I have only lived in two places that were difficult to inhabit, but both are still very vivid. The first was when I was six, and my family lived in a static caravan (or trailer in the US) for six months. I can’t claim that we were living there because of any kind of hardship, but I clearly remember the ice on the insides of the windows in the mornings, having to wash at the sink with freezing water, and a very particular smell of damp cardboard walls. The second place was a squat when I was an art student. Living there was my choice, although money was tight. This house was damp too: a 1950s bungalow with no central heating and single-pane windows. It sat in the middle of an overgrown garden, isolated, despite being near the center of town. One of my clearest memories from that time is one night when someone outside—an unidentified stranger—moved around the perimeter of the house tapping on each of the windows in the dark.
I am still drawn to places that don’t welcome humans, places where people have once lived and now have left. I am curious about the objects they leave behind, and the bare minimum a person needs in order to make a house a home. Or, sometimes, the maximum.
In my novel Unsettled Ground, the main characters Jeanie and Julius live in what might appear to be an idyllic home: an English thatched cottage. But the reality is very different to the vision. There are mice in the thatch and holes in the ceilings which let the rain in. When Jeanie and Julius’s electricity goes off, they have to use oil lamps and candles, and cook on an old range. They have no central heating and an outside toilet. And the next place they try to make home is a dilapidated caravan on a piece of wasteland. But they are resourceful people and make the best of what they’ve got.
What kind of place could you tolerate if you had to?
Here are seven novels I love with houses that most of us might consider uninhabitable:
Cassandra lives in a crumbling castle with her father, sister and stepmother. At some times of the day, especially in a dusky kind of afternoon light when it can’t be seen properly, the castle appears romantic and beautiful. But in her diary, Cassandra wittily records the reality of the place: the icy draughts, how her father has sold off most of the furniture, the smelly, muddy moat, and how she has to take a hot brick to bed to keep warm at night.
The House of Paper by Carlos María Domínguez, translated by Nick Caistor
A Cambridge academic is killed by a car while walking and reading Emily Dickinson. Her successor receives a cement-covered book intended for his late colleague. Intrigued, he travels to Uruguay and eventually to a remote and desolate beach. There he finds a ruined house made of books. Whose crazy idea was that, anyway?
“What remained of the walls were bowed, jagged fragments, and in among the clumps of cement, tiny seashells, and dark lichens, I could make out pages of books baked in the sun then soaked, glued together like cuttlefish beaks, the type bleached and illegible.”
In this book of a dozen short stories, there’s just one with a house I wouldn’t want to live in, but a year after reading it, the place is still in my head. In “Back of Beyond,” Parson, a pawnbroker, goes out to his brother’s place because he knows that his nephew, Danny, has been selling stolen items to fund his meths habit. But it’s not until Parson gets there that he discovers his brother and sister-in-law huddling in a freezing trailer and Danny living in the family home:
“The room had been stripped of anything that could be sold, the only furnishing left a couch pulled up by the fireplace. Even wallpaper had been torn off a wall. The odour of meth infiltrated everything, coated the walls and floor.”
Resin by Ane Riel, translated by Charlotte Barslund
Jens Horder is literally a hoarder—his house and outside yard are filled with stuff, so that it is almost impossible to move safely between the piles. Jens reports to the authorities that his six-year-old daughter, Liv is missing presumed dead, even while he knows she is hiding in a container in his yard. Liv sometimes goes inside the house to visit her bed-bound mother who has also become part of the junk and mess:
“Shiny blue-green flies buzzed around open cans. Faded butterflies bashed their brown wings against the windowpanes somewhere behind all the stuff…. Small mice and much bigger mice with very long tails. Something was always scratching, grunting or squeaking somewhere. At times it would be Mum.”
After a virus wipes out much of the world’s population, Candace—alone in New York but feeling she should still go to work—moves into her company’s office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper. She takes food from the employee’s vending machine and smashes her way into her boss’s office to sleep on his Mies van der Rohe sofa. It almost sounds idyllic: she sees a horse trot down Broadway and the stars in the night sky for the first time… if it weren’t of course for the plague and being all alone.
Sixteen-year-old Franklin doesn’t really know his father Eldon, but when he is called to visit the dying man, and ultimately help him make a final journey to the backcountry, he goes. Eldon is living in the most evocatively described flophouse:
“Clothes had been flung and were scattered every which way along with empty fast-food boxes and old newspapers… the hot plate was crusted with grease and dribbles, and a coffee can overflowed with butts and ashes and a few jelly jars stuffed full of the same.”
One day at the end of his grandmother’s garden, Barney falls into a disused chalk pit where he meets Stig, a caveman. Stig, well ahead of his time (this children’s novel was first published in 1963) reuses old junk to make his “cave” house: “There were stones and bones, fossils and bottles, skins and tins, stacks of sticks and hanks of string.” Stig of the Dump is one of my earliest memories of owning a book, and I still have a copy.
That question appeared on a poster in 1993 by Gran Fury, a collective of 11 artists and AIDS activists. The poster is strikingly simple, nothing but a blank, crinkled sheet with small text centered vertically in the frame: Do you resent people with AIDS? Do you trust HIV-negatives? Have you given up hope for a cure? When was the last time you cried? The piece—titled plainly, deliberately, “The Four Questions“—confronts the trauma of the AIDS crisis through alternating perspectives of positive and negative people, as though the artists are inviting us into their ruminating thoughts. All questions, no answers.
I learned about Gran Fury from Sarah Schulman’s latest bookLet the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. This tour de force narrates the early years of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) as told to Schulman and documentary filmmaker, Jim Hubbard, through 188 recorded interviews with surviving members. (Full interview transcripts are archived and available for free at the ACT UP Oral History Project.)
The book is full of fascinating people and events whose history would be common knowledge if our public schools were less homophobic and better funded. I never knew, for example, that until ACT UP pressured the CDC, women were categorically excluded from the definition of AIDS; or that they staged demonstrations at the New York Stock Exchange, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Guantánamo Bay, and the NIH headquarters. Like most people, the bulk of my AIDS education comes from movies and television—Philadelphia, Angels in America, Dallas Buyers Club, and more recently, Pose. Schulman dispels myths about AIDS history found in these pop culture representations. She tells the truth.
The last time I cried was during the conclusion to Let the Record Show, when I encountered an unexpected moment of intimacy in the cancer unit of a hospital between an ailing writer and her nurse. Upon learning the writer is an AIDS historian, the nurse begins sharing memories of treating AIDS patients in the 1980s and then suddenly chokes up. The writer and nurse sit for a moment in quiet remembrance. “This, I know, is the enduring relationship of AIDS,” Schulman writes.
I spoke with Sarah Schulman over Zoom about AIDS narratives, grassroots organizing, the political use of anger, and more.
Zach Shultz:I sort of read your title as having a double meaning. On the one hand, you’re referencing the art installation by Gran Fury at the New Museum in 1987, where they took the names of certain politicians and put them on tombstones with the photographic stills of the Nuremberg trials in the background. And that was an ironic way of trying to call for this justice that never actually happened, to hold these people in power to account. But also, this book is seeking to correct certain narratives out there. What is it that you want the record to show about ACT UP and about AIDS history more generally?
Sarah Schulman: Well, most importantly, that in America, change is not made by heroic individuals. It’s made by groups and coalitions of very diverse kinds of people, usually working in some kind of silo with like-minded people but standing together in a way that their work resonates with each other.
The second thing is that this movement was really the last social movement in America that was to some degree successful. And it’s very important to look at why and also to see what its limitations were. I think the biggest takeaway is that it was not a movement that worked on consensus. It was a big tent movement that had a lot of flexibility. There was a statement of unity, which was: “Direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” That meant direct action, not service provision. And if that’s what you were doing, you could do whatever you wanted. There was a kind of radical democracy that we’re very far from now, and that is really important to remember.
ZS: It seems like another thing you’re doing with this work is counteracting an image of ACT UP as only gay, white, middle-class men. You’re showing all these other different types of affinity groups and other actors that were important within the movement. Can you talk about why that image is out there and how much more diverse the movement actually was?
SS: One thing that’s very hard to remember now is that in the 1980s, the media, the government, and the corporate sector were almost all white males. And gay men who were in those sectors were closeted, for the most part. So, when the media looked at ACT UP, they saw other white males, and that’s who they interviewed and that’s what they represented.
But you know, it turns out there’s a very big difference between an exclusively white male movement and a predominantly white male movement. Because when women and people of color participate, they have enormous influence. And I really am very specific about that—about which ideas, which individuals brought from previous movements and which previous experiences, so that you can see ACT UP would not have succeeded without the influence of women and people of color.
ZS: Right. This reads almost like a handbook for people who want to do grassroots organizing. You mentioned that it wasn’t based on consensus. That there was a very radical democracy model in the Monday night meetings. So, can you talk about ways that [model] worked and ways it created some challenges for accomplishing your goals?
SS: Well first, the Monday night meetings were like a nexus. People who work in ACT UP were also involved in lots of other communities… working with homeless people, with Haitians, with prisoners, with mothers, with drug users. Then the Monday night meeting was a predominantly white gay male, but also female, gathering. If you only look at the Monday night meeting, you don’t see where ACT UP actually was.
In America, change is not made by heroic individuals. It’s made by groups and coalitions of very diverse kinds of people.
A really great example would be, there was no legal needle exchange in New York City. Mayor [David] Dinkins opposed it, even though he was African American and more progressive. So, people in ACT UP decided to do the civil disobedience of breaking that law, getting arrested, and having a trial. They won and made needle exchange legal in New York. But if you thought that that was a terrible thing, and you didn’t want to be part of it, you wouldn’t try to stop them from doing it. You just wouldn’t do it.
If you wanted to go interrupt mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and somebody else didn’t want to, they just wouldn’t go. And I quote people in the book saying, “Well, I didn’t go to that,” or “That wasn’t where I put my energies.” But this idea of stopping other people from doing what they needed to do, that just was not operative.
ZS: And did this just come about organically? Or was it a conscious, strategic decision?
SS: It was not conscious. In fact, it was never overtly stated. It’s something that I cohered by listening to everybody and sort of setting the period. Because ACT UP never theorized itself. A lot of things that it did, it just did. And it never decided to do them, never commented on them, because people were dying, and there was really no time for any of that.
Let me give an example: Somebody from the front of the room would say, “We need someone to write a letter to this person.” And someone else would say, “I’ll do it!” And no one would ever check on them. No one would re-read the letter or try to control it. You just let people do what they said they were going to do. They wanted to live. They were going to do it. And it just went on like that.
The biggest example I give is at the St. Patrick’s demonstration, December 1989, when the organization decided to do a silent die-in inside the church. So, we all went in there with 7,000 people screaming outside, but Michael Petrelis jumped on the pew, blew a whistle, and screamed at [Cardinal] O’Connor, “You’re killing us! Stop killing us!” And you know, chaos ensued. But it turned out to be for the best.
But at the meeting, nobody said to him, “You went against us, so we’re throwing you out!” Never. No one was ever thrown out. Because in order to do that to somebody, you had to have a sense of supremacy or elite-ness or superiority. These were people who didn’t have basic legal rights. Gay sex was not legal nationally until 2003. It just wasn’t like that.
When I interviewed him years later, I was like, “So Michael, why did you do that?” And he said, “Well, I was really angry because no one would let me be in their affinity group.” It’s a very human, messy thing. And a lot of things in ACT UP were like that. I mean, people OD’d and died, people stole money, people pretended they had HIV. I mean, it was messy and very difficult. But these are real people. They’re not clean, and they’re not pure.
ZS: One thing I find so fascinating about this is the idea of anger itself. We often associate that with something negative… or destructive. Especially in the Trump era, we’ve seen how anger can be wielded by the Far Right and manifested violently, like in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. But your work is shot through—not only in Let the Record Show, but also in other books I’ve read of yours—with a sense of anger and rage and indignation. So, I’m wondering: How can anger animate politics and art in ways that affect positive social change? And how might we distinguish between rage that is generative or destructive?
Anger, when it comes from a place of being oppressed, is different than anger that comes from wanting to protect a place of supremacy. They use the same word, but it’s not the same experience.
SS: One thing is that ACT UP never committed an act of violence, which is very interesting considering that people knew they were going to die… ACT UP had violence done against them. People were beaten. There’s a guy, Chris Hennelly, who’s had permanent brain damage from police violence. But ACT UP never committed an act of violence. And interestingly, they never voted to be nonviolent. They always kept the option open, but they never exercised it.
