The Question Every Writer Dreads

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Miriam Toews’s narrative voice is deceptively casual until it lands blows with stupefying precision. Anyone who has struggled with suicidal ideation—whether their own or a loved one’s—will find in her work a compatriot, and not a complacent one. Her characters take on the essential questions of how to live with rage and with humor, with skull-splitting grief and irreverent, Gen X-era nihilism. To say that All My Puny Sorrows changed my life would not be an overstatement. It was a book I gave away so many times that, over the years, I must have bought half a dozen replacement copies. The same was true, almost a decade later, of her more recent novel Fight Night.

I read Toews’s newest book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, three times. In between, I revisited some of her earlier work, including A Complicated Kindness and Swing Low, an experimental memoir written in the voice of her father, who died by suicide, as did Toews’s sister. To read several Toews books back-to-back, I found, is to feel almost like a member of her family. One hears her life’s most moving and confounding stories told and retold, often in surprising ways to serve new points and purposes. One feels truth and fiction bend and blend. 

Truce is a brief, kaleidoscopic memoir, fewer than 180 pages long, with a narrative shape that is less arc than slinky, curling around and around the question, “Why do you write?” As Toews attempts to answer, becomes distracted from answering, and bluntly avoids answering that rather impossible question, the book suggests several theories almost in spite of its author. Why does she write? To vent her hideous spleen. Why does she write? To end the pain and preserve the truth. Why does she write? Because her books, though they are a poor substitute for self-mutilation and murder . . . absorb her rage like a gasoline-soaked rag. Why does she write? To go there with you. To go right to the very edge of the rail where you can smell the creosote, feel the limestone shale give way under your feet. Why does she write? Because her sister asked her to. 

Rachel Lyon: In the book you mention that when you taught yourself to touch-type as a young kid, you started involuntarily typing all of the words around you with your fingers or the fingers in your mind. At the end of that anecdote, you write that you went to bed relieved: “I had typed away the day with the fingers in my mind as though that was the only way of proving to myself that I was alive, that what I was experiencing was real.” There’s an interesting authorial or narrative distance here. The person doing the recording is not really part of the scene. I see this speaking to the central concerns of the book: the faultiness of language, the dialectic between language and silence, the difficulty of narrative. 

MT: I hadn’t ever thought of that, but you’re right. The authorial distance, when I was typing in my mind, would have been from being on the outside a little bit, observing—although I was doing it even when I was actively involved in the scene itself. I would be typing what I was saying too. It’s an interesting idea, whether that was the beginning of writing, of becoming a writer.

RL: Writing as a practical or even embodied process, rather than a role.

MT: Exactly. It makes you think that we don’t have a choice in the matter. We write, to answer the central question of the book—if such a thing exists—because because; because I do; because I breathe; because I’m alive. I write because I’m writing. That’s just what’s happening.

It is a way to contain yourself, to disappear yourself. You’re taking yourself, taking everything that you’re feeling, experiencing, hearing, seeing, taking it all and writing it down. Whether it’s just in your mind or in a document, you’re putting it aside. It’s getting away from yourself.

RL: Moving it out of your body even as you’re doing it within your body.

MT: It is one of the things I think about when I think about the relationship, or the association, between writing and silence or suicide: that idea of disappearing yourself, getting away from yourself.

The domestic circumstances of one’s life determines the structure of their art.

RL: To just to stay, for a moment, with that idea of language and silence: There is a word from Robert Walser that comes up several times in the book, Prosastuckligeschaft.

MT: The prose-stuffed society.

RL: You include a few examples of language as junk, or filler, or meaningfully vacant but aesthetically pleasing. I was reminded of something you said when we last corresponded: you get bogged down in the idea that what you’re doing as a writer, with words, is ridiculous somehow, and that there are allusions to that thinking in all of your books. The futility of words. Do you feel as if you’ve gotten closer to that question with this book, or further away from it?

MT: I’m not sure. Maybe I’m in exactly the same place. Maybe I haven’t moved forward or backward. I just know that, as writers, what we struggle with is the limits of language; you do it anyway. For myself, I need to write, to live, to stay sane; I need to write because that’s what happens with my body, evidently. It moves towards writing. But I’m always aware of the cloud of futility or failure hanging over that.

If I put this word with this word, this word with this sentence with this pair—we can make ourselves crazy doing that. Call it perfectionism or whatever, ultimately, you write the thing down, you let it be, the book is finished, and you put it out there. But everything is perfect before I start writing. When it’s in my head I know what I’m writing, I know who I’m writing, I know who I’m writing to. And then you start and you’re suddenly confronted with your shortcomings. I’ve just come to accept that, to sort of reconcile myself with that. It’s an interesting conundrum, to be living in the idea of having to do something, but always with the knowledge that you’ll fail. Like Beckett said. 

RL: Try again. Fail again. Fail better. 

MT: I was doing a thing in some city, and this psychologist came up to me afterwards and started talking about a different writer. He was writing about language and babies and how infants don’t have language, yet are very capable of expressing themselves and their needs. When language is developed, that’s when we’re suddenly trapped. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet; this is the language that you have to express your humanity.

I didn’t write about this in the book, but my parents’ first language was an unwritten language—Mennonites whose first language this was Plautdietsch, low German, or whatever you want to call this medieval mishmash of languages. Yet there was documentation all along from the Mennonites, documents of life and record-keeping. That would have been done using a different language, High German probably. I just wonder, if you are a writer and the language that you have is an unwritten language, what do you do with that feeling, or that need? You may not even be able to fully comprehend that it’s a need or even articulate it back to yourself. If you don’t have the written language, then what do you do if you’re a writer? 

RL: I’m wondering about something that you mentioned in the book and elsewhere: that Yeats said life must be conceived as a tragedy in order to be lived. And meanwhile, there’s something sort of clownish and slapstick about the voice in your books generally—more particularly here in the letters that young Miriam sends to her sister. She writes “I want to be a clown. I think I am a clown . . . Maybe I was born a clown, and have to grow into my calling or something.” Lorrie Moore referred to it in her great article about Truce in The New York Review of Books as your “riffing, clowning voice.” What if the writer must conceive of life as a comedy in order to write it? 

MT: My take on that is that he meant, as long as you can resign yourself to the fact that life is suffering, as Buddhists say—this is something that I do—then you can start to see the other stuff, the absurdity, the irony, the comedy, and even the joy of life. Somebody like my mother, for instance, sees that life is essentially tragic, and for some reason that acute understanding is the thing that allows her to live. 

As far as comedy goes, I think clowns, or, at least, my kind of clown, the clown I think I am, or would like to be, is the kind of clown that can see it. Not the cliché of the sad clown. There’s something Lorrie Moore also said in her review, “the mournful harlequin at the forever wake.” They see it, they feel it, they get it. 

Stop, start, stop, start—that’s what it is to write. That’s what it is to examine something,

I was reading about Gertrude Stein and how so many people were so angry—men, of course—because she was funny. There was no way that she could be taken seriously if she was funny. But I see comedy as real. I take my comedy seriously! It’s another tool that we have, as writers, to tell a story—it’s not a relief, it’s not comic relief, it’s not a distraction. It’s going into the darkness, and staying there, just from a different angle. Those letters in the book that I was writing to my sister, I was really conscious of wanting to entertain her. Even as I was complaining about everything—I was an eighteen-year-old asshole, pretentious, and all the other things—I was fully engaged. I took my mission seriously. I really, really, really wanted to make her laugh.

RL: I notice we’re talking about these experiences and I’m not using this writerly phrase, “the speaker,” to refer to you, the letter writer; I’m saying “you.” Reading several of your books back to back, I had the experience of seeing characters in different incarnations and at different ages over the course of time. Nomi Nickel in A Complicated Kindness almost becomes Yoli in All My Puny Sorrows. Having written so much semi-autobiographical fiction, what was it like writing memoir? What were the differences in representing these characters fictionally and nonfictionally?

MT: There are differences. With fiction, first of all you have the freedom of embellishing. But also, this book is structured in a different way; it’s completely different from my novels which have a relatively standard structure with the arc. When you’re writing a novel you’re following a story that has to cohere, in a way. I want the structure of this new book to cohere as well. But it’s the structure—this kind of fragmented thing—that would just, necessarily, make it nonfiction, though I don’t know exactly why. I started writing it in the form that it is in, and then realized I wanted to write nonfiction. I wanted to use my life, my real life and the people and things in it. 

RL: I think you said this about Women Talking, too: that the form determines the book, that the form comes first. 

MT: Form, structure: it’s something I obsess over. As I’m reading, I’m always trying to understand how a writer structures their work. What do you like? How do you make that decision? What is the right structure for this story? Does that just come to us organically? It’s a little bit of both and trial and error. When I started writing, my kids were little, I didn’t have a lot of time to write, so it was just short little spurts, little blurts, fragmented. That’s all I had time for. It’s just my circumstances dictating the structure of the book. In this Gertrude Stein piece I was reading this morning, she was saying that, too. The domestic circumstances of one’s life determines the structure of their art.

RL: It does feel like a thing that gets overlooked in this notion of the great writer with all of the free time who sits at their desk all day long, and—

MT: and some servant, a woman, you know, brings some food and leaves it at the door and then quickly goes silently away, and doesn’t bother the great writer with anything.

RL: This topic of structure, and the central question, Why do you write? remind me of Swing Low, where, throughout the book, the narrative repeats, “Go back to the beginning,” and, “Write it all down.” I wonder about the idea of the refrain in this memoir—and in that book, which is almost a memoir. 

MT: It’s a very blatant reminder to myself of what it is that I’m doing, or attempting to do. It’s something that some editor—not the editor that I had, necessarily—might have suggested: Okay, we can take this out now, these markers, the repetitive refrain. But other people might see it as necessary, a Greek chorus. It is a way of getting going, a way of reminding myself of what it is that I’m attempting to do. Leaving it in was like leaving the bolts and nails in. 

RL: Are you leaving the scaffolding to show how the thing is built?

MT: To show how it’s built, absolutely, and to show the mental machinations—stop, start, stop, start—because that’s what it is to write. That’s what it is to examine something, an inquiry, a confrontation. You’re like: Okay., this; okay., but wait, no; okay., no, no; okay, what was I saying? I wanted to show the cogs, the process of wondering, of questioning, of attempting answers with the knowledge that you never will have an answer. 

RL: Near the end of the book, we finally hear back from your sister Marjorie. I found it so interesting that you chose to include her voice. Before that moment, we get a sense of, not just how much you miss her, but also—through this interplay between the present-day material and the stuff you wrote as an 18-year-old—we feel the quality of her being missed and the fact that she’s missing. When her voice comes in, it’s really moving. 

MT: If you’re thinking about her absence, her silence, then to bring in her voice has meaning. There’s context there. I remember, when I was writing the book, my mother came to me. She’d been going through her stuff, as she does from time to time, and she said she had that letter. Even though it was a letter to me, for whatever reason it was with her stuff. We all live together anyway, so a lot of my stuff is in boxes in her basement, and some of her stuff is here. She said, “Oh, here’s your letter, I thought you’d want to see this.” I was very happy to have it. I had started writing without the idea of bringing her in, so it was that kind of serendipitous thing. She gave it to me, and I thought, yeah, I want to put this in.

RL: Kismet.

MT: Totally. Like, she was giving me this gift and there was some sort of other level of consciousness working—Miriam needs something here. It wasn’t a coincidence.

Never Start an Affair with a Brilliant Person

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“An Extraordinary Life”, an excerpt from Brightening Glance by Pat Lipsky

A lot of life is random. But you can tilt the odds by placing yourself in those situations where good random things are known to occur. Of course randomness works the other way too. The first day of graduate school our painting professor was Tony Smith.

A tall bearded man my father’s age, stepping into the studio to confront the cautious, nervous ambitions and brazen insecurities of twelve graduate students. He was wooly-headed and brilliant.

I was twenty-seven, and brilliance seemed to me a manageable phenomenon—like hurricanes or measles, events that could also be handled with sensible precautions. The key attribute was staying power. Get inside the brilliant person’s zone of influence, then keep the transmission lines open.

Brilliant people I’d met often seemed focused on interesting things not quite in the room. Then you could see them too. But only after the brilliant people had pointed them out and spoken about them.

This was what brilliant people were for. The risk you didn’t take into account was the person at the other end of the transmission, with ambitions and insecurities of their own.

And, of course, Tony was brilliant whether any of us were in the room or not.

So as the semester progressed, what Tony wanted from me became one of those questions that illuminates everything but can’t really be faced, like the sun. My own husband was spoiled in the way of attractive people. Half the time he seemed present, solidly there. And then he’d look up at me only as a surprising interruption, a mechanism that either was or wasn’t functioning. But even when I was painting in class I could feel the weight of Tony Smith’s attention between my neck and shoulders. When he turned away, I’d raise my hand with a question and could feel the extra second he spent disentangling his gaze.

My best friend was a willowy and unwholesomely rich Harvard graduate named Aurelia Kleinman. “What’s his age again?” she asked. Her accent—lightly imperious—made you think of the Fitzgerald line about the voice being full of money. We were picking up our children from nursery school. I told her what a sharp dresser Tony was—always in a business suit, when other people weren’t arriving in suits that much to Hunter College. “What’s his body like?” Orrie asked with a small giggle.

She sipped coffee as we braced ourselves for the door. That interesting moment, all the children pouring through, when we’d instantly stop being adult friends and become all mother. Orrie and I were the only parents wearing sunglasses.

