10 Spy Novels With Women Protagonists

Posted on by Jo Lou

For the first time in the agency’s 74-year history, women dominate the upper ranks of the CIA. Since 2018, Gina Haspel has been the Director of Central Intelligence, and three of her top five directorates (support, analysis, and science & technology) are also headed by women.  

Women played key roles in espionage operations during World War II, but peace and the Cold War relegated women to largely secretarial or administrative jobs. Cold War fiction tended to mirror the gender roles that were available to women in the real business of spies—books were filled with dedicated secretaries and pretty girls with whom flirty romances might yield intelligence.  

Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, and the first woman to hold that position (from 1992-1996), reflected on the role of women in spy fiction in her introduction to the reissue of Graham and Hugh Greene’s collection of spy fiction, The Spy’s Bedside Book. “The true spy story resembles real life as we all actually know it,” she wrote about the stories in the book, all of which were written before 1957. Her only complaint about the old stories in the book is that, except for a nod to Mata Hari, women are of little consequence.   

Fiction’s espionage genre has long been a boy’s club. Wikipedia’s list of top living spy authors still only contains two women among the seventy names: Stella Rimington and Gayle Lynds. But as women rise in the rank of the CIA, spy fiction too is changing. The realistic spy novel has always tried to hold up a dark mirror to the wider world, so it is only fitting that as the world changes, that mirror reflects more women as central characters in spy novels.  

Gayle Lynds’s Masquerade, published in 1996, became the first spy novel written by a woman to become a bestseller, and it helped open the genre for other women. Kate Atkinson, a literary author, entered the spy genre with Transcription, and recently a new group of talented young writers, including Lauren Wilkinson (American Spy) and Rosalie Knecht (Who is Vera Kelly?), have written well-received works.

There’s also Natasha Walter, a British feminist author and human rights advocate, who published a debut spy novel, A Quiet Life in 2016. At the time, she made a plea in The Guardian for more women spies in fiction. She wrote:

“I have often felt alienated by spy fiction because it has often seemed so rigidly masculine….Reading or watching spy narratives can feel claustrophobic when it means entering a world in which it is so often men who see and women who are seen – and seen as sexualized bodies above all.”  

My new novel, The Mercenary, is part of this movement in spy fiction, featuring a young KGB officer who defects when she becomes disenchanted with corruption in 1980s Soviet Union. Here are ten spy novels (seven by women, three by men) where women are strong central characters. 

Restless by William Boyd

Eva, a young Russian woman, is recruited after her brother’s death to work for the British secret service in London during WWII. She falls for her mentor, Lucas Romer, who works as a double agent, and his betrayal leads to Eva’s attempted murder. The tale is interlinked with the story of Eva’s daughter in the 1970s and how she comes to terms with the discovery of her mother’s secret life as a spy. 

Hannah’s War by Jan Eliasberg

Dr. Hannah Weiss, a Jewish nuclear physicist who escaped Nazi Germany in 1938, works with American scientists on the atom bomb in 1945 Los Alamos, where she fends off chauvinistic flirtations from male colleagues. Hannah’s colleagues circulate a petition about her background, causing military intelligence to open an investigation into possible subversives on the team. The lead investigator wants to know whether Hannah is spying for the Nazis. Keenly developed characters add substance to the intrigue in this debut.

The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff

A story of friendship and courage centered around a ring of female secret agents during World War II. The action opens in Manhattan in 1946 when Grace, a young American war widow, discovers an abandoned suitcase in Grand Central Station. Upon opening it, she finds an envelope of photographs of a dozen young women. Grace sets out to uncover who they are, and what happened to them, soon learning that the photographs are of young British women recruited and sent behind enemy lines in the final months of WWII to serve as clandestine messengers and radio operators supporting the efforts of a British spy network.  

Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht

Knecht, a Center for Fiction emerging writer fellow, introduces readers to radio host Vera Kelly. Kelly is recruited by the CIA to work undercover in Argentina, where she becomes close with a group of student activists. Knecht has sly, intelligent fun with the idea that the mindset necessary to live as a closeted queer woman transfers seamlessly to high-stakes espionage work; a spy and a not-yet-out lesbian are both undercover—both accustomed to subverting identity with coded language and comfortable with covert action.   

