“Are you teaching me how to live without you?” Jeannie Vanasco asks in A Silent Treatment, her new book about the silences her mother imposed when they shared a house together. On certain days, only their smoke detectors were on speaking terms. Some silences went on for a few hours, while others stretched for months at a time, adding up to a year and a half across a five-year period. The cause for the abrupt distancing usually appeared inexplicable or mundane, such as being left out of a household errand or chore, and often were only broken by a medical issue, such as her mother fearing she was having a heart attack before realizing it was actually a panic attack.
In her third memoir, which began as an essay published in The New York Times, Vanasco tenderly, searchingly captures the intimate, often fraught connection with her mother—and implicitly invites the reader to do the same with their own loved ones. Vanasco nods to various research that has been done about silence and power in relationships, including a psychological study that indicates 75% of Americans have received the silent treatment. She tenderly crafts a portrait of her mother, who was born into the Silent Generation during the McCarthy era, the daughter of an especially cruel and physically abusive woman. Vanasco’s mother, who wants everything for her daughter that she couldn’t have for herself, and who wanted most of all to be a mother, is an eager subject. She is perhaps as anxious as her daughter to understand why she does what she does. “She expects me to interpret,” writes Vanasco. “And I interpret. Every day.”
Often reflective, sometimes poetic, the work echoes so much of the pacing we all do in our own heads when it comes to aging parents. A Silent Treatment reads as a plea to be heard—and a vow to listen with generosity.
Jeannie and I spoke over Zoom about female rage, how silence can be both powerful and punishing, and how hard she worked to get Nicolas Cage into the book.
Annie Liontas: Is silence annihilating?
Jeannie Vanasco: So many of us say we want silence. Some people pay a lot of money for it. Silent retreats, quiet neighborhoods, special lounges in airports. It can be a luxury. But it can also be upsetting. There’s that anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. It’s supposed to be the quietest place on earth—so quiet people can hear themselves blink. They freak out. They don’t know how to orient themselves. When I first read about it, I thought, Well, that’s a nice metaphor for my mom’s silent treatment. Her silences were so disorienting I’d often get dizzy listing all the reasons she might be mad. So when silence is a punishment, and it’s from someone you love, and you don’t know why they’re doing it, “annihilating” is a good description. Because you reach a point—I did anyway—where you ruminate about all the ways you’ve failed that person. And the longer the silence lasts, the more ways you can imagine. I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.
AL: You write, “Artists tend to put their fingers in the wounds, in the silences, and in the wounds in the silences.” How do you understand loneliness and silence, and even suffering in isolation, after writing this book for you and your mother?
I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.
JV: My mom isolated herself when she already felt lonely, and at first it seemed so counterproductive. She was hurt that I wasn’t spending more time with her, yet she was choosing not to spend time with me. But when you feel profound loneliness, self-isolation can make sense. You’re showing your pain. You don’t have to deal with words. If finding the right words were easy, I would have met my book’s original deadline. And I sure wouldn’t have obsessed over whether a comma belonged between “wounds” and “in.” But that’s what I often do when I’m stuck with writing: prioritize punctuation instead of confronting the subject matter.
An inability to confront, though, makes for good narrative conflict. It’s often a character’s tragic flaw. If they would just do or say this one thing, the story would end. Had my mom and I confronted the situation sooner, the book would be very different. For the record, my lack of confrontation had nothing to do with preserving a narrative arc. (laughs) I told myself I was giving her space. Really, I was afraid. Her loneliness and suffering were hard to acknowledge, for both of us. And the longer the silence went on, the more I tried to avoid her.
AL: Your mother goes quiet, even cold, when she is upset. When I’m upset, because I’m a hot-blooded Greek, I sometimes get too loud. What does it look like for you?
JV: I used to say, “I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.” Or, “I’m not angry. I’m just sad.” I want to talk through things. But if somebody is being unreasonable and won’t listen, I just apologize. Usually, I apologize. I’m probably afraid to confront the fact that I’m angry, or confront that somebody else is angry, because I want to make people happy.
AL: In your experience or research, does it seem like the silent treatment is often employed by women working in a patriarchal framework that alienates them from their own expression of anger, disappointment, rage? Is there power in silence for someone like your mother?
JV: Silence can be a really effective tool when people won’t listen to you. Psychologists say that women and men use the silent treatment equally, but I wonder if that percentage was different in, say, the 1940s, when my mom was born. Women of her generation—the Silent Generation, appropriately enough—had way fewer rights. So maybe they inflicted silence more, I don’t know. Research into social ostracism, as a formalized area of study, only started in the 1990s.
Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is.
I do think silence was my mom’s way to gain power and independence. She used it on my dad—more than I realized at the time. And after she moved in with me, she used it fairly regularly. She depended on me for a lot, and I know that bothered her. Later, she told me, “You know, I think I was on a power trip.” So there’s one reason of many. I know she had a hard time communicating her anger and sadness. I’m not saying her silent treatment was okay behavior, but context is important. She was in a really difficult situation. She’d retired, sold her house in Ohio, moved in with me—it was a lot at once. On a certain level, I admired how long she could go. She used the silent treatment for six months during the pandemic. This was pre-vaccines. I remember thinking, If anybody makes it out of this alive, it’s my mom. She is a pro at social distancing.
But while silence can be a powerful tool, if you’re repeatedly using it to punish a loved one, you’re alienating them when you actually want a closer relationship.
AL: You talk explicitly about your mother’s agreement—even enthusiasm—about this book, yet you also grapple with the responsibility of exposing her, not wanting to hurt her. I’m struck by how thoughtful and reflective you are in these conversations, and I’m wondering how this project feels genuinely collaborative for you both. Can you take us to those early conversations with her when you suggested the project?
JV: My mom should be the patron saint of memoirists. From the very start, she said, “Write what you need to write. You don’t need my permission. If I were to tell you what to put in or to take out, then it wouldn’t be yours anymore.” When I told her that the silent treatment would be the narrative frame, she responded that [it] was a great idea. She said, “A book needs conflict.” I don’t think many parents would necessarily be that understanding. Still, I worried about her response to being written about. So I used my New York Times essay, which addressed her silent treatment, as a test, and I guess I passed. Her response was, “Seeing it in print, I realize it was kind of stupid what I did.” But then she did it again. (laughs)
A lot of our collaborating has to do with her permissiveness and her openness to answering difficult questions, like, Why are you doing this to me? She said she didn’t know. I think we’re both a bit wary of clear answers, of any story that shows an easy cause and effect. She did write her story out—her life story—for me. And for a while I thought maybe I was going to reconstruct some of that. But then I risked implying: okay, she’s doing this because her mother abused her, or she’s doing this because…And I wanted to avoid reductive logic. Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is. Conventional wisdom is, Wait to write about something until you’ve got enough distance. But I doubt we ever have perspective on our feelings, which is why I prefer to write from within an experience. My experience with my mom’s silent treatment is kind of like my experience with memoir writing. When it’s happening, I’m often miserable. When it’s over, I’ve forgotten how bad it felt. I’m just happy it’s done.
AL: Have you heard from other mothers and daughters after they read your essay in The New York Times?
JV: I have, and that’s been wonderful. Readers have said it helped them feel less alone. But with the essay, I had maybe nine hundred words. With the book, I could address more of the nuances. Just the other day, a librarian emailed. She read an advance copy of A Silent Treatment and said she felt like she could give my book to her mom and it wouldn’t feel aggressive. She thought it came from a place of love.
AL: In addition to traditional methods, you often employ parentheticals to introduce your mother’s voice into the narrative, such as (Mom: you are such a disappointment.) How did you arrive at this structure and how does it function to create not only a longitude of your relationship with your mother, but also allow her voice to interject on the page when she has gone silent in real life?
JV: I remember being really bored by the manuscript. It read as this happened then this happened then this happened. And I had too much exposition. I forget when the parentheticals became a solution, but I remember feeling suddenly excited. Because they offered narrative momentum, texture, a means of transition. Whenever I needed to pivot or make a leap, I could interrupt a scene with something she said and see where it took me. And that was true to my experience. I’d remember her words at unexpected moments. They became intrusive thoughts. And because she wasn’t actually talking to me, parentheticals seemed like the right formal trick to bring in her voice. They could show how she was simultaneously absent and present in my life.
AL: You reference films and television and films, such as The Old Dark House and The Conjuring. How do such texts help you understand or frame your own relationship to your mother, and perhaps other mother-daughter relationships?
I love the challenge of writing out of love.
JV: Watching possessed mothers felt cathartic. In The Conjuring, the mother gets possessed in the basement—my mom was living in the basement—and she becomes horrible to her children. You can’t really blame her. It’s the demon. So, from a child’s perspective, the possession allows for emotional distance. The mother isn’t herself anymore. And as soon as the possession is over, she’s hugging her kids, and they’re okay with it. Everybody’s acting like nothing happened. I was like, Yeah, that’s kind of how my mom wants to act when the silent treatment’s over. Like nothing has happened. Like we didn’t just live out this painful experience. Weirdly, Nicolas Cage helped me frame my mother-daughter relationship. I think he’s a brilliant actor. My mom disagrees. What do I care? We even got into a dumb argument about whether he was handsome. Including it offered some levity. And I think other daughters can connect with that—that urge to argue with your mother just because.
AL: Seeing your mother as you do—in all her complexity, with all she’s lived through—seems like a great gift. Are memoirs, perhaps at their highest existence, both for and about the people we love?
JV: They can be. I love the challenge of writing out of love. It’s hard to do and make interesting. I also think it’s impossible to portray anybody accurately. My mom in the book is like my mom. It’s her and it’s not her. I selected the details. But I tried to write as honestly and lovingly as possible. I hope she sees the love. She hasn’t read it. She’s waiting until after it’s published. She’s the reader I most care about.
Sitting in the sky-blue Chevy Bel Air, he behind the wheel with both his hands on it, a man who took driving seriously, who understood that the weight and speed and thrust of a car are as full of latent danger as a bullet nestled in the chamber of a gun, and she his trusting passenger, not only willing but also eager to shed responsibility in favor of frivolity, which in this moment meant keeping the little dog, Dee, curled on her lap while her eyes freely roamed the landscapes flying by, endless woven tapestries hanging on either side of the black asphalt corridor. It was a cold autumn night in 1961.
They knew how to be quiet together, these two.
But not always, nor even frequently, for each was brimful with thoughts and opinions, and it was in their particular natures to take pleasure in vocalizing these. Both, moreover, had learned long ago when and where to stay silent in order to preserve their own sense of dignity, not to mention their physical safety, and had spent quite enough time keeping their mouths shut and faces impassive even as they yearned to contradict, correct, or at the very least challenge the record in rooms full of white men. Together, then, there was no need for self-imposed muzzles.
Among their earliest joys, these mutual funnels of sometimes suppressed speech, tornadoes of words twining round one another as they sat up late at night in those early days, when he was still married to his first wife and she was trying very hard not to appear to wish it were otherwise. In those white wicker chairs on the porch of the boarding house where they first encountered one another, his family slumbering, they talked about everything under the moon, he offering her cigarettes first, until his case ran out and she told him to hang on a minute and dashed to her room, all five feet of her, elevated another one and a half inches by her sensible, black, thick-heeled shoes. He knew he desired her when she returned unshod, a half-full pack of smokes in her small hand for them to share, but this was nothing new nor particularly alarming, only a measure that he was as much a man then as he had been at thirty and twenty-five and eighteen and sixteen. Desire, anyhow, did not always lead to divorce, so he lit her cigarette that first night and lit one himself and they continued discussing the state of the world and the wrongs they saw in it, and if sometimes she said the kinds of things that he heard in rooms full of white men, well, they were alone on a porch together. Later, after he had divorced his first wife, they were alone in motels together, until, eventually, they were alone under her own roof as often as he could get a weekend off work and then, finally, once they had married and he got the transfer to Boston and moved in with her, they were alone together in the home that was now theirs, shared, and when it was just the two of them, he felt fully within his rights to contradict, correct, and at the very least challenge her ideas. He noted that first night that she did not flinch like other small white women might when he did this, but rather leaned forward as if to shorten the distance between her eardrums and his mouth, her eyes a little narrowed either with the effort of listening or from the smoke.
There was intimacy in this shared silence too, now, only months after he had moved in with her, his second wife, to whom he was, too, a second husband.
They had set out from the Canadian border some hours ago, and it was now after midnight. She wished this brief, belated honeymoon would not end, but there was a storm coming and they had not brought enough money with them for a third night at the motel. She hoped her husband did not blame himself for this. The weekend was his idea, a welcome and romantic surprise, sprung on her when he returned from work in the morning just four days before. Oh, she hoped he was not in a bad mood now. He got mad at himself sometimes, a quiet anger like parental disappointment, his expression similar to how she imagined he must look at his boys if they were up to something naughty or got a low grade at school. He held himself to such high standards, became annoyed when he had missed a turn on Route 3 an hour or two ago. They doubled back and stopped to ask for directions at a restaurant, had ended up eating there, too, and the moist slice of chocolate cake she had gotten sat in her stomach, its weight welcome, sweetness still lingering in her mouth. She shuffled nearer to him on the bench seat—Dee slunk off her lap to the floor in response—and leaned forward to kiss the fat knuckle of his thumb. He did not like taking his hands off the wheel except to shift, especially when it was as dark as all this, which she knew, and so she nuzzled her forehead against his shoulder, just once, quickly, and moved back. He smiled, eyes still on the road, and she knew he was all right.
He was indeed in good enough spirits, although distracted. He was tired, and the hamburger he had eaten hoping it would give him energy had instead made him lethargic, his eyes heavier now. He should have had a coffee, but his ulcer had only recently subsided and he was limiting himself to three cups a day, none later than 5 p.m. He tried to fix his mind on something. The radio was off. It had begun emitting too much static, that gray shuffling noise, in the twists and turns of the highway making its way through the White Mountains. He did not wish to engage in conversation with his wife; he was too tired to feel intelligent, and the road was dark, demanding his concentration. He knew he instinctively glanced at her when they talked in the car and the margins were narrow on this road. It was better not to risk it.
His mind turned over the events of the weekend, the good food and the music, the Negroes he had noticed in Montreal and how surprised he was, never having considered that men of his race might live in such a strange, somewhat exotic place, all that French. Silly, he realized now, driving, as of course Negroes lived all over the world. He had friends in the service who told him about Negro Frenchmen and even Germans, although they had had a bad time of it during the war. He thought again about a conversation that he occasionally found himself having with certain men over the years, a talk that always went the same way, about how they noticed themselves, sometimes, thinking about things as if they were white, with the same advantages handed to them and thus the same ease of bestowing judgment upon others. As if the way white folk talked and lived, their innocence or, more commonly, their willful ignorance or outright racism, had permeated something in them. He and his wife had recently attended a scientific lecture about the blood–brain barrier, a set of selective cells in the brain that form a semipermeable border that only some substances can penetrate. That was what it felt like: the prejudices he saw all around him doing just what they should not do, what he wished he could prevent them from doing, and jumping the blood–brain barrier.
Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge my choice of racial terminology, which in my era is outdated and offensive. But the couple did not live in my era, and this is their story, the couple’s. For their time, and specifically their generation and class, the use of the term Negro was widespread and politically correct. Younger people, students and activists mostly, were just beginning to reclaim the word Black, but this wouldn’t achieve widespread acceptance and popularity until the end of the decade. Not until the mid-2010s did it become consistently capitalized in written media. I’ve chosen to use the terms contemporary to the couple in order to avoid anachronisms.
Language changes. What is widespread or preferred or acceptable changes from one era to the next. The language I use in my asides—preferred and respectful in my era—may well read as old fashioned, rude, or downright bigoted by the time anyone reads this.
His musings were interrupted by his wife asking him to look outside, at the bright star near the moon. Was it moving? He glanced up, puzzled. It did seem as if a speck of light was slightly farther from the bright moon every time he took his eyes off the road. Surely there were no satellites orbiting above New Hampshire, but perhaps, he ventured, one had drifted off course.
She kept watching the speck grow brighter, wondering if it was a trick of their own progress that made it seem to move. The moon hung like a big, beautiful lamp that night, drowning out many of the stars nearest it. The sky looked for a moment like the pictures in a storybook she had read when she was a child, during the days when her mama had limited her to one a day because no one had time to go to the library as often as she wanted, and there certainly was no money for books, not even before the Depression. The book was loaned by a neighbor, children’s stories about the constellations. She remembered so few of them now, but she had for a while begged her mama to stay outside after dark on weekend nights with a small flashlight so she could look up at the stars and down at the book and try to find all the constellations she could in the sky above her. There had not been any moving stars then, never, except when one fell, lucky, and she would make a wish. But the roving light she saw now, one hand nervously fiddling with a blue earring, seemed to be going much too slow to be a good luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.
But the roving light she saw now seemed to be going much too slow to be a good luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.
At her feet, the dog was whining just a little bit. Dee was a good dog, well trained, did not make a fuss when she needed to go to the bathroom, and never went on the floor at home or in the car, but just asked quietly, like this, whether her needs could be attended to. So her owner asked her husband to stop the car, for the dog, but also so she could look at the light, and see if it really was moving.
He stood outside the car, smoking, while his wife walked the little dog down a stretch of highway. He kept looking back and forth up the road, worried that a trooper might come by or a policeman or just a driver out late and bored and looking for trouble.
She took the cigarette out of his hand and smoked it and called him a sleepyhead, for he had not noticed her coming right up to him with the dog, not until she touched him. He could be like that, lost in thought and space, and she thought him almost too handsome in this stoic state. She loved his smile too, of course, even if his teeth were fake. They fit well and looked very natural on him, so that most people did not know.
He stretched once more and put an arm around her shoulders, asked if the dog was all right now, and she said yes, so they climbed back into the car. She settled herself and Dee as he pulled back onto the road. The cold night air and the little walk had refreshed her, and she looked out the windows with renewed interest.
There it was, the same peculiar light movement, and she began to track it again, the comfortable joy of a moment previous turning liquid inside her, sharpening into nervous curiosity. She pointed and asked her husband to look again, and told him he was being ridiculous if he thought the growing light could possibly be a star or even a satellite, so much farther away would it have to be then.
He raised his eyes cautiously. No, she was right, it could not be a star, and he said so, told her that he had made a mistake, that it was simply an airplane on its way to Canada. Yes, he soothed himself as he kept driving, it was just something regular like that, no need to get excited. The turns were getting sharper, and he wanted to pay attention, for there were too many stories in the paper of cars crashing in these mountains, usually when a driver was drunk or fell asleep at the wheel. He did not want to become a story in the newspaper, and he did not want such a pleasant trip to be ruined by his inattention, by his wife’s fixation on this perfectly ordinary airplane.
Still, he wished they would see another car, anyone who they might be able to shine their high beams at to say hello to, maybe even stop for a moment to ask if they, too, were seeing the persistent moving brightness overhead. He knew better than to be spooked just because it was dark, but his wife’s nervousness was putting him on edge. She had her face right up to the window on her side, he noted, keeping watch, and just as he was about to say something coolly rational to her, to himself, he heard her gasp and instinctively his foot hit the brake pedal. When he looked out past his wife, he saw the Canada-bound light, bigger now, as if the plane’s altitude were dropping—which could not be, it had many miles to go before the next airport, why would it be descending already?—and he saw it shudder in stillness that seemed entirely unnatural and change course, no longer northbound, passing them, but reversing entirely from its former direction and heading south. Toward them. After them.
Unnerved, he pulled the car sharply into the next rest area he saw, a little clearing with picnic tables and some trees and what looked like an outhouse tucked sheepishly far back. He got out, and she followed.
She sensed he was rattled, her husband, and that he would not admit it. He had his superstitions, everybody did, whether they copped to it or not, but still, he was a man most often inclined to take the rational route through things. He believed, or tried to believe, that reason would prevail, that he could reason his way into people’s hearts, into legal justice, into equal protection under the law. He was a man who liked to learn, who fiercely sought out experts on matters he did not understand, whether in books or lectures or TV and radio broadcasts. She loved him for this, and for much else, but she also thought his cerebral bent could be rigid, limited, and in this moment knew she simply must shake him out of his stubbornness, for she was beginning to get really frightened now and told him that whatever he wished to call it, it was still there and it seemed now to be following them, and even worse, now that they had stopped, it seemed to be closing in on them.
He shook his head and lit a cigarette for her, handed it over, and lit another for himself. He insisted again that it was a commercial liner, nothing else, but she asked how that could be, since she had never heard of a passenger airplane with a destination reversing its course in the middle of its journey like that. Preposterous. She was right, he knew this, and was glad now that his boys had not come with them on this trip. When he was first imagining the vacation, on his long shift four nights before, he allowed himself an expanded fantasy, one where his former wife could be reached in time, where she would allow her sons to take a day or two off school and take this trip with them. The boys liked his new wife, perhaps because, while she was not as fine a cook as their mother, she did allow them dessert every night.
His boys would have become excited by this roving light. Or perhaps they would not, but only because they both would have been asleep in the backseat this late, after 11 p.m. already. His mind conjured the cozy image of the smaller one leaning his head on the chest or shoulder of the bigger, and another option, of them curled up, toe to toe, sharing the blanket that was always folded in the backseat, just in case the car ever broke down in the middle of the night or in winter and he had to wait until morning for someone to drive by and give him a hand or a ride to the nearest gas station to call for help.
Of course, this image of his sons was foolish; they were teenagers now, one still in high school, the other due to start college in the spring. Yet he always pictured them as younger than they were, missing the prepubescent boys who gave their affection freely, who had not felt the need to posture at manhood.
It was thinking of them, his sons, that brought another idea to mind, one that was so obvious that he almost laughed in relief as he exhaled.
They had visited him for two weeks over the summer—Philadelphia was nearly a six-hour drive away, a longer bus ride because of all the stops, and so their summers and Christmas were the only occasions he expected to be able to see them for an extended period, a reality that constricted his heart when he let himself dwell on it, as he sometimes did during the long nights at work, and which made him desperately unhappy in a way that caused him to nearly, if not quite, regret all his actions of the last few years—but when they had last visited, they did what they had sometimes done when they were younger: went plane-watching. In Philly, he had taken them to the road near the airport, and they would make a game of guessing where the planes were going and listing all the things they knew about the state or the country they were imagining as its destination. He taught them how to tell what designs on the tail belonged to which airline.
As he stamped his cigarette out, he told his wife it was a Piper Cub, surely, some hunters flying around in it who must have stayed out too late and gotten lost and now could not see very well in the dark and were trying to make contact with the nearest air traffic control. But she told him it was not hunting season, which was true, although they could be poachers, of course, and perhaps they were flying at night like this because their flight had never been approved in the first place. She also told him she could not hear any noise, and a Piper Cub would be making some, especially one flying lower, nearer. He suggested the wind might be carrying the sound away; his wife raised her brows at him. The night was still and windless.
She remembered the binoculars she had meant to get out of the car before and hurriedly retrieved them, handed them over to him. He put the strap over his neck; her mouth twitched. She had made fun of him just days earlier for doing the same thing at the Niagara Falls, which they had gone to see on their way to Montreal. He had said the binoculars were expensive. Such a careful man, she thought lovingly even as she teased him for his overabundance of caution, tickling him and making him drop them from his eyes over and over.
Now she watched his face as he looked up, his mouth widening as he squinted. Her heart was pounding, for she had a suspicion, but not one she was willing to voice quite yet, especially not as her husband, who had seemed so relieved only a moment ago, became increasingly agitated. He hated not knowing things, did not take well to the unexplainable. He would think her ridiculous for even considering it. Her sister had seen some years ago one of those unidentified flying objects people spoke about sometimes, more so back then than recently, she thought, and her sister had a good head on her shoulders, children, a husband, a nice home, and plenty to be taking care of without inventing silly stories. So, yes, she had believed her sister, what her sister had seen, while her rational husband clearly had not, although he claimed to be agnostic on the topic. She knew she should not bring this up now, not when he handed her the binoculars with a slightly shaking hand and lit another cigarette from the butt of the last one.
She brought the lens up to her eyes and was disoriented for a moment by the view of the stars, but then saw it—there!—flying in front of the moon. She could see its shape silhouetted at first, but she kept with it and soon saw some colored lights go on and off along the sides. It sped up and she lost it, then found it again and noticed it was slowing down as it passed in front of the moon again. Because she was prepared this time, she focused closer on it and could see its shape, longish and curved, with narrow bands of flashing lights, red and amber, green and blue. She asked her husband if he could see them too and he repeated that it must be an airplane, it had flashing lights on it like they did, and when she interrupted to ask where its tail was, where its wings were, he said it clearly was not a commercial airliner or a hunter’s private vehicle but rather a military plane of some kind.
She suddenly realized, as she handed the binoculars back to him, that their little dog was sitting at her feet and shivering as if cold or terribly afraid, much like when they arrived at the veterinarian’s office, the site of shots and other indignities. Taking pity on the sweet thing, she brought the dog back into the car, soothing and shushing while she waited for her husband, who was taking another look at the sky, cigarette hanging between his lips.
As he watched it, he wished again for some other nighttime driver to pull off the road, bear witness to this matter. He had read once about the phenomenon of folie à deux and was frightened to think that he and his wife might be going mad together. As he watched the plane—or whatever it was, for he had to admit that he had never seen any aerial vehicle change directions as fast as this one did, nor had he ever heard of any that could change altitude or speed as abruptly—he strained to hear something, anything, other than the soft rustle of leaves from the trees sheltering the picnic tables in the clearing nearby or the crickets singing in the grass. He had turned the car motor off, and although he could hear its mechanical clicking as it cooled, there was no whir from above, no slight buzzing, not even a hum. He had the distinct notion that the flying vehicle, which was moving back and forth still across the moon but seemed unwilling to go off in a direction that would take it away, away, away, was looking back at him.
Watching him?
Ridiculous.
No, he had to shake himself free from such nonsense. He got into the car and told his wife they really should hurry on so they could get home. At this rate, he grumbled, with all the stopping and starting, they would get no sleep at all. He repeated that the thing outside was likely a military plane, perhaps something they were not even supposed to see, and maybe that was why it was sticking close to them, to make sure that they would not tell anyone. His wife asked how anyone that far away could possibly know what they were going to do, and besides, they could pull off at the nearest gas station and make a phone call and whatever it was flying up there would not be able to stop them. He gripped the steering wheel tighter and suggested that perhaps they were playing games with them, then, some air force hotshots that got their rocks off by trying to frighten gullible women in the night. He knew at once that his voice was too loud, that he had given away his own fears, and regretted his lost temper. He hoped she took his anger as part of his usual ambivalence about the military, in which he had served, and which had torn his face open and killed too many of his brethren both here and abroad. He was a patriotic man, proud of his service, but he could not always put away his conscience, that voice that asked what good it was, fighting wars, especially wars that had nothing to do with them.
He had to admit that he had never seen any aerial vehicle change directions as fast as this one did, nor had he ever heard of any that could change altitude or speed as abruptly.
They drove, uneasy with one another in a way that felt new and vaguely itchy, as if their bodies were wrapped in sackcloth rather than their sensible garments of cotton and silk. He knew the car was going far too slowly for his stated impatience to get back to Portsmouth, but neither he nor she mentioned it. She kept her eyes fixed upward, through the windshield, occasionally leaning against the side window. Cannon Mountain was ahead, a looming shadow with a bright peak, the lights of the eatery and tramway terminus looking like a Christmas tree in a dark room, only the angel still switched on.
When the moving light disappeared behind the mountain’s silhouette, he pulled the car over again, breathing a little easier, waiting silently with his wife to see whether it would appear again. He hoped terribly that they would soon be laughing at this strange tension, attribute it, quite rightly he thought, to their tiredness and the long trip, their eagerness to be back home.
She clutched the edge of the seat as he started onto the road once again, her breaths a little shallow with anticipation. She had to admit that she was excited, even eager to experience something out of the ordinary. She desired this even after a trip that was as out of the ordinary for the two of them as it could be, for it was their belated honeymoon, and while neither of them was in their first blush of youth, nor was this her first marriage or his, it was still special to be alone with her beloved for days at a time without the imposition of work or friends or civic duty. She wished fervently that this could be enough; it was all she had ever really and truly wanted, to be desired by a faithful man and be his intellectual comrade and make a life together that was as unselfish as they could make it while also enjoying the fruits of their labor every once in a while, as when they had been sent that wonderful photograph of President Kennedy, signed by his own pen, thanking them by name for their work stumping for him in New Hampshire.
They breathed together, the dog panting a smile up at them, and he started to drive again. For a few quiet moments it seemed like whatever had been happening was now over.
But it wasn’t, of course. If it had been, I would likely have known nothing about them. The vast majority of us, after all, know little to nothing about the vast majority of us.
It was not over, he realized, a pulsing pain beginning to throb in his gut. The bright object came out from behind the mountain as they surpassed its breadth, and rather than returning to its earlier position directly above them, it remained to their right, dipping lower than ever so that it was obscured on and off by the trees.
They passed a small sign, illuminated by the high beams, that directed interested tourists to take a right for Flume Gorge. Flume. It sounded like a conflagration, a sudden and violent plume of fire, and he gripped the wheel harder. There were few lights on the narrow, curving highway. He slowed further, distracting himself with the sensible fear of a speedy driver coming round the bend without care and plowing into his wife’s pretty car. Fluming.
