Perhaps one of the more bizarre aspects of having siblings is the sense that this person, your sister or brother, could have been you. Some other combination of the same genetic material has produced this person, who sometimes seems almost like a shadow self or an other-worldly version of yourself. It’s like seeing alternate versions of the way you turned out. Variations on a theme. This can be interesting, but it can also be horrifying.
Because I grew up in such a large family, I’ve always been attuned to, and interested in, the effects our relationships with our siblings can have on us. I’m particularly interested in the deep intimacy that can result, especially, but not exclusively, between sisters, and the ways this intimacy can corrode, reform, even completely disappear, over a lifetime.
In my debut novel, The Comfort of Monsters, the protagonist Peg McBride loses her younger sister. Because they were exceptionally close as girls, and because Peg was, ostensibly, the last person to have seen her alive, she carries a deep sense of guilt and shame about her sister’s disappearance.
In writing my book, I looked to literature that explored these complicated connections and what happens when they are broken: when a sibling dies, disappears, or flees. Below are seven books that showcase the specific horror and heartbreak of loving and losing a sibling:
With a heart-racing plot and a gorgeously flawed, yet painfully perceptive, narrator, Moore’s novel tackles a heady set of subjects: intergenerational trauma, addiction, sex work, police misconduct, single motherhood, and sisterhood. Set mostly in the Kensington neighborhood of Philly, Long Bright River follows Mickey Fitzpatrick, a beat cop, who undertakes a desperate and at times ill-informed mission to find her missing and long-time heroin-addicted sister. Mickey mines her past as much as her present to understand how both she and her sister ended up in the novel’s present moment. Her search for her sister is set against a disturbing slew of femicides, and like the narrator herself, readers are holding their breath every time another victim is discovered. A beautiful, wrenching book about the ties that bind us and break us.
In Housekeeping, a pair of sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, work through the wreckage of their mother’s suicide at the not-always-so-steady hands of their aunt Sylvie. Though the sisters were once close, spending days skipping school and playing in the woods, eventually Lucille feels the tug of proper society. And one day—fed up with her aunt’s eccentric habits and poor housekeeping, and desperate to belong and live a “normal” life—Lucille abandons her sister Ruthie and goes to live with her schoolteacher. Lucille’s desertion ripples through the novel, haunting Ruthie, and readers until the very last sentence. A deeply empathetic and moving portrait of the sometimes irreparable ways we so often grow apart from those we love.
The pulsing heart of Danzy Senna’s debut novel is the narrator Birdie Lee’s love for her older sister Cole, which is a beautiful but complicated kind of love. The sisters’ mother is white and their father is Black, and though the girls are so close they share a secret language, in public people often don’t believe they are sisters. Birdie is so light-skinned that people sometimes mistake her for white. When their parents decide to split up, supposedly to protect their mother who believes the FBI is after her, Birdie’s life is changed forever.
Birdie and her mother run away; Birdie is forced to become Jesse Goldman and to pass as a white girl, because her mother says that the FBI will be looking for a white woman with two Black daughters, not a white woman with one white daughter. Birdie lives several years on the run, pretending to be Jesse, and the consequences of her mother’s lies are devastating. All the while, Birdie yearns for Cole, for their secret shared language, for the sense of self she used to find reflected in Cole’s face, for her father, and for wholeness. Eventually, she leaves her mother and sets out to find the other half of her family. Caucasia is a fast-paced, heart-breaking, and whip-smart read about the deeply constructed nature of race and the very real harm these constructions inflict.
In this debut novel, set against the bleak backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, Chia-Chia Lin portrays a Taiwanese immigrant family of six as they try to make a new home in a beautiful but nearly inhospitable place. Tragedy strikes the family when several of the children contract meningitis. The narrator, Gavin, is so sick that he is unconscious for a spell. When he awakes, he finds out that his sister Ruby has died. Gavin grapples with his grief throughout the novel, believing himself partially responsible for passing the sickness onto Ruby, and thus for her death. Ruby’s death haunts the whole novel’s telling, and remains a powerful vacuum of grief, like a large black hole, that the family struggles not to fall into. The Unpassing is an empathetic, deeply felt, and lyrical portrait of childhood loss, of never-ending grief, and of unbearable unbelonging.
The narrator, Bobby, adores and even idolizes his 16-year-old brother Carlton. And when Carlton renames his little brother—christening him Frisco—he turns him into a “criminally advanced nine-year-old”. Bobby yearns to live up to his brother’s opinions of him, so he tags along on a number of adult exploits, including taking acid with his breakfast cereal, following his brother to a cemetery where he spies on him having sex with his girlfriend, and attending their parents’ boozy house parties. The narrator doesn’t just want to grow up to be like his older brother, he wants to be his older brother. But Carlton’s death, at the hands of a shocking accident, alters both Bobby’s and his parents’ lives forever. And though the remainder of the novel takes readers far from the moment of Carlton’s unexpected death, to—as the title suggests—“the end of the world,” the magnitude of this loss continues to haunt Bobby into adulthood.
Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is the story of Jo-Jo, a 13-year-old boy who is struggling to navigate his fraught familial dynamics. His father, Michael, who is white, is in prison at the infamous Parchman penitentiary and his mother, Leonie, who is Black, is an on-again-off-again drug user. And so the care of his little sister Kayla often falls to young Jo-Jo, and they form an intense, survivalist bond that Ward portrays with heart-wrenching tenderness. Haunting, and complicating these dynamics, is the ghost of Jo-Jo’s uncle, Given, who was the victim of a suspicious, likely racially motivated, shooting accident. Leonie is perhaps most affected by the loss of her brother Given and harbors wrenching guilt both about his death and her relationship with Jo-Jo’s father, Michael, who we later learn is related to Given’s killer. Leonie is deeply jealous of Jo-Jo and Kayla, because their closeness reminds her of her own loss. Though the meat of the book centers on Jo-Jo’s fraught relationship with his mother, who is spiraling out of control throughout the novel, Given’s absence affects the entire family. A powerful, lyrical exploration of the ways that violent loss and systemic racism have ripple effects through generations.
Nox—a difficult-to-categorize, shape-shifting sort of book—is required reading on grief. It’s a notebook of memories, including letters, poems, photographs, collages, paintings, and other fragmented artifacts compiled after learning of her estranged brother’s death overseas. Equipped only with one letter from her brother Michael, a handful of phone conversations with him over the years, and a limited knowledge of his movements, Carson struggles to write “an account [of his life and death] that makes sense.” And in some ways, though these investigations begin to sketch out a story for Michael, ultimately the assembled fragments are too inscrutable to become anything beyond that—a sketch, a kind of bizarre constellation of answers to all of Carson’s questions. A one-of-a-kind exploration of the circular processes of grieving, especially for a brother, a sibling, a person you feel you never really knew.
In “This Isn’t Music,” from Chris Stuck’s debut short story collection Give My Love to the Savages, a Black man who has recently moved home is covering his insecurities by making fun of everything around him, from the town’s blue-collar white residents to his Black ex-girlfriend. “You’re a snob,” the narrator says, “but only because you’re observant, hyper-observant. That’s your excuse.”
Chris Stuck has a gift for writing Black characters—often professionals—who are adrift. In different stories, a couple ruin their vacation by live-posting it, a Black conservative searches for love on a cruise ship, and an affair with a white woman turns into a Get Out-esque proposal where being a “kept man” has a new meaning. Everyone is alienated from their surroundings and not sure where to go next.
That in-betweenness is a bougie Black feeling. It’s a mixed-race one, too. Stuck has a Black parent and a white parent, and he addresses multiracial identity directly, in the Pushcart Prize-winning title story and in the collection’s wrenching opener, “Every Time They Call You Nigger,” which was originally published in Meridian.
Raised in Virginia and living in Portland, Oregon, Chris Stuck has an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University. Give My Love to the Savages is his first book, and Publishers Weekly praised its “inventive spin on Black satire” and “perfect balance of absurdism and realism.”
We spoke over video chat about Black in-betweenness and dropping your first book in your 40s.
Chris L. Terry: Writing that pushes the boundary of what’s acceptable can be really compelling. Do you feel like you’re working in that space?
Chris Stuck: It’s not like I’m trying to be controversial or anything, but I am trying to examine it. Like my story about the guy who becomes a penis, “How To Be A Dick in the Twenty-First Century.” I was having fun, writing a story that was amusing to me, and I thought my editor was gonna nix it. She loves that story for some reason! I had it buried in the collection so readers could sort of ease into the book, have a few warm-up stories before they got a six-foot-tall Black penis narrating a story.
CLT: “How To Be A Dick” makes it humiliating to be a penis. I like that one-two punch at the beginning of the collection: the poignant, personal-feeling “Every Time They Call You Nigger,” then this absurd story about a penis. It sets the parameters for the wide variety of topics and feelings that the book has to offer.
CS: I generally like fiction that has some kind of edge to it. I think a lot of fiction is so earnest that it gets boring. But sometimes I think about the humor in my book and worry that people don’t like humor in literary fiction. Some stuff, Black writing especially, tends to be what you would expect or what’s already been done. I love all Black writing, but sometimes we can be put into a box and accept it and just produce art that’s always been made by other Black folks in that box, whether that be slave narratives, inner-city narratives, drug and crime narratives, or the use of Black vernacular in a performative way in order to prove how Black you are to a white reader. This is no diss to anyone who does that, but the work that’s always intrigued me has always gone against the grain. Not everyone feels that way and that’s cool, too.
CLT: Paul Beatty has an essay about how his work attacks a certain sobriety that can feel required in Black literature. The idea that a story needs to be maudlin and dead serious to be great. I think, as a Black writer, there can be some pressure to not use humor because we need to convey things about our experiences that other people don’t take seriously. And, I agree, it can feel really stifling.
I love all Black writing, but sometimes we can be put into a box and just produce art that’s always been made by other Black folks in that box.
CS: When my agent, Dan Mandel, went out with this book, it was out there for a fucking year, and I noticed that most of the editors were white. So, it was hard not to get upset about that racial dynamic, and the monolith of publishing. I wasn’t what they wanted. At the same time, my stories were getting published in journals by white students in MFA programs. They were publishing me enthusiastically, so I had to check myself on some of that stuff.
Yet, no one wanted the actual book. I thought my agent would pat me on the back and say, “Well, we gave it a shot.” But he said we weren’t giving up. He made up a new list of editors and publishers. I saw Amistad was on it and I realized I’d never considered them simply because Amistad had a history of more traditional Black narratives. I didn’t think they’d dig what I do. Dan sent the manuscript out on a Thursday, I think, and Tracy Sherrod at Amistad called me the next Tuesday.
CLT: There is that generation, Danzy Senna and Mat Johnson, older Gen Xers who were writing about mixed-race Black experiences. Even Paul Beatty, who writes skewed Black experiences. I feel like maybe you and me are the next generation of that. We’re inspired by them.