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Serena Frome, daughter of an Anglican bishop, is admitted to the University of Cambridge. While at Cambridge she becomes romantically involved with her professor, Tony Canning, who before abruptly ending the affair, secures a low-level position for Serena with MI5, British domestic intelligence. The job gives Serena a chance to take part in a new covert program codenamed “Sweet Tooth,” in which the agency counters Communist propaganda during the Cold War by offering financial assistance to young writers, academics, and journalists with an anti-Communist bent. The story explores the relationship between artistic integrity and government propaganda. 

The Expats by Chris Pavone

The Expats by Chris Pavone

Kate Moore and her husband, Dexter, move to Luxemburg where unknown to each other, they work as spies for different parts of the US government—and their lives as spies and spouses are braided together in a suspenseful tale. Before moving to Luxemburg, Kate was busy in Washington where Dexter thought she did something for the State Department. As far as Kate knew, her husband did something involving computer technology. The novel hinges on the idea that neither spouse knew what the other was up to. It ends with a string of head-spinning revelations, as layer after layer of deceit is peeled away. 

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

In 1947, pregnant Charlie St. Clair, an American college girl banished from her family, arrives in London to find out what happened to her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war. She meets a former spy who, torn by betrayal, agrees to help her on her mission. These two women—a spy recruited to an underground network and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin—are brought together in a story of courage and redemption.

The Moscow Sleepers by Stella Rimington

A Russian immigrant lies dying in a hospice in upstate Vermont. When a stranger visits, claiming to be a childhood friend, the FBI is alerted and news quickly travels to MI5 in London. Liz Carlyle and her colleague Peggy Kinsolving unravel the events that landed the man in the hospital, and Liz confronts a network of Russians and their plot to undermine the German government. 

Liar’s Candle by August Thomas

Penny Kessler, a likable and reluctant American embassy employee wrongly accused of terrorist sympathies, goes on a non-stop adventure across Turkey in a quest to clear her name. The tension and relentless action ratchet higher from the very first chapter to the climatic ending as one terrifying escape follows the next and everywhere friends and foes change places. Thomas has eerily evoked not only the intrigue and brutality of terrorism in Turkey, but the country itself. 

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Wilkinson’s elegantly paced debut novel follows Marie Mitchell, a former FBI agent, who has been recruited by the CIA to go undercover and seduce a radical leader of Burkina Faso, who is visiting NYC. The well-worn trope of red-blooded American white men trying to save the world from the Soviet Union’s evil empire, long a spy novel cliché, is turned on its head; Wilkinson provides a unique spin on the Cold War spy thriller. American Spy explores the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s.

9 Books About the Dark Side of Girlhood

Posted on by Jo Lou

The first time I saw a picture of the girls in the Manson family, I was in college, I think, and was shocked to see that the girls looked like me: young, long-haired, smiling with other young, long-haired girls. In the most infamous pictures, the girls are gleeful as they walk into court, matching in prison-issued blue shift dresses and darker blue sweaters, tiny x’s carved into their foreheads. The incongruity between their age, their prettiness, and that little bit of self-desecration is jarring, the x a visible indicator of the unseen darkness inside. Every part of the Manson saga is unbelievable—from a cult of hippies living on a movie-set ranch to the slaughter of a pregnant movie star—but one of the aspects that has made the crime of enduring interest is the fact that the murders were committed by young women.

Generally, as a society, we aren’t comfortable with the darkness of women, and we certainly aren’t comfortable with the darkness of girls. We learn as children that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, and it is the boys, made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, that harbor an inclination toward darkness. Their ingredients are horrifying, but inherently more interesting. I can remember hearing that rhyme as a little girl and imagining that if you cut me open, inside there would essentially be the contents of a cupboard, ready to be mixed and baked, but inside a boy, there was mystery, violence. Boys possessed the elements needed to conjure magic: eye of newt, tail of dog. All I could make was a cake.

But the truth of course is that girls contain darkness and light, snips and spice, just like any other person in the world. And honestly, the experience of simply being a girl contains plenty of darkness in and of itself. Adolescence is a time of intense emotions, physical changes, aching desires, a growing awareness of what the world expects you to be and the realization that you might not be meeting those expectations. But we are asked to tamp down that wanting, to navigate the big feelings and strange transformations in a way that ensures we remain pleasant, polite, and pretty. If that isn’t dark, what is?