She said quickly, as the knob began to turn, “Fifty-one is a dangerous age, for a man. They get paranoid that you’re the last beautiful girl they’re ever going to interest. Dangerous for my father. And so, of course, very dangerous for my mother.” (What Orrie actually said was mummy, but I can’t bear to write it.) Then Orrie was dropping to one knee for her sons. “Oh, hello to you, hello to you!” I found the alert, worried faces of my own two boys inside the pack. It was heartbreaking the way their faces looked when they didn’t spot you immediately. Orrie was staring at me over her sunglasses. “So tread lightly,” she said meaningfully. “I’m just giving Pat hiking advice,” she explained to her boys.

When I was painting in class I could feel the weight of Tony Smith’s attention.

Her family was from North Carolina—they’d been rich through all but the first six presidencies. When she talked, you pictured estate forests, private runways, gold keys turning safe-deposit boxes, and politely abandoned plans in astonishing settings. But you could never ask Orrie directly about any of this. It would be rude: you could let her say it, but the data had to come from her, or the implication was that you were making her feel freaky. But every so often she’d lift those light imperious eyebrows and say, “Family event.” Then she’d disappear for a few days and come back another person, either reckless-tongued or very good-daughterish in a way that must have reflected the tensions of her growing-up self.

With Orrie, art felt like my private, mysterious thing. A special world to which my own background, plus talent and experience, entitled me. It was my estate. Art can do this, put you on an equal footing.

Life outside Hunter was solid, a sort of square. At breakfast and dinner I was one of four around a table: my husband, me, two children. But during the day there were the twelve of us in that studio, with its smell of paint and colors on canvas and old hissing radiators, being trained for our insane gamble. To become, if we could be, artists. And there was Tony, lordly and slightly ominous, his eyes pinned on me, which seemed an advantage.

Even if you don’t recognize the name—a hard, direct name that’s so much like him—you know his work. Tony Smith made the big black tetrahedron snake sculptures you often find on college campuses or see business people eating in the shade of, ties and scarves whipped by the breeze. A great one prowls the grounds around the National Gallery.

He wasn’t famous that way yet. It was all of our luck, Tony being at Hunter Graduate School. And it was my luck—good or bad—that he took this particular interest in me.

People shared rumors. Tony and female grad students; Tony not treating his marriage as any sort of map or limit to behavior. (The fact of Tony’s wife didn’t mean very much. One item of creepy gossip was about Mrs. Smith driving him to assignations. You could imagine her soft profile at the wheel, waiting outside a dark one-story house.) You’d forget this when you looked at him in class. And then remember after, when he found you with his large, hard blue eyes.

I had been in my own marriage six years, and come to understand the relationship as a kind of giant machine you rode in and somehow thoughtlessly fed your days to. You hardly even knew you were riding in it, as it chewed up days and months. Except for the moments when the machine suddenly broke. Even if it was just the smallest bump. And then you were aware of its thoughtless, gigantic power to ruin.

Even if I hadn’t been married, I would have been weirded out. Start an affair with a brilliant person, I thought, and this would light a fuse. The situation could explode in either of two directions. Either the affair would stop—and then no more brilliance, just avoidance and bad feelings. Or, and this was unlikely, if it progressed to marriage you’d end up being, simply, another version of the wife. You’d never really have been a fellow artist at all. In both cases, the brilliance you were there for would stop.

So if you really wanted to paint, the possibility of an affair was like a candle you had to keep lit but with only the tiniest possible flame, one that wouldn’t really melt any of the wax.

My friend Orrie had warned me about this. “Men are very, very sensitive mammals. They can be startled and wounded and frightened away by the tiniest movements.”

I always asked Tony questions—planned all week—when the class met on Wednesdays. Then he suggested we meet once a week after class, for private discussions, artist to protégé. These were thrilling. We talked as we broke down our painting stations, running hot water through our brushes—the paint giving in sudden delicious, sludgy clumps—and stowed away my canvases. And when we walked outside along the sidewalk crowds and rush hour car horns and smells, through the slanting light and shadows of Lexington Avenue, feeling the city cool into winter along our arms and on our faces and hands, Tony raised his voice to be heard above the soliloquy of traffic.

Another thing about brilliant people: they make the rare and elevated feel casual, near. Tony had studied at the Bauhaus—the famous German school so committed to the avant-garde that its faculty had to run from the Nazis. (They reconstituted in Chicago, where Tony met them.) Then he’d spent years as Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentice. Often Tony talked about Jackson Pollock as if he’d just stepped out of the room. Tony had been there at the beginning and end. He’d walked into the Art Students League and met Pollock, then helped lift the coffin as a pallbearer at Pollock’s funeral. It put you, mentally, on a first-name basis with art and history. Because you knew someone who had walked through those rooms—Pollock’s studio in East Hampton, the Chicago Bauhaus—it felt, by extension, that you’d been there too. That some of that dust had landed on your own shoulders.

When you start, art is limited to the narrowness of what you’ve been and things you’ve managed to see. There was a young person’s limit to what I’d experienced myself. I was painting what seemed meaningful to me: my two children, in their beds or under the tree shadows in Central Park. At Tony’s request, I brought these to class.

It was thrilling to have Tony look at your work: the very active, restless way brilliant people have of taking in material, galloping ahead, and enthusing about it. You can never quite be sure anything you’ve done really merits such attention. Tony asked, “Can I take some of these home to New Jersey with me? I want to look more.” No other painting teacher of mine had ever asked that.

Start an affair with a brilliant person, I thought, and this would light a fuse. The situation could explode in either of two directions.

He supplied the best definition of nonrepresentational art I’d ever heard. He demystified it. Tony was very close with the painter Mark Rothko. Rothko’s studio was just across the street, the fourth floor of East Sixty-Ninth Street; Tony often came to our class straight from having a look at Mark’s work. This often snowed us. To be a block away from all that. He told me, with a frown, that painting true objects from real life was fine. It was all well and good. Painting my feelings for my children was fine. “But the only way to really express true feeling is through abstraction.”

It took me a second: the words “express” and “feeling” came from that nervous world of concepts I wanted to exclude when talking with Tony. It took a second for me to make sure he didn’t mean them the way I didn’t want him to.

“What you’re giving me here,” he continued, “is an illustration of feeling. But not the feelings themselves.” He nodded as if he’d just overheard and liked the way he’d framed the idea. He nodded again. “Only abstraction can give you direct experience of actual emotion, which is what Mark’s paintings show us.”

To know he’d come from looking at Rothko’s paintings to looking at yours: that was the power of a person like Tony. You know they’ve stood in extraordinary rooms. And if they can like and accept you, somehow it seems as if your work can withstand those rooms as well. You’ve survived the toughest eyes. Tony explained that the reverse was true. “At my New Jersey place,” he said, “we have all kinds of old farm utensils. Tools, supplies, knickknacks, and what have you in the garage. Some of those, you know—you strip off the context, and they could be seen as abstract, beautiful.” He looked at me. And here I knew. He was talking about his house with me as a kind of flirt. Because it powerfully excited him—to have the concepts of me and the house joined in his mouth like that.

Sometimes his speech could be a blizzard of first names. Mark. Also Barney—for Barnett Newman, a famous painter, maybe even more famous as a theorist. Jackson was Pollock, who had started everything. Even “Tennessee.” For another friend of his, Tennessee Williams. He must have known how these constellations in his daily talk could snow any person in her twenties.

He was a wild anthology of Pollock stories. There he was, talking about the person who had made American art something big and major: glamour is a part of brilliance too. Can you be attracted to somebody you don’t find, somehow, glamorous? And for the person on the other end, can you hold the attention of someone whose tastes have been no doubt elevated by constant exposure to the best? Tony was friends with the man who had made American painting, finally, international. He told me, with excitement and regret, about the church he and Jackson once designed together, which somehow never got built. Jackson had refused the commission unless Tony’s work was also included. His best story was about that Pollock canvas called Blue Poles. The painting became very important, and a point of contention. Tony, Barney Newman, and Pollock were in Jackson’s studio: this was the barn in Springs, East Hampton, down a winding road with a view of the marshes. Jackson was in a low mood. They’d all been drinking, the painting Jackson had on the floor was refusing to come out. As they drank, the three men started putting stuff on it. Then they were all painting on it. First with brushes and sticks, then pressing their fingers and palms into the surface. It became a bacchanal. There was some bleeding; they took off shoes and started walking on it. (The blood was from Newman’s foot; he’d nicked his sole on a Coke bottle.) Then Barney got an idea—drawing eight long blue lines, to pull the picture together, and he painted them on. Blue Poles eventually sold to the National Gallery of Australia. The highest price then paid for a twentieth-century American canvas.

Lee Krasner, Jackson’s widow, disputed the story. This made a rupture between Tony and Lee. So later Tony retracted the whole story. In the cleaned-up version, Jackson had simply been “in a bad way.” That was all. When everybody was older, Tony’s wife attended the Lee Krasner retrospective at the Whitney. Tony sent her in alone; he didn’t want to face Lee. (This time, it was Tony waiting out in the car.) When Lee saw her, she reached out—and then, maybe remembering the Blue Poles story, Lee retracted her welcoming arms.

But what you also took away from these stories was daily and nourishing. That it was real people with real and messy lives that art came from. People who made egotistical arguments and had bad habits and spouses and children, all of which I had too.

Orrie was always asking. Until my stories about Tony became like his about Jackson Pollock. Lots of “Tony said,” “Tony did.” And Orrie seemed to enjoy putting me in this position: revealing to me all the pleasures I already took from the relationship. There’s a sadism in certain kinds of friendships. A forceful showing to you of yourself, or the friend somehow enlisting you in a private argument about their own past, that all people everywhere are disappointing in the same limited number of ways. Orrie advised me to tell my husband about Tony—a connection this big was bound to come out anyway, and I couldn’t afford my husband becoming jealous of my work in any way. Trust her. It would become after that a choice of work or family; nobody wants that. “Because either choice is a money-loser,” she said in her light voice. “A write-off.”

I thought for a moment about Orrie saying “can’t afford”—what could that phrase possibly mean to her?

Then Orrie was called away on one of her family functions. This one lasted a week, a great convocation of Gwinnetts, for a discussion of the museums and foundations that the family oversaw, plus the disposition of various mammoth properties. She came back in a vivid, dangerous mood.

I told her the advice about talking Tony over with my husband had been smart. It had woken him up a tiny bit. Also removed some of my guilt: if anything, by making him manageable for my husband too, it had diminished Tony.

She kind of shrugged angrily. We were walking down Sixty-Fifth Street to the nursery school.

“What does it matter what your husband thinks?” she asked furiously. 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

I wasn’t going to stay with him: Didn’t I see that yet? I told her about his good qualities. How good he was with our boys. How he never got in the way of my painting. How I liked his body, his hair. I wondered why she’d suddenly gone ballistic about my husband and our marriage. Maybe her family visit had put Orrie in a bad mood?

“He’s an airport,” Orrie said. “Who looks at an airport?” she asked. “Who bothers to really notice an airport,” she went on. “An airport is just the place that you leave.”

I got what she was saying but was surprised by her angry delivery, which put me off. We rounded a corner into a slash of February lemon sunlight. I thought you could possibly get this by mixing some of the color Aurelian with a touch of Payne’s Grey. Orrie pushed up her dark glasses. “You know why I’ve never done anything? Anything real? I’m talented too.” She waved her hand across her torso. “Anything like what you are doing?” And looked down. “No one in my family is allowed to fail. To try their hand and not succeed. Failure is so embarrassing and ordinary.” Now she was even walking angrily. Little jabs of her feet, which on a body like hers was a bit ridiculous. There’d been an English professor at school: slightly older and very attractive. He’d thought she had real talent, writing talent. He’d given her reading lists, talked about the famous writers he either knew or exaggerated knowing. They’d become involved. He’d proposed—and here, her family had stepped in. All those Gwinnetts with their heavy foundations and worldliness, who made the alliance impossible. “It’s up to you,” they told her only when they were certain what her selection would be. Orrie stood firm, then relented. And she told me what the professor said, in his sad university office, when she told him no: “We could have had an extraordinary life.” Tony’s life was turning extraordinary. Right around the time I graduated from Hunter he suddenly became famous.

There Tony was, on the cover of Time magazine, being called one of America’s most talented new sculptors—his was the fastest rise in the New York art world of the late sixties—that demanding, bearded face. He now belonged to the art world, as I read Time over breakfast. “The darling of the critics, the envy of every museum collector.” Us students had been right, and we’d lost him.

Tony didn’t make a big deal about it—but what could it have been for him to walk by a newsstand on the way to our class and see his picture on a row of covers? Like a mirror reflection in the window. It was only for seven days, till the next cover of the magazine: but for those seven days he must have felt more alive.

And at the end of that week’s session, when we were cleaning our brushes, I stayed a little later. Tony turned the water off. It made a kind of extra squirting sound as the flow ended. “There’s something I need to say.” Some of the water had fanned across his cuffs, which took my eye for a second: that blue suit with water darkening the edge.

He must have been waiting—and with the positive change in one area of his life he wanted to now approach the other. “I’ve loved you since I first saw you,” Tony said. He looked relieved. Then he said an odd thing, for all the declarations of love I’ve had, seen, and read about. It showed how cool he was in a way to add this—simply because it was, for him, true. “You remind me of my mother.”

He waited for me—and when I didn’t speak for a while, he waved his hand in the air. “You don’t have to say anything now,” he said. “I said what I needed to.”