CS: Definitely. They opened a door that we can go through and run off somewhere else. It’ll be the same for the ones who come after us. When we were growing up, we were the only mixed kids around. Now, I look at my younger cousins and their kids. There are mixed kids everywhere! Like, where did y’all come from? I get into old guy mode. Do you know how hard it was for us?
CLT: A lot of your characters are Black people who are isolated or adrift, like the couple in “Chuck and Tina Go On Vacation” who post their whole trip on the ‘gram. Or, “This Isn’t Music,” my favorite story in the collection, about the guy who moves back to his hometown and is having an affair with his ex. Tell me more about writing these characters.
CS: I like characters who are in between destinations, or between races in some way. That’s the way I’ve always felt. Every job I’ve ever had was just the job to make money, and it was never what I wanted to do. So, I’m always adrift. I envy my friends who are engineers and love their jobs. I was always thinking about something else while I was having to do a job or school, you know? Thinking, This is boring. I can’t wait to get to do what I want to do.
So many times, Black characters are relegated to being down and out in fiction. That’s a narrative that publishing is familiar with, so they just keep hitting it over and over again.
My last job was in diversity consulting, for a small Black-owned company here in Portland, Oregon. My boss was a successful dude and I want to see more of that in writing. So many times, Black characters are relegated to being down and out in fiction. That’s a narrative that publishing is familiar with, so they just keep hitting it over and over again. Even my editor, she was like, there’s only one or two blue-collar characters in your book. And I was like, but these white-collar characters are like you!
The guy in “This Isn’t Music,” he tried to go into higher education, but his heart wasn’t in it, so he went back to driving trucks. There’s that in-betweenness again. So there’s the question: as a writer, what do I write? How the world is keeping us down? Because in so many ways, it is. It’s reality. Or do I write about how some of us are actually excelling or trying to? Most of my family’s blue-collar, and when I’m around them, I occasionally feel how I’m not like them. But if I’m around more highly educated people, I feel like they’re stiff as fuck. I love it and hate it, but I feel like that’s my material.
CLT: I like how a lot of your characters are professionals. Do you feel like a middle-class identity separates a Black person from the Black mainstream?
CS: I do have people in my family who got into the right line of work, but when they come back to their family, it’s a lot of code-switching. With my mother, I could tell who she was talking to on the phone by her tone and diction. When I’d call her at work growing up, it felt like she was another person. It was “Professional Ma” on the phone. White folks are listening, boy. That’s what some of “Every Time They Call You Nigger” is about, figuring out where the hell to be comfortable in all these different worlds.
A Black person has never said I wasn’t Black enough. It was always someone who wasn’t Black.
Black people travel across so many different lines every day. So, people who have done well in life, I don’t think that separates them. If you’re tapped in, you’re tapped in. If you’re stuck up, like so many Black conservatives and certain Black social critics seem to be, you were never tapped in. It’s sad to say, but Black success is still such a new thing in the American mind. The first example we probably think of is the Huxtables. Maybe now it’s the Obamas. A fiction and a reality. But white America has had examples since the beginning of time. So it’s another in-betweenness that we have to deal with. You have to hold on to your Blackness yet know that Blackness is a broad state of being.
CLT: How does it feel to be bringing your first book into the world in your 40s?
CS: It’s too late yet right on time. I went to graduate school right out of undergraduate. I had classes with some of the professors that taught in the graduate program, and they were like, “Oh, you should apply.” So, I did and got in. But I was 23, in an MFA program, and I was a complete stoner, drunkie too. I still had to figure myself out.
Right after that, I got a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. While we were there, Jonathan Safran Foer’s agent or editor came to visit and she told us about him and his great book, even what his advance was. Naturally, everyone was jealous. He was younger than us, and we were young, too! Everyone wants to be the wunderkind, but I couldn’t deal with that. Back then, I didn’t have the confidence or the intelligence. I would’ve washed out. I think a lot of writing is just confidence. I know who I am now. I didn’t know myself for so long. I don’t think the male brain matures until the age of 27. Mine was probably after that.
CLT: How do you decide if or when you want to address mixed-race identity in a story, as opposed to just Black identity?
CS: The first story and the last story in Give My Love to the Savages are the only ones about mixed race, although other times I’m dealing with interracial situations. In the first story, I was talking about every time I’ve been called “nigger.” I wrote myself as the character and then started to change things. I don’t want it to be, “Me, me, me.” I want it to be a version of me or someone like me.
For the last story, a friend, who is white, told me her cousin flew into L.A. right when the riots were starting. And I tried to write it the way she told it, but it just wouldn’t work, which was for the best. But as soon as she told me that story, I knew the character was gonna be mixed-race because of Rodney King, the LAPD, and everything with race surrounding that. If the character was white, there could be some complications, especially with having a racist father, but not as many as if he was mixed with a white racist father and some baggage in his past. That’s just where my creative mind went with it. It felt like a story I hadn’t seen before, a story I could partially relate to. I’m always looking for the complications in stories, the in-betweenness again, and in a way, it’s an update on the “passing” narrative. How more in-between can you be than being a mixed kid with a racist white father driving around L.A. just as the ’92 uprising begins?
CLT: In your work, even if it isn’t explicitly a mixed-race character, there’s still having these interracial, experiences. I think that those are stories that we’re positioned to tell.
CS: For sure. Sometimes writers of color are pushed to exploit their corner of oppression, like, “Oh, I’m mixed. This is my niche. This is what I’m going to do forever.” I don’t want to be the mixed-race guy who just writes mixed-race characters. But I get if someone would. Sometimes, mixed folks are really into being mixed. I play around with that with my social media handles @super_biracial and @super_biracial_man just because I always got jokes. I actually identify as Black, not biracial. I was lucky to grow up around my Black family for 90% of my life. I was raised to be a Black man, even by my white father. So I could always see my brothers’ and cousins’ in-betweenness too because I’m them and they’re me. A Black person has never said I wasn’t Black enough. It was always someone who wasn’t Black. Yet being mixed, I can also see all the different nooks and crannies of race. I can travel across lines that some darker Black folks don’t or can’t. In some way, I feel like it’s a lucky position to be in as a writer. The stories are unfortunately endless.
An old woman had not left her house for a very long time. She had missed dentist appointments and a meeting with the podiatrist. It was possible that her son was keeping her inside the house against her will, selling her belongings, neglecting her care. The girl who had reported the case had not wanted to identify herself. She did, however, have much to say about the issue of cat feces.
Everywhere, she had said over the phone, and her voice had cracked with emotion. It’s like a minefield. Of cat shit.
Petra, ever diligent, had written this in the file.
The old woman’s house was on the mountain, on a road called Bottom Furnace. It was late January, so there was ice on the mountain also, and frost heaves, and some small, impassable bridges. There was never cell service. Petra kept a flashlight and a blanket in the trunk of her car along with a set of flannel underwear, still in the package. She had never asked herself how, in the case of a breakdown, she would get herself into the underwear.
Petra liked street names, how strange they could sometimes be. Bottom Furnace, she imagined, would go well with Lost Lake Road and Swearing Hill. Last week, she had driven to a house on Mad Tom and to another on a road called Twitchel. She liked the old names of the people that she visited: the Ethels and the Hirams. Hyacinth and Sissy and Eugenia. Lester, with his pipe and his large, scaly ears. She made sure that they were being cared for, that they had enough fuel for the winter, and sometimes, out of kindness, she checked the mousetraps for them. She asked if there was anyone harming them, or if any of their medication had gone missing.
There was wildlife too: the black bears, the folded flight of herons over her windshield. How red foxes trotted with their heads turned, conscious of traffic. In the winter, there were mostly little birds, crows cawing, and recently, a small white cat in her backyard. She had built a shelter for it from a Styrofoam cooler lined with straw, after seeing the design in a children’s magazine.
Can we let her inside? Petra’s son had asked about the cat, his concern only deepening a well of desire within her to let worlds mingle, just for once.
Petra turned onto the mountain road. She removed a glove, finger by finger, with her teeth and placed her hand against the heating vent on the dashboard. Vermont Public Radio had been playing Brahms all morning, which always brought her heart to a crawl, made her feel like damaged goods—in an appreciative sense. It carried a memory too, something almost a decade gone: a mansion, august with green vines and piano attics. Walking there under the weight of her violin case, over a footbridge where there was a pond, reflecting the colors of dawn. How young she had been, feeling as though she were truly, truly herself, in the same way an adolescent moose charges top-heavy from the tree line. Endearing; terrifying.
There had been an ice storm the previous week and some of the trees along the road were bowed or broken. She could see the fresh wood where someone had used a chainsaw to clear a limb that had fallen. The wood chips were bright against the gray, muddied snow. Lately, the majority of her cases had taken place on these remote stretches, in areas referred to as hollows—places that seemed to Petra to be utterly random and lonely. It worried Petra’s husband to know that his wife was out there by herself. For his sake, she often left out certain details, like her encounters with unchained dogs, or the old man in the wheelchair, who had snorted a line of cocaine off the back of his gnarled hand. And, of course, there were things like cat feces, which, knowing her husband, would have dismayed him most of all.
How young she had been, feeling as though she were truly, truly herself.
Her husband was a tortured man. He would not use public restrooms, or see movies at the theater. Sometimes he microwaved slices of bread, or pickles, of all things. Sometimes he boiled water before drinking it, just to make himself feel better. After six years of marriage, he had never shared a drink with his wife, never sampled food from her plate, never used the shower after her without first wiping it down.
Yes, he’d say, with perfect self-awareness. I know that it’s all in my head.
She found the address without difficulty, just as the intermezzo on the radio was ending. The house was lopsided with a mossy roof and an enclosed front porch almost fully obscured by blinds. She could see, from where the blinds were askew, that the porch was filled with bits of furniture with the legs thrown upward, sun-bleached fabrics, and piles of newspapers with the pages bent against the glass.
Caroline Marrows was the old woman’s name. Petra confirmed the spelling on the case folder, then repeated it under her breath as she walked over the ice to the house.
If I don’t do it—repeat it like that—she had tried to explain to her husband, then I will spend the whole interview worrying that I’ve said the wrong name. Like a madness.
You mean an idiosyncrasy, he had replied.
A girl in short sleeves and a winter hat met Petra at the inner door. She seemed to look beyond her, through one of the cracks in the blinds, as if checking to see what kind of car she had arrived in, or if there was anyone else with her. Petra extended her hand.
I’m here to see Mrs. Marrows, she said. The girl did not speak, but she moved aside for Petra to pass through. Her face was long and peevish. She reminded Petra of someone working at a carnival, a face that says, Come on and try your luck.