My novel We Can Only Save Ourselves is very much concerned with this dark side of girlhood. Loosely inspired by the Manson family, it follows Alice Lange, a “perfect” teenage girl beloved by all in her idyllic neighborhood, as she rejects the life laid out for her and instead follows an enigmatic stranger to his home, a bungalow full of other young women like Alice, all eager to lead more authentic lives. There is darkness there, in the house, among the girls, and, Alice learns, within herself. Meanwhile, the mothers of Alice’s old neighborhood must grapple with what her abandonment means for them and what it reveals about their golden lives—did the crack Alice’s departure left in their carefully constructed world allow darkness to seep in, or is it possible the darkness was there all along?

In honor of all the girls who do bad things, here are nine pieces of literature that explore the dark side of girlhood:

Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan

The Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan

Growing up, I read every one of Duncan’s young adult novels, but the one that disturbed me the most wasn’t the one about the girl with the evil twin or the one with the creepy boarding school but The Daughters of Eve, a story with no supernatural elements or murderers—just a group of high school girls who form a club under the supervision of their teacher, Ms. Stark. She tells the girls they have lived their lives unknowingly oppressed by men—by their fathers, by the boys in their school—and she encourages them to rise up and gain independence. After examining their lives, the girls begin to enact small revenges against the boys and men they know until things dangerously, violently escalate. Like the girls, we too see the truth in what Ms. Stark teaches but find ourselves troubled by the means they take to seize control of their lives. A story of power and rage, The Daughters of Eve is both a call to action and a cautionary tale.

The Secret Place by Tana French

The Secret Place by Tana French

A year after a boy’s murder at St. Kilda’s, a prestigious boarding school, a note is found pinned to a bulletin board, announcing only I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM. Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway spend a day at the school, interrogating the students and untangling the truth from the lies they hear, but when it becomes clear that two rival groups of girls are at the center of the web, Moran is confronted by the surprisingly sinister side not only of teenagers but also by the shadowy world of wealth and privilege. Moran is drawn to St. Kilda’s, its posh exclusivity and beauty—intoxicatingly different than his own upbringing—and is slow to see the darkness there. French draws a parallel between the hidden danger of the school and the danger lurking among the groups of girls—she toys with our expectations of their capabilities in the same way she allows Moran’s own preconceptions to be challenged. 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

In Ng’s debut novel, we do not get girls as killers or temptresses or devious liars; instead, Ng explores the pressure a teenage girl experiences, the darkness an external thing that slowly becomes internalized. The body of Lydia Lee, the girl at the heart of the novel, is found in a nearby lake, a presumed suicide; but as police investigate her death, they learn that Lydia’s real life did not match the one her parents assumed she was living. She was not, as they believed, a popular girl who maintained a special place on both the honor roll and at every party, but instead a loner, struggling both academically and socially. A tender examination of ambition and family and the ripple effect the past has on the present, this novel is a heartbreaker and will feel especially resonant if you were a certain kind of teenage girl (or the parent of one).

Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman

The girls in this book are scary and funny, loyal and devious, and together they are, as Wasserman promises in the feverish prologue, radioactive. Like Lydia Lee, Hannah is a nobody at her high school; unlike Lydia, she attracts the attention of a cool girl, Lacey, who is as edgy as Hannah is bland—but Lacey brings out a sharpness, a fire in Hannah. She introduces Hannah to Kurt Cobain and the fun of rebellion, and they bond over their mutual hatred of the beautiful and cruel Nikki, whose boyfriend Craig killed himself a year earlier. These four are connected to each other in surprising ways I won’t reveal, but I’ll say that among them Wasserman creates an incendiary tension that feels real and dangerous, culminating in an ending that really, truly shocked me and made me text my sister to tell her to read this immediately. Relationships between teenage girls are fraught, complicated, in some cases guided almost equally by love and pettiness, passion and jealousy, and Wasserman makes the friendship between Hannah and Lacey both tender and frightening.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

No one writes about the psyches and complexities of teenage girls like Megan Abbott; this entire list could have been comprised solely of her fantastic novels. But I could only pick one, and as a mother who has logged many hours watching her gymnast daughter work out, I had to go with this one: Katie Knox and her husband Eric have made their daughter Devon, an exceptionally talented gymnast, the center of their world—everything revolves around Devon’s training and their shared Olympic dreams. Devon herself is steely, icy, wholly apart from her peers in the gym and at school; she is untouchable, and, as Katie learns, unknowable. When a member of their gymnastics community is found dead, everyone is shocked, but Katie watches Devon absorb the event with a cool detachment, and Katie worries about what that means about Devon and about herself as a parent. As the book unfolds, we see how Devon’s ambition, which serves her so well in the gym, is its own kind of darkness, and her parents must confront their own complicity in that. Like Everything I Never Told You, You Will Know Me explores the horrifying reality that all children remain, to a certain degree, strangers to their parents. 