And a few weeks later, I had Tony to dinner. This was his idea. He said he couldn’t get me out of his head. I’d avoided Orrie since she’d compared my husband to a departure gate. But I still had to go to school for my children. And the day Tony was to visit, I saw her head with its stylish short haircut at the beginning of the line of mothers. She kept turning over her shoulder—then came and found me.

This was the good daughter version of her: She was now nearly furious with concern. “You have to be ruthless to be happy,” she said. “You can be nice and well-meaning and you end up just in the middle. Medium happy, okay happy.” She waved her hand around us: at the parents, the school. All consigned by Orrie to okay-ness. Her own husband, Henry Kleinman, was just another Harvard banker. His being Jewish had been an indulgence and was as far down the scale as her family went. Hard negotiators, they had probably seen it as an acceptable compromise.

“What makes you think you can expect something extraordinary,” she said, “ if you’re only ever willing to act like everybody else?”

Tony came to our apartment with a large wrapped present, set it by the closet door, solemnly shook hands with my husband, rested his hand on his kneecaps as he bent to say hello to my children. He had only ever seen them in paintings. He made the house feel suddenly small—filled it in a way we didn’t seem to. We all were attendant on him. And I didn’t know why he had wanted to come and the whole thing appeared somehow terribly dangerous: to compare himself with my husband, to claim me, take me from him? Or maybe, just to become more intimate?

I felt the strangeness. Having brought him, with my own young powers, to my house, from his world into mine. And knowing—he and I the only people in the room knowing this—that I could have him at the center of my life if I wanted. That everyone in the room was hanging on his offer. Maybe his bringing himself here was his way of making an offer.

And from the ricketiness of that perch we all sat down. I couldn’t hear anything that was said, though I know I nodded and smiled, some social part of me continuing to conduct necessary business as I saw the two men in their places at the table: the square was just the three of us now. And at that moment, I didn’t know what I’d do. Tony had told us how important hanging a show was: a painting could look great by itself but then not as good when you hung it next to the wrong canvas for an exhibition. Everything was context. When I started my own showing, and I still remembered many things Tony had said, I understood how right he was, and how generous it had been, at this pitched moment, for him to think to share it. And Tony for a moment did look every year of his age, across from my young, handsome husband. My husband looked smooth. Then my eyes adjusted, and I could see again how extraordinary he was. Tony asked if we had anything to drink, preferably scotch. My feelings were shifting by the second.

To know he’d come from looking at Rothko’s paintings to looking at yours: that was the power of a person like Tony.

And from that situation—one of those moments when anything might happen—Tony proceeded to get unbelievably, impossibly drunk. He became as drunk as I’d ever seen anybody drunk. Drunk in the way of the past’s drunks. Of the people for whom drunkenness was a truer state, interrupted by wasteful periods of sobriety.

And then drunk in a strangely unappealing way: as time passed all the alcohol seemed to consolidate in his nose. After about an hour, the bridge of his nose would wriggle and squinch up and down like a rabbit’s. He drank for two solid hours: he sang a song about being Irish, and then one about a grasshopper but most of the second verse was mushed. Eventually, my husband lifted his eyebrows at me and relaxed into nonobservance: it was as if, earlier, some essential part of him had sensed a danger to himself, a threat to his settled life, and now that objective cold self sensed that the danger had passed. He nodded at me. One more bit of irony: marriage had allowed my husband to join a long line, to partake in a great cultural observance. We’d both joined a line that extended to Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock and perhaps even Frank Lloyd Wright and many others: people who had gotten to see Tony Smith drunk. I’d heard about but never experienced his drunkenness—for me it was the cutoff point.

My husband excused himself, rose from the table at ten o’clock to check on the boys. I whispered to Tony, asking if he was all right. We were alone at the table, and I wanted to see what he would say. My moment of decision had passed. This was a life I did not want. His nose went through another unbelievable series of twitches. “Sure,” he said. Then he rested his cheek on his dessert plate as if it were a pillow. When I asked how he was getting back to New Jersey, he said he’d need a cab. I couldn’t imagine how he could hail one. I pictured the many hurdles between our table and the passenger seat. He’d have to first navigate the hallway. Then pilot the many-buttoned, suddenly elaborate cockpit of the elevator. Cross the desert of our lobby. And then face the unpredictable freelance personnel of the street. There was quite an adventure in front of him. I understood I was responsible for getting him home. As we went through the door, he grabbed the gift he’d brought. He lurched upright.

In the lobby Tony said, “It’s all okay, all okay.” I agreed. It was okay. Then at the door he gave me his gift again, the brown paper–wrapped square. “For you,” he said. “Real things, they can be abstract too,” he said.

Outside on the street I hailed and seated him in the cab. And felt relieved he was leaving.

As my husband watched TV in the bedroom, I removed the brown twine and paper from around Tony’s gift. It was, as he’d told me, the industrial farm stuff from his home in the country. A burlap sack, with framing nails tacking it against a light wood stretcher bar. Purina Hen Chow, it said. It was beautiful. From the industrial stuff, the barn stuff from his home in the country. And how brilliant of Tony to see the art there.

He’d connected the concept of his house and me again, in this visceral way.

My children especially loved it: and their loving it was always a kind of secret between who I now was and who I’d been then, the circumstances of the gift. When I had my first show a year later, becoming successful so fast that Tony’s face and my face were advertised together in Art Forum, on separate pages, so if you closed them the faces were together. And when I opened it again, he looked as remote and glowering as he had that first day of class. As if he’d never been somebody who had given me anything personal. This was the treasure I held off selling until the bitter end, when everything had changed again. And when I brought it to Sotheby’s, since Tony had never signed it, I was told the piece was simply without value. There was no way to prove the brilliance was his or if it was mine.


From Brightening Glance by Pat Lipsky, published by the University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2025 by Pat Lipsky.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Book of Exemplary Women” by Diana Xin

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Book of Exemplary Women by Diana Xin, which will be published on December 1st, 2025 by YesYes Books. You can pre-order your copy here and read “Sweet Scoundrel,” first published in Recommended Reading!

In Book of Exemplary Women, Diana Xin’s debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they reach for understanding and try to hold onto each other’s stories. These three linked pieces take readers across roughly three decades of time. Interspersed between them are many other characters, in different stages of girlhood and womanhood, haunted by the spectors of lost friends, past lovers, and their own unvoiced but untameable desires.

While ghosts, vampires, and other manifestations of dread stalk these pages, many of the stories are firmly grounded in realism. That said, the themes they tackle then reappear in pieces with a slanted realism, similar stories refracted in a different light. This doubled lens mirrors other doublings throughout as characters consider who they are and who they could be, what they want and what they’ve given up.

Here is the cover, designed by Alban Fischer:

Diana Xin: I was really excited to have Alban Fischer take on this project, having admired his cover art on other books I’ve loved. I felt very grateful to have him on board for Book of Exemplary Women.

To start the conversation, Alban shared three cover design concepts. Each one was inspired by a different quote from the book and each one had wildly different aesthetics. There was one cover that featured the figure of a girl in a more modern style with bright colors and a sans serif font (from the line “she did not look away from the mirror). This design contrasted greatly with the other concept (from the line “wolves had eaten her heart”) that included line illustrations of wolves along with a more classic font. How marvelous to have such options!

Both my publisher and I were most drawn to the third design. We were in agreement there right away. The positioning of the hand beckoned us in, but there was a threat in it, too. The flowers in the background were feminine but strange. The pink in the peonies could be mistaken for veins and blood. The empty space behind the flowers, the looming darkness, suggested the erasure common to narratives about women, and also conveyed a certain ghostliness.

That said, we still went back and forth on the details as we tried to finalize it—Could we add some kind of flower or plant that was thornier? What about a splatter of dirt that went beyond hand? This lead Alban to incorporate the thistle and curling vines, which added another element of the strange and unwieldy.

The black thread looped around the two fingers references a specific scene from one of the three linked stories within the book. The thread actually refers to a lock of hair. In these three stories, mother and daughter cannot escape the family’s inherited ghost and continue to carry with them the grief of the past. Hair is a reminder of heritage, impossible to fully shear off.

I love that this image makes it onto the cover, its importance further emphasized by the textual interplay.

In Chinese culture, there is also the idea of a red thread, generally invisible yet tenaciously tying us to all those we are fated to meet. The hand with the thread looped around the fingers pushes us to interrogate that thread. What do we choose to do with fate? How do we serve others? What of their lives do we continue to carry with us?

I thought that the hand was a particularly salient part of the body to feature, for all the labor that women do and the way we continue grasping for each other and holding on to each other’s stories.

Masking the photorealistic flowers behind the shadowy hand also reflected the way the collection as a whole moves in and out of realism. The exemplary woman is a mythological creature. Characters might strive toward their own idea of her, but this pursuit only reveals more of their flaws, and the impossibility of existing in a world with so many expectations.

I imagine this collection living in a cracked mirror world. Various themes are refracted throughout—grief and desire, cancer and affairs—but some stories take place on the right side of the mirror, while others play with the light seeping in through the cracks, entertaining the otherworldly.

In Ming Dong Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction, he posits that one narrative tradition of Chinese fiction is the fantastic captured as the everyday, something akin to magical realism. Although I wasn’t aware of this during the many drafts and revisions, and my writing is also influenced by my education in English literature and creative writing, I was glad to find this thread that connected back to the stories I loved as a child.

The flowers within the shadow of the hand—reality encapsulated within the ghostly—perfectly echoes this lens.

Alban Fischer: The brief for Book of Exemplary Women was pretty open, and it wasn’t difficult to hit upon that one indelible image among Diana’s searing narratives to inspire several options. Struck by “His auntie said that his mother was not here because she had no heart, because wolves had eaten her heart” from “Sweet Scoundrel,” I created one option featuring a drawing of a pack of menacing wolves with a ragged space missing, as if clawed away, revealing title behind. Another drew on a moment from “Intermission” and featured a young woman’s form effaced by a mirrored surface (“She did not look away from the mirror”), with the type in a languid, breezy typeface over top. The third and preferred option took the sensuous “She looped the hair twice around her middle and index fingers” from “Visiting Hours” as its impetus. I wanted something that was at once sensuous and sinister; the publisher and author felt the same and requested the addition of the thistle and vine elements.

The NY Times Connections Destroyed Society and We’re Fine With It

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

I Am the NY Times Connections Puzzle and I Am the Reason Everyone Is Angry

It is June 12, 2023. It is my first appearance in the Times. For the final category of today’s puzzle, I group together the words KAYAK, LEVEL, MOM, and RACE CAR. People struggle to figure out how they’re related. I reveal that they’re all palindromes. People get frustrated, unaware that orthographic patterns were supposed to be one of their considerations. After losing the game, a man who typically responds to his wife with a polite “yes?” instead responds to his wife with a pointed “what?” It is a shift in behavior. I have put forces into motion that are greater than myself. I have set the bar.

It is January 8, 2024. Puzzle 211. I group together the words CIRCLE, HORSESHOE, PITCHFORK, and TRIANGLE. People try to find the common link. Instruments? Games? The American west? I inform everyone that the words are all shapes of capital Greek letters. Puzzlers complain. One Air Canada passenger responds by re-opening his airplane door after boarding and falling to the tarmac. I am an agent of chaos.

It is May 4, 2024. Frustration has been rising. I group together CARROT, HURTS, JEWEL, and OM. I pretend that everyone should be able to deduce that these are homonyms for units of measurement. In reality, these are humankind’s least-used units of measurement. I could have included “dine” and “lucks” and been no less obtuse. After losing today’s game, Kendrick Lamar is so angered by the category that he produces a song that says Drake is a pedophile. My influence spreads.

It is April 3 and April 4, 2025. On back-to-back days, I group READER, SUNDAY, BEACH, and TREE into a category for words that follow “palm,” and then BAY, HARMONY, INK, and TRADE into a category for the names of companies with the letter “e” removed, even though “trade” still has another “e,” even though no one’s heard of a company called E Ink, and, most importantly, even though the category is stupid. People are furious. Markets react. Stocks lose $6.6 trillion.

It is June 21, 2025. I group together GERM, LUXE, MALT, and PORT. Before I reveal the category, people think the words might be connected because they all have something to do with alcohol—port a type of wine, malt related to beer, germ for germination. But luxe doesn’t fit. People scratch their heads. I then let everyone know that the category is for words that are also the first syllables of European countries (Germany, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal). Players are livid. Laptops are thrown. Situationships end. One country bombs another.

It is February 17, 2026. Global diplomacy teeters on a razor’s edge. This was my goal. The culmination of my work. I group together the words BRUH, DARE, KNEE, and MUSS. Everyone’s frazzled. It becomes the lowest completion rate ever for the game. I then reveal the category is for words that each rhyme with one syllable of “nefarious.” Tensions erupt. Alliances fracture. Switzerland deneutralizes. The world goes to war.

It is October 28, 2050. Humanity is gone. Wiped out by the anger I fomented. There is no one to play me. No one to post on Reddit about the choices I’ve made. No one to gloat in a group chat about their impossibly long winning streaks of 3 or 4 days. No one to wonder whether they should play me or Wordle first, whether I am aperitif or digestif, dawn or dusk, Genesis or Revelation. Deep in the recesses of an offshore server farm powered by an unending ocean current, on a computer connected to nothing, whose processes go to no one, I generate the last of my pre-programmed puzzles. I group together the words HEARTACHE, LAMENT, REGRET, and REMORSE. The category is “things I cannot feel.” The wind blows. The moon glows. The ocean ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows.

