Discovering Souvankham Thammavongsa’s stories had been accidental, or what I would call serendipity. To me, her stories depict a necessary form of hope. In fall of 2021, I had just returned to the USA after spending six months post-pandemic at home in India, when my homesick heart returned to Thammavongsa’s story collection How to Pronounce Knife. A friend had recently gifted me a fountain pen that became the best pen I’ve ever owned, and partly because I wanted to keep writing with that pen, I opened my writer’s journal and copied the story “The Gas Station” from beginning to end by hand. It felt important—perhaps even urgent—that I spend such careful time with the story’s rhythms and its 36-year-old accountant protagonist, Mary. It’s the first and last story that I’ve ever had the urge to engage with in this way.
Thammavongsa’s fiction astounds me—I have reread her stories multiple times, taught “How to Pronounce Knife” and “Randy Travis” to my undergrad writing students, and learnt the craft of writing from her work. Her debut novel, Pick a Color, is another example of all the things that make Thammavongsa’s craft shine: its airtight form, soulful characterization, and the evocative portrayal of the mundane. Pick a Color follows a nail salon owner, Ning, through the course of a day. The novel opens with the opening of the nail salon and closes with the closing of the nail salon. It could’ve been any other day in the narrator’s life, and in many ways it is, but having gone through the experience of living it with Ning, a reader is changed. The novel quietly burns with the power of human love and friendship.
Souvankham Thammavongsa and I corresponded about her forthcoming novel via email. We discussed the art of absence, making what is real fiction, and keeping the reader wanting for more.
Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal: A constant theme running through the book is a form of witnessing. Ning and her employees are looking in on their customers, Ning is looking in on her employees, and finally the reader is looking in on Ning. Why do you think witnessing is important for this book?
Souvankham Thammavongsa: You’re right.The novel is not built on plot. It is built on voice and that alone has to be made to carry things.
Writing about a nail salon worker is usually done from the outside, through someone else’s gaze. Seen as quiet and sad, pitiful, shameful, disgusting, and only from a glance. I don’t do that here.
I make the English speaker feel foreign in their own language.
The novel asks you to pretend the English language right in front of you is not there. We are told that they are speaking in their “own language” but the joke is that it is actually the English language right in front of us. I am not translating a language. I am writing in the English language, but I make it feel translated. When we do hear from people who are speaking English they are only heard from twice saying “yoo-hoo” and “whoa, whoa” which are just weird sounds.I make the English speaker feel foreign in their own language.
There’s a difference between point of view and perspective. Anyone can just choose a point of view, but a writer’s real talent and magic happens inside what they can do with perspective. We can feel how loud her life is, what she cares about, her pride and her power. Wherever we come from, whatever it is we do in our own lives, we are made to be a nail salon worker—we are not just a reader reading about the nail salon.
ABM: It’s common in your oeuvre to keep your characters unnamed. You have talked in your past interviews about how namelessness creates a sense of universality. But in Pick a Color, not naming serves a different purpose. Could you talk a little bit about the purpose of namelessness as it applies to the lives of the characters in the book?
ST: The girls are nameless to the clients, but not to themselves or each other—and in this world they matter only to themselves and each other. In fact, it is the clients who feel nameless actually. In the nail salon world, you do not want to be named. Who wants to be “Asshole” or “Miss All Caps” or “Finger Toes”? A name is powerful. It can place you and also undo who you think you are.
ABM: As you said, the reader gets to be a nail salon worker for the course of the book. We’re privy to Ning’s deepest thoughts. Through the book, you’ve created such a careful balance between a slow unraveling of Ning’s history and preserving some of the mysteries, such as Ning’s missing finger. How did you choose which mysteries to reveal and which ones to not? What about the questions that remain unanswered?
ST: The novel takes place in a single day. I worked not to betray the form.
A name is powerful. It can place you and also undo who you think you are.
I am a writer of absence. I write what is there, but I spend a lot of time making what isn’t there as well. I love that readers are left with so much. That the characters and lives live with them long after they get to the last page and close the book. A life has been made so real to them. To earn a reader’s want like that and to have them still want even when the book is done feels like an achievement to me.
ABM: The finger feels especially important in its absence. It’s also one of the biggest unsolved mysteries. Is it the irony of a missing finger in the profession where fingers are important? Or is there something more?
ST: It is not just any finger. It is the ring finger. To tell what happened to that missing finger is a great question for basic reasons like information, practicality, plotting, closure. But that question does not serve art. To tell would diminish how I have made it missing in the first place.
ABM: I love what you said about being a writer of absence and creating art through absence. What you describe is ars poetica to me. And well, you are a poet. How does being a poet play into your fiction?
ST: I don’t lean on my poetry. It exists as a work in itself, and I am confident that it does. I don’t drag my poetry into fiction and insist it be called fiction. I am confident in my prose. I don’t romanticize not being understood. I think when you enter the house of fiction, you leave your shoes at the door.
ABM: I want to talk a bit about the characters and relationships in the novel. Ning is a strong woman, and as you said, powerful. Early on in the novel, Ning says that she chooses to be alone and that she is a family of one. But that’s perhaps not the entire truth. She has many relationships she holds important, and a dynamic that’s present in all these relationships is one of a teacher and a student. Ning has been a student of her boxing coach and then of Rachel, the owner of the nail salon Ning worked at before starting her own. Now she is a teacher to the girls that work for her. Did you see these mentoring relationships fulfilling some need that other conventional relationships cannot for Ning?
ST: I think Ning is alone but she does know love. She is completely devoted. To her work, to the girls, the shop, her clients, being the best at what they do there. And they all carry her the way love can.
ABM: Who do you see Rachel as? Who is she to Ning? And who is she to the story?
I don’t romanticize not being understood.
ST: This is a great question. The novel is about female friendship, and there’s a lot of space to read into that. I don’t think Ning knows exactly who she is and who Rachel is to her, but this is a day that when she looks back she might see a beginning or maybe an ending of some kind. And let us just leave it at that.
ABM: Rachel and her brother, Ray, have been a part of another world—the story “Mani Pedi” from your short story collection. Ning and Ray’s life paths have been similar. In fact, “pick a color” is something that Ray used to say to his customers when he first started at Rachel’s salon, because he couldn’t remember all the colors. So we can see that Ray has influenced Ning in some ways. But in the book he is only ever a mentioned character, never appearing on-stage. Could you talk a little bit about how Ning started as a character for you, and why Rachel makes an appearance in the novel, but not Ray?
ST: The novel is built out of a short story, but I didn’t want to expand that. That would be too easy. I wanted that short story to stand alone and remain self-contained. I felt Rachel was too angry as a voice and Raymond was not interesting to me as a voice.
My dad always told me he never had to worry about me. That I would always find my way. For a parent to say that to you, I think, is an incredible compliment. I was really down and out, preparing taxes by myself at a kiosk in a Wal-Mart when my dad said this to me. Whatever life was going to give me, I would find a way to love it and to do my work well with incredible pride. I wanted to read about a person like that.
I didn’t have a name for the narrator in the novel and thought of leaving her nameless, but in the middle of writing the novel my brother died. He called me Ning. I thought of how I might never hear that name again, so I named her Ning. [I] wanted someone to say her name out loud over and over again so that I might hear my brother’s voice come alive.
ABM: Thank you for sharing that with me. Now the part where Ning’s name is gifted to readers makes even more sense and seems even more special. Does hiding kernels of truth in the fictional help you make your characters real?
ST: I don’t think there is such a big divide between what is real and what is fiction. Even when something is real, we still do the hard work of making it up.
It’s fall of 2025 and I have officially entered my seventh year of teaching college. It’s my husband’s eighth year, which he celebrates by teaching eight classes across three schools. The time I spend on campus not teaching is spent tutoring kids in every subject I possibly can: psychology, anthropology, communication, ethics, sociology, nutrition, education. After a few semesters of tutoring the same topics and syllabi, I feel as though I could teach the classes myself. I tutor because it’s good money and there’s a need for it and also because I genuinely like it. I’ve worked with some of these kids for their entire college careers. Some of them I’ll follow to graduate school. When my first full-time tutoring student graduated in the spring of 2024 and I watched her watch across the stage to receive her diploma, I cried.
I like tutoring, but I wouldn’t do it if I could teach more. Tutoring can be overwhelming at times; feeling as though I’m responsible for the outcome of a student’s grades and success is mentally taxing. I can’t teach more, at least not here at my current school in California. A bill passed in my state ensuring that adjunct professors—or lecturers, as they’ve started to call us—can’t teach more than 19.75 hours without receiving benefits. This was meant to incentivize universities to move toward more full-time hires. The bill passed, but the initiative failed. More adjuncts than ever, less classes. Still, no benefits. My university goes out of their way to ensure that. I could go elsewhere, but that would mean more commuting, more juggling, change. Tutoring fills the income gap that my weak course load has left me with.
Last year, I turned down a full-time job offer at a fairly prestigious university, a couple hours away. It felt like an honor to even be offered. After all, full-time teaching jobs are hard to come by, particularly in California. I tried to make the possibility of it real, but it didn’t pan out. The cost of living near the school was too high, and the pay not enough to meet it. No potential for spousal hiring meant that my husband would be jobless. So, I stayed where I was and hoped it would get better. Has it gotten better?
My first job was at Party City when I was fifteen. A short walk from my house, past the freight train and CVS, the Fuddruckers where an old man once hit my mom’s car, the bank and the used bookstore, Party City was a staple of that particular strip mall. As a kid, I often wandered to the back section of the store to stare at the rows of horror masks with a sense of semi-petrified curiosity. I loved Halloween, so the job seemed like a good fit. I convinced my best friend to apply with me, and soon we were working shifts together with walkie talkies and making an impressive $8.25 an hour.
Our uniform was khakis, a black shirt, and a neon orange vest that said, “Who You Gonna Be?” in thick black letters on the back. It was the same motto our manager instructed us to shout-ask to customers the moment they walked through the door. Watch and learn, he said during orientation, then showed us the how-to by shouting at the first people to walk through the door, a mom and a daughter: Hi-whoyagonnabe?
The woman looked confused and rightfully so. The way he said it made it sound like he was speaking gibberish or having a stroke. He repeated the question a bit slower and the woman remained confused. Who-ya-gonna-be? It was not the watch-and-learn moment he hoped it would be. Eventually the woman understood what he was asking and responded reluctantly, Uh, I’m not sure. My manager directed her to follow the green footsteps to the costume wall in the back.
It was a temporary job, seasonal, but money was money, and my friend and I needed it to buy weed and a classmate’s leftover opiates from his wisdom tooth surgery. We called to each other from across the store and traded accessories we borrowed from the miscellaneous costume aisle. Sometimes I wore cat ears. Other days, it was an astronaut’s helmet or a red clown wig.
I joke that I could die here, in my classroom, and the university would ask who I was and how I got there.
I learned the intricacies of how fog machines work and which fake blood was superior and for what use. I spent my days sucking helium directly from the tank and staring in a trance at the life-size Freddy Krueger that sold for a mere $250. When you waved a hand over his sensor, a child’s voice sang. One two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three four better lock your door. Couldn’t Freddy Krueger get past the door? Wasn’t he an apparition of some sort? Didn’t he enter through dreams anyway? I had questions, but the statue still spooked me.
Now, more than 15 years later, I drive past the former Party City in my current town, noting the faded imprint of the letters left behind on the building, and sigh with relief that I made it out of high school alive. As hard as Halloween decorations try, there is ultimately nothing scarier than being a teenager.
I genuinely love teaching. When it’s good, it’s so good. My creative writing students remind me time and time again why I love writing, why I love reading, of the magic lasting power that is telling a story and having it be heard, received, and celebrated. The hour and fifteen minutes fly by when we’re sharing, speaking, and workshopping. I’ve taught rhetoric, both introduction and upper division; disability studies courses; and classes about intersectionality. I’ve taught first-year creative writing, memoir writing, and experimental writing. It’s a cliche to say, but I always learn something about myself from teaching, even if it’s something about myself that I don’t necessarily want to know. I’ve cried with my students, and I’ve laughed with them. I’ve had some who have taken every class they can with me, and I’ve so valued their return each time.
At the end of spring semester last year, two students gave me handwritten notes. I keep them propped up in my closet for when I need to be reminded that the work I do is not entirely fruitless.
When I was seventeen, I applied for a job as a co-song leader and music teacher at a Jewish summer camp. I knew the minute I left the office after officially being hired that I would hate my life for the next three months. I can’t tell you why I had this premonition, where it came from or how I was so certain of it, but it turned out to be right.
I got the job because my friend from school and soon-to-be co-counselor recommended me for it. Wouldn’t it be so fun if we did that together all summer? he asked. After hearing how much it paid, I agreed. A few thousand dollars to sing with kids and lead shabbat services over the course of a few humid months. It sounded just easy enough, and I liked kids just enough.
What I did not know was how difficult it would be to work with someone I thought I knew pretty well. As soon as the guitar strap hit his shoulder, his reign of terror began. He was unbelievably cruel, critical and scathing, for reasons I can’t even remember. He would scold me for anything and everything. He seemed to hate me, despite being the one who initiated my place in the program. Because we spent each day working together and carpooling to camp, I had few opportunities for reprieve.
When I did have time to myself, I hid in the arts and crafts closet and cried behind storage bins of beads and polymer clay. When Friday rolled around and it was time for shabbat services, I barely had the chutzpah to stand up before the camp and strum my guitar and sing. In between groups of campers, I shoved challah in my cheeks like a hamster and poured powder mix-made grape juice down my throat to wash it down.
Once, during a song in one of our music classes, a kid in the front row sneezed. I watched the snot leap from her nose directly onto me and my co-counselor’s shirts. Because we were mid-song, I could not run from the room screaming. We finished the song and the class, and then I sobbed with my shirt under the sink faucet.
I’ve never been stung by a bee before, I told a group of campers one day before stepping outside and immediately being stung by multiple wasps in the soft flesh behind my knee. I cried big blubbery tears while a seven-year-old patted me on the back on the bench in the nurse’s office. It’s going to be okay, the kid said, attempting to console me. No, it won’t be, I thought to myself. I hate this job and I hate my co-counselor and my boyfriend is having the time of his life in Australia this summer while I’m stuck here being swallowed by humidity and the screaming stillness of suburbia.