She watched for the bright object, a thrill trapped in her throat. She said nothing when they drove right past a motel, VACANCIES lit up in neon above a single yellow square. She imagined the night manager inside, feet on the desk, trying to stay awake with the paper or a small TV set. How glad the clerk would be to have the night’s boredom interrupted! But they did not have enough cash with them for a room, and besides, as frightened as she was, she wanted dearly to see what would happen next. Her whole body tingled with the fear, the adventure. She could not believe any real harm would come to them. Nothing so very bad had ever happened to her, even though many things had threatened to over the years. She had survived diphtheria, two bouts of pneumonia, a likely unnecessary appendix removal—the doctors were all so hot for appendix removals in the ’30s—and she believed in some quiet corner of herself that she was a little bit blessed, that God watched over her safety.
Around the next bend, the trees thinned out on the right, and when she looked through the binoculars again, she felt the early stirrings of what, much later, she would recognize as awe: the thing above was huge, round. She could clearly see now two rows of lit windows. Her heart raced. She told her husband he must stop and look, he must, and reached for his arm, tried to convey the urgency she felt, the need to share this moment. It was like nothing else he had ever seen, she told him.
They were in a stretch of emptiness just south of Indian Head, a kind of summer campground where two imitation wigwams sat empty in the middle of the clearing. He could picture his boys, when little, running in and out of the structures, could imagine them playing war games, holding sticks and yelling Bang! at each other, or mingling with the children of other families and putting together an impromptu baseball team. But it was dark and deserted now, cheerless, and she was still clutching his arm. He stopped, to humor her, and took the binoculars.
He left the car running and leaned against its soft, comforting vibration. The plane that was not a plane hovered at an angle a hundred yards away and maybe two hundred yards up, a treetop’s worth above those standing silent and tall below. His wife demanded to know if he saw it, her voice shaking. He was scared too. He knew planes well enough. He was a rational man. He understood that there were things the military did not share with the populace, but this—this hovering silence, bladeless, wingless, its lights all wrong—it seemed to be far beyond the capabilities of what he knew of modern engineering.
The thing swung over the road from one side to the other, and he followed it through the binoculars, his mouth dry. Small fins silently emerged from its sides, each with a red light at its end, and the two rows of curved and lit windows tipped toward him, as if the thing was looking at him, at them. He shut the car off and walked away, crossed the rest of the road, walked onto the dewed grass as if compelled; he had to get nearer, had to see it better.
In the car, his wife bent over to pet their dog with a trembling hand, murmuring nonsense comfort words to it, to herself. When she sat back up, she fully realized just how spooked her husband must be, because he had left the vehicle right in the center of the road, between southbound and northbound lanes. Anyone coming from either direction might smash right into them. Worse, the man took the darned keys with him. So while she could not move the car, she could keep her eyes peeled, watch the road while her husband watched what she was beginning to allow herself to call a UFO, at least silently. She would call her sister tomorrow morning, once she had slept.
In turning her head back and forth between the front and back windows of the car, her gaze caught something moving. Her husband. His figure blurred into the darkness and density of the trees, the field he was crossing, the shadow cast by the now enormous object above him. He looked so very small beneath it.
She screamed his name, and the dog yelped at the sudden loudness of her voice. He probably could not hear her, she realized, so she slid over to the driver’s side, to the open door, and called out for him again, again, again.
Whether or not he registered a sound in the distance, he would never remember later. He was too focused on what he saw above him through the binoculars. There, behind the windows, were a dozen figures crowded together, all wearing uniforms, black and shiny. They did not look quite right; something was wrong with their skin, with their eyes, those eyes that seemed to meet his gaze. For a wild moment, he felt he had the upper hand—after all, they did not have binoculars, so surely he was seeing them much more clearly than they could see him.
All at once, they stepped away as if called by something, someone, and moved to a wall full of lights and buttons behind them, which reminded him of a telephone switchboard or an electrical panel. Only one figure remained at the window. The husband’s fingers moved, trying to focus the lens on that face, a face he could not reconcile with anything he had seen before. It seemed to be getting closer, the face, the craft, descending. He felt powerfully that something terrible was about to happen.
That he was going to be taken.
Captured.
In a panic, he turned and ran to the car. Get away, get away, get away, he must get away, he thought, his entire body shivering despite the mild still air, even as he sprinted faster than he had since basic training. His bowels shifted in him, his heart raced, his ulcer pulsed. He heard his wife shouting for him, saw her coming out the driver’s side. She slid back in and babbled as he thrust himself into the car, put it in gear, and started driving, but he could not register any of her questions, so full was his head with the word run, so full his mouth with the word capture.
The best nights of my misspent youth were spent at rock and roll shows. I’d been addicted to the radio since early in my childhood, and as soon as I had a learner’s permit and a job that gave me permission to drive after hours, I went to every concert I could get to, even when that meant driving hell for leather through four states to get back home before my parents noticed how long I—and my mother’s car—had been gone. Usually I went alone; my taste ran in the opposite direction of most of my friends, who were busy swooning over boy bands and pop starlets who had started out as Mouseketeers. But I never felt a stronger sense of belonging than when I was surrounded by strangers who loved the same music I did, even when I stuck out like a sore thumb, too young and too female to be at the gigs I was going to. I craved it like a drug, that feeling of being swept up in a collective sonic transport where, for an hour or two, all my excruciating self-awareness and teenage angst dissolved.
I never kicked the habit, and instead only went deeper down the rabbit hole as I grew older, finding ways to get as close to the action as I could, whether it was as a rock writer, an unofficial roadie, or just a die-hard fan. (I once booked so many different gig tickets in one week that my bank assumed it was fraud and canceled my credit card, forcing me to call and explain that yes, I had intentionally purchased concert tickets for seven straight nights in a row.) Sadly, none of the talent I worshipped rubbed off on me, and my own attempts at music-making fell woefully short. I had a knack for a different kind of composition, but even as I carved out my identity as a writer of fiction, I kept coming back to live performance. My first novel, If We Were Villains, drew on another artistic obsession of mine, the works of Shakespeare, which captivated me with their lush musicality. But I’d never read a novel about the Shakespearean actors that captured that world as I knew it, so I decided to write it myself.
My next novel, Hot Wax, sprang from a similar place. While there are countless biopics and books about music out there, not many captured the transcendental experience of a truly pulse-pounding live show that kept me coming back seven nights a week. The ones that did stuck with me, like the best of those concerts, long after I finished them. The power of performance is tough to capture in prose, but these eight books showcase how triumphant and transformative live music can be.
Durastanti’s semi-autobiographical novel follows the daughter of two deaf parents as she navigates a chaotic upbringing divided between a small town in Southern Italy and New York City. Her early life is defined by her parents’ shared disability, the unique sonic landscape she and her brother—who are both hearing—occupy. Her mother loves to watch live concerts on TV, moved by the performances she cannot hear, prompted to ask the young Claudia, “What is music like?”
Their extended Italian family is inherently musical. Claudia’s grandfather and his friends try to share the experience with her mother by dancing tarantellas and stomping on the floor, “hoping the vibrations would sail up her calves, ripple in her hips, crash against her ribs.” Claudia’s mother eventually sours on music, while Claudia herself becomes a devotee, moving to London as a young adult in a doomed effort to join the fading punk scene. She too is disappointed, realizing she has arrived too late and moved there for the wrong reasons. But music still has enormous influence and becomes a defining feature of her identity outside of a family where there was little room for her.
Gruen’s claims to fame are many. He befriended John Lennon when that was tremendously difficult to do, had a rare window into the fraught home life of Ike and Tina Turner, and toured Japan with KISS—to name just a few. His biography doubles as history of rock and roll in the twentieth century, as he grows up and grows into his considerable talent alongside many of the stars he documented. What made Gruen a great photographer was his “performance IQ”: because he loved live music, he had an impeccable instinct for when and how to snap a photograph that might capture the spark of the performer in the flesh. It’s impossible not to get caught up in his excitement when he’s seeing David Johannsen and the Dolls for the first time, or to feel his trepidation on the bus with the Sex Pistols when he wakes up from a nap to learn Sid Vicious nearly slit his throat to steal his boots. Gruen got closer to the action than anybody else ever did, and it’s a thrill to go along for the ride.
This slim volume is difficult to define—is it memoir or autofiction or lyrical snapshots of a certain place in time? It’s all of those things and more, an intimate history of Jess Hopper’s transformation from Midwestern punk to respected rock critic. Hopper and her friends careen around Chicago on their bikes, speaking a strange pidgin English of slang and song lyrics as they bounce like pinballs from gig to gig, club to club, misadventure to misadventure. If you didn’t have a youth like hers, it makes you wish you had, because no matter how grim and grimy it gets—stealing cigarettes and getting high on Theraflu and dancing in bars where the scene looks like “Chuck Klosterman’s birthday party, staged at a Sandals resort”—every page crackles with life. Night Moves reads like my own teenage diary, if I had ever kept one, the passage of time marked less by the calendar than by album releases and DJ sets and early Hold Steady gigs and mixtapes swapped with friends. Music—not just heard but seen and felt—is the defining feature of Hopper’s unusual memoir; she’s uniquely qualified to do it justice.
Nick Kent, like Bob Gruen and Jess Hopper, got up close and personal with the best and worst of the music business. He started writing for NME in the early 1970s when he was barely a legal adult, and before he was thirty had toured with some of the biggest acts in rock. At the end of ’72 he observes, with characteristic dry wit, that “Just eighteen months earlier, I’d been a gangly, girlish figure in a school blazer… Flash forward to just three weeks ago though, and I’d suddenly gotten all brash and extrovert, dressed up like a glam-rock Christmas tree and snorting cocaine with Led Zeppelin at 3 o’clock in the morning in some four-star hotel.”
Kent’s transformation at the mercy of live music is extreme; he finds and then loses himself in catastrophic fashion, succumbing to a crippling heroin addiction in the company of pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and getting beaten half to death with a bicycle chain by his former bandmate after a brief stint as a member of the Sex Pistols. It’s a minor miracle he survived the bloodbath of the hard rock heyday, but that makes him one of the best raconteurs to tell the tall tales of that era.
Total Chaos is just that: total chaos. It’s one part interview, one part memoir, one part scrapbook, and one part museum exhibit. The Stooges’ legendary live shows are documented not only through Iggy’s colorful firsthand accounts, but with photographs and gig posters and newspaper articles and other artifacts from the Godfather of Punk’s coming of age as an artist. What I love most about this book, though, is how Iggy’s performance continues through the interviews; he’s liable to break into song in response to Gold’s questions, offering the reader a rare glimpse inside the demented mind of one of the greatest frontmen of all time.
Like Durastanti’s autofiction, Vonnegut’s first novel is a meditation on what happens when human beings lose access to live music. Eerily prescient, especially as generative AI threatens the lifeblood of artists and the survival of manmade art, Player Piano follows a star engineer at the Ilium Works, a tech company which has nearly succeeded in replacing all human labor with machines and human intelligence with supercomputing. Dr. Paul Proteus, the story’s reluctant protagonist, begins to question everything after encountering the titular player piano in a bar that caters to the “unskilled” laborers who live on the wrong side of the river. The instrument’s uncanny imitation of human performance—which “stop[s] abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy”—sends Proteus spiraling into an identity crisis which makes him rethink everything he’s ever worked for and question the wisdom of handing the very things that make us human over to machines.
This is a coming-of-age novel like no other. The ten-year-old narrator, Molly, lives in a Quaker commune in the wake of a fiery tragedy until the arrival of dirt-biking ex-con Jeanie turns her whole world upside-down. Molly’s infatuation with Jeanie is inseparable from Jeanie’s heavy metal anti-heroism, and soon she takes off for Chicago to prove she, too, is a badass and—quite literally—raise the dead.
But the headbanging soundtrack to Molly’s metamorphosis is just one musical element in this raunchy, rollicking carnival ride of a novel; music becomes a secondary language for many of the characters, who fall back on sung verse, spoken lyrics, and even tap dance when more pedestrian forms of self-expression fail them. Wilson’s prose is no different, moving to a weird, wild music entirely its own.
John Wray’s sixth novel hits as hard and fast as the howling guitars the book’s resident pop-culture preacher, Leslie Z, waxes poetic about from the very first pages. Stranded in the socio-cultural wasteland of the Florida Gulf Coast in the ’80s, Leslie is Kip Norvald’s unlikely gateway drug to the world of “bangers.” His first experience seeing a band called Death live is instantaneously life-changing. “I can feel it in my teeth, man,” he says, before they even make their way into the building. Cast out by every community he’s ever tried to be a part of, Kip finds an unlikely chosen family with the Black bisexual glamazon Leslie Z and the mysterious Kira Carson, a girl “with an actual death wish.” Wray’s outcasts and outsiders find themselves and each other in the tarry mosh pits of death and doom which fueled the furor of the Satanic Panic. Wray writes with an insider’s intimate insight, and brings every concert scene, like Frankenstein’s monster, wondrously and horribly to life.
Laura van den Berg: By now we’ve all published, or will soon publish, the paperbacks of our most recent books, which means we’re all around a year out from hardcover publication. If you could go back in time, what would you tell the 2024 version of yourself?
Katya Apekina: I love this question because it invokes these versions of ourselves talking to one another. The idea of a coherent self is an illusion. I’m always surprised when I stumble on a note or something from my past self. I think I am still too close to Mother Doll coming out to have really useful advice for my previous self, but I will tell her that some stuff will be exciting, and some stuff will be disappointing, and that I’ll get to meet a lot of interesting people–which, when I was writing the book during the isolation of COVID would have been the dream.
Gabriella Burnham: With Wait, I was very nervous about how to talk about Gilda, the mother character who is deported early on in the novel. I worried that most readers wouldn’t want to pick up a book about such a politicized topic, even though I knew it was a topic that needed the emotional nuance that fiction offers. I even suggested we remove mention of the deportation from the copy on the back of the book so as not to dissuade readers (my agent convinced me this was the wrong move).
In the year since Wait has been published, the situation around ICE in the United States has become increasingly dangerous. There have been several ICE raids on Nantucket, where Wait is set. Conversations around abolishing ICE have resurfaced in the mainstream. I wish I could remind my 2024 self that it’s our job as writers to push the boundaries of what’s considered palatable social discourse.
Emma Copley Eisenberg: I love all these answers and retweet them and will only add that if I could go back in time to talk to the version of myself before my debut novel Housemates was published, I would tell her to keep it weird, or maybe make it even weirder. Some readers have been delighted and some confused that the first person narrator of the novel is not the main character; she’s talking from the side about two young queer people that she maybe stalks, maybe imagines, maybe…who knows? My only regret, if I have one, is that I could have made this narrator EVEN WEIRDER. Also, I’d tell myself not to schedule more than two book events back to back – you think it will work and it could, but only if you don’t have a body that has needs and might get sick!!