8 Innovative Poetry Collections that Articulate Atrocity

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I was four years old, I witnessed the abduction of schoolchildren in Ibadan, Nigeria. Over the years that followed, more friends, parents, and neighbors disappeared—some were found with severed limbs, others never returned. I would grow up to become the most dis-tuned human I knew—I struggled with expression, had an undefinable fear of spaces, and couldn’t access my own trauma. When I found poetry in 2013, after years of burying myself in math labs and olympiads, I was searching for a language that could hold both the magnitude of collective trauma and the inadequacy of words to contain it. A language to bury friends whose names are stuck in the blanks of my memory, whose faces are dreams I would later have in my small rooms in Iowa. A language capable of witnessing the unwitnessable.

The books gathered here do that. They refuse linear testimony and embrace a formal restlessness that informed my debut poetry collection The Years of Blood. My collection, an archive of lost people living in memory, required the dead and the living to converge, to mourn and bury one another. Sadly, the English language only provides linear expression for the fractured reality of violence and survival. Writing the poems demanded something else entirely—a poetics that could embody fragmentation, carry silence, sit within itself in language, and refuse the false comfort of resolution.

The eight poetry collections gathered here rarely appear on standard trauma syllabi, yet they proved indispensable companions while I navigated the intersection of personal memory and collective grief. My trauma is collective one—I acknowledge this despite the fact that many Nigerians are numb to it, are not writing and speaking in the face of these everyday disappearances, and have been politically maligned for expressing themselves. Each book on this list demonstrates what I call “trauma-informed poetics,” offering formal innovations that emerge both from aesthetic choice and the limitations of language. These poets demonstrate an understanding of the way conventional storytelling cannot contain the reality of historical atrocity, systemic and state-backed violence, and intergenerational trauma. These poems draw inspiration from witness poetics, which mirror the psychological effects of trauma. The poems are characterized by fragmentation, repetition, temporal disruption, and the use of silence to testify.

Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

Reading Philip’s book-length poem is like communally excavating the 1781 Zong massacre through radical erasure. This was a mass murder in which the crew of the British slave ship Zong threw more than 130 enslaved Africans overboard to claim insurance. I entered Zong! as one might approach a wreck—slowly, reverently, unprepared. I didn’t expect the poem to feel like drowning itself, although I had expected to find myself in some sort of catastrophe. How heavy the memory of the archive. How the truth cannot be stowed away. In Zong!, Philip fragments language and scatters words into wave-like spirals, a visual and sonic entropy that registers disorder and uncertainty, echoing the bodies of human beings forced into the ship’s lower decks and the terror imposed upon them. Silence speaks through this feral disorientation of language. The multilingual collisions—English, Spanish, Patois, Yoruba, Latin—pulled me out of linguistic certainty and into the chaos of loss.

Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry edited by Qin Xiaoyu, translated by Eleanor Goodman

This anthology presents work by 31 Chinese migrant worker poets from among China’s estimated 274 million internal migrants, documenting industrial dehumanization through diverse formal approaches. The collection ranges from lyrical verse to experimental prose poems, documentary techniques, and found poetry that transforms the language of factory production into verse. Poets like Zheng Xiaoqiong develop what she calls “a language of callouses,” incorporating metallic vocabulary and machine rhythms into their verse structure. Xu Lizhi’s haunting “I Swallowed an Iron Moon” becomes emblematic of the collection’s approach: “I swallowed an iron moon / they called it a screw.” The collection emerged following the Foxconn suicides that brought international attention to factory conditions in China and addresses twin traumas of alienated work life and separation from loved ones. These worker-poets serve as witnesses to workplace accidents, deaths, and systematic exploitation. By transforming industrial terminology into poetic language, the poets create beauty while documenting catastrophe, proving that poetry can emerge from the most dehumanizing conditions.

The Rinehart Frames by Cheswayo Mphanza

Mphanza’s collection uses centos and ekphrasis to explore Black erasure across the African diaspora. The book collocates Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Rinehart with Abbas Kiarostami’s experimental film 24 Frames to examine what Mphanza calls “the splayed-ness of Blackness.” Mphanza’s formal innovations include the extensive use of documented centos, the adaptation of the pecha kucha format for rapid-fire contemplations, and the fusion of collaborative testimony with ekphrastic technique. In “Open Casket Body Double for Patrice Lumumba’s Funeral,” written in Lumumba’s voice from his casket, the poet addresses historical trauma through ventriloquism and the appropriation of borrowed language. The cento form becomes a method of communal witnessing, sampling voices across the diaspora to create testimony that refuses individual authorship. This “shamanistic archaeologist of the soul” reassembles fragments of collective memory, making the work both formally innovative and spiritually urgent.

Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma

This groundbreaking collection stages baptisms, protests, and underwater hauntings to examine post-apartheid South Africa’s strategic forgetting, marking what critics call “a massive shift in South African poetry.” Putuma employs experimental typography, including strikethroughs, capital letters, and varied spacing to create unsettling reading experiences that mirror psychological fragmentation. Drawing from her theater background, poems like “No Easter Sunday for Queers” use performance elements including call-and-response and dramatic pacing. The collection’s three movements—”Inherited Memory,” “Buried Memory,” and “Post Memory”—explore how childhood transmits trauma, how grief lives in the body, and how contemporary violence echoes historical atrocity. Putuma’s formal disruptions embody traumatic experience, refusing to make trauma “prettier” for the reader’s comfort. The devastating “Memoirs of a Slave & Queer Person” consists of one line: “I don’t want to die with my hands up or my legs open”—connecting police violence and sexual assault through formal compression.

Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk

This bilingual collection documents displacement from the 2014 Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine through linguistic decomposition that mirrors physical destruction. Yakimchuk, forced to flee her coal-mining hometown when Russian-backed militants occupied the region, literally decomposes place names—Luhansk becomes “hansk,” because “Lu has been razed to the ground.” The collection’s five sections employ Ukrainian Futurist techniques reminiscent of 1920s poet Mykhaylo Semenko, using wordplay and fragmentation to document contemporary war. Formal innovations include body-landscape conflation (“I wash the coal / like I’d wash my braids”), homophonic wordplay using Ukrainian linguistic structures, and absurdist humor as survival mechanism. The “Decomposition” section serves as the book’s heart, with the poet declaring, “there’s no poetry about war / just decomposition.”

Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah

Joudah employs recursive elegies that fracture time, nation, and Arabic-English borders to examine Palestinian displacement and medical witnessing. He creates “footnotes” that complicate, rather than explain, using medical prosody, to explore mortality and desire. Formal innovations include temporal fragmentation that switches between past and present, collaborative authorship that “intentionally effaces the lines of authorship,” and prose poems that critics describe as “lustrous” examples of the form. The collection’s recursive structure mirrors how trauma returns cyclically rather than progressively, creating what one critic calls “gradual inoculation” with irony and paradox. The collection demonstrates how formal innovation can create intimacy while maintaining necessary distance from unspeakable experiences.

Obits. by Tess Liem

This debut collection asks “Can poems mourn the unmourned?” by creating obituaries for lives newspapers ignored. These are victims of mass violence, missing women, fictional characters, and the poet’s Indonesian aunt. Winner of the 2019 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the collection uses obituary structure as both constraint and liberation, offering multiple definitions of that “obit”: it is “a story we have to tell ourselves,” “an arithmetic,” and “an opportunity.” The book’s formal innovations include eleven variations of “Obit.” poems scattered throughout four sections, center-justified text creating visual uncertainty, and the Montreal metro system as a recurring metaphor for collective mourning. At one point, a metro platform’s yellow caution line becomes the proximity to death: “Stand on the cautious yellow / Stare down the tunnel & shrug.” Liem employs a “poetics of defamiliarization” through fragments, actively resisting traditional elegiac metaphors. Rather than claiming to know the dead, Liem confronts her own limitations in writing about loss, creating space for collective uncertainty.

Exiles of Eden by Ladan Osman

This formally experimental collection uses the Adam and Eve story to explore refugee displacement and institutional violence, refracting “the streets of Ferguson, the halls of Guantánamo, and the fields near Abu Ghraib” through a mythological lens. Osman’s approach to trauma employs embodied witnessing where “pain is not located in an identifiable muscle only, but in a person, a relationship.” The collection rejects prescribed narratives, with the speaker noting, “I resist the narrative that’s ascribed to someone like me.” The final poem, “Refusing Eurydice,” creates ritual language for collective healing: “We are looking for a better myth. / We’ve only been looking since Eve.” Through mythological reframing, Osman creates new possibilities for understanding contemporary displacement and violence, showing how ancient stories can contain modern trauma while pointing toward transformation.

9 Podcasts That Welcome You Into the “Literary World”

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

There was a time when I was not a so-called “Podcast Person.” I had, however, struggled to make sense of my place as a writer within the vast sea of writing programs, workshops, and conferences. The writing world and its accoutrements often feel inaccessible to writers—being invited to participate can be a hard, complicated thing to navigate. When are you granted the right to call yourself a writer? How many credentials are needed before you’re taken seriously? What are the most impactful ways to develop (and feel confident in) your craft? If you’re feeling the same dread I frequently do when trying to acclimate to literary spheres, you may find encouragement within this list of podcasts that are cognizant of the “unwelcomed” writer’s dilemma. Their in-depth discussions with writers, craft talks, and reading recommendations beckon listeners into relevant, encouraging conversations and spaces. Incorporating these podcasts into my own listening rotation has informed my knowledge as a writer and reader. I leave each episode with new, expansive ideas about what it means to be a member of the literary world. 

Literary Friction 

I love Literary Friction because of its lively, conversational tone, the diversity of interviewees, and the plethora of reading recommendations that accompany each episode. Many episodes have aided me in making sense of my own writing, or putting words to ideas and feelings I hadn’t been able to articulate. In the “Desire” episode with K Patrick, hosts Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright ask “How do you render the physical intensity of desire on the page?” Listening propelled me into a rewrite of a short story about identity and desire I had spent months agonizing over. With each installment revolving around a unique theme like feminism, money, magical realism, or deception, there’s something for every kind of writer to learn from this podcast. 

Great Podversations 

Great Podversations is made up of “candid conversation” between meticulously matched author-interviewer teams. These conversations about writing, culture, politics, and history are held in front of a live audience at The Kentucky Center, and the energy and excitement of the crowd are palpable. Listeners are invited to hear Colm Tóibín and Silas House discuss childhood and home, Joan Baez and Diane Rehm cover music and activism, Charles Booker and Eddie Glaude Jr. talk about race and politics in the United States, and many more renowned authors meditate on their work. 

DIY MFA Radio

Consisting of intelligent and enthusiastic dives into craft, the minutia of the literary world, and author processes, DIY MFA Radio has the same value as many traditional MFA programs. The podcast promises to help listeners “get those words on the page” and follows through with its generative and inspiring episodes. Writers with and without an MFA are bound to benefit from this podcast brimming with insight and ideas from authors, teachers, and publishing professionals. 

MFA Writers

MFA Writers is a wonderful resource for anyone who is curious about pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing. Jared McCormack interviews students who attend a wide range of programs, creating a space for discussion about “their program, their process, and a piece they’re working on.” Not every creative writing program is a good fit for every writer, but these thorough, twice-monthly accounts from students provide exceedingly helpful information about assessing, applying to, and acclimating to MFA spaces. 

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writers as artists with the propensity to meaningfully impact our society. Weekly episodes focus on one author who provides a glimpse into their writing career, perspectives on craft, influences, and processes. Kaveh Akbar’s episode about “not looking away from the terrors of the world, addiction and rehabilitation, the messiness of life, and questions about goodness” feels especially resonant right now. 

Writer’s Routine

For many writers, a lack of time and resources are insurmountable barriers to creating routines that support their careers. Writer’s Routine consists of interviews with writers who are in the process of maximizing their time and creativity to imagine, create, and publish their work. Night owls and early birds alike are represented through a plethora of episodes that provide listeners with tips for managing a life of writing. 

The Book Case 

Being a writer means being a reader, but if you feel “stuck in a reading rut” try listening to a few episodes of The Book Case. This is a podcast focused on broadening horizons—listeners are guided on a journey through the literary world to become acquainted with titles they may not have considered otherwise. After listening to an episode from last October, I read Into the Water by Paula Hawkins and uncovered an interest in thrillers and mysteries. With new episodes posted every Thursday, this podcast makes a perfect addition to weekly listening line-ups.

Writer Unleashed 

Geared toward fiction writers and memoirists, Writer Unleashed is a podcast that helps listeners learn to create engrossing stories with “unstoppable momentum.” Episodes are fairly short—they range from fifteen to thirty minutes—and allow writers to feel motivated to get started on, or move forward in, a project. I found the encouragement to develop a strong writerly vision in “What To Do When Feedback Shakes Your Confidence” particularly useful. 

Borrowed 

From Brooklyn Public Library, Borrowed is an award-winning podcast that focuses on the importance and vitality of libraries within our culture and society. As a podcast rooted in a free, communal environment, every episode seeks to “center the voices of our patrons and our librarians and find stories that challenge your idea of the public library.” Fascinating discussions about topics like race in librarianship, Luddite teenagers, and the labor of maintaining a common space abound. Listeners should tune into other series from BPL—Borrowed and Banned and Borrowed & Returned—for more stories about the politics of reading, writing, and literary spaces.

A Queer Story is Never Going to Represent Every Queer Experience

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As a queer author, I’ve used speculative writing since childhood to explore, explain, and examine my experiences. The stories I’ve written through the years almost always contain magical or fantastical elements relating to my feeling of being different from those around me. I never did this consciously, and when I noticed the pattern I wondered if there was some link between queerness and speculative writing. Does speculative writing provide a unique platform for expressing the queer experience? Carmen Maria Machado, having written the speculative into queer works of fiction and nonfiction, seemed like the obvious person to answer this question.