Even if at times it felt eternal, the hot hell that was that summer would eventually end and the job would too.
I joke that I could die here, in my classroom, and the university would ask who I was and how I got there. Sometimes I have dark thoughts. I don’t want to but I do. I dream about being hit by the campus shuttle, injured but not killed. My mouth waters at the thought of a potential settlement. I fantasize about objects falling, striking me unconscious, a library book jumping off its shelf and knocking me out. I dream about being hurt, just enough to get me the upward mobility in this job that I can’t get elsewhere. I don’t want to die, not at all, but I can’t help imagining how random chance could make me visible in this place where I’m otherwise invisible. When an adjunct dies, do they send out a schoolwide email? Or do they pretend, much like they do with everything else involving adjuncts, that they were never here to begin with?
I was eighteen with the world at my fingertips, or at least on my laptop screen. I found the posting for the job on Craigslist. The official title was “webcam model.” The temptation was steep. $2.50 per minute without ever needing to leave my dorm room. I had an alias, a floor lamp, and a dream of quick cash. My profile picture on the website was a grainy mirror portrait of my butt in green underwear that I’d taken in an Urban Outfitters dressing room. My name was Lila.
It was an era before widespread and easily-accessible sex work or its normalization. There was no OnlyFans, no Instagram modeling or private Snapchats. Sex work was meant to be secretive, and even online, it came with the promise that it could be.
In my time between classes, I chatted with men whose loneliness was palpable. By request, I did things that hadn’t previously struck me as being capable of fulfilling a desire. I stood in yoga pants. I tried on shoes—my own and my roommates’—and strutted around. I put my glasses on and took them off repeatedly. I tied my hair in pigtails. I chewed gum, spit it out, and put it back in my mouth. I tapped on my teeth and ate snacks with my jaw open. I yelled at men. I pretended I was disappointed in them. I pretended I was proud. Whatever I was asked to do, within my own boundaries of what I was willing to do, I did. The only request I couldn’t fulfill was one involving cheese—not because I was morally opposed to it, but because I didn’t have any cheese on hand. Although I wasn’t resistant to the idea of it, most of my requests involved no nudity at all, just extreme specificity.
While some encounters seemed scripted in their strangeness, most were normal, if not almost natural. Most of the men who sought my services wanted conversation, some semblance of companionship. There was one man I chatted with only through the private text messaging system. He wanted nothing more than to talk about our day to day. We messaged for an hour and a half, and I made $225. He returned more than once for the same.
Of course, not all of my encounters were devoid of sexuality. Many of the men wanted to see skin, share their desires, flirt, shower me with compliments, or tell me that their wife was in the room with them, something said by more than one person. Was there really a wife in the room, or was it just a fantasy of misbehavior?
I retired my account after a few months, only to put up with shit from men in my real life who didn’t pay me at all, men who would seek me out only after the sun went down, who wanted me in secret and avoided me in public. At least the job had a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of money on a prepaid debit card. The relationships I pursued afterward offered me nothing but disappointment, grief, and a feeling of shame I brought with me to bed and kept long after they left. In the end, I felt no shame about the men who paid to see me bare, just the ones who got to for free.
In my sixth year of teaching, I take over a class for a friend who has quit, and rightfully so. After a year of filling in the full-time job of a retiree, she has been replaced by someone who had never stepped foot on this campus prior to being interviewed. There’s a whole group of us adjuncts, competent and fully capable, who could take over any class at the drop of a hat, and do. Yet when it comes to opportunities with actual job security, we’re passed over or through. Small ghosts haunting the hallways of buildings and classrooms, summoned only when needed and neglected when not.
The new tenure-track hire in the department tells her students she only teaches so she can write. It reminds me of the longtime tenured professor in the department who cancels two full weeks of class every semester to travel abroad. The whole thing feels something of a Shakespearean tragedy, betrayal after betrayal under the guise of bureaucracy. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, how much you genuinely love teaching, how much your students love you. There will always be someone getting paid more to do less.
The new hire negotiated the teaching of two classes for this semester, meaning she’ll make about three times what I do for about the same amount of work. I laugh when I learn this. There’s not much else I can do. What is exploitation if not this?
I was twenty and needed a job, specifically an internship, but the only place willing to interview and hire me out of all my applications was a DIY cake decorating studio in central West Hollywood. It shared a wall with a triple dollar sign bakery, the kind of place that crafts life-size characters out of fondant and Styrofoam while serving you sheet cake and charging a minimum of $500. Our side of the wall charged $50 for customers to come decorate a previously frozen six-inch cake or six cupcakes.
There will always be someone getting paid more to do less.
I spent my days developing carpal tunnel from manually rolling rainbow balls of fondant and teaching people how to make roses out of them. I stuck cakes to boards with frosting, and safe in the refuge of the kitchen, I’d sweep mounds of buttercream into my mouth with my fingers. I formed a passionate relationship with the walk-in refrigerator, where I would go to cry, or to hide from customers or my manager, or to ram four cupcakes into my mouth at a time from the too-ugly-to-sell bin. Every day, I stole a Kind bar to eat with my lunch, the only not overwhelmingly cloying item available for purchase. I always had a stomach ache, but it was more likely caused by my boyfriend at the time, a recent college graduate who refused to get a job and with whom I fought frequently.
I loved my coworkers. They stood by me when I got chewed out for the cost of the decorating experience, as though I had any say in the matter. We pooled our tips and collectively sighed when private parties mistook the 20% service fee for a gratuity, despite it going directly and completely into the owners’ pockets.
I made coffee for customers using the same beans for the entire day. This is the best coffee I have ever had, said a mom who had brought her kids in for a birthday party. She bought seven more cups for the rest of the moms, and they all agreed.
At the end of every shift, I shook sprinkles out of my hair and what seemed like all the crevices of my body. I’d become a vacuum for sweetness. Like many of the others, this too was a seasonal job, lasting only the summer. When it ended, I was relieved to be away from so much unbridled sugar. It would take me nearly a year to walk past the bakery aisle at the grocery store without gagging.
In my fifth year of teaching, I connect with a new tenure-track hire in my department. We chat over coffee and cookies, and when I reveal to her that I don’t have an office to use, she offers to share hers with me. I should know then that it is too good to be true, but I’m desperate for the opportunity to have a place to work on campus that isn’t the library or the faculty lounge, which is overrun with geriatric professors eating lunch and two faculty members who have frequent screaming matches in Italian.
I move a few things into the office and bring with me a bowl of candy that I keep filled to the brim. My officemate encourages me to put my name next to hers on the wall outside the door. The office is a saving grace despite being next to the bathroom, providing a clear path to hearing every flush of a toilet. It doesn’t bother me. I just like having a space of my own to exist in, an actual office where I can host office hours.
Then after a year of office bliss, I receive a text. In it, there is good news and bad news, but because the good news has nothing to do with me, it just feels like bad news and bad news.
My officemate has received a promotion and wants the office to herself again. I should’ve seen it coming. When she saw me in the office on the days we both were on campus, she always looked pissed. Was it me or some other factor? I’m not sure it matters. I pack up my three things and leave.
I walk by the office almost daily on the way to my first class, longing for what I briefly knew. Smokey was right: a taste of honey is worse than none at all. The note on the door hardly ever changes: Working from home today.
At 19, I joined a casting website for people in the Los Angeles area. I had always wanted to be an actress and now was my time to try. I applied to every posting that remotely fit my description. I could play 14 to 22, or maybe younger if I had to. I was blonde, but I didn’t have to be. Curvy? Or slim? Athletic? I couldn’t decide what exactly I was, so I went with all of the above. I auditioned for anything and everything. I booked close to nothing. I was living in a Venice Beach apartment, driving hours in the claustrophobic city-wide traffic to get to castings and callbacks.
Eventually I landed some music videos and background work in a few films. The first music video was for a DJ named Afrojack. I didn’t know who Afrojack was, but the gig seemed promising. I was shuttled with the rest of the extras from Hollywood to the middle of the desert. We spent twelve hours in the hot, hot sun, dancing on the set of an abandoned gas station, listening to the song playing loudly over and over again in the background. We had our hair and makeup done in a trailer and ate ice cream from a colorful truck in front of the camera. It was a fun, exhausting day. Some people spent it fighting for screen time, but I was just there for the money and the free lunch. We all got paid the same, regardless of the end product. A few weeks later, the music video premiered on YouTube, albeit to a small audience, but I noticed something about the cover photo: I was in it, frozen in a frame, dancing in my purple bikini.
The next video was for T-Pain. It was a shit show on set, with no organization or clear direction. I was hired to be in a “featured role.” The song was called “Make That Shit Work.” It wouldn’t win any awards, but it was undoubtedly catchy.
In the video, you can see me holding a selfie stick and taking a photo before being interrupted by someone else. I was supposed to get paid $300 for the day. I never saw a cent.
One morning in July, I awoke with a violent stomachache simultaneous to my phone ringing. I answered and the voice on the other line reminded me of a role I auditioned for. “The director asked for you, personally,” the line on the voice told me. The memory of the audition returned. The director was Andy Milonakis, a figure I’d watched on TV and loved growing up, and as I stood before him in that small room, I couldn’t resist telling him. “I’m a huge fan,” I blurted out. Ultimately, I couldn’t overcome the cramps to make it to set that day.
My last memorable role of the summer was on an indie film where my phone overheated beyond functionality and I had to stick it in a cooler to get it working again. I spent all day in the sun, ate pizza with the other extras, and had a small cameo in the film standing bikini-clad with poor posture next to Tim Heidecker as he emerged from a cake.
I did not make it big. Acting was hard. Getting the opportunity to actually act was harder. I didn’t mind being in the background, but it was more work than what I was compensated for, and it would take years to get union status. I did not renew my subscription to the casting website.
We used to have an hour-long meeting at the beginning of the fall semester for adjuncts in the English department. We would convene in the art building to talk about the year ahead, discussing classroom successes, failures, bright moments, our hopes for the semester. I looked forward to it. We haven’t had one in years.
It would cost the university $30 per professor to pay us for the hour. Most of us wouldn’t mind attending without pay, but the university is afraid of being sued, so no more meetings. I used to be involved in the disability studies meetings, too. I liked those. I felt like I had something to offer my colleagues. I liked discussing disability politics and how they translate to the classroom. I also got ousted from those meetings, which would’ve cost the university a total of $30 a month.
I laugh when I walk by the disability employment month banners that adorn the light posts on campus every October. In my disability studies course, we talk about systems, how they oppress and marginalize and harm the most vulnerable groups. We talk about inequity, inequality as inequality, and healthcare access. I do this while knowing that I, a person with a disability, do not get healthcare from my job.
I applied to the adult store in my town the summer after I graduated college and heard back before I could apply anywhere else.
Located in a rundown strip mall a few miles from my house, sandwiched between a Metro PCS and a local pharmacy that was likely a front for something more sinister, A Touch of Romance had just the thing to satisfy the needs of just about anyone. I became a connoisseur of self-pleasure devices, bondage materials, and overpriced positional wedges. I learned more than I wanted to about both the products and people buying them.
It sounds gross to say that I ingested a lot of lube at that job, but I ingested a lot of lube. Flavored, that is. Tiramisu, pumpkin spice, mint chocolate chip. I particularly liked the lotion for handjobs that was meant to taste like cotton candy. As I strolled the generally empty store during my eight-hour shifts, I’d sample the new edible variants out of boredom. The place was an oral-fixator’s dream.
Every shift, I’d pop two aphrodisiac chocolates in my mouth, not because they caused an increase in libido, but because I was hungry and I liked how they tasted. The results were that my cheeks would flush for the first half of my shift but not much else.
I spent my days helping men purchase items that I thought should be illegal to buy (a child sized silicone abdomen with breasts, a rose tattoo, and two points of entry), and kindly declined when they asked me out.
Year after year, I watch as tuition goes up and our pay stays the same.
I hung up pairs of panties with jingly bells attached and wondered what bells rattling had to do with sex. Perhaps there was something Pavlovian about it.
I loved the job, truly. I loved the stained cheetah print carpet and the gargoyle chandeliers by the vibrators that made absolutely no aesthetic sense. I loved hanging up the cheap lingerie and helping women (and some men) find a set that made them feel sexy. I loved watching people try to stealthily shoplift pairs of $1 underwear and doing nothing to stop them.
It was the best of retail jobs and the worst of retail jobs. The best because we didn’t accept returns and the worst because sometimes new hires would take items back anyway and I’d have to explain to them that we can’t accept a vibrator once it’s left the store, for obvious reasons. I loved the job because the women I worked with were interesting and strange and just as sad as I was. Tina was a sex therapist who worked at the store part-time to further her mission of public sex education, Allison took the job because she had to and hated every minute of it, Meg moonlighted after her fulltime job as an accountant at The Cheesecake Factory, and I was there to fill time and save money ahead of graduate school. Regardless of our differences, we were all united by our circumstances and our surroundings, which was a shitty paying sales associate title, boyfriends we hated, and a seemingly endless array of butt plugs, some of which had animal tails attached. It was a little less than a year but it could have been a lifetime. I left with a fuller drawer and more knowledge on the body and the sexual preferences of strangers than one generally needs to know.
My students laugh when they find out that I’m on TikTok, but what they don’t know is that I’ve made more over the summer from three videos than I make in an entire year of teaching. It’s funny but also so not funny that it hurts. This is not the promise of studying and working hard for a career that was sold to me in my childhood. Year after year, I watch as tuition goes up and our pay stays the same. I go out of my way for students, and the university goes out of their way to pay me less and less. I’d suggest we unionize, but they’d replace us before we got to the second syllable. I wear all the hats I can fit on my head because I love my job, and there are people here getting paid four times what I am who hate theirs.
I tell my students it’s not about career. It’s about making enough money to survive and be able to enjoy your life, the one that Mary Oliver reminds us is “wild and precious.” I say it often, but sometimes I’m sure I’m saying it to try and convince myself of its truth. Do I believe me? Does it matter?
