In the window of my grandfather’s corner store,
a cat dressed in my hijab. I feed her titans
of war, pluck Muhammed Ali out her chest wound,
sharpen her a legend in the lake at midnight.
Outside, a wave of Yemeniyat beat a man
after he gropes someone’s daughter
in the crowded street. They do it all in abayas.
Full-veiled niqabs. Unstoppable ninjas with
a hundred power-ups. And I know each one
had a bodega cat as a sibling. We learned
the ecology of courage, how to weave one
into our biology, the kind with a third-world
gut and claws out for the cops. What’s the word
for a bodega cat’s disciple? Vroomed exhaust,
indecent daughter, gray impression on the grid,
ruthless? We keep our scars. They throb
when we pass their glowing eyes, invasive
as a second language. If anyone has taught us
to fend for ourselves, it’s the cats on Tremont Ave.
The cats here are made from nothing. One day,
nameless limbs, small square of sidewalk, like a fig
fallen too soon. The next, a gang member’s mascot,
beast born from an Arab’s love and coked-up rats.
A woman in tragedy also grows that fast,
turns from whimpers to wind in seconds
with the right kind of violence, and after,
makes herself a home for the lost who look
for it. Even the drunks that enter can sense
these cats are off-kilter. They take her on anyway,
leave with one less eye and night terrors.
She gobbles the glass bottles they swing, spits
them out as bullets, laps their blood like
a creature of darkness. She conflates the brute
with the hero. She kills her kids with calmness,
knows how these streets latch on to anything
too green. Bodega Cat Sensei doesn’t give a single
fuck. What is there to fear when you’ve already
licked the edge? I want to be that baddie.
That bitch. That witchy intuition wrung tight
as my braids. Won’t find me frozen in the woods
with my scarf stuffed in my mouth. Won’t find me
as a scraggle scaled salmon swimming upriver,
flung into a muddy ditch and left to rot. I’ll be funnel
of yellow heat who goes running into a field.
All I want is to be an adequate ancestor
to the Yemeni women who come after. Who visit
my grave with bundles of nut meat for their great-
auntie with the immortal hips, that, myth says, broke
high facility fences and let out all the paperless.
Future long-haired girls gliding above all
that had happened before them. Who will salt
their stories with my own living and become
part of it. So after this lunch break, I’ll head to work
and whistle back at the guy who shouts, Nice tits
because it’s true. I do have nice tits. And a nice
peach emoji, and a birth story, a Khaleesi
walking out the fire. Let them find me dressed
only in leaves, bathing with bodega cats
and their panther mothers, breasts wagging
akimbo. I can’t forget those women who clapped
back. Who did not wear worry with each black
layer. Did not let things happen as they usually do
then drop like rotted fruit when it was over.
When I came out as a lesbian at nineteen, I had never kissed a girl. My only representation was pirated streams of movies and shows like Carol, The L Word, and the uber-popular Orange is The New Black. In these (mostly mediocre) forms of media, I envisioned my future, filled with a large sapphic friend group and love that would hopefully transcend the cheating, violence, and death that followed every fictional lesbian.
Now, only five years later, I am in awe of the beauty and creativity that stems from the lesbian community. Being a lesbian has been an overwhelmingly rewarding and fruitful experience that I’ve shared with such diverse and incredible people from varying cultures and with differing relationships to their gender.
Lesbians, bisexual women, and queer women share so much experience and history, and I’m grateful to be living in a time where we can support each other while telling our own authentic stories. From the revitalizing of The L Word to shelves upon shelves of realistic and award-winning lesbian and queer tales, the broader queer community has showed up for the next generation in miraculous ways.
Sexuality is a unique and sometimes fluid experience, but the authors below have referred to themselves as lesbians in interviews, bios, or tweets. As a lesbian writer, I find that these books and authors make my world brighter and less lonely. So for Lesbian Day of Visibility, a day I will be spending happily in love with my girlfriend and surrounding by the queer friendgroup I once imagined, cozy up with these tales of lesbians discovering themselves, their bodies, and their futures.
This rich and luxurious novel follows three generations of women from a Tawainese-American family. The majority of the book is from the Daughter’s perspective, as she navigates her relationships to her Mother and Ama, as well as her own body (that is growing a tail) and her enchanting neighbor, Ben. Daughter and Ama begin communicating via letters that emerge from holes in the yard. It is easy to get lost in K-Ming Chang’s intensely lore-driven prose that reveals family secrets, desires, and histories.
Forthcoming this June, Kristen Arnett’s new novel follows a married lesbian couple with a troubled son. Sammie is a stay-at-home mother who has rearranged her career to take care of her son, Samson, even though she is not naturally very maternal. Her wife, Monika, is emotionally distant and doesn’t provide much reprieve to Sammie’s monotonous and silently growing fear of her son. The book begins when Samson is a toddler and jumps to his teenage years, where their problems are still ever-unfolding and growing. A crooked portrait of dysfunctional partnership, parenthood, and resolution within oneself.
In the pristine tourist paradise of Montego Bay, Jamaica, lies a sordid reality for the natives of the island. Delores is the mother of Margot, a hotel worker by day and a sex worker by night, and Thandi, a precocious student who her family will do anything to support. Although Margot is potentially a lesbian, she uses her managerial position at the hotel to gain clients so she can send Thandi to a private school. Thandi, however, feels desperately out of place at the primarily white school. Nicole Dennis-Benn’s use of native dialects and dynamic characterization make her world feel dazzlingly haunted.
Set in post-apocalyptic Vancouver, Kirilow lives in an exiled community of women, some of whom can clone themselves (“doublers”) or regrow their organs (“starfish”). Then a mysterious flu sweeps through the town and her lover, a starfish with terminally ill clone sisters, dies. Kirilow, eager to save her community, leaves and finds a new starfish. But before they can save anyone, they’re kidnapped by a group of powerful men who are being detrimentally impacted by the new flu. In this cyberpunk novel, Lai creates a fever dream of a world made from the remnants of the one we know.
When Wendy, a trans woman with a group of trans friends and a Mennonite family, discovers evidence that her late Opa might have been transgender, she ignores it. Between her recently deceased Oma, and her and her friends’ addictions, dives into sex work, and mental illness, there is plenty on Wendy’s plate. This novel looks unflinchingly into the breadth of experiences trans women can and do face, while never losing sight of the love within their community. Plett’s new collection of short stories, A Dream of a Woman, also focused on queer trans women, is forthcoming this September.
A hybrid memoir of essays and poems, Funeral Diva mourns for a generation of gay Black men and queer people who died during the AIDS epidemic. Looking back to New York City during the late 1980s, Sneed reflects on coming out and losing so much of the Black queer community, as well as focusing on today’s crisis of police brutality and the Covid-19 pandemic. With other prose tackling her childhood, commentary on media, and navigating the world as a Black lesbian, this collection is concentrated and devastating.
The daughter of two addicts in a tumultuous marriage, Madden recounts growing up as a lonely Jewish, bi-racial, gay girl in the late ‘90s Boca Raton, Florida. With a captivating voice and gravity, this memoir in essays brings you into her world at full speed, complete with the trauma, confusion, and heaviness of addiction and assault. Years later, when her father dies, Madden reckons with how to grieve someone you never fully had.
In this collection of poems, Mukomolova explores her identity as a Russian Jewish lesbian New Yorker through the folk tales of Baba Yaga and Vasilyssa. While some poems embody the woods and lore, others are grounded in a fast-paced New York with Craigslist missed connections and lots of lesbian sex. Sometimes these worlds meet and cross over each other in outstanding ways.
In an early essay in Girlhood, Melissa Febos describes a pond that she used to frequent as a child: “Despite its small circumference, our pond plummeted fifty feet at its deepest point.” This could be a metaphor for female adolescence, the overarching theme of Febos’s book. Through the interconnected essays of this collection, she reveals the seeming small circumferences we often place on our girlhoods or those which are imposed on them. As she plumbs the depths of her coming of age, we see horrors more ordinary than we think, pleasures less desirable than we might realize.
The author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me, Febos is both an essayist’s essayist and a writer who transcends the very concept of genre. Girlhood’s researched reportage is intimate, poetic, and revelatory as the personal narrative itself. The book seems to listen as much as it talks. In this way, Girlhood does what an essay collection should do at its best: offer the reader a companion, fellowship beyond the aspirational profit economy models of self-care. Girlhood is our girl, there for us, sincerely and enduringly, as we begin to reconsider the circumferences we may place on the stories we tell of ourselves.
Febos and I talked via email about opening up closed cases, writing as an act of appreciation, and what we really mean by care.
Nina Sharma: I remember hearing you at AWP DC 2017 at “Candlelight Vigil for Freedom for Freedom of Expression,” fifty or sixty writers speaking up just as darkness of night was settling over DC. We were processing Trump’s inauguration, all the feelings of grief and helplessness that came with it, and you said, “then I woke up the next day and I realized I am not a child.” This makes me think about how being a child, being a girl child, is something that, even as a woman grows from girlhood, is a label or script she is asked to never outgrow. What was it like to be in touch, if not in conversation, with your girl child self continuously through the course of working on this collection?
Melissa Febos: Oh, it was so uncomfortable! In many ways, this book is an anthology of the girlhood experiences that I sought to exile for many years. Not in a deep, repression kind of way, but just in a this-case-is-closed kind of way. I had a story about what happened and how it affected me, and I didn’t really want to reconsider it. Except it wasn’t the true story, or at least the whole story, and so I kept circling back to that time, like picking at a loose thread. I had already learned that the only way to be free of the past is to face it, but I still sometimes return to the hope that there is another way. It was painful to go back to that younger version of me and really listen to her—sometimes it did feel like an actual conversation!—but the reward has been so profound. It was through writing this book that I became more able to love that young self, acknowledge the full breadth of her experience, and respect the ways that she’d succeeded at surviving.
It was painful to go back to that younger version of me and really listen to her—sometimes it did feel like an actual conversation!
NS: We have a guiding Febos-ism in our two-writer household. My partner often references a lesson you offered your students: “the story you told yourself to get through it may not be the story you need to tell on the page.” This sentiment crops up in “Kettle Holes”: “We don’t need the truth to survive, and sometimes our survival depends on its denial.” Can you talk about the process and perhaps pleasures of cracking into those things which we have survived?
MF: Ha! I love that. What an honor, to get quoted regularly in a household of two other writers. This sentiment has proved true for me, over and over, and this book is certainly no exception. “Kettle Holes” was the first essay I wrote of this collection and in a way it was a catalyst for the rest of the essays. I had this experience of remembering a terrible experienc of being bullied as a kid, and then went and found my description of it in my childhood diary and saw that I had rewritten the experience as totally benign, as if I had been playing with a friend. It was chilling, and heartbreaking. I knew that I had done a similar revising on a lot of the hardships of my girlhood, and basically decided to go find those revisions and undo them.
There was a moment while writing every one of these essays when the familiar narrative of an event—that I wasn’t bullied, it was no big deal, it didn’t affect me much, etc.—cracked under my closer examination and the truth spilled out. It was always a bit chilling, but also so satisfying, because in that moment, the truth that I’d been carrying inside me all of the intervening years was finally acknowledged.
NS: I really loved the ways your partner, Donika, comes into the narrative. Donika holds up a mirror for you but not in the “mirror test” way, nor the testing that follows through girlhood. It’s more like Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror:” “I find it hard to believe you don’t know the beauty you are but if you don’t let me be your eyes and your hand to your darkness so you won’t be afraid.” As someone who writes about their beloved a fair amount, I really appreciated the ways you did.
I think we need people to serve as mirrors in order to build a more accurate and generous picture of ourselves.
MF: I love that song so much! Nico’s little husky voice—I’m going to have to listen to it after this. And yes, I think there’s a lot of belief out there that we have to love ourselves in order to love well, and while I get the logic that undergirds that thinking, it also hasn’t really been borne out by my experience. Being loved by folks who know how to do so well—my mother, Donika, many close friends of mine, even dogs!—has taught me how to love myself. I think we need people to serve as mirrors in order to build a more accurate and generous picture of ourselves. It’s not sustainable to depend on others entirely for our self-esteem, of course. We have to be willing to step up to do that work in ourselves, but to have someone there to model it for us is so precious. Maybe one of my secret (or not so secret) hopes for this book is that it models a path to self-love, functions as a kind of mirror that shows how the pains of the past can exist on the same continuum as a more generous relationship to self.
NS: Something I always think about is the more I write into the realities of my relationship with my partner, the more, paradoxically, we become characters on the page, telling a story both about and beyond us. How do you think writing into personal relationships informs a narrative of personal growth? And how might the story of you and Donika outsize that work? In other words, how does personal becomes political?
MF: I relate to that a lot. It’s funny, because you’re right that when I write about us, we become these characters, playing out a single story or set of stories, with a weird kind of integrity that is distinct from that which we have as actual people. But also, it’s through writing about us that I more closely examine our interactions and relationship. Externalizing the familiar can make it more visible, you know? Over the course of the day we might have any number of interactions that are sweet or challenging, or whatever. Like, there’s a scene in one essay where Donika compares me to a baby tiger, sort of reframing my view of my body in a different, more positive way. In the moment, I was like, aw, thank you, but also a little dismissive, maybe, because it felt too vulnerable. But when I wrote about it, I was basically bawling. To see a moment like that located in the structure of a particular narrative, in this case that of my relationship to my body, it suddenly becomes clear how meaningful it is. I could give so many examples like this! Of all kinds of relationships, too. In this way writing is really a practice of appreciation, of truly looking at the people and experiences that are so familiar we can neglect to see them fully.
NS: While your essays always feel intersectional, differences within girlhood were made explicit in this collection. There is attention in particular to differences of racial and cultural backgrounds throughout the narrative. I notice Girlhood uses the term “collaborate”: all the various collaborations we engage in throughout girlhood and how they may follow, and revise, as we grow. Could you speak a bit about what “collaboration” means to you and the power of interracial collaboration in particular?
MF: It’s such a big job, undoing the harms of patriarchy and white supremacy! I don’t think we can do it without immense collaboration. It was really important to me when writing this book that I didn’t neglect to acknowledge the variations in experience for women of different races (along with other kinds of difference), when we are talking about everything from slut-shaming to consent. I also didn’t want to speak for anyone else’s experience. That’s one of the reasons why I brought so many other voices into these essays. In terms of interracial collaboration, well, I believe we need it and that it’s possible. I grew up in an interracial family, have a multi-ethnic background, and also identify as white, so I’ve always had an awareness of it.
At this point in my life, care is really an action more than a feeling. Care is the work of love.