Petra entered a cluttered kitchen with a warped linoleum floor. Above the sink, which was piled with dishes, there was a small window with a drawn curtain. The hard winter light glowed through a pattern of red flowers flecked in the center with yellow. Petra found herself taken by these curtains, their implied intentions: like a petition for all that was nice and long ago.
She was accustomed to finding her way through unfamiliar houses. Upstairs, they would sometimes tell her. Casey’s old room, as if she were privy to the house’s history. Once, she’d walked into a log cabin and was led by a German shepherd to a skylit room where a large woman lay suspended in a hammock. The whole space was rigged with hammocks, for the cats and ferrets, for potted plants by the window. The woman was on oxygen and had a list of health issues. She told Petra that she was saving her money for a trained monkey that could change out the toilet paper, fetch chips with nimble hands that would not crush the bag. A ferret had emerged from inside the woman’s sleeve then tumbled to the floor, limping away to some other, unimaginable part of the house.
What Petra remembered vividly was the floor, which was, due to the hammocks, almost completely bare—or at least would have been, had it not been for the tumbleweeds of dust, fur, and little pellets of dry food, compressed so densely that the cats batted them around like toys. Petra had stared at this expanse of oddly sculptural bits of filth and thought, sadly, of her husband. How the sight would have overwhelmed his mind, propelled him into a fit of highly specific madness, like the time he took sandpaper to his top lip, because he was convinced that it would prevent him from catching a cold. She had given him two Xanax and sent him to bed. The result had been so effective that she often wondered if she could get away with spiking his coffee some mornings.
It would shed no light on her husband’s condition to reveal that he spent most of his days working with dirt. In his lab, he dealt mostly with a black, pungent substance called char, which needed to be stirred and measured. His work was environmental, a tireless search for what was fertile, what dark, smelly matter would best produce life. He moved about the counters and test tubes with his horn-rimmed glasses, his long lab coat and nice shoes, barely touching anything.
He dislikes correspondences by mail, his assistant said. Make sure you never lick the envelope.
And then the baby was born. He was born gaunt and nearly translucent. The infant’s frailty was something that the man in horn-rimmed glasses could understand wholly, he found, and he kept vigil in the NICU with such haggard tenderness that Petra was spun right up with it. She joined him in his delirium: the cleaning of little red skin folds, hot towels from the dryer, and bottle temperatures. Visitors were asked to speak at a low volume and douse their hands in disinfectant lotion.
Petra found Mrs. Marrows in a back room where the windows, curtains and all, were cocooned in sheets of plastic. They billowed every few minutes in the draft, which gave her the disorienting feeling of being on a ship, or very high off the ground. Besides the peevish girl who had met her in the doorway, there had also been a man, presumably the old woman’s son, who had not spoken, but nodded to the side, so that Petra was not sure if he was acknowledging her or cracking his neck. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, the front of which was obscured, almost down to his belt buckle, by a thin beard. He had taken a step back to allow Petra to pass through to the hallway, and she had heard the linoleum pop and groan beneath his steel-toe boots.
Mrs. Marrows smiled from her armchair. The way that she was seated there, beneath a heap of afghans, reminded Petra, eerily, of a trick of puppetry, as if the woman were standing behind the chair, sticking her head through a hole.
Mrs. Marrows, Petra began, worried momentarily that she had the wrong name. I hope you are staying warm.
The woman nodded. The plastic on the windows made a sucking sound, and Petra once again had the sensation of being in a tower, high above the ground. She noticed that the room was almost bare. It might have passed for tidy had it not been for the whorls of cat hair pressed into the rug, like the meteorological images of clouds.
Last spring she had brought her husband to a concert. She had not told him that she knew the composer, that once, in college, they had slept together. The music was tremulous and experimental. She was filled with visions of the deep sea, of dazzling ancient creatures.
It was the first time that they had left their son at home with a babysitter. He had just reached the age that her friends had warned her about. It will be why this and why that, they told Petra. Just you wait. But her son rarely asked why. Instead, his questions were fully formed, with their own gravity.
How do you know that a caterpillar is not cut in half?
Who is a window washer, really?
After the concert, Petra’s husband had frowned. Too long, he said. It sounded like listening to someone weeping. For too long.
The boy was asleep when they got home, the babysitter watching television with her bare feet on the couch cushion. Everything was fine, she said, except he would not eat his beets. He was worried that they would stain his teeth forever. He thought that the celery would tie a knot in his stomach. She shrugged.
Petra’s husband had smiled at the babysitter as he counted her bills at the door, but then he spent the rest of the night scrubbing the couch cushion, turning it around and forgetting which was the sullied side, then cleaning the rest of the house, just in case. Petra could hear him going through the silverware as she fell asleep, hearing music in her dreams, like the clink of polished knives laid out across the table.
Something was wrong. The man with the long beard and the steel-toe boots was not happy. He had appeared in the doorway, his head stooped. I’m just not comfortable, he was saying. I’m just not comfortable with her being here.
When he stretched his arms up to grab the doorframe, Petra saw the hair on his belly. She saw his belt buckle, the butt of a smallish gun just off-center. I’m just not comfortable.
The plastic on the windows billowed. Petra did not know if the man had meant to reveal the gun as a threat, or if it had truly been an accident. She had a strong desire to be back in her car, to have her public radio, her fingers jammed into the warm vents. I must not act rashly, she thought, followed by: If I could only rip through the plastic, I might escape through the window.
The man looked at her.
I have an uncomfortable feeling about her, he said, still not addressing Petra outright, although he did not appear to be speaking to the old woman in the chair either. It heightened her sense of danger, to be disregarded this way, as one would a prisoner. She looked down, avoiding his eye, and noticed that her hand was on the zipper of her purse. Somehow, she had unzipped it, perhaps in an unconscious effort to reach for her pepper spray. Her husband bought her a new can of it every Christmas. He said that you never knew how much potency was lost over time.
It doesn’t spray as fast as you expect it to, he would explain, year after year. You have to keep your finger down. It was useful advice.
As her son grew, his questions continued: What if an acorn fell into his mouth while he was yawning? If a finger grew too long? Just yesterday, he had sat behind her in the car and spoken of next Christmas—the child only ever talked about next Christmas, as if the present or approaching Christmas was too real to bear. He wanted to have a tree strung with popcorn and bells. But not stars. Never stars.
Do glass planets exist? he asked. Do children ever get a bone for Christmas? Just a bone?
What’s your name? the man asked Petra. She told him and he shook his head, unconvinced. I’m not comfortable with you being here anymore, he told her, his index finger pointing to the floor. With the other hand, he adjusted his belt.
They should all just sit down and talk, thought Petra, but the only piece of furniture was the old woman’s chair. In the corner, there was a large crater in the rug where something round and heavy once stood—the base of a lamp, maybe, or some kind of barrel. As Petra’s eyes traveled over the rug, she saw many other shapes: small circles from a set of table legs, the right angles of a chest or bookshelf, all of which made her feel as if the world were disappearing around her, piece by piece. She took a step forward and the man stood rigid, blocking her path.
She had seen her husband angry plenty of times. The way he moved his tongue around inside his mouth, as if tasting his own fury. How he studied his knuckles, wondering, she supposed, if this was the day that they would burst at the seams. But perhaps she was not being fair, for he had never been violent. With their son he was always soft-spoken. But one night they had gone out with friends and she had become quite drunk, grabbing hold of him for balance, touching him flirtatiously—her own husband—so that the other couple raised their eyebrows in amusement. At home, he could not look at her.
You embarrassed yourself, he said, and she saw there, in the line of his jaw, all the capacity any man had ever had for hatred.
The man blocking Petra’s path did not seem to know what to do with his hands. They hung stiffly at his sides and it made Petra feel a little sorry for him, as if he could not commit to being fully menacing. This did not mean that Petra was unafraid; his indecisiveness signaled to her that he was capable of anything. When she had arrived in the room, she had noticed an aged brass pole in the corner to her left. Her first thought was that it was some kind of antique pole for an IV bag, used for a homebound patient. Medical equipment—albeit never outdated medical equipment—was not an uncommon sight in her work. But it was not an IV pole. Petra saw now that it was a stand with a curled hook meant to hang a birdcage. At some time, perhaps in the distant past, or perhaps not so long ago, someone had kept a bird and fed it food and talked to it through the bars. Petra’s son would have something to say about this. It occurred to her that she might try telling the man that she had a son, that her son was waiting for her to come home. He was the kind of boy who would worry about the moss on the roof, wonder if the lacy white roots dangled down from the ceiling. He would not like there to be a stand without a cage.
The girl who had opened the door for Petra appeared behind the man. The man’s shoulders softened. He scratched the inside of his ear with his pinkie. Whatever he had wanted to do, it seemed, he could not do in front of her.
Come with me, he said, and he motioned for Petra to follow.
Once, during one of her investigations, Petra had discovered a dead body. She had been obliged to wait around for the state’s attorney and the medical examiner to show up. She had had to pee, but she did not want to be in the bathroom when they arrived. She did not even know if it was permissible to use the toilet of the deceased. The body was that of an old man, who had seemed to have fallen and caved in one side of his head. There had been no odor until the body was moved and the wound, which had been pressed to the floor, was exposed. When she got home, she had gone straight to the shower, turned the heat up as high as she could stand it. She wondered, briefly, as she scrubbed beneath her fingernails, if this was how her husband felt all the time, this itch, this dread. It’s not about dirt, she had thought, but the epiphany had not lasted, and the next day, she had found herself stupefied once again, when he threw into the waste bin a perfectly good carton of milk.
Petra’s husband did love her. He loved his lab and his nice shoes. He loved the deep freeze of winter. It was a relief to make his own heat, he said, to know that it was his own. He loathed the ocean for its warm currents and the city for its hot breath, all the secondhand air. Where there was life and where there was passion, there was also filth, he said. And when it came to sex, he braced himself against his wife, like a tree trunk in a flood, waiting for her desire to run its course.
With the composer it had been different. They had met in a student ensemble in that grand music building with the vines. He had played first violin and she, second. The composer had been a child prodigy. He could play twenty instruments by the time he was fifteen. Petra could not even name twenty instruments. She was always impressed when she remembered the name for the timpani, that thunderous one.
Where there was life and where there was passion, there was also filth.
The composer had been sloppy, kissing her all over, like a house painter without a plan. His arms were just strong enough that he found he could lift her, although he could not figure out where to put her. He swept the books off his desk and they landed facedown on the floor. She remembered being flattered, as if she had not expected to be revered over books, especially by someone so studious. She knew, even back then, that he was brilliant. She had watched him play, his bow drawing the notes from the strings, each measure a new tension discovered, then broken. But then there he was, wheezing and sweating, bumping his elbow, pulling her hair.
I like this, she had wanted to say. But the composer seemed ashamed.