The more I paid close attention to the one-on-one human connections I was making, the less I fixated on specific press hits or looking at numbers.
Julia Phillips: Oof, yes to all of this, and an especially emphatic yes to the mention of a body with needs that might get sick. The early-in-2024 version of myself expected this year to be ruled by book and publishing concerns, but it actually ended up being defined by body and medical concerns, so I’d tell my past self that in the midst of all this exciting book stuff, it’s always worth it to care for one’s physical being—to make sure to eat well and sleep well and go to doctors’ appointments and take medicine. It was easier than I realized for me to lose track of those things in the midst of professional fun, stress, and travel.
LVDB: I published the book before State of Paradise, a story collection,in 2020, so of course everything was virtual. I was really excited to be able to travel irl for SOP, but when the moment arrived I found that I was a little uneasy doing front-facing stuff (events, interviews) in a way I hadn’t been before. I’m not sure if there was a little pandemic life hangover or if it was because this particular book contains so much personal material, but there was an internal tension I hadn’t felt before. I really wanted all my events to be group events, because I love a good party and collaborating with writers I admire, for sure, but also I think I was trying to hide a bit. So don’t hide! would be one thing I’d tell my 2024 self. Also, I had forgotten how much a few weeks on the road can take it out of you. If I could go back in time I would have blocked off more rest in my schedule.
Priyanka Mattoo: I actually got the exact piece of advice that 2024 me needed from my husband. He told me, just before the publication of my memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, that I was going to get a wave of love for the book, but it probably wouldn’t be in the shape I imagined it would be. That was incredible insight. I think in this wildly unstable publishing climate it can be easy to get caught up in where attention for the book is coming from–for whatever reason it feels so make or break with a debut, like am I going to get this immense avalanche of love and sales, or is my career over before it started–and it reminded me to pay attention to the shape the love was actually taking–the reviews and press were lovely, but notes from readers, notes from awkward far-removed acquaintances who picked up the book and read it, and were touched, in some way, were the crest. The more I paid close attention to the one-on-one human connections I was making, the less I fixated on specific press hits or looking at numbers.
KA: Based on when our books came out, we were probably all writing them during COVID, right? How do you think the pandemic influenced the books and the writing?
GB: My debut novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone, published in July 2020, and I think that experience shaped Wait more than writing the book during the pandemic itself (in some ways quarantine was the ideal condition for writing a novel, which is a long, solitary process). 2020 was a period of deep political unrest in this country; many authors were questioning the slow pace of book writing as an effective tool for change, even as readers were turning to books to learn, to make sense of our moment, to fill the time. It was also a very strange year to be marketing a book–most of us felt too ashamed to ask people to pre-order our books when so many were dying from or struggling with COVID. From the book business perspective, I know there was a big push for publishing houses to buy Black and POC authors, but then by the time their books came out years after, the initial enthusiasm flagged. Basically, it was a very contentious and unusual time to navigate the publishing world, especially as a first-time author, and it taught me that ultimately, we cannot predict what will happen when our books enter the world. That period made me appreciate the process of conceiving, writing, and editing a book even more.
ECE: Yup yup, when I wasn’t watching Love is Blind or collaging during lockdown, I was writing Housemates, and the writing continued into seasons 2 and 3 of the pandemic (2021, 2022). I had started writing the novel in 2018 but writing fiction in my little room while people were out there in the streets dying of COVID or working to save peoples lives put the whole enterprise of what I was trying to do in stark context and not in a good way. What is the point of doing this? I wondered many, many times. So I put that question into the novel; Housemates is maybe most about the question of why make art at all, and if art can save your life. I was writing the novel to actively figure out my answer to that question, and so I gave that question to the narrator and made it her quest to solve over the course of the novel. For a while I couldn’t figure out why the most common response to reading Housemates was people telling me it made them revive some art or craft practice of their own, but when I think about it now I do know – it’s because the book is a twisty argument for the kind of aliveness and the kind of presence making art requires of us. I felt about 50% less dead when I finished writing the novel than I had felt before writing it.
LVDB: I don’t think State of Paradise would exist had the pandemic not happened. The novel takes place in the aftermath of an unnamed sickness that is distinct from Covid (this sickness has a speculative edge) but / also SOP is very much about what I did during the pandemic: return to Florida, where I grew up, and live there, surrounded by my family, for several years. This was a massively difficult time and also ended up being one of the most beautiful, transformative, surprising, and healing periods in my entire life. There was no way to not write about it. But at the start of 2020 I had plans to work on an entirely different book. The pandemic changed the course of my life in a day-to-day sense–as it did for all of us–and also altered the path of my work. I actually found this pretty humbling, as a person who has a lot of plans; all of a sudden I was in the thrall of this unexpected and paradigm-shifting moment in time, as opposed to following the design I’d envisioned for myself.
JP: So much of what you all are saying here matches up with my experience of this book: the blown-up plans, the scrambled path, the transformed work, the shocking more-alive feeling that came with writing it. Because of the pandemic, I came into this project with so much more desperation and came out of it with so much more joy that I ever imagined was possible before.
KA: I remember writing Mother Doll while I was hiding in the attic from my child who was not in school. I was taking these mediumship classes over zoom, as research for my novel. It was these guided meditations that I was doing in the cramped attic room, and it was an escape. At one point in the pandemic we drove across the country and I took care of my grandfather. I’d visit him in the hospital and he would dictate his memoirs to me into a recorder. He just wanted to talk about his early childhood. He would talk at me for hours, and this feeling of receiving another person’s story was also a big plot point in my book that I was writing at the time. The heaviness of being this type of receptacle. He died and I arranged his funeral, and then we went back to LA and I finished the book. I think there were a lot of books that were written during COVID because people were at home, and writing can be an escape or a coping mechanism.
PM: Like Laura, I don’t know if I’d even have this book if not for the pandemic. I was screenwriting just before, and then the TV/film sales machine abruptly stopped (and then we had the WGA strike). I was home with the kids, and had very little time to write, but still felt the urge to get stuff out, so I wrote a few essays that became op-eds for the NYT, and then a piece that landed in The New Yorker. They were all about my itinerant childhood and my displaced Kashmiri community, and there was a tipping point when I had published about ten in quick succession–they were pouring out of me–that I knew I had a book. I sold it on proposal, via zoom meetings. And man, was I grateful to have a reason to squirrel myself away during the zoom-school years. I’ve blocked most of it out, but not the energy that writing gave me.
GB: I want to ask about money! Most people, I think, know that when an author publishes a book, they receive a sum of cash for that book (“an advance”). But many people may not know that the amount of money you receive for your advance directly correlates to the marketing budget for your book. If you receive a huge advance, the publishing house will pour more money into making sure your book is a hit. The books that get the most money are positioned to make the most money. On the other hand, if you receive a huge advance, the risk of failing to meet sales goals might be higher. How do you square this with the personal work we do as writers, typing away in a word processor day after day?
ECE: So much to say!! Basically yes, publishing is capitalism so the more they pay for a book the more they are incentivized to try to make back their investment by pushing that book. I’ve written before about how this system impoverishes readers, as readers are then only going to hear about maybe 20 books a year and these will be the ones that publishers want you to hear about not because they think these books are the “best” but because they think these books will do well as objects under capitalism. This stuff matters, materially and culturally, as I want to live in a world where I hear about and read more books than just the ones deemed profitable.
But also I know enough to know now that I really can’t control how much my books sell for, how much my ideas or my humanity is valued in the marketplace. I can control how I interact with and talk to readers of my books though – we are living in a moment where authors can talk directly to their audiences in ways that were previously unimaginable. Ideally this kind of direct communication goes hand in hand with in-house marketing efforts that amplify the book on a bigger scale, but I think some of the successes I’m most proud of for this novel came directly from connections I forged with readers independent of my publishing house. I can influence the narrative of what people think my book is about – I’ve done that with Housemates via making original video content about the book, investing effort in a Substack that tells my audience what I want them to know about the book, and the ways I talk about the book at events.
LVDB: I agree that the only solution is to write the things we must write–our obsessions, our terrors, our loves. I worry when students talk about writing to the market, because it’s not a fixed target; it’s always shifting. It also seems like such a narrow lens to be looking at the world through. We have little control over the value the market places on our work, or the moment a book will be published into. But of course knowing this stuff and then living it out in the context of a capitalist system are two very different things.
I published my first book with a small indie press, for very little money, and I loved a lot about the community at that moment in time–there was little expectation of being profitable. If you sold a thousand copies you were, like, amazing. I did a lot of events at friends’ apartments. I crashed on a lot of couches. I was happy for friends who sold their first books for huge amounts of money, but that level of visibility and the attendant stresses seemed to belong to a different universe. My press didn’t have a marketing department or a publicity team. The additude was very DIY and let’s-try-shit-and-see-what-happens.
I’m grateful for the support I have now, especially editorially–I am lucky to have worked with two outstanding editors who always pushed my work towards its best self. But I also kind of miss that indie energy. Traditional publishing is at a moment where they recognize a lot of the usual models aren’t working in the way they once did and yet there can be a real reluctance to experiment. There’s a lot of entrenchment. I think it’s useful for writers to understand where we simply have very little control, which can be a helpful form of release, and also to understand where we do have agency. I appreciate the way you’re speaking to the latter in your response, Emma: how we can shape the way our work is described to readers, how we can connect with readers directly.
KA: I think after you see how things work a little bit from the inside it doesn’t get any less baffling. Why are some books pushed over others? It’s very rarely for artistic reasons. Most journalists don’t even read the books they put on the lists they compile. The books that get hyped, that take off, it seems like a confluence of factors that one can’t control, but also, most of the time, it’s not an accident. That’s why it’s maddening when you’re the writer, because on one hand it feels like it’s outside of your control, but then it also isn’t entirely, and that loop can make you nuts. Of course it’s somewhere in the middle–there are things you can do, but hard to know what, if any impact they will have, but I guess ideally you just do everything you can or want to do and then move on. It is helpful to think in terms of a career rather than about individual books.
I think some of the successes I’m most proud of for this novel came directly from connections I forged with readers independent of my publishing house.
PM: As a former Hollywood agent, I need to point out that I find the sales/PR/marketing aspect of publishing excessively confusing–at least Hollywood is super open about how things are marketed and sold. Because I also know a lot of authors who got nice advances and then felt their books were completely ignored? I think we have a system that makes a lot of good product, and is then at an utter loss as to how to sell the crap out of it. From what I can see, marketing spend (for non household-name authors) seems actually to be allocated after the book catches on fire via pure luck. Basically I don’t talk to a lot of authors who are happy with how their books were taken to market, and the joke I make is that yeah Hollywood makes its messes, but book people are supposed to be the smart ones, surely we can figure this out?
GB: I hear that too, Priyanka– even authors with sizable advances end up feeling disappointed in how their books are marketed (and yet, it is still true that an author who gets a six or seven figure advance will receive way more attention than an author who gets a five figure advance). I think this speaks to the consolidation of the market. There are so few places to publicize and market books, and the places that seem to “work” are celebrity book clubs (impossibly thin odds) or going viral on BookTok (also impossibly thin odds, and highly unpredictable). Basically, even a Big Book can hit a limit in terms of publicity channels, and in the end we’re all relying on a big heap of luck.
JP: This is my favorite subject, Gabi. But, yeah, I don’t know if there is any squaring the two: the arbitrary and capricious capitalist machine on one hand and the art-making we do on our own on the other hand. In this moment of my career, it feels like the only way to exist with these irreconcilable things is to talk as plainly as possible about how they do (and don’t) work, treasure the luck we get, not blame ourselves for the luck we don’t, and keep typing.
LVDB: On that note, I have a follow-up question! It feels like we’re in a moment, in publishing, where the landscape is really shifting. There is a lot less space in terms of review coverage, which has been true for a while, and also the things that would normally supercharge a new book (a glowing NYTBR review, an NPR interview) don’t seem to be impactful as they once were. On the flipside, new doors are opening (as you noted, Emma, writers have more pathways for speaking directly to our audiences). I’m wondering what discoveries you made about connecting with readers: approaches that turned out to be more impactful than you’d anticipated (or vice versa)? Things your publishers were a little reluctant to do that turned out to be really successful?
KA: I’m so curious what other people will say about this. I am not savvy about this stuff. When strangers write to me about my book I write them back, but it’s always sort of strange–since it’s a one-sided intimacy. But I find it moving to know that what I wrote helped someone or made them feel seen. When I think of the book more as an act of service than some extension of my ego, it makes it easier to do things for the book.
I don’t have an impulse to write a newsletter, to share my thoughts or ideas in that way, though I think it’s such a nice and direct medium, and maybe that could change. For my first book, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, for the book event, we had a drive-in reading–it was very LA–people drove up to this beautiful park on a hill, and we put a radio transmitter in my friend’s jeep, and I did an interview and reading from my car, and people listened in their cars, or from radios, sitting in the park. It was actually pre-covid, but it would have been the perfect social distanced event.
ECE: Damn, I love the sound of that book event Katya! Oh to be in a park on a hill listening to you read! It’s so true – reviews, even an NYTBR review, do not move the needle anymore because so few people read them, a bummer indeed. I am not trying to say “look on the bright side” because there IS no bright side – I want more carefully considered criticism and more places for people to talk about books rather than less – but I do think that the places that do move the needle now are more democratic and unexpected and that this state of affairs is remaking the industry in some generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment (advance) as the sole determinant of a book’s sales. TikTok, Substack, and literary podcasts are the places that can make a difference where I’m seeing the most interesting and serious literary criticism – long posts about a single book, direct to consumer cultural criticism magazines like The Metropolitan Review, and long TikTok or Instagram videos analyzing the structure of a novel. Two things that were unexpectedly impactful were a single video from a wonderful, taste-maker BookTok account (which did not come out of nowhere, but came out of about a year I spent learning and engaging organically with interesting literary booktokers) and being featured on Virginia Sole Smith’s Substack and podcast, Burnt Toast which happened because my book interrogates body size and diet culture and so was a topical fit for that pod. When people come up to me at events and say they learned about my book, it’s almost always from one of those two places.
JP: Emma, I’m so impressed with your long engagement with BookTok and the different ways you directly engage with your readers! Your description of that one tastemaker video and your appearance on Burnt Toast as “unexpectedly impactful” rings true to me—that some aspect of this landscape is determined by long-term work on the author’s part, which can then wind up in surprising connections and unanticipated results. I was amazed this past year to see how some of the relationships I formed with readers around my debut, five years ago, grew to be newly meaningful with this publication. People I met then, sometimes only once, showed up patient, generous, and invested in my continuing career. It meant the absolute world to me. I didn’t anticipate that connecting with folks in a bookstore five years ago would forge a relationship that would last to the next book (and hopefully beyond!)