When we are talking about feminism, I think it’s entirely the work of white feminists to address their own whiteness and internalized racism so that we can become safe collaborators for BIPOC feminists. This goes back to the suffragists, right? Further, even. Audre Lorde famously said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree,” and it’s an attitude that still needs to be taken up by folks of all kinds of privilege who call themselves activists or leftists or liberals or whatever. For me, this work has meant taking on the lifelong project of understanding how racism and white supremacy have informed my own consciousness and behavior, and undoing it so that I can be a better collaborator.
NS: Something I always have to remind myself is that there is no being “good at” healing but this book feels like a sincere act of healing, for oneself and as an offering to the reader. Maybe it’s because you don’t make a catchword out of healing. What does care mean to you?
MF: I’ve thought a lot about this. I have had a thorny relationship to receiving care for a lot of my life, and have also sometimes thought that feeling a sense of care was enough to call love. At this point in my life, care is really an action more than a feeling. I can have affection or sympathy for someone, recognition of their situation, but if it stays in me, a passive experience, it isn’t care. Care is the work of love. It is the conversation, the gesture, the march, the cooking, the play, the work of art, the slow building of a consciousness that holds all of myself, and more than myself.
What would the world look like without men? How would countries function with governments led by women? Would workplaces become less toxic and hostile? What would the cultural shift in what we read, watch, and listen to look like? The speculative exercise of imagining the world with only women made me think in a different way about the gender dynamics at play in our patriarchal society today.
My debut novel The End of Menexplores a world in which a pandemic quickly kills 90% of the world’s male population while women are immune. Set between 2025 and 2031, the book follows Amanda Maclean, the Scottish doctor who treats Patient Zero and is trying to keep her husband and sons safe; Catherine Lawrence, an anthropologist who is determined to tell the stories of those who are lost and left behind; and Lisa Michael, a virologist trying to create a cure.
Truly memorable speculative fiction blends the practical and the emotional. In The End of Men, I wanted to show a hyper-realistic speculative vision of a world in which only 10% of men survive and the world must reshape and rebuild in a totally different way. But I also wanted to dig into the emotional ramifications of this new society. What does it feel like to be widowed or lose your partner when almost every other woman in a straight relationship has also experienced that loss? How do you recover from the loss of sons and brothers and fathers and friends?
Here are seven books that show, in some way, what a world could look like without men.
This short, perfectly-plotted novel follows Ada as she is forced to leave her town and becomes an outlaw. Set in the 1800s, decades after a plague has killed the majority of the population, it’s a woman’s ability to bear children that determines her value and safety in this new world. Ada finds a gang of outlaws—all women and non-binary people—who have created a safe oasis for themselves outside of the confines of this dystopian world.
This intensely creepy YA novel follows a core trio of three friends at a school taken over by “the Tox,” a terrifying disease that causes their bodies to break apart. The three main characters— Hetty, Reese and Byatt—have lived like this for two years. Their girls-only boarding school is on an island, with only a few female teachers to keep them sane and safe (or so you would hope). When Byatt goes missing, Hetty does everything she can to find her. Men are introduced later in the book, but the central core of a group of women—physically falling apart, isolated, but with close, twisty, dark friendship bonding them—is what drew me in.
This isn’t technically a book showing a reality without men, but it is an extraordinary piece of non-fiction that shows how different the world would look if it wasn’t built by and for men. Covering everything from the lack of testing of drugs on women which puts our health at risk to how cars are more dangerous for women to the fact that entire cities are designed without women’s needs in mind, this book both enraged and galvanized me.
After a storm kills the grown men of a Norwegian island, Vardø, only women and 13 boys and elders are left. From the first pages of this gorgeously written historical novel, my heart was in my mouth. The gripping aftermath of the storm shows how the women have to reform their identities and relationships that have been defined by their husbands, fathers, and sons. The exploration of women’s power and resilience is brilliantly done, and its intersection with witchcraft and indictment of men who fear women make it one of my favorite novels.
Three sisters live on an eerie island, looked after by their parents in a world that is post-apocalyptic and unexplained. After their father doesn’t return from a supply trip, the girls start to break apart their mother’s explanations and things become stranger. An insular, claustrophobic novel in which the few men who appear are out of place and unwelcome in this female world, The Water Cure is an exploration of control, sisterhood, family, and what it means to be “safe” as a woman.
A sci-fi classic, this weird and spiky novel uses multiple, parallel universes to explore gender, reproduction (children are born through the merging of ova), and radical ideas of childcare. One of the four worlds of the novel, Whileaway, is a female-only utopian society in which men supposedly died many hundreds of years ago (starting in “PC 17,” PC being Preceding Catastrophe) from a plague to which women are immune.
It would feel remiss not to include the ultimate, fantastical women-only world. Wonder Woman’s homeland—Paradise Island, also known as Themyscira—is an island from which men are banned under the penalty of death. The comic, a favorite of mine, follows Diana’s first year protecting the earth.
At some point in the past few years, I’ve noticed that a certain kind of wildly popular self-help guru—male, young, obsessed with optimizing one’s life—has gotten particularly intense about reading. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, reads 20 pages of a book every morning and maintains several “Best Books of All-Time” lists, including a list of “Books with the Most Page-For-Page Wisdom.” Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, lays out in one of his blog posts how to read faster and remember more of what you read. “Scan for important words only,” he advises. “You get 90% of the meaning with about 50% of the words.” Manson, too, maintains his own lists of “Best Books of All Time.”
The king of reading as a form of self-improvement, though, is undoubtedly Ryan Holiday, the author of Ego Is the Enemy, The Obstacle Is the Way, and Stillness Is the Key, as well as books on marketing, “media manipulation,” and the trial that ultimately took down Gawker Media. He’s also a vocal proponent of Stoicism—as in, the ancient Greek school of philosophy. He runs a website called The Daily Stoic, which publishes articles on “How to Plan Your Day Like Marcus Aurelius,” and from which you can buy a pewter bust of Seneca or a medallion that says “Memento Mori” on it. Holiday writes about his own reading habits with messianic fervor. He advocates reading extremely long books, buying books over borrowing them from libraries, and taking extensive notes by hand on index cards, which he then files away into categories. “Wisdom, not facts,” he writes. “We’re not just looking [sic] random pieces of information. What’s the point of that?”
What would I be like when I emerged from this 13-day course a fully optimized reading bodhisattva capable of absorbing a book’s infinite wisdom with a single glance?
Ryan Holiday is also the creator of Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge, a $50, 13-day course developed in 2019 whose promotional page promises that the course will teach me how to “Remember more of what you read to reach your true potential” and “Make more time for reading by replacing dead time with reading.” The page features no less than four red “Buy now” buttons. Months into a pandemic that seemed to have no end, I stumbled across this course and wondered: How exactly would a self-help bro teach me how to read better? Might I gain some clarity on what life-improving benefits we actually derive from reading? And what would I be like when I emerged from this 13-day course a fully optimized reading bodhisattva capable of absorbing a book’s infinite wisdom with a single glance? I got out my credit card.
Day 1: Start A Commonplace Book
You may be wondering what on earth I—someone who, insofar as I’ve made a professional name for myself, has done it as a book critic—was even doing in this part of the internet. Mostly, it started with a bad relationship. Circa 2017, I spent day after day reading shitty blog posts that doled out relationship and self-improvement advice—guiltily, by myself, and in an incognito tab, the way most people consume porn. Eventually, I stumbled across a whole ecosystem of self-help bros telling me how I might fix my life, and started reading them religiously. Something about the way they looked at life resonated with me, probably because I was dating an extremely troubled tech bro who was also constantly telling me how I might fix my life (and his).
Back then, in those miserable days of 2017, I had also started writing book reviews. Maybe if I just read more, I thought then, I might get closer to figuring out what it is I actually wanted to do with my life, or at least more closely align the disappointing external trappings of my life with what I felt inside (sad and literary).
If the purveyors of self-help are talking about something, it’s a good bet that the subject has become a source of guilty, deep-rooted despair.
These days, I no longer read articles dispensing relationship advice in a private tab on my phone late into the night, but the way gurus like Ryan Holiday think about reading—as a “habit” to be “optimized”—has lingered. If the purveyors of self-help are talking about something, it’s a good bet that the subject has become a source of guilty, deep-rooted despair in American life. And the way Holiday has talked about reading for years now seems to have been prescient: he, and this course, tap into the fact that reading is something we’re now all deeply anxious about.
Consider that the internet now seems to be filled with advice on how to read (more mindfully, more diversely, more quickly, more lengthily, more weekly, but mostly just more), and with people writing about their monumental pandemic reading projects and far more people beating themselves up because they can’t bring themselves to read anything at all, which means they’ve failed in some vague but definite way. All these lists and tips—“Read during commercial breaks!”—don’t make sense unless we’re haunted by an ambient conviction that however much we’re reading, it’s not enough. (Unless you get to 100 books a year, upon which I hear you instantly attain enlightenment.)
And there are all those vexed questions about format: do audiobooks “count”? Do e-readers “count”? Despite the lists’ assurances that actually there are no rules when it comes to reading, we can’t shake the feeling that there’s something simply more virtuous about glue bindings and dog-eared pages. That reading is now an oddly sanctified and protected activity, something that exalts and improves the person who can muster up the willpower to crack open a book.
I consider myself an earnest book-reading type as much as anything else, but something about this blunt insistence on reading as an undifferentiated good doesn’t quite sit right with me. Isn’t it an oversimplification to say that reading any book, regardless of its content, is a good thing—and even, as these tips suggest, the best thing one can do with one’s time?I worry that the way we talk about reading now has taken a turn for the sentimental: it’s reading as lifestyle signifier or personality indicator, reading as a fetishy idea, instead of something that people just, you know, do.
I suppose what I’m skeptical of is the notion that the mere act of reading can “improve” anyone. It feels a little more complicated than that. Back in 2017, I started reading books for money out of a vague sense that I might gain a clearer idea of myself and my own mind—that I might, in some way, become better. So, if anything, I’m the perfect counterexample: If reading a lot is really supposed to improve and exalt us, why do I still feel totally inadequate all the time?
I get an email from “Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Challenge.” It is festooned with pithy quotes, generic book-themed line drawings, and illustrative anecdotes about great men of history, a regular sausage-fest: Ronald Reagan, Marcus Aurelius, H.L. Mencken, Charles Darwin, Beethoven, Mark Twain.
The email itself provides unobjectionable advice: start taking notes on the books you read and collect those notes in a single place (your “commonplace book”) for easy reference. I do this already—I’ve developed a byzantine yet highly technological system that involves the notes app on my phone, my email, and an inordinate number of text files—and so the email tells me I should “make a commitment to refresh how you use your commonplace book.”
“If you don’t find anything in your current book multiple days in a row,” the email continues, “consider discarding it and picking a new book, one that you’ve chosen specifically because it promises to impart lessons. Think of specific topics you want to cover: devote the next ten pages of your book to leadership, or examples from history, or the price of arrogance.”
There’s something off to me about the idea that anyone would choose a book “specifically because it promises to impart lessons,” as if the keys to life could be neatly extracted, lifted clean out of a book’s pages to be dutifully copied down. Obviously books can teach us things, but it seems to me that often this type of learning—“wisdom, not facts,” as Holiday himself puts it—is a slower, more difficult process, one where insights arise from the way a book’s language and plot and grammar act on your mind. I think of that highly-shared Lauren Michele Jackson piece about anti-racism reading lists, which themselves are explicitly compiled to “impart lessons.” These reading lists, Jackson writes, fail the very people who ask for them, “for they are already predisposed to read black art zoologically.” In a very real sense, actively looking for “lessons” might fail precisely because of how ham-handed the looking is.
Day 2: Calculate How Many Books You Have Left To Read in Your Life
After answering questions in a handy worksheet about whether anyone in my family had heart problems before 50, and whether I know my blood pressure, and whether I always buckle my seatbelt, I am given an estimated life expectancy of 90 years. That means, given my current rate of book consumption (around 60 books a year, if you must know), I have about 3,720 books to read before I die.
Counting the number of books one reads has always felt like a bookworm’s version of a dick-measuring contest.
This number is supposed to frighten me into reading more—it’s a “Stoic memento mori exercise,” Ryan Holiday tells us in an accompanying video. Looking at it, though, I don’t really feel much of anything, though I also sincerely doubt my 89-year-old self will be reading 60 books a year. Counting the number of books one reads has always felt beside the point and slightly suspect to me, like a bookworm’s version of a dick-measuring contest. It’s what you do with the pages that counts.
Day 3: Re-Read a Book You Love; Day 4: Read a Work of Fiction; Day 5: Read a Banned Book
Day 3’s email tells me I need to pick a favorite book and give it another go. (“It’s only through true study and depth of knowledge that one builds expertise and mastery.”) Day 4’s email is about the benefits of reading fiction—gaining insight into the human condition, understanding other perspectives, empathy, etc.—and it includes a quote from Adolf Hitler: “I’ve never read a novel. That kind of reading annoys me.” Day 5’s challenge is to read a banned book. Or rather, it’s to “pick a book that has been banned, and ruminate on its ideas. Take notes on the messages its author intended to send. Absorb its knowledge, knowledge that was forbidden by certain people; fight back against their censorious urges.”
I’ve decided to reread Madame Bovary, which checks all three boxes. When I first read the novel, I was subletting a dingy but incredibly cheap room in a Chicago apartment the summer after graduating college, with no real plans for the rest of my life. Every night before I went to sleep I’d lie on my thin, lumpy mattress and crack open Flaubert. I might have been paralyzed by the thought of my own appallingly vacant future, but my problems paled in comparison to Emma Bovary’s. I read with delight as she marries a disappointing man, takes two very different but equally disappointing lovers, and then—after some mind-blowingly gorgeous passages about the nature of fantasy and reality—dies.
When the novel was originally published, it was considered obscene enough by the French government to be put on trial in 1857, mainly for its frank, impersonal depiction of adultery without helpful moralizing from the narrator to show readers the errors of Emma’s ways. (Flaubert was eventually acquitted, and he dedicated the novel to his lawyer.) As a fallen denizen of the 21st century, I find it easy to dismiss this attempted censorship as futile pearl-clutching. What I’m more interested in is that Madame Bovary is just one of many instances of literature that plays on the dangers of consuming literature. Along with books like Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey, it gestures towards fears that novels were in fact so seductive that they could seriously confuse a person, render them incapable of discerning what was real and what was fantasy. Which stands in stark contrast to the soft-focus image that “reading is our compass, our guiding light” and that “it’s what we owe our ultimate devotion.” Which are actual quotes from a “Read to Lead” email.
Day 7: Review A Book Like A Critic
I am, for better or for worse, a professional book critic, and today I received a worksheet that renders my profession obsolete.