I have a lot on my mind, he told her and picked up her clothes from around the room.
They had moved into the kitchen. The girl in the winter hat had made herself comfortable, sitting at the table across from Petra and lighting a cigarette. In front of her was a clutter of bottles, paper plates, various greasy tools that did not seem to belong. From beneath the mess, she unearthed a fashion magazine and began to read it, turning the pages with the hand that held the cigarette, decadently, completely at ease. The man with the long beard stood beside Petra’s chair. He had said nothing of the gun and Petra was beginning to wonder if she had been mistaken. Maybe her eyes had deceived her and she had been following his orders for nothing.
I love my mother, the man said to her. Something bulged in his jaw.
Petra felt sympathy for the man and so did not know what led her to say what she said next. She leaned back in her chair.
I was told there would be cat feces, she said.
The man looked at her. His beard, Petra noticed, was graying near his mouth and chin, but down at the bottom, where it was sparser, she could see the bright orange hairs, glowing in the sun.
She clasped her hands together. Cat excrement, she said.
The man grew rigid, looked at the girl in the winter hat, who lowered her eyes and flipped her magazine, suggesting that she did not intend to hear any of this. He turned back to Petra.
What? he asked her. What did you say?
Your house, she said, louder this time. It’s not as filthy as I expected.
Sometimes Petra dreamed of the composer. She dreamed of his lips pressed all over her, his hands grabbing. There was something about her that he could not figure out, and he would become more and more enraged, moving her around the room, forcing her against the wall until the plaster cracked. And sometimes, because it was a dream, it became her skin that was cracked and then her whole body, under the force of him. Parts of her came right off, like bits of glass, and, in the midst of her arousal, which was strongest in this dream, there would be a small voice crying out, as if to a child. Stay off the floor! You’ll cut your feet!
The man leaned in. His beard intersected a ray of sunlight from the window, which, catching the lighter strands, illuminated the whole, ragged length of it. Something near his waist clunked against the edge of the table.
Who called you? he asked. He seemed rejuvenated by this new, palpable offense. Petra could smell his breath. It smelled like a hole, like wet tobacco, like menthol.
I have no idea, she said.
Roland, said the girl in the hat. Roland, she said again in a scolding voice that was older and huskier than Petra would have expected. But he paid no attention and reached again for his belt.
Petra wondered if the man would really keep a loaded gun pointing down his pants, if he would wave it around, like a lunatic in a movie, or aim it straight. She wondered why she had not tried to run, or why she even bothered carrying the pepper spray. You have to hold down the button, she thought. It doesn’t come out like you think.
Roland, said Petra, just as the girl had. What a big name to have, she thought, way up here on this mountain. She looked at him and found that she was laughing. She said his name again—Roland!—laughing harder still, just to see what he would do.
Sometimes, Petra passed cows standing coolly on the wrong side of the fence. Roadkill that had been rained on and was hard to identify. A raccoon, circling in a daze under the midday sun. Her husband liked raccoons, because they washed their food.
They also eat trash, she explained.
Her son worried that raccoons might not recognize their own reflections. Because of their masks.
Last summer, a rabbit had darted in front of Petra’s car. It would have been killed by the pickup truck in the oncoming lane had the truck not stopped abruptly as well. There was a man behind the wheel of the truck. He had a pipe in his mouth. The rabbit cowered in the space just in front of the truck’s tire, and Petra met the man’s eye. She shook her head, as if to say, Don’t go. He held onto the pipe and nodded and they both waited. At some point, the rabbit had hopped back toward Petra’s car and disappeared from view. The man in the truck shrugged: the rabbit could be anywhere. So they waited some more.
Go, Mommy, Petra’s son had said from the car seat. He wanted to know about ghosts. He wanted to know where green olives came from.
Petra’s husband often wanted to know how long she spent in the shower after work. Did she remember to wash her hands when she was in there? And her feet? Letting the water run over them was not the same as washing. Getting dirty was not proof that she was helping anybody.
Go, Mommy, said the boy. Petra had looked once more at the man in the truck and then stepped on the gas, leaving the rabbit—dead or alive—behind.
What if a house painter paints all the doors shut? her son had asked.
Petra had driven on.
What about pitchforks? Bathtub drains? Do storks ever forget how to walk? They passed a cornfield, a country store. Someone was hammering a PICK YOUR OWN BLUEBERRIES sign onto a post. Petra pulled the car over and turned off the engine.
Look, she said, turning to the boy. One day I will die and a bunch of men that you don’t know will dig a deep hole. They will put me in the hole and I will stay there until I am a pile of bones. Any questions?
The boy stared at her and shook his head. He looked out the window at the person hammering the sign: a woman wearing an apron over a long patterned dress. He was silent as his mother started the car and turned back onto the road. It seemed to him that they drove for a long time, until the passing telephone wires created a sort of wave, a pulsing nothingness in his head. And when they reached home, he saw that his house was standing where they had left it, that it had not floated away. He saw his father’s face in the window, exhausted from holding it down.
Last week, Slate published an essay by a writer who claims to have inspired “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian, the viral 2017 short story. Alexis Nowicki says that the story contains details from her life and previous relationship, all used without her prior knowledge or consent. The Slate piece has rekindled an ever-smoldering conversation about the definition of autofiction; a genre that exists at the disputed border between fiction and nonfiction.
Roupenian never classified her short story as a work of autofiction. “It has always been important for my own well-being to draw a bright line, in public, between my personal life and my fiction,” Roupenian wrote in an email statement to Nowicki. But as soon as “Cat Person” was published, people were quick to ascribe autobiographical intent. Due to the story’s discourse-adjacent themes, as well as the gender of its author, the piece was routinely described as an essay or an article. Some readers assumed that the writer was using personal experience as a launch pad for a #MeToo take.
For Roupenian, the blurring of herself and her protagonist wasn’t just an issue of willful misreading. Because of the reactions the piece provoked, it became, in her mind, a matter of safety. “I have always felt that my insistence that the story was entirely fiction, and that I was not accusing any real-life individual of behaving badly, was all that stood between me and an outpouring of not only rage but potentially violence,” Roupenian told Nowicki.
Both the author and her muse went viral, becoming publicly exposed in ways that they could never have fully consented to.
In her essay, Nowicki describes the unsettling experience of realizing that she was the star of someone else’s story. She argues that “Cat Person” was an invasion of her privacy, explaining how acquaintances recognized her in the piece and made false, hurtful assumptions about her past relationship, based on a partial, fictionalized portrayal. Of course, Nowicki’s disclosure doesn’t take any of the focus off Roupenian. Instead, both the author and her muse went viral, becoming publicly exposed in ways that they could never have fully consented to.They’ve become the main characters of a new story, one that’s overpowered the original fiction.
I started binging TikTok last summer, during the peak of the pandemic and early days of the app’s “main character” trend. In these videos, creators emphasize, or imagine, that they are the main characters in their lives. This could consist of plugging oneself into an established TV or movie trope, or dramatizing a totally mundane moment. In one video, hashtagged “maincharacter,” the creator jokes about walking away from friends for a moment “to be the unique one.” Images of him sitting alone, dramatically staring off into the distance, flash over a Lana del Rey song. The caption on another clip reads, “I literally just ran through the field with this song it was cinematic it felt like nothing could stop me and I felt like the main character.”
It makes perfect sense that, at the height of quarantine, teenagers began inserting themselves into other, more compelling narratives. For the past year and more, as coronavirus cases waxed and waned around us, everyone has been talking about time—how it moves and how we move inside of it. Quarantine time was, somehow, both abundant and in short supply. For those of us privileged enough to stay home, days passed slowly, full of desolate hours, while months slipped by.
But this was never an issue of time so much as an issue of plot, or story. Time didn’t abscond, wasn’t passing slower or faster; we just lost our daily distractions from its passage. In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber describes time as an “agent” of plot. A character makes a decision and then time passes, forcing consequences. Seasons pass, and seed-choices bear fruit. What was missing from many of our quarantined existences was not the experience of time passing, but rather the presence of plot, of one event leading to another. This absence was at stark odds with the causality of the world beyond our quarantine bubbles. Out there, decisions, actions, fleeting moments of contact and exposure, all had serious, even deadly consequences. If we were lucky, we could afford to live in a room, in an apartment, where nothing much happened. Time moved forward, but didn’t yield the gifts or the consequences that we’ve grown accustomed to. Without narrative movement, and so little to do or decide, it became harder to see ourselves as the architects of our own lives.
What was missing from many of our quarantined existences was not the experience of time passing, but rather the absence of plot.
Stuck in a plotless existence, with no action rising or climax in sight, TikTok users transformed themselves into characters compelling enough to carry such a story. On TikTok, reimagining your life as a work of art, and casting yourself in the starring role, is called romanticization—or delusion. In the literary world, we call it autofiction.
In autofiction, as on TikTok, artists position fictionalized versions of themselves against carefully constructed backdrops. These two genres exist at the intersection of solipsism and craft, a place where the “authentic” self is performed for a mass audience. Both forms seek to elevate the mundane, depicting experiences that nearly everyone can recognize. We read other fictions to escape or experiment, to meet characters we admire, lust after, or abhor. But a work of autofiction promises something closer to a home: a consciousness not unlike our own, navigating the mundane turns and sharper edges of our common world.
As some of us emerge and others stay enclosed, we can all relate to autofiction more easily than ever. At the heart of these novels, which often decentralize plot or outright forswear it, is a writer typing in a still room. In Patricia Lockwood’s recent novel, No One Is Talking About This, her fictional stand-in quips, “The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair.” In last year’s Drifts, Kate Zambreno describes the novel she is writing, the one we are now reading, as “a memoir about nothing.” In between thinking about writing her book and thinking about how she is failing to write her book, Zambreno’s protagonist cries and masturbates, watches movies and windows and neighborhood cats. While not technically pandemic novels, these works of autofiction arrived just in time. Like a main character video, they allowed us to imagine that our plotless lives might still have meaning. They suggested that there was still art, or at least the potential for art, in all those dark pandemic days, the ones that felt like we were just barely existing.
Of course, most of us know that our lived realities do not merit fictionalization. But autofiction, like social media, can be aspirational (and just a bit delusional). If authors can be main characters, then maybe we can too.
But a work of autofiction promises something closer to a home: a consciousness not unlike our own, navigating the mundane turns and sharper edges of our common world.
Inherent to TikTok, and perhaps autofiction as well, is the notion that main character is a desirable role. We all want to be stars, social media assumes. We want to stomp down the street to a film score, to never be without flattering lighting, adoring fans, or a wind machine to blow our hair. And when it comes to fiction, who wouldn’t want to be both the artist and the muse? To be reassured not just that your life is worth reading, but that your internal narration and witty asides are actually the stuff of literary greatness?