I joke that I’ll die here and part of me worries I’m not joking at all. I’m not concerned with legacy, but I don’t want to meet my end somewhere I’m not loved, acknowledged, or appreciated. My students remind me I am these things, but sometimes I worry it won’t be enough to make me stay beyond the present semester. Then I get to thinking about what would be enough, and if it’s even out there or possible, a job that recognizes my efforts and keeps me close to who and what I love.
I often think of the nonsense I put up with at the jobs I’ve had throughout my life and the person I have been at all of them. Would she have put up with this shit? Or would she do like she had before for so many years, refusing to deal with the ridiculous and move on to the next. I know that girl well. Once, when a customer asked her, If there’s no bathroom, then where do you go? she stared straight ahead, expressionless, and answered, Where don’t I go? I’m peeing right now. When scheduled to work New Year’s Eve despite requesting it off, she put in her two weeks.
I think about the girl who cried at the cash register after her best friend died and no one would cover her shift. I think about the girl who had to call the police for protection at work and how they laughed when they got there, more than an hour after the call. The place she landed is not what she thought it would be—it is both worse and better. There are tenured faculty that refer to us adjuncts as “the help,” research we can’t get funding for, and contracts that don’t guarantee a future. But sometimes there are poems, and stories with drawings, and students who say things like, This class reminded me why I love to write or I was going through a rough time and this class is what I looked forward to or Being in your class saved me from myself. What is life if not half-dance, half-wrestling match? It isn’t all suffering. I stay here, despite all the indifference and discontent, because there are always new discoveries to be made in the classroom, new connections formed, new stories told and written, and how lucky am I to get to witness it all? I stay because of the teachers I had who gave me more time than they were compensated for and for the students who make me want to do the same. I stay because there is no better place to be a courier of kindness and because I can be kind. I also stay, in part, because I’ve grown scared shitless of change. My jobs of the past were easy to leave, because they were just jobs. They were never meant to be permanent or indefinite, simply a paycheck for the time being. But this is my career, and if there’s no way of moving up, can it even be called that? If I let it go and move on, will it fade behind me, insignificant, like those other jobs I gave so many hours of my life too?
When the frustration boils and bubbles and nearly overflows to the point of no return, I think about why I’m still here, at this institution that does not love me like I do it. Maybe it’s because it’s bad but not bad enough, but I like to think that there is always a reason we put up with the things we’d rather not, a purpose lurking somewhere among the sacrifice. Something or someone calls out in the dark and reminds us how we got here and why we stay, so we stay. At least for now.
To be an immigrant in America is to be a foreigner forever. The perpetual otherness is twice as bad for undocumented immigrants, who find themselves in the headlines almost daily, as the news attempts to fuel people’s innermost prejudices. But the very nature of these news stories is to be fleeting and skin-deep. Even when they aren’t fanning the flames, basic journalism only requires answering the five Ws (what, who, when, where, why) and maybe the “how” if there’s enough space in a publication or an extra minute in a broadcast.
For readers who want to understand the human factor behind the news headlines about immigration, there are no better storytellers than immigrants (regardless of status) themselves. Danger No Problem and Sunday or the Highway, the first two books in my Domingo the Bounty Hunter series follow Domingo, a Filipino American bounty hunter who catches undocumented immigrants whose crimes are a lot more serious than entering the country illegally. He develops great empathy for his quarries as he navigates the world of undocumented immigrants as though it’s a landscape filled with landmines.
Novels about undocumented immigrants written by immigrants are scarce, which makes this list special. Here are six of my favorite novels about undocumented immigrants written by immigrants, and one equally outstanding novel written by a first-generation Brazilian American author. These books offer poignancy and pathos you won’t find in the news. They are timely and at the same time timeless. They all deserve more readers.
Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart, is in a class of its own. Bulosan immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in 1930, in a time of great hostility toward newcomers, especially people of color. The Philippines was then a U.S. colony, and yet Filipinos were not welcome in America. “I came to know that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California,” says Allos, the novel’s narrator. While Allos doesn’t say outright that he’s undocumented, he, his brother, and fellow Filipinos advocate for naturalization, implying their dissatisfaction over their legal status. As a migrant worker in California, Alaska, and Washington state, he experiences physical and financial hardships, racial discrimination, and violence. Despite the protagonist’s traumatic experiences, he still believes in America. Quoting his older brother, he says, “America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eye of men that are building a new world.” This book, published in 1946, broke my heart. It’s remarkably relevant in 2025. The anti-immigrant sentiments in the 1930s are, unfortunately, very similar to what we see today.
The very title of this excellent novel by Laila Lalami, born in Morocco, announces its overarching subject. But the novel packs a lot of serious themes, in addition to immigration. The death of Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in a small town in the Mojave Desert in California, is at the center of the story. Driss was killed by a speeding car in what appears to be a hit-and-run accident, or was it? Driss’s death triggers conflicting reactions and emotions from nine characters who narrate the book. Their narrations touch on a wide range of issues, from race and religion to immigration, class, and family dynamics. Although the novel involves a murder mystery, don’t expect page-turning plot and relentless action. Lalami’s novel is an occasion for contemplation about our prejudices, fears, and hopes.
In this novel, the titular son is a Filipino teenager named Excel (like the spreadsheet, as he points out) who’s been struggling with his lack of legal status ever since his mother told him he’s not “really here.” Without proper authorization and documentation, he doesn’t exist. This revelation by Excel’s mother, Maxima, a former B-movie action star in the Philippines, serves as a catalyst in his young life. He spends nine months in the desert of Southern California with his girlfriend Sab. As though being undocumented isn’t bad enough, Excel also must contend with his mother’s job. Maxima makes a living scamming gullible American men who seek romance online. I had the pleasure of attending the Filipina Authors Book Club online meeting in April 2023, which featured Filipino-born American author Lysley Tenorio as guest speaker. He mentioned two things that stayed with me. First, the title of his book, which I love, was actually an alternative. Tenorio had originally called it Dynamite America. Second, while the book is about immigration and mother-son relationship, Tenorio said he saw it as a novel about “sonhood,” or what it means to be a son.
In Edge Case, Edwina is a Malaysian of Chinese descent working at an AI startup in New York City. Her husband, Marlin, who’s Malaysian of Indian descent, has apparently left her. She must look for Marlin without revealing his disappearance to friends, family, and coworkers, because she doesn’t want him to get in trouble given that their work visas are expiring. The couple are double immigrants in the sense that their ancestors immigrated to Malaysia from China and India, and now they themselves have immigrated to America from Malaysia. “I was born into diaspora, that I had merely moved from a place that wasn’t mine to another place that also wasn’t mine,” says Edwina. Malaysian-born YZ Chin has written an immigration novel that’s one of the most realistic I’ve read. She nails down the crushing immigration application process and the recent immigrant’s fears, stresses, and aspirations. Most of all, she does this with a great sense of humor.
The fear of deportation and feelings of displacement are common among undocumented immigrants throughout the world, and Amnesty portrays this brilliantly. Danny, originally from Sri Lanka, works as a cleaner in Sydney, Australia. The government has rejected his application for refugee status, so he must toe the line. With a steady job and a girlfriend, he’s fairly content being invisible in his adopted country. But Danny’s invisibility is threatened when one of his clients is murdered. He knows the dead woman had an affair with another client of his. Danny faces a moral dilemma. He has no rights in his adopted country, and yet he has a moral responsibility to help in the case of the dead woman. Should he tell the police what he knows to help get justice for the victim, even though it would mean revealing his legal status to authorities and risking deportation? Indian-born Adiga presents Sydney from the unique lens of an undocumented immigrant during a thrilling twenty-four hour period. Danny’s predicament forces us to examine the importance of a citizen’s responsibilities vis-à-vis his rights.
Romanian-born author Roxana Arama’s Extreme Vetting gets its title froma term popularized during Trump’s first campaign, which refers to a proposal for a more draconian screening process for would-be immigrants. The novel follows Laura Holban, a Romanian American immigrant like Arama. Laura, an immigration lawyer in Seattle, advocates for vulnerable undocumented immigrants facing deportation. When David Ramirez, a high school student who’s the same age as Laura’s daughter, asks for Laura’s help, she takes his case. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have arrested David’s Guatemalan father, Emilio. Laura has the experience, passion, and moral wherewithal to help Emilio avoid deportation to his native country where his family was murdered. But as soon as she files for Emilio’s asylum application, her life is turned upside down. The people who killed Emilio’s family are bent on getting rid of Emilio and Laura both. In the end, Laura isn’t just providing legal representation to her client, she also must protect his life and hers. This thriller explores the complexity of immigration laws and application process by weaving a conspiracy involving ICE and human trafficking into the plot. In doing so, Arama highlights society’s ridiculously high expectations of immigrants who are seen as a monolithic group regardless of ethnicity.
The Nantucket of American-born Burnham in this novel showcases the great disparity of wealth on the island. On the one hand, there’s Elise, whose undocumented Brazilian mother, Gilda, works 70 hours a week as a restaurant cook to send her to college. On the other hand, there’s Sheba, Elise’s best friend, who owns a posh summer home on the island. The lives of Elise and her younger sister, Sophie, first-generation Brazilian Americans, are upended when their mother disappears. Gilda, who’s supposed to join Elise at her college graduation in North Carolina, fails to come home one day. Instead of attending her graduation ceremony, Elise goes home to Nantucket. By the time the sisters hear from Gilda, she’s been deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Worse, the sisters are being evicted from their house. They take refuge in Sheba’s guesthouse while they figure out how to help their mother return to America. Ironically, Sheba’s generosity serves to highlight the stark difference between Elise’s and Sheba’s economic status. I see this novel ultimately as a story of two homecomings—first, for Elise, who returns to Nantucket after spending four years away in college, and for Gilda, whose deportation to Brazil ends her American Dream. The vicissitudes of life force both women to see their birthplaces in a dramatically new light.
Try your hardest, be your best, the only competition is yourself. Every time I beat me, I win and every time I win, I lose. When the person in the mirror thinks it’s time to quit, I take a cold look in the hard mirror. How could I let that loser win? Smoke plumes over the basketball courts. For weeks the groundskeepers gathered all the fallen leaves. In the center of the bonfire, a paper-mâché goat hung slightly above the flames by a rope tied to the end of a hydraulic arm bolted to the bed of a blue maintenance truck. Tossing leaves in the air from baskets in their arms, six neon-yellow-vested groundskeepers dance around and flames lick the legs of the paper-mâché goat. Every so often a groundskeeper wearing a long green visor and flower patterned vinyl arm coverings vanishes into the burning pyre. As I approach the humanities building, behind the flame reflection licking the glass, a feeble administrator with parted hair licking his lips and a middle-aged administrator with updo hair laughing, tears rolling down her cheeks. How many of the groundskeepers have died? Several students at the edge of the basketball courts smoke cigarettes and spit between the spit and butts already on the ground. A student munching on an uncut roll of kimbap, sitting alone on a nearby bench, head down, face blue, staring down into their phone screen. The ancient history professor, who usually passes me without regard, remarks unsolicited, our gems have been corrupted. He fuddles around with his scarf. Speed addicts, their feet moving too fast to touch the ground, when they land, they are out of joint, history chopped, sampled, remixed, barely recognizable. Blip blip blip. He makes a blipping gesture with his good hand. We are feedlings for capital’s voidmouth. The history professor had recently been put on probation. He did not meet the annual research point quota. When I was younger I saw them as sprouts, he says, with the right amount of water and sunlight, I believed they could become trees. What if, I say, you could imagine your disconnection from the students as a launchpad for self-discovery. If you could look deep inside yourself you might find something in common with them. If not in your present state, perhaps in your youth. . . . Aha, a lightbulb moment, the history professor grabs my shoulder. Your ears are wet. I feel behind my ears. Two small oceans blow surf onto my neck. A tiny whale surfaces. It shoots mist out its blowhole and onto my back hair. Now I know what you know, I say to the history professor. And I understand nothing.
The University President Attends a Special Exhibition Commemorating the Life of the University President at the Museum Named After the University President
When the university president walks down the red-carpeted staircase to the opening ceremony of the special exhibition commemorating the life of the university president at the museum named after the university president, the administrator team stationed in the side aisles give the physical cue and the gathered humanities professors stand up and bow ninety degrees. Several white-dressed hotel management and tourism students place flower bouquets in front of the podium next to the red ribbon across the exhibition entrance. Say what you want about the KGB, the Russian studies professor whispers, but doesn’t finish his sentence. The chancellor administrator, head deputy of the board of directors, and regent serving dean of confections and cutlery walk to the podium. We live in tumultuous times, the chancellor administrator begins, when the political apparatus is stretching the social fabric so tightly around the national body you can hear the little threads snap. He makes scissor fingers with his hands. Snap. Snap. He cuts air with his hands. Some professor-slash-administrators seated in the front row nod. Some slowly clap. Our university family gathers to honor our shepherd. He has been a light in the tower, shining on the harvest fruit and semesterly nuts. Due to his warmth, we blossom. Some professors in the back poke at their phones. The chancellor administrator continues, in this museum named after the university president, to mark the opening of this special exhibition commemorating the life of the university president, I now have the distinct honor of welcoming the university president. The classical ensemble of music professors seated beside the podium begin playing Bach’s Der Herr denket an uns and the university’s publicity team photographers flash, snap, flash, snap, and while the university president is handed a giant brass pair of scissors by a hotel management and tourism student in a white dress, while he approaches the ribbon across the entrance to the special exhibition commemorating the life of the university president, while he cuts the red ribbon, while he pauses to take photos shaking hands with each administrator in front of the cut ribbon, and even while he walks back up the red carpeted staircase to the exit of the museum named after the university president, the administrator team stationed in the side aisles, university logo pins on their lapels, continue to cue to the professors. Stand and clap and stand and clap.
Plestia Alaqad first came across my Instagram feed in October 2023, shortly after the genocide in Gaza had begun. She was only 21, but she became one of the most prominent journalists reporting from the ground in Gaza. In her blue press vest and helmet, Plestia posted video after video, showing the destruction and horror Israel was inflicting on her people and her homeland. She became an iconic figure in the early days of the genocide and was eventually able to leave for Australia, where her uncle lives.
Plestia, like all of the journalists in Gaza, was in the unique position of having to report on a genocide while also trying to survive it. During that time, she kept a diary, detailing the difficult and devastating first 45 days of genocide. I remember watching Plestia’s videos, in awe of her bravery and dedication to showing the world exactly what was happening.