PM: If anyone ever figures out the answer to this, let’s clone them and put them in charge of publicity for every book. I truly have no idea what was effective or not! I thought I could figure it all out, but I did not, and trying to make sense of it was making me anxious. So I took a deep breath and thought about how I wanted to celebrate my book, had some lovely DIY-type events in cities where I had a lot of friends, and did a bunch of book clubs and readings, and a couple of festivals. Then I got back to writing–both the next book and my newsletter, which is small by design. Maybe this is a boring answer but it’s the one that keeps me sane.
When I think of the book more as an act of service than some extension of my ego, it makes it easier to do things for the book.
GB: Like literally everything, the book media landscape has been remade in large part by algorithms that drive engagement (Substack, Tiktoks, podcasts, Instagram reels etc…) While I do agree it has evened the playing field in some ways and opened up new possibilities, every author now has to decide how much to share about their personal lives for the purpose of selling books. I was kind of stunned when in a review of Wait in NPR, the critic parsed out which aspects of my novel were fiction and which parts were taken from my actual life, all based on an interview I did with my publisher. Even memoirists feel this push–I have several memoirist friends who say, “I wrote everything in the book– why do I have to keep finding new ways to say it to a front-facing camera?” The answer seems to be that your personal life feeds the algorithm (way more than a book cover does), and if the audience connects with you as a person, then they are more likely to buy your book. It’s a mixture of social media voyeurism, a dearth in rigorous book criticism, and perhaps an unintended consequence of the OWNVoices movement (i.e., prove to me you are qualified to write this novel about X group of people by revealing your own personal history and background). That doesn’t totally answer your question Laura, I’m realizing; this is more to piggyback on everyone else’s answers, which are spot-on and I co-sign each one!
LVDB: Emma, I’m so interested in what you’re saying about how the industry is getting reshaped in some “generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment.” It does feel like we’re in the midst of a real shift in terms of how readers find their way to books. It’s exciting to see new spaces and pathways opening up.
ECE: Totally, and I also hear what Gabi is saying. It’s such a tough double bind. I recently taught a class about “diving into the wreck” of fiction, aka how to embark on a new project when everything in the world screams “who cares?” and how we as writers carve out a space of belief and of possibility. How are you diving back in, into your next project, or into something else creative? Or are you not/what are you doing instead??
LVDB: Truly a question for the ages! At this point in my life there are few things I believe in more than the power of story. And I don’t mean this in a hokey “literature-will-save-us” kind of way (I do not think it will!). Because story is so fundamental to how we understand ourselves and our environment. If our own internal story is fucked, we’re going to be operating at a big deficit. Something will always be a little misaligned. If a nation’s self-narrative is fundamentally dishonest it’s going to be hard for that society to move toward real justice and equity. Stories can reveal the world to us in powerful and important ways, and they can also be dangerous–so many people are out there weaving stories that warp reality for their own profit. I think it’s the artist’s job to do the opposite, to say something true. That is a kind of foundational thing I come back to. I am nearly always working on a story of some kind. It’s how I process being alive.
KA: It seems like a question of faith. For me writing has required a lot of faith and what at times felt like magical thinking. Will this all cohere in the end into something? And then, after that, will I be able to shepherd it out into the world? If you start thinking about it too much, it can feel hopeless and discouraging. Better not to look down, to keep moving forward. When everything DOES cohere, and the novel clicks into place, it’s like a very satisfying sensation I feel physically. I don’t think too much about “who cares” as long as I care. I’m usually writing to understand something, a behavior or way of seeing the world that is different from my own. It’s driven by a curiosity, and requires a presence or empathy that feels like some sort of religious fervor? I don’t know actually, since I have never had a religious fervor, it’s just what I imagine it would be like–because it does feel like I am given access to something divine, and it’s hard to find that space, that portal or whatever you want to call it, but when you are in it, and it is carrying you along somewhere, it feels amazing and suddenly things feel alive and pulsing with meaning. All of this is great, but sometimes it is too great, and it takes me too far afield of my life, and I find it hard to toggle back and forth, to be present in the actual world. I don’t know, I’m making it all sound very woo. I started another book, but I am not working on it currently, because I am ghostwriting something else to make money.
JP: It is very woo! Art making is magic! Creating something that wasn’t there before—connecting to something greater than, outside of, beyond ourselves! I agree wholeheartedly, Katya, that it’s not necessarily meaningful to me whether someone else thinks this activity is a sensible or meaningful or worthwhile way to spend my time, whether someone else cares. I care. I’m deep in another manuscript and it’s thrilling to me. Creative work makes me feel human and alive.
I think it’s the artist’s job to do the opposite, to say something true. That is a kind of foundational thing I come back to.
PM: Maybe it’s because I came to writing late, and was so eager to get here, but I start a new project the second I hand one in. I just handed in my next book, am wrapping up a screenwriting thing, and then I have a proposal for a third book I need to pull together. But also, the process of diving into another project is wildly different for me as a nonfiction writer, because I’m not world-building and harnessing my imagination to craft people out of thin air. A new project starts with observing, thinking, reporting in detail on the things I see/read around me, and a book-shaped narrative comes from patterns and connections I make while I’m engaging in daily life. I didn’t exactly set out to write about myself, I like to write about the human experience, and I’m the closest human I can investigate without being rude. I used to worry that focusing on memoir and personal essay would reveal me to be indulgent and ridiculous, but then I saw that the more specific I could get about my life and feelings, the more it opened up conversations with people who were feeling the same. I was a profoundly lonely child, and this has been the remedy.
And I, too, fall into the pit of “what is the point,” but if the goal of art is human connection, and that’s what we most need in this moment, then… the work is the point. When I’m flailing around about the state of things, I give myself the time off I need to tend to my family and myself. But I find, more weeks than not, that I am itchy to come back to writing, even just as a way to process everything that’s going on. And then of course, there’s the spite. Maybe it was because I didn’t get to be a writer for so long (I was agenting and producing until my late 30s), but I have a backlog of things I’m dying to write, and I’m not letting the end of the world stop me.
GB: If we as a people have learned anything in the last, I don’t know, 100 years, it’s that, to change, we need a movement built across disciplines and styles, and art is a central part of that constellation. My “who cares?” comes more from the story itself and less from the act of writing, which I gave up apologizing for a long time ago! I’m getting better and better at sharpening my instinct around which are stories worth telling and which aren’t. I totally agree with what you said, Laura, about how stories are used to mystify and obscure reality (let’s look at the American Dream mythology, for example), and so it’s especially important to tell stories that are specific and true, as Priyanka said. It may be that novels are not always the right form for the moment, and I’m trying to get back into journalism for that reason. But, novels are what I love to read and write most, they make me happy, and that’s important too.
ECE: I recently went to a talk where a very smart older woman writer listening carefully to the excellent answer of her conversation partner and then when the attention turned to her, she said “Yes, it’s that.” I have nothing to add. Yes. It’s all that you have said!
JP: Let’s try to project ourselves forward: as we leave the hullabaloo of this particular publication period behind, anything you want to tell the 2026 version of yourself? What would you like to say to the person you might become a year from now?
LVDB: I’m working on a novel called Ring of Night that’s tentatively scheduled for 2027, so by next year I’ll be sliding back into the pre-publication gear (lol what). I’d like to encourage my 2026 self to boldly try new things, with the understanding that deciding something is not for me doesn’t mean I failed. It was just an experiment! Also: I normally have a sequence of books I’d like to write in my mind, but I don’t know what my next project is beyond Ring. I’d like for my 2026 self to see this open space as a beautiful quiet field to roam around in, trusting that the next project will emerge in its own time.
Teen me was pre-med, and pretty miserable about it. We’ve come a long way, and we have to remember to enjoy it.
KA: I love that, Laura. A beautiful quiet field. I hope to be wandering in it soon too. I guess that’s what I would tell my 2026 self–to remind her to roam around and think and be less reactive.
ECE: (Un)fortunately I am already back in pre-publication gear as you say, Laura, since my next book of fiction, Fat Swim, will pub in April 2026. I feel (at this moment! Ask me in six months!) strangely calm this time. I never thought I’d get to write one book, let alone three. All the systems that once gave us feedback on if our book is good, if it “succeeded”, have crumbled (see above) so I feel this time that I am publishing a book into a kind of open clearing. The clearing has weird blue-ish grass and trees you don’t recognize and is filled with fog and no one can see anything. So what I would tell my 2026 self is to do a little dance in that clearing. Dance dance dance, because no one can see you anyway.
PM: I would like to remind myself to slow down. I always think I’m going to learn to do this without reminders, and then I get overwhelmed or frazzled, short with the family, puzzled about my work, wondering why things aren’t working or why the world is frustrating me so much, and I wish there were a more complicated solution than just take a breath and slow my brain and body down, times infinity. I hope you’re slowing down, future me! Faster is never the answer!
And also that cliche of—- what is it? The teen version of me would freak out, seeing what dreams I’ve achieved? I try to have some perspective when I’m disappointed in my work life. Teen me was pre-med, and pretty miserable about it. We’ve come a long way, and we have to remember to enjoy it.
GB: Yes to slowing down, Priyanka. At the end of 2024, I was churning out a new novel at the speed of light. Some of that energy was genuine enthusiasm for the new project, but I think most was pent up drive from the book publication year. I didn’t want to be talking about my books anymore; I wanted to be making them. When 2025 hit, my energy came to a grinding halt. I had thought I’d have a new draft by the summer! Lol! Not even close. And guess what? That’s not only OK, it’s totally necessary. The book will be better if I take my time, let it develop. Remember that, 2026 self. It is OK if the book isn’t where you thought it would be. You’ll be busy reading Laura and Emma’s new books anyway!
Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026.
Katya Apekina
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film “New Orleans, Mon Amour,” which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.
Gabriella Burnham
Gabriella Burnham is the author of the novels Wait, which was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and was named a Vulture best book of the year, and It Is Wood, It Is Stone, which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Burnham holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph’s College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and the Verge. She and her partner live in Brooklyn, NY with two rescue cats, Galleta and Franz.
Julia Phillips
Julia Phillips is the bestselling author of the novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Priyanka Mattoo
Priyanka was formerly a talent agent at UTA and WME, as well as Jack Black’s partner at their production company, Electric Dynamite. Priyanka co-founded EARIOS, the women-led podcast network, and co-hosted its critically-acclaimed beauty/wellness podcast, Foxy Browns.
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture, and The Hairpin, and her film work in festivals from Sundance to Cannes. She was raised in India, England, and Saudi Arabia before moving to the U.S. in high school, and holds degrees in Italian and Law from the University of Michigan.
Priyanka is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, and her piece How to Extract a Mother’s Rogan Josh Recipe Over Zoom was noted in Best American Food Writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Battles were fought. Book covers were judged. Voting buttons were clicked. And ultimately, select winners prevailed.
We know you all worked long and hard in this year’s Battle of US vs UK Book Covers. It was a tough one. So many colors. So many themes and narrative details sought to be captured in just a couple images. And so many questions dared to be provoked. Realism or surrealism? Photography or impressionistic painting? Text heavy or face-based? And where do animals fit into all this?
In all the years we’ve done this, this battle proved to us that US book designs are getting better! With 17 wins, the US designs beat out their UK counterparts by a landslide this year, making the US our overall winner. Given that our voters were primarily US-based, maybe this shows that publishers are starting to get to know their audience a tad more—at least as far as visual art/design goes.
So, did your favorite book covers come out on top? Place your bets now, and scroll below to find this year’s results.
Kicking off the competition is the great Lydi Conklin’s Songs of No Provenance. Though neither aim to capture the main character’s music career explicitly, both covers capture the novel’s themes of identity, appropriation, fame, and secrecy on a metaphorical level—with vastly different approaches. Featuring a colorful, cartoonish crowd, the US cover leans into the comedy that Conklin is known for. Meanwhile, the UK cover goes for a more edgy approach, with its realistic black and white image of a person covered in eyes, hinting at Conklin’s daring prose and the feeling of being watched while in the spotlight. Voters largely preferred the US cover, perhaps hinting at an early inclination toward striking pops of color.
Only in the second round, and we already have an extremely close call. With Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One, the US cover won by a margin of only 5 votes. For a book about clownery, it makes sense for y’all to try to play tricks on me—I really thought UK was gonna win with its silly clown face! But our audience preferred the slightly more abstract clown approach on this one, and like with Conklin’s, it looks like once again bright colors prevail.
The voting for Liann Zhang’s Julie Chan is Dead was a clear knockout—a whopping 82% voters chose the US cover. Though the bright yellow and hint of violence in the UK cover is definitely intriguing, you can’t help but admit that the US cover brings out more of the mystery of this novel: Who is the girl covering her face with her phone? Why is she the only brunette in this sea of blondes? The duplicity and interrogation of fame, identity, and technology are front in center here.
Another knockout, Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story pitted realism against surrealism: 73% of voters rooting for a literal blob on the US cover, versus 27% of voters for the UK’s balloony lettering alluding to the blob. And though the lettering of the UK’s balloons are brighter and more eye-catching, the literal blob is frankly super fun and hilarious. I want to know what the blob is doing. And the way that the blob warps the subtitle? With the US cover, it’s all in the details.
Jessica Gross’s Open Wide was a close call! It was nearly a 50/50 split amongst our Instagram voters for the two very different covers, but our web voters swayed the decision, and the US cover won out by a margin of 20 votes. The unique drawing on the UK version is cheeky and humorous, but the suggestive imagery on the US cover is both provocative and captivating. A slash of bright pink amongst the grey combined with the man’s ambiguous, though clearly worried expression shows why the US cover pulled through.
Tense and beautiful, Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting tracks a woman bidding to start over, breaking free from her husband’s control. Though the UK cover was beautiful in its own right, featuring a woman with her two daughters by the ocean, it seems our readers slightly preferred the metaphorical imagery of freedom that the bird on the US cover represents. With a title like Nesting, you can see why voters appreciated the parallel being explicitly made on the cover. This marks yet another win for the US.
With a title as suggestive as Brittany Newell’s Soft Core, you have no choice but to have a cover that matches that risqué energy. And though both covers definitely accomplish this in their own right, readers had a clear preference for the US cover’s pop of color, and the sensual nature of the leather gloved hand, front and center. Though the UK cover offers us another sensual portrait, it isn’t quite as explicit as its US counterpart, which seems to capture a hand reaching toward a crotch—much more racy than a hand moving through strands of hair. The US won with a significant 63% of the votes.