Because anger, when it comes from a place of being oppressed, is quite different than anger that comes from wanting to protect a place of supremacy. They use the same word, but it’s not the same experience.
ZS: So, going back to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Stop the Church demonstration on December 10, 1989. There was a part in the book where you talk about how this demonstration has been represented recently on the television series Pose. And when ACT UP members saw [the show], there was some anger about that portrayal being inaccurate. I don’t know if you’ve also watched another television show that recently came out called It’s a Sin?
SS: Yes, I saw that.
ZS: There’s one scene where they go to an ACT UP protest to lie down in the streets… But they never mentioned the name “ACT UP.” It’s all decontextualized and depoliticized. What do you think about these narratives being told about AIDS and about ACT UP from within certain dominant cultural institutions? Like, what’s missing from the stories that we’re telling? And what are people getting wrong?
SS: Well, they’re getting everything wrong, and it’s always been that way. Representations of AIDS have never accurately represented the mass political movements that forced change in this country… If you pretend that it’s individuals who cause social transformation, it’s much more acceptable for corporate film studios. Corporate culture likes that message, but it’s not true.
The issue with Pose was that there were, of course, people of color in ACT UP, but [the show] didn’t represent them. They ignored them and then created people who were not there, by creating Black trans women who did not get arrested at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One trans woman did get arrested, but she was white. Kathy Otter, who was the elected facilitator of ACT UP, actually. So why not tell her story, too?
ZS: What did you think of It’s a Sin?
SS: Well, It’s a Sin is kind of at the end of the old way of telling [the story] … What I think they captured that was accurate was how young everyone was, how fun it was, how great it was to get away from homophobic families and have that freedom… But the fact that everyone who was positive died is absurd and not helpful to anybody. That the only woman they focused on was asexual, apparently, had no personal life, and her whole life was serving people. I mean, it was kind of crazy. It’s so far from reality that hopefully after my book comes out, that kind of thing won’t be possible again.
ZS: One thing you mentioned that [the show]got right, and I saw in your book as well, is this idea of activism as being fun, or being charged with erotic energy. Like people would go to ACT UP to meet partners or hook up, and they would go to a zap in the morning, and then a party at night, or go straight from the clubs to a shift at the hospital to watch somebody. And that piece gets lost in the ways we think about politics as something very serious.
Just because you’re alive doesn’t mean that you’re fine.
SS: Well, most political movements have to be things that make the lives of the people in them better. Otherwise, they don’t work. And this was a movement for people’s lives by very, very young people who had been really excluded and marginalized from their families, from the places they were born. They did not have loyalty to the system. They had much more loyalty to each other. And so, they had to live their whole lives by the time they were 25 or 26. They had to live everything because they were going to die.
So, it was fun, and it was bold, and it was sad, and it was frustrating. And people shared apartments and helped each other get jobs and spent a lot of time together. I mean, so many people that I interviewed said their whole lives were ACT UP. They stopped their careers, they dropped out of school, and they got alienated from people who weren’t doing anything. It was a way of life.
ZS: But the flip side of that, especially when you’re dealing with a movement where the stakes are so high, where people are dying so quickly, is: How do you avoid burnout? [When] dealing with such overwhelming grief all the time, how did you get up every day and keep doing it?
SS: People didn’t deal with it. You were all in it together, and every time somebody died, you were with other people who also shared the loss. And then you turned that into action.
When I interviewed people 15 or 20 years after the events, I would ask them about that. And people would say, “We just kept fighting.” But then I’d say, “Do you remember one person in particular who died?” And that’s when the tears would come.
A lot of it is unprocessed, and that’s something that César Carrasco talked about in the conclusion and why I use it as a conclusion. He was a refugee from Latin America during the fascist period, and he became a psychiatric social worker as a result of his activism. And he’s talking about my generation, a little older. Men who [survived], they’re not resilient… Just because you’re alive doesn’t mean that you’re fine. And all of the loneliness… and that first generation, the people who survived have had a lot of drug problems. [César] goes really into that, you know, the long-range consequences. So for many people, it hasn’t been dealt with.
ZS: I actually underlined part of your interview with him that really hit me in the heart. If you don’t mind, I’ll read: “When you are left with a whole bunch of people, but neither you or your friend has a narrative, then you don’t want to talk… You just stay isolated. So developing a narrative for what happened afterwards, I think that would be very useful.”
So, what is that narrative? Is this what you’re doing with the book?
Let me crack open a time capsule for you: it’s 2001 and I, a Catholic, 16-year-old high school dropout, have just walked to Blockbuster in my billowing JNCOs to rent a VHS tape of A Clockwork Orange. I will watch the film on the upstairs TV while Fox News blares on the downstairs TV. I am unaware of the fact that the movie received a “C” rating (for condemned) from the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which means I’m committing a mortal sin by watching it—and because I don’t know, I won’t mention it when I go to confession.
Something else I don’t know at this time: on the other side of the country, The Boston Globe is investigating the systematic cover-up of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Their bombshell report will spark similar investigations all over the world, and one of the findings of these reports will be the fact that previously, the Church’s system for dealing with pedophile priests was to quietly send them off to addiction rehab centers before reassigning them, because that’s what Church hierarchy believed sexual abuse to be: sexual addiction. It wasn’t abuse and trauma; it was out-of-control desire and a failure of willpower. This general narrative isn’t unfamiliar to anyone who’s grown up going to confession, where you’re told that you were born with original sin and you’re doomed to spend your whole life in a Sisyphean fight against your monstrous nature. You’re going to slip up, and that’s okay—that’s what confession is for. You start over with a clean slate and get back up on that horse and try to be better (or try not to be a sexual predator anymore).
But, for me, The Boston Globe report will uncover more than the Church’s refusal to protect children. It will erode my religious narrative of sexuality as a struggle between repressive will power and monstrous desire—a narrative that presupposes sexual violence as an inevitability. It’s this narrative that A Clockwork Orange will invert but not destabilize when I watch it on its 30th anniversary.
Given the choice between sexual repression and sexual monstrosity, Alex chose to be the monster.
This year marks the movie’s 50th anniversary, and when I watched it 20 years ago, I did so with no awareness of the fact that I’d spent my whole life steeping in the conservative Catholic language of monstrous sexuality. I was dazzled by the surrealist interplay of lighting and music, the alternating wooden and over-the-top performances, and the incomprehensible teen slang that was both playful and dangerous. More than anything, I was dazzled by Alex. Who was this dark, complicated boy for whom Beethoven and sexual violence came together as a synesthetic high art? In the language of destructive sexuality, Alex was someone who wasn’t trying to rein in his desire. His violence wasn’t a failure of self-control; it was an abandonment of any pretense of restraint. Given the choice between sexual repression and sexual monstrosity, he chose to be the monster.
Around this time I was also chatting with adult men on AIM and ICQ. I’d been receiving messages from men since I was 14 and I thought that it was because they’d read my profile and found in me an intellectual equal. I even had a running joke with them: when they told me how old they were (34/m, 36/m, 39/m), I said, “you’re the same age as my mom,” regardless of what number they gave me. It was important that I address the elephant in the room, which allowed me to believe they wanted to talk to me because I was clever. They sent me pictures of themselves. Some weren’t bad looking, but there was the occasional horror movie sequence of a slow-loading picture revealing first a shining bald scalp, followed by gray eyebrows, and finally bearded jowls. Sometimes they asked me for pictures of myself, but I didn’t have any because I didn’t have access to a scanner. There was the occasional request to “cyber,” for which I was always game. (I never thought of this as a breach of the purity pledge I signed in my catechism class when I was 13 because it wasn’t real sex, so I never mentioned it in confession.) The chats gave me a secret backchannel through which to explore sex, desire, and power. When the men pursued me despite my joke about them being the same age as my mother, it fulfilled the narrative I’d contrived of a failure of willpower in the face of monstrous desire: unable to control their desire, they became monstrous. I reveled in the power this afforded me while identifying with the men who had failed to stay on the path of righteousness.
A Clockwork Orange offered an alternative narrative. Instead of a failure of self-control, there was agency: a choice to be monstrous. In identifying with the men I talked to online, I also identified with the frustration of trying and failing to be good. The concept of choosing to be bad was exhilarating, and I read the book along with every scrap of trivia I could find. I learned that the author, Anthony Burgess, had also grown up Catholic and was an extreme political conservative who fled the U.K. to avoid paying taxes on his considerable wealth. For Burgess, the story of Alex and the post-capitalist Russo-British near future was a story of the State versus free will. As he explained in a 1986 introduction to the novel:
By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice.
Stanley Kubrick’s summary of his film adaptation was less focused on the moral implications of the story, but rather the political implications; he explaineditas “a social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.” Is it? Watching the movie, one might notice the directorial choice to center the straightjacket and eye prongs as the true dystopian horror—the image of tears running down Alex’s cheeks while wires and electrodes spill out of the halo on his head foregrounded as the real violence of the story. But this is after we’ve just watched several grisly yet playful and balletic scenes of sexual violence—the implication being that the suffering of Alex’s victims is bad, but the suffering he endures at the hands of the State is worse. The question Burgess pursues, and Kubrick underlines, throughout the story is whether a person (specifically, a man) can be truly “good” if he has no choice. In other words: the individual soul’s journey to moral righteousness is more important than a functioning society where women can live free from sexual violence. Art factors into this equation as well, as the aversion therapy that Alex endures, the Ludovico Technique (Ludovico being Italianate for Ludwig), is underscored by the music of Beethoven. In killing his violent compulsions, the State also kills Alex’s artistic compulsions. The argument Burgess and Kubrick seem to be making, then, is that women’s suffering is necessary for both the moral and artistic triumph of men’s souls.
The argument Burgess and Kubrick seem to be making is that women’s suffering is necessary for the moral and artistic triumph of men’s souls.
I sensed dishonesty in the centering of the straitjacket and eye prongs the first time I watched the movie. If Kubrick was going to ask me to revel with him in the playful scenes of violence against women, I didn’t see how he could then ask me to be horrified by the State’s violence. But I understood fear of the State as I read the novel with the ambient chatter of Fox News in the background. As in A Clockwork Orange, the narrative on Fox News, as I understood it then and as I understand it today, was that the State was the enemy; collectivism was the enemy; pro-social policy (from the diaphragm: socialism!) was the enemy. I was already primed for the zero-sum world of A Clockwork Orange before I started writing fanfic about the fourth droog (a girl—me—obviously). In draft after draft, I crafted a world in which a girl could be chosen to join in the ultraviolence because she wasn’t like other girls. I wrote within the same zero-sum logic in which Alex goes directly from perpetrator of violence to victim of violence, with nothing in between—because in his world and mine, there was no third option. It was the same zero-sum logic in which I understood a dollar for one person was a dollar out of another person’s pocket; in which good was equaled and opposed by evil; in which I could be the target of predatory men online or I could get in on the joke.
The year after I rented A Clockwork Orange for the first time, my best friend’s mom found out that her husband was having sexually explicit chats with teenage girls on the Internet. They got a divorce, and I stopped responding to messages from men. That might have been the moment I realized I had never been in on the joke. Or maybe it was the following year, when my 65-year-old boss started sexually harassing me on the day of my 18th birthday. Or maybe it was the day a man followed me home from work. Or the day a man followed me in a cemetery and raged when I asked him to leave me alone. At some point along the way, it became clear that I could never be the fourth droog. In the epic battle between good and evil for the fate of the soul, I had never been the soul in question; I had always been the stumbling block on someone else’s journey.
I don’t know if A Clockwork Orange would’ve appealed to me at all if I hadn’t been ready to recognize the narrative of the struggle between moral control and monstrous sexuality. And I don’t know that I would’ve truly recognized how problematic that narrative was if I hadn’t learned about the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse cover-up, predicated on that very same binary. But both A Clockwork Orange and the sex abuse scandal employed the same intellectual dishonesty that troubled that sexual narrative. In A Clockwork Orange, it was the centering of the straitjacket and the eye prongs as the true violence. In the Catholic sex abuse scandal, it was the treatment of pedophilia as an addiction. In both cases, the implication was that the suffering of the victims was not the focus of the story.
There is a picture on my grandparents’ wall of the beloved family priest who baptized several of their children and grandchildren, myself included. He died in the late ‘80s, but a few years ago my mother learned that he had been accused of molesting a five-year-old girl back in the ‘60s. In the picture on my grandparents’ wall, the priest is sitting on the couch with one of my aunts—six or seven at the time—on his lap. I can look at that picture and imagine what he probably saw: a moral man in control of his monstrousness. The head controlling the heart. The superego controlling the id. I wonder if anyone saw the little girl in danger.