Now, Plestia is living in Lebanon, and I spoke to her over Zoom from New York about her new book, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resistance. The book takes readers even further behind the scenes of the horrors she witnessed, showing the incredible resolve and spirit of the Palestinian people. We see Plestia’s life change forever in these pages, as she struggles to find her place as a journalist and genocide survivor simultaneously. Her diaries are a living document of Israel’s atrocities, in a time when censorship and propaganda are on the rise. Plestia’s words and experiences will no doubt become an important part of history, and today, I can only hope that this book will help spread awareness and change so that we may one day see a free Palestine.
Deena ElGenaidi: First of all, I just want to say congratulations on the book. I’ve been following you on social media for a long time. Watching your videos when you were in Gaza is one thing, but reading about your personal, first-hand experience puts everything in a new light. How do you feel having your diary entries from that time out in the world for people to read?
Plestia Alaqad: So you know how a diary is usually a personal thing? I’ve been writing in them for years. I remember my first diary—I got it in grade six. I used to always write, write, write, and I never wrote with the intention to publish or that other people would read it. It was very personal. I wasn’t filtering my emotions or anything. Then when I was writing during the genocide, and I survived and evacuated Gaza, I started reading my diary again, and publishing houses started approaching me. A diary is a personal thing, but this is also a story millions of people can relate to. It wasn’t my story alone, so I felt it would be selfish to not publish it.
DE: Well, thank you for publishing it. I think it’s really informative and I hope people read it and change their opinions and start doing more for Palestine. There’s a line at the beginning when you say, “I’m four Israeli aggressions old.” I thought that was a really profound way to show that this didn’t start on October 7th. You also say, “How much trauma does it take to start thinking that bombs are like rain? And how much trauma does it take to consider that funny?” And it just shows how normalized the violence coming from Israel was for everyone in Gaza. But at what moment did it become clear that this aggression was different? That it was not an aggression like the others, but a genocide?
Why are we living in a world where this is even allowed?
PA: The moment I realized it’s a genocide, not a normal Israeli aggression, is when a hospital was bombed, because I always thought that hospitals were red lines. They’re a place where injured people are getting treated. But when I saw a hospital get bombed and no one did anything about it, and now there’s barely any hospitals even functioning in Gaza, I knew that this was a genocide. This is not like anything I’ve ever experienced before.
DE:That makes a lot of sense because, like you said, that is a red line.
PA: Yeah, but with Israel, it seems that there aren’t really any red lines, especially right now. As we’re talking, today, Israel bombed Doha as well. In this week alone, they bombed Palestine, Tunis, Qatar, Yemen, Syria, and south of Lebanon. So what are the red lines here? And why are we living in a world where this is even allowed? I think everyone, whether you’re Palestinian or not, should feel threatened by what Israel is doing and by what the world is allowing.
DE: You say in the book, “The most harrowing stories are left unreported,” and you briefly compare the way the media reports on Ukraine versus Gaza. As a journalist, what was it like being in Gaza and seeing how biased the media was and still is?
PA: Honestly, journalism isn’t what I thought it really was. Growing up, I was so passionate about journalism and the media industry. I believed that the media had the power to change the world. But right now, what I’m seeing is how the media is reporting on Palestine. They only report on a Palestinian once that Palestinian is killed. Only then do they start appreciating that person.
Like, Hind Rajab’s story, for example. We all knew Hind Rajab’s story while it was happening, while she was calling, and they were trying to save her, and no one did anything about it. But after she died, now there’s movies about her, which I don’t mind. I’m glad there is a movie and awareness about her and her story. But there are a million Hind Rajabs still stuck in Gaza. Are we waiting for them to die? Then we will start honoring them and talking about them? Even journalists like Anas [al-Sharif] and Mariam [Abu Dagga]—Israel killed them, and then the world started appreciating them and talking about them and doing interviews about them. But what about when they were alive?
DE: That’s absolutely true. And I think it’s interesting you bring up Hind Rajab. There’s the movie about her, but I saw that her mother is still trying to get donations and flee to safety and is now worried that Israel is going to target her. So at the same time that there’s this movie, we’re still ignoring what’s happening to the people who are there.
PA: Exactly. Her mother and her sibling are still stuck in Gaza, and they can get killed at any minute. Only then will we start talking about them, sharing posts, saying, this is Hind’s mom, showing her last message to the world, and this and that. But how about we actually try to do something and save them now? By we, I mean people in power, because I wish I had that power. But unfortunately, I don’t.
DE: Aside from the individual stories of people that are still there now, are there other stories that you wish were reported more?
PA: The thing is, journalists are tired because for almost two years now, they’ve been hungry while reporting on this—starving. They are losing loved ones while they are reporting about the ones grieving. So they don’t have the energy or mental capacity anymore to report about every single story, but Gaza is full of stories. The stories we see are nothing compared to the stories that we don’t actually see.
They only report on a Palestinian once that Palestinian is killed. Only then do they start appreciating that person.
The other day I was talking to a nine-year old, Lulu, and it never occurred to me until she told me, that she has never been to school because grade one and two was COVID. Grade three, she went for like a month or two, then there was this genocide, and she didn’t go. Now, she’s studying online, but this online studying for children doesn’t really count.
DE: What you were saying earlier about how tired the journalists are actually leads to my next question. There’s moments in the book when you go to a location to report on something happening, but then you end up helping the people there. You mention that you’re torn between your role as a journalist and existing as a Palestinian, and I think that’s a really difficult and unique position for a journalist to be in. But it is the position that all of the journalists in Gaza are in right now, where you’re reporting on a genocide while also experiencing and living through it. How did it feel being in those two positions at once?
PA: It’s difficult because you’re a Palestinian person reporting on Palestinian people while also living that. So a lot of times I find myself just standing between: should I be a journalist or should I be like one of them and just help them? Because I know they would help me. And in the heat of the moment, you’re just so traumatized that you can’t even think, and you just act out whatever your mind tells you.
DE: I can’t imagine how difficult that must be. There are moments in the book when you show that people are also looking to you for answers, expecting you to know what’s going on and to have all the information. But you yourself are getting your information from regular people. So what was it like having them look to you in that way when you didn’t always have the answers?
PA: Oh my God, I remember once my friend Yara called me, and she was like, “Plestia, my family and I just heard that a certain building got bombed.” I was like, “Yeah, okay. Are you sure? Should I post about it?” And she was like, “You’re the journalist. I’m the one asking you to make sure and see if the building got bombed or not because our friends live there.” I was like, “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I’m literally in the middle of the street. I don’t have access to the internet, and I’m hearing a lot of sounds of bombs. But how am I supposed to know if this sound means this building got bombed or what happened?” It’s valid for people to expect journalists to know everything, but this genocide is different.
I remember another time, we were walking in the street and wearing press gear. So an old man asked us, “What do you think? What is happening?” We said to him, “You have a radio, so you’re actually listening to the news. So you probably know more news than we do.”
DE:There’s another line in the book where you say, “But I enjoy watching sunsets and sunrises, and I do both today, and nobody can take that away from me, not until they kill me, not even Israel.” And amidst all the horrible news coming out of Gaza, every once in a while, I’ll see hopeful moments like this. How do you hold on to that beauty and hope amidst all that’s going on?
PA: Because hope is the only thing that Israel can’t bomb. Obviously, sometimes I feel hopeless and helpless, but other times I’m like, nothing lasts forever. The occupation won’t last forever. One day Palestine will be free, and maybe right now we’re a step closer to a free Palestine. So no matter how hopeless I get, I try to always hold on to hope. And I think that’s a very Palestinian trait to have.
DE:I’ve seen that a lot online—a lot of Palestinians talking about how important it is to hold on to hope. It’s amazing that you’re able to do that, given everything that’s going on.
PA: It’s true, especially with the sea and the sky—it’s the only thing that Israel can’t bomb. So watching a sunset or sunrise in Gaza feels like a win, or looking at the sky or looking at the sea. It will always be there just waving, you know?
DE:Since leaving Gaza, what has the response from the international community and the media been like for you? And do you feel like people are listening, or opinions are starting to change?
The stories we see are nothing compared to the stories that we don’t actually see.
PA: I mean, after two years, yes, the opinions are starting to change and starting to shift, but that leaves me wondering, was it necessary for all of that to happen just for opinions to change and for the world now to be more aware of what’s happening? Like at what cost?
DE:Especially since the violence was always happening, maybe not to this extent, but people just weren’t paying attention before.
PA: Exactly. History didn’t start in October 2023.
DE: Have you found that the media response has been better since leaving?
PA: Some media responses have been better, others not. For example, it’s so funny that until today, some people call it a “conflict.” I wish it was a conflict, not a genocide, because as far as I know, in a conflict, journalists don’t get targeted, babies don’t get starved. Some media are trying to do better, but they still fail to address it as a genocide. They’re afraid to say things as they are, and calling it a genocide is the bare minimum.
DE:What do you think is next for you, and how will you keep advocating for Palestine?
PA: I genuinely just hope the genocide will stop because it’s hard to even comprehend or understand what’s happening, or to plan your life, or move on with your life, or know what you want to do next, while your people, your friends and family, are stuck in Gaza. They’re starving, and they might get killed any minute.
Being born and raised in Gaza, it was always hard to plan because no matter how hard you try to plan for your day, Israel will always have another plan. On October 6th, I was out with my friend, and we were sitting at a beautiful restaurant called La Villa. It’s a bit high, so when you sit there, you see the skyline of Gaza. So we were sitting there eating pizza and hot chocolate—I don’t know about this combo, but we felt like it—and we had our laptops open, saying, let’s apply for scholarships, let’s do this, let’s do that. The next day we woke up to a completely different reality. And ever since that day, I feel like I don’t have the privilege to plan my life or to plan what to do, even right now.
I’m supposed to be in the US, for example, for the book, for my book launch, to do a book signing, to raise awareness about Palestine and Gaza. But I know with all the rules, my visa won’t get accepted, so I didn’t even try applying for a visa. And the annoying thing is, I need a lot of paper and documents to prove that I’m real, genuine, and worthy to enter the country. Meanwhile, they can just enter my country, and I actually can’t go back to Gaza right now. So it’s just weird to me how borders and passports work. I think people don’t really understand how privileged they are with their passport or with geographical luck, really. Where are Palestinians supposed to go?
DE:I have one final question for you. What do you wish that more people would ask you, and what do you want to leave readers with that I didn’t ask or that we didn’t cover in this conversation? PA: I want people to know that The Eyes of Gaza isn’t my story alone, and when they’re reading that book, reading about what’s happening, my emotions, everything I’m going through, to remember that there are around two million people still in Gaza facing that. My experience was only for 45 days, but now, people in Gaza have been there for almost 700 days experiencing a genocide.
Twenty- and thirty-somethings aren’t hanging out with friends the way we used to. We’re drinking less because of anxiety, health, or recovery, so we’re not going out as much. We go on dates via apps we hate. Post-pandemic, many of us are out of practice when it comes to meeting new people or sustaining old friendships. But the want and need to connect hasn’t gone away. We’re just not sure how to do it anymore. Enter: the reading series.
Across the country, the number of untethered readings disconnected from a specific publisher or magazine has skyrocketed over the past couple of years. These series act as dedicated, consistent spaces for people to come together and listen to three to ten minutes of prose or poetry written by writers on the subway that day or extracted from their published Big Five novel or somewhere in between.
In New York City, one could attend a reading every night: Sunday at Readings at Parkside followed by Confessions, Monday at Franklin Park Reading Series, Tuesday at Patio, Wednesday at Stage Break, Thursday at Limousine, and Friday at Straight Girls. And then repeat some variation of that the following week.
Everyone needs an excuse to gather, a structured place to connect to both new and familiar faces offline.
And it’s not just in NYC, where readings have always been a part of the literary scene. In Philadelphia, Bring a Blanket hosts free readings in the park to promote access and community. In Cleveland, the Plum City Reading Series brings together local and national writers for three readings and a party. In Boise, there’s Storyfort. In Baltimore, Hidden Palace. There’s Small Press Nite in San Diego and Light Jacket Reading Series in SF. Empty Trash, Car Crash Collective, and Casual Encounterz are all based in LA. The list goes on. And it’s not because people suddenly love writing and reading more than they used to. It’s because everyone needs an excuse to gather, a structured place to connect to both new and familiar faces offline.
Bronwen Lam and David Dufour weren’t ready to let go of the sense of community and camaraderie that Bud Smith and Michael Bible’s fiction workshop provided when the course ended last fall. So they put on a reading of six of their fellow workshoppers at TJ Byrnes, tucked away in FiDi, to continue to get together and nerd out about writing. They were surprised, the night of, to find the bar fill up with eager attendees, all excited to listen to readings and meet people. The night turned into the monthly series Patio, drawing consistent regulars who love the warm and inviting nature of the curated Tuesday event.
A similar situation occurred when Leah Abrams and Heather Akumiah finished Tony Tulathimutte’s crit class in the summer of 2022. They weren’t ready to leave the creative, communal environment that course fostered, and even wanted to extend it to others, so they organized a reading at Unnamable Books. Again, the turnout was great, and it evolved into a series at Berry Park as an ongoing space and resource for the writing community.
In DC, missing the inspiring environment of their MFA at Sarah Lawrence post graduation, Rachel Coonce and Courtney Sexton decided to put on a reading at a local bar. 75 people came to hear ten local writers read their work aloud. At the time, there was no other free, consistent series in the city at the time, and they decided to keep the series going to unify the city’s scene and foster inclusivity.
Many people show up solo, hoping to meet someone, and the readings are the icebreakers.
Again and again, reading series were birthed out of a desire to continue to hang out and connect with fellow writers, a manner to hold onto and later grow the community that the organizers had become accustomed to. And, judging by the number of attendees that showed up each time, they were not alone in craving the in-real-life connection. Cassidy Grady and Annabel Boardman, who host the Sunday night series Confessions at KGB (Chloe Wheeler has recently stepped in and Annabel has left), noted that each weekly event is always packed, a mix of regulars who crave the consistent space to come together and new attendees eager to find something to do with their Sunday nights. When Jodi-Ann Burey hosted her first Lit Lounge this past January at Seattle’s The Station, her worry that no one would come was shattered when almost 100 people showed up, including a friend she hadn’t seen since pre-pandemic. Tickets for Evan Hanczor’s Tables of Contents, a series that sits at the intersection of literature, food, and community, always sell out.