Each little sheet—which prints four to a page and looks a bit like the tiny surveys you get at fancy restaurants asking how the service was—says “Read Like a Critic!” in flowy script at the top, flanked by two drawings of open books. There are spaces to fill out the book’s title, author, and genre. The question afforded the largest amount of space (four blank lines) is: “Sum up the book in one or two sentences.” Below that is “Do you agree with the author’s thesis?” with two Scantron-type bubbles labeled “YES” and “NO.” Then there are questions about what the author’s strongest and weakest points are, and what they got wrong, and what they could’ve improved. On the very bottom is “Rating:” and five blank stars you can color in. I can’t decide if I find the whole thing adorable, as one would a child’s crayon rendering of the interior of the Sistine Chapel, or appalling, as one would if everyone thought that was actually what the interior of the Sistine Chapel looked like.
Mostly my notes are me copying out deliciously snarky or luminously precise passages and writing ‘whoa’ next to them.
To be fair, it’s not like reading as an actual critic is particularly glamorous. Certainly not the way I do it. I have finally begun to reread Madame Bovary, and mostly my notes are me copying out deliciously snarky or luminously precise passages and writing “whoa” next to them, or recording brilliant witticisms of my own devising, like “if I ever became a rapper my rapper name would be Flow-bear.”
But I also have a lot of unresolved questions bouncing around in my head. What’s with that weird first person plural the book starts out with, and why does it just fade away? Why does Emma’s perspective start so late; why do we get the life story of her boring husband in so much detail first? There’s page after page of description so crystalline that everything else I read feels vague and baggy for a while, but why is it written that way? Does it have anything to do with the act of looking or seeing (“His own eye would lose itself in these depths, and he could see himself, in miniature, down to his shoulders, with his scarf on his head and his nightshirt unbuttoned”)?
What I’m mostly trying to do is figure out what exactly Flaubert is up to, to try to understand the novel’s language and plot and grammar. Simultaneously, armed with index cards, I’ve been dutifully scanning Madame Bovary to extract “information that strikes you, quotes that motivate you, stories that inspire you for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, in your speaking, or whatever it is that you do,” as I was advised to do in that first email about commonplace books. But I’m not quite sure what to write down to save for myself for posterity. Every sentence seems both incredibly stylish and completely meaningless taken out of context. Flaubert isn’t going to come out and drop some hard-earned truths on us outright, it turns out. Whatever lessons there are, they seem baked into the style itself—and nearly impossible to articulate on a worksheet.
Day 8: Replace Screen Time with Book Time
Today’s task is: read all the goddamn time. “When you sit down with your coffee and some breakfast, don’t watch the news. Read a book. When feel [sic] the urge to reach for the phone, don’t open Twitter. Open the kindle app. When you’re commuting to the office, or you’re at the gym, or you’re on a run, don’t listen to music. Listen to an audio book. When you’re eating lunch, don’t catch up on your social media feeds. Read. When you’re waiting at the airport, waiting at the gate, waiting to takeoff, waiting for the pilot to permit electronic devices, don’t just sit and kill time. Read. When you get home from work or when you have spare time on a weekend, don’t binge-watch Game of Thrones. Binge-read it.”
We’ve agreed that reading is categorically better than the way we’re actually spending our time, which is mostly dicking around on social media.
In some respects, this email directly addresses the main reason we’re so anxious about reading: because we’ve agreed that reading is categorically better than the way we’re actually spending our time, which is mostly dicking around on social media. Reading is “hard” now, something we have to convince and/or trick our lazy animal selves into doing instead of shopping online or looking for fulfillment at the bottom of an endless newsfeed or letting the “Next Episode” button on Netflix fill rightward with unstoppable speed. Reading is now seen as precisely the opposite of dicking around on social media, something that might just save us from the forces of the corrupting internet/everything that makes us dumb. It’s the argument Nicholas Carr articulated a decade ago in his book The Shallows: that we’re slowly forgetting how to read and grapple with difficult texts, and that our dwindling attention spans put us at risk of losing a grand but infinitely fragile intellectual tradition at the core of everything that makes Western civilization great.
When I was a kid, I would have made Ryan Holiday proud. I read on the toilet, I read in the moments immediately before and after showering, I read while I was supposed to be practicing the piano (I’d put my book in front of the sheet music), I read during meals. My sister and I even brought books to restaurants to read while our parents talked to each other, and it took me a long time to realize that this was something other people didn’t do. I did become a very good reader, but I was also an awkward shy kid who remained completely clueless about the state of the actual world well into my twenties.
Which is why I’m not convinced that reading is strictly more valuable than, like, the vast breadth of all other human activities. How exactly is reading better than staying informed or listening to music or talking to your friends or parents or a stranger or just having a silent moment to yourself? It makes no sense to consider reading the “opposite” of any other activity; doesn’t it all depend on the experience of what you’re actually doing and what you’re getting out of it? Exclusively exalting one category over another means ceding your own judgment to mere differences of form—and I’ve seen TikToks that contain more poetry than some books. I get that mindlessly scrolling through Twitter or watching people yell at each other on cable TV can corrode one’s soul. But surely you need some sort of healthy mix. The ancient Greeks were always going on about moderation.
I’m not convinced that reading is strictly more valuable than, like, the vast breadth of all other human activities.
“You’ve converted minutes and hours that you used to spend passively into something else: time spent acquiring wisdom,” the email says. But this line of reasoning presumes that there’s only one correct way to read, i.e. to acquire wisdom, instead of perhaps to experience beauty or joy or a certain heady pleasure, which I’m beginning to realize is why I read. (And anyone who thinks all books are founts of wisdom clearly hasn’t read enough books.)The aggressive pursuit of “wisdom,” in fact, strikes me as a distinctly unwise, almost naïve way to go about your life. Aren’t there profound truths you can’t glean from books, things you can really only learn from experience and the passage of time? I think of a line I read once in a Geoff Dyer book: “How can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?”
Day 11: Read A Book That’s Above Your Level
“You’re here because you’re a good reader,” today’s email begins, encouragingly. “But you want to become a great reader. Well there is a harsh truth at the center of all improvement: you will not get better by doing what is comfortable and convenient. Progress demands conquest.”
That “conquest” is triumphing over books we’re intimidated by because we think they’re intellectually over our heads or too long to actually make it through. I decide to read Edward Said’s Orientalism, a book that’s been on my list for years, and then I feel extremely uncomfortable about the notion of “conquering” Orientalism.
I’ve been thinking, in any case, about reading not as conquest but as something quite the opposite: freedom. I find it depressing that so many people feel a sense of obligation about reading—something they “should” do because it’s “good for them”—because part of reading’s appeal to me is that it feels fundamentally not coercive, an escape hatch from social pressures and other people’s expectations. Reading lets me make my own quiet decisions about whether I agree with an idea or not; I can vacillate in indecision (my typical state) for as long as I need to without anyone demanding that I come down on a side. Forcing yourself to read almost feels like destroying the spirit of the whole enterprise. Read hard books, by all means, but do it because you actually enjoy it, not because of some underbaked sense that it will turn you into “a gladiator of the written word” (gross; actual quote).
Day 12: Build and Organize Your Library; Day 13: Start Your “Anti-Library”; Wrap up Day (plus bonus content)
The email helpfully suggests a list of books that are designed to be worked through one day at a time, starting with two books by Ryan Holiday.
I organize my books (“You want everything about your library to facilitate your future use of it as a developmental tool”), buy ten more books on the internet (“An anti-library ensures that our weaknesses, our island of ignorance, is always in plain sight”), and the course is over. The next day, I receive an email that contains three extra, longer-term challenges, one of which makes me roll my eyes so powerfully that I’m in danger of pulling a muscle. It’s to “pick a book of wisdom and read one page per day.” The email helpfully suggests a list of books that are designed to be worked through one day at a time, starting with The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman and The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. The Daily Stoic consists of quotes and themed meditations for every day of the year, with headings like “Be Ruthless to the Things That Don’t Matter” and “Cut the Strings that Pull Your Mind.”
“One of the reasons we wrote The Daily Stoic,” reads the email, seamlessly transitioning into an advertisement, “was that we thought it was pretty remarkable that despite more than two thousand years of popularity, no one had ever put the best of the Stoics in one book for ease of study.” The idea is that day by day, the reader focuses on integrating a tiny aspect of Stoic philosophy into their own life. If that works for you, great! Meaningful direction on how we should live our lives is hard to come by nowadays. But I find it hard to accept that wisdom is simply a series of injunctions that sages came up with thousands of years ago, a list of “do this, do that” that can be catalogued in what is essentially a desk calendar masquerading as a book. If wisdom were that easy to access and simply difficult to put into practice, why struggle through War and Peace at all?
I have finally finished rereading Madame Bovary. I didn’t remember it being so accessibly funny, nor so dark at the end. I also didn’t remember identifying with Emma quite so much, which says something about how I’ve spent the six intervening years between readings. When I read it for the first time back in 2014, I saw a clear-cut distinction in the novel between fantasy (bad) and reality (good), and was astonished by the way Flaubert used the way he was writing, his style, to make his point. But now I kept noticing that coexisting with the narrator’s scathing irony was sympathy and identification—I got the sense that Flaubert was able to so completely skewer Emma’s delusions because he had experienced them, in some form, himself (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”). The descriptions of Emma’s pastoral surroundings, the ones she scorns, are crisp where her fantasies are vague, but they now seemed to me tinged with their own kind of romance.
What reading-forward self-help gurus miss is that reading great literature is perhaps the least efficient thing you can do.
But I still feel like I’m barely scratching the surface of this novel. What reading-forward self-help gurus miss, I’ve come to conclude, is that reading great literature is perhaps the least efficient thing you can do. I keep coming back to the word “discernment.” Unlike self-improvement books, literature isn’t full of common sense injunctions that get straight to the point, that give you the answers outright, that tell you exactly what you need to do to change your life. The books I love the most don’t give you very much direction for your own life at all. They show you different ways of looking at human problems—they teach you how to see. That’s the lesson I’ve taken, at least, from the clear and unforgiving narrator of Madame Bovary, who fillets every character and presents them to us for our own judgment. And through that, through a long period of slow discernment that might take as long as life itself—and might, in fact, be life itself—is how I think you might gain wisdom.
Which, it occurs to me, is also why I still feel totally inadequate all the time, despite all my reading. Because honing your capacity for discernment actually requires that you feel totally inadequate most if not all of the time: because what you’re doing is a ton of self-questioning, constantly reevaluating what you think you know, existing in a state of doubt that might let the nuances in. It was an old Greek dude, after all, who noted that true wisdom means realizing that you know absolutely nothing.
In Crying in H Mart, MichelleZauner—also known as the indie-pop musician Japanese Breakfast—writes of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer and the caretaking process. The mother-daughter relationship is the beating pulse of this memoir, presented in all of its uncomfortable complexities. But if this relationship is the main melody, there are countermelodies and harmonies that add to the depth of Zauner’s memoir: the trickiness of negotiating a mixed racial identity in both America and South Korea, of constantly straddling two lines. The preparation and consumption of food, and what it means to cook for someone. The desire to be a musician, to find one’s own path in the world. The implications of being someone who needs to record, to reflect, to process grief in a creative manner. These all come together to create a polyphony of themes, held together by Zauner’s sincere prose.
Like her music, Zauner’s memoir is filled with verve, lyricism, and those little everyday details that craft a visceral reality. Pitchfork’s review of Zauner’s album, Psychopomp,notes how “Zauner’s gift for connecting specific details to simple metaphor [is] uniquely affecting”—the same could be said for her writing. She has a way of extrapolating poignant meaning out of commonplace objects, whether those are H Mart groceries or old kimchi fridges. My favorite passage in Crying in H Mart, perhaps, is when Zauner compares her grieving and documenting process to that of fermenting kimchi:
“The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday.”
Through her memoir, Zauner not only passes on and articulates her grief, but also creates a space for that grief to transmute, develop, ferment—into something deeply poignant and beautifully insightful. I’m certain I won’t be the only reader to cry from the first 10 pages onwards. After I finished, I washed my face—then opened my fridge to make myself a midnight snack of kimchi fried rice. Later on, I was grateful to have the chance to chat with Zauner about the memoir-writing process, as well as discussing our favorite Korean dishes.
Jae-Yeon Yoo: First of all, thank you for sharing this book. I’ve been feeling really homesick for Seoul during the pandemic, with all the mixed homesickness of being a Korean who’s spent most of her adult years in America, and this book really resonated with me.
MichelleZauner: Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. In a way, I’m the most scared to see what other Koreans will have to say about this book.
JY: How come?
This was the first time I’ve felt like, ‘Oh my god, am I not Korean enough to write something like this?’
MZ: Because I think that we’re not often used to seeing our story be told, and so, of course, it’s gonna either resonate with them the most, or they’ll be the most critical of what I got wrong [or] if it doesn’t mirror their experience, you know. I also never wanted to write a book that pandered to a white audience in any way, so I’m just, you know, always nervous of both sides. [Writing this memoir] was the first time I’ve felt like, “Oh my god, am I not Korean enough to write something like this?” There are a lot of people that have very strong opinions on the internet that don’t feel like I’m Korean enough to talk about certain things. So I’m very, very glad you liked the book.
JY: Yeah, I think—for writers of marginalized identities—there’s this total burden of trying to be authentic, to get everything “right” and speak for an entire population. When really, at the end of the day, we all have the right to tell our individual stories. Your point about not pandering to a white audience ties into something I was curious about; you directly address the reader throughout the book, such as how you use “you” and “us” pronouns to describe the H Mart community. Who is Crying in H Mart written for?
MZ: Oh, it’s for me [laughs].I feel like I don’t think too much about it. I’ve been really lucky that I’ve had the experience of writing about a very specific personal thing that feels like only I can relate to, yet finding out that specificity is what makes something so moving and detailed and universal. So, I try not to think too much about [my audience], though there are certainly fans of my band who I’ve met—that to me is the ideal audience, because they were who I wanted to reach. You know, in the same way that Karen O hit me as a teenager, I hope to have that kind of effect on young Asian Americans that struggle to see themselves or hear their stories told. Those readers are really personal to me, but I tried to just write from a very personal place that I hope that anyone can relate to.
JY: The way you tackle grief and food is definitely universal. I also love the way you negotiated multiple languages in this memoir; not only the obvious ones of Korean and English, but how you crafted food as a language in it of itself. Could you talk more about this interplay between language and food for you?
MZ: For me, growing up with a family that I struggled to communicate with, food became a very natural vehicle for, you know, tenderness and expression of love. It is also a very simple language; when you travel, one of the first things you learn how to say—beyond like hello and thank you—is, “That’s delicious!” For my family, a replacement for language was sharing a meal together, communicating our shared love for it.