“Well. Kenny Bond is dead,” Mom says over pie. “And I, for one, am not sorry.” She lays her fork down in a satisfied way.
Kenny Bond was a celebrity in our town. He owned the biggest auction pavilion in Green County. When someone in your family died, Kenny Bond auctioned off their furniture.
He looked like a news anchor. He was tall and blonde, and when all the other men in Green County were hard-pressed to produce a decent-fitting suit even for a funeral, Kenny Bond wore one every day, looking down from his billboard on State Road 47.
Our family had a long-standing feud with Kenny Bond. He shot our dog.
Personally, I didn’t really even like the dog all that much. He was fat and mean and he never would play with you. But he was our dog anyway, so everyone was bent out of shape. Especially Owen.
Kenny Bond’s step-grandkids told us on the playground, “Our stepgrampa shot your dirty old dog.”
Owen was only in the first grade, and he took the news badly. When Dad came home from his shift at the hospital lab, Owen had wedged his head under the cushions of the sofa and wouldn’t let up crying till supper.
The dog had been let run, and he ended up on Kenny’s perfectly green lawn chasing one of his prized peacocks. I’m guessing I don’t have to mention that Kenny Bond is the only person in Green County who owns peacocks.
So Dad comes up with what he calls his Plan of Ultimate Retribution. Owen asks what that means—retribution, and Dad says, “Never mind what's retribution. Are you sad?”
Owen doesn’t answer, but that doesn’t matter to Dad, who keeps talking. “Your dog’s dead—of course you’re sad. Well, you just stay sad till Saturday, you hear?”
Saturdays were auction nights. Back then, on auction nights, you could hardly back out of the driveway for the traffic, everyone parking their vehicles along the side of the road. Kenny Bond had built his auction pavilion smack between his house and ours. We’d run off to play after dinner, and Mom would call after us, “You kids be careful—it’s auction night!”
Saturday night was going to be Kenny Bond’s auction of old Ms. Kerrick’s estate. Kenny Bond always called it an estate sale, even when everyone knew you’d lived your whole life in a run-down three-room trailer at the end of East Southwest Pike.
Mom knew all about the Kerricks, as they had come into the emergency room under what she called “suspicious circumstances.” She said they were trash. But the whole county would probably show up to the auction anyway to see what was what. Folks would line up outside the refreshment stand Kenny Bond had built just off the side of the auction pavilion, where his mom sold chocolate pie and hot dogs. She was a mean old lady who pretended not to hear kids when they spilled their change out on the counter and asked what they could get for it.
Saturday at 4 p.m. prompt, Dad put Owen in the car and drove him just down the road to the entrance of Kenny Bond’s auction pavilion.
“Son, here’s where you get out,” he said. “Remember. Your dog’s gone. And he ain’t never coming back.” Dad patted Owen hard on the back once and said, “I’ll be waiting right over there.” Then he hammered a big wooden sign into the ground beside Owen. Kenny Bond Shot My Dog, it read.
Owen was pretty much over the dog by then, but upset enough about having to stand in the hot sun as a steady stream of cars kicked up the dust and gravel of Stop 11 Road that he started right back up with the crying. The line of cars slowed down as they passed. Dad, across the road, leaned against his car, nodding in satisfaction.
Kenny Bond did poorly that day, though really it was the Kerricks’ “estate” that took the beating. Everyone underbid. Kenny Bond made only a hundred and fifty bucks in commission that weekend, and everyone knew it. Dad felt victorious. “You see, kids,” he told us, putting his feet up on the coffee table and opening a beer with his pocketknife, “that’s what you do when people are assholes to you.”
Later, Dad, never one to waste good lumber, used the sign as a lid for the toy box he built for Owen. Poor kid—every time he got told to put away his basketball, he’d open up the toy box and there’d be that sign: Kenny Bond Shot My Dog.
Mom tells me three different stories about how Kenny Bond died.
“It was hot out and he come in for a cold drink. Tia, his third wife, was right there in the kitchen handing him the glass, and damned if he didn’t up and die right there in her kitchen.”
“Mom. That’s not true,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “It was because of the booze. He was a drinker, you know.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
And all she says is: “Well.”
In the end, the story she settles on, and which is mostly true as far as I can make out, is this: Kenny Bond went into the hospital with chest pains. He sat down in the ER waiting room while Tia filled out the paperwork, and right there, before she could even finish, he was dead.
We know this is true because Dad said he heard it over the intercom in the lab that someone was coding in the ER. He just didn’t know it was Kenny Bond.
“Which is a good thing,” he says later, “cause I would have gone in there and given him something to tangle with."
“But, Dad,” I say. “He was already—”
“I know.”
It's not long before Kenny Bond’s house, the auction pavilion, even the refreshment stand, all go up for sale.
“Looks like his wife is fixing to hightail it out of here about as quick as she can,” Mom says, as though this is to be expected.
The last auction will be for all the stuff Tia doesn't want in her new condominium up in Indianapolis. I picture a tall, shiny skyscraper looking out over the city.
On Saturday, the traffic is busier than ever. Everyone’s comes out to see this—Kenny Bond’s estate auctioned off at his own pavilion. After supper, Dad trots us all over to have a look, Owen slow-poking behind us. Dad shouts over his shoulder, “Let’s see some hustle, son!” and Owen reluctantly picks up the pace.
The pavilion’s filled with people, but no one’s bidding. Up on stage there’s a six-foot-tall oil painting of Kenny Bond. The auctioneer’s standing at the podium, holding his gavel like any minute now someone’s going to jump in with a decent bid.
Over at the refreshment stand, Kenny Bond’s mom looks heartbroken. She leans over the counter, feeding chocolate pie and hot dogs to the peacocks, who probably don’t know they’re about to be auctioned off just like everything else.
“All right,” Dad says after a while, and we head back home, Owen racing ahead, jumping up and over the spot at the property line Dad marks out with a can of orange spray paint every time it fades out. He doesn't really need to, though. From here you can see plain as day where Kenny Bond’s perfect green lawn stops and our patchy scrub-grass takes over.
I wrote large chunks of what would go on to become my novel, Highway Blue, whilst leaning against the windows of various moving trains, buses, cars, and planes. I remember in particular one evening half-curled on the seat of a train carriage as it moved through the darkness of a January night along the German-Austrian border with the arm-rest of the next seat digging into my side, feet up on the little prop which ran along beneath the black window and the small table on the seat-back in front of me folded down, tapping away at the keys. It was 3 a.m. or 2:30 a.m. or something like that, my eyes were hurting and the plump sleeping woman in the seat beside me kept slipping slowly over onto my shoulder. The train compartment smelled faintly of stale bodies and cigarettes and coffee.
The book that I went on to write is the story of Anne Marie and Cal, a young couple on the run from their own past in a beaten-up old car, moving through a mythologized landscape towards an unknown future.
I have always gravitated towards the image of the character on the run, whether in literature or film or music, the person with that certain something in their past or their own psyche that for whatever reason prevents them from living within the parameters of the day-to-day.
The character on the run is the misfit, often hyper-romanticized (whether intentionally or not), enshrined in the smoke-wreathed, sun-faded, stylized imagery of pop culture.
The writers I’ve included in this list have created what are, for me, some of the best examples of those figures—figures who look in at society from their own strange and sometimes shocking perspectives, yielding material that can be uncomfortable, beautiful, or chilling, but one way or another is hard to forget.
What follows are some of my personal go-to picks about people on the run from their own troubled pasts, whether physically or emotionally. From the deluded, the insane, the lost, the healing, to the passionate—here are a few of my favorites, along with the characters that make them great:
In the opening pages of Mishima’s novel, Koji looks back from the deck of a moving ship as it leaves the town of Numazu behind him on the shore. The ship is a prison boat, and Koji has just been discharged from the penitentiary where he has served out his sentence for attacking his lover’s husband with a metal wrench. Waiting for him on the other side of his journey are Yuko, his lover, and Ippei, her husband and Koji’s victim, whose life has been irrevocably changed by his injuries.
The narrative is punctuated regularly by Mishima’s often-startling, bad-dream imagery that sometimes borders on the surrealistic—pale fetuses, wilting lilies, the shadow of a rat thrown across a face. In many places, this imagery is linked to regression or stilted growth, as ideas of the traditional loving, respectful man-woman dynamic—so important to the Japanese society of the time—are twisted out of shape, refracted through the panel of dark glass that Mishima holds against them.
At the novel’s opening, Therese Desqueyroux sits in a carriage traveling down a dark road. The carriage is taking her away from a trial, at which she has just been acquitted of the attempted poisoning of her husband. At this point, as she makes her way towards her family estate, Therese is not so much running from a troubled past as moving towards a troubled future—she is going home, to face her husband and young child, and the emotional punishment that she knows is waiting for her there.
Through Therese’s memories, we see her existence leading up to the trial, trapped in a marriage that is not only loveless but also abusive. The people who surround her are obsessed only with maintaining the tight social rigors of the day, unable and unwilling to offer help.
Therese fantasizes of making her escape to the longed-for crowds and conversations of Paris. She is razor-sharp, complex, literate, constantly chain-smoking—her hands stained yellow with nicotine—a walking subversion of the docile ideal held up by her rural society as the epitome of female beauty in early 1900s France. Mauriac’s portrait of a complicated woman making her way from an abusive past to a place in the world where she can live with autonomy is written with a raw grace.
The first novel in what would go on to become McCarthy’s Border trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is a lyrical ode to the loss of innocence; a book about the conflict between romanticized ideas of adventure and the American West, and their violent reality. McCarthy eschews traditional Western punctuation and instead writes in a lilting, hypnotic stream-of-consciousness.
After the death of 16-year-old John Grady’s grandfather, he learns that his beloved family ranch, where he has been raised, is to be sold. Faced with the prospect of moving away from the ranch into the local town, John Grady and his best friend Rawlins instead decide to take off on horseback, making for Mexico to find work as cowboys. There they encounter the true realities of the violent border world into which they’ve stepped.
Tom Birkin leaves behind the horrors of World War I, and memories of his recently broken marriage, to travel to a small village in the English countryside in which he has been commissioned to uncover and restore a mural hidden under whitewash on the wall of the village’s old church. As he begins the work, Tom meets Alice Keach, wife of the local reverend, and they begin to form an emotional bond that teeters on the edge of being called love, both of them knowing that if they ever choose to do so it will break the idyl in which they’re living.
A Month in the Country is told with aching nostalgia for the memories of a lost summer. This is a quiet book whose beauty lies in its subtlety, its emotional nuance. Its impact is all the greater for it.
In Baldwin’s masterpiece, a group of young, Bohemian friends—living to the insistent jazz beat of Greenwich Village and Harlem in the 1950s—are each running in their own physical or emotional ways: Leona is escaping a broken marriage and separation from her child in the South. The beautiful, brilliant jazz musician, Rufus, grapples with the heart-breaking self-destructiveness that has grown within him as a consequence of his struggle against his societal position as a Black man in the New York of the ’50s. Eric is returning to New York, after many years in Paris, to face the memories of his complex relationship with Rufus.
Baldwin writes about race, sexuality and loneliness with such unflinching viscerality, always looped around by the sensuous, unrelenting rhythm of late-night jazz clubs. The humanity and the rawness of Another Country are, for me, unparalleled.
An emotional running from the past here, in Jackson’s pitch-dark gothic mystery.
After the unsolved poisoning of the entire rest of their family, the two surviving Blackwood sisters withdraw from the outside world into the environs of the family home. The love between the two sisters is simultaneously beautiful and chilling—unconditional and completely without blame, no matter what one or the other of them may have done. Their relationship is all the more complicated for its simplicity.
The novel’s central theme is one recurrent in many of Jackson’s novels—the persecution within small-town communities of those who appear to be different. The village in We Have Always Lived in the Castle bears a strong resemblance to the small Vermont town in which Jackson and her academic husband lived, themselves encountering strong anti-Semitic feelings from the townsfolk, as well as a general mistrust of the couple’s intellectualism.
Strange, unapologetic, full of savagely dark humor, at its heart We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a fierce protestation against those who attempt to push others who show difference onto the margins of society.
In an attempt to escape the suffocation of his life in New York, Paul Kemp boards a plane to Puerto Rico to take up a post as a journalist at the chaotically dysfunctional Daily News. Kemp’s fellow journalists at the paper live in varying degrees of physical and mental degeneration, as they swill rum in the humid oppression of mosquito-laden nights.
