frenemy and former college roommate, arrives unannounced. At first, Lucy seems intent on rekindling their relationship as they explore their exotic new locale. But soon, Alice begins to question Lucy’s intent—and everything about the life she left behind.
Ten days at a luxurious health resort sounds like the perfect retreat, right? For nine strangers, the Tranquillum House offers the potential to reboot their lives. But as romance novelist Frances Welty gets to know her fellow guests, including the house’s enigmatic owner, she wonders if she should leave the resort before it’s too late.
Lizzie cancels her destination wedding only a week before the big day—too late for a refund, so she opts to bring a group of friends to the venue for a distracting getaway. As soon as they arrive, though, it’s clear someone’s out to mess with her: the wedding decorations are waiting for them. And while she sleeps, her friends partake in drunken debauchery that’s far from benign. A juicy, beautifully written thriller brimming with secrets, lies, and betrayal.
Cassandra Bowden’s job in the airline industry makes adventure easy to come by, and with the combination of her binge-drinking habits, she’s used to the occasional blackout. After a wild one night stand, she wakes in a Dubai hotel room to find her suitor dead beside her. Afraid to call the police, she lies and lies until it’s too late to come clean and face the truth of whether she killed him—or, if she didn’t, who did.
In this twisty, powerful literary thriller, Sylvie travels to the Netherlands to visit her grandmother one last time. But when she vanishes, it’s up to her younger sister, Amy, to track her down—and uncover the haunting secrets that reveal as much about their family as Sylvie herself.
Gina Frangello had a suspicion there was a hunger to talk about women who break the rules. In advance of the release of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism and Treason, she admits after some prodding, “I got more letters from women before this book came out than I ever received for all of my four other books cumulatively.”
In Blow Your House Down, Frangello tells the story of falling in love with a man who wasn’t her husband. Of becoming herself, finally, in mid-life, while caring for her children and aging parents, divorcing, and getting breast cancer. Of the day her best friend died, after which, “I never once felt even mildly tempted to pretend I was anyone else again,” she writes.
Indeed, before I could get my hands on it, her book was appearing on most-anticipated lists and had racked up three-star reviews from Publishers Weekly, BookPage, and Library Journal. What was this blasphemy? This untold tale, this pent-up story that legions of women needed to talk about?
Her “treason” was daring to question the ways women are boxed in by the American institutions of marriage, motherhood and the medical industrial complex. The book simply throbs: with the quenching of new desires, with beloved bodies living and dying, with promises to children being stitched carefully back together. It pushes the boundaries of form, experiments with point of view, negotiates our social imperatives.
If her story is connecting with so many women, Frangello muses:
“That only reinforces how silenced women have been. Because my story is not that radical. I am a heterosexual-ish white woman who lives in a nice house. I didn’t leave my children and take up van life or even have an affair with another woman. If this is as far as the publishing industry has allowed women to go, just wow, are we failing to give a wide array of women voices to speak about their truth.”
I first met Frangello when she was faculty advisor to a literary magazine I wrote for in graduate school, and I couldn’t wait to speak to her about the book. Because as the buzz for Blow Your House Down was building, I was beginning to hear from long-time girlfriends after a year in quarantine, and at least half of them were saying the same thing: my life is no longer working.
I spoke with Frangello via Zoom from Chicago, where she lives with her family, teaches, and writes.
Amy Reardon:It seems like every other friend I talk to is on the verge of blowing up her life. And by life, I mean, specifically heteronormative couples with children. Are you hearing the same thing?
Gina Frangello: Yes.
AR: Why do you think?
GF: I think for a lot of people, their heteronormative marriages are much more traditional than they may appear at first glance. I think a lot of heterosexual married couples do not actually spend that much time together and are not each other’s primary confidant. And when suddenly you are in a situation where you never leave the house, the cracks show. One of the ways that people avoid seeing the cracks is by dancing as fast as we can in our American lifestyle.
AR: Your book is about a woman who has made herself sick trying to live up to the expectations of women in our culture, and once she lets her real self out of the box, there’s no going back. Can you talk about that?
GF: It’s complicated, right? Because some of the things that you’re saying are kind of also true of men. While my book has an angle toward women and is strongly feminist, and I am fairly obsessed with feminism, I do think that the life of the average middle-aged man is just as constricted.