JY: Yeah, your book beautifully articulates how food is what defines you as an individual, while simultaneously being something that ties you into a broader community. You talk about your mother, for example, and her sharp memory for others’ food preferences.
Growing up with a family that I struggled to communicate with, food became a very natural vehicle for tenderness and expression of love.
MZ: Yeah, that’s something that stuck with me too. I am a little obsessive about which one of my friends is vegan or gluten-free, or can’t have mushrooms. So, for me, those types of preferences are so important. I remember meeting my friend’s fiance, and she asked him, “Do you like cilantro?” You’ve loved each other for three years and you don’t know if your partner likes cilantro?! Those things just hold a—I don’t know—heavy weight in my relationships.
JY: Absolutely. I feel like you must throw great dinner parties.
MZ: Yeah, I used to!
JY: As someone who also grew up with Korean culture before it was considered “cool” in America, it’s been strange to watch Korean food become hip (like gochujang and kimchi)—not to mention the skyrocketing popularity of K-pop, K-drama, and skincare. In Crying in H Mart, you mention how you started hiding your Korean identity in middle school in order to fit in better.What’s it like, to watch it become so “in vogue”?
MZ: It’s strange, but it’s exciting. I think that our generation is maybe a bit more protective about it than our parents’ generation. But I remember when PSY and “Gangnam Style” were a big thing, and how proud and excited my mom was about that, or that more American people knew of what bibimbap was. I think that there’s some sorrow that I didn’t get to experience that appreciation when I was younger, but there’s also a real excitement that kids—who maybe would have felt out of place growing up—have this culture that is being celebrated now. It feels really exciting to me that they get to have that.
JY: Music is obviously a huge part of your artistic journey and identity, and is mentioned throughout Crying in H Mart. I’m curious to hear about the connections or differences between the memoir-writing process and your songwriting process.
MZ: I did study creative writing in college, but I’ve been writing songs and albums since I was 16. Songwriting affords the opportunity to be a bit more ambiguous; it’s sort of essentially just writing a series of poetic fragments.
The big lesson that I took away is that [the book-writing process] is a long haul. One of the best pieces of advice from my editor was, “I want to hear more about the weather.” I just learned so much about everything—describing place, dialogue, pacing. I also learned just how important perspective is: to just walk away and not think about something for months at a time, knowing that you’re going to return and rework something. Coming back with a fresh brain is incredibly, incredibly important. I rewrote the second chapter of this book probably 12 times, before I just deleted it. The process was learning to take a cold, hard look at yourself, and seeing what sticks.
JY: You’ve talked about how your past two albums, Psychopompand Soft Sounds From Another Planet, explored your mother’s passing through different frameworks; how does this memoir relate to your albums?
MZ: They all encompass the same period of time, in a way. My two records explore a lot of the same things. Psychopomp was such a raw experience, written right in the time about what had just happened and immediately after my mother had passed. I think a lot of the book covers the same kind of stuff; some of the lyrics are borrowed from Psychopomp [and used in Crying in H Mart]. Like, “the heavy hand” [a chapter title] is a lyric from the song “Rugged Country” and is about my mother’s wedding ring. The song “In Heaven” is about this frustration with people using God as a crutch to get over grief, and [me] not having that, also about my dog mourning—those are all things that get covered in the book. For Soft Sounds, that record was so much about the disassociating process that I went through and enduring trauma—calling it by that for the first time, recognizing that trauma as a kid in the caretaking process. Obviously, the book shares a lot of those same themes as well.
JY: I was really struck by one of your last chapters, which talks about your childhood photos being sent to you via the kimchi fridge. You talk about fermentation and not letting memories fester, transforming that so—cliche as it is—it does seem like it’s a continual process and not about an end goal. Can you talk a bit more about this idea of kimchi-making and (metaphorical or literal) fermentation?
MZ: Well, I highly recommend kimchi-making as an activity! Especially right now, when some people have more time on their hands than others. I think that it’s a really beautiful thing, and it takes such a long time. It requires a lot of patience and it’s such a tactile, immersive experience. It feels very meditative and special. And after waiting, there’s a wonderful end product to have—especially if you eat a lot of kimchi, like I do. I also think it helps you appreciate food so much more in the same way that baking your own bread or growing your own food can. You really appreciate something more, once you know what exactly goes into it.
JY: The way you just talked about the kimchi-making process echoed what you were saying earlier about the revision process for your memoir. The importance of time—of being really viscerally immersed, then letting something sit and coming back to it.
MZ: Mmm, yeah! But, you know, (laughs)there’s no revising kimchi, if you fuck it up early on.
JY: One moment of linguistic analysis that was very powerful for me was your description of “yeppeu,” [which can mean both “pretty” and “good” or “well-behaved” in Korean]. You note how “this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.” Beauty—and the upkeep of it, through makeup and clothing—is a sub-theme that runs throughout the book, highlighted by your mother’s physical decline. I’ve long admired your aesthetic and fashion choices; could you talk a bit about how your morals and aesthetics fuse (or clash)?
MZ: Yeah, it was a real arguing point of contention between my mom and I. When I was growing up, I went from aspiring to be “yeppeu” to shirking “yeppeu.” I really went through an ugly things phase where I wore oversized t-shirts and ugly sweaters. I don’t know why I gravitated towards those—I guess I felt like I needed to dress that way to be taken seriously as an artist, or even as a person, as a woman. It was also just the aesthetics of the age, I guess. But now it’s nice, because I’ve grown to appreciate fashion—in a way that my mom would be rolling in her grave about. It’s been really fun to come to [fashion] on my own terms. It was funny because my mom, like many Korean moms, was obsessed with Chanel. I actually just did a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, where they put me in a Chanel suit to be photographed in. And they were like, “Okay, we want to see more of your arms; we love the juxtaposition of your tattoos and the Chanel luxury suit.” Hearing that was such a wonderful full circle moment.
JY: It does sound like your mom was someone who voiced her opinions strongly. In the memoir, you contrast her “brutal, industrial-strength[,] sinewy” love against the “Mommy-Mom,” this ideal American housewife and mother figure. Simultaneously, a leitmotif that surfaces throughout the book is one of your mother’s coined idioms, about always “saving 10% of yourself” in every relationship. Familial love, in the terms it’s described in Crying in H-Mart, seems to present love as a currency—or something numerically measurable (percentage-able). Can you talk more about this portrayal of love, especially as juxtaposed against the American Dream model?
Mothers have the ability to cut you down yet lift you up in a way that no one else can; that relationship is so intense and special.
MZ: I think that, for a long time, I just didn’t understand the way that my mother loved me and it was a very confusing relationship for me—for both of us. A line that sticks out to me in the book is when my mother tells me, “I’ve just never met someone like you.” That was a huge moment for both of us because, all this time, I had really felt how cruel and critical and judgmental she could be, and thought they were very idiosyncratic parts of her personality. But, as I became older, I realized that it’s really rooted in the culture in which she was raised and the way that her mother loved her. I didn’t have very many Korean friends growing up, and, as I’ve gotten older and had the opportunity to have more Korean or Asian friends, I realized that’s a thing that really unites a lot of us. I don’t know a lot of American moms out there, who say, like, “Honey, you’re really breaking out” or be really critical. That was just a really confusing thing for me. But then, as I got older and exposed to more people who had similar upbringings to me, I realized, “Oh, your mom also hates everything you bought her for her birthday? I should also accept that’s a normal thing.” A lot of my mom and dad’s relationship was lost in translation; I don’t think I really knew that until I was older and I’m still learning a lot about that now.
JY: Yeah, I appreciated how you didn’t try to sugarcoat anything; the family dynamics were presented in a nuanced, complex, and sometimes illogical way—because familial love doesn’t work logically.
MZ: I think that you’d be hard-pressed to find like any person who’s had a completely frictionless relationship with their parents. A lot of people’s relationships with their moms is that [mothers] have the ability to cut you down yet lift you up in a way that no one else can; that relationship is so intense and special. And I think that was a really important part for me to include. It had to be this complicated good with the bad, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been real for anyone.
JY: And I can’t leave this interview without asking a bit about food. What’s a Korean dish that you can’t recreate at home that you really wish you could?
MZ: Mmm. That’s a good one. Oh—pajun [scallion pancake]! I’ve tried to make pajun, or any kind of jun [savory pancakes]. My husband loves them. And I always want to make them really ba-sak ba-sak [extra crispy]. But I never can get it; it’s just never crispy enough. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
JY: For pajun, we’ve also been trying; my sister tried putting in starch.
MZ: I tried starch! It didn’t work, so I gave up for a while.
JY: Speaking of jun, I think we were actually planning on making minari-jun tonight for dinner.
MZ: Oh, did you see the movie?
JY: I did, did you? What did you think of it?
MZ: I loved it. And I really adored [the grandmother]. I have so much respect for a woman of that age who is still challenging herself, artistically and creatively, putting herself in a situation she doesn’t have to be in to make art I really admire. And obviously her acting was just fantastic in that movie.
JY: It’s really exciting to see all these different depictions of Korean American life coming out. Minari is obviously very different from Crying in H-Mart, and I think it’s great to have this range and space. Can you talk about the scarcity mindset around Asian American performers? You mention this attitude in the book, when your younger self reflects, “if there’s already one Asian girl doing [rock music], then there’s no longer space for me.” Do you feel like that’s changed at all or is changing?
MZ: Well, I think it is changing because we have a word for it now. But I still have that feeling all the time—I’m jealous of my peers that are doing similar things, and it’s just one of those things that you have to remind yourself to constantly fight against. It’s the same thing with internalized misogyny; I feel like I am up against that all the time. Or internalized racism. I think that it’s something that exists in all of us that you have to actively fight against all the time. Just because things are getting better, it doesn’t mean that [these systems] just go away automatically.
Boys and girls sit on benches beneath the canopy of trees lining the walkway, lapping at ice-cream cones. Others cut zigzagging paths down the walkway on their roller skates. Red and white parasols shelter hot dog stands.
I begin whistling, both hands shoved into the pockets of my denim skirt. The low notes blend together. If I try to whistle too hard, I veer off-key. I can’t properly separate the notes of fast songs like this, so they end up merging into each other.
Doesn’t match my mood, but I change to the blues. This way, you see, it doesn’t matter if the tune wobbles a bit—you can still make it to the end.
Oh, each day is such a gift.
I’m having so much fun that I can’t hold back my smile.
But what manner of idiot just stands there grinning all the time? So, I sing these songs all day. I’ve been like this ever since coming here.
A bus pulls up from behind, letting off Emi. She gives a big wave and runs up to me. “Where you off to?” She smiles, and a warm breeze teases her curly hair. Then, the scent of the sea.
“The Seaside Club.”
“Oh, same here!”
The sign outside of this bar on the outskirts of Yokohama actually reads “Serenity.” Kind of sounds like somewhere you’d go to “die with dignity,” to be honest, so we’ve chosen our own name for it. And everyone here just calls this area “the seafront.” Some folk go for “coastal promenade,” but who knows what they’re on about. Emi and I walk along by the pier, looking at the Hotel New Grand off to the side.
The melody in my head goes on, coming out as a hum now, not a whistle.
“What’s that one called?” Emi looks at me.
“Can’t say. I’d have to get back around to the hook first.” I’d stopped following the lead guitar to answer her, but I pick it up again straight away. Emi joins in with an organ-like tone. Our jam continues, on and on.
And there’s no stopping us, not even now we’ve reached the Seaside Club. The mood of the piece has become quite melancholy, or serious, but it’d be no fun to cut it off, so we stand there, carrying on. Finally, we find a chance to get back to the hook. She seems to know the song too, and we really get into it. And, like an avalanche (or so we think), we slide into the ending. The End. Or not—I decide it was a pause, and then add one last phrase. If I had a guitar, I’d be playing a trailing solo that lingers through a slow fade before disappearing, like a whistle in the darkness.
“What was it, again?” I ask, pushing open the glass door of the bar.
“‘I Can’t Keep from Cryin’ Sometimes,’” Emi answers quietly.
Can’t help but cry. True that. But I wonder why a song with a title like that came to mind.
Anyway, we make for the bar stools as usual, without giving the song any further thought.
“It’s just beautiful outside,” I say to the bartender.
“It’s always like that here. Everyone’s so content at first,” he replies, coolly.
“What’s that supposed to mean? You can live a life of absolute leisure here.”
I’d won my place in a lottery. The ticket came with some tissue paper I’d idly bought . . . I think. (My days here are like tissue paper too, I suppose—I float around, dazed, and any memories of the past are blurred and hard to pin down.)
“Oh, but you’ll tire of that. If you’re a committed sort.” This barman likes to get up on his high horse.
“We can stay here as long as we like, can’t we? And we’re free to go back to Earth any time,” Emi says, fiddling with her paper napkin.
“Technically, I suppose. Do you want to go back?”
“No, no,” she shakes her head, “I’ve only been here half a month.”
“Wait!” I turn to her. “Didn’t you say it was half a year, before?”
“I never said that.” She pauses a moment and adds, more sweetly, “You must’ve just misheard.”
One wonders. I mean, I’ve been here around a fortnight, and seeing as she was here before me . . .
“A beer, perhaps?”
“Oh, forgot to order. Yes,” I reply to the barman, “in a small glass, please.”
He places a delicate fluted glass on the counter, and then a freshly opened bottle. Emi glares as he performs this routine. She’s always like this when I drink.
“It’s the middle of the day, so . . . I’ll have something soft,” she says, slowly.
Emi didn’t win any lottery—she’s here for therapeutic reasons, a change of scenery. Apparently the air on this planet does you good. She says she’s twenty-five years old. I’m not sure what she was doing before coming here.
“Go pick some music,” she says quietly, her mind elsewhere. Stood beside the jukebox, I touch the screen and begin scrolling down through an endless stream of song names and numbers. There are enough records in this thing to fill an entire radio station’s back catalogue. I get sick of sifting through them all, so I just choose three tracks without much thought, and head back to the bar.
“What did you go for?” Emi props her elbows on the bar.
“Some rhythm and blues.”
“Nice.”
A shrill, tinny voice sings “Lucille”—could be a woman or a young boy. I spend a moment captivated by their strange enunciation, which wraps around the lyrics as if the words were the singer’s own. I take a sip of beer and put my glass down again. Emi glares fiercely at my hands.
“My mum, she . . .” After a pause, she breaks the silence. “She’s an alcoholic. Drinks from the morning and right on through. She doesn’t care, as long as she has her sauce. And it’s not about the taste—she says she never even liked it. But being a little tipsy helps take the edge off her pain, she says.”
The barman listens to her words attentively. Well, I suppose he always takes his job seriously. But once Emi started talking, a slight tension seemed to draw across his face.