Written while Thompson was in his early 20s and unpublished for years, The Rum Diary resurfaced amongst some of his old papers, was brushed off before finally being put out into the world in 1998. The book is permeated throughout with the anxiety of growing old, the fear of succumbing to the suffocation of the day-to-day, and the need to kick out constantly against the looming threat of the unremarkable. Thompson’s writing is blunt, brutal, ragged, wild, redolent with a thirst to wring what’s there to be wrung out of life.
In the spring of 2020, Ben Philippe was in the middle of drafting a book on “the quirks and maybe the light trauma of having been the Black friend in white spaces” all his life. It was supposed to be a conversational, gently satirical take on the things white people should and shouldn’t do if they aspire to have a Black friend: Don’t touch the hair. Don’t ask if Black guys are bigger “down there.” Don’t say that you “just really don’t think about race” because you’ve never had to. Don’t claim white privilege isn’t a thing because the term “implies a boat full of Leonardo DiCaprio clones and a seven-digit bank account” and all you have is a stack of unpaid bills and a backache.
And then last summer happened. As if the coronavirus pandemic weren’t enough, Black people kept dying at the hands of police and the pattern stood out to the world in a new way: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. If 2019 was the Hot Girl Summer, thanks to an eponymous song by rapper Megan Thee Stallion, 2020 became the summer of Black Lives Matter.
Having known Ben for almost a decade and enjoyed his two young adult novels, The Field Guide to the North American Teenager and Charming as a Verb, I couldn’t wait to take the plunge. What I discovered was a book—part literary memoir, part study guide, and part sardonic etiquette primer—as deep, probing, humane, and, yes, funny, as the man himself.
Ben was born in Haiti and raised in Montreal, Canada, where he was often the only Black kid at school. He grew up speaking French at home and learned English by watching shows like Gilmore Girls on the WB (he still can’t go the length of one interview without mentioning the show. See below. I did not bring it up. He did!). Eventually, he moved to New York to go to Columbia, and then to Austin, Texas to attend the Michener Center for Writers, where we met.
I talked with Ben—one of the warmest and wittiest people I know, with the wholesome good looks of a Disney Channel kid—over email about the beauty of friendship when you’re young, being Black in three countries, and coming out the other end of the Trump era.
Greg Marshall: Why do you think friendships in our youth are so formative?
Ben Philippe: It sometimes feels like the number of people we can say “I love you” to gets smaller as we get older. Your partner, your immediate family, your kids. There’s something sad about that to me. In elementary school, your best friend being seated 20 feet from you felt like a canyon! I used to use my friend’s deodorant stick on road trips. In college, my best friend would just sleep in my unmade bed. Now, friends get hotel rooms when they visit and we have dinner together, talk about mortgage rates. It’s part of growing up and I don’t need to use another 32-year-old man’s deodorant, but there’s also something sad about that distance to me. Something was lost there. I think that’s why adult friendships are no longer sacrosanct spaces that allow for political discourse and fraught conversations. They’re not magic anymore, lame as that is to say.
My friend has a line that I love and that I wish I could have shoehorned into the book: “Anyone who thinks you’re friendly is probably not your actual friend, Ben.” My few friends are the first barrier to all my, err, for lack of a better word, bullshit. The rage, the whininess, the moodiness, the insecurity, the dark memes…there’s an intimacy that comes with that. I love reflecting on that.
GM: Why were you interested in explicitly addressing white readers? What are you hoping they take from the book?
It sometimes feels like the number of people we can say ‘I love you’ to gets smaller as we get older.
BP: I did want the reader to think of me as a friend. I tried to artificially create that comfort level on the page, starting with blunt questions you might ask a Black friend who you know will not hold them against you—and then said Black friend goes on 20-page tangents about his childhood here and there because he’s kind of a narcissist.
Friendships are uneven constructs. You talk about heavy politics one moment, about pop culture the next, about your bad dates the moment after, and your friend might just angrily vent at you about the state of the world. Sometimes, you simply throw book recommendations at each other. I wanted the book to hit a few of those notes all at once.
I think coating everything I wanted to say in the highs and lows of a friendship made it easier to write without pretending to know more than I do. I have no grand thesis about the diaspora of Black America or the Haitian-Canadian-American migration narrative, just my thoughts as your Black friend Ben.
GM: Did writing about your life make you see it differently?
BP: Well, life doesn’t always have a satisfactory resolution. It’s a life lesson I had to learn; narrative closure is a lie taught to us by [beloved Michener instructors] Jim Magnuson and Elizabeth McCracken. If you’re very lucky, life just kind of goes on. You keep waiting for the dust to settle—work, romance, friendship, family, racial discourse, politics—but then you realize the unsettled dust is just life happening… I got that last line from an X-Men comic! Boom!
GM: You have some incredible Black women in your life, starting with your mom, Belzie. In the essay “Sister, Sister,” you reckon with your male privilege. Was that a tough thing to do?
BP: I need to stop writing about my mom. She Googles herself now. I’ve created a monster.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone likes to “wrestle with their privilege” or even interrogate it. It doesn’t feel good! So you can’t “tsk-tsk” white people for their privilege if you’re not willing to at least acknowledge your own. I’ve had plenty. The one I’ll never shake off is male privilege.
You can’t ‘tsk-tsk’ white people for their privilege if you’re not willing to at least acknowledge your own.
The essays where I gripe about my love life felt like the setup to a punchline where you widen the shot to reveal a row of exhausted Black women side-eyeing me, and wondering if this fool is serious. (That might still happen.) I’ve had enough Black women in my life to at least glimpse this massive chasm and it felt wrong not to at least mention it.
GM: 2020 was one hell of a year. What has writing about that journey been like for you?
BP: Groan. Exhausting! I’m sure a pithier version of the book would exist if the summer of 2020 didn’t happen in the middle of my writing it. It was overwhelming in a lot of ways. For a while there, I was just looking to burn bridges, ha. On paper, via email, in person. I wanted to yell at someone. Anyone! Like, please, tell me you’re calling the cops on me, Amy Cooper, watch me emotionally eviscerate you into a puddle.
But while anger is fun to ride (and write), it’s not very productive beyond the immediate catharsis. It’s kind of like putting any underlying thought in bold+underline+italics. It just covers the content you’re trying to get across. I couldn’t write an Angry Book—it would desiccate me—but I did manage to write a book with a couple of angry chapters in it.
GM: You describe the book as a “tell-some, not a tell-all.” In this book where so much about your life is on the table, what were some of the things you wouldn’t write about?
BP: Hmm. My current relationship. My last conversation with my dad. Trying to make it as a screenwriter. (I’m not coy about it; it just felt like a massive tangent.) Some racist encounters that were just kind of boring. Some bridges were too dull to even bother burning. How terrified I am that this, writing as a career with a credit score of three digits, is all going to go away in the blink of an eye. Snakes.
GM: What’s your take on social media as a writer? We should note that you are verified on Twitter, you bastard.
BP: That blue checkmark both means nothing and people are despondent when it goes away, ha. I probably would be too, to be honest. But I at least try to remember that it’s all just 1s and 0s in our phone and not to take it too seriously? My followers count also plateaued at around 6K, so luckily the publisher never puts too much weight into it when they buy one of my books. This guy ain’t no influencer, thank God.
I don’t think social media has changed my writing habits too much beyond the absolute cringe of mandatory self-promotion. I block liberally; I only engage if I feel like it; I tell Ted Cruz he sucks regularly. It’s all about striking that healthy balance.
I remember making a joke about Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls being a literal bastard once and a very nice mom replied something like, “What does this say to the single parents of your readers?” I blocked her right away. Like, no. I’m not getting into a serious exchange about this because you process jokes from the great internet abyss as commentary on your life, Helen. You live inside my phone; I don’t live inside yours.
GM: I know a lot of the book was written during the Trump era. Are you feeling more optimistic now that we have Biden in office?
BP: I am! I am feeling more optimistic with Biden in office than Trump. It feels like the least controversial statement in the world but people get mad about that sentiment, too!
“The Democrats suck, too!” “Now’s not the time to get complacent!” It’s like going “Hurray! My arm isn’t on active fire anymore!” and having someone answer, “Ok, but have you even checked your cholesterol lately?”
I’ve always been a prolific reader, but until the year I graduated from college, I hadn’t read a single book by an author of Indian origin who’d grown up, like me, in America. Year after year, I searched for authors from the Indian diaspora whose work had something to do with my own life, until eventually I realized several years ago that, for me, the descriptive term “Indian” feels flattening and false. “India” is a nation; it’s a national identity, not a culture, nor an aesthetic. There are too many distinctive cultures, languages, faiths, castes, customs, practices originating within the boundaries of India, all of which affect the materiality of people’s lives, the material of their storytelling.
So why a list of diaspora novels?
There’s long been a danger within the ethos of “multiculturalism” that one vision of a nation or diaspora will stand in for the whole. A reader from another country might read a single book by an author of the Indian diaspora and feel that’s enough, now I know, in spite of the cultural heterogeneity of the nation and the diaspora. This year is a banner year for inventive and stirring and memorable books by us, the diaspora. It might be the most exciting year so far for Indian diaspora books within my lifetime.
Books can feel like doors, permission, freedom. This list of the 8 books from the Indian diaspora that feel new and thrilling is a starting point, not the last word. There are more of our stories coming, I know.
Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls is one of the best works of narrative nonfiction I’ve read. I’m pretty sure, by the end of the year, it will be one of this year’s best books, period. It’s the true crime story of two girls in an Uttar Pradesh village who are found hung from a mango tree. It’s also a feminist work about the girls’ death and the murder investigation that follows. The book unearths the way power works in an Indian village, and how that power is upheld and reproduced, not only by the legal system, but also by ordinary people who don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong. What sets it apart for me is that even though it’s highly particular and specific, it reflects a much larger story about how power works in insular communities to disadvantage and harm girls, especially poor ones that nobody shelters, everywhere around the world. This power can be as simple as rabid gossip. More importantly, perhaps, this power works through the emotion of shame, and that’s an insight of which everyone should be aware.
Sanjena Sathien’s debut novel Gold Diggers is magical realism about striving upper-middle-class Indian Americans. Told in first-person, the protagonist is a hapless teenager in Georgia with second-hand ambitions. He’s surrounded by academically achieving Indian Americans and other Asian Americans. He longs to be as talented as them, and one night, when he sees his beautiful neighbor—the object of his lust—drinking gold, he figures out how he might do it. There are scenes in this novel that so accurately reproduce the affluent Indian American experience of the aughts, I wondered if it was really intended as satire. Around halfway through, the novel breaks open. There’s a scene—and speech—that made me recognize just how brilliant this book is. The second half, in particular, is a dazzling gold heist story. Mindy Kaling is adapting this book, which makes perfect sense, but get in on the ground floor.
Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room is the diaspora novel I most anticipated this year. His first book, the unsettling Ours Are the Streets, is about a young man of Pakistani origin who grew up never belonging in England and returns to Kashmir and Afghanistan where he is radicalized. His second book The Year of the Runaways is phenomenal, detailing caste and racial discrimination in India and Britain’s Sikh communities. The China Room is utterly different, but it did not disappoint. It’s a dual narrative of a young bride in rural Punjab prior to Independence who is trying to figure out which of three husbands is hers, as well as the story of her great-grandson. Her great-grandson comes back to his uncle’s house in Punjab from a racist small-town in England, in hopes of shaking his addiction. It’s intimate and startling.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts is a departure but retains her usual grace and close attention to moments. Told in brief chapters, Lahiri wrote the novel in Italian and then translated it into English. It’s a subtle, unadorned story in small movements, but less culturally-situated than her other fiction. A solitary narrator wanders around a European town and makes observations and thinks about her life. In another writer’s hands, this might be dull, but she somehow makes it a luminous consideration of estrangement. The narrator says at one point: “Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.”
Akwaeke Emezi’s work has genius in it. I’ve never seen anything like what they do to bind language to their identity as a Black trans person of mixed Indian Tamil and Nigerian Igbo descent. Their language also expresses an overlapping reality as an ogbanje, or spirit who looks like a human.