Once again, our voters were confident. Though I could see an appeal to the minimalism featured in the US cover of Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, the UK cover is both chicly minimalist, as well as fun—we have a pink and orange egg opening up! How cute. And the pops of color once again seemed to hold sway with our voters. Nearly 70% of the votes went to the UK cover here, in the UK’s first win of the competition!
The cover of R.F. Kuang’s highly anticipated Katabasis was tasked with incorporating the multilayered nature inherent to Kuang’s storytelling. Both the US and UK covers feature a complex labyrinth—the US cover giving us a more distant and three-dimensional view, while the UK cover immerses us deep into its running staircases. I’ll have to agree with the voters, who found the more immersive perspective of the labyrinth to be more exciting. 61% of voters selected the UK cover over the US cover, in the UK’s second win.
Finally, we’re getting back into some closer calls! Both covers for Maria Reva’s Endling feature large expanses—the US cover with a van traveling set against a stark red sunset and a black-and-white striped road, and the UK cover giving us a realistic portrait of a single cloud, reminiscent of a snail. Though the snail-cloud of the UK cover is both fun and artistic, I can see why the US cover slightly won out, with 55% of the votes—the contrasting colors are just so brash and unique. The US cover will definitely stick out on a bookshelf.
Patricia Lockwood’s WIll There Ever Be Another You has two very different covers, both irresistibly iridescent—just like the prose found inside of this novel. And though the split glass and fractured light shining on the UK cover is elusive, who could possibly say no to the cute cat on the US cover—especially anyone familiar with Patricia Lockwood’s classic tweet about her cat, Miette? With a whopping 72% of the votes for the US cover and its cat, it looks like Electric Lit readers might all be cat people.
With the covers for Susan Choi’s Flashlight, we pit photographic realism against impressionistic painting. I personally thought the bright yellow of the UK cover fit the title better, especially in contrast to the darkness of the path featured here as well. But voters would confidently disagree—75% preferred the more painterly approach of the deep orange sun setting on the US cover, featuring a silhouette disappearing in the distance.
Interestingly, the outcomes for our web votes and our Instagram votes were vastly different for Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. For our web votes, the outcome was pretty close, with the US winning slightly, 38 to 34.But on Instagram the difference was drastic. 176 votes went to the eerie darkness heavily featured on the US cover, which perhaps better captures the feeling of being trapped when compared to the literal barred off window shown in the UK cover, which only received 105 votes.
Both versions of Karen Russell’s The Antidote feature a cool gradient of color, paired with sepia toned imagery. The US version features a lone house, looking awfully isolated, while the UK cover features a lone woman—and a hare perched on the lettering! I thought maybe the hare would win over the voters, especially given their proven love for furry creatures on covers, but turns out the more flashy color gradient won us all over, with nearly 60% of the votes.
If my time working in social media has taught me anything, it’s that people (and algorithms) prefer faces. So it makes sense that, when comparing the two covers for Jo Harkin’s The Pretender, the people preferred the cover with not just a face, but two of them, each fit with their own mysterious, Mona Lisa-esque smile. 75% of votes went to the US cover, over the UK cover’s 25%.
The trend of “more color = more votes” continues, with Sarah Hall’s Helm. Though the muted grey contrasting against the small, orange sunset in the UK cover is beautiful in its own right, there’s just something so immediate about the bright green of the US cover, complete with its falling yellow letters. The US wins once again, with 67% of the votes.
In my experience going out for many many evenings and weekends, it’s that shining city lights are a precious and beautiful sight that everyone loves to stare at. So even though the UK cover of Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends is brighter with its shocking pink and orange, I too couldn’t help but adore the portrait of a city’s evening, given to us with the US cover, which won with 69% of the votes.
The US cover of Tash Aw’s The South won here with a staggering 74% of the votes! I find the UK cover to be magnificent—the neon green is eye-catching in the best way, while the portrait of a man looking wistfully to his side is a gorgeous image. But it stood no chance against the massiveness of the US cover, which gives us an expanse of the southern landscape behind sharp, delicate lettering. As the saying goes, bigger might just be better, at least when it comes to images on a book cover.
Another nailbiter! Both covers for Issa Quincy’s Absence heavily feature black and white photography set between bold colors. And though the US cover had more photographs featured, the UK cover had two things going for it: brighter colors and wacky shapes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those shapes on a book cover before. Maybe that’s why the UK edged this one out, with 51% of the votes.
I was very surprised by this one! The US cover of Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World is a gorgeous blue, featuring lots of tiny toy babies. So cute! But maybe a choking hazard—voters clearly preferred the flat, 2D drawing given to us in the UK cover. There’s something very reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve there, a nod to a reference in the novel, which perhaps our readers picked up on.
Both versions of Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records heavily feature flowing bodies of water. The US version gives us waves drawn onto a black backdrop with a chalky material, and a lone figure below a tiny setting moon. But the UK cover, on the other hand, completely washes over us, with a shiny gloss of bright blue snaking down the center. The UK cover is brighter, glossier, and feels slightly more immersive—like I’m about to be lost in a sea of records myself, rather than watch someone else be lost there. The UK wins with 54% of votes.
The face of a bear is still a face, so it may be no surprise that voters greatly preferred the UK cover of Callan Wink’s Beartooth, featuring a bear baring (excuse the pun) its teeth over the more minimalist US design. There is a violence suggested in all that red of the US cover, but sometimes you really can’t beat a good face card. Especially if it’s a good bare face card. The UK wins here once again, with 71% of the vote.
The US and UK covers of Yoko Tawada’s The Bridegroom Was a Dog are both fun and playful, cluing us in on the dreamlike, humorous quality to the narrative at hand. The former gives us a dog holding hands with a gloved hand, fit with a dainty wedding ring. But the latter—and our winner here—gives us a person whose face is being licked by this ridiculously long, pink tongue. 61% of voters went for the tongue-in-cheek option here, making the UK cover the winner for the fifth time in a row.
Olva Ravn’s The Wax Child is represented in the US by a smoking crib, and in the UK by a woman with a wad of bright orange wax covering the entirety of her face. These similarly grim portraits are effective in communicating the eerie horrors that await readers just behind these gorgeous images. Maybe the presence of wax on the UK cover was enough to win more hearts, though—the UK comes out on top, with 54% of the votes. There’s only one more round, and the UK has won six times in a row! Get up, US!
The covers for Helen Oyeyemi’s A New New Me feature bright colors that pop. The US cover gives us seven watercolored teacups reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, alluding to the split personalities featured for each day of the week in this novel. Meanwhile, the UK cover offers us a groovily painted button, showing the beginnings of its unraveling. Closing out this year’s Battle of US vs. UK Book Covers, the US finally returns for one more win! 64% of the votes, against the UK’s 36%. It’s like we’re new again!
For The Sun After Long Nights is an unflinching record of Iranian women’s resilience and strength against their country’s oppressive regime. The authors, Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour, are Iranian journalists who corresponded and—in Jamalpour’s case—reported from the ground as the largest uprising in the history of the Islamic Republic unfolded.
The book centers the revolutionary moment when the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement erupted in 2022 after a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, was arrested and beaten to death by the city’s morality police for not adhering to Iran’s hijab rule. Suddenly, at least two million Iranians, led by young women and members of Gen Z, took to the streets to express their outrage.. These young women, Jamalpour included, exchanged notes with poetry and slogans that fueled the resistance even as the regime cracked down with arrests, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Miles away in self-imposed exile, Tabrizy started covering the protests for The New York Times, analysing video and images shared by Iranians on social media. Caught in the cascade of events, Jamalpour and Tabrizy started exchanging emails despite the risk to Jamalpour, who could be imprisoned for communicating with a Western journalist. Together, they bore witness to young girls and elderly women standing up to police; young women cutting their hair; Iranians chanting “Death to the Islamic Republic.” This book captures that moment and then expands outward, recounting stories from the authors’ lives and those of the women who came before them. Together, Tabrizy and Jamalpour unveil the role of women in Iran’s revolutionary past, and deftly illuminate the blurry line between the personal and political.
I spoke with Fatemeh and Nilo via email about poetry as reclamation of Iranian identity, honor under patriarchy, the western gaze on Iran, and more.
Bareerah Ghani: It was fascinating to learn about the role of poetry and music in Iran’s revolutions. What are your thoughts on poetic expression as reclamation of land and identity, particularly in connection with Iranian women and their revolutionary spirit.
Nilo Tabrizy: Like many Iranians, I grew up in a home filled with the 14th century poet Hafez’s words. I wrote about the intersection between Persian poetry and Iranian identity forGuernica in 2020. Language is such an important point of connection to identity. For the many of us who can’t return to Iran, poetry is a lifeline to our land and history. When my parents recite classic Persian poetry for me, or when I hear lyrical protest chants, I can almost see and feel myself there. It’s the strongest way that I can connect with Iran from afar. The long history we have, dotted by many social movements and political upheaval, the way that our people always find hope after the darkest nights, all these moments being captured in verse is so very moving. It may seem impossible now to imagine a country where Iranians can live peacefully, journalists can report without state pressure, and people like me can return safely, but if Hafez’s own turmoil with hypocritic religious rulers moved and made way for important poetry, then Iranians can also find a path beyond this system that harms so many of its own.
Fatemeh Jamalpour: Poetry has always been political for us Iranians. For centuries, we’ve used literature and verse to challenge authoritarianism. Words have long been our weapons—more enduring than bullets, batons, or tear gas.
For the many of us who can’t return to Iran, poetry is a lifeline to our land and history.
During the One Million Signatures campaign against discriminatory laws in 2006, Iranian women introduced one of the first feminist anthems, with lyrics like: “I sprout on the wounds upon my body, Simply because I am a woman, a woman, a woman.”
During the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, lyrics and performances embraced a new language of agency and defiance.The protest songs, slogans, and symbols show how much ordinary Iranians are moving away from theocracy and toward secularization. This is no longer a nation passively waiting for change and a good day to come—it’s one rising to create it. In Iran, poetry is never just art. It’s survival. It’s rebellion. Its identity reclaimed.
BG: Beyond systemic oppressions like the hijab law, you also mention honor killing, domestic violence and forced marriages. As a Pakistani, I witness this in my country too and continue to be baffled by such mistreatment of women. How do you deconstruct the concept of honor as it’s defined and applied under a patriarchal regime?
NT: This is such a moving question, thank you. To me, honor is a communal concept. To define and redefine it, all members of a society need to be involved in its shaping, not just the few men in power. Women during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement challenged it by taking back their streets and voicing a refusal to let the Islamic Republic govern their dress and their society. To me, that’s exactly what honor and a feminist movement are—not just toppling a current system of power but envisioning something new in its place.
FJ: I came terrifyingly close to being killed by my educated father and older brother—an experience that, tragically, is not uncommon for women in Iran. Like you, I’ve seen firsthand how the concept of “honor,” shaped by patriarchal and religious ideologies, is used to justify violence and control over women’s bodies and lives. Yet a growing grassroots feminist movement—particularly in provinces like Kurdistan and Khuzestan—is challenging this brutal status quo. Local Kurdish and Arab NGOs and activists have been at the forefront, documenting honor killings, naming victims, sharing their photos, and demanding public attention. Their work has pushed both domestic and diaspora Persian-language media to cover these tragedies with greater empathy and urgency. And domestic journalists like Niloufar Hamedi have played a vital role in bringing these stories to light. She reported extensively on the murder of 16-year-old Romina Ashrafi, who her father beheaded with a sickle in northern Iran— in the name of honor. He was released just months later, protected by legal loopholes that grant leniency to male relatives under Iran’s Sharia-influenced penal code. In a system governed by deeply patriarchal laws, justice for victims like Romina is rare.
BG: As you two reflect on the revolutionary legacy of women in your own family, a chapter ends with this verse from Nigerian writer Ijeoma Umebinyo, “Nobody warned you that the women whose feet you cut from running would give birth to daughters with wings.” I would love for you two to talk about what inheritance means to you as Iranian women.
NT: I feel so grateful to have a strong connection with my family, and to have spent time with my grandparents before their passing. This is not always the case for immigrants who resettle to a faraway second country. I was perhaps the closest with my maternal grandmother whom I called Mamani. She was always incredibly independent. She lived with us for years at a time in Canada, going back and forth to Iran while being primarily based in Tehran. Widowed at a young age, she always reminded us that we need to carve our own paths and be able to face anything in this world. There was also an emphasis on education for the women in my family. My maternal and paternal great grandmothers were educated at a time when most girls didn’t know how to read.
In short, those are the two things I carry with me—independence in the sense of self-sufficiency and of creating one’s place in the world, and education, constantly being curious and learning as an endless life project.
FJ: That verse has always been deeply inspiring to me, because, as I wrote in the book, my mother was a professional sprinter before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She dreamed of becoming a champion, but the revolution and the restrictions it placed on women’s lives stole that dream from her. Still, she never stopped encouraging me to pursue mine. Unlike many women of her generation, she never pressured me to marry or have children.
To me, that’s exactly what honor and a feminist movement are—not just toppling a current system of power but envisioning something new in its place.
I also learned the importance of education, independence, and self-reliance from my illiterate grandmother. I still hear her words in my head: “As a woman, your hand must be in your pocket.” But the fight for liberation is a collective one. We are the inheritors of that ongoing struggle, and it’s our responsibility to carry this unextinguished flame forward. It is the legacy of women who, even when bent under the weight of religious patriarchy, did not break. Instead, they sprouted again from their wounds.
BG: While discussing the killing and mistreatment of Balochis, a minority in Iran, an eye-witness notes that their marginalization continues because of a lack of media coverage. How can independent media help Iranians, especially minorities, achieve justice?
FJ: One of my most unforgettable memories as a journalist was the day I traveled to Ahvaz, in Khuzestan Province, to cover the spring floods of 2019. I went to the NGO coordination center to join volunteers heading to flood-affected areas. But no one was going to the Arab-majority neighborhood of Malashieh, on the outskirts of the city. No aid had reached them. No media had covered their plight. I was told, “They are Arab and Sunni and angry, it’s not safe to go there!” So I went there alone, with my camera rolling. I saw men, women, children, and older people—everyone—filling sandbags with their bare hands, building makeshift levees to protect their homes from the rising water. When I approached them for interviews, they told me they would only speak in their mother tongue—Arabic. Though I don’t know Arabic, I agreed immediately and later added Persian subtitles to the interviews. I respected their language, they trusted me. And then something beautiful happened—they began to dance the traditional Yazleh, jumping rhythmically on the levees while singing in Arabic, “this is our homeland and we protect it”. It was a decisive moment. These weren’t “minorities.” They were a united people facing a disaster with nothing but courage and bare hands and triumphing.
To me, this is precisely why we need local media that publishes in the native languages of Iran’s diverse communities—media that amplifies their voices. But for 46 years, the Islamic Republic has systematically denied such platforms. The regime’s policy has been consistent: suppress minority voices and erase their presence from the local and national narrative.