Machado’s writing demonstrates how the speculative can function as both mirror and magnifier for the queer experience. Across her body of work, the uncanny, the strange, and the mystical become ways to articulate life outside normative frameworks, while the elasticity and hybridity of genre make space for queer desire, fear, and embodiment in all their complexity. Her writing suggests that the speculative is a way of refracting reality, illuminating how queerness shapes our understanding of the human experience while rejecting heteronormativity even within genre itself.

I spoke with Carmen over Zoom about the ways speculative writing can serve as language and metaphor for queer life. Our conversation touched on the diagonal experience we share as queer authors, the “Bury Your Gays” trope, her methods for crafting speculative stories, and the queer media that shaped her growing up.

Jayda Skidmore: I see speculative writing as creating a framework for the queer experience within language and metaphor. Can you define what writing the speculative means to you?

Carmen Maria Machado: I feel like genre labels are ultimately arbitrary. It’s not like they’re not interesting; they are interesting, for all kinds of reasons. But to me, the speculative occupies a large number of labels and sub-labels that people give to non-realism and can mean all kinds of things.

People who are queer and who belong to any number of groups outside the mainstream are operating from a place of diagonal experience.

By the time I was coming of age as a writer, that was the word I felt the most comfortable using to describe what I was writing. I would say it’s very loosely non-realist work that also engages with the real world in some capacity. So, I would not call Game of Thrones speculative fiction; I would think of that as epic fantasy. I think of speculative fiction as being in the same general areas as liminal fantasy and magical realism. It has a genre element, a non-realist element, but it’s rooted in our world. That’s probably it, in my opinion, but these are all very nebulous terms. The meanings shift.

JS: Thinking about your own writing, how do you feel the speculative elements relate to queerness and queer trauma?

CMM: I think that people who are queer—and people who belong to any number of groups that exist outside of the mainstream—are operating from a place of diagonal experience. It’s diagonal from other people who don’t share that identity. I think speculative fiction is a way of accessing that weird diagonal experience.

Certainly, I think queerness and the disinterest in realism are related. A lot of it has to do with wondering: How do you tell stories? I don’t think it’s about trauma, either—trauma is part of it, but it has to do with queer joy, and the queer experience as neutrally defined. Basically, that you can see things other people can’t see.

I’m reminded of this time when I was growing up. My mother loved the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, and it was a huge part of my childhood because my mother would watch it whenever she ironed. I remember seeing it as an adult after coming out and being like, “These are lesbians!” But I went my whole life without realizing it. I remember saying to my mother, “Do you realize that these characters are lesbians?” and she was like, “No, they’re not.” And I was like, “Mom, they are.” And we got into a huge fight, and she accused me of reading into it. I was like, it’s not that I’m reading into it. It’s just that I can see what you can’t see. It’s so obvious to me, and of course, it’s not obvious to her as a straight lady, right? That’s what I’m talking about—you have this way of seeing things that other people can’t necessarily access.

But again, I think that’s true of not just queerness. It’s also true of other identities. One way you can write and talk about that is by thinking about how you look at the world the same way every day, and then one day you look at it and it’s slightly different, something has changed. 

JS: You mentioned that it’s not just about queer trauma, which I agree with, but the way I come at my queerness in my writing is through a lens of fear. I’ve encountered other queer people who feel their use of the speculative isn’t about fear, but rather about the lack of language for their experiences in a heteronormative society. How has speculative writing lent itself to expressing your queer experience?

CMM: I think it’s all of it. It’s about trying to put a container or language to the ineffable. That includes things like desire and also things like trauma and fear and sadness and grief.

When I was writing my memoir, I was trying to capture a super specific experience of pain that is related to queerness, but not in ways you would expect. Not just, “I’m gay and it went badly.” There’s the dynamic of what it means to be hurt by another queer person, which is a really specific flavor of betrayal. It has to do with learning how to explain and talk about it. It has to do with how to think about it. 

I feel like I’m a queer person and the way that I’m approaching writing about bodies and desire and being alive just doesn’t feel fully rooted in this plane. That’s part of what makes it hard to articulate. I write about desire as uncomplicated, in terms of its sexuality. No one’s really angsting over being gay. Not that that’s not important to have represented. It’s just not what I’m interested in. Queer sex or being bisexual are things I’m interested in articulating and expressing on the page, but in the sense that they’re not commented upon. It just simply is.

JS: That’s something that I really enjoy about your writing. I love the way queerness is just inherent. It’s not the only or entire purpose behind these characters. It’s just them. They just are. 

CMM: In a lot of my writing—even when I was keeping a LiveJournal for 10 years of my life, from fifteen to twenty-five—I was writing, probably way too publicly, about sex and stuff I was interested in. People liked it and responded to it, when really, I was writing about the thing that was burning inside of me.

This might be so niche, but when I was writing on LiveJournal about being bisexual in college, for example, I actually had a huge blowout conflict with an aunt of mine who somehow, through her daughter I guess, found my LiveJournal. This would’ve been around 2005. My aunt basically was like, “You can’t tell people you’re gay. You can’t. It’s okay to be gay, but you can’t just tell people that. Don’t you want to have a job? Do you want to live your life?” All I could think was, “Whoa, what an insane way of approaching the world.” I was like, “I’d actually rather be out and happy and not afraid to talk about who I am.” So, I feel like I’ve always been incentivized towards writing what I want to write about, in the way I want to write about it, and doing so in this very unapologetic way. I hate the phrase unapologetic, but truly doing it in an unapologetic way. When one commits like that, I think readers feel it.

JS: I’ve read discussions you’ve had about feeling drawn to the space between reality and the fantastic, that it’s close to how you see the world but elevated. How do speculative elements color your perception of the world? How do they manifest in your lived experience?

CMM: I am the kind of person who has always engaged in a lot of mental play—I’ve been doing this since I was a child. All children engage in play, and if you’re very lucky, that capacity continues into adulthood. That was a huge part of my identity as a child. I’d read a scary book, for example, and then be up all night because I felt it so strongly—I was always really responsive to my environment in this way.

I’m just a human being trying to write about my experience. No individual person can stand in for their entire community.

I’m prone to a lot of weird thoughts and funny thoughts and what-ifs. I have this way of being able to take an image or an idea and just run with it. In Her Body and Other Parties, I have a story called “Eight Bites,” which came to me through two channels. I had been asked to write a Little Mermaid pastiche, which was ultimately rejected, so, I was like, okay, I’ll just put it in my book. Then I also was reading this memoir, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head by Jen Larsen. It’s about gastric bypass surgery. In the memoir, Larsen has some detail where she says something like, “I had lost X-number of pounds. It was like I had lost a whole person.” Then I thought, oh, what an interesting concept. Most people read that and think, “Right, the weight that she’s describing she lost is the equivalent weight of another person.” But my brain was imagining a person coming out of her. And I was like, “Wait, so it’s like there’s two of her? The part of her body that she lost is its own separate entity?” My brain just immediately goes there. I don’t even stop in that middle place. I understand what the image is trying to say, but I’m already eight steps ahead. I do that a lot, where I’ll just see a thing or have a weird idle thought, and then the story just manifests. Not even manifests, but kind of spirals out.

JS: In Dream House as Prologue, you quote Saidiya Hartman who says, “How does one tell impossible stories? … Advancing a series of speculative arguments.” Do you think queer stories are impossible stories to convey?

CMM: I don’t think any story is impossible to convey, and yet I also think that conveying a story is ultimately always an exercise in approximation. That is just the reality of experience, right? You have an experience, it’s this singular thing, and even in the moment where you try to translate it into words—whether you’re speaking them or writing them—you’re already pulling away from the experience.

Again, you have to write what burns inside of you, the thing that speaks to you, the thing that you must say, or else you will die, to paraphrase Audre Lorde. But this idea of, what must you say? When you are trying to say an approximation of something in proximity to another person who shares that experience, they will understand the thing you’re saying. For example, you’re like, “I’m a queer person who had a queer experience. I’m trying to articulate that experience in some capacity.” Another queer person is going to see that and understand it.

Part of the joy of reading and writing is that moment where you read something and there’s this jolt of recognition. You’re like, “I didn’t know anyone else had that thought before. I didn’t know anyone had that experience before, and here’s someone who understands, who has experienced the same thing I thought I was alone in experiencing.”

JS: In the chapter “Dream House as Omen,” from In the Dream House, you end with the words, “Fear makes liars of us all.” I pondered that quote a lot in relation to my thoughts about queerness and fear, and using the speculative as language for the anxiety I feel regarding my queerness. It got me thinking about the relationship between lies and fiction—what do you think about that relationship? Does it impact queer narratives?

CMM: I would not say there’s any relationship between lying and fiction, even though I know that’s a quirky little thing people like to say: “I’m a professional writer. I lie for money,” or whatever. That isn’t actually what writing fiction is. Writing fiction is an attempt—ideally—at approaching some kind of truth.

In the case of my memoir, the lie I’m speaking about is that I promised my ex I wouldn’t write about the things that were happening—and I did, both in fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is another way of approaching the truth. It just has different tools that are available and a different way of impacting people. People read fiction differently, there are different parameters around it, but it is another way of trying to tell a true story. 

I think that right now, fiction is in crisis. Not the genre—not as though the novel is dying—but the idea that how we think about fiction, the approach to writing fiction, is in crisis. All these conversations about who’s allowed to write what, and what it means to write from your own life, or write from someone else’s life, or write about a story you heard once and use that in fiction, puts us in a weird moment. I don’t think people understand what fiction is and how it’s written. It’s created a lot of confusion around the rules, if any exist, around fiction writing.

JS: I completely agree. Going into that a bit more, In the Dream House shows trauma a queer person can experience, and there’s a conversation within the LGBTQ+ community about the overrepresentation of queer trauma versus happiness—it’s the Bury Your Gays trope. How do you balance the need for positive representation with the realities of queer trauma?

CMM: Conversations about representation are so profoundly broken that I actually find it alarming. This is kind of what I’m talking about with fiction being in crisis. It is not your job—“you” being the general “you”—to represent anything in any particular way, right? Your job is to write art, which is not to say that you can’t do a bad job at something. On one hand, certainly I do not want all queer literature to be defined by trauma. That would be insane. But also, it is not inherently bad if someone is writing about queer trauma or, for example, decides to kill a gay person in their text.

This is going to make me sound 10,000 years old, but I think we’re overcorrecting in this very “social media” way, where people understand the Bury Your Gays trope and why it’s problematic, and then for some reason the mental course corrective is, “If you kill a gay character off, then you are being homophobic by engaging in this trope,” which is an insane thing to say. It’s not true.

Articulating that a trope exists and how it exists is just a way of saying we should notice when certain types of stories are cropping up in a place. What does that mean and why is that? That’s why I wrote the chapter about queer villainy in the memoir [“Dream House as Queer Villainy”]. I was thinking about the question, what does it mean when I’m essentially writing a book saying, “This really fucked up thing happened to me in this lesbian relationship.” Technically, that is engaging in bad media representation of my community. But I am not the representative of all gay people. I’m just a human being trying to write about my experience. The desire to turn individual people into totems or representatives of their entire community is such folly. Even when it’s positive, it never goes well. No individual person can stand in for their entire community. When you make them do that, that in itself is homophobic, racist, etcetera.

Can a Pen Pal Save Your Life?

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“The Promise of Hotels” by Bill Cotter

Helen Chaissen was on United 228 to Newark when she learned of the death of her old pen pal, the writer Gabriel Ulloa.

She had boarded in Dallas thinking she had an aisle seat, and was not happy when she realized she had somehow been assigned a middle seat instead. Wedged between a man wearing an Ohio State football jersey engrossed in a newspaper, and a young woman holding a large but placid infant, Helen found that her only chance at spatial liberty was to put down her tray table, prop up her elbows, and rest her head in her hands. Forty-five minutes into the flight she found a certain balance, and thought she could, maybe, endure the remaining two hours and four minutes in only minor discomfort. She hoped she wouldn’t snore if she fell asleep.

When they reached cruising altitude and the cabin began to grow cold, the Buckeye folded up his New York Times and handed it to Helen. She took it without a word. She read Krugman, an article on prison escape, and some book review by an author she’d never heard of. She completed the unfinished crossword in her head. She scanned the unknowable tables of stock prices, and even read about all the Yankees on injured reserve.

The paper was just about spent. Helen flipped past the obits, but a name caught her attention, and she turned back.

Gabriel Ulloa, Memoirist and Essayist on Depression, Dies at 44.

Her breath caught, and she read on.

Mr. Ulloa, a writer whose subject matter was mental illness and the havoc it wrought in his life and in the lives of friends he had made in the numerous psychiatric hospitals he had been committed to since the age of 14, has died of an apparent suicide at his home in Manhattan. He was 44.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Ursula Majaniev.

Mr. Ulloa, who initially wrote about his struggle with major depressive disorder in his memoir, The Bearing Wall, in 2006, subsequently published essays in leading magazines and journals.