In Dear Senthuran, Emezi writes their memoir in letters. Each letter is addressed to a different person in their life, but together the letters form a narrative about growing up trans in Nigeria, transition through two surgeries, gender identity, relationship struggles, an MFA program, the experience of writing and publishing their innovative debut novel Freshwater, and the aftermath of that publication. As they put it, “What words do you chant into the space between spaces, to bend your desires into reality?” This is language that stuns, rather than aims for pretty construction, while also revealing so much of a brilliant inner life. It’s a must-read, perhaps especially for experimental writers or artists of color who are trying to figure out a place for themselves in the existing market.
Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is a hybrid memoir about coming of age as an Indo Guyanese queer poet. It’s striking in its play with genre, and vivid in its imagery and metaphor. Mohabir weaves together fragments of his grandmother’s Bhojpuri songs with his own poems and prose about growing up queer—first in Florida with his family, and then his later coming of age in Queens, New York City. His family, which has coolie, mixed-caste ancestry and a history of indenture in Guyana, converted to Christianity. Mohabir sees in his father’s resistance to Hinduism a kind of self-hatred; he attributes this to colonialism.
The memoir is an unusual, lyric glimpse into Mohabir’s perspective, as well as a window onto a world that is severely underrepresented in English letters. It’s artistically unique, although it shares a bit of background with Gaiutra Bahadur’s earlier Coolie Woman, which is a well-researched family history and narrative of indenture. In contrast, Mohabir takes a personal, confessional approach, fusing poetry and fragmented memoir together to tell the story of a sexual and political coming of age.
Anjali Enjeti’s Southbound is a thoughtful essay collection about growing up multiracial and Indian American in America and her journey of activism. Like Sejal Shah’s collection This is One Way to Dance, it brings to light nuances of growing up in America as a person of Indian ancestry. It pays particular attention to hybrid or mixed-race identity—Enjeti is of Indian, Puerto Rican, and Austrian descent. She has a talent for illuminating personal transformation. Repeatedly, she writes about starting out with one view and then transforming her outlook based on lived experience and learning more. She writes essays about the complexity of experience and belief. For instance, she writes about the distinctions in feeling between her support for women who choose abortion before having children, and her view afterward. It’s important in these next several years to stay involved in activism and the political process, to build a better America, and to avoid a repeat of the last four years. Southbound is timely, speaking to this need.
I’ve never read a novel like Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitive, and, I kid you not, I’ve been waiting for this tremendous, complex, moving novel for years, but never expected to receive it. It’s the inventively-told story of three generations of a Tamil Muslim family in Chennai, San Francisco, and Texas. Two Tamil Muslim sisters take different approaches to their faith and lives before and during the Obama years. Seema is a lesbian Muslim activist in San Francisco who gets pregnant with a straight-edge Black lawyer she met at a protest. Her sister Tahera is orthodox, working and raising children in Texas, while struggling with Seema’s sexual orientation. Memorably, gorgeously, parts of the book are narrated by Seema’s baby in a direct address to his grandmother as he’s being born. I cried. There is so much of life in this book.
The 90-minute drive from my childhood home to visit my grandmother necessitates passing a pair of gigantic road signs written in all-caps white lettering on a black background. “IF YOU DIED / TODAY,” the first inquires, “WHERE / WOULD YOU SPEND / ETERNITY?” The second advises that “HELL IS / REAL.” The “H” in that one gets its own special red color to signify how seriously the sign wishes itself to be taken. This is some biblical shit, some hefty contemplation for the cars trundling innocently toward the nearby outlet mall.
My brother and I have always loved these signs. We chuckled at them growing up, snarkily admiring their confidence with the self-satisfied glee of children who have recently discovered irony. What, exactly, was ironic about the signs we surely could not say, not then. Recently it has been much easier. In part this is because we have learned the definition of irony; mostly this is because the sicker Grandma got the more likely it became that, as we sped toward her condominium and then nursing home and then funeral site, contemplations of eternity had filled the vehicle long before the signs appeared.
The conversations about my grandma’s future had started around the time I moved home, early in the pandemic. Grandma isn’t doing so well, we were told in low, pained tones. Grandma doesn’t know how poor her health is, Grandma needs help, Grandma might have to move. She’ll be better off in a home, we agreed, agonizing over logistics. Then, later, when she began her quick descent, the conversations grew vaguer, more equivocating. Grandma was slipping away and Grandma forgot things and Grandma couldn’t eat or walk or speak but it was okay, really, because now she is in pain but soon she won’t be, and that will be a relief, really, actually, if you think about it.
I understand that life’s value derives from its finiteness, but I find nothing inherently beautiful about the dying itself.
I do not and have never liked death. I understand that life’s value derives from its finiteness, and that dying imposes such a necessary truncation on existence. But I find nothing inherently beautiful about the dying itself, not conceptually and certainly not in practice. There was no glamor in watching my grandmother’s brain disease spread into her synapses, eating through her memories, dulling her opinions, depriving her of the ability to rearrange her pristine collection of antique cow figurines or dress herself in colorful beaded sweaters. Her impending death seemed manageable when we talked of it in abstractions, when my parents fed us sinewy assurances crowded together in the kitchen. It seemed okay until I had to think about it in any substantive, material way. When I tried to envision what went on inside her head, all I could picture was a white noise machine with the volume all the way up, drowning out everything that comprised her selfhood, making the world look like a staticky television.
In the dead of the pandemic winter, I drove past those two prosthelytizing signs to visit my grandmother for what I did not yet know would be the last time. My family stood awkwardly in the soil of a dead garden and waved to Grandma in her wheelchair through a looming picture window in the hospice unit. We spoke across the glass through a phone whose corollary a nurse held to my grandma’s ear. That woman’s arm must be getting sore, I kept thinking, watching it slowly start to quiver, though she never once complained. My mother kept motioning me to talk—she responds to your voice, she whispered—but the words stuck like too much peanut butter down my throat. I imagined how lonely it must feel for her, straining through the brain fog toward people who seemed to slip further and further out of reach. She pointed to her chest and then through the window, toward my father, her son. She groaned and hummed and repeated the gestures. We know, we said each time, as she pointed and shrieked, pointed and let out a horrible, high-pitched scream. We know you love us, we kept repeating, but she couldn’t make the noises into words. Her body was tired, the nurse was saying, but I could see her eyes and they didn’t look sleepy at all. I’ve watched horses’ eyelids stretch open in a lightning storm; this looked like that.
Whatever I had told myself about the gentle transition from life to death seemed belied by the obvious pain she was in.
The nurse told us, after, that we shouldn’t worry about the noise grandma was making, the horrifying screeching that sounded to me like some staggering blend of fear, frustration, and pain. “She’s developed her own language,” the nurse explained calmly, warmly. It’s a common symptom of dementia, apparently, this sort of nonverbal communication. I didn’t know whether to believe her; I still don’t. Whatever I had told myself about the gentle transition from life to death seemed belied by the obvious pain she was in. What I heard sounded to me like a primal distillation of human suffering. It seemed ludicrous to pass it off as an alternate means of conversance.
No one commented on the road signs that day on our drive back home. Frankly, I found their scare tactics unconvincing. I didn’t so much fear what came next for her; it was the getting there that troubled me.
“We have all agreed,” announces Marian Leatherby’s son early on in The Hearing Trumpet, “that she would be much better off in a home.” The “she” in this edict is Marian, the 92-year-old protagonist of Leonora Carrington’s 1974 surreal novel about a home for elderly women that becomes the epicenter of the apocalypse. The pronouncement is news to Marian, who has lived peaceably with her family in Mexico for the past fifteen years. “She would be much happier in an institution where there’s proper help to take care of her,” Marian’s daughter-in-law continues. “She ought to be dead,” concludes the grandson. “At that age people are better off dead.”
I felt ashamed to envision how she might feel, hearing us speak about her like a child.
Marian’s family speaks about her callously, unaware that Marian is now equipped with the eponymous hearing trumpet, which makes their conversation discernible. They say things no reasonably empathetic person would say about the elderly, but the first time I read The Hearing Trumpet, about a month after my grandmother passed away, this scene elicited in me a trickle of guilt, a rising heat around my neck. It recalled those pained conversations in my parents’ kitchen when we articulated, however kindly, a similar sentiment: this woman does not understand the reality of her suffering. I imagined with a pang that my grandma, like Marian, crouched nearby, jotting down notes as we spoke. I felt ashamed to envision how she might feel, hearing us speak about her like a child. But as I pictured her scoffing at our sighs about her future, I was surprised also to feel a thrill of satisfaction on her behalf, imagining that where we perceived a senile brain draining of consciousness there was, instead, an astonishingly colorful internal life.
Marian’s family soon recedes from the plot of The Hearing Trumpet, and their early remarks serve mostly to establish a contrast between the drab world Marian inhabits at the beginning of the novel and the resplendence of her inner life. Most of the narrative, in fact, focuses on Marian’s adventures upon arrival at the Well of Light Brotherhood, a home for elderly women. Here, Marian witnesses a murder and prevents another, leads a coordinated hunger strike against the home’s tyrannical religious leaders, and uncovers and then enters into a centuries-old mystery. Though early sections of the novel are written in a quirky but plausibly realistic style, its central portions consist of an increasingly fantastical story about a heretical nun who acquires sinister, supernatural gifts on her quest to find the Holy Grail. Apocalypse descends, heralding catastrophic climate change, Marian’s rebirth via pot of boiling stew, the arrival by ship of a wolf-woman, and a composite queen made of bees. The novel culminates in a dreamlike haze, gloriously liberated from the bounds of earthly logic.
Most critics have framed the novel’s construction this way, anyhow: as an ascent toward surreality, and a triumph of that form—delightfully absurd, inventive, cannily psychological, without the Freudian phallocentrism of much traditionally male surreal writing. But encountering this novel as I did in the immediate aftermath of my own grandmother’s death, I found a complementary storyline buried within The Hearing Trumpet’s surrealism.
Reading that early scene wherein Marian’s family sends her away, I wondered if the family, however selfish and unkind their remarks, had gotten something right. Perhaps they were watching a very old woman approach death; perhaps that very old woman narrating the novel did not and could not know this. Perhaps that family conversation is the last trace in the book of a world external to Marian’s narration, one watching warily as Marian’s formidable soul outgrows its container. And perhaps in addition to all the reasons I admired the book—its feisty, feminized surreality, the droll wit of its nonagenarian narrator—it might do something else less glamorous, which is to tell a first-person story of someone dying. Marian, after all, begins the story clinging to the last vestiges of her human sentience. She transcends reality through the apocalypse. I wondered if she might simultaneously transcend life through, well… death. If this is so, the vision it presented was, for me, a revelatory one. The Hearing Trumpet replaced my claustrophobic imagining of my grandmother’s death with a lavish narrative of adventure and cataclysmic triumph. In doing so, the novel presented a liberating framework for envisioning her passing, one that granted it a semblance of beauty.
If this is indeed death, the process seems remarkably pleasant.
The conversation among Marian’s family was the first clue that I might read an end-of-life story within Marian’s narration. Others followed. Despite the acuity of Marian’s observations and the prowess with which she unravels the mystery set at the elderly home, she admits occasional lapses in lucidity. “Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be,” she reflects at one point. “I often mix them up.” Even before the book has departed from its early realistic portions, Marian refers to a geographically distant living mother. Marian is ninety-two; a living mother would have to be well over 100, but Marian never acknowledges this preternaturally advanced age. Could this detail, I wondered, present merely an early suggestion of the surrealism to follow in later portions of the novel? Or might the reference to a living mother signify a fracture in Marian’s cognizance, a hint that she was not, after all, gripping so tenaciously to her consciousness? As the novel’s plot accelerates, logical barriers slip away. The world seems to bend to Marian’s will; every barrier to her aims resolves with a curious neatness. When the weather grows ice-cold, for example, Marian’s friend drops by, announcing herself newly a millionairess, and distributes fur coats and provisions to the women. Marian, it seemed to me, might well be losing hold of reality just as the book does, inserting her own fanciful narrative in its place.
If this is indeed death, the process seems remarkably pleasant. Marian’s passing does not seem to deprive her of any capability. In fact, the book offers a touchingly humanizing, invigorating portrait of old age. Marian and her peers are liberated from the norms that confine younger people, especially young women, within prescriptive social boundaries. As the residents begin their rebellion, one of the other elderly women delivers a rousing speech. “Although freedom has come to us somewhat late in life,” she informs the home’s matron, “we have no intention of throwing it away again.” She continues:
Many of us have passed our lives with domineering and peevish husbands. When we were finally delivered of these we were chivvied around by our sons and daughters who not only no longer loved us, but considered us a burden and objects of ridicule and shame. Do you imagine in your wildest dreams that now we have tasted freedom we are going to let ourselves be pushed around once more?