BG: You note that The New York Times, when covering women’s protests, would publish pictures of only those with their heads covered which was “the antithesis of the women’s stated values and beliefs.” What are your thoughts about the Western gaze on Iran? How have you navigated working for western media outlets?
NT: Since immigrating as a young child to Canada, I’ve gotten very used to living in an explanatory mode—always having to give detail and context about my culture and where I come from. This has served me quite well in the different newsrooms I’ve worked in because I’ve had to get comfortable with thoroughly explaining news stories about Iran and making the case for why we should be covering them. I was reluctant to cover Iran for years as it would mean living in self-exile. But when President Donald Trump first took office in 2017 and rolled out the Travel Ban which barred many Iranians from entering the US, I felt it was my duty to start reporting on my country. Especially when I looked around and saw that I was one of the only Iranian reporters at The New York Times. I realized that if I wanted the coverage to be more reflective of what my fellow Iranians were experiencing, I had to start meaningfully contributing to the report. Many editors that I spoke with were eager for nuanced views of Iran as it’s a difficult country to access language-wise and unsafe for journalists. I’ve been lucky to have many supportive and empowering editors who have pushed me to share my expertise on Iran.
FJ: While the Islamic Republic’s regime silences us, we are often erased by Western media as well. Many editors are more interested in numbers than names—statistics rather than stories. We’ve been asked by our American editors: “Were there more than ten casualties?” As if only when a body count crosses a certain threshold does it become newsworthy. That kind of framing reduces human lives to headlines. Even when Western journalists do cover Iran, the representation is often flattened. Iranians—and more broadly, Middle Easterners—are depicted as veiled, devout, anonymous figures, rarely afforded full complexity. After years of contributing to Western outlets, I’ve realized this isn’t simply a byproduct of censorship—it’s the legacy of a colonial gaze that continues to shape how our region is portrayed.
BG: The memoir mentions impartiality and journalist-activist binary as a central tenet in Western journalism. Both of you approach this aspect of journalism differently, can you elaborate on your approaches?
NT: Part of the reason why I moved to almost exclusively covering Iran using open source reporting methods in 2022 is because I want to work with digital evidence, which is much more irrefutable than traditional reportage. The latter type of reporting often relies on interviews and unnamed government sources. Open source reporting means using available material such as videos uploaded to social media, satellite imagery, ship tracking data, etc. It’s an accountability-based reporting. This is how I’ve navigated impartiality. Impartiality doesn’t mean that one has to be a robot. We’re all humans doing this work. Of course I have feelings about covering Iran, and indeed my compassion and empathy make me a stronger reporter who can connect with people in sensitive situations. Centering on a visual documentation approach is what keeps the reporting fact-based—I’m limited by the evidence at hand and therefore don’t inject opinions into investigations.
FJ: I don’t believe the core issue is impartiality—it’s about the dignity and responsibility of doing honest, responsible journalism. The kind of “impartiality” emphasized by Western editors tends to be selectively applied for their national coverage. For instance, during the recent Israel-Iran conflict, major outlets like CNN devoted airtime to regime-approved rallies, amplifying state narratives. Meanwhile, just blocks away, anti-war protests—where ordinary Iranians risked everything to voice dissent—went completely unreported. Where is the impartiality in that? Who is given visibility, and who is systematically erased?
As an Iranian journalist, I don’t see neutrality as a viable or ethical stance when we’re reporting on state violence, censorship, or human rights abuses. We’re not observing from a distance—we live with the consequences of the repression we report on. There’s no illusion of balance when you’re facing a regime that jails, tortures, and kills its critics. We don’t have the luxury of standing in the middle. In this environment, so-called “objectivity” can become a tool of erasure. For me, the priority isn’t detachment—it’s truth, integrity, and bearing witness. I’m not neutral in the face of injustice. I stand beside my people.
BG: What impact do you hope this book will have on Iranian community and solidarity?
NT: What’s beautiful and freeing for me is thinking about how from the moment the book is out in the world, it no longer belongs to Fatemeh and me. It belongs to our community. Our diaspora includes many resilient people living in exile. I immediately think of the Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network that documents injustice against Kurdish people in Iran, or Haalvsh which does the same for Baloch people in southeastern Iran. I hope that by reading our reporting and personal narratives our wider community can connect with the resilience and strength of our people, both in and outside of Iran.
FJ: My hope is that this memoir sparks awareness and opens a space for empathy, not division. That it can serve as a bridge—just as Nilo and I found each other across the regime’s walls—especially between generations of Iranians. I deeply believe in the power of honest storytelling to remind us of what connects us, beyond fear or suspicion.
In a time when the regime has worked so hard to fracture our communities—at home and in exile—I hope this book helps rebuild a sense of solidarity. That it invites us to imagine and work toward a shared future, much like the vision of justice and freedom that Narges Mohammadi and so many of our sisters continue to hold onto, even from behind prison walls.
I’m carrying my mother’s guitar and her dead boyfriend’s clarinet as we walk down the hallway to storage unit CB09. Much of the morning had been spent deliberating what to take—a Santa Claus mug (leave), her father’s framed portrait from the New York State Supreme Court (keep), a set of camping chairs (leave), an air conditioning unit (keep). We leave behind the ashes of three dogs, but the musical instruments make the cut.
I’d been receiving the same texts from her landlord for over a year: “No rent paid.”“Ambulance in front of house; mom found unresponsive.” And I’d spent the last two months driving from my apartment in Brooklyn to the east end of Long Island to move her belongings—first, to the back garage that the landlord let her use to temporarily store her things and now to a 5’ x 5’ storage unit (“Closet Plus”) at Westy’s Self Storage on Jericho Turnpike. It was October and the eviction was official. We needed to get together what she wanted to keep of her life and find a place for it.
We needed to find a place for her, too.
On the drive from the state-funded physical rehabilitation center where she had been since her last overdose, Mom tells me Westy’s is stunning. “People want to get married there,” she says between drags of her cigarette. “No orange metal doors!” She repeats this unattractive detail of modern storage unit facilities like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest: “No wire hangers!”
I’d been receiving the same texts from her landlord for over a year: ‘No rent paid.’
We pull up to what could be a Holiday Inn or a penitentiary. A large multi-story building with few windows, overly landscaped bushes and gated access. Westy’s logo is a sketched portrait of a West Highland White Terrier, its head cocked slightly to the right. I stare at the dog’s open mouth, tongue playfully hanging out, as Tim has us sign paperwork for the moving truck and the unit. Tim loves my mom’s Grateful Dead sweatshirt and tells us not to worry about refilling the tank. He’s got it covered. I can’t tell if this is a normal policy or if he’s being kind, but I choose to believe the latter. When in need of a sign of humanity or goodwill, I am capable of believing a lot of things.
II.
My husband and I witness a stranger abandon a bag of five-week-old kittens on the sidewalk while walking through a graveyard in Brooklyn. We hold their tiny bodies against ours and walk to the local shelter, but it is May and litter season and there is no room for them. We communicate to each other with a look that has been ours since the start and know they will be coming home with us.
Neither of us are good at saying no, but when our concerned family and friends see photos of the kitten’s faces covered in food and watch videos of them playing on our living room floor, even they agree that they would have kept them.
We learn things about kittens: how their eyes are blue at birth and change over time. We hold them up to the light and watch the pigmentation of their irises morph. Blue becomes green becomes yellow. We weigh them to make sure they are gaining enough body fat: 70 to 100 grams each week.
In bed at night, my husband and I discuss the practicalities of what we are taking on. We imagine the five of them at their full adult size, lounging on the couch or stretching on a windowsill. The inevitable stench of the apartment and the bulk purchasing of lint rollers.
But there is comfort in doing the absurd together.
III.
When I pull into the driveway of my mother’s house, the dilapidation is staggering: empty boxes line the driveway; the lawn is filled with trash and broken glass; the buckling floorboards of the front porch have corroded. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it like this, but it manages to surprise me every time. The inside of the house is uninhabitable—a historic signature of my mother’s addiction, which spiralled out of control again after the death of her boyfriend. They met in an addiction program, and while they never stayed sober, they were each other’s last remaining companions.
I had, months prior and after serious reflection (ignoring that Al-Anonic earworm “detach with love”), offered to hire a cleaning company. But when they arrived at the house, the cleaners called to inform me that it was not possible. The state of the place was beyond the level of services they provided. A still life of the moment before another ambulance would take her to yet another ICU. The kitchen counters were littered with the debris of addiction: half-empty pill bottles, a box of Sweet N’ Low resting against molded slices of bread, insects methodically crawling along the lip of a can of Diet Coke. Unopened bags of long-expired prescription medication could be found on nearly every surface of the room. The door to the pantry lay off its hinges, and a dried brown liquid ran down the panels. Exoskeletons of tiny beetles gathered in dusty corners, frozen in their final moments.
In between filling up bags of trash, I sit on the edge of the couch and take long, deep breaths—the kind I have my tenth-grade students do when I’m deescalating a classroom crisis. The task of going through all this stuff is impossible to complete between the two of us and after a few hours of coming to terms with this, we haphazardly comb through the remains.
We do not mention the amount of drugs in the house. We do not hold up the needles and pill bottles to shout, “KEEP?” or “TRASH?” from the top of the staircase. We just move around them, as if they are not the most important objects in the room, as if they are not the reason we are here doing this in the first place.
IV.
In September, my husband falls in love with a woman whose name is Peril. “It writes itself,” I tell a friend, knowing that eventually I will write it too. By December, I am moving out of our home of five years.
Divorce can be a kind of eviction.
On nights when he is out with Peril, I write and pack boxes. I turn my feelings into paragraphs, give them form, shape, a home. Madness becomes metaphor. Sometimes it floods out of the margins, off of the page entirely. On those nights, I focus on the packing. I pull books off the shelves, remove jackets from their hangers, wrap mugs in honeycomb paper. The candle we bought in Woodstock (keep), the guest book from our wedding (leave).
It is not the same as moving my mother. Things here are organized, though there is a similar sense of urgency. The house has become uninhabitable in a different way.
Divorce can be a kind of eviction.
I come across one of the boxes that I had taken back with me from my mother’s house. It contains Christmas miniatures for a village her father had made for her as a child and that she made for us every year until she lost custody. Some of the figurines date back to the 1940s—the paint having chipped from the hat of a caroller, a missing limb from an ice skater or branch from a tree. The more recent additions to the village feature an LED fire that lights up and a skating rink with magnetized parts that move the skaters in figure eights. I unwrap the Lemax resin houses from their bubble wrap, and notice tiny white pills scattered all over the bottom of the box. I almost mistake them for snow.
When I grant myself a break from packing, I press my flushed body against the yellow wall my husband and I painted together during quarantine—when home became a harbor for us, a hideout from the pandemic. When we became a team against the spread of an infection that would, it turns out, not be the cause of our marital demise.
It takes a few months, and somehow no guarantor, but I finally sign a lease for an apartment in a three-family house in Kensington. My students ask how the kittens are doing and I tell them, relieved that they are not inquiring the same from me. Boxes pile up as I remove the familiar objects and place them in their new home.
I light the candle from Woodstock.
I break the boxes down, but some are oversized, too unwieldy, and refuse to be held together by twine. I pull them out to the front of the house and try to fold them, but they are stubborn. I let out a loud sigh that is meant to be a scream.
Secretly, I admire their resistance.
The front door opens and my elderly landlord runs out. I am a person who always assumes I am in trouble and so for a second, I hold my breath. I notice, though, that she has on her winter coat, her house slippers, and before I can say hello, she is bending over to hold a flap of the cardboard down. Her hands remind me of my grandmother’s—sturdy and storied. She looks up at me and yells, “Get on!” Soon enough, the two of us are standing atop the obstinate boxes, jumping up and down. It is the first time I have laughed in weeks. The double wall of paper fiber gives way. We grab the rope and wrap it around the sides, our hands meeting in the middle to tie it together. A high five signals our success.
Winded and out of breath, my landlord says, “You can’t do everything alone.”
V.
I am on the phone with a social worker at the New York hospital that is trying to discharge my mother on the day that Jordan Neely is killed. Neely, a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator and unhoused man, was strangled by a white United States Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny on a Manhattan bound F train.
Mom had been detoxing in the hospital for two weeks but was physically well enough to go home; there was, however, no home for her to return to. I ask the social worker what our options are. He tells me there is a seven-year waitlist for the Section 8 housing in Suffolk County, and a four to five year waitlist for mental health housing in upstate New York. A silence ensues as I wait for more options that do not arrive.
I ask, “And until then?”
“She enters the shelter system.”
There is a lump blooming in my breastbone that I recognize as panic. The first time I noticed it was during tenth grade Earth Science. I spent the earlier years of my education in Catholic School and had not ever considered the formation of celestial bodies, fossils marking the passage of time, the Big Bang Theory—my first existential crisis. Here it was again, that tightness growing somewhere near my sternum, as the social worker compiled a list of available shelters.
Although the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey shows that the city’s vacancy rate has dropped to 1.4 percent—the lowest it has been since 1968—the affordable housing shortage is still dire. Rapidly increasing rent, the defunding and gutting of social services, continues to put low-income individuals and families at risk.
Graffiti appears on subway platforms: “Justice for Jordan”. Friends on the internet share statistics of how many vacant apartments and office spaces there are in New York, criticize the housing crisis and criminalization of homelessness under Mayor Adams. The New Yorker publishes a profile piece on Neely, highlighting the fact that he spent most of his childhood in shelters and transitional housing, his own mother brutally murdered when he was only 14-years-old.
There must be room for us all in this expanding universe.
I am transferred to a nurse at the hospital who informs me that when my mom woke up, she was confused and agitated. They had given her a sedative, an injection of Haloperidol, to calm her down. She had to be physically restrained. When I see her next, a Milky Way of bruises adorn her wrists.
Before Neely was killed, witnesses report he had been screaming that he was hungry and thirsty, that he had been asking for a job. Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, but the state determined that it was justified for Neely to have been physically restrained—a six-minute chokehold that would end his life.
Textbook images of galaxies and nebulae flash before my eyes and I think: There must be room for us all in this expanding universe.
VI.
I remember the contradiction of the scene at my mother’s home after the eviction: She kept so much of the life she was trying to leave. I wondered if these objects—a Celtic cross that had been hung up in every place she’d ever lived (there were many), a pair of work heels (she had stopped working years ago as her addiction became less of the functioning kind), even her parent’s bed sheets—were tethering her to this life, were her attempt at staying. Hoarding as survival mechanism.
And what was my own survival mechanism? The writing of this, the getting it down? Even as I write and re-write the eviction and the divorce, I delete some scenes: the human details of my heartbreak, the initial hysteria of losing a home you thought was yours forever. I do not say, for example, that one day a few weeks after moving out, I returned to the house and cut up the art my husband hung on the walls that Peril had purchased for him (leave).