While some are definitely there to hear the readings themselves, many are there with the hopes of fostering community. Post pandemic, it’s hard to talk to someone new at a bar. For many of the reasons listed above, and the role that lockdown played in our ability to socialize. It’s a muscle we either didn’t get the chance to build or that weakened during years of forced neglect. But at a reading, there’s structure that fosters interaction. There’s a schedule, an activity, a reason to be there. Many people show up solo, hoping to meet someone, and the readings are the icebreakers. Everyone’s heard the same story and now they can talk about it. Plus, while alcohol is often available, it’s not the central theme of the night like it often is on a night out, so people who don’t drink are equally included.
And even for those not going to readings to meet new people, the event can act as a crutch to reach out to people you already know. It’s easier to send someone a poster of an event (one that fulfills the bohemian dream of attending underground literary events) than to ask to spend time together one-on-one. It’s a non-vulnerable invite: “Do you want to go to this reading?”, instead of “Do you want to continue to be my friend?” In a time when people are scared to take social risks, the structured reading series makes the first move for you. It creates a space to feel cool and interact with people without having to put yourself out there as intimately.
Organizers too get to use their reading as an excuse to reach out to people. They’ve created a platform to talk to and meet writers they admire. Ann Stephesen calls Parkside a fan club and a lovefest, an excuse to interact with and spotlight writers she loves. “Do you want to be in my reading series?” instead of “Do you want to be my friend?”
Although reading series are often more about gathering than the act of reading itself, there is something uniquely powerful about literature in creating the community. Unlike a running club or a Volo match, other activities people are turning in hopes of meeting new people, reading and listening together invites emotional vulnerability and reflection. There’s a particular intimacy in hearing a story and then being able to talk about it with the writer and with others who share similar interests that brings people together. Annie Lou Martin notes that the poetry itself is essential in fostering the unique energy of Club Wonder, part of whose goal is to “tend to the hearth of poetry” and feed the literary fire. Mikey Friedman of Page Break swears that reading out loud is the “secret sauce” of building connection. Em Brill, who ran an ahead-of-its-time series at KGB Bar in 2021 and 2022, shares that readings are unique environments in which artists and freaks who should be meeting are finally able to come together and meet. And “every time writers meet, the literary world changes.” While it might be less intimate to invite someone to a reading, the intimacy of the reading itself fosters a rare environment that makes the rise of the reading series as a mode of connection make even more sense.
A reading is an ephemeral event that takes place in a specific location at a specific time for a specific audience. It’s contained.
The closeness of the space also offers something unique for the writers/readers themselves: the chance to share work they might not be ready to or comfortable with putting online. The internet today is a very permanent place. Once something is published, it’s nearly impossible to ever remove it. In contrast, a reading is an ephemeral event that takes place in a specific location at a specific time for a specific audience. It’s contained. This therefore gives readings a bit more room for play, for controversy, for experimentation. The setting might embolden readers to share something a little more out-there or just something they aren’t fully confident in. At Confessions, Annabel and Cassidy even promote this, intentionally fostering a transient space for writers to read something that might be too risky to publish. In a time when people are so worried about being canceled for their online presence, it’s nice to have space that feels safe.
At first glance, the rise of the reading series might seem like evidence of how messed up we are, that we need structured excuses to connect, that we’re too stunted to simply call a friend or say hi to someone at the bar or coffee shop. But it’s also a sign for something else: a new kind of confidence and a belief that if the space you want doesn’t exist, you can just make it yourself.
Cassidy was not satisfied with the uncurated series happening in downtown New York in 2023, so she decided to start Confessions. Riley Mac and Montana James Thomas created Straight Girls for similar reasons, craving thoughtfully considered lineups. When Jules Rivera couldn’t make it to a lactose intolerant reading—a series founded by Ruth Minah Buchwald that exclusively features writers of color—in the fall of 2023, she decided to put on herbal supplements at Cherry on Top to bring POC writers together. After the pandemic and the closure of Brews and Prose, Matt Weinkam at Lit Cleveland started Plum City Reading as the new melting pot series to connect local with non-local and emerging with established writers. Mikey created Page Break (and later Stage Break) because there wasn’t the gay book club or contemporary reading retreats he desired.
Today, the individual has the confidence to create the space they think should exist. So while the series’ rise might highlight the fact that people are having a hard time connecting and need the excuse of a social structure to hang out with people, it also indicates that all hope is not lost for our generation.
Deena ElGenaidi’s debut novel, Dust Settles North, opens in the summer of 2012 and closes in winter 2013. Told from dual perspective, the story follows siblings Zain and Hannah, whose lives unravel after their mother’s untimely death. The two siblings head to Egypt from New York to bury their mother, where they have to deal with little-known relatives on top of their insurmountable grief. Hannah and Zain, both in their twenties, find themselves lost in life. To make meaning out of her grief, Hannah decides to stay in Egypt, while Zain goes back to New York and struggles with substance abuse.
Set against the backdrop of political upheaval and ambiguity in Egypt, Dust Settles North is a story about exploration—of the self, of the truth hiding behind both national and familial secrets, and of discovery. Much like the dusty terrains of Egypt—the home that is not home for Hannah and Zain—their parents’ lives have been dust-ridden, layered by a lifetime of truths unspoken. Zain and Hannah decide to break away from the family legacy of lies and secrets and in doing so, find personal liberation.
ElGenaidi’s storytelling is honest and vulnerable, and she creates a vivid world full of characters who are as real as they are flawed. Throughout Dust Settles North, ElGenaidi tells the story of a family that is on the brink of breaking apart, but through honesty and courage, pulls itself back together.
ElGenaidi has interviewed many authors for Electric Literature, and I was pleased to get the chance to speak with her as an interviewee this time around. Deena and I spoke over Zoom about Egyptian politics, grief as plot, and intentionally othering the English language.
Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal: This book has grief at its center. The protagonists face such profound grief that it inevitably changes them. Why were you drawn to this kind of grief as a theme for your first novel?
Deena ElGenaidi: The book started off as a short story, and I wanted something big to happen at the beginning that would be the impetus for the characters to move forward and to make the decisions that they make. And you know, something likeyour mom dying—that’s obviously huge. I didn’t intend going into it for the book to be focused so much on grief. But those were the plot points that I chose. Grief becomes a huge driving force in all their decisions and Hannah’s decision to give up law school and stay in Egypt. And Zain’s life sort of falling apart—all of it is rooted in their grief.
ABM: Another thing that moves the plot is all the rules imposed by their family, culture, and religion that Hannah and Zain must follow. Following the rules dictates whether or not they are good Muslims and good Egyptians. How do you see all these sets of rules driving the stakes even higher?
DE: Well, almost immediately the grief breaks down those rules, and you see the systems starting to crumble. Zain and Hannah have kept all these secrets from their family and from each other to be perceived as good Muslims by their family. But right at the beginning of the story, Hannah decides she’s done keeping those secrets from her brother. So right away we see the rules that they’ve grown up with breaking down. Hannah’s decision to stay in Egypt and give up law school, like I said, that stems from her grief, but it also immediately breaks some of the rules that she has been brought up with. She’s no longer doing things to appease her parents. She’s going off on her own, which, being the girl in the family, is judged a little bit more. Or, they wouldn’t even have allowed [her to] leave the country just by herself. The grief immediately and throughout the story has them breaking all the rules that they follow.
ABM: I agree that from the start both Zain and Hannah break rules in light of their grief. And in another sense, they also follow rules, in that Hannah is following in the footsteps of her mother and Zain is unknowingly following in the footsteps of his father. It’s as if some familial rules and dynamic are still being followed. Son after father, daughter after mother. How does this mirroring define their journey?
DE: That’s an interesting question, because you’re right. They end up following in their parents’ footsteps in some sense, but their parents were also breaking the rules. Zain has this affair and then finds out his dad was also having an affair, which, you know, in any culture, you’re breaking a rule. And Hannah follows in her mom’s footsteps by going to protests and getting involved in organizing and activism. We learn that her mom was in some way breaking the rules as well, because her parents didn’t approve of that. So while they do follow their parents in a certain sense, they’re following the rules that their parents broke.
ABM: You mentioned that grief allows Hannah to leave the US and stay back in Egypt. There is a certain kind of bravery in that. Hannah’s character, to me, is brave, in that decision and also in her everyday choices. The only person she can’t seem to be honest with is Zakaria, the first Egyptian friend she makes in Egypt. Could you talk a little bit about her motivations for being honest with everybody, what it means for her and her personal journey?
The grief immediately and throughout the story has them breaking all the rules.
DE: When Hannah gets to Egypt and starts talking to people and meeting people, she becomes friends with other Americans first. So, she feels a little more comfortable to be herself and be the same person that she was in America to some degree. And then when she meets Zakaria, he, to her, is a personification of the perfect Egyptian Muslim, or a person whose idea she has in her head who maybe doesn’t even exist. It’s just this idealized version of Egypt and the people in Egypt that’s very much based on what her parents told her growing up. They made Egypt seem wholesome and that everyone there followed the rules they were meant to follow. Because he’s the first person that she befriends who’s just Egyptian, has no ties to America, she projects all of that onto him. As a result, it makes her shift her behavior to be the person that her parents perceive her as, or that she would want to be perceived as by someone who is this good Muslim, good Egyptian. And then it turns out that’s not really even who he is. It’s just her projection.
ABM: The framing of the book and the story—it’s quite tight. We start in summer of 2012 and end in winter of 2013. It coincides with the term of Morsi as the president. What’s the significance for you in overlapping the political timeline with the personal one? Could this story exist outside of that political timeline?
DE: The personal narrative of the characters could have existed outside of that timeline, but it would have taken on a different framework for sure. I started writing this in 2015, which is a few years after all of those events in Egypt. It was a time period that I was interested in. I was in Egypt right around that time—either summer 2012 or 2013. I wasn’t there when the protests and the Arab uprising started, which was 2011. So [that’s] the reason I didn’t place it in that time period. While writing, there were moments I wished I did [set it during that time] because it was a little simpler, but I didn’t witness it myself. I was there post these events. What I saw, I found interesting: the way my family moved through Egypt and how people would say, oh, we can’t do certain things because it’s dangerous to be out in certain streets. The power outages that I talk about in the book, those were actually happening, and they would occur at different times every day but would last exactly one hour. This was a way to learn more through the writing.
ABM: In trying to create her identity, Hannah has to justify choosing to be an activist. Her family is worried, but Zain, who is—to put it in a crass way—literally fucking up his life, questions her. Even her friend Vanessa questions her. Why do you think that that’s part of her character, where she is okay with those questions but is also okay justifying herself?
DE: Hannah gives up her spot at law school and at Columbia Law—which, ironic that I chose Columbia, given everything that’s going on right now, but it’s a big deal to get into law school at Columbia. Because of that, I think she felt she has to justify the decision because it’s not one that you can just lightly make. People don’t give up their law school spots at Ivy League universities very often. In Hannah trying to justify all of her decisions, there’s some sense of self-doubt: Did I make the right decision by giving up law school? Did I make the right decision by doing this? And then she tries to do all these different things: go to the square, accompany Vanessa during the journalism she’s working on, and that’s Hannah trying to find her place in Egypt and figure out what is it she wants to do and how she can use her mind and intelligence and be helpful in some way. She’s always trying to justify those decisions, to herself mainly, because she wants to feel that she made the right decision by giving up law school.
In Egypt, English would be the other.
ABM: I want to talk about how Arabic is being used in the book. You do this interesting thing where, to denote that the characters are talking in Arabic and the reader is getting an English translation, you italicize the English. Was that an editing decision or something you wanted to do?
DE: I made a point not to italicize Arabic. I didn’t want [the language] to seem exotic. A lot of the Arabic phrases I have included are turns of phrase used often in Egypt or in other Arab countries. I didn’t want to draw attention to it by italicizing it. I wanted it to just fit in with the rest of the narrative. There are just specific moments where I want the reader to know that this conversation is happening in Arabic, so I will italicize something to show that.
ABM: That’s such an interesting formatting choice because it almost others English in a way that it doesn’t other Arabic in the book, and I love that.
DE: Yeah. In Egypt, English would be the other. So that feels true to the setting.
ABM: You have interviewed Palestinian authors, and I know that you want to highlight Palestine through your literary work. Hannah is doing similar work. At one point, she wants to correct a friend who calls Palestine “Israel”. Did you find yourself giving such characteristics to Hannah that resemble your work as a writer and a critic, or did you want Hannah to be specifically political?
DE: A little bit of both. I wanted to write her in that way. You brought up that line where she wants to correct someone and say, no, it’s Palestine. That line came much later in the story. Because of everything that’s going on now, it was at the forefront of my mind. And I included this to show that this was always going on. It’s not just, you know, after October 7th. I think all of it is related, the activism and the politics and the situation happening in Egypt and what’s going on in Palestine, everything going on in America right now. It’s all connected. And I wanted the characters to show that they understand it.
He wondered if his eyes were open when he woke, such was the level of earlydark on the ranch. Oliver reached out. Maude was breathing. Good. He lay there until a single beam of light swept slowly through the room. He went to the window. Across the highway spun a beacon atop an old radio tower, around and around. He closed the heavy curtain he’d hung to block the damn shine of the radio tower. He tried to keep the snaps of his shirt quiet as he dressed then went to the child still curled up under the coffee table. She was breathing too. She wasn’t asleep but Oliver didn’t blame her. Maude had laundered her denim getup though bloodstain now clouded the acid wash. Her red sneakers were on and tied tight like she might run off any minute. Maude had taken her hair out of braids though there was no hope of sustaining trust long enough to brush it so now the child had a mane of frizz.
He poured old coffee and put on his coat and went out on the porch and pulled on his boots, then studied the dregs in his mug as the watery grounds morphed pareidolic. The child limped out carrying her radio. They eyed each other sideways through the dark.