The old women in this novel are not enfeebled by their proximity to death, but seem freshly aware of their worth. As the writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk reflects in the afterword in the New York Review of Books’reissued version, out this past January, there is an inherent feminism in writing such a protagonist. “In old age a person becomes eccentric,” Tokarczuk observes. “This appears to be a natural law of development, once adapting to society is no longer essential, and the paths of the individual and the community start to diverge. Perhaps old age is actually the only time in life when we can finally be ourselves, without worrying about the demands of others or conforming to the social norms that we have been constantly instructed to follow.” That the book proves legitimately empowering of Marian and her fellow elderly women presents a vision of old age and even death that seemed exhilarating. In this way, The Hearing Trumpet gave me a story about my grandmother’s passing in which the world inside her head grew more vibrant, not less, as I had imagined.
The Hearing Trumpet gave me a story about my grandmother’s passing in which the world inside her head grew more vibrant, not less.
Crucially, though, the novel doesn’t make death seem desirable, the way troubling narratives that romanticize suffering sometimes can. Marian seems to relish being alive. “With age one becomes rather less sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of others,” she reports early on. “For instance at the age of forty I would have hesitated to eat oranges in a crowded tram or bus, today I would not only eat oranges with impunity but I would take an entire meal unblushingly in any public vehicle and wash it down with a glass of port which I take now and again as a special treat.” She seems amused by the increasingly turbulent turn of events, responding with as much composure to her friend’s makeover in a matching lilac wig and lilac limousine as to global climate destruction and famine. The Hearing Trumpet counsels not that death is good but merely that death will come, and that when it does, it might do so gloriously.
My father spoke even less than I did at that final visit to my grandmother’s nursing home. The last thing he said came out quiet and strangled, slipped in as we were saying our goodbyes. “Don’t be afraid, ma,” he managed, and then he was trampling flower stems in his haste to return to the car. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to know, whether he said this in the hopes that she understood, or with a prayer that she was already beyond comprehending that there might be anything to fear.
I don’t know what it felt like for her, those final months, weeks, and days, that slipping away from here toward elsewhere. I cannot possibly know if it was pain and fear and then a sea of blackness, the way I imagined it went. It doesn’t make a difference, in any case; the period of her life that we termed the dying part is finished. But the dead remain in memories, in the stories we tell of them. And the story I choose to tell of my grandmother, the one I hope for though may not entirely believe in, is one in which the end felt like or perhaps consisted of a harrowing, glorious adventure. A cabal of fearsome old ladies swaddled in furs, sharing a tin of biscuits, sailing home.
JonMooallem’s This is Chance! is disaster lit for people who still have faith in humanity. In a time when most news stories seem like they were beamed in from a dystopian YA novel, it can sound unreasonable to recommend a book about a major natural disaster—in this case, the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964—to offer solace. However, This is Chance! is one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in a long time, and reading it during the pandemic offered me comfort beyond anything I could get from a set of statistics.
The nonfiction book, now out in paperback, is set in the blossoming metropolis that was Anchorage, Alaska in the 1960s. It follows Genie Chance, a news reporter who became the voice of Alaska to the outside world as she covered the aftermath of the disaster over the radio. Ultimately, though, Mooallem’s book isn’t just about the second largest earthquake ever recorded, but about the real people who lived through it and the community they built together. Throughout the book, Mooallem expertly weaves in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town; Anchorage was preparing for a local theater production when the earthquake hit, but the play also speaks to themes of both community and mortality.
As someone who grew up, and currently resides, in Anchorage, I was excited to talk to Mooallem over the phone about a book that captures the culture and community of Anchorage more than any other book I’ve read.
McKayla Coyle: In the book, you talk about how disasters happen all over the world and people tend to react in the same way, which is with rationality and selflessness. You even point out that in response to disaster, “Anchorage was just like every other city in America.” Obviously this book has to be set in Alaska because it’s about the Great Alaskan Earthquake, but is there anything else about this particular setting that was especially useful or inspiring to you as you were writing this book?
Jon Mooallem: So the first thing is to clarify that it’s absolutely true that the response in Anchorage was typical of other communities in the world. But it’s typical only in the broadest sense: that people helped one another. People were cooperative and industrious and they managed to solve problems for themselves. However, Anchorage’s response to the quake is still 100% ripped through with the specific idiosyncrasies and character of Alaska. It’s the Alaskan version of that phenomenon. In general, when there’s a disaster in the community, people will rush in to help. In Alaska, some of them showed up with their own bulldozers, which is not something that’s going to happen in Manhattan. To me the first, most basic thing is to clarify that point.
What drew me to this story originally was the character of Anchorage at the time. The community of Anchorage was in this very particular moment in its history where it was really starting to feel confident and proud of itself, it was starting to feel like a real place in the world. The irony that this moment was when the buildings that they were so proud of were randomly knocked down by this disaster—the cruelty of that was really poignant to me. It would’ve been a completely different story in a different place. No one worried after 9/11 that Manhattan was going to go away, but there were legitimate fears about Anchorage disappearing after the quake. So, in my mind the details and the emotional weight of the story is absolutely specific to it being an Alaskan story.
No one worried after 9/11 that Manhattan was going to go away, but there were legitimate fears about Anchorage disappearing after the quake.
MC: I loved the details about how excited everyone in Anchorage was to have a JC Penney building. When I was in high school, we got an Olive Garden and there was like a one month wait to get a table there for literally the first six months. Things like that feel very special up here.
JM: That’s actually interesting to hear because Anchorage is obviously such a different place now than it was in ’64, right? But it doesn’t surprise me that there’s still an energy of always trying to be a little bit bigger and a little more like other places. I related to that on a personal level too, I go through the world thinking, “I think I’m pretty good, am I good?” So this whole idea that there’s always this force that’s waiting to pummel you, I can relate to that.
MC: Definitely. So I read another piece that you wrote about Alaska in TheNew York Times about a kayaking accident with your friends, and in that piece you talk about looking for meaning in disaster and there’s a question of whether there’s ever meaning in disaster. With This Is Chance!, did it feel like you were creating meaning in the disaster of the ’64 earthquake just by writing about it? Did you feel like you found any meaning?
JM: The thing I was talking about in that kayaking piece was that the randomness of things happening is inarguable. You can’t really pick apart questions like, “Why did a tree fall on my friend?” or “Why was there an earthquake?” I was resisting having any kind of mystical, magical-thinking answer to that, and instead I was just accepting that this is the world: it’s dangerous and erratic. That doesn’t mean that there’s no duty or meaning to be found in the aftermath of those events though, right? Specifically in the way people behave and respond.
I hadn’t thought of it like that, but of course when you spend time writing about something, you’re giving it a shape and therefore you’re leading it towards meaning. I wouldn’t say I was giving it meaning, but I would say I was highlighting possible meanings. I think that’s what we have to do just to survive. We have to be able to tell ourselves a story about what we’re living through. I think I’m feeling that right now, a year plus into the pandemic. I’m just beginning to have a little bit of perspective on what the whole thing has been like, to even begin to think of it in terms of a story.
I think that’s what we have to do just to survive. We have to be able to tell ourselves a story about what we’re living through.
MC: The idea that structure creates meaning, and the question of whether writing confers importance were things I was thinking about a lot while I was reading this. I didn’t know much about the earthquake before I read this book, and I live in Alaska. I had never heard of Genie Chance, and I hadn’t even considered that the earthquake caused damage in Alaska outside of Anchorage. You don’t think about the fact that you’re only hearing one story.
JM: That was actually something that really worried me while I was writing this book. It feels awesome that now people know about Genie Chance because I found her junk in a basement and wrote a book about her. But at the same time, there’s a cosmic unfairness. The idea that—in addition to her story being a pretty incredible story—the reason why this book hangs in large part on her story was because she was the one whose stuff I had access to. Even she knew that her story was just one story that could be told about the disaster. That’s what I was thinking about when you were talking about writing giving things this weight, or this emphasis, is how that doesn’t seem fair to me. The best I could do to remedy that is to say explicitly in the book, “There are other stories that someone else might tell or that no one will ever be able to tell, so let’s pause and keep that in our heads.” I guess you could say that telling the story of a woman from that time is corrective to the record, but it only goes a tiny step beyond. The unfairness of it still seems to outweigh the good.
MC: Related to that, you focus a lot on the mortality of the people that you’re writing about, but by writing about them you’re immortalizing them in a way. Did you ever felt like you were bringing people back from the dead, or rescuing them from death, or anything along those lines?
JM: The problem is there’s truth to that, but the words we use to talk about it are so overblown. I’m clearly not immortalizing anyone, my book could be out of print next year. But there’s something real that’s happening, and I don’t want to sound too woo-woo, but I’ve got to believe there’s something positive if just one other person in the world knows these peoples’ names after all this time. That seems good, just in a small way.
I never really thought of it as immortalizing them. To me, the takeaway wasn’t, “Look at this person.” It wasn’t about the individual people. It was this overwhelming sense of “My lord, there’s so many people!” They all have these stories, and they all come and go. I guess it sounds a little sappy when you put it like that, but there’s a visceral experience when you actually realize that there are so many people with their own stories and lives. We walk around thinking we’re the protagonists of our own life—and we are—but the stories of our lives are not that indispensable in the long run. I don’t mean that as a bummer, I just think that’s what it is.
MC: That was something I really liked about the Our Town strand in the book. The moments when you were jumping between first introducing someone and then being like, “And then a year later he would be dead and there’d be a plaque for him right next to where he’s standing right now,” really hit me. There’s transiency but there’s also repetition.
We walk around thinking we’re the protagonists of our own life—and we are—but the stories of our lives are not that indispensable in the long run.
JM: I love that you had that response, because that was sincerely what it felt like to work on the book. I had so many documents, it was absurd. For something that happened 50-some-odd years ago, the resolution at which these stories were preserved was like magic. I was spending all my time within those three days. I’d spend hours a day obsessing over the smallest details about what a particular person did on one day, and then I would think “I should Google this guy,” and without fail the first thing I’d find was an obituary. That’s not a perspective that we walk around with in daily life.
I think there’s something parallel to this in the story of the earthquake. It’s a reminder that the way you see the world around you is pretty limited, and that the earth can move and all these shops on Fourth Avenue can drop underground. That’s not in your vocabulary of possibilities as you just make your way through the world. You’re not conscious of that—why would you be? But it’s kind of incredible, and things start to happen when your life becomes imbued with the realization of these possibilities.
That’s the whole point of Our Town, so it made sense to me to write the book like this. It just seemed like the natural way to tell the story if you were talking to a friend. If I were to tell you, “There was this guy Bill Davis and he was a kind of hobbyist mountaineer, he ended up running the search and rescue thing,” then your next question would be, “Did you talk to him?” and I’d say, “Yeah I talked to him, he was 80-something years old and he died a year after I talked to him. He never got to see the book.” I’m just being honest, but it changes the story to know all that.
MC: So we’ve been talking about the characters a lot—I’m gonna call them characters, they’re obviously real people, but they carry a particularly large amount of weight in this book. There are parts where you talk about how the city has lost all familiarity, and that it’s been “reduced to a wilderness.” In that space, the people of Anchorage aren’t just the heroes, they become the setting of the book, too. I think that’s why this book rang so true to Anchorage for me, because you focus so heavily on the personalities and the anecdotes and the weird people who live here. That felt more real than just writing, “Oh, there’s a lot of trees and there’s bears sometimes,” you know what I mean? I was wondering how it’s different to lean primarily on people to create your setting rather than leaning on a physical environment?
JM: That’s a really cool way to think of it. I think in the book I say something about how the people became this kind of alternate infrastructure, but you’re right, “setting” is a much more literary way to think about it. I do think that the physical space and the community are related.
That’s the upshot of the book: you hold onto everyone, because that’s what keeps you from sliding off the face of this moving earth.
I think these people who were in Anchorage at the time really did see themselves as mid-century frontierspeople. Genie talks about this explicitly, as does almost everyone in Anchorage at that time, that this mindset fosters interdependence. So I think that people are the setting in the sense that, even before the quake, there’s not much in the city itself. The spareness of the environment makes you notice the people more, and how they relied on each other in very obvious ways.
That’s the upshot of the book: you hold onto everyone, because that’s what keeps you from sliding off the face of this moving earth. When the earthquake comes and knocks down the little bit of quote-unquote metropolitan civilization that exists there, suddenly everyone is living in the bush. People in the middle of downtown Anchorage are getting their news via ham radio and going to their neighbor’s meat locker for food. All the things that disguise their interdependence in a more developed, 20th century community are suddenly gone. Maybe the people are always the setting, but you don’t notice it as much.