I think a lot of middle-aged men don’t have a whole lot of friends. Work is their life, and the amount of time they spend with their families is really limited. But women can’t get away with that. We have careers, we have elderly parents we’re taking care of, we’re often also the primary liaison with our husbands’ families. We’re buying the holiday presents, we’re arranging the birthday parties, we’re taking the children to the medical appointments, we’re liaising with whoever is providing childcare while we’re working. Then we’re expected to be fully present for our kids in a way that I don’t think anyone really expects of fathers.
We see a father at the park, and it’s like, “Oh, he’s a great dad.” Any effort is rewarded. Whereas for women, often no effort is sufficient. And amidst that, where is the space for a woman’s personal inner life—much less desire, feeling fully alive, feeling electric, feeling intoxicated with life? So you burn out, and you get to a point where, as many women I know say things like, “I wouldn’t even have the emotional energy to have an affair. All I want to do is lie in front of The Daily Show with a glass of wine and totally numb out because I’m exhausted all the time.”
Sadly, for both men and women, in order to feel a connection to who we are and to what it feels like to experience life fully—rather than through the prism of someone else’s needs—sometimes the only place that’s possible is away from the nuclear family unit.
AR: Why do you think it is so terrifying to be called a bad mom?
In our culture, ‘she’s a bad mother’ is one of the worst things they can say about you.
GF: It’s the ultimate slur for a woman. I think this is why we see so much more freedom in the memoirs about women’s youth than we do in the memoirs about women’s middle age. We’ve gotten to a point, culturally, where we can write books about our misadventures in youth, whatever they were. If we were a drug addict, if we were promiscuous, if we were a sex worker, or a terrible daughter. Whatever we did, if we write about it from a time before we were married and had children, that will more likely be devoured, sometimes fetishized, because our culture loves to gawk at the pain of hot, young women. But we don’t tend to demonize the woman for having done those things when she was younger.
AR: Then we’re supposed to grow up and be responsible?
GF: Yes, it’s utterly different if you write about these things once you’re a mother because in our culture, “she’s a bad mother” is one of the worst things they can say about you. It’s in fact one of the ways women of color are demonized. They have their children taken away from them for smaller infractions than white women do. They’re demonized for having children at all if they don’t have tons of money, accused of wanting the government to take care of them. If you look at the way motherhood is coded between middle-class white women versus women of color or working-class and poor women, you see a massive cultural difference. A whole group of mothers are being branded bad mothers from the get-go and therefore dismissed.
AR: Whereas for upper-middle-class motherhood?
GF: We worship at the altar of the fantasy of the holy, all-giving, altruistic, white, well-off mother. As though this is a saintly thing to have done, to have children. But oh, those other women over there are not saintly, they made a bad decision for having children.
We worship at the altar of the fantasy of the holy, all-giving, altruistic, white, well-off mother. As though this is a saintly thing to have done, to have children.
So either way, you are supposed to be defined by becoming a mother, and if you fall into the group of women who are coded as saintly and virtuous by virtue of reproduction, but then you fail to revere your cultural coding by doing what is expected of you, well, how dare you? Because you’re questioning this whole altar we’ve built to worship Motherhood—capital M—that reinforces racism, classism, and gives middle-class, upper-middle-class white women a little star that is actually a way of manipulating white women into upholding patriarchal and racist systems. It’s like, “Here, ladies: see? We do value you. What would we do without mothers who keep the hearth?” And we’re supposed to be happy with this token and think now we’re appreciated and that this is a form of equality with men. We’re supposed to think: Oh those poor women over there, they’re not equal, they’re the ones we have to worry about. But we’re not helping the women who are being othered and demonized, we’re swallowing a line of patriarchal bullshit and then becoming complicit in it.
AR: Do you think interrogating the dark corners of a woman’s desire is scary for some readers and critics?
GF: It’s really liberating to some and it’s scary to some. I’m trying to excavate the ways women have been treated systemically throughout history. So there are indictments in the book, but I’m not indicting anybody who chooses to stay in a safe practical marriage. I’m not saying everyone needs to throw caution to the wind and let desire and great passion be their true North. I made clear in the book, for example, that I wouldn’t have had any judgment of myself as a character if what I had ended up doing was staying with my former husband, because I think there are many different paths that people can take to wholeness.