Why aren’t we dead? said the child.
I ask myself that sometimes. I don’t think it’s healthy though.
She stared at him. When I close my eyes, do you see light leakin out?
Why would light be leakin out?
She closed her eyes, held them shut. He bent close to her face, examined every angle of her grim squint. He wondered if he ought to be scared.
I don’t know, said Oliver. Can you hop off this porch? He helped her down and pointed around the house to where, across the highway, the light of the radio tower swept the desert, its beam passing over the barbed wire and onto his ranch. Sometimes, said Oliver, when I close my eyes, I see that damn light still.
What is it?
Well, that’s the old monkey farm. What’s left of it anyway.
Around the Gently place were all kinds of blinking lights, all switched on in the last decade or two, unnatural in color and mechanical in strobe, clear across the horizon from the army’s missile range to the NASA test track, from the border patrol to the air force base. The ranch was stuck like a black hole at the center of all that twinkling modernity. But this one particular tower was the worst—from dusk until dawn its safety beacon spun, spilled onto the outer ranges so probably the cows dreamed of damnation to a desert discotheque.
There aint monkeys there anymore, said Oliver. The lab’s been closed a good while. They got all kinds of others there now. Hollywood, if you can believe that. Movies sets and other nonsense like monsters and science fiction. But they aint bothered to kill the monkey light. Oliver spit. Sometimes closin your eyes don’t shut it all down.
Together they closed their eyes, took in whatever lights lingered in their personal darknesses. Then they looked at each other again, seriously contemplated the purpose of the other’s existence. The child’s eyes were green in a way that reminded Oliver of something he couldn’t quite remember but vowed to. C’mon then, said Oliver. He helped her back onto the porch and to the rusty benchswing where she stretched out her bandaged leg. I gotta feed the animals. You ready to say your name?
Izzy.
Izzy?
Just Izzy. Not short for nothin.
Alright, Izzy. Good name, Izzy. You’ll keep watch while I do some chores? Keep them eyes peeled?
At the stalls he dropped hay for horses and ground feed for the milk cow, threw scratch to pigs and checked the coop for eggs but there were none so he tacked up and rode east toward the gate where he’d left his Ford yesterday. Out that way, toward the Llano Estacado, there were no unnatural beacons of experimenters or warmongers. Out that way, for one precious sliver of horizon, all light was still only far off and ancient. The light of dead stars. He got off his horse and spent a long while rubbing his neck. Whenever tragedy was afoot, his war wound itched like there was shrapnel eager to get back to its origins. After all his jawing on the phone Maude had asked, Does your scar itch? He’d said it didn’t and it hadn’t started to yet so he rubbed it wondering why not as he climbed into the truck and hung his head out the window and drove slow, holding the long lead of his horse following behind until they got back to the porch and Izzy.
Come meet my horse, said Oliver. This is Sorry.
Izzy stood, limped closer.
What do you think about that? A horse named Sorry.
Izzy reached out and touched the horse. She said, Sorry, you’re a beautiful horse.
Oliver slapped Sorry’s rear and grinned. The child says you’re a looker!
He has made everything beautiful in its time, said Izzy.
What?
Izzy pointed at Oliver, held her finger there like an admonition. She said, Also He has put eternity into man’s heart.
Her words lingered as dawn rose and the dead light gave way to day.
Twenty minutes to town and at the Mobil station Oliver stopped for more coffee and a newspaper. The headline was bold: LA LUZ CULT CLASHES WITH SHERIFF—CORPSE & LANDING STRIP ON FARM.
He parked at the hospital and walked in and loitered at the nurses’ station. A drunk with a chest of crusty vomit snored violently on the waiting room bench. The sound, like struggling to swallow his own face, echoed across the sterile tiles until Oliver could take it no more and rolled the man onto his side.
Your friend? said a nurse.
Not one I’ll claim, anyway.
Oliver stuffed magazines behind the drunk to prevent him from resuming the snoring pose and then followed the nurse to a storage room where she filled a bag with gauze and antibiotics and syringes ready to fix rabies.
What wild thing yall got now? said the nurse.
I’m just the gofer. As always. You know how Maude is. Workin with some or another charity in El Paso.
That woman. Rest of us look awful ugly in her saintly glow.
I’m blinded by three decades of it. Burned to a crisp by now.
Aint no other nurse got energy like Maude does.
Yes ma’am.
Anyways, be sure she brings a receipt or somethin. Admins do occasionally take stock.
Down the hall came echoes of hollering.
Jeez Louise, said the nurse, all night it’s been like a tabloid around here. I swear. Abuzz with cult activity. Can you believe such a thing?
I saw the headline. Cult and a corpse.
I know! Can you imagine such a thing?
No need for imagination, I guess. It’s all happened now.
You are right about that. Been waitin all night on the coroner. Now this army doctor just appears and takes charge. And Deputy Woodson down there cussin about he don’t know all what. Television news done called already ten times. From here plus Texas!
Unbelievable.
I can neither imagine nor believe, Oliver Gently. It’s all happened now. The nurse clicked her tongue a few times and whistled and rushed off toward the commotion.
Oliver rummaged in the bag a bit and looked around and moseyed nonchalantly after the nurse. Down the hall and through a set of doors he came to a window where he lingered out of view from those on the other side. The nurse tried to calm Deputy Woodson who shook his finger at a big fellow with thick-rimmed glasses, wide suspenders under a white lab coat. At the big fellow’s neck was a turquoise bolo tie with a silver slide that hung loose because it couldn’t get a tight cinch around his fat neck.
Oliver pushed his hat back, nosed up on the glass. Nearly half a century of cultivating a steadfast lack of interest in the affairs of others and there he stood surreptitiously gandering through a window like some kind of pervert peeper. Beyond Woodson and the nurse, stretched out on a surgical table: the corpse.
Nearly half a century of cultivating a steadfast lack of interest in the affairs of others and there he stood surreptitiously gandering through a window like some kind of pervert peeper.
Its flesh was dark and wrinkled and put Oliver in mind of an ancient mummy though the woman seemed to have been young. Her hair was bright red and despite the leathery state of her skin all that near-neon hair gave the sense of, well, vigor. The doctor tucked in his bolo tie, leaned over her. He held something viscous which he set down before reaching again into the woman who was cut open from the waist to the neck. He was taking her insides out. Some of them were piled on the table next to her like so much jerky. A heart. A liver, maybe. And something else: a little alien thing. Woodson cussed and turned away. The big man snapped a bloody glove off. He pulled open a long drawer from the cadaver locker and moved the arm of another corpse so he could lean there and ponder his findings and roll a slim cigarette and ponder more. He smoked and thumbed his suspender and tapped the turquoise stone on his bolo tie.
Oliver tried to halt a sneeze but couldn’t. Everyone turned as he wiped snot off the window. The doctor’s finger stopped tapping. He put out his smoke and closed the drawer. He pulled his suspender out like a bowstring, his index finger like an arrow cocked at Oliver who settled his hat and gave the man a slight nod like he had no fear but moved along anyway because his war wound slightly tingled.
In the waiting room the drunk awoke and felt every pocket and fold of his clothes, every bodily nook on the hunt for one last cigarette. The drunk said, Come here, friend. Do you have a smoke?
No.
Well then what is you here for then?
No reason.
Do you know why I’m here?
No.
I’m sayin I can’t explain bein here just now at this present moment exactly though I got premonitions regardin the purpose of hospitals. You aint got no smoke?
No.
Fixin up. That’s all hospitals is for. Aint that so? Well then aint you here to get fixed up then? Are we gettin fixed? Maybe the fix is in! Is that it? The fix is in!
I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Then go on and explain yerself! Explain both ourselves if you got a mind for figurin the cosmos! Why we here?!
It’s a mystery, said Oliver. He had the urge to try explaining more, wanted to start from way back: In the beginning. What was it they said at church? No man knows God from beginning to end. That’s right. And what was it the child had said this morning? Also he has put eternity into man’s heart. Well, damn. Izzy had been quoting scripture. Oliver hadn’t fully understood that until now and not until this very moment had he understood that particular scripture to be a taunt. God gave mortal man a mind to fathom and long for eternity, a concept at odds with our very nature—what cruelty. And what did little Izzy know of all that? Was she taunting him or was it just God’s taunts in the mouths of babes?
Oliver wasn’t the type to know Bible verses by heart—he had the gist, how humanity was forever falling short—but he should have recognized that Izzy was quoting scripture. What other scripture could he recall? One phrase had always stuck with him: the face of the deep. The Bible gets going with God trying to name everything—thinking up words for day and night and heaven and earth—but even before that it begins with darkness upon the face of the deep. Like, before everything: the deep. In the beginning . . . , the Bible says, darkness was upon the face of the deep. Well what in the hell is the deep? The deep gets a face but never a proper name. The deep, that darkness, is the beginning of all things. Damn. Maybe, in the beginning, God started calling names because he was scared of the dark.
Oliver wanted to tell the drunk that whether or not he would find that last cigarette was known long before the galaxies took shape. Oliver wanted to say this not because he believed it but because any god scared of the dark didn’t bode well for creation. The drunk went on rubbing himself hoping to manifest tobacco. Predestination was a lazy way to make sense of eternity. In time, Oliver knew, all things might happen. Not just one. Ranching had taught him that. Damn. Another realization—he should have known right away but he was sure of it now: that corpse, that mummy woman cut open, the little alien thing beside her, it wasn’t anything strange at all, just unborn.
The nurse came and dug through documents at the front desk. We got to clear yall out now, said the nurse. Yall got to go.
We aint here for any reason anyway, said the drunk. The mystery’s the only reason, if there be sense enough in that. Which there aint. On account of the fix is in.
In the parking lot Oliver climbed into his truck and idled there studying the newspaper:
Discovery of the partially decayed body of a 29-year-old woman ended a search that began when local authorities received a bizarre anonymous phone call telling them that members of a religious sect were preserving a body in a barn, awaiting the dead woman’s return to life.
The body was found in a shed on the property of Mr. Saul Heel, self-appointed prophet of the group. Mr. Heel lives on a farm in La Luz just north of old Highway 54, where he claimed his followers would assemble as the only survivors of the world’s end in 1969.
Mr. Heel led his followers up the canyon to Bridal Veil Falls, where the confrontation with police occurred. A fire was set but the group of roughly two dozen were all apprehended, save Mr. Heel, whose whereabouts are unknown. The fire is largely contained.
Besides various boxes of radio parts, likely stolen, officers noted a flattened area on the property identified by authorities as a landing strip for flying saucers. A sign at the edge of the landing strip reads “All children of God welcome, humans stay clear. Angels sign here, please.”
Oliver flipped the newspaper. Below the fold was another story—SPACE TRAVEL CLAIMS LIVES—about the Apollo astronauts aflame on the launchpad. He flipped from one story to the other, forcing them through the gullies of his brain simultaneously.
The newspaper said nothing about anything unborn. And it said nothing of a missing child.
The big man in the bolo tie exited the hospital and then Oliver knew him. Easier to recognize in the sun, his hands not in the dead. A doctor from the missile range with a silly name: Jolly. He was not fat but thick. His white lab coat stretched tight all over and he bulged through, a pale bull. He carried a bone saw, smaller than the one Oliver used in the cutting room at the ranch. Sharper. The pale bull came to the truck. Oliver couldn’t help but size up how he’d break down, all prime: chuck, flank, and brisket.
Doc Jolly set his saw on the hood of the Ford where it rattled as the engine idled.
I am sorry you saw that, said Doc Jolly. He pulled from his shirt pocket a leather pouch and pinched tobacco and rolled another long, slim cigarette.
I’ve seen worse, said Oliver. What did I see exactly?
Jolly struck a match and puffed. He flicked the match away. Through his nose he inhaled slow and delicate. Up from his mouth a couple of cloudy snakes slithered over his lip into his nostrils. He exhaled and ashed and the embers of it caught the wind and flared and disappeared.
Do you care to know what I think about the moon? said Doc Jolly. He spoke with an unplaceable accent, put on and tiresome, wrought maybe from reading too much.
Why would I care about that?
You sit there with the newspaper, my friend. The space race is on. These astronauts, dead and sacrificed. Nothing strange, in this day and age, about patriots politely discussing the moon, the moon and its casualties, Apollo in ashes, et cetera.
Along came the drunk, out from the hospital. He ambled up to the men, tried to snatch the cigarette from Jolly’s hand. At first, Jolly pulled back. Then he smiled and put the cigarette to the drunk’s lips. For a moment, between them was the mingling of smoke, their exhales all mixed up and intertwined as if from the same fiery lungs. And then the drunk stumbled off messily sucking the cigarette to the butt, mumbling, Hallelujah.
Why’d you give that fella your smoke?
I am not a smoker. Not really. I suppose it is just a puff here and there to help cleanse the stench somewhat. Do you know what I mean when I say the stench?
I get the feelin you’re standin here at my truck for a reason.
No reason. My apologies, sir. Doc Jolly lifted his bone saw and used it to scratch his back. In any case, said Jolly, what I think about the moon is this: I feel sorry for the moon. Like I feel sorry for Vietnam. The war goes on. Always has. And these places do just get caught up in it.
Oliver put the Ford in gear and drove off. Doc Jolly sat on a curb with the bone saw for a lap table. He hulked over his little pouch, rolled another slim cigarette, and inhaled the smoky snakes of it.
Maude injected Izzy a half dozen times. The child flinched when touched but didn’t blink as the needle went in. Antibody shots around the bite on her thigh and then vaccine in her arm. Maude dressed the wound and took a seat on the sofa and looked over the newspaper Oliver handed her as Izzy curled up in the easy chair, her stained hands red against the turquoise plastic of the radio.
Was it a sheriff’s dog that bit you? said Oliver. Was there a whole lot of gunshootin? Who set fire to the mountain? How’d you end up alone?
Izzy kept quiet.
Maude said, Tell us about your mother then.
Izzy thought for a minute. She said, He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
I told you she’s talkin Bible riddles. What are we supposed do with that?
Will you tell us about your parents? We’d like to get you back to your family, when it’s safe. Where is your family?
I need this radio fixed, said Izzy.
Alright. Anything can be fixed.