MC: I think that the thesis of your book can basically be summed up with your line, “Our goodness is ordinary.” How has your belief in human goodness changed from when you began writing this book to now that we’re a year into the pandemic?
JM: That’s one that I don’t exactly have an answer for, though it’s one that I’m asking myself constantly. There’s definitely been moments in the past year when I was like, “My book is all wrong,” you know? Like, “People are vile,” and, “Look at these idiots!” I’ve gone through all kinds of ups and downs on that front. And it’s been weird to also have this strange, personal-slash-professional stake in whether or not people are going to turn out to be good. So on top of all the moral and spiritual aspects of it, I’m like, “Am I right? Am I wrong?”
I do think that there’s been so much failure of human ingenuity and leadership along the way, large and small, and I’m incredibly cognizant of that. But given that’s the case, there was a lot of good at work; I definitely did way more good this year, in a civic context, than I’ve done in my life, and I’ve seen other people doing the same thing. And good isn’t always in the doing, but in thinking and in challenging the ways that we think about things. There’s been a lot of really positive action, but there’s also been positive soul searching and quiet contemplation that’s happening. So I think if it’s a yes no, “Are people good?” Then yeah, I still come out on “People are good.”
MC: In the book, there’s a difference between being quote-unquote good in an active, visible way in the short term, versus being that same kind of good in the long term. Like you said about introspection, there’s variety to what it means to be good.
JM: I’m really glad you mentioned that, actually, because that’s one thing that I was trying to make clear when the book first came out at the beginning of the pandemic. The book is about three days, it’s the first three days after this completely devastating, confusing disaster—at the end of the book, they’ve only just figured out how many people died. When you look at disaster studies, that’s a very particular window of time. It’s when you see this altruistic collaboration at its peak. After that is when all the bullshit starts to happen. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and impatience and frustration. In some ways, it’s not a good analog to a pandemic, because we haven’t been in that honeymoon period this whole year. We’ve been moving in and out of thorniness and confusion. It’s not a question of “Are people perfect all the time,” it’s that there are these windows where you see what’s possible.
MC: I was so sad when I was reading the book and I got to the end of those three days. All of a sudden, the bureaucracy came in, and I was like, “Oh, fuck, I guess they can’t keep this up.” They have to live in a different society now than they’ve been in for the last three days, and this other society has radically different expectations.
There’s something we can do right now to fix this: there’s something people can do to help. That’s such a relief after going through this whole year.
JM: I think that’s totally right. And I feel like, with the vaccine, it’s a chance to be in that moment again. Now there’s just one big project, which is to get these vaccines in peoples’ bodies. There’s something we can do right now to fix this: there’s something people can do to help. That’s such a relief after going through this whole year where that has often not been the case.
MC: Yeah, it’s a clear-cut opportunity to do good. I got my first vaccine two weeks ago, and I was thinking about how I hadn’t been around this many people in a year, but I also hadn’t been around this many happy people. You go into a grocery store, and there’s a lot of people, but they’re all at their wit’s end. But you go to a clinic and everyone’s like, “We’re getting the vaccine!” They’re so elated.
JM: I’ve heard that from so many people. There’s something about being in proximity to that many people. Everyone feels like they’re part of something substantial, they’re not side-eyeing each other, like at the grocery store. It feels like the fellowship I’m describing in the book, and it’s very welcome.
“Hương, 1978” from Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
Hương and her sons had been in the country for only a month, but already they were having problems.
Their sponsor, a white Catholic priest, paired them with the Minhs. “Both thirty-two,” he said while driving. “You will like them.”
The priest—she never remembered his name—was old and serious and restrained. He walked with his hands behind his back as he took long, sweeping strides and had a habit of keeping his head slightly bent forward as if he were listening to something everyone else could not hear, giving him a look of arrogant superiority. He reminded her of the priests who came to her childhood village with hard European candies and boxes of Bibles in hopes of converting someone in their bad Vietnamese. She remembered one priest who couldn’t pronounce bạn and instead said bàn and they made fun of him behind his back, calling him Father Table. Still, Hương did not not like this New Orleans priest. She was lucky, she told herself. She was alive. She made it to America.
The priest took an exit onto another highway. He didn’t use his blinker.
They had been on and off highways all morning, dropping off other “refugees”—the word still felt strange in her mouth, in her mind—at temporary homes. Earlier that morning, the priest dropped off a couple from Vũng Tàu at a tall building. Then a single Saigonese girl at a short house painted pink. Another family of three was given to an American fisherman and his wife, and they greeted each other with hugs as if they had known each other all their lives; the wife gave their son a pink stuffed elephant. Hương and her boys were the last to be dropped off.
Bình slept in an infant seat as Tuấn kneeled by the window and watched as the world slipped by, pointing and calling out the names of everything he saw: xe hơi, xe đạp, cây, nhà. What Hương noticed the most was the concrete—the buildings, the roads, the sidewalks, the fountains, the statues. So much concrete, she thought. She imagined them rubbing against her, scraping her knees and hands, leaving bruises and scrapes and marks. She was thinking that way nowadays: what can hurt her, what can leave a scar.
The priest turned onto a road, and just like that, the hardness of the city disappeared, replaced by flat plots of parched grass and a traffic light. Beyond that, a billboard advertised a deep red sausage with rice grains inside.
As they waited, the priest glanced up into his rearview mirror and smiled. “Gần tới rới,” he said, Almost there, in an accent Hương found oddly charming, like the way the Australian English teachers at the refugee camp spoke, and that gave her something to latch on to, a type of comfort. The van continued down the long stretch of road for another five minutes before slowing down into a turn. In front of a house, a fat Vietnamese man waited.
“Mr. Minh!” the priest chuckled. Mr. Minh waved when he saw them.
“Welcome to America!” Mr. Minh shouted as the priest parked the car. He pulled the door open and bowed extravagantly, making a show of the gesture. His large hands came at her next and grabbed her wrists. He shook them furiously. “Chị will like it here very much!” he said. “It’s America! We’re all friends here!” His face glowed red. How unlike her husband he was. Công was thin and suave, bookish and reserved, and, above all, neat; this man was chubby and rude, drunk and loud—above all, loud. She could have pictured Mr. Minh spending his time at bars and his poor wife coming to get him at three in the morning. She thought, not without bitterness, that they never would have been friends in Vietnam. They were two different types of people; a friendship had little chance.
“We’re all friends here!” Mr. Minh repeated, confidently, caressing her sloppily, stupidly. It made Hương feel little, like a bug waiting to be squashed. She held on to her baby boy and motioned for her other son to stand closer. The wife—Hương noticed her now—stood aside as if this were the regular order of things.
“He used to be a police officer,” the wife said in her scratchy voice. “Now, he drinks!” She laughed and Hương didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh out of courtesy or just nod sadly in agreement. She decided on doing neither and stayed silent and stiff.
“Very well,” the wife said. Then, in English, she said something to the priest, shook his hand, and grabbed Hương’s suitcase. The priest drove away.
“This way,” she said.
Hương walked up the porch steps and crossed the threshold. Right away, she smelled the rotting wood, disarming at first but only because it came so suddenly. The lights were off, and in the darkness, the room felt vast and empty. As her eyes adjusted, she realized the room was small and arranged at its center were a floral fabric sofa, a white plastic chair, and a small television. A fan spun lazily above.
The wife told Hương it was called a “shotgun house.” Ngôi nhà súng, she clarified. “See?” she said. She placed the suitcase down and mimed the shape of a gun with one hand. With her other, she held her wrist. Closing one eye, she looked through an invisible scope and the appearance of intense concentration fell onto her face. For a few seconds, she stood silently, so focused on something in the distance that Hương looked toward where the wife stared, too. Then “Psssh!”—the imitated sound of gunfire. It was so unexpected but also so childish, Hương jumped back and felt stupid for doing so. Like a child tricked in a schoolyard, she immediately hated the Minhs, their poverty, their obnoxiousness, their immaturity.
“See?” the wife said. “A house for guns.” She made the motion of dusting off her hands. “But you don’t have to worry about that here. No war, not here, not ever.”
“Of course,” said Hương, composing herself.
“That’s all in the past now,” the wife said.
“Yes,” said Hương, “the past.”
“Just stay out of the doorways to be on the safe side.” She broke out into a cackle, though Hương didn’t find any of it funny. Nothing in America was funny. Mrs. Minh’s tricks weren’t funny, their situation as người Việt wasn’t funny, and Hương felt outraged that people like the Minhs should even think about laughing.
“Let me show you more,” said the wife. She led Hương through the doorways and into the kitchen and the couple’s bedroom in the back. “You’ll sleep up front. The phòng khách,” said Mrs. Minh.
The next morning, the priest arrived to take Hương downtown, dropping her off at the church. Before coming to America, Hương had never been inside a church. In Mỹ Tho there was none. In Saigon, only a handful. But here they were everywhere, and all the other Vietnamese seemed grateful for that. The first few weeks, as they slept in the pews, they seemed at peace. Hương, for her part, slept uneasily under the watch of the statue of Jesus on the cross. His sad, pleading eyes made her want to cross herself like all the other Catholics did. She knew Công would have laughed at her for it, so she didn’t.
“Here,” the priest said before letting her go. He tore out a sheet of yellow paper from a legal pad he carried everywhere. For the last week they had been finding her a job. “Because you need money to survive in New Orleans,” he said as if he thought life in other countries were any different. They had often gone out in groups, but today was her first day alone. Franklin’s Seafood, said one line, followed by an address. Poydras Street Dry Cleaners, said another.
“Franklin’s looking for cashiers,” he said, “and Poydras a clothes folder. Oh, and…” He wrote something else down and gave another sheet to Hương. “Be on the lookout for signs that say HIRING.” She held the loose sheet of paper and sounded out the word with her lips.
“Hi-Ring,” she whispered.
“Hi-er-ing,” he said.
“Hi-yering.”
“Hi-er-ing.” Hương mouthed the words and folded the paper away. The priest gave her directions and she was on her way, pushing the stroller she’d borrowed from the church for Bình with one hand and leading Tuấn with the other. By the time she was on Magazine Street, she looked up and wondered how a city could be so empty. Down one way, a driver had parked his school bus and was reading the newspaper and eating a doughnut. Down another, two women talked to each other in smart business skirts.
As she walked, Hương reached into her purse for a pocket-sized notebook, a gift from the church. Từ vựng căn bản, she had written at the top of the first page, followed by the phrases she had remembered from her English lessons:
Hello.
How are you?
I am fine.
Thank you.
She practiced the words aloud, repeating them in whispers, analyzing the pronunciation, the tones. English was such a strange language. Whereas in Vietnamese, the words told you how they wanted to be pronounced, in English the words remained shrouded in mystery.
She scanned the priest’s list, then returned to the notebook. So many words, so many ideas, so many meanings. If only Công could see her now! She imagined that she spoke English the way he spoke French, like he was born there. She saw them sitting together on a porch looking out on a garden—maybe like one of the gardens she’d passed here in New Orleans, with immaculate flower beds and sprinklers and birdbaths—and she’s holding up the words, helping him pronounce them. What she would tell him then, when they were settled, successful, American, reminiscing of all that life threw at them, the improbability of their survival, and yet nonetheless…
Suddenly, Tuấn pulled her arm. “Look!” he said. “A cat!”
“Tuấn!” Hương grabbed him before he stepped into the street. A car passed by. A horn sounded.
“But it was a cat,” her son said, “and it wasn’t like any other cat. Didn’t you see it?”
“Stay with mẹ,” she said.
They walked two more blocks before finding the first address on the list. A cartoon fish with huge eyes stared back at her from a tin sign. Leaning her forehead against the glass, she peered inside and imagined herself holding a tray of drinks and chatting with customers.
A girl at the front counter waved at Hương to get her attention. When Hương didn’t come in, the girl came to the door and asked her something she couldn’t understand. Hương reached for the notebook in her purse then, but it was gone. A sense of panic came over her. After emptying everything into her hands, she realized she must have dropped it while Tuấn was running into the street. She found the note the priest gave her—there at the bottom of her purse, a piece of shining gold—and handed it over.
“Please,” Hương said in an almost whisper, unsure if it meant làm ơn. Surely, it meant làm ơn! She forced a smile and hoped it didn’t appear too eager. Then she stopped smiling altogether to avoid any possibility of looking desperate. She remembered the women in their business suits. How confident they were. How successful.