“She’s always trying to quit, but she winds up reaching for the bottle again. One time, she went to throw away all the booze she’d stored up. Took me with her, too, all ceremonial. And when we got home, she was so happy—“Now I’ll never drink again!”—all of that. But just two hours later, she was getting restless. ‘I should’ve kept a little drop,’ she’d say. ‘Just enough for a little nightcap before bed.’ And before long she was out buying her bottles again.” She lets out a long sigh, her brows furrowed, and wipes her palms with a tissue pulled from her sleeve.
“And?” I ask, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Did she ever do anything to you?”
The color drains from her face. That seems to have unsettled her.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .” Didn’t I? Well, then, what did I mean?
“It’s fine, I don’t care. You mean, did she hit me, right? Like some drunken guy on a rampage? No, nothing like that. But when my dad left for work, she’d grab a bottle and a glass and head right back to bed. When she was in a bad mood, she’d be like that all day long. Towards the evening, she’d start thinking about preparing dinner—but it’s dangerous, isn’t it? Cooking when your head’s all over the place—spilling, scalding, dropping knives everywhere. So she’d make something up about feeling unwell and go back to bed again.”
Emi wipes her forehead with the tissue.
“Shotgun” plays through the speakers, breaking the silence between the three of us.
“I wonder why I blurted all that out,” she whispers between the phrases in the music.
“Because of this.” I gesture to the beer before me.
“Yeah, that’d be it.”
“I’ll never drink in front of you again.”
“Oh no, that’s going too far.”
“But it reminds you of your mother, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. It’s weird. A little while after I’d arrived here, she started really playing on my mind.”
A door opens and a young barmaid enters the room. The older barman takes off his apron. He only ever works extremely short shifts. I guess it’s enough to keep the place ticking over.
“What are you up to tonight?” I change the subject.
The barman begins clearing his things up.
“I’m going to Friday’s Angels,” Emi replies, mentioning the name of a kooky nightclub.
“Oh, great idea! Maybe I’ll come along.”
It’s my kind of place, old-fashioned interior. There’s a thickly carpeted floor, raised in bumps here and there for people to sit. And they don’t just play the charts—you hear some outrageous tunes in there. The other day they started playing some novelty song called “Don’t Feel like Doing Anything at All”, and I couldn’t get over it. And there are no kids on the scene.
“And hey, in that case,” Emi adds, “you might run into Naoshi. He’s always there.”
I feel myself blush. The sound of his name alone sets my heart racing.
“He’s cute, isn’t he?” She laughs. “Have you spoken to him, at least?”
“Not yet.” I shake my head, bashfully.
“Reckon it’ll take a while to get something going?”
The barman adjusts his scarf and leaves. I stare at my hands, gripping my beer glass.
“Well, who knows. Things can shift all of a sudden.”
I found him pretty much straight after I arrived on this planet. He’d come to the spaceport to meet some other girl, as it happened. And, oh, the wariness I felt then, and still now—and yes, that’s right. It was wariness, I’m certain. Not excitement.
I’d seen him before, somewhere. But how?
There’s no way I’d ever forget someone so beautiful. And, actually, rather than having seen him before, it’s like I’ve been involved with him.
“When I first laid eyes on him, I felt like he’d been someone close to me,” I say, absent-mindedly, “but I also felt this sense of coldness towards my own self; a distance from the version of ‘me’ that had been close to him. It’s a weird way of putting it, I know.”
“Hey, how old are you?” Emi sips her lemonade.
“Nineteen.”
“Right. So phrases like “I wanna live again” won’t have crossed your lips yet. She used to say that all the time at one point, my mum. ‘I wanna live again.’”
“That was a song, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, you can find a song for anything, you know. There’s even a song that goes, “This isn’t real love, it’s just a song”.”
Emi grows silent and starts picking at the peanuts set out by the barmaid.
“When did your mum say that?”
“When she was thirty-six. It was a dreadful age for her. All she wanted was to hit reset and start everything over again from twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five? Why so specific?”
“That’s how old she was when she got married.”
We fall silent again.
At some point the barman comes back. Music continues playing from the jukebox. Next up is “Love’s End Does You Bad.”
“I’m sorry. I’m all over the place at the moment,” Emi says, after a pause. “I keep remembering all these things from the past, without meaning to. And these memories—they’re so vivid. This stuff about my mum, I mean, it’s as though I went through her suffering myself.”
“It’s because you’ve got all this time on your hands.” I play with my silver bracelet. Emi’s wearing the same one—they have little discs on them that work as a sort of cash card. While we’re on this planet, nothing costs a penny. But neither the barman nor the barmaid wear one.
“You’re right. It’s so easy to end up imagining stuff when you’re idle.”
Seems like she’s got her mind on other things today.
A languid song, almost dripping with despair, comes on the jukebox. I check the screen—”I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living.” Paul Butterfield.
“Can I get you two anything else?” the barmaid asks.
We take the bus out of Yokohama as dusk nears. “What’s the next stop?”
We sit towards the back, and I gaze outside. “Yokosuka.”
“I want to go shopping,” Emi says, quite out of the blue.
“Shall we get off, then?”
“But we only just got on.”
The sky grows an ever-deeper blue; it’s almost too exquisite to watch. I gaze out the window, eyes glued to the view. The sides of the buildings lit by the sinking sun all glow a uniform gold, subtle yet intense. It’s as if rectangular shapes have been cut out of the sky, revealing this shining layer beneath.
“I didn’t know the city could look like this.”
I feel something drop onto the back of my hand. Tears! Shocked, I turn to face Emi.
“This is the first time I’ve cried over a little scenery.”
“It seems like everyone starts being honest with themselves about their feelings, once they come here.” She takes a tissue from her pocket and puts it to my nose. “Well, it’s different for the workers, of course.”
She seems troubled. I blow my nose. Come to think of it, this must be the first time since I was a child that I’ve cried in front of another person.
It seems like everyone starts being honest with themselves about their feelings, once they come here
“Apparently there’s something in the air here that gets you all wistful and nostalgic. Hey, are you glad you came?”
“Of course I am!” I answer, ardently.
I haven’t told Emi about this yet, but I had absolutely no friends before this year. It was a serious problem—and not one that could be easily explained away by shyness or introversion. I did have an idea of why people didn’t like me, but I just wasn’t prepared to admit it. I consoled myself by deciding that I hated other people and had no desire to love anyone.
But I’m drawn to Emi now, after only meeting her a couple of times. And there’s Naoshi, too.
“We shopping, then?”
“Oh, right.”
“Let’s get off here.”
And the magic doesn’t wear off, even after we leave the bus. It’s actually painful how beautiful even the ground is, and how the air is laced with the sweet scents of spring.
The last of the sunlight gives an even coat to the tops of the buildings. I can see the start of Chinatown a little down the road.
“Ages ago, I used to go out with this boy from Hong Kong. What was his name? Law, something like that.” Whose words are these coming out of my mouth? There’s no way that could’ve happened to me. On Earth, all I did every day was trudge back and forth between class and home. Are these someone else’s memories?
“What was he like?”
“Good at looking after money, but I don’t mean he was a cheapskate! He was very orderly. And extremely romantic.”
“Hmm, well. Bet he was a pretty randy bastard then, wasn’t he? Often the case with those outwardly rigid types.” Emi never ceases to impress me with her insight.
“Yeah, he was! Feels like an age ago now, though.”
“Bet he was always posing, right? And almost too protective.”
“Uh . . . Well, he didn’t love me much, so I never had the benefit of any protection like that.”
And it was aged twenty-four that I lost myself to Law’s almond eyes . . . Just when did I take over someone else’s life?
We’ve arrived at an area lined with brash American-style boutiques.
“You know, I was hoping for something grungier.”
“How about those punky places over there, then?”
I buy a stole made of yellow netting and a rose to wear around my neck. Still not quite there. Then, a black suit from a less racy shop—with a tight skirt, mind, not trousers.
“Want to come round to mine for dinner?” Now, I’m only inviting Emi over because I hate being alone with CHAIR. This is a chair that sits in the middle of my apartment and talks to me—and only ever to say mean things! It’s pretty ridiculous for a piece of furniture to have a personality, but that’s just how it is. And it talks just like my mother.
“I’m kind of tired. It’s been an intense day. I want to take a break and digest it all, by myself.”
The fact is I’ve had my fill of her already, so I’m secretly quite glad. But where’s my sense of agency? It makes me sick, seeing myself so limp-willed.
Emi raises her hand in the darkening blue light, and I sigh as she turns and walks away, as though the words “free will” were written across her back.
Once I get home, I take tonight’s clothes out of my wardrobe and lay them on the bed.
I sit down beside them and light a cigarette, and CHAIR pipes up. “What about the new outfit?”
“Oh, the black one?” I lay out the black suit, too.
“Why did you go and buy that?” She has a rough, raspy voice, husky yet piercing—she sounds just like my mother, and I hate it.
“I thought maybe Naoshi could be into plain girls. And it makes a statement, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know why you’ve become so obsessed with that boy without even having spoken to him yet, by the way?”
She shakes with laughter, her balding velvet cover trembling with its greyish floral pattern, and her armrests wobbling, too.
Now, I’ve never sat on this CHAIR—she started jabbering away at me the day I took this room. Anyway, you can tell her springs are probably broken just by looking at her.
“Look, Naoshi is someone you used to know. That much is true.” She takes a few steps to the side.
“Why did I forget him, then?”
“Because your long string of failures begins when things start going to pot with him. It takes you a whole decade to even realize he’s serious about you.”
“Does he dump me?”
“No, child.” CHAIR strides about the room.
“So . . . You mean there’s some misunderstanding between us and we split up. Is that it? I mean, there’s no way I’d be the one to leave him.”
“What if you are?” She lets out a snigger.
“No, I’d never—”
“Oh, come on, I just wanted to scare you a bit!”
“But, look—that’s not something that happens to this ‘me,’ here, right? It’s not me that makes that mistake.”
“Well, I suppose we could say so,” CHAIR says with a speculative air, before shimmying back to her original spot.
“That’s something done by another ‘me,’ in a parallel world, right? How old am I there now?”
I realize it’s a stupid question as soon as I’ve said it. Which “now?” How do you even define that?
“You’re in your thirties, probably. You’ve realized your mistakes and you’re stuck in a whirlpool of despair. You’re in a state, like that last song you put on at the Seaside Club. Seems like you’ve actually gone a bit mad.”
“Oh, cheers.”
“No need to thank me, dear.”
“I seem to be wrong in the head here, too.”
“How come?”
“I mean, a chair’s talking to me.”
“You get doors and microwaves that talk, don’t you?”
“That’s because someone’s made them that way!” It’s gone seven o’clock.
Cooking can be a pain when I’m on my own. (CHAIR doesn’t eat anything, you see.) And my diet is horrific. I suppose I hate fresh fruit and veg because my mum was always telling me to get my five-a-day in. She’d always be saying, “It’s good for your looks. Ugly girls need all the help they can get!”
So, three pieces of stale cake it is—straight in my gob.
“Aren’t you going out?” She knows everything.
I take a bath, which makes me sleepy. I put my pajamas on and lie in bed. The clock by my bedside reads a little before eight.
“Get dressed, do your make-up!”
“I’m shattered. Be quiet for a bit.”
“You’re scared, aren’t you? That’s what it’s really about. You’re worried you’ll mess it up again.” I hear mockery in her voice.
“Sure, maybe. But why did it happen before?”
“Because you had no self-confidence. Naoshi’s always surrounded by girls, looking bored, right? And you were just too damn proud to let anyone know how that made you feel. You hid it from him. Never even occurred to you that he might doubt himself too.”
“What did you say?” I ask, leaping up.
I’d heard CHAIR’s words, though—we both know that. So she says nothing more.
It’s way past eight o’clock.
Emi must’ve left by now. I consider calling her . . . But only consider. I don’t actually do it.
“How long are you planning on staying on this planet?” asks CHAIR after about half an hour has passed.
“I want to stay here forever.”
“Everyone says that, dear. But you can’t, can you? You have to live your life. You have to cook, clean, look after the kids when they’re sick. You have to go out to work.”
“Why do I have to keep on living that life?”
“Well, I’m not sure why.” Her voice strikes a gentler chord, all of a sudden.
And I repeat that phrase in my head. “I’m not sure why.” I fluff my pillow, turn off the lights, and chant a spell. Sleep, sleep. Make the world disappear.
Two days later, and I’ve made it to Friday’s Angels. “Heroin” is playing, which is a major plus—but no sign of Naoshi.
“Apparently he was just here,” Emi yells. You have to shout to be heard. “He came in with that girl there,” she says, pointing to a blonde dancing centre stage. A different girl to the one he was with at the spaceport.
I go to the bar and order a 7Up.
There’s a strobe light pulsing, and people’s movements skip between each flicker. It could be a time-lapse video, with a fresh troupe of frozen corpses searing every flash-lit frame.
The lighting becomes more psychedelic. I cut through the middle of the dance floor (keen to get a good look at this blonde) and make for the door. Not particularly pretty. (Not that I’m particularly pretty, either.)
Naoshi’s there, sitting on the stairs.
“Aren’t you coming inside?” I ask, standing still.
He keeps his head down and says something back. I don’t hear him.
“What?”
He repeats himself, but the sound coming from inside the club swallows his words, and I can’t make out what he’s saying.
I sit down beside him. He’s repeating, I think, the same words again, and with great patience.
“This girl said she wanted to come, so along I came . . . But I just hate people looking at me.”
I say nothing.
Apparently he came to this planet around the same time Emi did, whenever that was. And he’s famous, so I knew his name straight away.
He cuts a very striking figure and there’s a distinct aura about him. Some would say he has a sort of ethereal beauty, and you can’t help but know he’s only half human.
He was one of the first alien “blends” and, well, his almost completely green head of hair is hard to overlook.
Expressionless and gloomy, he has these severe, empty eyes that seem to say he’s long given up on any kind of hope or ambition.
I take a sip from my bottle and pass it to him. He looks back at me with that wide, unsettling stare—it’s like looking into the glass eyes of a creepy doll. His eyebrows are also a deep green and bushy around the sockets.
Meekly, he sips the 7Up.
“I don’t get it. Girls always want to come to these crowded places. I just wanted us to be alone together, somewhere quiet.”
“Well, it’s because they want to show you off.”
He runs his long fingers through his hair.
I can hear some popular song playing through the door. The dry superficial performance sounds pretty funny to me now. The melody is so monotonous, and the phrases are excessively long. Grand old golden-ratio tunes just don’t seem to suit this era.
“You know, lately,” I begin, slowly, “I’m finding it hard to identify what happiness and pleasure are.”
He looks up.
“Well . . . Does it matter? If something feels good, that’s pleasure.” He gives a weak laugh. “Nothing more to it.”