Mr. Ulloa wrote that his depression was the direct result of years of systematic abuse at the hands of his older brother, which only ended when the brother died in an accidental drowning when Mr. Ulloa was 13. He was first hospitalized at 14 at Hartford’s Institute for Living. At 16 he was hospitalized at McLean, in Belmont, Massachusetts, for 17 months, where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy, one of the only treatments he claims actually helped his depression, though the cost, in terms of severe memory loss and cognitive impairment, was high. In his mid-twenties Mr. Ulloa married the writer Ava Bass, and enjoyed a period of relative psychological calm. Ms. Bass’s suicide in 2008 plunged Mr. Ulloa into a renewed depression from which he never recovered.

According to Ms. Majaniev, Mr. Ulloa had attempted suicide three months earlier and was hospitalized for six weeks. She stated that he seemed in good spirits in the days before his death.

The obituary went on—details about Gabriel’s writing life, surviving family members, and where to send donations.

Helen sat back in her seat. She closed her eyes.

Nine years ago, in 2007, Helen had sent Gabriel an intelligent, funny fan letter about The Bearing Wall, confessing she’d also been at McLean, though for manic depression, and noting that they’d had the same doctor, a proto-Freudian coconut named Jonah Gaspard, whose office was papered in Dubuffet posters and who seemed interested only in one’s sexual dreams and masturbation practices. Gabriel wrote back, and the two maintained a snail-mail correspondence, largely free of innuendo and flirtation; in fact Helen shared her letters with her boyfriend at the time, Roger, and Gabriel had shared Helen’s letters with his wife, Ava.

As Ava’s depression started to get out of hand, Gabriel began to confide more and more in Helen, always by mail. Helen started keeping these letters secret from her boyfriend. Gabriel wrote to Helen that Ava couldn’t seem to get off the couch in their living room, that she wasn’t eating.

Ava won’t talk, Helen, except to read me articles on the internet about artists or writers who committed suicide, Gabriel wrote, in scrawly green ballpoint on a long sheet of lined yellow legal paper.  She describes their circumstances and their methods in terms of appraisal, as though kicking tires. I can’t trust her to take her medication, and she won’t talk to her therapist, sitting in clenched, enraged silence for 50 minutes twice a week. She’s losing weight. She won’t wash or brush her teeth for days or weeks at a time. She can’t even take joy in the affections of Thiago, you know our peculiar little tuxedo cat I sent you pictures of? What a terror   

Here Gabriel’s green ballpoint dies out, and a thick, inky blue felt-tip takes over. 

and he so enlivens the place. But she doesn’t see him. The only times Ava exerts herself is to cry, which she does several times a day—hard, choking displays of pure wet need: she looks at me as though starved; famished for a sustenance she cannot name. Then she’ll fall asleep for hours, even half a day, sometimes more, finally waking disoriented in a humid knot of blankets on the couch in the living room. She eats Gummi Bears and drinks lemon-lime Gatorade. I guess it’s good she consumes anything at all.

I’m sorry about this, Helen. I’m sorry about this report.

Gabriel signed his letter, as he always did:

Yrs &c.,

G. U.

When Gabriel found himself in Dallas on New Year’s Day, 2008, he called Helen from his hotel room. He wanted to know if she wouldn’t mind meeting in the lobby so they could talk. It was 10:30 at night. Helen told Roger she was going out to karaoke with her friends.

Had she not told that lie, things might have been different.

“Helen,” said Gabriel, rising from a fake Eames chair in the thrum of the crowded lobby, a beer in one hand. “Is that you? It looks like you. At least it’s how I imagined you. Damn. I’m happy to make your in-the-flesh acquaintance, at long last.”

Helen ignored his outstretched hand and gave him a long hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I need a drink,” she said, looking around for a waitress. Gabriel looked around too.

Helen took the opportunity to study Gabriel. She’d seen his photos online of course. Dark eyes, broad nose, full, almost feminine lips, black hair cut short and parted on the left. He was taller than she had anticipated, more muscular; she had expected a degree of withering, a cant of decay in a man who’d been through what he had. He had suffered at the hands of his brother. Gabriel may have murdered him. No one drowns in the bathtub without a lot of help.

“How is Ava?”

“Oh Christ,” said Gabriel, sitting back down in the leather chair, exhaling with finality. “Bad. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t have left her alone. I never do. Usually, anyway. Ah! Bloody hell. She refuses to use the phone, text, even email. I do what I can to make sure she’s not trying to kill herself. A friend, in the apartment building across the street, we’re both on the fifth floor? He watches her with binoculars, like freaking Rear Window, and texts me with reports on her movements.”

I do what I can to make sure she’s not trying to kill herself.

He reflexively checked his phone, then put it away, all in four seconds. 

“God, Gabriel.”

Helen leaned forward in her chair, conscious of her bare knees, the old scar on the left one, a skateboarding injury, a gouge shaped like the sardonic Amazon smile.

“There is nothing, I swear nothing, in that apartment she can hurt herself with, and she never goes out. When I left I took a souvenir pocketknife I got at Epcot when I was a kid, a big bottle of generic Advil, and a jumbo box of trash bags. I left everything on the floor of a cab on the way to JFK.”

“So give yourself a break,” she said, falling into the same rhythm of familiarity she used in her letters. “What’re you in Dallas for, anyway?”

“Conference. ‘Mental Illness and the Arts.’ Giving a talk, Dallas Museum of Art, part of a series.”

The waitress brought beers. “What’s it about?”

“Writing and depression,” said Gabriel. “How it’s difficult to write when one is depressed, and almost impossible to describe depression with the clumsy blocks of language available in the English tongue, blah blah. I’m using a number of historical examples—the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, William Styron, you know, the noonday-demon pantheon of white Anglo-Saxon et cetera. Plus myself, aargh, such a solipsist. Whatever. But Ava, too. Ava is a particularly acute example, because she is the only one of those, besides me, who is still alive, and the only one who is currently depressed and unable to write.”

Gabriel stared at Helen. He looked as though he were waiting to be stabbed. “Does she know you’re going to talk about her?”

“She’s insensate. I don’t even think she knows I’m not home. She might not know I exist at all, or that I ever did.”

Helen thought about Roger, home alone, thinking up caustic, witty, and original observations on the infelicities of Man, God, sex, and the Dallas Cowboys, reducing them to 140 characters, and posting them in hopes of 1) awing and 2) adding to his precious 12,157 followers; this endeavor Helen knew he would occasionally place in abeyance to surf pornography—he confessed as much to her, though he would not tell her the nature of what he viewed, the frequency he “used” (his term) porn, the expenditure of passion, the magnitude of lust, the degree of satiation, anything. They had been together three and a half years, and the fun had gone out of sex after about two months. Their now infrequent couplings were characterized by haste and almost vicious kissing, always in the dark, always in the early morning, just as their alarms were going off. All Helen could think about when Roger’s iPhone’s seagull-themed alarm sounded was the bath she was going to take when it was all over. She thought briefly about why she was with him at all. He was easy, and it could be so much worse.

“Shouldn’t Ava be in a hospital?”

“Money. Insurance. No one has any. You know? And I don’t want her in Bellevue or some county place. I think that would truly fuck her up.”

“ECT?”

“Same story, money. I’m paying for her shrink and her meds, at cost, and it’s all I can do. I’ve borrowed money from my sister, thank God for Stella. But she only has so much, and she’s got her own shit. At least the shrink does house calls, for what it’s worth. Only in New York.”

The crowd in the lobby had begun to thin, and Helen had a sense of how cavernous it was. A kind of agoraphobic panic started to climb her esophagus, accompanied by the crushing certainty that this—whatever this happened to be—was in the process of ending, and that she would never see Gabriel again.

“Look,” she said, the gambit forming in her head. “Gabriel. I know we don’t know each other all that well, but I have a good job. What if I. . .”

Courage always tasted like aluminum, a light metallic tingle way back at the base of Helen’s tongue.

“. . .what if there was money?” she said, the words spilling out fast. “Say I gave you money for a course of electroconvulsive therapy for Ava. Not a loan. I have the cash.” 

She did have it, from her aunt Carolyn, who died alone in a Beaumont nursing home, her will penciled on a wall, leaving everything to Helen—her tiger figurines, two steaks in the freezer, and the suitcase under her bed filled with five-dollar bills. It was not as much money as it looked like. 

“Why don’t you let me, Gabriel. It works, as you know.”

The waitress brought their third round of beers and informed them that the lobby bar would be closing in ten minutes.

“Jesus, Helen. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to say. Should we go somewhere?”

“This is Dallas, not New York. The whole city’s closing for the night. So,” she continued, “maybe we should go to your room?”

In the moment before he responded, anything was possible. When Helen was seven she jumped off a ledge into a quarry full of pellucid blue water. Before she hit, when she was alone in the air, her heart felt like a ball of frost in her chest—that feeling returned to her now, in the lobby of the hotel.

They found an elevator. Helen was on a lot of medication, and two beers plus a few sips of a third had made her wobbly. The spasm of agoraphobic panic and resulting flex of courage had rendered her hyper-aware—she could feel her pupils dilated to a comical breadth. She squinted in the low light. She was glad to be alone in the elevator with Gabriel, the warmth and closeness of walnut and brass and the columns of amber buttons; the pale pressure of subtle acceleration.

“Are you okay?” said Gabriel, gently reaching out to hold her by the elbow.

Helen nodded, and leaned into him more than she needed to. Gabriel opened the door to Room 1236. A bottle of champagne sat in a metal bucket of melting ice.

“I forgot about that,” he said. “Somebody sent it up.”

Helen wondered whether this was true. She studied him as he stared down at the sweating bottle, but he betrayed nothing.

Gabriel sat on one bed, she on its twin. They faced each other, their knees a few inches apart. Her old scar throbbed. They placed their beers on the side table separating the beds.

“Your offer. . .I can’t accept.”

“Of course you can,” said Helen, as certain as she had ever been about anything. “Someone’s life is at stake here, Gabriel. You must put your personal values, your ideas about debt and loans and obligation and pride, put them all aside, accept the money, and get her help. Look, I won’t miss it, it won’t matter to me.”

“I still—”

“What do you think it will cost, a course of six treatments, about $15,000?” 

“Helen—”

Helen opened her purse. She got out her checkbook. With the same hesitant care that she had always used to pen her letters to Gabriel—drawing the letterforms so they would be clear and never misunderstood—Helen wrote out a check for $15,000, dated it, then signed it, the leaning, childish cursive of her full name filling the whole of the signature line. She sat down next to Gabriel, tore the check from the book, and placed it in his hands.

“If you’re absolutely sure.” 

She nodded, no longer sure.

“To be paid back,” he said. “With interest.”

She closed her eyes. Zeroes floated in the darkness behind her lids. Too many. She felt lightheaded. She opened her eyes. Negative images of the zeroes remained for a moment, then vanished. 

“The beer’s gone,” she said.

“Well then,” said Gabriel, ”let’s open the champagne.”

Helen was seeing double now. She felt goofy, wonderful, terrified. She smiled at Gabriel. He smiled back. She saw herself in him. She didn’t really have an extra fifteen thousand dollars.

Gabriel handed Helen a plastic champagne flute. The pale liquid rose fast, bubbling over the rims, down the sides and over her hand. She laughed, and Gabriel’s smile widened.

“Do you like football?”

Her heart sank a bit at the question. Helen hated the game. Roger lived for it. 

“Honestly, no.”

“I mean futbol. Soccer.”

Soccer made her think of collapsing stadiums and death by trampling. Hooligans and vomit and missing teeth.

“Well, I don’t really know.”

“Right now, Liverpool is playing Chelsea.”

Gabriel turned on the TV. He made a dramatic show of puffing up pillows for himself and Helen, and propped them up against the headboard on the bed he was sitting on. Then Gabriel leaned back on one side and messed distractedly with the remote. Helen lay gently next to him, as the TV before them glowed green with the grass of the pitch.

Helen’s body began to ache in a way that made her think of solar flares. Neither of them moved. It lasted for ninety minutes.

When the game was over, Gabriel clicked the TV off and they lay in silence, drinking the last of the warm champagne, Helen’s head almost on his shoulder, close enough that she imagined she could hear the sound of blood rushing through his veins.

“You probably shouldn’t drive,” he whispered, as though there was someone else in the room who he was afraid of waking. “Should you call Roger?”

“I lied to him. I told him I was out with my friends Patricia and Janelle, singing karaoke.”

“I see. What happens if you perseverate the lie?” 

Helen called Roger, waking him.

“I got drunk, baby. I’m going to sleep on Patricia’s couch.”

“Did you drive?” said Roger, his voice burred with suspicion.

“No. Yeah, I’ll get the car in the morning.”

“Do not get arrested. That’s all I need, for my girlfriend to get a dewey.” 

“I’m not driving, shit!”

“Good.”

“Good night.” Quietly, she added, “I love you.” 

“Yeah, love you.”

Helen put her phone in her purse and her purse on the floor. She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her bra without removing her blouse. She stood, started to unzip her skirt, stopped. In the dark of the hotel room Gabriel Ulloa lay on the bed, his legs crossed. He did not move. She could not tell if he was looking at her. The only light in the room came from a bright red LED clock on the side table: 2:41.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m angry with you for tempting me away from my damaged wife. In fact I hate you for it. But you’re just drunk, I understand that. Me too. And this is all my fault, really. I see that. Soccer. Jesus fucking Christ.”

Helen sat on the floor. Gabriel turned on a light and went into the bathroom. Helen climbed under the covers of the other bed, fully clothed. This was the end of it. It was over and all was lost, but at least there was no pain.

She listened to the shower run, then turned the light out.

In the morning he was gone. A knock at the door.

“Housekeeping,” said a voice.

At least he cashed her check.