Marlena by Julie Buntin

Buntin’s debut novel tells the story of the lonely Cat and her intense, brief friendship with Marlena, her next door neighbor. Marlena is quick and fun, and the girls become best friends, fast. But Marlena’s world is a shadowy one, defined by neglect and want, and Cat lets herself be drawn into it, intoxicated as much by Marlena’s friendship and the accompanying adrenaline as by the drugs they take and the booze they drink. The story of Cat and Marlena is tinged with regret, a melancholy that other books about bad girls may lack: we know from the opening pages that Marlena will be dead before the end of the book, and that Cat will grow up to be an alcoholic. By framing the novel this way, Buntin reminds us of something we already know but often don’t want to confront: there are certain relationships that never leave us, and even in their brevity, continue to shape who we are and the choices we make. 

Bunny by Mona Awad

Bunny by Mona Awad

The girls in Bunny are older than the other girls on this list—they are MFA students—but in certain ways are the perfect embodiment of dark girlhood. The Bunnies are a quartet of girls that Samantha, another MFA student, watches with both disgust and interest: they call each other “Bunny,” and they are exclusive, twee, saccharine. Samantha can’t stand them. But one day they invite her to join their group, and against her better judgment, she does. Then things get weirdly dangerous and dangerously weird. This book is wild, scary, and funny, nearly impossible to boil down to a few neat sentences, but I can say it’s a sharp exploration of femininity, friendship, and the creation of art.

The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

The title alone of Flynn’s adult debut (she has previously written two YA novels) is resonant and anxiety-inducing: who among us hasn’t been in a new place, friendless and uncomfortable, and tried to reassure ourselves that the girls really are so nice here? Ambrosia, one of those titular “nice” girls, receives an invitation to her ten year college reunion—along with an anonymous note that says, “We need to talk about what we did that night.” Amb knows she must deal with secrets from her past, the fallout from the bad things she and her former best friend, the toxic and manipulative Sully, did, but things get worse when Sully reveals that she too has received similar anonymous notes. Is someone going to take their revenge against the girls? Alternating between Amb’s time at college and the present day, Flynn reveals the darkness girls are capable of, building toward a thrillingly unsettling ending. Be on the lookout for The Girls Are All So Nice Here in March.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

A staple of high school English classes everywhere, The Crucible features the original teenage girls not to be trifled with: Abigail Williams and her friends, the instigators of the Salem Witch Trials. Miller imagines Abigail as the young scorned lover of John Proctor, an older, married man, and in her anger, Abigail first tries to put a curse on Proctor’s wife and then, when that doesn’t work, turns her story on its head and accuses other men and women in their Puritan community of witchcraft, including Proctor himself. Miller intended his play to be an allegory for McCarthyism, but it is also an exploration of power—who wields it and why. Here we have a group of girls who suddenly possess an unearthly amount of power in a society that has never allowed it before. By the end, our sympathies extend even to Abigail, who, when all is said and done, is a heartbroken young girl who does what she can to seek her own kind of justice in a community that would never grant it for her.

Imagining Life as an Inanimate Object

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Aimee Bender’s new novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, Francie reflects on a journey from Portland to Los Angeles she took as a child after her mother smashed her own hand with a hammer and was institutionalized. Francie is haunted by childhood images of a butterfly painted on a lampshade coming to life only to drown in a glass of water (which she then drinks) as well as other drawings, like a beetle and a rose on a curtain’s design, transforming from likeness to corporeal form. These memories confront Francie with uncomfortable questions: Were they real or in her imagination? Is she losing her mind the way her mother was? She constructs a “memory tent” with her cousin Vicky, where she can finally face them. While dealing with her surreal recollections, violent thoughts intrude on Francie’s mind, keeping her locked in her room from the outside so she can’t, as she believes she will, hurt anybody. 