Or I do say it (keep).
What do we do when we keep losing home? We write ourselves one.
Home is a cardboard trampoline. It is a storage facility with no orange metal doors. A Christmas village or a subway car performance or a hospital bed. It is the place we make for ourselves when love has failed us.
We break and make it where we can: my mother in the shelter, the street kittens brought inside, and a room of my own on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn where I write about it all.
When the 20th-century Black intellectual and organizer W. E. B. Du Bois set out to rescue the Reconstruction era from the slander it had suffered, he felt the weight of the historical baggage confronting him. Across more than 700 pages of lush prose-poetry that composed Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois rewrote the story. He centered the agency of the recently emancipated – the Black men and women who threw off the “chains of a thousand years.”
Twenty-first-century historians have vindicated Du Bois’s take, with recent studies exploring Reconstruction as the nation’s second founding and a testimony of Black survival amid the campaign of white terror that ultimately ended the experiment in multiracial democracy. Yet Du Bois, who also wrote fiction, has found fewer followers among contemporary American novelists, who have more often trod the imaginative terrain of the run-up to the Civil War rather than its long aftermath. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved(1987) represents an exception: even as we think of it as a story about slavery, the novel actually takes place in Reconstruction.
In the work of Nathan Harris, the 33-year-old Chicago-based writer with an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas, that literary landscape is beginning to shift. His Booker Prize-longlisted debut The Sweetness of Water (2021), told the tale of recently emancipated brothers, Prentiss and Landry, as they imagine a world for themselves amid a Reconstruction Georgia occupied by US troops, hostile white Southerners, and the husband and wife pair who befriend the siblings. Amity, Harris’s sophomore novel, out this month, chronicles the relationship of brother and sister Coleman and June, who are legally free but must traverse boundaries and borders both personal and political to realize that freedom, reclaim their relationship, and construct a world for themselves without any guarantees of legal rights or protection.
Last month, I interviewed Harris via a shared Google Doc. It certainly outpaced the handwritten missives that 19th-century Americans sent to one another from the battlefield to the homefront. We spoke about narrative craft and historical content, Toni Morrison’s legacy for writers of Black historical fiction, and the links between the past and present US at a moment when news reports about ICE raids and legal challenges to birthright citizenship emphasize the abiding stakes of Reconstruction today.
Gregory Laski: Amity, like The Sweetness of Water, takes place in the Reconstruction era. What made you decide to stick with this historical period for your second novel?
Nathan Harris: Honestly, I never intended to return to this period. Part of me even wanted to avoid it. The postbellum South is so steeped in horror that, during research, there were times I felt like quitting. But there are two sides to that coin, because it was also the research that kept me going, kept highlighting parts of the past that just felt captivating to me. In this instance I came across stories of Confederate loyalists who fled to Mexico after the war, hoping to recreate the lives they’d lost. It was a kind of fantasy, this belief that they could reclaim their independence and find refuge from a United States that had rejected them. Alongside them were many of their formerly enslaved people, effectively marooned in Mexico. I had never seen that story told in fiction before. I thought maybe I could shine a light on that specific window in time, in that particular place, and that it might resonate with readers. Amity is what came out of that.
GL: You’ve mentioned, in other interviews, that you’d not been exposed to much fiction set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and I wonder if that’s partly a function of how few contemporary novelists have grappled with the Reconstruction era?
NH: I have no idea. Maybe I’m just not seeing it! There’s so much great historical fiction being published these days, and I know I’m missing some incredible work. It’s certainly rich terrain to explore for novelists, and a very formative time in our nation’s history.
GL: Yeah, I hear you. I mean, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch(2023) is set in the 1870s, but in terms of books focused on the Black freedom struggle, I could only think of Beloved (1987) by the late, great Toni Morrison. I actually took to Bluesky to check myself, asking folks to name 21st-century novels set in Reconstruction, and a famous scholar of African American literature replied with a plot summary of a book whose title she couldn’t recall offhand. Turned out, it was TheSweetness of Water. I think that exercise confirmed my thesis! Do you have any ideas about why we don’t have more contemporary fiction set in this era?
It was a kind of fantasy, this belief that they could reclaim their independence and find refuge from a United States that had rejected them.
NH: Far be it from me to pathologize why authors might gravitate towards any time period, genre, subject. What I know is that Toni Morrison was there early on, as you said, and she made space for the rest of us. Nowadays, to our great fortune, there are an unending number of Black authors inventing their own fiction based on our collective pasts that might not be set in that particular moment in time but certainly are in conversation with it. We’re all working along the same historical continuum, and that sense of interconnectedness is what feels most powerful to me.
GL: Who are your models for writing historical fiction about this period, or historical fiction in general?
NH: There are many, but I’ll give you one to start, Edward P. Jones. My first editor, Ben George, gave me a signed copy of The Known World when my first novel was published. I couldn’t think of a better gift. He actually visited The Michener Center when I was in school and I was too terrified to take his workshop. Probably for the best; having my early work in front of him might have been a death knell before it had time to mature.
Another influence, especially on Amity, was Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Mr. Stevens was a guiding light when I was shaping Coleman’s character. Both are dealing with repressed emotions in very fascinating ways. I can’t say I managed what Ishiguro did, not by any stretch, but that novel was a touchstone and an inspiration nonetheless.
GL: I’m curious about the creative timeline of the two novels, whose publication dates span four years. Was The Sweetness of Water already out in the world when you began what would become Amity? Or were you working on both simultaneously?
NH: My first novel took a rather slow road toward publication, and I used that time to start in on Amity. Nothing truly creative with The Sweetness of Water was taking place then. So there was definitely some overlap but it wasn’t like I was writing two novels concurrently. I’ve had other authors tell me that the best thing to do to get your mind right when you’re enduring the stress of publication is to write something fresh. The early pages of Amity were exactly that for me.
GL: In the acknowledgements to Amity, you cite a number of scholarly works on 19th-century US and Native history, calling the studies “instrumental in the writing of this novel.” How do you draw on facts from these historical sources to fuel the creation of fictional figures and worlds?
NH: I just try to immerse myself in the time period and use what I learn to enhance my work. The research shapes the language, the sense of place helps ground scenes. My novels would be impossible without the true scholars who came before me. I’m really indebted to them.
GL: You also mention that you did research at the border. Tell us about what that process looked like, and how it informed Amity’s concerns with geopolitical questions of territory and land rights, between Mexico and Texas in particular?
I’ve had other authors tell me that the best thing to do to get your mind right when you’re enduring the stress of publication is to write something fresh.
NH: I felt I needed to see the region firsthand. I had a wonderful guide who showed me around, took me on a tour of Big Bend, and shared, with me, the history of the area. It was such an intriguing melting pot, shaped by so many different indigenous tribes, settlers, nations, and shifting borders. But mostly the trip gave me the sense impressions I needed to imagine what it was like for my characters. It’s a very unique area. I can only imagine how daunting it must have been for someone encountering the desert for the first time.
GL: How did the physicality of Big Bend, and also its history, shape your portrayal of Amity as a place in the novel? As I read, I sort of had Morrison’s chronicle of all-Black towns in her brilliant novel Paradise (1997) in the back of my mind, and because you mentioned maroonage earlier, I am now thinking of it as maybe a maroon colony too.
NH: Regarding Big Bend, it was a very unique mix of tranquility – the absolute quiet at night was a sort I was not used to, having spent a great portion of my adult life in the city – alongside that daunting feeling I spoke of earlier, brought on by the epic scale of the mountains, the vastness of the desert. I could go on but suffice to say you’re hitting on exactly what I felt. That this was a place someone could escape to and find peace; a place where someone giving chase might have second thoughts.
I’ll just add that the Black Seminoles lived side by side with the Seminoles. They shared a great deal culturally and had a strong allegiance, but it was a complex social relationship that sets their communities apart from the all-Black towns I was used to reading about.
GL: When Publishers Weekly announced the deal for Amity, the book’s title was The Rose of Jericho. Both have rich symbolic meaning in the narrative, for June’s arc especially. Who made the change, and when?
NH: It was a mutual decision made fairly early on.
GL: Did you encounter Rose of Jericho, the tumbleweed that your characters call a “resurrection plant,” during your visit to Big Bend?
NH: It’s funny you ask, as I actually bought some! They sell Rose of Jericho as a souvenir around Big Bend. I still have it stored in the desk where I write. I had absolutely no idea you could bring some home with you but it’s sort of the perfect little memento of the trip and my time writing the novel.
GL: As I read Amity, I also was rereading Sweetness. What struck me was how sensitively you depict such complicated relationships between Black and white characters. In Sweetness, for example, the formerly enslaved brothers Prentiss and Landry should have little reason to desire any interaction with the white characters George and Isabelle Walker, much less to trust them – yet the story repeatedly underscores moments of “sympathy” among the cohort. As a writer, how do you craft relationships that at once recognize the historical realities that would close off routes to cross-racial alliance and reveal opportunities for unexpected openings?
NH: One reason I enjoy writing into the past is that I have these opportunities to play around with class and racial politics during very heightened moments between a diverse cast of characters. Prentiss and Landry might not desire to have interactions with George, or any white characters, but what choice do they have, really? The world they inhabit is a white one. They must navigate their newfound freedom amid the very people who once enslaved them.
I approach these relationships as I do any other. You search for the humanity in every single character, no matter how good, how evil, and relay it onto the page. As I delve further and further into the characters’ psychology, what comes to the surface is often unexpected even to me. When it’s pat, or if it feels like I am only doing what I want the character to do, as opposed to what they would do, is when the work becomes routine, and I know I need to dig deeper.
GL: Staying with questions about technique, Sweetness deploys close third-person narration spread across the book’s multiple characters. By contrast, Amity shifts to the first-person perspective of Coleman for the bulk of the chapters, but retains close third person for June’s story, which appears in intercutting sections. How did you arrive at that structure?
Prentiss and Landry might not desire to have interactions with George, or any white characters, but what choice do they have, really?
NH: The narrative dictates the requirements of the form. Coleman needed to tell his own story. There was no getting around that. To filter him through a third-person perspective would have diluted something essential about his person and something essential about his story. It didn’t feel as necessary for June, and I was able to explore her inner life with a bit of distance. The contrast also creates a dynamic element to the novel, more texture and breathability.
GL: I understood Amity as a bit of a supplement to – or maybe a refraction of – the more hopeful vision of Reconstruction that Sweetness offers, with the possibility of Black-white cooperation and economic equality. Amity trains its sights on the characters of color, especially the interiority of June and Coleman’s sibling relationship, and near the end of the novel, you write that June’s “store of sympathy” for the family that enslaved her “had gone dry.” It’s as if the two books, read together, chart various historical paths that Reconstruction might have taken – and, at least in terms of its defining ideal of interracial democracy, still might take. Does that reading resonate at all with you?
NH: I really do find it gratifying when people arrive at such articulate and thoughtful interpretations of my work! It resonates, yes, though it wasn’t something I consciously set out to do when writing Amity. Still, I love that there’s now an opportunity to consider the two novels side by side, and to see them in conversation with one another.
GL: You said in a 2022 interview that the Reconstruction era “reflects” current conflicts about race and class, and even contending ideas about “our nation.” Revisiting that statement now, and having published Amity, do you view the links between this particular American past and our present in 2025 similarly?
NH: Absolutely. If anything, those links feel even more urgent now. Which is a bit depressing. Nonetheless, authors like me keep reaching toward the past to try to make sense of the present climate. I will say there’s something grounding in it too, almost therapeutic, which is also perhaps why readers keep returning to historical fiction as well. The country endured then, with all its flaws and divisions, and somehow found its way to this moment in one piece. We have to hold on to some sense of hope, some belief that we can keep going. I think of Coleman or June on their journey, which feels endless, with so many obstacles, and yet they persist. That’s what we all must try to do. Persist in the face of so much darkness.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofReplicaby Lisa Low, which will be published on March 24th, 2026 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can pre-order your copyhere.
Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.
“The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low states in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from the outside, as if through an open ceiling: “Like any good girl, / I became good / at watching myself.” The poem itself becomes a site of investigation, reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. These powerful and direct poems offer a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity.
Sure to appeal to readers of Monica Youn and Claudia Rankine, Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from the others.
Here is the cover, designed by adam bohannon, with original artwork by Yuqing Zhu:
Lisa Low: While searching for cover art, I stumbled on an old listing for a workshop led by Yuqing Zhu in 2021 in Chicago. I immediately loved the description—“Yuqing Zhu creates self-portrait collages to uncover a personal mythology, channeling her family’s past into an allegory to the future”—and all of her work I found online. Even though the workshop probably showed up in my searches because I live in Chicago myself, the geographical connection made it all feel a little meant to be.
I love Zhu’s “Celadon, Porcelain” and how it makes self-representation playful, surreal, even wistful, yet also an act of strength—mixed feelings that I also want to convey in my poems. In Replica, sidestepping readers’ racial expectations while writing about yourself becomes an impossible task. This alternative self-portrait—the jade green that makes me think of sickness (nausea, envy) and alienation, the nod to blue-and-white ceramics like dishes I grew up using, the open mouth—accomplishes so much of what I hope to do in Replica in creating new ways to be seen. I absolutely love the scale and off-centeredness in adam bohannon’s design that also adds to the tension. I’m so grateful to both Yuqing and adam for this cover that contextualizes my book!
adam bohannon: well, what a gift to be presented with the piece of art we’re using for the cover. i kinda couldn’t stop staring at it, which is always a good sign. several ideas immediately presented themselves. and the path to the final design was pretty quick, which i think is thanks to the fabulous art. like a lot of things in life, less seemed like more: simple type, work the color palette, enjoy the directness and intrigue of the one-word title.
i’m so happy that we went with the added visual hook of having our title type peek out + wrap around the art!
one of my favorite designs ever. and one of the happiest journeys.
Yuqing Zhu: I completed this piece, “Celadon, Porcelain,” back in 2017 when I was just a college student beginning on her artistic journey. I never imagined it would receive a second life on the cover of a poetry collection, and I’m so deeply grateful to Lisa for selecting it. Like most of my work, this piece is a self-portrait that taps into my cultural heritage. The title and imagery reference the two most enduring forms of earthenware originating in China — celadon, which is glazed in a jade green color, and blue-and-white painted porcelain. I adore how bowls and other vessels are means of asking for and receiving, and also of offering. Here I depict myself as a vessel with the capacity to hold anything the world has to give and also perhaps offer something in return.
or, a breathless double-sonnet of you-misunderstand-me
Click to enlarge
A Portrait of Black Man Wrestling with His Secret Self
or, an inner cosplay ode to the singer Brandy
Click to enlarge and scroll
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