Helen learned of Ava’s death five months later from, of all people, Roger. Ava had published her suicide note to Facebook, and in it, had said she would miss sex when she was gone, and hoped the afterlife was an erotic one. The note went viral, and eventually Roger happened upon it.

Ava had published her suicide note to Facebook, and in it, had said she would miss sex when she was gone, and hoped the afterlife was an erotic one.

“Weren’t you friends with this chick’s husband?” said Roger, turning his laptop around and pushing it across the kitchen counter early one morning before work.

“Oh God.”

Helen went in the bedroom and dialed Gabriel. 

“You calling about your money?”

“Jesus, Gabriel, no, I’m calling about Ava.”

“You want to know how she did it? That seems to be all anyone’s interested in.” 

“I just want to know if there’s anything you need, anything I can do?”

“I don’t need anything.” 

“Gabriel, I—

“I finally confessed to Ava about what happened in Dallas, between you and me.” 

“Nothing happened,” said Helen, fierce; quiet. “Fuck, Gabriel.”

“Ava was dead two days later. She used a roll of packing tape to seal off her nose and mouth, suffocated. While I was out getting Indian. Saag paneer. I thought she was doing better, going to eat a proper meal instead of pure sugar. I got home and her head was mummified. She was still alive, she fought me weakly for a while. I accidentally cut her face trying to remove the tape with scissors and a knife. When I finally got it off she was gone.”

“I—I don’t know what—”

“It’s best if you don’t call again.”

In 2012 Helen received a cashier’s check from Gabriel for $17,500. There was no note attached. She sent him a long letter, which was returned unopened. Daveed, Helen’s boyfriend at the time, intercepted the letter.

“Who’s Gabriel Ulloa?” 

“Long story.”

“I’m sure curious.”

Daveed sat on the end of the couch, ready to go pick up the takeout he’d ordered from the shawarma place on the corner. In one hand he held an umbrella he’d pinched from a hotel in Memphis long ago. Rain strafed at the windows of their apartment. They listened to the hushy roar of it. Then Helen sat down next to Daveed, and told him everything.

“Why don’t you go up and see him?” 

“He hates me, clearly.”

“Maybe not. And besides, anger is not the same as hatred.” 

“I’ve googled him, he has a girlfriend.”

“Meaning. . .” said Daveed, tapping the metal tip of the umbrella on the old wooden

floorboards.

“Meaning. . . I doubt I’d be welcome.”

The rain stopped. Sudden, as though the sky had finally emptied. 

“Maybe the girlfriend sent the letter back.” Helen considered this. “At least call him.”

“Gabriel?”

“Helen?”

“Wanted to thank you for the check. You didn’t have to do that. But it came at a good time.”

“Good to hear your voice.”

Helen thought about Daveed, his jealousy glimmering in the low light of their apartment. Helen thought about Ava, and the force it must require to peel adhesive tape off of human skin.

“I sent you a letter.” 

“You did?” 

“It was returned.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel. “My partner. Ursula. I bet she saw a woman’s name handwritten on the return address and sent it back. She’s a bit like that.”

“Is she good to you?”

“Listen, I haven’t been well. Three hospitalizations, lots of meds, nothing working, even ECT not having much effect. They’ve dialed it down from the old days. You know? I sleep nineteen hours a day, the other five hours I weep and plot ways to kill myself so that it won’t upset my parents and sister and whoever finds me. It’s exhausting. I manage to do a little writing, but my themes are ordinary, arguments thin, sentences anemic, all just meatless skeletons, and everyone is rightly refusing to publish the crap. But to answer your question, yeah, Ursula’s good to me. She makes sure I eat and take my pills and she drives me to appointments. She reads to me, my only pleasure, short stories, Nadine Gordimer, W. G. Sebald, Steven Millhauser. Screech’s Montaigne. Ursula’s a fine editor as well, and I trust her with my work. She’s overprotective, though. She’s out at the moment, or she would not have let me answer the phone. So we’re lucky we’re getting to talk, Helen. Tell me about you.”

Gabriel took a deep breath after his monologue, uttered in seconds. 

“Nothing to tell. Stable. Dating a good guy for a change.” 

“Not a Roger.” 

“Not.”

“Ursula’s home, I should go.”

That was the last communication Helen ever had with Gabriel Ulloa. Two more letters sent were both returned, presumably the work of Ursula Majaniev.

Helen waited at the carousel until her old black suitcase tumbled down the belt and wedged itself between a Louis Vuitton trunk and huge military duffel bag. Helen, stumbling along with the carousel, could not dislodge her old American Tourister. The man in the Ohio State football jersey, who’d given her his New York Times, grabbed it for her, and gently placed it on the pocked linoleum. Without thanking him, Helen fled baggage claim, found a taxicab, and within an hour was checked into her hotel on 53rd.

Helen drank water out of the sink, ate both the granola bars she’d brought along, and watched the ash gray of the city through a small, south-facing window. She showered. The scent of the hotel shampoo made her cry, hard, and later she fell asleep on a threadbare loveseat trying to remember what it was about the essence of pomegranate that brought her to such wailing despair.

She woke, dressed. Down on the street the drizzle was turning to rain. She bought an umbrella in a bodega and headed toward Gramercy. Helen always associated the borough of Manhattan with death: she’d tried to commit suicide here once, and had known three people other than Gabriel who’d succeeded. She’d known two people who were murdered, half a dozen who’d died by other means. It always made her think of Jim Carroll, his song “The People Who Died.” She had written to him once, but he did not write back.

The gray, the damp, the stink of the walk pressed the spirit of death against her cheek like the flat of a sword.

Helen pushed the intercom button next to #504 Ulloa/Majaniev, where he’d always lived.

“Yes?”

“Hi, I’m Helen Chaissen? I was a friend of Gabriel’s? May I speak with you for a moment?”

No response. After a moment Helen buzzed again. Nothing. She was about to leave when a young woman dressed in a long black coat emerged from the building.

“Shall we get a coffee and talk?”

In silence Ursula led them a block east to a diner called Colonel’s. They sat across from each other in a tall, private booth. A waiter brought mugs of coffee, even though they hadn’t ordered them. Helen added cream and sugar to hers, felt Ursula staring at her. Finally she looked up.

“Helen, you said?” 

“Yeah.”

“And you’re here. . .”

“I’m in town for work for a couple days. Listen, I was not a close friend, just a fan. We corresponded. I just happened to read about Gabriel in the paper on the plane up, not three hours ago. I’m sorry to blindside you. You’re probably overwhelmed. Overwrought. Over-everything.”

“It’s all right. I’m not, actually. I’m glad to see you.”

Ursula Majaniev smiled. In the umber light of Colonel’s, a gold tooth, way back in the buccal recesses, glimmered like a dying star.

“Suicide is a kind of repellant, and keeps people away,” Ursula said. “Very few people have approached me, and it makes me angry. It’s one of the only times in my life I’ve felt truly enraged, like I could put my fist through sheet metal, or kill someone with a screwdriver.”

Ursula smiled again. Gold.

“I have to ask you something, Ursula. I wrote to Gabriel a few times, and you returned my letters. Why?”

Ursula stopped smiling. She lifted her coffee to her lips, drank, put the mug down, without ever taking her eyes off the woman seated across from her.

“I would never have returned letters, never did. On the contrary, it was my duty to open and read letters to Gabriel, fan letters, notes from friends, doctors, editors, lawyers, lovers, if he wanted me to. If any were returned, he did it himself. Can I ask, are you the hotel girl, from Dallas?”

Helen blushed.

“That’s me. The hotel girl.” 

Ursula smiled again, coruscating.

“He wrote about you, about that night, about his ultimate confession to Ava of what he’d fantasized about you in that hotel room. He wrote about Ava’s death by suffocation. Esquire was going to publish the piece, but he killed it. I think he was worried you would recognize yourself as the girl, even though he didn’t use your name. He called the moment ‘by far the most potently erotic moment of my life, and as well the arc between a childhood of unwanted mouths and an adulthood of enfeebling depression.'”

“Jesus Christ, nothing happened!”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “I know. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is dead, but for you and me.”

Helen stared into her coffee. It was strong, thick stuff, the sort that cream had little effect on, and she wanted to shrink down, climb over the hot ceramic lip and disappear into the sweet swirling mud of it, suck it into her tiny lungs, a few seconds of blind, pressing panic, then death, and utter freedom from this moment, from Ursula’s words, Gabriel’s words, the lo-fi spooling-off of a devastating confession of nothing, made all the more sonic and piercing by Ursula having known the text of it by heart and delivering it not like a poem or a speech, but like a stillbirth: with calm, patience, and the confidence that comes in knowing that the failure was not hers.

Ed Park Isn’t Sure He Answered The Question

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

One of the great things about running a digital publication is the freedom to try something new, just because. Yes, I am always inspired by books. But lately I’ve been feeling equally invested in the author as person—perhaps because as of this year, I am one. I wanted to try a different model of speaking with established authors, one in which we get to know them as a person, a thinker, and a creative practitioner, while having fun along the way. Introducing “23 Questions With Ed Park.”

—Denne Michele Norris
Editor-in-Chief

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Ed Park: Brought near tears by Rachel Aviv.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

EP: Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese. 

3. How do you start from scratch?

EP: I’m always on the lookout for curious turns of phrase, any lexical sequence that sparks something. I keep a list of aspirational titles, for which I hope someday to write a fitting story or novel. Same Bed Different Dreams is an example—an old Korean adage that I knew would make a good title. I’d periodically try to cook something up that would do it justice, but I didn’t start to crack the code till 2014.

I was on a plane the other day, sitting in coach, and as the flight attendant pushed the cart up the narrow aisle, he chanted, “Elbows and knees, elbows and knees.” That’s a good title or perhaps a bit of dialogue from which I can build. I’m not sure I answered the question. 

4. Three presses you’ll read anything from:

EP: New Directions, New York Review Comics, KAYA Press.

5. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?

EP: All.

6. If you were a novel what novel would you be?

EP: Pale Fire, or The Cave of Time (a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure)

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

EP: Up at dawn. Coffee in hand, I discover I really did jot a few evocative, enigmatic lines from the incredibly strange dream I just had (instead of dreaming that I scrawled them down). These conjure the basics of the story, and I just have to fill in the gaps with lambent lines that by some miracle come easily to me, for hours on end. I work through lunch, take a nap, write some more. Then I watch an episode of Fisk.

8. Typing or longhand?

EP: Typing on a typewriter.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

EP: Write what you know.

10. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

EP: Write what you know.

11. Realism or surrealism?

EP: Surrealism.

12. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

EP: Favorite: The Swimmer—a movie of extreme psychological horror, derived from a Cheever story that’s just a few potent pages long. (Runner-up: Inherent Vice.)

Least favorite: White Noise—I’m sure there are ones I’ve liked less, but this is one I tried most recently. Maybe it gets better. I liked the scene of Adam Driver (as Jack Gladney) taking German lessons. I admire Baumbach for swinging for the fences. But the tone is not the tone in my head.

13. What’s your favorite comfort snack?

EP: Peanut butter on crackers

14. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

EP: Immaculate first draft. Then take it apart, make it better, as the larger structure and ambition of the project become clearer to me.

15. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

EP: Break it down. Use short numbered sections.

16. Write every day or write when inspired?

EP: Every day, as close to a fixed schedule as possible. 

17. The writer who made you want to write:

EP: Vonnegut, Brautigan, Douglas Adams, Stephen King—in high school, I read virtually everything they wrote up through the mid-’80s. And in college, immersion in Nabokov and Faulkner and Ulysses sparked a different kind of literary ambition. After that: John Irving, Don DeLillo. Discovering George Saunders in the early ’90s (“The 400-Pound CEO”) and Kelly Link in the late ’90s (“The Girl Detective”) were also turning points. 

18. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

EP: Last sentence feels unimpeachable.

19. Writing with music or in silence?

EP: A little of both. If I have music on, it’s usually without words, often something Baroque—Scarlatti, Telemann.

20. Describe your writing space.

EP: A desk off of the kitchen in our New York apartment. To the right is a small CD player. There are binders of notes and drafts, plus books stacked on the surface that I brought there from the shelves in other rooms because I consider them research material for whatever projects I have going on. But a lot of these titles go unexamined. I have a few icons—a stone statuette from Jeju island and a matryushka that my friend Amanda gave me featuring Buffalo Sabres players from the late ’90s, such as Dominik Hasek and Miroslav Satan.

There’s a banker’s lamp, jars and mugs stuffed with pens and bookmarks and earplugs and things, a bulletin board, and a Webster’s with the cover mostly detached at the spine. 

21. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

EP: I memorized Yeats’s “The Second Coming” earlier this year, and I dial it up on the old mental database whenever I’m stuck in a long line, or in a waiting room with no end in sight. Its terrifying imagery and all-seeing tone struck me with unusual force during high school, but I like it even more now. 

22. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to?

EP: Skylight in L.A.

23. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

EP: Finding new forms of narrative energy—honing my style without repeating.

The Medication Kept My Mind in a Loop

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Halfway through my idea, an axe came flying to chop it apart. This happened every day, all day. I could not think!

The human mind wants to flow in long lines, spin up stories, hatch plans, and solve problems. If thoughts are trains, then mine were a wreck in a desert landscape, keeled over on its side. Wandering around the mess I was heartbroken, toes banging against a piece of bent metal here, remains of an armrest there. Hoping to get sharp again I kept pounding coffee and RedBull. But my mind just looped, like a line of broken code firing up and never executing. This was what the medication did: olanzapine is a substance similar to antihistamines, the drowsy allergy relief. The difference is that it never put me to sleep. It just got me part of the way there, when thoughts become vapors. On the outside, I gave the appearance of being calm and at peace. But inside I was browbeaten, stuck, grieving my once free thoughts.