“Seems like you live a pretty straightforward life.”
“Oh, I’ve got my problems. You know, I used to comb over and pick apart every single day. Then, all of a sudden, I stopped thinking—I became ill . . . My brain cells took some damage, and I lost the ability to, I dunno, think like I used to.”
It’s as if he’s talking about someone else entirely. “What do you mean, you’re ill?”
“I’m a drug addict.”
He looks up at me after giving this blunt answer, trying to gauge my reaction. I fight the muscles in my face, trying to keep from expressing anything.
He gets up.
I follow his line of sight to find a boy standing at the bottom of the stairs, seemingly fixed to the spot, looking like a glitch in the scene. He’s an absolute fashion victim, with a bandana tied around his calf. Brilliant. Doesn’t suit him at all, sadly.
The boy makes his careful way up the stairs, step by step. He’s smaller than Naoshi height-wise, but sure makes up for it in width. One of those baby gym-rat types.
“Need to have a word with you, pal,” the boy says, with a cracked voice.
Here we go, I think to myself.
“I don’t think I know you,” Naoshi says, apparently racking his brains.
“About the girl.” He glares at me. “Her, there.”
“Sorry, what?” I step closer.
“Don’t be moving on other people’s girls, you hear me?” He looks at us both.
“Since when am I your girl?”
“Look, there’s no sense in pretending. We met twice before, out there, and you made them moves on me, remember? ‘The world’s gonna end soon,’ you were saying. ‘Let’s watch it go, together.’ And I’ve been preparing for it! But here you are, spilling all the fucking beans to this one.”
“He’s a nutcase!” I say.
Naoshi lets out a long sigh. “Everyone’s messed up here.” The boy tries to grab my arm.
He falls down the stairs. Naoshi yells something. The boy hits the landing hard.
Seems I’d kicked him over with my very own boot. I say “seems,” because my body moved before I’d even thought about it. I stand very still, surprised by my own actions. “Is he knocked out?”
Naoshi is intolerably calm. “It’s fine. He didn’t hit his head.” The boy gets up, clumsily, trying to recover his dignity.
Emi comes out through the door. “Fancy getting something to eat? Oh, dear. That blonde girl’s looking for you, you know.” Naoshi makes to leave, but pauses and asks me, timidly,
“Mind if I come see you tomorrow?”
“What time?”
“Just after noon.” And he heads indoors before I can even nod my head.
I lean against the wall. “I wish he’d stop this.”
“The fighting?”
“No, no, that was me. That’s not what I mean.”
“You’re shaking.” Emi gives me a hug.
I open my mouth to say something, but close it again.
“Let’s go.” She leads us out, and as we approach the landing, the muscly boy is still there, staring dumbly at me.
Cloud covers the night sky.
We walk along, blown by a warm and balmy breeze.
Wide streets, dark buildings—now and then, a peaceful haze will soften the neon lights of the drive-ins and the nightclub doors.
“Doesn’t this town make you feel all nostalgic?” Emi voices what I’d been thinking.
“You know, I’d always assumed I just wasn’t capable of seeing myself with real emotional clarity.”
“Well, without that clarity, you’ll never make it to the big leagues. You’ll just spend your whole life stuck among the amateurs.”
We cross the bridge. Chains of boats line the river. The road by the edge seems to be part of some big construction project, with cranes overhead casting their dinosaur-shaped shadows. The lights of cars following the curves of a distant motorway are joined like a necklace.
A desolate scene, quite apart from the seafront. Yet I still feel a similar sense of nostalgia.
“But recently, you know, I’ve been having these moments of shining coherence. I really mean it.”
“So until now you’ve just been laying on emotion for show when you’re with other people?”
“I suppose so. Hey, how about that place over there with the orange curtains?”
It’s an all-night cafe with poky windows, a cheap air and a sparse scattering of customers.
Emi and I sit at a table by the wall, and a waiter approaches with a lengthy menu. Can’t be bothered with that, so we just go for the set meal and drink.
“What’ve you been seeing so clearly now, then? People say all sorts of things, don’t they, like: ‘I’m turning into my mother,’ or ‘I’m really feeding the weak woman stereotype.’”
“There’s not much difference really, is there?” Emi’s mouth creases into a smile. “Everyone thinks they’re unique when they have these moments of clarity. Kind of like how you felt when you cried in Yokohama, perhaps. I don’t know. I find those moments allow me to forgive myself, even if it’s just a little bit . . . And I forgive my mother, too.”
“Things gets easier once you acknowledge the situation.”
“That’s right. Even if you don’t solve anything. It’s the same with my own illness, too. It might flare up again once I’ve gone back to my life on Earth. It might not. There’s no controlling that. It’s not a good habit, to want to solve everything.” Emi gazes elsewhere as she speaks.
My meal arrives. There’s the main dish, a salad, and also a small glass of rosé.
“Is this included? It wasn’t on the menu.”
Emi wraps her handkerchief around her finger. Before long, her order comes too. And, sure enough, another glass of wine. “They’re really testing me.” The handkerchief, tied like a rope, turns her finger white.
“Come on, it’s fine—” I begin, only to be shocked by Emi’s intense glare, seething with energy. I thought her gaze would pierce right through the glass. She looks away and wraps the handkerchief tighter, until it hurts. Her hands are shaking.
“Hang on, was that . . .”
She looks up. Resentment wells in her eyes and spills out with her tears. “That’s right. The stuff about my mum—that’s me. And no, I didn’t mean to lie about it. I just couldn’t acknowledge that part of myself. It was too painful, so it had to be smuggled in under the guise of my “mother.” They put us to sleep before we came to this planet, right? They must’ve manipulated our minds along the way, somehow.”
I stand up, shuffle round the table, and sit down next to Emi. Though they’re both types of addict, there’s a stark difference between an alcoholic and a dope fiend. The boozer clearly needs other people. They’re clingier than junkies. Now, if you’re hooked on tranquilizers or painkillers, you may be less bother because you become so passive, but you’ll inevitably be cold, distant and unfeeling.
But how do I know all this? Emi continues sobbing.
“You know, I’m not sad at all. I did just realize that this alcoholic mother of mine is me. But these tears, they aren’t because I’m sad.”
I grab my bag and pull out a handkerchief. Emi uses her own to blow her nose, then thanks me and reaches for the new one.
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
Her tears subside. She dabs at her eyes and tries hard to smile. “Feels good to cry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going back to Earth tomorrow. That’s my illness: I’m an alcoholic. I think I’ll make it through.”
“Wait, hold on! Tomorrow, that’s—”
“The sooner the better. Let the Seaside Club barman know, will you? He’s been a great help.”
I’ve come to depend quite heavily on Emi, so I feel a bit dejected. She knows what I’m like. You end up completely hooked on people who indulge you. Naoshi, though—he hardly seems the dependable type.
“We’ll meet again, I know it.”
I listen to her words, crestfallen. I stare at those glasses of wine, as if they harbored destiny itself.
I can’t have slept more than a few minutes before a faint knock wakes me up.
“The sun’s barely up, you know,” whispers CHAIR.
I go to the door in my pajamas, barefoot. There’s no intercom. And there stands Naoshi. He stretches his long neck, his hair covering his eyes. “I thought you might be out,” he smiles faintly, with his big lips.
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s so early in the morning.”
I really don’t see his point. He smiles again. It’s a bit of a grimace, actually—he seems slightly unhinged. Exhausted, too.
“Come in.”
He moves to the sofa.
“How did you know where I live?”
“I just ran into Emi. She had a suitcase with her. Pretty thing.”
“Have you been up all night?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll go home soon.”
“Do you want tea or coffee? I’ve got jasmine tea, too.”
He lays on the sofa, his eyes on my bare legs. Then, a moment later: “Coffee’s not very good for you, you know.”
“Says the drug addict.” I put the kettle on.
This isn’t about ‘redoing things.’ There’s no starting over.
“I’m sick of these reboots,” he murmurs, facing me, as I open the can of jasmine tea. “I’ve had so many already, redoing things over and over again.” I can see only his green hair from the kitchen. “This is maybe my fourth time coming here.”
I take the mugs out of the cupboard.
“Correct,” announces CHAIR.
I almost drop the mugs.
“This isn’t about ‘redoing things.’ There’s no starting over,” she says. “You go through some similar experiences every time—it’s about letting go, basically.”
I cower at CHAIR’s shrill voice, but Naoshi doesn’t seem bothered by it at all.
I quiver as I make the tea.
“Reboots are about letting go, and accepting things,” CHAIR emphasizes, more quietly.
Naoshi opens those cold, unsettling eyes and watches me settle his mug on the table. He sits up and lets out a sigh long enough to carry his whole soul.
“You’re growing on me,” he says offhand, with a shrug of his thick eyebrows, “I’ve come to like you now, having met you so many times here on this planet.”
“Here he goes, blabbing on again.” More mockery from CHAIR.
“It’s simple really. So this is my fourth reboot. Now, for some reason you didn’t turn up on my third—I guess they try mix it up a bit.” I don’t think he can hear my speaking furniture. “Well, it’s made me believe in fate anyway. I always end up the same no matter what path I take.”
“Can you time-travel, is that what you’re on about?”
“Nope.” He shakes his head.
I sit on the bed, drinking my tea.
“And if you really think about it,” Naoshi says to himself, “it’s not so bad.”
“No thinking needed,” quips CHAIR.
“You know,” I say, “I thought you’d be more introverted, a man of fewer words.”
“I am, when I’m out there. And I’m pretty loaded right now, too.”
I get up and sit by his feet. “Hey, what exactly are these ‘reboots’ all about?”
“It’ll become clear, soon enough,” he replies quietly, sounding a little weary.
“Now then, look at this old scene,” CHAIR begins, “you’re hoping to get him to say he likes you again, aren’t you? But you needn’t bother. He could say it a hundred times and you’d still never be satisfied. Not even a thousand times would work. And it’s because, child, you just don’t love him. Not one bit!”
The nerve of this CHAIR, using a word like “love”? Has she no shame?
All the same, I get my sweet and coy act on (tilting my head to one side, etc.) and ask him, “What’s love?”
“This, surely?” He reaches out and places his hand on my shorts, on my crotch, before immediately taking it away again. He did it so casually I couldn’t even jump. “I’m a horribly direct guy, aren’t I?”
Oh, but if I showed some force, he’d bend to my will. You see, Naoshi had long ago disembarked from his life, had withdrawn and shut himself away in this pillowy narcosis. And now, he’s merely watching himself drift on—watching, wholly numbed, and without emotion. I doubt he could even muster the energy to try and understand anyone else. In that head of his, there probably isn’t much difference between me and his old guitar. And he isn’t trying to hurt anyone—no, not at all. He’s just . . . checked out.
But who cares if he objectifies us? It’s all fine with me. “Well, he’s not exactly ‘fine,’” CHAIR says, in my head.
I want to make him mine.
“And you reckon you’ll bring an end to your endless string of failures that way?”
I know, I know. But the reason I want him is something more urgent than love.
To me, you see, Naoshi is . . . a symbol of a certain time. And the voice in my head is no longer CHAIR’s. A make-believe time. I made it up, all by myself.
“Mind if I stay here a bit longer?” He seems more relaxed all of a sudden. And then I remember. He asked the same thing before. Back when I was twenty years old. An endless age had passed since then.
“Why don’t you sleep in the bed?”
“Okay.” He begins taking off his clothes.
I open the curtains slightly to look outside. A new day—fresh, luminous—is already starting. I imagine I’ll head back to Earth eventually. Once I manage to let go completely. I no longer care about happiness or unhappiness. I just hope the scenery’s pretty, wherever I am.
“Aren’t you going to lie down, too?” Naoshi calls out to me from the bed. I lift up the covers and get in beside him.
He wraps his arms around my neck. And he speaks now, in a gentle voice, to no one in particular. “Don’t worry. The world won’t stop spinning. It’ll keep going, even if you don’t want it to. On and on, until you’re absolutely sick of it.”
The barman from the Seaside Club is staring into my eyes when I wake up.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Not too bad.”
He’s a doctor, and we’re on Earth.
“You didn’t get what you were looking for, though.”
What a serious look on his face!
“I’ve come to accept that it just might not be possible.”
I can see a dull-colored sky through an open curtain. Weak sunlight is coming through the window.
“That planet isn’t real, is it?”
“That’s correct. Everything you experience there has been programmed and transmitted to your brain. We didn’t want to create a fantasy world, you know, where everything’s just as the patient wants it.”
“What if they never want to come back?”
“We forcefully wake them up, which can be quite painful, psychologically.”
“And the travelers with silver bracelets were all patients, weren’t they? So everyone else must’ve been fabricated, imagined . . .”
“Emi, who we discharged a little earlier—she left her contact details. Seems she wants to meet up with you.”
She must be thirty-six years old, in this world. Naoshi must be out of the facility too, then. He took off from that planet three days earlier.
I get up.
No need to look in a mirror. I already know the score: I’m a dejected housewife, in my thirties—impatient and frustrated, yet too limp and lethargic to do anything about it. And I live in one of those hideous, uniform, low-rent apartments I can see out the window.
The doctor has left.
I change into my clothes.
Waiting for me in the corridor is my husband.
Naoshi’s grown so shabby and unsightly, a goblin next to his past self. Silently, he steps towards me.
I take his hand, for the first time in forever. “Please, let’s not go to that planet anymore. Do you realize what these reboots are doing to us?”
He issues some vague sounds in response. And outside, the day turns to a swampy night.
We often behave as if there’s something inherently shameful about reading and writing fanfiction. I remember compulsively clearing my browser history as a child, terrified that my parents would find out what I was doing. I would slink into my family’s computer room and search up stories on YouTube, fanfiction.net, or fandom specific forums. I wanted to engage more in my favorite worlds and read more about characters I learned from, related to, and loved. But as I grew up, I learned that this instinct was embarrassing, and that the resulting work was “cringey” and “bad” and “not real literature.” So I kept my AO3 and Tumblr oneshots hidden and in private browsers.
But if “fanfiction” means stories and novels that incorporate already-existing characters and worlds, including sometimes real people (“real person fiction” or RPF), then it’s not relegated to work on AO3 and Tumblr—plenty of traditionally-published stories and novels count as fanfiction too. Extended universes like Star Wars or Star Trek have officially-licensed books and graphic novels by fans. The genre of historical fiction allows writers to envision the inner lives of their favorite artists, generals, or royal advisors. Yet we often don’t think of these books as “fanfic”—maybe because they’re not on fanfic websites, but just maybe because we consider fanfiction to be the domain of young women and young queer people.