The girl looked at the word, then at Hương. She did this several times, confused. “No,” the girl said. “No,” she said again, this time more forceful, like the word was a pebble and she was flicking it toward what must have been a strange Vietnamese woman, a woman who did not belong here, a foreigner. “Do you want to eat?” the girl continued, slow and loud. “We serve food. Do you want to eat?”
“Eat?” Hương asked. She didn’t know what that meant. It sounded like a hiccup, one that you tried to suppress. Eat! Eat! Eat! What was the girl talking about?
The girl became impatient, angry even, pointing inside, where people were enjoying their grotesquely large meals.
“I am sorry,” Hương said, giving up, using the phrase she knew by heart: I am sorry. It was a good phrase to know. This was what the Australian English teachers taught her at the refugee camp. I am sorry for what happened.
Before the girl could say anything else, Hương turned around and walked away with a steady stride. She didn’t know what had just happened, but she felt, in the pit of her stomach, that she had done something wrong. The last thing she saw on the girl’s face was a grimace. She was being told, she was sure, that she had done something rude, against the country’s laws. They would arrest her. They would arrest a woman and her children for not knowing the rules. Would they even let her stay because she was arrested? What would happen to them all then? They crossed the street and took another corner. She walked faster.
She didn’t know what had just happened, but she felt, in the pit of her stomach, that she had done something wrong.
“Mẹ, what’s wrong?” Tuấn asked. He looked back toward where they had come from.
“Don’t look back,” said Hương. She pushed the stroller and led Tuấn away. “Don’t you look.”
Suddenly, she noticed, all around her people were talking. There were couples talking, groups talking, children talking, a woman held a dog in her arms and she, too, was talking to that small animal. Yet the words they were saying didn’t make any sense. She repeated the words she knew in her head, a chaotic mantra of foreign sounds that contorted her mouth comically, strangely, like a puppet’s—Yes, no, thank you, please, yes, no, sorry, hello, goodbye, no, sorry. The important part was to keep moving. She knew that much. She saw a fenced-in and empty park across the street and without looking ran toward it, but before she reached the gate, a man with beads around his neck and oversized sunglasses bumped into her. She could smell the alcohol on him. All of a sudden, the whole city smelled of alcohol and everyone everywhere was drinking and smiling and laughing. What was wrong with these people? What was wrong with this place?
She turned back and was stepping into the street, pushing the stroller with both hands, when a car slammed its brakes and the driver pressed down on his horn. It stopped before hitting her or the stroller. She looked down at her shaking hands: she had let go. In the surprise of the car coming and its horn sounding, so suddenly and so loudly—she had let go. The first sign of danger and her first instinct was to let go and she’d nearly killed her son and the man pressed down on his horn again and she realized she was still in the middle of the street and she felt ashamed, the most shame she’d ever felt in her life. She held back tears, but Bình cried. She clasped the handlebar of the stroller more tightly.
“Stupid fucking lady!” the driver screamed.
“What did he say?” Tuấn asked.
“Let’s go home,” she replied. “He said we should go home.” They crossed the street and headed down another.
“But home is so far away,” said her son. “I’m tired.”
“What?” She had forgotten what she told him. She looked around for anything that might have been familiar.
“Home is far away,” her son repeated.
“I know,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I know.”
The Minhs were home when Hương returned. After dinner, Mrs. Minh left for a job cleaning at a university. Hương’s sons slept peacefully. She kept a watchful eye on Bình. Did he understand that he’d nearly died today? Did he know he had a horrible, reckless mother? She would have to tell Công, wouldn’t she, about all that had happened? She would confess it to him, everything she’d ever done—if only she were given the chance, an opportunity to talk to him, to learn what had happened, to get him to America and plan a way forward. For that she would confess it all.
At the camp, she had written him and mailed the letter to their home in Mỹ Tho. When she received no answer, she wrote to their old home in Saigon. She wrote as soon as she was able to. She must have sent a letter every day. Noticing how many letters she had been sending off, another woman at the camp reprimanded her.
“Are you so stupid?” the woman asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The Communists, when they see the letters, they’ll know you escaped and they’ll know who to punish: your husband!” Hương stopped writing then.
As the sun rose, Mrs. Minh arrived home, smelling of detergent and rubber gloves. Without a word, she joined Hương on the couch and watched TV, which Hương had turned on for its soft glow. From her seat, Mrs. Minh would glance at her temporary guest every few minutes as if to say something important but ended up talking only about the shows. In this show, a witch causes havoc by her misunderstandings but her husband loves her anyway. In this one, there’s a magical talking horse. Here, a group of Americans are shipwrecked.
They settled on the shipwreck show, or at least Mrs. Minh did. In black and white, it looked far away, a different place, a different time. Even if it was a different language, it was easy to laugh at, easily understood.
Except Hương wasn’t laughing. It didn’t even look like she was paying attention. The light on the screen bounced off her eyes.
This would happen multiple nights: Hương staring blankly at the screen in the dark while Mrs. Minh sat on the edge of the couch in contemplation. It made the air heavy, both of them knew, but neither one knew how to fix it.
Then one night Mrs. Minh asked, “What do you think of America?”
“Dạ thích,” Hương said. “It’s not Vietnam, but it’s not bad, either.” She coughed to clear her throat. All day she hadn’t been talking to anyone in Vietnamese except her sons. It felt so strange after so much silence, and the words came out muddy and sticky.
“The priest said you left on a boat,” the wife continued. “Is that true?”
“Vâng.” Hương wanted to tell the wife about the way the water moved, how you never got used to it, about the men on the boat and their constant fighting, about the uneasy sense of knowing only water, knowing that it connected the entire world—one shore to another—yet not knowing when you might see land. There were so many things to say, and finally she decided to ask a question, the most important question she could ask, the only one that mattered—“Do you know how to get a message back to Vietnam? I have a husband. He was left behind…”—but Hương stopped short of finishing when there was shuffling noise in the bedroom, the rustling of sheets, the bouncing of bedsprings.
She bit her lips and held her breath. Something was coming; she could feel it. Mrs. Minh’s eyes wandered to the back of the house. Then came a scream and the sound of glass hitting wall, one clash of impact followed by the rain-like sound of hundreds of shards falling. The baby woke with a cry and Hương got up to calm him. Tuấn stirred from his corner of the couch and asked what was going on.
“Nothing,” she told him. “Nothing to be afraid of.” She bounced the baby as footsteps made their way across the hardwood floor and the bathroom door closed and the shower turned on. The baby leaned his head on her chest and quieted.
“I’ll go check on him,” Mrs. Minh said, standing up. “Yes. I’ll go do that.”
The couple would fight into the morning. Something else would break. At one point, Hương thought she heard a smack on skin but she wasn’t sure.
By eight, Mr. Minh had left, slamming the door so hard Hương was sure the house would fall down. Mrs. Minh mumbled as she prepared breakfast, “Damn that man. Worthless…”
The next afternoon, Hương left the Minhs. With Bình in her arms and Tuấn following behind, she walked several blocks until she saw a motel. The word, she remembered, meant place to stay. She would stay at the motel for a week, find a way to get in touch with Công, and get him here to New Orleans. No one told her how to, but, she decided, no more waiting. It was time for action. She paid in cash. The room was twenty-five dollars. She put the thirty dollars she had left in her front pocket, holding her hand over it to make sure it was secure.
After she called him, the priest arrived the next morning. He sat in his van as Hương led the boys out. The radio played gospel hymns, but he turned it off as they made their journey downtown.
He had been searching for her all morning, he said when they were on the highway. The window was down and the wind was more hot than cool. The Minhs had told him she “just up and left,” without telling them where she was heading. She hadn’t even left a note about where she was going, how to reach her, or what her intentions were. She could have “dropped off the face of the earth”— she had no idea what that could possibly have meant.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” the priest said. Did she know New Orleans could be a dangerous place? he went on. People get murdered here. Robbed. Beaten. She was a recent immigrant, and people could have taken advantage of her. Why did she leave?
She didn’t answer him right away. It could have been a rhetorical question. But he didn’t have to live with them. He didn’t have to live with Mr. Minh’s night terrors or his drunkenness. Or the couple’s arguments. He didn’t have to live as if in a nightmare, where everywhere she turned something was strange, askew, incoherent. That was what her time in New Orleans had been like. He couldn’t have understood any of this. His life wasn’t complicated. He was a priest, for God’s sake! He didn’t know a thing about suffering.
At the church, they filed into his office. The priest turned on the air-conditioning and searched through the mess on his desk.
“They don’t like us,” she said finally. She didn’t know what she expected him to say or do. Anger bubbled inside her. “You don’t understand,” she managed to say before taking a seat.
She realized she was less of a person and more of a test to this man. She was a puzzle to figure out, a jigsaw, a number among other numbers.
The walls of the room were lined with certificates with fancy writing and gold seals; crosses, some plain wood, others decorated with gold; and there were photos, mostly of him—here with a group of nuns, there with a youth baseball team, another a group portrait with other priests. And among all this, a framed cream-colored piece of paper. An emblem sat in the middle and below it, a motto: In service to One, in service to All.
Finally the priest said, “I’ve been a priest for ten years.” He took off his glasses, rubbed them with a cloth, and put them back on. “And I don’t think I’ve ever taken on more than I have this year.” He went on to talk about God, bringing up Bible stories about tests and hardships. God was testing him, he told her.
For the first time since she’d met him, she realized she was less of a person and more of a test to this man. She was a puzzle to figure out, a jigsaw, a number among other numbers. He lived to serve not humanity but his ideas and career. In that way, she thought, Catholics were not too dissimilar from the Communists. She had been hoping this man was different. How foolish she was to put her life in his hands.
“Don’t you understand?” he asked, rhetorically. He smiled dumbly, as if he had reached an epiphany.
She breathed in and exhaled. She was exhausted. “Yes,” she said and left.
As she closed the door, a woman’s voice, somewhere, squealed, “Trời ơi!”
Hương looked up. She scanned the pews to see if anyone was there, and her eyes stopped at a closet door left ajar, a thin strip of light streaming out. She paused at the threshold. Inside, Thủy, a girl younger than Hương whom she knew from the church, was bent over a table.
“Chị Hương!” Thủy opened the door and cried out her name again. The girl jumped up and down and reached out for Hương’s hands. “Come! You have to hear this!” she said. Hương didn’t know how to react as Thủy moved aside and showed her the cassette player on the table. She pressed a button and it began to click. Soon, through the static, a man spoke.
“Thủy ơi!” said the grainy voice. “How I miss you so! It is raining here again, my love. Can you hear the water? The heavens cry.” The voice quieted to the sound of water pelting against mud.
The man was probably a young boy Thủy’s age. Hương wanted to laugh at their young, naïve love. Instead, she took a step closer, inspecting the cassette player—the spinning of the tape reel, the clicking of the movement, the smooth buttons with their colorful symbols on top. She focused on the spinning of the wheels. For a moment, there was no other sound except that clicking as it echoed in that small closet.
“Thủy?” the man’s voice came on again. Hương stepped back.
“There he is!” Thủy squealed and clapped her hands in excitement. She hugged Hương, and then, embarrassed, restrained herself.
“Thủy, when you return home, we should get married! I know that’s not what your parents want, but…”
Thủy turned down the volume and Hương left the girl to her tape message.
Walking down Camp Street, Hương thought about the ease of making a cassette. Unlike the letter, its content wasn’t obvious; instead, it was hidden, unless the tape was played. But people would play it only if it looked suspicious. If she were to label it “Uncle Hổ’s Teachings” or maybe just “Communism,” they would not even bother looking any further into the matter. Yet there was the cost of sending it. And would she mail it to their Mỹ Tho address or their Saigon one? Would Công still be there? Was Công safe? What if the Communists captured him? No, she had to wipe those uncertainties from her mind. She needed to think positively; it was the only way. She would have to ask the priest about the tape recorder. After apologizing for her behavior that morning, she would say politely, “Cha, cho con mượn cái này.” Coyly, she would add, “I will return it, I swear. Just one night.”
Công would be reached. They would be reunited. New Orleans looked brighter and happier then. She smiled. It was the first time in weeks. Perhaps even months.
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![Thérèse Desqueyroux (Penguin Modern Classics) [ Language:English ]: Mauriac, Francois: 9780141394053: Amazon.com: Books](https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/81E29mM1zoL.jpg)