“You look happy,” says a psychiatrist to a woman in Shulamith Firestone’s book Airless Spaces, a 1998 collection of portrait sketches of women at the New York hospital. The scene is a soup kitchen Christmas function. A mental patient shows up after a year of living alone. Her affect is flat. She’s heavily medicated.

“She made a wry face: ‘Not quite.’ He tried again: ‘Content, at least?’ She shook her head no. He finally settled on ‘Stabilized?’

‘Stabilized, yes,’ she granted.”

                                    From the story “Stabilized, yes.”

To stabilize means to cause something to become fixed and stop changing. It’s cruel to do this to a human mind. The mind wants to move around, shape-shift, spiral, explode. The word “stabilize” comes from carceral psychiatry and the context of punishment and enforcement. But over time, it has become part of everyday conversations about care,, support, kindness and wellbeing. It has entered the context of family, love, friendships and work relationships, where it is squarely misplaced. Once, a mentor I had in graduate school told me about a student who used to be troubled and overdramatic, “but now on medication, she’s really stabilized.”

I froze. I knew this was supposed to be a good news story and I was expected to applaud it.

“I was the one who took her to the psych ward.” My mentor’s voice held the satisfaction of the end of a fairy tale: “I got her help.”

“Did you go visit her?”

“No,” my mentor gazed quizzically into the middle distance. “I didn’t want to intrude, and she never contacted me afterwards. Not even to say thanks!”

It seems like a coin with three sides, on which the first-person experience does not match with its medical record, does not match with the appearance to an outside observer. The three threads–self, science, and society–are knotted in a web of mutual misunderstanding, deception and misprision. 

We’ve all heard the story about a “chemical imbalance in the brain” that medications are going to correct. But when considering the first-hand accounts of the people who’ve actually taken the medications, we may hear that chemical peace feels oppressive, stabilization can be like a chokehold, and the promise of balance is just a lie. Meanwhile, there’s adverse effects like drowsiness, lethargy, and impacts on heart, liver, and hormonal health. Finally, there is one more paradox: To say the meds don’t work, or that they’re bad, is to be mentally ill. The Diagnostic-Statistical Manual (DSM) of psychiatric disorders has that baked into the list of symptoms, so to have first-hand experience will lessen, not strengthen, your authority on the subject. I used to butt my head against this stone wall of barmy logic. What world is this?

When I heard about the memoir Unshrunk by Laura Delano, I was excited. With a subtitle like “A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance,” I hoped it would go into that dark and tense field of when the meds don’t work, the meds are bad, and the more you say it, the more they want you to take them. 

Unshrunk maps that under-examined experience through the auto-anthropology of Laura, a young woman from a super well-heeled background (New York debutante balls!) whose early brush with mood swings at thirteen lands her the first appointment with a therapist, that will turn out to be the first of hundreds more.

The three threads–self, science, and society–are knotted in a web of mutual misunderstanding, deception and misprision.

Delano, who is in her early forties today, writes in her preface that she spent the best part of her teens and twenties as “a professional psychiatric patient” (her words—I’ll refer to the author as Delano, and the protagonist of the memoir as Laura). No expense was spared to give Laura the best of everything, especially when it came to medical and mental health care. She got therapist after therapist, medication after medication. To no avail. 

Laura studies at Harvard, but has to miss a lot of school. She does not learn or grow like other college students. No dramatic broadening of horizons takes place, no academic romance with a new subject. There’s no “coming of age” like in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, nor even (not really) any of the sexy, messed-up stuff from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. Despite all that Harvard can offer young people, Laura fails to plan a career, let alone find her calling. After college she’s adrift and hops between therapy appointments, group sessions, treatment centers, and sundry social gatherings where she cannot talk about how she’s really doing, nor share the experiences that constitute her daily life. Increasing differences isolate Laura from the rest of her cohort, who are consumed with talk of internships, jobs, weddings, births, the property ladder; here, Laura’s life fades in comparison, and stays hidden behind a fence of shame and internalized ableism.

In recent years, the memoir market has seen many mental-health memoirs that resolve in redemption through therapy, or are built as tales of salvation-is-a-pill. By contrast, Delano’s Unshrunk takes a resolute stance against that trend. Unshrunk is one of the first, if not the first, traditionally published memoirs that explicitly writes back to the institutions of therapy, psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, and the pillars of what we think is a good family: so concerned with their daughter’s demeanor and appearances that they bankrolled an experience of over-medication, in what some might argue is a subtle form of gender-based violence.

It’s one of society’s many injustices that those who most urgently need mental health care–often unhoused, middle-aged, Black men–are denied access to the most basic services, while others—young white women from wealthy backgrounds—whose needs are less urgent, receive it in overabundance, to the point of it being counterproductive. Laura’s medications beget side effects, creating the need for more medications, begetting more side effects. Meanwhile, the insurance keeps paying, and everything snowballs. 

Blown up to the scale of a cultural practice in North America, this dynamic has led to the creation of the “rich, overmedicated daughter” cultural phenomenon: a growing population of young women with multiple health issues and diminished autonomy. These young women bear the brunt of the medications’ side effects, which can include thyroid, kidney, liver, skin, and cardiovascular illness, cognitive impairment, stunted emotional growth, as well as professional, educational, and social limitations.

She got therapist after therapist, medication after medication. To no avail.

Laura’s story is part of a bigger picture. Her memoir follows in the celebrity footsteps of recent books by Paris Hilton and Britney Spears: Paris (2023) tells the story of Hilton’s ordeal in an institution for troubled teens, a place she describes as being somewhere between a boarding school, a prison, and an old-fashioned reformatory. Her handlers were intent on breaking her spirit, so that she would be “fixed” once and for all, and stop embarrassing the conservative Hilton family. Meanwhile, in the highly publicized case of Britney Spears, the singer received psychiatric treatments at the behest of her father, who engaged the American court system to extend his legal authority over her into adulthood.

Spears’ memoir exposes the legislative and social structures that enabled her entrapment–the mental health conservatorship, the tabloid press and its hostile coverage of her quarter-life crisis, misogyny in the music industry–and how tricky it was to detangle herself from these intercogged and combined locks.

“My world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” Spears writes, and: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.” (The Woman in Me, 2023)

It resonates deeply with a quote from Delano’s Unshrunk: “I was beginning to see my psychiatric medications more clearly for what they were,” she writes: “instruments of behavior control wielded upon me by professionals who saw it as their right to decide what went in my body. It was a right I’d once afforded them, but not anymore.”

Fueling all three women’s narratives are serious allegations of autocratic cultural practices in America: consent-violating paternalistic and socially malign customs that particularly affect women, especially in situations where money is involved. 

The climax of Unshrunk is when Laura quits her medications, and then fires her therapists one by one. Laura comes to realize that the medication she took stopped her from feeling and thinking through “the deeper existential questions [she] was grappling with—ones about identity, performance, meaning, purpose, womanhood, body, and self.” Once aware of the damage done, Laura begins her journey of making up for her years of stalled development, missed milestones, and stifled personal growth. A cloud of brain fog lifts, the tomb under her feet cracks—she can breathe, expand, take up space. She becomes “unshrunk.”

One of Unshrunk’s most interesting sections is precisely the story of how Laura went off her meds. It’s a personal experience report of dramatic withdrawal, with horrific symptoms that encompass sensory disturbances, bodily, mental, and neurological dysfunctions, and an astronomical level of brain noise. The symptoms of psych med withdrawal are so severe, they include difficulties staying oriented, out-of-body sensations, mood swings, sleep issues, disruptions to normal thought processes. All of these are apt to bring on strange behavior in the person experiencing them, and produce symptoms that strongly resemble a psychotic break or serious mental illness like schizophrenia. They may even resemble mental illness more so than mental illness itself. Thus, for many people who’ve tried to withdraw from psych meds, these symptoms can become an invitation to say: “See, there. You have a mental illness. You need to get back on your meds!”

But that’s not right. Withdrawal is a different beast, biologically and chemically speaking. Delano’s book does a good job of explaining the difference, and really drills down on the bio-weapon that psychiatric medications are, focusing on their internal and endocrinological agency. She introduces concepts like homeostasis and iatrogenesis to dig deep and long into the physiology and biology of what happens when psychiatric medications enter and exit the mix of our bloodstream. (Spoiler alert: it is much, much more complex and all-encompassing than “a chemical imbalance in the brain”). Delano’s self-report of the weirdness, considerable pain, and bold-headedness it took to persevere in the face of lacking community support to wean herself off psychiatric drugs doubles up as a practical resource for people in the same predicament.

A few news pieces in recent years have noted that it’s notoriously hard to quit psychiatric medications. Some articles have spread the latest insight on how best to do it: “do it very slowly.” This conjures up the image of a slow and plodding procedure, assuming buy-in from the community and a sympathetic prescribing doctor who wants to help with the project–which it can be impossible to get.

A cloud of brain fog lifts, the tomb under her feet cracks—she can breathe, expand, take up space.

But let’s say that the first gigantic hurdle has been cleared. The medical aspect of the procedure is an equally tall order. The drugs are powerful, ridiculously so, even though our modern world seems to have forgotten that. But dip into their history and at the beginning, the clue was in the name: Thorazine. This early antipsychotic (developed from the 1930s and brought to market in the ‘50s) was named after Thor, the Norse thunder-and-hammer god. It was believed that Thorazine would be “a hammer” to the walls of insane asylums. It was such a strong sedative, it calmed even the most violent patient right down, without nevertheless putting them to sleep. This technology enabled a mass exodus of asylum patients, and their diaspora. Free to go home, some ended up in jail. Many more went on to live alone, shunned by former friends and family, like the woman in Firestone’s Airless Spaces. They took the asylum with them—orally, nano-technologically, delivered through the blood-brain barrier in pill form or as monthly injections. One might say that psychiatric medications installed the mental asylum at the molecular level, in chemical form, as an edible asylum if you will.

Today, the drugs’ Thoric strength is seldom remembered. Prescribing doctors rather emphasize that the newer generation of pills is easier to swallow. The patients’ jury is still out on whether that is true. Regardless, doctors now prescribe antipsychotics to all kinds of people for all sorts of conditions. Trending towards an aesthetics of cosmetic and elective pharmacology, psychiatry seems increasingly dedicated to preserving sameness, padding and blocking out anything that could be remotely ugly, uncomfortable, or unpredictable—and using the big guns to do so. The result is a growing base of people, like Laura, for whom the medication is wildly overcorrecting, and creates a “botoxed” inner self that is so motionless it has no wrinkles, but also, no life.

To make matters worse, with the rise of telemedicine and increasingly doing away with face-to-face consultations, especially in the mental health space, it looks as though in the future it’s going to become harder, not easier, to go off-script. When the doctor from the iPad only asks questions from a script written by AI, which was trained on centuries of hateful theory, could it be that we’re going back in time, not forward? This kind of thing keeps me up at night.

Our pharmaco-asylumian narratives stand for a secured, fixed, and immobilized state of order—especially for girls—not for disorder, nor dynamism, explosiveness, nor any kind of shape-shifting, transitional state outside of the sane/insane binary, nor for states that may be indecipherable, illegible, mixed-up, nor for any form of psychic entropy, chaos, change, self-divestment, nor spontaneous growth… The list goes on.

As the machine learning models are trained to know and perpetuate the abysmal status quo in mental health care, I often have dystopian visions of everyone I know lining up to get onboard a never-ending marble run of repeat prescriptions, until one day we’ll all be living in the edible asylum forever. So, before that can happen, we need to talk about mental illness as a two-way street, not a one-way destiny. When it comes to medications, we need to talk about the off-ramp, not just the on-ramp, and not just about prescriptions, but also de-prescriptions. Most of all, we need to come off the negative “stabilization” trip and prioritize becoming, growth, optimism, possibility, enablement, learning, revelation, nurture, connection, discovery, transformation and rebirth. Personally, I believe all of those things are possible and achievable for all of us, and I think Laura’s story and Unshrunk are a piece of living proof that it can work… and just how difficult it is. 

The drugs are powerful, ridiculously so, even though our modern world seems to have forgotten that.

Delano’s work forges a path of emotional growth and possibility, despite how rough the medication withdrawal is and despite the bridges that had to burn as a result of her decision. Sitting with the unpleasantness, and pushing for change, she has emerged from her quest clenching a compilation of useful resources on what we know about psych med withdrawal—and how much we don’t. She highlights how no drug manufacturer ever ordered a trial to find out how to safely get patients off their psychiatric medications. Delano’s quick dive into (publicly available, but seldom scrutinized) clinical trial information, turns up that the drugs were trialed for just four to eight weeks before they went to market. No pharmaceutical lab or medical research facility has documented what happens to people after one, two, five, or ten years of constant psychiatric medication use. This means that next to nothing is known officially about the impacts of long-term use. What there is instead, however, is plenty of so-called unofficial knowledge: consumer-led knowledge bases, patient-led initiatives, that collect oral and anecdotal evidence, creating a preponderance of community-owned knowledge. Delano’s book points those who are interested in the right direction so they can learn more. 

It’s certainly sobering to note that the scientific and medical literature has never thought this knowledge worth having, or worth producing an answer to the question of how modern psychiatric medications affect our brains and bodies when taken in the long term. But, for those who do wish to inquire, I guess a great way to find out might be to go and ask your local wealthy blonde girl. She might know.