Some people—women, critics—read a book like this and recognize their own kind of safe, practical, but not very happy marriage. Or perhaps they are dealing with a certain amount of anxiety and fear around constricting roles, like watching what they say with their male partner, and they may feel like this book is telling them they’re weak, they should be doing something else, or their life isn’t fulfilling.
I am just pointing out how many of us are living in those realities. How often being in a long-term heterosexual marriage has to do with a woman learning what she can and cannot say, how she can and cannot act, to keep peace. Not only between her and her husband, but between all of the members of the family, where she is the conduit who is always running around trying to smooth things out between everybody else. What that basically means is she’s working off a frantic script in her head of how to make everyone not explode at each other and her, and there’s not a lot of space in that script for how she may really feel. So I think a lot of women recognize their own reality in that, and then there are interpretations of how they feel about recognizing their own reality. It may be euphoric, or it may be hostile.
AR: It seems like everyone wants to talk about the infidelity, but you also write about the larger social issues that led to it?
Look how we’ve glamorized and gawked at self-destruction in women in film and literature: presenting self-annihilation as the only sane response to this woman-hating world.
GF: Yes, that’s the hot-button topic in this book, but to me, it wasn’t the only one. It’s only one avenue for exploring the lack of options that art, psychiatry, medicine have posited for women who step out of the box, particularly after a certain age. Look how we’ve glamorized and fetishized and gawked at self-destruction in women in film and literature. I fell into that pattern myself in some of my fiction—of presenting self-annihilation as maybe even the only sane response to this woman-hating world. It’s like if you see what’s going on, that’s the only option for you. I’ve loved so many books that seem to frame it that way: Lithium for Medea, the mythology around Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, the French films of the 1990s. Then I began to question why somehow, we always end up with a body count of women.
AR:This year’s film Promising Young Woman?
GF: Yes, right. I loved that. But for God’s sake, do any women who step out of the box get to go on?
AR: Like if you are a woman and you reject the status quo, your only option is death?
GF: It’s true in far too many women’s lives. Until fairly recently, if you did something like I did, you would lose your children. You would be excommunicated from society. There are still laws against infidelity in the United States, in a number of states. Now, are they practiced? Not often, of course, but it’s only been in recent history that a woman can dare to step out of the box, which men have always been permitted to do and remain members of society with rights. Once a woman gets in the box, it has seemed that the only way out for most of human history is to lose everything. So as a person who had managed it—I lost things, but I didn’t lose everything—I felt like I needed to share that story. There is life after having done things you’re not allowed to do, and even after things you regret.
AR: In the book, your best friend Kathy dies. Do you think in some ways that set off the chain of events?
GF: Oh absolutely. Prior to Kathy’s death, I knew I was significantly less happy in my marriage than I had once been, but I also felt that this was just life. Kathy’s death revealed holes in my life, revealed loneliness, revealed things I was not getting in my marital relationship.
When your closest comrade, the person that you spend the most time with outside of your children, gets a diagnosis out of nowhere, you definitely question, “How am I living? Am I living the way I would be living if I had four months to live? Am I living the way I would be living if I had four years to live?” And for me, the answer was no. It hadn’t always been no, and I think that’s really important to stress because I think memoirs about divorce can be very reductive, as in she left the man who made her unhappy and then found someone who made her happy. It’s not that simple. People change, and marriages change. Something can have been genuinely good for us at one time and that, sadly, doesn’t mean it always will be.
AR:One of the things I loved about the book was its ambivalence, like the third time you went back to your ex to patch things up. Or this moment, with your new partner:
“Somehow my lover and I have fast-forwarded through two decades of coupledom and here we are, just where we both left off: a woman crying in another room and a stone-silent man pretending not to hear her.”
Can you talk about why it was important to track that ambivalence?
I wasn’t trying to write a swaggering book that suggests if you’re in a traditional or oppressive marriage, you stick it to the patriarchy by having an affair.