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

Like Bender’s previous novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Butterfly Lampshade delicately uses fabulism to illustrate mental illness in her protagonists. Reading it, I felt a deep kinship to the book’s emotional landscape and the way it so perfectly illustrated the pain of the intrusive thoughts that plague me every day. Bender’s methodical descriptions of the images make them erupt, so that the story is not so much about moving the story forward, but closely examining the precarity and psychological impact of each passing moment. As the book unfolds, these moments are revisited and expanded so that they take on new, sometimes uncanny meanings. The Butterfly Lampshade delves into the elusiveness of memory, the paralyzing nature of anxiety, and the importance of the journey towards healing. 

I spoke to Aimee Bender about intrusive thoughts, the uncanny valley, and the rupture between mind and reality.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva: Do you experience intrusive thoughts? I was diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder a year ago and I sometimes think thoughts like, “Someone is trying to poison me” or “I am going to cut off everyone’s head,” stuff like that. Your character Francie imagines violently stabbing her cousin’s soft infant head so intensely that she needs to lock herself in her room. Could you speak more on how intrusive thoughts have shaped your writing and your characters?

Aimee Bender: Yeah! I have OCD too and it has had this really, really painful side. Something that was helpful to me once was this Edgar Allen Poe essay called “The Imp of the Perverse” which is about that impulse to do something destructive and how common it is! In the essay, Poe talks about these impulses as a little imp telling you to do something you don’t want to do.

One of my clearest memories of this is when I was 21 and my boyfriend got me a trip on a hot air balloon with him in San Diego. The whole time I was thinking “Why am I not jumping out of this balloon? Like, what is keeping me inside this balloon?” There was no barrier. I was anxious the whole time, I could barely enjoy it. 

I’m 51 now and after much therapy and life experience, the separation of thought and action feels super interesting to me. What felt so important to me about the book was to think through different minds navigating this blurry line between thought and action. For a character who is psychotic, their sense of reality becomes unclear. Events may be clear to someone outside their world, but someone going through a psychotic episode might not know where the boundaries are. Everything is super porous. And for a person with OCD, you think what is porous is not. You think if you have a thought it will translate into an action. But I think the vast majority of us are just scared of our thoughts!

One of the simplest things in my own therapy was just thinking, “Have I ever done any of these things?” Well no, I’ve never done any of these things, but I’ve thought a million things. You know, even just holding my baby and thinking “I wanna throw the baby against the wall.” Terrifying. But also, I was never going to throw the baby! I took such good care of my babies. I’m at a point where I realize my thoughts are just thoughts, I’m not scared of them anymore. But I wanted Francie to be not at that point yet.

MLO: Francie compares the Ovid myth of bringing a statue to life to an active shooter at a movie theatre, a situation much like the Colorado Dark Knight shooting in 2012. That’s actually an intrusive thought I have! Francie describes how the shooter, dressed up as a character in the movie, was stuck in this transference between thought and reality, kind of being stuck in like the uncanny valley.

AB: Part of my interest in this book was trying to track two different realms. Francie does this literally with a train ride between a world where reality is less fixed and a world that is clearer. Her cousin Vicky belongs solidly in the clearer world, but Francie’s mother, Elaine, exists between these two worlds. 

So, yeah, you’re right, it is the uncanny valley and it is the Colorado Batman shooting. When I heard that story it was a scary example of someone traversing a line that we can usually trust. Of course, the vast majority of people who suffer from psychosis are not acting on their thoughts, they’re just wrestling with them. There was a rupture for the shooter, first in his mind but later a rupture that became real for both him and the audience. The rupture must have been so clear inside his mind. That made me trip out and wonder if all violence is the projection of someone’s mind onto someone else’s body. And like, probably! How we treat each other gets all muddled up in that.

As for Ovid, I’ve always been attracted to that story and to stories of the inanimate becoming animate. We’re so willing to make that move, to accept that. And yet, it’s so scary if people really believe it to be real, when the boundary is crossed. A statue that comes to life is beautiful in theory, and most of us know that it’s the realm of the imagination. But for someone else it’s not, and that can be really scary.