But there is a downside to starring in your own fiction. In the past, novelists have largely been able to avoid the kind of stress, exhaustion, and exposure that routinely plagues social media personalities. Unlike lifestyle influencers, writers of autofiction have maintained an air of mystery. They’re not in the business of teary-eyed confessionals or incessant life updates. No matter how personal their work, they’ve always been able to cry fiction.
In his 2014 novel 10:04, Ben Lerner deliberately blurs the lines between his “real” self and his fictionalized narrator, who shares his name. 10:04, like Drifts, is simultaneously a novel and the account of crafting said novel. The protagonist, like Lerner himself, is attempting to expand a story that he wrote for The New Yorker. As events unfold, we’re constantly led to question the veracity of the story; whether these things actually happened to Lerner or are just plot points he’s considering.
At one point, rhapsodizing about his novel in progress, Lerner writes, “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously.” How fun, and how convenient. It’s the oldest trick in the action movie: flood the enemy with dupes, dummies, and clones. They’ll never know which one is real, and you can creep past all those doppelgangers to emerge unscathed.
If authors can be main characters, then maybe we can too.
In a recent interview with Bomb, Kate Zambreno says that she “writes narratives in which there is an I who is me and not me.” Zambreno adds, “The tradition is not something I’m inventing.” That’s true, of course: autofiction, by any other name, has existed for centuries. But writers are now expected to post a kind of autofiction daily, in addition to their published work. For young writers and journalists, maintaining a social media presence is increasingly non-negotiable. In addition to any fictional avatars they might want to manifest in their work, they also have to project a version of themselves onto their Instagram and Twitter feeds. In a New Yorker piece on the “main character” TikTok trend, Kyle Chayka notes, “Influencers have to be main characters around the clock.” Increasingly, so do writers.
While authors like Lerner might deliberately obscure the seam between fact and fiction, readers now have their own methods of demystification. As Lockwood notes, “I think we’re in a position to better be able to tell when something is autofiction because people’s lives are more online. You can go back through my timeline and see where the real me is experiencing things that eventually make it into the novel.” Readers don’t need to wait for, or be limited to, an author’s disclosures. They can compare any writer’s work to their feeds, inferring what is real and what is fabrication.
Now that authors are expected to become brands themselves, they have less control over when and how they adopt a starring role. What was once a choice—to maintain a demanding social media presence, or to be the main character of your own work—feels increasingly inevitable. If you’ve borrowed details from real life, or if your writing is in any way autobiographical, readers may very well trace the fiction back to its source, even if you’ve tried to fictionalize or obfuscate. In a post-privacy world, we’re all writing autofiction, whether we like it or not.
Years ago I wrote a poem, “Mirror Window.” The gist of it was that I kept mixing up the words, mirror and window; I said one when I meant the other. It was alarming, I was not yet forty, too young to lose language. My daughters noticed and teased me about being old, as daughters will, and I wrote about that, kind of a circle of life thing.
I’ve gone back and read the poem and it’s not bad, but like all my writing at the time and from years before, from my teens, I filed it away and distracted myself with being young: sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, i.e., men, and then marriage and a shiny, happy family in a house on a hill. I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand, I was distracted from writing by love, lucky me; on the other, love was conditional or finite, humans being human, especially me. The writing was a constant, but me as a writer was something—someone—I could not see. I thought of it as a hobby.
The writing was a constant, but me as a writer was something—someone—I could not see. I thought of it as a hobby.
In my late 40s, I tried “Mirror Window” again. This time it took the form of an essay, which came about because I was in possession of a large, antique mirror that I didn’t like but couldn’t get rid of. Let me go back.
I got the mirror when my mother died a decade earlier, not just my mother but my father too, he in March and Ma in June, both suddenly, neither yet seventy or sick. I was thirty-seven years old, an only child, or an adult only child, and a mother myself, in a complicated marriage. I was left with a split level to sell in the dead middle of Long Island. The contents were all mine, down to the coffee cup in the sink with Cherries in the Snow lipstick left on its rim. Consequently, the objects and furnishings and jewelry held—hold— outsized sentimental value.
Time passed, the parameters shifted. Love was indeed finite. My marriage ended and my little family reconstituted itself. We moved, with the mirror, to where we fit better with one less of us. That’s when I decided to paint its frame, give it a new look for my new life. I laid it out on a tiny patch of city yard on a sunny day, and in the course of sanding it down, I was on my hands and knees hovering over my reflection, focused on the task, not noticing myself. And then I did, and I saw how I’d look if I were on top of someone. How I looked during sex was on my mind at the time—I was a divorcée, it was still called that—because I was having a lusty adventure with a man seventeen years my junior. I was on top regularly.
We both reveled in our age difference but the truth was, I’d been trying to hide it.
The vantage point over my reflection showed my hair hanging in lank curtains on either side of my face, red with exertion. Gravity plus the sanding effort yielded sagging and swaying. The word “jowls” made itself manifest. I’d never looked my age before, but kneeling over this mirror, I sure did.
The distracting fling with this guy had turned into foolish fantasies about a life together. Once during pillow-talk, we did that thing of revealing something each had never told anyone else. My dark secret: Botox. We both reveled in our age difference but the truth was, I’d been trying to hide it.His dark secret? He admitted that he would stay a relationship’s course until someone new came along to provide him with a reason to leave. I knew this was true. It was the case with us; I had recently been the new one. “Mirror Window” was an essay about heartbreak. Once again, I filed my work away.
It turned out there was more to it than heartbreak. It turned out that refinishing the mirror gave me a window into a future with him I could not countenance, in both senses of the word—countenance like face and countenance like support. The truth is even if I had not sagged over the mirror that day, I was already worried about being where I am now, here in my sixties with a younger man who’d all but warned me he’d be watching for the exit. People do tell you who they are, and you should believe them, and he did, and I did.
I’m vain enough to want to ‘age gracefully,’ of course.
I’m vain enough to want to “age gracefully,” of course. The aging part has a mind of its own, but I grapple with what the graceful part should look like. I have had loss and sorrow and disappointment, who hasn’t, but that’s alongside great joy and the gift of an open heart. My pro-aging formula (a clap-back to the labels on the anti-aging stuff I buy) is to balance and re-balance on the inside so that when yet another signifier of my age shows itself on the outside, like a mirror taking the point of view of a lover, it’s not a disadvantage. It’s righteous.
I haven’t been completely successful at this. Unexpected reflections in shop windows startle me every time. Seconds pass before I realize it’s me, and that is strange. Recognizing myself is a process. I am in my sixties now, with Past Me and Future Me reflected too. Maybe the graceful part is that I’ve wised up. There’s less time ahead than has gone before. I’ve set (most) distractions aside and can see—I can’t not see—that recognizing myself, my selves, was always a process.
So I reframed. My longest, truest commitment, to writing, was never a hobby. It is what I do and who I am. First novel at 60, forthcoming novel at 65, third in the works. Now and then the hot chill of regret passes through me. I should have started sooner. I should have been less high, less young, less seductive and less seduced, less distracted. Well, wait. That’s not right. I was full of life and love, and sorrow, joy, and disappointment—the open heart. Regret is beside the point. I know there’s no grace in that.
Let me keep going.
I am still new at being me, the writer. I have so many ideas that I cast around too long before I settle on something. A writer friend advised, “Just write about what you always think about.” Mirrors and windows. It’s not a sophisticated metaphor, but it is simple, it is effective. In my work, my women think a lot about how to age gracefully even as they learn to recognize themselves in their new old faces. They stare into their bathroom mirrors and wonder what to do about the jowls even when they are nobody’s lover, let alone on top. They too are startled when they catch an unexpected reflection in a shop window.
Two crazy things happened recently on the same locked-down day. I went through my apartment in a pandemic-fueled mission to spruce things up. I decided to repaint the frame on my mother’s mirror again, it’d been a long time, and I wanted it to match a smaller mirror that I bought at a yard sale in Montauk thirty years ago, with an infant in my arms and a toddler hanging from my legs. I was inspecting this smaller mirror and I was surprised. Oh. It’s a window frame. A window frame, fitted with mirrored squares instead of clear glass. I’d had it for so long I didn’t register it anymore, even though I passed it several times a day. I actually own a mirror window.
Mirror window. It wasn’t a mix-up, I hadn’t lost language. I was telling myself something I couldn’t hear yet.
Not an hour later, I picked up a package containing the manuscript of my new novel—about distorted memory, accepting who you once were, and recognizing who you are now—from my editor. I poured some red wine and sat down, thrilled and grateful to see his old-school, handwritten edits on manuscript pages. On page 178, there was a strong delete mark through the word “window,” and his caret and note indicating it should be replaced with the word “mirror.” I’d done it again.
Mirror window. It wasn’t a mix-up, I hadn’t lost language. I was telling myself something I couldn’t hear yet. I was showing myself something I didn’t see yet. It’s like the two words were saying, and kept saying, Look inside, look outside, write it down, make it your life.
My daughters are now old enough to tease each other about getting old; I’ve aged out of the joke but I’ve revised the old poem, newly titled “Last Laugh,” wherein I give myself the final word, a circle of life kind of thing. I revised the saggy-jowls essay, and this is how it’s ended up: published, not filed away. I’m tunneling into the third novel, and in an opening scene my protagonist is holding a chaotic yard sale, everything must go, including her dead mother’s furniture, including a window frame fitted with mirrors for panes, just like mine.
Near the end of Pik-Shuen Fung’s debut Ghost Forest, the narrator laments: “…I am overcome with envy for the people who live where they were born and raised. Why is it that I have to choose?” I thought about this dilemma—the privilege of choosing where one lives—but I also wondered if it wasn’t a false choice, particularly for children of immigrants. Obviously, we cannot pick our place of birth. We have no say in whether our parents decide to leave their cultural homeland and raise us in another country where we must assimilate.
In the case of Ghost Forest’s unnamed protagonist, she comes of age in Vancouver, Canada, alongside her sister, mother, and grandparents, while her father remains behind in Hong Kong. Through short vignettes, she pieces together her memories as a young child and anecdotes passed down from the women in her family. While a college student studying painting, she encounters moments of quiet conflict with her father that continue to reverberate into her adulthood.
The novel presents a familiar immigrant narrative of split families and split identities told by a fresh, contemporary voice—a perspective many diasporic readers will recognize. Entangled with the struggle for wholeness that underlies the main character’s experiences, what scholar Anne Anlin Cheng describes as “racial melancholia,” another more immediate and palpable feeling of loss takes hold as she recounts her sick father’s final days and her family’s visits to the hospital.