GF: Oh God, yes. I mean, I was careful to track those so carefully because I had absolutely zero interest in writing a book where the message was, “Unhappy in your marriage? Have a passionate affair and it will solve all of your problems.” There have been some books like that, and many others where the woman ends up off the cliff or in the Thames with rocks in her pockets. But I wasn’t trying to write a swaggering book that suggests if you’re in a traditional or oppressive marriage, you stick it to the patriarchy by having an affair. Relationships are complicated, and when both people in an extramarital relationship have been in marriages that have lasted two decades or more, and one of the parties has three children, things are going to burn to the ground. And I don’t just mean with regards to the fall-out of divorce. Very quickly I realized there were no guarantees in my relationship with my lover either. I didn’t know if that was going to translate to a future. I had to ultimately realize that I was leaving for myself, not for someone else. I didn’t want to go backwards, whether I stayed with my lover or went on alone.
AR: Do you think women have to blow their houses down to find the wholeness and depth that you’re talking about? And do you have any advice to those women writing you letters?
GF: I don’t think that it’s always necessary, not at all. At the end of the book, I talk about the many-worlds theory, in which, reductively put, all possible outcomes are physically realized in some parallel world, and I offer an alternate ending.
E. L. Doctorow does this in Book of Daniel. I directly ripped off the idea, where the fictional character Daniel presents three different endings of what could have been real. I ask could a person who’s been unhappy in their marriage, who’s had an affair, end up using that epiphany as a way to heal her marriage and to find more freedom and more self-expression within the marriage? That’s fully dependent on the people involved. Unfortunately, a very frequent result when a woman or a man has committed infidelity and then wants to save the marriage, is that they are expected to go back to being who they used to be. I think that that is probably not the way to go, because if things had been on the right path for both partners, the affair would not have happened. So, you have to be two people who are willing to throw a stick of dynamite and blow a whole new path for yourselves as a married couple. Some couples can do that. Others cannot.
I was watching an episode of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, when I looked at my husband, Dan, and said: “Do I really behave like that? Is that how I come across?”
He nodded.
I was talking about Alina Starkov, the protagonist in Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series, an orphan soldier who is reluctant to believe that she’s a Sun Summoner. In the scene, a visibly shaken Alina is questioned by Bhagra, a teacher who is meant to train her to use her powers. “Do you think you belong here?” asks Bhagra, to which she replies hesitantly, “I’m told I do.” Bhagra then asks her a more pointed question: “So you have to be told a thing to believe it?”
“Not always,” Starkov says.
I cringed. My 17-year-old self would have sounded just like her. But this time, watching a young adult heroine who wasn’t strong and had no self-esteem, was an excruciating masterclass in what self-doubt actually looks like in women. Alina was no Hermione Granger or Nancy Drew or Georgina Kirrin or Katniss Everdeen. In fact, Bardugo’s heroine was the opposite: she was a young woman who struggled with confidence, anxiety and nursed so much pain that it felt impossible, even as a reader, to believe she was the chosen one. In every line Alina uttered throughout the series to put herself down, I was reminded of my own childhood, an adolescence that I didn’t want to look back on, where my entire identity was rooted in some sense of shame and insignificance.
In Alina Starkov, Bardugo had stripped off the façade of strength so often forced onto young female protagonists, and instead molded an anti-heroine whose trauma doesn’t make her tough or domineering, but rather reduces her to a vulnerable and scared person who doesn’t trust anyone. Then Bardugo pushes the reader to wonder: can such a woman save a war-torn country?
The idea of emotional strength in literature has always fascinated me. I grew up in India in the late 80s and 90s, when most young adult fiction that was available was typically British or American. Not surprisingly, the female characters that heavily influenced me were white, headstrong, and popular among their peers.My early heroes were the Wakefield Twins from Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew, Darrell Rivers from Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, and the girls from TheBaby-Sitters Club. I wanted to be like them: they had liberal parents, never worried about money, and even had boyfriends. None of these aspirations added up, of course, because my own life was nothing like theirs.
Not surprisingly, the female characters that heavily influenced me were white, headstrong, and popular among their peers.