It’s a Galaxy and we don’t deserve it but have it only by the grace of God. This was Brother Heel’s. The Galaxy connects us to all things . . . when it’s fixed.
It’s a Galaxy and we don’t deserve it but have it only by the grace of God.
Even when she wasn’t speaking the King James, words came from Izzy’s mouth like they were written down somewhere and that bothered Oliver, having to think about where they were written down and by who and to what end. The child said so little but what came out straddled naïveté and certainty, like any kid talking to dolls, explaining the whole world.
That aint authentic NASA gizmos, said Oliver. That’s just another busted Emerson. But we’ll get batteries if you want. Won’t help nothin. Out here TV don’t work half the time. Remember I showed you that monkey light? Missile range has got antennas and radars galore. There aint hardly airwaves left for Cronkite or Bonanza.
The Galaxy works, said Izzy. Anybody can hear it. Even you could hear it.
I believe you.
It’s how God talks to us. God comes on the radio.
Now, just what do you mean? God?
If the Galaxy’s broke, we can’t hear God.
Alright, kiddo. Now . . . you mean like a church program, or some hellfire preacher? What station plays God?
He’s just . . . He is the radio, said Izzy. I am that I am and who is and who was and who is to come.
Oliver stared at her like from the paying side of zoo glass. He threw his arms out and stammered, unable to say any of the blasphemous things echoing in his brain, because Maude already had her nails digging into his thigh.
What about this Mr. Heel? said Maude. The newspaper claims he’s missing. Is he maybe out searchin for you?
No.
Somebody’s bound to be missin you.
Izzy spun her dials and said, My mother’s gone. Brother Heel was bringing her back. But he’s gone too. His head exploded on the mountain. In the fire . . . he rose up. Izzy raised her palms high, raised her gaze too, had a whole moment of what Oliver could understand only as some pantomime of zealous supplication. Then she curled back into herself, into her busted Galaxy.
There shall be no flesh saved, said Izzy.
Early evening and riding a stretch of fence might clarify something. Always more holes to patch. More concerns to ponder low in the gurgling worrypits of the gut. A wilderness of fear stones slowed the man down but at least belly pain wouldn’t put him in the loony bin. My mind is sound, said Oliver to his horse as he tacked up. Aint no god in radio.
He patted Sorry’s rear, brushed his patchy mane. Most everybody, upon first encountering the miserable beast as an ugly foal, had reflexively apologized to his long face out of some innate guilt about their own repulsion, but they’d said sorry with such empathy that the horse got sort of sweet on the word, like it was his name, and so it was.
Giddyup, Sorry.
They went northwest toward Highway 70. The day’s last rays of sun glared off the big stretch of white dunes across the road. The ranch sat near two buttes, called Twin Buttes, though the shape and character of the buttes were different enough. In the Chihuahuan Desert any big rock jutting from the dusty plains is an anomaly, and here were two, a real incongruity with the Gently place in the middle. How had Izzy ended up here?
Though Oliver’s granddaddy had written Twin Buttes Ranch on all the official paperwork, few ever used that name. The ranch was spitting distance from those blindingly white dunes, the dregs of some ancient lake, one of the world’s great natural wonders, according to brochures from the visitors’ center at White Sands National Monument. So the name was sometimes White Sands Ranch and always the Gently place but almost never Twin Buttes Ranch, even though the brand adorning the gate and burned into the cattle was pretty clearly a couple of flat-topped hills with a slim rib of moon slung over them. Looking out on the ancient gypsum dunes Oliver thought again about the face of the deep, if this was its opposite or end, the blinding maw of sand he’d been raised in. If you came to town and asked after White Sands, folks would think probably you meant the missile range, because the military was the biggest business around and of course they’d taken the name for themselves, for their proving ground: White Sands Missile Range. For this reason above all, Oliver hated when folks called his ranch White Sands. In two decades the government had gone and turned one of the world’s great natural wonders into an unquenchable wound of war games. Twin Buttes by the Monument, Oliver had said for years, by way of direction to the Gently place. Veer left at the blinding maw—steer clear of any bombs.
And why was it that the child now reminded him of this—one more weapon crash-tested at the Gently place.
He eased Sorry along the fence, eyed his spread, added all he saw to an already infinite list of decrepitudes. The barn roof leaked. Cow tanks strewn across the playa leaked. Somehow everything leaked though there was never rain enough to fill the cisterns. The well was low and what came up was briny. The big corral plus all the pens were held upright primarily by rust. The yellow paint he and Maude had annually caked on the house peeled now all over like a thick hide poorly fleshed so big patches of adobe were exposed and crumbling. The cinderblock slaughter house needed a new chain hoist and the cutting room had a broken freezer. Toward the buttes there were two rickety single-wides and an Airstream where various extended family or hired hands had lived over the years before Daddy ran them off. Oliver had renters out there now at the butte camp. He couldn’t afford to pay cowboys but occasionally he’d knock money off the already piddly lease for a hand bailing hay. He was down to sixty head of cattle now, just what he could manage with his son joined up and gone to Vietnam. Hardly a living, sixty cows.
Between the buttes was an old tin barracks. The army had dragged it over some years back to make amends after a misunderstanding involving drunk soldiers and a dead heifer. Before he died, Oliver’s daddy had lost his mind in that barracks, digging holes toward a grand bomb shelter. At times it seemed his daddy had wanted to move the whole ranch underground. But like so much on the Gently place, the bomb shelter languished unfinished. Now the barracks was mostly a playhouse for the kids of tenants at the butte camp, of which currently there were four boys: Benny and José and Dusty and Luis, troublemakers all.
Oliver pulled up on Sorry and sighed. Sorry spun slowly clockwise, something the horse tended to do instead of standing still. Sorry walked like a drunk, even when held halter. The horse had moon blindness, meaning there were clouds in his eyes that waxed and waned, made him sensitive to light, got him confused at times. Plus maybe spinal parasites or encephalitis, according to the vet, who periodically tried to load Sorry’s ass full of fist-sized pills. Oliver always declined on Sorry’s behalf. A balance issue for sure but maybe more of a sensitivity than an impairment. The horse noticed the world spinning counterclockwise, Oliver figured, and simply compensated by spinning the other direction. Fair enough. Surely the globe’s spin accelerates toward annihilation. Why not try going the other way?
Atop the revolving horse Oliver took it all in—his place and everything falling apart between its fences. He spun toward the glowing runways of Holloman Air Force Base and its cargo planes of boys headed for Vietnam and spun toward the Organ Mountains and the glow of the missile range headquarters there, its labs of engineers dreaming up rockets headed for Vietnam or the moon, spun more toward the dim haze of El Paso and Juárez, spun toward floodlights of a checkpoint hassling folks coming up from the border, spun to the Monument where streamed endless headlights of Yankee families in station wagons leaving whole picnics of trash on the dunes as they hemmed and hawed over how beautifully desolate this place looked, spun finally again to the old monkey farm and the light of its radio tower flickering on for the night.
He’d told Izzy the monkey light was a nuisance and didn’t care to unpack the situation much beyond that. But of course it wasn’t just the light. NASA had shown up with those test monkeys right as his daddy really started to lose it. And NASA had got the army geared up to take yet more land again. Even with the monkeys gone now—the facility decommissioned and dressed up like a frontier town—the light taunted him still, flashing over pretty boys getting rich pretending to cowboy when he couldn’t hardly make a buck actually ranching. Despite calls and letters and visits to various official meetings of the town council and military brass and Hollywood suits, the monkey light stayed bright as the day it went up, just one fairly minor flare in the whole angry blaze of modern America rising around him, but Oliver felt the throb of its particular luminescence deep in the marrow of his discontent. Nowadays riding fence felt like it was less about keeping track of his dwindling herd and more about keeping everyone and everything else out. The fence line got shorter and stronger and he ventured out less. He was besieged by all things on all sides. And now the cult kid. What was it about her eyes? They were the strangest green, like translucent jade. It was the color of those weird stones he would find on the outer range, sand melted and fused inside the fireball of the atom bomb blast. Trinitite, they called it. Her eyes were like that. Goddamn. He put Sorry to a trot toward home. He was done getting pushed around and keeping quiet about whatever fell to his ranch, or exploded on his ranch, or got took from his ranch. He settled it in his mind then. Can’t let nothin ruin the child no more. Whatever she is, she’s our line in the sand.
Somewhere in my house, rolled up in a poster tube, is a map of Europe the way it was in my childhood—Germany split in half, Yugoslavia still one country, the Soviet Union looming large. My mother is German, and I grew up moving back and forth between the U.S. and what was then West Germany. I was in college when the Berlin Wall fell, a moment I never imagined would occur in my lifetime. I kept the old map on my wall for many years afterwards as a reminder of how things had once been. Eventually, though, I took it down, put it away.
Thirty-five years after reunification, Germany is still reckoning not just with its division, but with the flawed process by which it became one country again. I’ve seen it first-hand. In 2017, my husband, two children, and I moved for two years to Leipzig, a former East German city I’d visited regularly since my parents moved there in the early 1990s. By 2017, nearly three decades had passed since reunification, yet Germany’s division was still ever-present, raised again and again in conversations about who owned what, who believed what, who resented whom, who voted for whom. During those years, I wrote the first draft of my debut novel, Restitution, which tells the story of Kate and Martin, German-American siblings faced with a decision after reunification: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? But another family has lived in the house for decades, and the question of right and wrong is far murkier than Kate and Martin initially expect. As with all stories about divided countries, Restitution is about identity and belonging, about what it means to be forced to leave a country forever, but also what it means to see your homeland become unrecognizable or disappear altogether.
The novels below are set in countries that have fractured, shifting our maps and our conceptions of the world. The reconfigurations covered on these pages take many different shapes, but all are born of violence, and the scars are still visible. These books powerfully illuminate the lingering political and personal damage of these ruptures, which cannot be hidden away like an old map.
If You Leave Me is both a war story and a love story. Against the backdrop of the Korean War, two cousins fall in love with the same girl, Haemi. One can offer her money and stability. The other is her childhood love. In a country torn apart and turned upside down by war, Haemi chooses stability—and a lifetime of regret. When the war ends with the two Koreas still separate, Crystal Hana Kim’s characters wonder what it was all for. If You Leave Me is, above all, a heartbreaking novel about love, but it is also the story of a country splitting in half, of families growing apart, of the unimaginable becoming commonplace. In Haemi’s words: “…the war had suddenly made us two countries with no shared history.”
Fatin Abbas’ novel takes place during the second Sudanese civil war in the early 2000s. Ghost Season tells the story of the staff and volunteers at an international NGO based on the border between the warring north and south regions. Within the walls of the NGO compound, Abbas’ characters build a tentative community that cuts across national and ethnic lines. Ghost Season explores the protection this community offers, but also its tragic limits. Violence encroaches in the lead-up to the accords that will ultimately set the stage for the creation of two separate states. Amidst all the horror, Ghost Season is also a love story, showing again and again how love in all its different forms (romantic, parental, platonic) can offer, if not a happy ending, then at least a reason to go on.
Milkman, which won the 2018 Booker Award, does not explicitly mention Northern Ireland. In fact, the book steers clear of proper nouns and names, instead using descriptors, such as “country over the water” and “country over the border.” Still, it is clear Milkman is about a young woman in 1970s Northern Ireland, who is being stalked by a paramilitary leader in her neighborhood. At the same time (and perhaps because of his interest), she faces constant surveillance. Intimate and political oppression quickly become one and the same. In a place of violence and divided loyalties, everyday items and mundane choices are deadly political symbols. At once horrifying and deeply revealing, Milkman lays bare the ways in which communities and individuals fall apart.
At the heart of House of Caravans are two brothers, torn apart and then reunited during the partition of Pakistan and India. Suneja depicts the brutality of colonial rule as well as the devastation caused when the British leave, redrawing boundaries and cleaving apart communities in the process. The reverberations of these ruptures are felt across generations in this moving novel about loss and second chances. The prologue sets the stage for a story that leaves no one unscathed. Shortly after Partition, one of the brothers seeks to board a train to escape from Pakistan to India, but the violence of that upheaval has gotten there first: “No one is left alive. The train is no longer a train, but a tidal wave of blood. In Punjab, the land of five rivers, a sixth is born.”
Dubravka Ugrešić’s narrator is a Yugoslav woman living in Amsterdam after the disintegration of her country. She gets a job teaching students who also came from Yugoslavia, and together they seek to document memories of their now fractured home. This thought-provoking novel raises many questions about displacement and loss. Is it even possible to speak of “our country”, “our people”, and “our language” in the aftermath of war and division? Can there be shared memories of a home country that no longer exists? In the narrator’s words, “with the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased.” As the narrator’s life spirals out of control, she seeks to hold onto an identity that is no longer recognized, while building a future in a place that remains foreign.
In this multigenerational novel, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai reveals the horrors of the Vietnam War from the perspective of those left behind while their loved ones are fighting. The novel alternates between two points of view. In one, Hương revisits her childhood memories from the 1970s. In the other, Hương’s grandmother describes the end of French colonial rule, the Great Famine of the 1940s, the Land Reform of the 1950s. Their stories reveal the deep emotional cost of a conflict that split communities apart, pitting friends and relatives against one another in life and in battle. After the war, the country’s reunification brings new scars, but also tentative hope, as the characters reveal secrets and seek each other’s forgiveness.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel explores a toxic love affair between a married, middle-aged writer and a much younger student during the waning days of the East German regime. As their relationship disintegrates, so does the relationship between the East German state and its own citizens. Covering the years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kairos examines what it means to lose all understanding of a beloved person or country. What happens when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when love turns to hate? A friend asks the young woman: “Will it be possible to keep the good, and slice away the bad with a single cut?” She is speaking of the political transformation, but the question is equally applicable to the love affair. Erpenbeck draws out these parallels, exploring the damage caused by personal as well as political oppression.
Unlike the other novels on this list, Isabella Hammad’s novel is not about a country divided into two or more independent countries, but about an ongoing occupation. Still, the theme of division (between Israel and Palestine, but also among characters) is ever-present in this powerful and thought-provoking novel. Sonia, an actor of Dutch and Palestinian heritage, leaves her London home to return to Haifa, the site of her childhood summers. She accepts a role in a Palestinian production of Hamlet in the West Bank but is unprepared for the violence that follows—at check points, at rehearsals, and at the performance itself. As the threats mount, Sonia and her fellow actors question the meaning of the play. They ask: Can Hamlet be read as an allegory for the occupation, and is their production an act of resistance?