Every culture has stories about established characters. Cinderella stories and Shakespeare adaptations and myths about myths dominate our libraries. (Shakespeare himself was revamping stories from Ovid and Chaucer.) And a lot of these adaptations garner not only traditional publishing deals, but broad literary respect. So here are 8 published books that by definition are fanfiction. And if these books can be good, who’s to say the work on AO3 is anything to sneer at?
It’s 1862 and Abraham Lincoln’s son is dead—at least mostly. In the evening following the 11-year -old’s death, Willie Lincoln explores the bardo, the space between this world and the next. With a cast of 166 characters (primarily OCs), this historical RPF shows Willie meeting and befriending ghosts from all backgrounds who are grappling with their existence, their present state, and their lack of future. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln, torn between the start of the Civil War and insurmountable grief, sneaks into the cemetery for a final evening with his son.
Snuff, a sentient dog belonging to Jack (as in the Ripper), narrates a series of 31 connected drabbles taking place across a 19th-century October. Snuff and Jack sneak around a dark and dreary London collecting everything they need for “The Game,” which culminates during a full moon Halloween. An onslaught of literary and historical references (Rastov aka Rasputin, The Count aka Dracula, The Great Detective aka Sherlock Holmes) show up, with their pets, as Game participants. The winning team, either the Openers or Closers, will decide the fate of humanity.
A modern, Brooklyn-based Pride & Prejudice AU. Zuri is a proud Afro-Latina Bushwick native, but her neighborhood is quickly changing. Zuri’s older sister starts falling for their new neighbor, Ainsley Darcy, but Zuri and Darius Darcy can’t seem to meet eye-to-eye. As Zuri navigates cultural identities, college applications, and her relationship with her neighborhood, she learns to balance pointing out other people’s flaws and accepting her own.
Imagine: A “vaguely academic,” drug-addled tale about a couple named Wendy and Jack, trapped in a haunted house with their young son. No, no not that story, a different one. This one is “intertextual.” Wendy and Jack terrorize each other through time and space in an endless loop. With thorough expositions of horror tropes and rigorous subversion, this couple’s hate for each other keeps you on your toes.
The Iliad but make it gay and horny. At first, Patroclus is Achilles’ servant. For years, he watches the son of a sea nymph and a king grow up, golden and beautiful. Then when war breaks out, the two become closer than ever and fall completely into each other. As the years drag on and tensions are raised between Achilles and his commander Agamemnon, Patroclus asks himself what bonds are sacred and what he must do for the war to end.
Hillary Rodham is a bright, young law student who begins dating Bill Clinton, a charming student with big political dreams. Although the two connected on every level, Bill seems unable to stay faithful, and a young staffer comes to Hillary with rape allegations. Bill fails in his 1992 presidential bid, while Hilary focuses on her long-term career. When 2016 rolls around with Bill, Hillary, and Donald Trump as potential candidates, what will be this AU’s election outcome?
Dr. Voth, a trans man and academic, becomes focused on Jack Sheppard, an 18th century con man. After discovering a manuscript entitled Confessions of the Fox, Dr. Voth unravels Sheppard’s tale of his own trans identity and his relationship with a South Asian sex worker, Bess. Dr. Voth narrates in the footnotes of this manuscript, which provides a multi-layered queer lens to view an imagined history of a real thief.
In a 21st-century Underworld, Penelope, Odysseus’s faithful wife, is lonely, bitter, and sharp-tongued. With centuries of hindsight, Penelope remembers her life from her childhood in Sparta to the years of waiting for her husband’s return. Her twelve loyal maids helped to deter her suitors, but when her husband returns and hangs them, their blood stays on her hands. Featuring interspersed drabbles from her maids’ perspectives, the truth about what happened between her and Amphinomus, and her thoughts on why her cousin, Helen, sucks.
Fiona Mozley’s sophomore novelHot Stew focuses on the unlikely intersection of a whole cast of diverse characters whose lives constitute the hustle and bustle and grit of contemporary Soho in London. There are homeless communities, there are old drunks, there are young businessmen, there are sex workers, there are developers, there are those who resist. The “big bad” is gentrification: developer Agatha wants to get the sex workers out of one of her Soho properties so she can better monetize it. This is a novel about solidarity among the dispossessed, and about holding on to what is good about the old when the new threatens to paint over everything with its matte, rich gloss.
English writer Fiona Mozley triumphantly emerged on the literary world stage at the age of 29 when her debut novel Elmet was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Elmet is a “northern Gothic” set in rural Yorkshire, and focuses on the claustrophobic relationship between a father and his two children, and their disputes over land and property. Hot Stew is an entirely different kettle of fish, but Mozley’s concern with property, place, and development remains central.
I talked with Mozley over Skype, she in Scotland, and me in Australia; neither of us in Soho.
Madeleine Gray: You’re a white woman who is Oxbridge educated, and one of the main characters, Precious, is a Black woman, not tertiary educated, and a sex worker. What are your thoughts on what authors can and can’t do with characters whose experiences they do not share?
FM: So, the first thing was, because it’s a multi-voice narrative set in London, it would have been beyond bizarre for all of those characters to be white. So after I’d made that decision, I decided, okay, well, I didn’t just want the peripheral characters to be people of color. So I decided to make some of the more integral characters people of color. Then I just focused on the things about them that I felt able to describe and imagine. Precious doesn’t face issues of race in the book because when you write characters, you only ever write a bit of them, don’t you? There’s never a complete story. So I just focused on the bits which I felt pertain to the novel in a way that I could get to grips with—and the parts of those characters’ lives with which I didn’t feel able to get to grips with, I didn’t write about. I suppose I felt I would have written about them poorly.
I find these questions and these conversations so interesting and so important, but I think part of it is actually just trying to make the best of it, try to do what you can, try to take on board these valuable points and try to be aware that you may fall short and that there may be criticisms and those are valid and potentially part of the conversation.
MG: Okay, so as you said, you don’t do the bits of the characters that you feel you can’t access. For Precious, who is a Black sex worker, this means you don’t paint her Blackness as something that detrimentally affects her in this line of work, like she doesn’t experience any racialized objectification or violence. And for the other sex workers in this book, too, they seem to have no problems apart from development and gentrification.
FM: I wasn’t really interested in showing the sex work per se, because it’s not what the book’s about. I didn’t want to gloss over the fact that a lot of sex workers have a really, really hard time, but I also didn’t want these sex workers, these characters, to experience the hard times. I wanted these women to have a really good situation and for their main difficulties to be socio-economic and their main struggles to do with money and housing.
I felt that it was necessary to mention other set-ups, like how a lot of sex workers in the UK are trafficked, but again, this novel is all very artificial, this is a fictional vision. For me, it was first and foremost about treating the characters as human beings, working out their lives in terms of their relationships, not their work. We don’t focus very much on Bastian’s work, for example. So, again, the thrust of the novel was property, this dispute and the struggle over a piece of land.
MG: Why did you choose Soho as the setting?
Of all the cities that I’ve ever inhabited, it had to be London because London is the place where I’ve seen the most profound divisions between rich and poor.
FM: I thought about setting it in a bunch of different places, but it just seemed to me of all the cities that I’ve ever inhabited, it had to be London because London is the place where I’ve seen the most profound divisions between rich and poor. And it’s a place in the UK where those forces are happening most frenetically, where gentrification is at its apex, and particularly Soho, because it has this history of being this Bohemian quarter and it’s been various things over the years. It’s been a place where immigrants have gone in the 19th-century, it’s got a lot of political connections, Karl Marx lived there, and it’s also been the center of the theater district, a food district, and sex work district. It’s a real melting pot, I suppose, for want of a better word. So it seemed like a really good place to set it. Also I ended up living in London for four months in 2013 in an illegal sublet, kind of like Glenda, and that was when I was writing Elmet and thinking about Hot Stew.
MG: The character of the Archbishop, the ringleader of a group of homeless people in Soho, is very interesting to me. If you wanted the sex workers in your novel to have a generally good time because you wanted gentrification to be their only problem, then your decision to characterize the “leader” of a large homeless population as pretty much evil is an interesting move. He’s almost Trumpian in his illogical rhetorical sway. What was going on here?
FM: I wanted him to represent almost the spirit of London, but not in a good way. I wanted him to be this demon at the heart of the city. And he talks about how he claims to be 300 years old and it’s all very surreal. He claims to have lived in connection with all these historical characters and he’s given Karl Marx his best ideas and he sat for Joshua Reynolds and all of Casanova’s stories are actually the Archbishop’s. So I wanted a sense of this demon at the heart of the city that’s been living there for centuries and who’s been whirling various forces around him and he now finds himself in this basement preying on vulnerable people trying to collect them together and whip them up into a frenzy. In some respects, I saw that as the play within a play, even though it’s not a play, it’s a novel. There is no play.
MG: Yes, you wrote a novel.
FM: But there’s this extra layer of artifice, I suppose. The homeless community finds this crown in the rubble, which turns out to be a theater prop but they don’t know it’s a theater prop. And so I wanted this connection to an almost Shakespearean tragedy figure, who is whirling these forces around him and then he comes to his ultimate demise. And I suppose I’m really interested in the pettiness of power. With the Archbishop we can watch him doing his thing and just think, “Oh, what’s it all for?” And I think that always applies, whether you’re in charge of a Soho basement or whether you’re in charge of the United States of America. I mean, I wasn’t actually thinking of Trump but it works, doesn’t it? The same pettiness, the same pointlessness to it all, the same dark energy.
MG: Absolutely. But then for Agatha, the developer who wants to get the sex workers out of her building, her want of power comes from a similar but also such a desperate place. Tell us about what motivates Agatha’s desire for power.
The whole novel is about being slowly eaten alive whilst you’re trying to also consume.
FM: I don’t even think she necessarily wants power. I think she’s terrified. I think she’s terrified of other people, she’s terrified of being found out or cast out. I mean, her own sisters are after her. She’s really worried about revolution and rioting. She’s incredibly lonely, but I think her desire for power and is a desire for control. I’m quite interested in the role that fear has in that mindset. She’s definitely the arch villain but I suppose when there were moments when I wanted to humanize her, I wanted to present this idea of terror and fear and loneliness, which, I suppose, is a well-trodden path when we’re thinking about what makes powerful, rich villainous people tick. There is this idea that we can come back to the place of vulnerability. But I am genuinely interested in that because I’m interested in the way that it might be possible to get through that, rescue those people from themselves even if they don’t really deserve it.
MG: Evil people are going to read your book and then change their minds because they’ll understand their own vulnerability.
Moving on! Hot Stew is very plot-y but it also plays so much with language and metaphor and simile, and on this note: I’ve noticed that you’re obsessed with snails. There’s this bit that I liked when Bastian’s putting in his AirPods and your narrator says, “The earphones fit snugly. The plastic beads like tiny snails curled in their shells.” I love that image. But the novel also begins with a snail, and then there are snails all throughout it. What’s with the snails?
FM: I wanted to start the novel from the smallest character and then let it all unfurl. And, of course, the snail is a curly thing, isn’t it? So it has this idea of slowly unspooling, and that snail there was about to get eaten and the whole novel is about being slowly eaten alive whilst you’re trying to also consume. So it’s about, I guess, the “autophagy” of capitalism. [Fiona here wanted me to make clear that she was using air quotes and making fun of herself when she used the word “autophagy”. She was, this is true.]
And snails obviously carry their homes on their backs and so much of the novel is about home. In a lot of medieval books, people used to write in the margins, and one of the recurring motifs are snails and snails get up to all sorts of things. There are snails who joust each other and are dressed up as knights. People have tried to work out why the snail is such a motif in the marginalia but snails have this association of being in the margins and I suppose I wanted to evoke that.
MG: Speaking of movement from the margins: your first novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when you were 29 and it hadn’t even been published yet. How did that experience shape the trajectory of your career but also your attitude to writing? And, as a follow-up, what are your thoughts on literary prizes: good or bad?
FM: So, it had a profound effect on me. It meant that I just had a career overnight. Elmet was never supposed to do that. So it completely changed my life! But I really wanted to make the most of the platform that Elmet gave me.
And in terms of literary prizes, it’s a difficult one for me because I would be nowhere without them. Elmet was nominated for quite a few other prizes as well and it completely projected me into a world that I wouldn’t otherwise have inhabited. Do I think that literature should be about competition? No, I don’t, but I can’t detach my own good fortune from the prizes that Elmet was long listed and short listed for.
There are no ethical choices in capitalism. You have to be absurdly successful or from a rich background to be in a position to refuse prize money.
That being said, it’s also really funny when I think about where the money for prizes comes from. But it’s this thing, isn’t it? There are no ethical choices in capitalism. You have to be an absurdly successful author or someone from a really rich background to be in a position to refuse prize money. And with the Booker particularly, you find yourself rubbing shoulders with all sorts of people at those dinners, and I’m very much one for making the most of all encounters and all conversations. So if I happen to be sitting next to a hedge fund manager or, indeed, a Tory peer who sits in the House of Lords, then I’m going to subtly make the most of that conversation. But it is always strange looking at the authors and their politics and then the people who are also sitting at the dinners and funding the prize and their politics.
MG: What do you hope to have done with this book? What do you want readers to take from it?
FM: I mean, I’d love it if people did more reading around the politics of sex work and the politics of gentrification. If you’re someone that already knows a huge amount about gentrification and the politics of sex work, you may find this book totally bland and uninteresting. But I think, I hope, that there will be lots of people who read this book who are interested in the world around them but maybe haven’t really thought about some of the themes that it explores. And I do hope that they maybe think about it more.
In fact, I have actually already had that response from readers who’ve said it really made them think their own assumptions about sex workers. And I think that’s a good thing. I just think that novels are important in exploring human connections and human motivations and extending empathy.
MG: Yes! You can often feel like a bit of a humanistic loser for having that view, but I believe it too.
Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stumbled into the public consciousness in 1971. Cementing Thompson as the purveyor of a new style of journalism, the book is the best-known piece of literature about the titular city. The book’s entrenchment in the canon of pop writing was further perpetuated by a big-screen adaptation replete with all the by-now-familiar images from the book: over-the-top drug usage, outlandish tourists coming to race through the desert at the sporty Mint 400, and the author’s aggressive mumbles on all things right and wrong in the world.
If there is one theme in his surreal journey at the start of the 1970s, it’s Thompson’s alternately grandiloquent and bizarre assessment of where America landed after the turbulent 1960s. He chooses Las Vegas as his setting and portrays a gaudy, greedy, and garish city as both magnet and maker of the worst triumphs of capitalism.
Determining whether this work has earned its literary standing is something that can benefit from the local voices not represented in the most famous book about their own city. Now, 50 years later, three Vegas writers examine the text against a backdrop of tourists cosplaying Thompson’s fantasy and parachute journalists attempting to report on “the real Las Vegas.” Spoiler: they come away with very different opinions.