I attended an Anglican-protestant boarding school until I was seventeen. The school was ten hours away from our hometown in Southern India because towns like mine didn’t have good schools. My parents were also middle-class Hindus—but like most parents, believed that sending me away to a boarding school (which were relics of British colonization in India) would give me access to an English education, discipline and a sense of self-reliance. This meant that unlike the Wakefield twins or Nancy Drew, who came from stable, upper-middle class families, my teen years involved daily prayers, respect for rank, ritual, and having to write letters home if I needed the basics. Pocket money, snacks, and the odd movie CD to watch in school. Without any real emotional support though, all the English values and customs that should have helped me navigate post-colonial Indian society as a lady only left me terribly confused about who I was meant to be. All I learned was that to be a strong woman, I had to put up with hardship with no complaints, like so many of the female characters in classic British novels.
But that wasn’t all.
In an environment of such rigid discipline there was never any room to recognize or heal from trauma. A regular day in high school for me meant sitting through classes where girls were reprimanded for everything from short uniforms to being ‘noisy’, picking constant fights with my mother (through letters) to be able to make my own choices, or spending days at a stretch kneeling in the hallway as punishment for talking back to a teacher. So, again, unlike my girl heroes, who were capable of speaking up and questioning, I sought strength in skillfully avoiding emotion. There was a certain freedom in allowing myself to believe that I didn’t deserve happiness and success because I didn’t ever have to face the fear of failure. In my mind, if I’d already failed, I’d already won. So, no amount of bullying, harassment or humiliation could evoke a response from me.
Unlike my girl heroes, who were capable of speaking up and questioning, I sought strength in skillfully avoiding emotion.
This is why Bardugo’s Alina Starkov is such a rare hero for me. Alina is a 17-year old orphan, who was raised in an orphanage in Keramzin, and she has little or no aspiration to dream above her station. Her best friend (and romantic interest), Malyen Oretsev, is also an orphan and the only person she trusts. The experience of growing up without emotional support defines Alina’s character from the very beginning. She has the tendency to hide away in the face of power and joins the Ravkan First Army as an assistant cartographer. She doesn’t trust people. Even when she discovers that she has magical powers— the ability to summon light, which makes her a powerful Grisha—she insists that it was a mistake. All throughout Shadow and Bone, Alina laments that it is absurd that anyone would view her as a savior.
“He believed I was the Sun Summoner. He believed I could help him destroy the Fold. And if I could, no soldier, no merchant, no tracker would ever have to cross the Unsea again. But as the days dragged on, the idea began to seem more and more absurd.”
But Bardugo skillfully deploys Alina Starkov’s tendency toward self-deprecation to reveal the inner workings of a young woman’s mind. She stresses on the kind of emotional paralysis that Alina faces because she is unable to let go of what she’s been taught to think of herself as a child. By the time it sinks in that nearly all of war-torn Ravka—including the villainous Darkling—sees her gift to summon light as a sign of hope, she decides to do something to prove her worth, even if it means failing publicly, and she does so only because she’s got nowhere to run.
“I didn’t belong in this beautiful world, and if I didn’t find a way to use my power, I never would.”
In every chapter, Bardugo takes on the complexity of what doubt and failure feel like for Alina, and gives the reader remarkable insight into the role confidence plays shaping the characters of strong young women. This is refreshing because female individuality in fiction is so often tied to the idea of moving on from trauma and pursuing the strength one derives from hardship, instead of being weighed down by it. Nancy Drew doesn’t dwell on the death of her biological mother. Darryl Rivers wastes no time getting homesick in Mallory Towers. Georgina Kirrin doesn’t care that getaways to her family’s private island when she is lonely are a uniquely upper-class privilege. The tendency of writers to focus on the future of their characters without examining their present is a missed opportunity; because it is well-documented that children do not merely outgrow their trauma. Their personalities are shaped by it, and usually, their futures are ruined by the effect it has on their minds.
In 2014, BBC World News America’s Washington Correspondent, Katty Kay, and ABC News’ Claire Shipman, wrote in the Atlantic about the confidence gap among women. In researching their book Womenomics, they found that even high-achieving women who had great careers had the tendency to see themselves as less competent and less suited for leadership roles than their male colleagues. This confidence gap begins in girlhood, they found, because girls often see their failures as an extension of themselves.
Female individuality in fiction is so often tied to the idea of moving on from trauma and pursuing the strength one derives from hardship.