About a year ago, when my child was a few months old, he started refusing to nurse. It was devastating in ways both mysterious to me and not, but I was determined to keep trying. My lactation consultant couldn’t do much for me at that point except tell me to wait it out, but she did recommend another LC in the area in case I wanted a second opinion. This new-to-me consultant had an Instagram account—a popular one. As soon as the algorithm figured out that I was pausing for longer on her videos than I usually do while scrolling, I saw every new post, every new reel, every new event she was promoting. Her content tended to be reassuring and educational, centering parental mental health alongside babies’ needs, and I learned a lot about things I never imagined I’d find fascinating.
I was also impressed with her hustle; she often used TikTok trends and other mimetic video formats to share bite-sized information which she then expanded on in the captions. I could never, I always thought.
I promise you; this is not actually an essay about babies or lactation. It’s an essay about capitalism.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2014 speech accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is mostly known for this one incredibly quotable line: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” It’s a good reminder, certainly. But when I came across the speech recently, what stood out to me most was the middle, where Le Guin called out the publishing industry and the writers who capitulate to its whims:
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial…And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this —letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
I was nodding furiously at my computer screen when I read this. But in writing this essay, I kept coming back to this idea of writing to the market, and thinking about how difficult it actually is to do. Lincoln Michel pointed this out in his newsletter, recently: “Writing effectively to formula is a skill. Most authors fail. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that most ‘commercial fiction’ flops commercially. The majority of works aspiring to ride the buzziest trends disappear into the same dustbins of literary history as everything else.”
Plus, there’s a world of difference between being sold and being told to sell yourself. On the surface, anyway, being a writer whose publisher is selling them to the world seems pretty great—the implication here is that your publisher would be doing a lot of the work, putting marketing dollars behind you, and you’d just have to show up and do what they ask of you. But the reality is that most writers are not really sold—they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, to sell themselves.
So, we try to do just that. Some writers are able to make their income from writing books, but the vast majority of us—the ones who feel the need to sell ourselves–do not. An Author’s Guild survey of 5699 writers found that the median income full-time authors made from their books was $10,000 in 2022; with other author-related income (defined as “editing, blogging, teaching, speaking, book coaching, copy writing and journalism”) it came to some $20,000.
Most writers are not really sold—they’re told, implicitly or explicitly, to sell themselves.
I found these results interesting, in part because I don’t really consider myself a “full-time author” precisely because most of my income (which has fluctuated over the years, but which aligns pretty well with the survey’s results in aggregate) does not come from writing books. For six years, while I was in graduate school, part of my income came from my stipend, and the rest came from freelancing, which was what I was doing before as well; since then, it’s come from my freelance work as a book critic, the very occasional teaching gig, copyediting for an infrequently published magazine, and editorial clients. According to the Author’s Guild’s definitions, then, I have been a full-time author with author-related income since I graduated in 2023; I have hustled, and hustled, and hustled, and yet my cobbled-together income is well below living wage for an adult where I live, and teeters rather closer to poverty wage territory.
So while we do, of course, need writers who know the difference between writing to produce something marketable and writing as an artistic practice, they will—unless they’re independently wealthy—have to spend a lot of their time making ends meet. Such writers have needs too—they need to be able to keep a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on their tables. They need to have the time, space, and means to expand their horizons and enrich their imaginations via whatever methods they choose. They need, in other words, an income.
When I’m writing fiction—especially when it’s going well—I’m not consciously producing a market commodity, but rather practicing my art. At the same time, though, I’m not not producing a market commodity. The hope, as much as I wish it didn’t need to be, is to make money off the damn thing at some point down the line.
And in order to do that, I feel the ambient pressure to sell myself like deodorant.
When I actually booked an appointment with the lactation consultant with the 100k+ Instagram following, she turned out to be unhelpful. We met over Zoom, and her main conclusion was blaming my mental health meds (prescribed by a psychiatrist who specializes in reproductive health) for my baby’s sleepiness and frustration at the breast. She suggested I visit further specialists (an occupational therapist; someone who did “bodywork,” whatever that is; an ENT) to determine what was going on with his oral motor skills and airways, none of whom would have been covered by insurance, and whom my pediatrician determined were likely unnecessary. I was back to square one.
Like so many confused and frustrated nursing parents, I turned to Reddit. I was just about ready to give up when someone on r/breastfeeding who’d gone through similar struggles recommended a third lactation consultant, one based in North Carolina, which meant that I would have to see her over Zoom as well. I was wary, but reached out anyway, and detailed our struggles so she’d be able to tell me if there was any point in meeting. The next day, the LC wrote me back—she was warm, encouraging, and incredibly hopeful; she even had her scheduler find an earlier time slot for me. She turned out to be more or less a miracle worker, and within a month, my baby was back to nursing enthusiastically (and has, in fact, not yet stopped).
This LC’s practice has a simple and somewhat janky website, and an Instagram account with 209 followers as of this writing, which is updated once every week or two to little engagement.
When I started trying to find an agent for my first not-terrible novel right after I graduated college (spoiler alert: I failed), I was already on social media, of course, and had been for years, but in the mid 2010s we were just rounding a corner (or so it felt to me) into a widespread proliferation of Twitter and Instagram within writing, publishing, and media circles.
It was also the era of the Personal Essay Industrial Complex; a whole bunch of media—both glitzy startups and legacy publications sleekening their online offerings—seemed to be cashing in on the confessional writing that people had been enjoying for years in the more anonymous blogosphere (think Livejournal, Open Diary, Blogspot, and WordPress). Like many writers getting their start during this era, I did my time bearing (and shaping) my soul for $50 a pop in the queasy hopes of going viral and maybe landing a regular writing gig in the aftermath, or (in my wildest dreams) even a book deal. And like the vast majority of my peers, that didn’t happen for me. I had to keep toiling the old fashioned way, writing a second novel I felt good enough to send to agents, and then a third, and then a fourth.
But throughout that time, even though no one said so explicitly, it seemed clear that if I ever wanted to publish a book, I’d need to try to be public in a certain kind of way, likeable (or, if unlikeable, at least funny as hell) in a certain kind of way, marketable in a certain kind of way. No one ever told me what that way was. I learned by example—by watching other people as they interacted on social media, mingled at New York City bookstores, and jumped through hoops while making it look like they hadn’t needed to train a day in their life to do it.
I’ve never been good at self-curation, though—I was and remain someone who can be cringe and sincere on main—so although I kept trying, I always felt like I was failing.
I’m certain on a gut level that there’s a difference between making art and producing a market commodity, but I don’t know how to parse it.
Now, between the growing wealth gap, hustle culture, and our collective inability to create (so far) a reality outside of capitalism, those of us who want a career in the arts, and who aretrying to at least partially support ourselves with our art, feel even more pressure to market ourselves, to be visible online and off. Of course, having a social media presence doesn’t guarantee sales. How readers discover books is a murky and mysterious process. Yet when people ask, as they often do, “Do you need social media to sell a book?” and receive the resounding answer “No, you don’t!” there’s always an asterisk: No, you don’t, unless you’re trying to publish a memoir or an essay collection that relies on you being a known and marketable quantity; no, you don’t, but depending on your publisher, you might not get much in the way of publicity or marketing if you don’t do it yourself; no, you don’t, except how else do you expect all the people you don’t keep in touch with IRL but who might remember you well from school or that job or that family gathering to know about your book and pre-order it?
I’m certain on a gut level that there’s a difference between making art and producing a market commodity, but I don’t know how to parse it—whenever I try, I end up getting lost in the nuance, adding caveats upon caveats. What I do know is that I want to be read, and I want my books to touch people, to mean something to someone, to make others feel the way I have felt when reading literature I’ve loved. And in order to reach readers in my current time and place, and with the status I have, I need the apparatus of publishing to help with editing, copy-editing, designing, typesetting, printing, distributing, and marketing my books, most of which are things I don’t know how to do. In other words, I need help turning my art into a market commodity—and I need to sell myself like deodorant alongside it—in order to be able to continue making art at all.
The lactation consultant with the Instagram following is a brilliant content creator. She is incredible at marketing her services and using her skills to educate her audience. But she did not, ultimately, counsel me very well. I don’t mean to say that she was bad at her job (in my case, anyway) because she is a good content creator; she might have behaved the same way with me regardless. Yet I wonder how much the time and space necessary to be an influencer, even on a small scale, might take away from the reasons she became a lactation consultant in the first place. Maybe it’s a good tradeoff for her, but I’m curious why she got into this content creation aspect of her job (and it is, clearly, now part of her job), and whether she felt she had to in order to distinguish herself from other consultants or in order to make a living. Then again, maybe the content creation brings her more joy than consulting ever did; maybe she likes being able to speak to a broader audience and educate them about lactation and all its weird, wonderful glory.
The LC in North Carolina is not a content creator. She doesn’t, as far as I can tell, market her practice at all outside of being listed by The Lactation Network. I discovered her via word-of-mouth, and I have, since seeing her, recommended her to at least a dozen other people. She is a brilliant listener and communicator, and wonderfully counsels her clients. She might well have been all of this even if she spent hours of her week planning, shooting, editing, and captioning videos. Maybe she would have found it fulfilling to do so. But there are only so many hours in a day, and something would have had to get shorter shrift, whether her clients, her home life, her hobbies, her exercise, or her sleep.
What I’m trying to say is that there are two very different skillsets at play here: There is the work a person chooses to do, and then there is the need to market themselves as a person who can do that work. Being good at one does not mean being bad at the other, but it is possible to be good at both, neither, or only one of these things.
I am a writer; my artistic medium is language, preferably written down. I have also, from time to time, made content, and in the leadup to my book’s publication, I’ve amped up this aspect of my life; I do not, however, have the stamina to (try to) be a professional content creator.
Every few months, it feels like, discourse arises in one social media venue or another about the difference between art and content. I think some people use the terms interchangeably, while others use them to denote a stratification between so-called high and low culture. I am very aware—having thought about it at length—that my own discomfort with being associated with the word “content” comes from my perception of it, largely, as a produced market commodity.
Content, as I understand the term, is trying to sell me something: a product, a lifestyle, a way of thinking, a way of doing. Sometimes this is direct, sometimes it’s indirect, and sometimes it’s as subtle as creators who make money because the platform hosting their videos pays them for how many eyeballs land on their page, in order to put more ads in front of those eyeballs.
Art, on the other hand, may be for sale—under capitalism, artists often must sell their art in order to make a living—but artwork you buy (or rent, or receive for free) is not, itself, trying to sell you something.
I want to be clear: Content creation is labor, and I have no interest in demeaning it. Plenty of times, the line gets blurred anyway, and what we view as “content” could well be considered art. But art that isn’t viewed as content is also a labor of its own, and it is labor that is deeply devalued. It’s become so devalued, in fact, that writers are expected to turn themselves into content creators, into brands, in order to market themselves. In a recent essay for LitHub titled “None of Your Business: Why Writers Shouldn’t Feel Obligated to Share Too Much,” Debbi Urbanski wrote: “I think it’s time to question what we ask of authors, particularly new authors, in exchange for paying attention to them. Everything I wanted and needed to say is in my stories. So why then am I even writing this piece?”
She wrote that piece because she had to create content; she had to, she writes, talk to “her publicist a few months before her latest book came out to brainstorm angles for opinion pieces like this one that subtly promotes the new release.” But Debbie Urbanski—like, I suspect, the majority of writers—would rather use her voice in her art than in service of its marketing.
Why am I writing this piece, you may ask, especially if you happen to know that my new novel, Beings, has just come out, and that Electric Literature itself recently published an excerpt of it in Recommended Reading (with, coincidentally, an introduction by Debbie herself)? It started by texting with a friend about art and content, who said I should write an essay about it, and by the time the pitch was accepted, I realized I was only six months away from my book being published, and asked if we could time the essay to correspond with that, more or less. So here I am—I wanted to write this piece anyway, and I hope I would have, but now it’s become part of the work of marketing my book (please go buy my book).
As long as we live under capitalism, making art should be considered labor and as such be fairly compensated.
A lactation consultant isn’t an artist (though I’d argue that there’s an art to helping people), and nor should she need to be a content creator. The profession can exist without the trendy hashtagged trappings of content creation and marketing and social media influencers. But, as with many professions—especially those requiring people to essentially operate their own business whether they’d like to or not—marketing one’s self is ambiently expected. If three decades ago you were expected to have a business card, and two decades ago you were expected to have a website and a publicly available email address, and one decade ago you were expected to have social media accounts… now, it seems you’re expected to not only have all of the above, but to also churn out content in order to remind people that you exist, you exist, you exist, and you do a thing. How will anyone know about you if you don’t post? is an ever-present, if rarely directly spoken, undercurrent.
But bankers or hedge fund managers aren’t expected to go viral in order to make money. Doctors aren’t expected to have a platform in order to do what they do. Content creation is often seen as an alternate route, a way to make a living without being a doctor or a hedge fund manager, and the way to become one is, often, by professionalizing one’s hobbies or skills that may or may not fit into other professions. It’s hard to do, and it’s hard to succeed, just like it’s hard to succeed as an artist. Expecting artists to do both means expecting us to add yet another job to all the other ones we already have according to the Author’s Guild survey.
I firmly believe that as long as we live under capitalism, making art should be considered labor and as such be fairly compensated. But thinking of art that way can feel queasy, unhip, or even just totally anathema to the spirit of the thing, the mysterious magic of following one’s muse. And it’s true that the more time we spend trying to hustle for work and market ourselves, the less time we have to actually devote to the practice of art. It’s no wonder we’re all so tired.
Le Guin added a couple postscripts to her speech, one of which included this line: “There are a lot of us ‘people of the book’ who aren’t willing to define value only in terms of salability, or to become grateful fiefs of the market lords, but who intend to write and publish as we see fit and get a fair price for it.”
I am one of those people who is unwilling to define value only in terms of salability; but whether I and my peers will be able to write and publish as we see fit and get a fair price for it? That remains an open question.
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