Veronica Klash
It’s the middle of summer. As a docent at the Neon Museum, I spend most of my time in the Boneyard, the outdoor display area featuring over 200 Las Vegas signs in various stages of life. The thermometer one of the other docents snuck in has broken from the heat. The backs of my knees are sweating. That’s when the bachelorette party in matching outfits shows up. They’re wearing white bucket hats, white tank tops beneath open floral short-sleeved button-downs, beige shorts, and oversized aviators with yellow lenses. One of them has a cigarette holder poking out of her mouth. As they start posing in front of the massive Moulin Rouge sign, mimicking influencer affectations, I thank God it’s time for my break. I go inside for the cold kiss of air conditioning and to wipe down the backs of my sweaty knees.
What I see, as a former hospitality worker in Las Vegas, is a series of scenes where the narrator and his ‘attorney’ are obnoxious assholes to hospitality workers in Las Vegas.
The singular imagery and rhythms of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas may be compelling. However, labyrinthine prose and exciting illustrations do nothing to mask the staggering array of inexcusable transgressions Thompson revels in as a pseudo-protagonist and author. The characters have all the depth of a drug-filled bathtub. The plot isn’t a plot. It’s a manic, circular anecdote that leads nowhere. What I see, as a former hospitality worker in Las Vegas, is a series of overdone scenes where the narrator and his “attorney” are obnoxious assholes to hospitality workers in Las Vegas. On the page is the same entitled, rude at best, threatening at worst behavior that is often displayed by visitors in this city. The narrative rewards disgusting actions toward bartenders, front desk staff, and waitresses. And let’s not forget the violent badgering and traumatizing of a housekeeper. Is that the exciting Las Vegas experience that bachelorette party was hoping to recreate after their photoshoot at the museum?
This book is fun like holding back your friend’s hair while she’s puking is fun. The party is over. You’re there, you’re present, but all you can think about are the horrible decisions that have led you both to this moment. I made the horrible decision of reading Fear and Loathing interwoven with Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins. I don’t know if Vaye Watkins loves this city in the way that I do, but I know she’s lived it. Her stories are evidence of experience. Of sneaking in under the slippery, translucent skin of a place and making a home of the spaces in between. By contrast, Thompson drops on Las Vegas like a cartoon anvil dripping with toxic masculinity.
In a telling section of chapter 10, the narrator, more a paranoid mess than a person, discusses interviewing and scrapping a story about Nevada’s inmates.
Why not? They asked. They wanted their stories told. And it was hard to explain; in those circles, that everything they told me went into the wastebasket or at least the dead-end pile because the lead paragraphs I wrote for that article didn’t satisfy some editor three thousand miles away—some nervous drone behind a grey formica desk in the bowels of a journalistic bureaucracy that no con in Nevada will ever understand—and that the article finally died on the vine, as it were, because I refused to rewrite the lead. For reasons of my own… None of which would make much sense in The Yard.
This condescending and arrogant paragraph is as revealing as the book gets. The reader is not privy to these “reasons of my own”; we’re meant to trust that the unreliable narrator’s reasoning for killing the story wasn’t pride or ego, but some sort of nebulous, righteous motivation instead. This throwaway sliver is a clear portrait of the author’s attitude. Hunter S. Thompson, obnoxious asshole, gonzo journalist, iconoclast, symbol of the martyred uncompromising writer, looms larger than any of the works he produced—an image furthered by Johnny Depp’s exhaustive embodiment of the author as character in two movies. In that sense, Thompson and Las Vegas live parallel lives, their portrayal grand, exaggerated, and unnuanced, leaving behind a myth most won’t distinguish from the truth.
Rare is the occasion when anyone deems the city worthy of further exploration. They would rather rehash clichés about gamblers and neon glow.
Reporting about this town (and that’s what this book is, after all, a reporter’s take on Las Vegas) consistently replays Thompson’s narrative of wild exploits in a desert oasis. Rare is the occasion when anyone deems the city worthy of further exploration. They would rather rehash clichés about gamblers and neon glow. Don’t get me wrong, I could write a whole essay on neon glow, I love neon glow, but there’s more here. There are unique neighborhoods like the Historic Westside, recently highlighted for Thrillist by local writer Soni Brown. There are unique people, like the ones featured in Amanda Fortini’s essay for The Believer. But you wouldn’t know that from Thompson’s book or the multitude of media that followed it.
There’s no interest in telling a new story; it’s far easier to emulate one already told, to build on the familiar fiction that’s been reinforced and accepted. This is fiction that prevailed in large part (with some help from tourism campaigns) due to the reverential treatment Fear and Loathing has received and its ongoing popularity. The fiction is that Vegas is a shallow, hollow place and the Strip is the worst example of depravity and consumerism. In actuality, Vegas is an inspiring city, with folks like Kim Foster single-handedly starting a free pantry to help feed people during a pandemic. It’s a city with a pulse-hastening culinary scene that celebrates talent like Jamie Tran’s, first honed on the Strip then shared with locals on the chef’s own terms. It’s fertile ground for a creative community that refuses to be confined and defined with artists like Vogue Robinson and Q’shaundra James. It’s home to organizations like Gender Justice Nevada, that fight to provide support and build change.
I’m convinced that love for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is love for the fantasy and shadow cast by its legacy—and author—rather than any of the book’s merits. Whereas love for Las Vegas can only be conjured by the reality of the place itself.
Dayvid Figler
My family moved to Las Vegas in the Spring of 1971 from Chicago. It was a cross-country trip in a rented station wagon, decidedly drug-free beyond some industrial strength Dramamine and copious amounts of Benson & Hedges hard pack cigarettes. Once arrived, we temporarily stayed with my Uncle Izzy, a flamboyant gambler who worked days at Caesars’ Palace spinning the sucker-bet BIG 6 wheel. My dad got a job dealing a game called “Pan,” favored by older Jewish ladies, at the Sahara Hotel. This is where my folks decided to live and raise their 3-year old.
Around age 14 or 15, I remember picking up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at the main branch of the Clark County Library for the first of what would come to be at least a dozen reads. Had I kept a diary then, the review would have been concise:
Lives up to the hype. Of course, the guys like it—so many drugs (boring)! I love it way more because he’s right about Vegas….it totally sucks! Also, Circus-Circus…YES!
This would have been around the book’s tenth anniversary, but by then, it was already the most essential book about my hometown—at least in my small circle of friends. Reading it was mandatory. In fact, some 40 years later, there are only limited new entries in the Las Vegas literary canon, and Fear and Loathing still comfortably rests near or at the top of any serious list. Most of the others (but thankfully not all) are by visitors who seemingly dropped in for little more than a bender or to confirm their presupposed notions. Hunter S. Thompson was no different—a tourist on a mission. Still, SOMEONE wrote about us and hit all the spots I knew well from my own adventures with my family. That’s awesome!
Now, 50 years after a station wagon came from the east and a red convertible came from the west (is it possible we both arrived in town the same day?), I no longer think Las Vegas totally sucks. Indeed, I’ve become a fierce defender of my city. And if you’d assume I’ve grown weary of the countless parachute journalists who choose to only write about the “reptilian” bombast and mostly stick to the tourist-laden Strip to support their pre-ordained narratives, you’d be right. But somehow, Thompson gets a pass from me even with his distracting, surreal hyperbole; details missed or chosen to be overlooked; and the shamelessly sparse mention of locals (apart from mocked casino workers).
I like to write about my hometown, but I also know Las Vegas as two cities. One is ours and one is theirs, and they outnumber us manyfold.
I like to write about my hometown, but I also know Las Vegas as two cities. One is ours and one is theirs, and they outnumber us manyfold. The visitors have every right to their take on a city that invites, lures and challenges them to find an experience worth their cash and repeat business—but their idea of what the city means or represents is necessarily very different from the one those of us who live here experience. Since we encourage it all to fuel our economy and repeat business, though, we are rightly stuck with the consequences, literary or otherwise.
In Fear and Loathing, I’ve come to find that the subtitle grounds the work: “A Savage Journey in the Heart of the American Dream.” As evident in the text, Thompson likely feels the dream is already dead. Died at Altamont or Vietnam or pop music or Spiro Agnew’s front pocket. He thinks Richard Nixon would make a good Mayor of Las Vegas. He stands on a steep hill in the city and laments “you can almost see the high-water mark” of the failed revolution of the free-thinkers, the explanation of which is the core of this book. And he chooses to pontificate upon all this from Las Vegas while admittedly indulging in its many offerings. Thompson, as skillful fish-taler, looks for answers to a puzzle he already solved before hitting Barstow, but damn, if it doesn’t serve as a valuable glimpse of the world at an important time from an important vantage spot.
It’s a book still worth exploring.
When Thompson calls Las Vegas “the American Dream” he does it with a sardonic howl. He revels in his fellow visitors who, maybe more like him than he’d care to admit, come here and engage in what they think is hep but is in fact old and stale and exploitive and corporate and controlled. He thinks of himself, perhaps, as the last free spirit in the playland of the intellectually dead, but misses the point that Las Vegas made a space for him, too. (I still giggle when he puts a 2-dollar bill down on the Big 6 game). He’s savage all right, skewering heartless casino executives and their dutiful goons, patsies, and shills (including the cops). It’s verifiably a true thread of Las Vegas, yet not a fully-fashioned yarn. Obviously, there’s more to Las Vegas than what Thompson “reported” in his week-long journey, but he does a memorable job at taking some unflinching snapshots through a free-thinker’s lens.
When Thompson calls Las Vegas ‘the American Dream’ he does it with a sardonic howl.
The book has value because Thompson was spot-on in choosing Las Vegas to observe America transitioning out of the hopeful ‘60s, Las Vegas as stuck in ‘50s, Las Vegas as place where Americans come to merely “hump the American Dream.” Intuitively, but not comprehensively, he catalogues Vegas’s sexiness as “bush-league,” its rebranding of hackneyed entertainment as hot, its promise of freedom coming with Draconian laws. In other words, he landed, like so many others from elsewhere, in the melting pot of our country’s Melting Pot. And like a Gonzo Jeremiah, he’s compelled to tell us that we should be very fearful (or is it loathing?) that we’re actually in a stew.
He hits the nail on the head that Las Vegas has somehow marketed its way into a genius compendium of artifice, hope, risk, opportunity, growth, disappointment, mundanity and resonance. And those are the keen and important insights this local Las Vegas lover needs in a book about Las Vegas. Because the two cities co-exist, the chronicle remains an entry in answering the important questions of how and why—even if it’s sometimes opaque through the comical haze of all those drugs (boring!).
Krista Diamond
At the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2020, we began our first day with a caveat: Consider that you may not be the reader for every story.
I had never thought of this, but it seemed obvious. Of course! If you have a pervasive fear of the ocean, you may not be the reader for a novel set on a ship. If you are in the midst of a painful divorce, you may not be the reader for a love story. Realizing you are not a story’s reader can inspire growth: You deliberately open yourself up to a literary experience you might otherwise disregard. Or, it can be practical: It saves you from wasting your time.
Who is the reader for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? I have read this book twice at different points in my life and as such have been two different readers for it.
I first read this book when I was 13 and living in New Hampshire. A boy I had a crush on said it was his favorite. He seemed so worldly for a 14-year-old at a Catholic school—he smoked weed, drank alcohol, kissed lots of girls. The book seemed similarly wild. Wanting to impress him, I read it. I found it terrifying and incomprehensible. I had never left New England, so Las Vegas and the Mint 400 went over my head. I had never so much as sipped wine during communion, so the lengthy descriptions of drugs made no sense. And Ralph Steadman’s illustrations gave me nightmares. “I liked the part with the hitchhiker,” I told my crush after finishing it, and he chuckled and nodded—my first taste of a guy conveying now here’s a girl who gets it in response to my saying something generous about art depicting violence towards women.
The second time I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was at 32 after five years of living in the city. Five years of tourists dressed in Raoul Duke’s signature bucket hat/Hawaiian shirt/yellow sunglasses ensemble for Halloween. Five years of Instagram posts with the caption We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Admittedly, I wasn’t looking forward to rereading Thompson’s famous text—I already bathed in its cliches every time I walked the Las Vegas Strip—but I felt I owed it to this city that I love so much, and perhaps to Thompson too. After all, everyone around me seemed to have a parasocial relationship with the idea of guy; maybe it was time to let his work speak for itself.
Before I embarked on this second reading, I took inventory of myself as a reader: I am a woman who lives in Las Vegas and mostly enjoys literary fiction. These three facts about me became the biases (if you want to conflate identity with bias) I ran up against again and again throughout the story.
There’s a case to be made for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a critique of masculinity. But to me, it just reads as the literary equivalent of every drunk man on Las Vegas Boulevard who has groped me and called me a bitch.
As a woman, it is difficult to be this book’s reader. Certainly, there’s a case to be made for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a critique of masculinity (and believe me, I’ve heard it from men in my own life, usually prefaced with a hearty, “Actually…”). But to me, it just reads as the literary equivalent of every single drunk man on Las Vegas Boulevard who has groped me and called me a bitch. Like those drunk men, there is no examination of male violence; there are just jokes about sexual assault. During the chapter in which Raoul Duke watches his attorney threaten a waitress with a knife, there is the beginning of a realization that could be followed by introspection (“The sight of the blade jerked out in the heat of an argument, had apparently triggered bad memories. The glazed look in her eyes said her throat had been cut.”), but it is quickly abandoned.
As a Las Vegas resident, it is also difficult to be this book’s reader. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a tourist’s perspective of Las Vegas. It is a preamble for “what happens here, stays here.” This is a book that gleefully tortures locals and treats the city like a lawless wasteland where the only people who matter are the ones who visit. For this reason, I’m kind of glad that none of the tourists I see dressed as Raoul Duke for Halloween in Las Vegas have ever read the book.
Lastly, there’s the writing itself, the part that those who only know the myth of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are willfully deprived of. Thompson’s prose can be beautiful on the occasions he takes a break from long lists of drugs the characters have consumed/are consuming/want to consume—god, “the womb of the desert” is such a melancholic descriptor. In the final chapter of the book, when Raoul Duke limps onto the plane away from Las Vegas feeling like he might “either cry or go mad,” there exists a rare glimpse of vulnerability in the writing. At last, here it is, a toehold into our narrator’s heart: the morning after the night out when one wakes up, sober, and looks inward. But Thompson doesn’t give us that—won’t give us that, can’t give us that.
And that brings us back to “us.” The readers. The perennial question: Who is the reader for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? I don’t think Thompson wrote this book for women. I don’t think he wrote it for Las Vegas either. I am not this book’s reader—and honestly, that’s fine. I don’t want to be.
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