Over a video call, Fung and I spoke to each other from our respective homes in New York, a city where we both ended up after childhoods spent on the opposite coast and a world away from relatives in Hong Kong. Marveling at many of the parallels we shared, I told her that my own father passed away two years ago. I felt grateful to Fung for so poignantly articulating the process of grieving and recovering family stories. In a literal sense, her incorporation of Cantonese mirrored attempts in my own fiction to replicate a language I grew up hearing but not writing. Our conversation, much like the emotions of joy and sadness that bubbled up for me while reading Ghost Forest, offered an opportunity to not only see each other, but also feel seen.
Mimi Wong: Where did the novel begin for you?
Pik-Shuen Fung: I was actually in art school, so I was doing my master’s at the School of Visual Arts, and it was the summer between my first and second year, and my dad had just passed away. So I was grieving. I was just in this mindset of making artwork. One day, I wrote out a vignette, and since I was in art school, I thought about how I could turn it into something I could show in my studio. I recorded myself reading it out loud. Then I turned it into a voiceover for a video project. The vignette I had written had a sort of circular quality, and I really enjoyed that. So I wrote a few more [vignettes], and then I made it into a type of short film.
MW: What were the visuals accompanying the film?
PSF: I tried a lot of different visuals. In hindsight, it was really apparent that I just wanted to write. But because I was in an art program, I was thinking about it visually. I tried appropriating some random footage I found on YouTube. Then ultimately, I found this really beautiful Chinese ink painting from the Yuan dynasty by a painter called Ni Zan, who was considered one of the Four Great Masters of the Yuan dynasty. There was a painting that he made the year his wife passed away called Wind among the Trees on the Riverbank(1363). I took fragments of that painting and matched it to the fragments of my voiceover.
MW: I love the way you play with fragmentation because I thought it was such an appropriate way to reflect how many of us learn about our family stories. They come to us and like bits and pieces over our lifetime. Our parents tell us some of it, but usually not anything in full. I’m curious to hear you talk a little more about how you were playing with that form.
PSF: I think that because that was the form I began writing in, and because I was continuing to experiment with the video, I decided to continue writing in fragments, and not in any particular order. I just wrote whatever was most interesting or charged for me. Then I would print them out on tiny pieces of paper and then rearrange them on my floor many, many times. And that’s how I grew the book. It was an intuitive decision in the beginning, and over time I also saw that it really worked, as you said, to capture the way that our families tell us or don’t tell us their histories, and also the experience of grief and memory.
MW: How did you go about digging into these memories? Especially young childhood memories, I feel like it can be really difficult. How did you kind of get in touch with your younger self?
I was more interested in leaving space for the reader to draw their own connections. I wasn’t as interested in describing the interiority of the characters.
PSF: Since it’s a novel, I didn’t feel limited to the experiences of my own memories. I think that what I was interested in doing is mimicking the experience of memory. And to me that is non-linear, it’s associative, and sometimes one image brings up the next image. Also, in my experience, memory isn’t always full of detail. Sometimes certain details really stick with me. But other times it’s like there’s only one detail that is salient.
To answer your question, I probably wrote most of the childhood scenes in my editing process. That was what my editor pushed me to do more of. It was really trying to choose which moments in the narrator’s childhood I felt were emotionally resonant, and not just because the book is so short. I really wanted every part to have some kind of emotional resonance. I think the difficulty was probably just in choosing what to add in during that stage.
MW: I also really love the way that you use Cantonese in the novel. For me, there’s something so inherently nostalgic about hearing it and seeing the way that the character is absorbing it. Was there any sort of approach you had in mind about how you wanted to use this secondary (or first) language? Were there any pitfalls you wanted to avoid?
PSF: Cantonese is my mother tongue, but I feel much more comfortable expressing myself in English. Also, my reading and writing level is really, really low, like elementary school level. I think for me choosing when to use Cantonese came down to whether I felt like it could only be expressed in Cantonese. So in my book, it’s a lot of the proverbs. There was a period when I went through this very complicated process of converting the Cantonese I wanted to use. I would convert it into pinyin, which is because I studied Mandarin in college, so I could write in pinyin, and then try to find the simplified character, and then convert it to the traditional character, and then put that into the manuscript. It took me so long.
By the end, I had this realization, I wouldn’t even be able to read this, and I’m really writing this book for people like me. So I went and changed it all back to the Cantonese romanization because a lot of times when I read romanization, I immediately know what is being spoken in Cantonese. Whereas if I had seen characters, I probably would have just, I don’t know, maybe put it in my Google translate app or something.
MW: One of the examples that I thought was really interesting in terms of it being something that was almost not translatable occurs in the second chapter, or the second fragment, where you talk about “gwaai” (乖). I immediately recognized it. I feel like there are a lot of connotations to that word that you can’t translate. What was your kind of understanding of what that term means, and how did you experience it growing up?
PSF: I think I really disliked the word. It’s like this combination of good, obedient, well-behaved, and respectful of your elders. Or it’s like the child embodiment of filial piety. Actually, I have a story about this word. I remember talking to my mom years ago. We were talking about this visual artist whose parents did not support her becoming an artist. So she ran away from home, and made it on her own, and became really successful as an artist all by herself. And my mother said, “Oh, she’s so lek.” [Meaning] impressive or talented. And then I looked at her, and I was like, “Do you think she’s gwaai?” And then she just completely changed the subject because I think that it just doesn’t fit into that concept of gwaai.
MW: To talk a little bit more about the characters of the different family members, I thought it was so interesting that they all kind of comment on their temper, or each other’s temper, especially given the fact that a lot of them seem to actively trying to control their emotions. I got the sense the narrator was not feeling certain things or pushing down certain things. How did you try to convey these different emotions even when maybe the characters themselves aren’t fully in touch with them?
PSF: Growing up, I didn’t realize my family was always talking about tempers. Tempers was just such a frequent topic. The first time I saw that reflected in a book was in Weike Wang’s Chemistry. And I was so happy to see someone writing about that as a trait that might run in a Chinese family.
Being Asian American or Asian Canadian, a lot of times it’s like people just look at our faces and assume that we’re a certain way.
In my experience, there’s so much focus on this idea of tempers, and having bad tempers, and that being inherited. But at the same time, I’m not writing about most other emotions openly in the novel. That’s the one emotion that’s focused on. As for the characters in my book, I think that I wasn’t so interested in how to convey the emotions that different characters were feeling. I was more interested in leaving that unexplained or leaving space for the reader to draw their own connections. I wasn’t as interested in describing the interiority of the characters.
MW: That’s interesting that you were reading Chemistry and recognized something that made you think, “Oh, I hadn’t thought to verbalize it this way, or even identify it.” I think that’s what’s really cool right now about reading so much new fiction by second generation or 1.5 generation writers who are trying to articulate what this weird experience is—growing up with immigrant parents in a country that’s not your homeland. What does it mean to you to be part of the Asian diaspora?
PSF: For me, just having more types of representation in general for 1.5 generation, second generation, people like us, is exciting. Being Asian American or Asian Canadian, a lot of times it’s like people just look at our faces and assume that we’re a certain way. To have more of us writing about our experiences and be able to recognize ourselves in all our forms, to me that’s what is exciting about what’s happening now in fiction.
MW: What I really enjoyed about the experience of reading your novel was, on the one hand, it was very much an individual experience. I was stepping into the main character’s experience and stepping into this other person’s shoes and seeing the world through their point of view. But then I also loved all the things that I did recognize and that felt familiar to me. That was a new feeling, and it made me wonder, “Oh, is this what other people get to feel all the time?”
PSF: Oh my god. Yeah. Have you read Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien? When I read that book—reading about a Chinese Canadian girl in Vancouver—I just started crying because I realized it was the first time that I’d seen my particular type of experience represented in a novel. Until recognizing it, we don’t even know that such a big experience has been missing from our reading lives.
At first glance, I believe that all fiction is about intimacy. The act of reading is a search, driven by curiosity and perhaps intellectual loneliness, for what is both otherand what is familiar. This is where intimacy lives: in this bardo where the cup is neither empty nor full; where we are neither the other person, nor ourselves. We often link intimacy with sex, or with deep, probing conversations. Crying in front of a lover without covering your face. Writing a long letter, or even arguing. Feelings of purging, but also connection.
The characters in my story collection, Prepare Her, can often be found looking for intimacy and human connection in peculiar ways. In “Something for a Young Woman,” Allison, feeling unfulfilled, leaves her husband, but then finds herself obsessing over an old boss, as if she cannot help but replace one weary relationship for another. In “A Bone for Christmas,” Petra’s marriage to a man with crippling OCD begins to feel so sterile, that, out of curiosity, she provokes a man with a gun. A cowboy sitting on a dead horse becomes an act of intimacy for April, in “Rodeo,” as she slowly realizes that her husband is a stranger. And “Trespassers’” 15-year-old Emi finds the absence of intimacy in her young sex life, as well as her friendship with Catherine, upsetting to the point of dissociation.
I love works of fiction in which intimacy is found, or sought after, in unconventional ways, because I feel that it is the nature of intimacy to be surprising, frightening, and sometimes downright otherworldly. I have found seven books that approach intimacy from this angle, that hunger for human connection in the corners of the unexpected and strange.
Rife with fairy tales and fairytale logic, the playful structure of this novel reminds me of riding in a car with the windows down; while it may appear that you are following one route, a hundred other stories, sounds, and smells are rushing in. In the central storyline—for there are many—Daphne Fox feels painfully distanced from her husband, a famous writer, and finds herself befriending his imaginary muse, Mary, to get closer to him. In a startling act of intimacy, Daphne gives Mary—who appears before her naked—her own favorite “lilac shirtwaist” from her honeymoon to wear.
This entire novel in stories is about intimacy, beginning with Olive’s husband, Henry, whose heart breaks for a young widow, and who longs for people everywhere to be paired, and never alone. It is Olive, however, in her brusque and unruly way, who ties these otherwise unrelated stories together in a sweeping, literary act of intimacy. Her tears over an anorexic girl in “Starving,” help to open a man’s eyes to the dearth of intimacy and compassion in his marriage. And, in “A Different Road,” Olive finds herself feeling tenderness for a most unlikely candidate: a young man who is holding her at gunpoint in a public restroom.
The husband and wife in this novel remain unnamed, which is perhaps a reflection of their state of emotional estrangement when they arrive at a grand, but somehow obsolete hotel somewhere in snowy northern Europe. Estranged does not mean loveless, however, and the story of their love for each other unfolds heartbreakingly, in the cold and unfamiliar rooms of the hotel. As the wife, who is dying from cancer, continues to reject intimacy, the husband cannot seem to help himself from forming strange—sometimes unsettling—connections with the hotel’s regulars.