It’s no surprise that even in Siege and Storm, the second book of the Grishaverse, when Alina rises in the ranks to lead a group of Grisha dissenters, she becomes terribly insecure and begins to crave revenge. She wields her power as a distraction and wants to use it to be done with it all. She is also hypervigilant and anxious about the attention she receives, constantly overcome by the feeling that she is out of place in the Little Palace because she doesn’t believe an orphan like her is deserving of wealth and prosperity and good fortune. It is hard to like her in these moments, but the idea that someone can be affected by economic trauma is astonishingly relevant. I grew up in a home where money was always an issue and it affects all my decision making even today, in my 30s. The guilt of eating expensive meals or buying more clothes than I need or treating myself to new technology when my old phones are still working is real. My mother’s words never leave me: There isn’t any money. That costs money. We can’t afford it. So Bardugo makes no attempt to push her heroine towards accepting power and fame easily and by doing this, lets the reader know that socio-economic trauma is often deep-rooted and complex, and that the only way to overcome it is to confront it.
Confrontation with this sense of self-doubt and trauma permeates the Grishaverse novels; there is no one way Alina overcomes it. Instead, Bardugo throws Starkov into situations that force her to make decisions—whether good or bad—and to later have to reflect on her actions. We are introduced to a process of unpacking and dealing with hurt, rather than a singular event of this. In the first book, Alina trains with a Shu mercenary, Botkin Yul-Erdene, a man who is clearly cut for war, and a powerful Squaller, Zoya. Zoya tells Alina: “you stink of Keramzin,” words that Alina does not forget throughout the series. Botkin complains that she is “too slow, too weak, too skinny.” Bardugo touches upon how these insults deepen Alina’s sense of doubt and belonging, and how she begins to distance herself from all her fellow Grisha summoners.
“The more time I spent with the Summoners, the greater that chance that I would be found out.”
Found out. This is self-doubt at its worst, a classic case of imposter syndrome.
But Bardugo’s storytelling pushes the reader to stay, to be patient. And as Alina begins to fight back, slowly and painstakingly, taking on one personal challenge at a time, the reader too begins to understand the importance of small wins when it comes to conquering self-doubt and trauma. And these small wins are big for young women. For instance, when the sessions with Bhagra begin to sour, Alina decides to try letting go of her grief for a moment, and then is suddenly struck by how freeing and powerful it feels. When she realizes that the Darkling might kill Mal, she pulls herself together to summon her power and save him. Time and time again, throughout the Grishaverse trilogy, Alina peels away her trauma layer by layer, until all that’s left is the person she was truly meant to be.
As Alina begins to fight back, slowly and painstakingly, the reader too begins to understand the importance of small wins when it comes to conquering self-doubt and trauma.
The thing is, anti-heroines are a tricky creation.
I recently went through the archives of JSTOR’s “Talking about Books” column, in which brought together teachers and educators to discuss classroom and reading practices. In 1999, a group of teachers came together to discussed strong female characters in English Literature for an issue of Language Arts, and to determine how to lift up under-represented voices in children’s literature. The focus leaned heavily on creating positive female role models. They examined Karen Cushman’s The Ballad of Lucy Whipple to highlight the importance of creating female characters that are confident, secure, and self-reliant in their ability to solve problems.
If I’d read Whipple back then, in 1999, the year I turned 13, I’d perhaps have agreed. Whipple was exactly the kind of character that I would have thought was strong. The motto of my high school was “self-reliance,” and students, especially girls, even as young as eight, learned to write checks to withdraw money from their school bank accounts, wash and dry their own clothes, wax and shine wooden floors, and even work a boiler to heat water. Whipple was not a big departure from the traditional female characters in books that were popular in children’s classics than in that she was clearly poor, frightened, and never “coddled” by her parents. Take Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl or Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables or Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and you’ll quickly see what I mean.
Coddling women = bad.
This was how female strength was seen. It was also pretty much the motto that shaped my childhood and left me unclear about how to deal with the darker forces of my emotional self: doubt, despair, fear, depression, shame. Those are things to be hidden.
But perhaps, no more. I’m hopeful that Bardugo’s audacity to redefine feminine strength will shape young adult fiction. In refusing to write around trauma, instead writing directly through it, she allows Alina Starkov to become consumed and haunted by it and eventually, develop the strength to fight back and overcome it. It is healing through confrontation. It is a different kind of pain, and a necessary one that we need more of our literary heroines to go through.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