In Russell’s stories, where it seems anything is possible, I find myself reading on high alert, careful not to miss any crucial pieces of the worlds that are forming before my eyes. In “Bog Girl: A Romance,” a teenage boy experiences his first feelings of love when he unearths—or un-bogs—a 2000-year-old mummified girl. It seems that he has discovered a perfect, one-sided intimacy in the bog girl’s frozen, but serene smile—that is, until she re-animates. In “The Gondoliers,” a young girl linked from birth to her sisters by a gift for bat-like sonar, seeks solitude in a “dead spot” of polluted water. While this might appear counterproductive to the spirit of my list, I find the escape from intimacy, and the search for it, one and the same.
In this first book of Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, the narrator, known only to us as “the biologist,” volunteers to go on an expedition to a dangerous and undisclosed wilderness called “Area X.” There, she discovers a lush and dangerous ecosystem complete with bizarre biological riddles, life-altering psychological suffering, and perhaps the one thing that surprises her the most: a glimpse into her late husband’s soul.
When intimacy exists in dystopia, it can appear alien, or uncanny, in contrast to its surroundings. In Adjei-Brenyah’s story “The Era,” a high schooler named Ben, begins to fall for a girl despite a life’s worth of programming against emotional decision-making and compassion. It is with a backward, convex, kind of thrill that we watch intimacy for the sake of intimacy become an act of rebellion. By creating a future that is whittled down to the bare, ugly essentials, Adjei-Brenyah makes us crave the complexity and disorder of the heart more than ever.
This collection is perhaps the most perplexing when it comes to the author’s intentions, in the way that it blends the archetypal and the deeply personal. Dinesen’s characters are dreamers, faced with moments where their dream worlds crest and break through to reality. Profound conversations about impossible realizations take place. Intimacy is touched upon and then lost. It is dizzying, enchanting, and I am compelled to include it in this list, because sometimes the strangeness of the mind, and the bleak terror of a heart’s desire, make the most exotic backdrop for a fairytale.
That night, as she waited in bed beside the boy, her husband lounged in a hotel room somewhere, reading a book or watching TV or playing video games, eating from a room-service tray laid out on the bed. Even if he was working on spreadsheets or filling out service reports on his laptop, the image of him there, by himself, in a quiet space, seemed luxurious and exotic. In her darkest moments, she imagined that her husband craved this time away from them, a wave of relief washing over him each Monday as he pulled out of the drive. Four whole uninterrupted nights of sleep! Blackout curtains!
A discrete, achievable task to accomplish that day! A paycheck to expect at the end of the week!
Did he ever stay away a day longer than needed? Delay his departure from St. Louis or Indianapolis with one more cup of coffee? Anger ballooned inside her as she imagined him dallying on the Internet in a café. He should leave the moment he was finished. He should get up early—as early as she did—and get his work done quickly so that he could rush home. That’s what she would do if she were away.
Her problem was that she thought too much—“toxic thinking” and so forth—so she tried to stop, but a physical sensation of exertion remained.
Was it her fault that her husband made more money? That it made more sense for her to quit her job than for him to quit his?
Was it her fault that he was always gone, rendering her a de facto single mom for the majority of the week?
Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring? That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence?
Was it her fault that, though she longed for mental stimulation, she still found herself unable to concoct a single original thought or opinion? She did not actually care about anything anymore. Politics, art, philosophy, film: all boring. She craved gossip and reality TV.
Was it her fault that she hated herself for her preference for reality TV?
Was it her fault that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations, even though having a baby did not, in any way, represent a departure from work to which a woman might, theoretically, one day return. It actually, instead, marked an immersion in work, an unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope, staggering, so staggering, both physically and psychically (especially psychically), that even the most mentally well person might be brought to her knees beneath such a load, a load that pitted ambition against biology, careerism against instinct, that bade the modern mother be less of an animal in order to be happy, because—come on, now—we’re evolved and civilized, and, really, what is your problem? Pull it together. This is embarrassing.
Actually, if you thought about it, it really wasn’t fair to call her a night bitch. Such a gendered slur didn’t account for the fact she had made a boy with her own body, nurtured his multiplying cells for months and months to her own detriment, to her own fatness, to the decline of her youthful sex appeal, which wasn’t supposed to matter. A real feminist wouldn’t care about such things as the shape of one’s body or being thin or appealing to heteronormative cis men, and actually she did not care about this, but she did care about being hot in her own eyes. It’s just that a person has ideas about herself, has a vision for herself, and her vision for herself had not been of a mother, but now that she was one, she felt strongly that she needed to be a hot one.
But there wasn’t really a commensurate word to degrade men, was there?
If she was Night bitch, was the boy, then, a rotten little cock when he looked her in the eye and then proceeded to dump an entire bin of freshly collected toys on the floor, his only explanation afterward that of macaroni? No.
And was her husband, in turn, a computer nutsack when he was leveling up his Pit Lord for long hours into the night, thus effectively curtailing the potential for a satisfying sex life, thanks to his absence in bed and also to the fact that he was playing video games? Was he a nutsack? Maybe.
Bitch just had a ring to it, that condemning, inescapable ring, a ring that fucker or asshole could never fully conjure for a man. Bitch was flat and sharp and final. She thought of a bored, small-town bureaucrat in a shabby little office with orange carpet and flickering fluorescent bulbs stamping official yet pointless documents with clicking, metal thuds. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Thank you. Have a nice day.
The house waited silent and clean, the paint smudges of that day a distant memory. The boy, beside her in bed—bathed not once but twice, for he needed a midday bath and then a night-night bath, to calm him, to try to soothe him into sleep any way she could—was also finally, gloriously asleep. She inched from bed, down the stairs, into the bathroom. She had bruised her tailbone in the fall earlier, or else the tag in her pants had been irritating her back. In indistinct yet nagging discomfort, she reached toward the base of her spine. Her finger found a swollen lump, and when she checked it in the mirror, she saw a raised mound, hot to the touch.
She pressed the spot at the base of her spine with two fingers and flinched at the pain, then twisted around again to examine it in the mirror and, when she couldn’t get a close enough look at it, retrieved a hand mirror, which provided little enlightenment as to the nature of the bump, then opted to take a picture of it with her phone, only to find a blurry red mass on the screen after repeated tries. She thought she felt a hair protruding from the bump and decided tweezing it would relieve her discomfort, and so picked at it blindly for a time, only exacerbating the pain and causing the thing to begin to seep.
Fuck it, she said to no one, and stomped to the closet in the guest room to retrieve a box of her old art tools. As she opened the lid, the pungent smell of the paints and putties and the noxious tang of old glues calmed her and immediately transported her to those long hours alone, fingers dirty and sore, every manner of clay and paint and glue splatter on her clothes. She inhaled deeply, intoxicated, before steeling herself against the tears she felt welling from a place of profound and desperate longing to return to her projects—any project—and the complete inability to do such a thing. She quickly sorted through a shallow tray to find a sharp X-Acto knife—what she had been looking for all along—then washed it at the kitchen sink and held it above a flame on the stove. In the bathroom, she traced the tip of it down the red lump and felt instant relief as it oozed open. She held a hot washcloth to the lump, pushing to drain the fluid, then dabbed it with a hand towel. When she looked again, it had deflated. A flurry of hair poked from the incision she had made. The only word she could think to describe it was tail.
“Man hordes [:] a blessing or a curse? Tonight we hold a debate.”
All over the United States, men (“always white men”) are hoarding together to perform unprompted, unpredictable tasks. Afterwards, they have no recollection of joining the horde; a perfect black hole where their actions lived.
A man horde in Columbus, Ohio, rescued a ten-year-old girl’s kitten from a very tall tree.
A man horde mowed twenty-six lawns in Drain, Illinois.
A man horde in Plano, Texas, kicked a German Shepherd to death.
According to the CDC, men are three times as likely to horde if they’ve horded before—and it’s into this dark, satirical context that Alex McElroy’s debut novel unfolds.
The Atmospherians follows the story of Sasha, a disgraced wellness influencer, and her childhood friend Dyson, who wants to start a cult to reform men. Here, the men (or Atmospherians) will become the equivalent of film extras: “people who provide the atmosphere and stand in the background. What better aspiration for men? To… let the action continue without them.” By joining the cult as its co-founder, Sasha finds an escape from a life that has closed in around her; but she is also finds herself on several acres of inhospitable land with thirteen men.
In turns funny and grim—but always verging on the terribly real—McElroy’s skillful debut takes readers deep into the strange zeitgeist of wellness, internet culture, and the many faces of masculinity that often seem to coalesce into one. As one of the questions in Dyson’s survey to the potential Atmospherians reads:
It’s so hard for men in this world.
☐ True.
☐ Very True.
In many ways, McElroy’s novel is perhaps the story of a world (our…world?) in which the choices before us can feel bizarrely skewed.
Richa Kaul Padte:As teenagers, Sasha invites Dyson into “a world of self-doubt and surveillance”—diet culture, body policing, toning, shaping, the list is endless. She reflects: “For him, this was a vacation. Once he shed the weight, he would return home to the safe shores of masculinity, abandoning me.” I know this is sort of a central question of your book, but just briefly: how safe are those shores?
Alex McElroy: This is such a great point—and it highlights one of the main conflicts of the book. In this passage, Sasha is speaking out of resentment and an awareness of Dyson’s male privilege. Yes, life will likely easier for Dyson because of the gendered inequalities built into a patriarchal society. However, when Sasha fails to see the ways that Dyson’s conditioning harms him and makes him vulnerable, she loses touch with her own humanity. The shores of masculinity might be safer than what Sasha experiences every day, but that doesn’t make them unimpeachably safe for the people who live there. And the book asks Sasha to reckon with this reality.
RKP: At the heart of The Atmospherians is not just the performance of identity, but a feeling that this performance is what gives characters a sense of self—for Sasha, this has mainly happened online; for Dyson, offline. But over time, the more stable their performances grow, the more their selves seem to fracture under the weight. Is our compulsion to be singular selves without contradictions largely down to the internet pushing us to stay “on-brand”, or is there also an offline drive to fashion ourselves into consistent entities?
AM: Consistency is a privileged position—like, imagine if the world is so built for you that you never need to adjust who you are? Which is to say, I don’t think that it’s the internet pushing us to stay on-brand. I think that the notion of remaining on-brand has been, for generations, a fairly problematic demand imposed on marginalized people—and weaponized against them when they do not remain consistent. It is normal to code switch, to be inconsistent, to contain many selves. Think Whitman and his multitudes. That said, the desire to be consistent and singular is normal insofar as its normal to wish you could avoid the realities of being human: we’re inconsistent, we contradict ourselves, we shape-shift as a means of protection.
RKP: There are files on each of the Atmospherians, but one stands out—an outlier named Peter who “Dyson described…as ‘already a very good man’. There were no redder flags.” I think many of us have arrived at this realization in different ways, but: what is UP with the so-called “nice guys”? What makes them the reddest flags of all?
Consistency is a privileged position—like, imagine if the world is so built for you that you never need to adjust who you are?
AM: Sasha has been burned by men who called themselves nice guys, and now she’s suspicious of the label. The movie Promising Young Woman—and apologies to my friends who hated it—does a good job of interrogating the nice guy brand, delving into what might lurk beneath that superficial label. To speak more generally, over the last couple years, I’ve learned that when you think you’re an expert in something you tend to set yourself up for a humbling. It’s dangerous to assume you don’t have anything more to learn. That can be applied to self-identified “nice guys.” They view their behavior as the behavior of a nice guy, and any critique of their behavior as toxic can seem, to them, like an attack.
RKP:Sasha is being aggressively hounded, both online and off, and while she wants her earlier, uncorrupted fame back, she also recognizes “the value in being forgotten.” There are several legal cases pertaining to the “Right To Be Forgotten” currently underway, which largely call on Google to scrub certain images, videos or information from its search results. The trouble, though, is that the people fighting these cases range from victims of revenge porn to politicians accused of misdeeds.
As the line between curtailing the endless archive of digital memory and supporting the crucial call for collective memory (“never forget”) becomes increasingly muddled, I’m curious to know: where do you stand?
AM: This is such a complicated issue, and I don’t think it’s as simple as whether to leave these details online or to scrub them. They need to be taken on a case by case basis. In the instance of revenge porn, it is absolutely necessary that the images be scrubbed from the internet. That is a nonconsensual violation. In my opinion, what’s missing, right now, is not a standard policy but a trustworthy organization capable of determining whether something should be scrubbed or maintained. I don’t trust Google to serve as that organization—which seems where we’re at now—nor do I have particular ideas about who should take on this role. Is it the job of the state? It’s hard to trust the state. Corporations? Yeah, right—but I’m sure they’ll try. Perhaps this is kind of a non-stand, but I lean on the side of largely maintaining collective memory and [also] finding a way to create a commission capable of determining when it is best to forget.
RKP:I don’t want to give too much away, but at one stage in the book I felt a shift in my emotional landscape towards the men that mirrored Sasha’s—what she describes as “a little slug of sympathy… marking its trail.” And like Sasha, “I could have allowed myself this empathy, this softness, but it scared me.” As she reflects: “It is always easier—safer—to look away.” What made you decide to look?
AM: I’ve had a tendency, in my life, to eagerly sympathize with people who’ve hurt me and to think myself into their perspectives. I’ve had a father and a mother and stepfathers and stepmothers who have hurt me deeply, yet I still love them. This isn’t always a great habit to have in life—loving people who hurt you—but it can be helpful when writing fiction.
Loving people who hurt you isn’t always a great habit to have in life, but it can be helpful when writing fiction.
Throughout the process, I thought a lot about Kaitlyn Greenidge’s 2016 essay “Who Gets to Write What?” in The New York Times about creating a racist white character. She writes, “I was struck by an awful realization. I had to love this monster into existence.” And that seemed true of my book. I don’t like how these men act, but in order to write about them, I needed to love them at some level. And that’s what pushed me to look, because I think that’s what fiction requires—so long as it doesn’t completely center the “monster.”
RKP: Explaining his idea for The Atmosphere, Dyson “hopp[ed] from truisms to clichés to conclusions as if they were rocks in a stream.” As Sasha later says: “he aimed for the cadence of wisdom, wasted no time striving for content…Cadence dug a trench in the mind.” This emphasis on cadence is not just a cult-ish feature though, and belongs to start-ups and influencers alike—a “language of strategic confessions and origin stories” that I suspect is often the language I end up using online too. Why do things feel less true when they are stripped of cadence, even when we intellectually understand that cadence is often what obfuscates?
AM: I think we’re just accustomed to how certain arguments work. There’s a reason why we have English composition classes to teach basic structures of argument and paragraph development—we best internalize meaning when it arrives in a form that prioritizes information how we’re accustomed to reading. The same is true of the cadence of online speech. When someone begins a tweet, Freaking out that or I can’t believe or So excited to announce or No one is talking about or I’m tired of talking about or—you get it—we intuit how to absorb the information that follows. So, things that don’t fit those cadences sound less true, because the structure of the information is unfamiliar to us and is thus harder to absorb. It’s like if you went to see a stand-up show and the comedian speed-read their entire set off a notepad then rushed off the stage. Same words, but likely very unfunny.
Many people of African and Asian heritage living in Britain today are descendants of immigrants from Britain’s former colonies, who arrived after the 1948 Immigration Act allowed them in to help rebuild the “Mother Country” after the Second World War. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalized homosexuality in the UK, where queer men, in particular, were persecuted under amendments that had existed for almost a century. The history of multiracial Britain in the latter half of the 20th century, therefore, has coincided with a trend towards equal rights for LGBTQIA+ people, culminating in the passing of a law allowing them to marry.
Literary fiction has observed all these changes. In 2004—a year after Tony Blair’s Labour government repealed Clause 28, which had been introduced in 1988 to prohibit the discussion of homosexuality in schools—Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, a depiction of multiracial queer life in Margaret Thatcher’s London as the AIDS crisis erupted (Hollinghurst’s gay-as-hell debut, The Swimming Pool Library, came out in ’88 and was a bestselling middle-finger-up to Clause 28). Writers like Jeanette Winterson, Philip Hensher, Sarah Waters and Patrick Gale have all explored queer life and love against the backdrop of societal change, happy not to have to live and write their truth in secret as E. M. Forster had to. But, as everywhere, queer, trans, and intersex writers of color have been underrepresented in the British narrative, and our literary timeline tells a story of its own.
I was recently introduced to the Jamaican author Andrew Salkey’s 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, which must be one of the first examples of Black British queer fiction. Published when gay sex was still illegal, it takes an unflinching look at queer Black life while being reticent about actual bodily contact. Reading it, I saw many similarities between the mindset of its narrator, Johnnie, and that of Jesse, the protagonist of my novel, Rainbow Milk. Both are migrants, both feel disconnected from “home”—however that is defined—both are queer and questioning in a world that wants them to be straight and Christian, both are Black flaneurs pounding the streets of London, looking for a purpose and for something to do with their eloquence. Writing in 2018-19, however, I could write much more clearly about sex than Salkey could. The problem for queer people over the years has often been a lack of honest stories to peg theirs to, to show that they’re not alone and that others came before who faced the same issues and found some answers. Hopefully, the next generation will have these books at hand.
Surge is a poetry cycle that reimagines the night of January 18, 1981, when a group of young Black people from South London gathered for a house party, in which 13 died in a fire, and another a year later from suicide. It has never been established whether the fire was caused by an accident or arson, and given the extreme racial tensions in the UK at the time, the question has hung in the air for 40 years. Two months after what came to be known as the New Cross Massacre, the Black People’s Day of Action took place as a protest against institutional racism and the lack of care for our health, safety and justice, foreshadowing the events of 2020.
Fans of Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other should check out her earlier work. The Emperor’s Babe, her second novel, began to take shape upon the discovery, in East Anglia, of the 10,000-year-old remains of an African girl of about ten. Roman Britannia was once ruled by Septimius Severus, who was half-Libyan. The Emperor’s Babe is a hilarious verse-novel in which Zuleika, a young Sudanese immigrant, is married off to a portly, perpetually absent Roman, but begins an affair with the emperor himself. Written in hendecasyllabic couplets combining Latinate diction with South London slang, Babe reimagines Londinium as the playground of slave girls and drag queens, while challenging the myth of Britain’s Black presence as being a recent thing.
Housegirl follows two teenage girls—one, a sensible, pious type from Ghana who has been working as a housemaid; the other a queer, independent spirit, born and raised in South London. What could they possibly have in common? Will they get on? What can they learn from one another? Is it better to bury the truth or live by it? A wildly funny, moving, and immersive take on queer femininity and heritage, and a nostalgic trip back to early-2000s Brixton.
While working at a London gallery, Mathilda—a working-class, queer Nigerian woman—comes across a portrait of the near-forgotten (fictional) Black Scottish Modernist poet Hermia Druitt, and is transfixed. She needs to know everything about this magical figure, and follows her footsteps to the obscure artists’ colony, somewhere in mainland Europe, that Druitt once stayed at. What follows is a clash of cultures: minimalism v maximalism; pragmatism vs decadence; Eurocentrism vs Black history, in one of the most luxuriously written and sharply witty novels I’ve read in years.
Nnenna Maloney is a 15-year-old biracial girl whose white English mother, Joanie, will not reveal who her father is. Regardless, she keeps her head down and does well at school; too well, when it emerges Nnenna might have done enough to earn a scholarship to the Sorbonne. Interspersed in the story is Joanie, 15 years earlier, as a young woman trying to find herself as a student at the University of Cambridge. We all wonder what our parents’ lives must’ve been like before we were born, and this is a perfect summer read full of the embarrassments of teenage longing.
That Reminds Me feels more like a collection of shattered fragments than a conventional novel, but that is its beauty and correct form. In tightly written prose poems, Owusu tells the story of K, a Ghanaian boy who was sent to live in rural England with a white English family as a baby. His birth mother came to claim him when he was eleven and already used to a way of life and identity that is immediately blown apart in the city. K has to build another version of himself from the ground up, one that is an acceptable form of Black masculinity for his new environment. But who really is K, and will that question consume him?
Another great entry into the twins/döppelganger genre to add to those by Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi, Brit Bennett and others. Oto and Wuraola are born to wealthy parents in an affluent part of the Nigerian city of Ibadan. Wuraola is a beautiful girl; and so is Oto, but she was born intersex and is being forced to live as a boy. Hers is a battle against tradition, ancestry and gods, but Oto never loses her wicked sense of humour, and soon she will be old enough to make her own decisions.
Escape to an Autumn Pavement, is, I believe, an unfairly forgotten novel that should be a classic. Johnnie Sobert is a well-educated Jamaican man who has moved to England for… well, he’s not quite sure what. He coasts along comfortably enough living in a Hampstead rooming house and working at a West Indian club in Soho. Attracted to both women and men who make him choose between their binary prisons, and a magnet for well-meaning racists, Johnnie is a flaneur looking for a vessel for his eloquence, desiring of a history and the space to be himself. Sardonically witty and remarkably fresh, fans of James Baldwin’s later novels will love this.
Our narrator, a successful auteur known only as “maestro”, is in Italy promoting his latest film, hailed as a masterpiece, at a prestigious international film festival. While looking for the perfect espresso, he gets chatting to a woman who seems to reveal a lot of her own story very quickly, and takes him deep into the inner-city belt to show him a mural painted decades before by her late lover, who committed suicide. Upon deciding that she must be the subject of his next film, their perfect relationship begins to splinter. Diary of a Film is an exquisitely written homage to classic queer cinema and European travel, and a serious dialogue about who gets to tell whose stories.
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