MLO: Yeah, it’s frightening! You revisit that rupture when Francie’s mother gets upset at her for destroying all of her stuffed animals, because her mother believes them to be real. I used to have a stuffed animal named Princess. If she fell on the floor, I would kiss her and apologize until eventually I learned that there was no little brain inside of Princess.  

AB: But it takes so long to learn that, right? I slept with so many stuffed animals and I felt so bad deciding who I should kick out of bed. Then that feeling became so oppressive! It started out so empathic and then it became a horrible thing where I couldn’t move while I was sleeping. 

I’ve always been interested in the point where the beautiful tips into the grotesque and the grotesque tips into the beautiful.

I’ve always been so interested in the point where the beautiful tips into the grotesque and the grotesque tips into the beautiful. When we look at things closely, how do they shift? Take the intrusive thought: it feels very scary, but it’s ultimately not that scary when you realize you’re not going to act on it. Then you can be like, “Okay, I have such an imaginative mind, I just want to hop around into every thought!” And it’s all in there. It’s part of what makes me want to sit down and write. All these things that feel awful and beautiful.

MLO: This year I’ve had this really sick feeling that I can predict the future? But just because something turns out to be true doesn’t mean I’m in touch with something greater. But then also I’m like, well what if I am?… I don’t know. 

AB: No, I understand! I’ve had that thought too! You can run the numbers and make enough predictions and you might hit one but that doesn’t mean that you’re psychic! [laughter] It just becomes a way to turn on the self. It becomes a way to scare yourself and I think Francie scares herself so much she has to lock herself in a room. I certainly have felt frightened of my own thinking to the point that I would limit my thoughts.  

MLO: Now I’m kind of thinking of this book as a horror story.  

AB: It is in a lot of ways!

MLO: One of the scariest moments in the book is when Francie and the steward who is chaperoning her run into these strange people on the train, who seem not of this world. They sound like they’re trying on the English language and there is no record of them being on the train. Were they from another kind of place? And is that the place that Francie and her mother belong? 

AB: The meaning is sometimes elusive to me, too, but I do think of them as living in a kind of the realm of the butterfly and the beetle and the rose. The people on the train exist in that place and they’re comforting to Francie because she is in a moment of transition and the people are somehow part of that transition. I wanted the steward to be able to see them because I didn’t want them to be a figment of her imagination. 

This goes back to the uncanny valley. Francie is so unmoored at that moment in her life. There’s a portal opening for her to somewhere else, but something in her life stabilizes, the portal closes, and she can finally start to set some roots. I don’t think the people on the train are malevolent. I just think they come from somewhere else. They offer something else to her, they ask her for some tickets and all she has are these items, the butterfly and the beetle and the rose. She could go with them but she doesn’t.

MLO: I read The Butterfly Lampshade along with my friend in Arizona and they actually had a question for you. They compare Francie’s mother Elaine living in the institution to a princess trapped in a castle. The institution even has an “aura of a decaying European castle.” Is the institution in the book based on a real institution, where patients would live in the extra space of a nursing home? What do you want to say about the reality of institutions or is it only a metaphor?

AB: I had an aunt who was in different institutions for most of her adult life. We would visit her once a month. She was probably in her 30s, and she was often in places with elderly people. She had a severe bipolar diagnosis with psychotic episodes and she was intellectually disabled. She had multiple accounts of struggle. And she moved a lot in the 1970s and 80s, so we would see that, you know, this institution is more hospital-like, this one is actually a nursing home, this one is a house. That was in mind when writing Elaine’s place, but the room she stays in isn’t actually a room that I associate with my aunt. I like the princess in the castle idea, but it was important for the room to be beautiful and decaying, to have a transitory quality, for all that beautiful stuff to be delicate and crumbly. That’s a metaphorical piece. But the cafeteria and the gathering in the institution, all of those details come from experience. 

MLO: Do you think we’re in the uncanny valley right now? Like we’re on a long train ride to our new future and waiting to be let off, like Francie?

AB: The only real thing I can say about it in relation to the book is that I feel so clearly like I cannot process it. I am just moving through it and trying to make it work. I’m barely able to take in the numbers of COVID deaths, barely able to take in the fear. As a friend of mine was saying, walking down the street you feel like you’re both predator and prey. If the neighbor’s kids come too close, you move back. Things feel painful and there’s no space to process it. I think it will take time. I’m certainly not able to be like, “Oh, this is what this was like,” I’m more like, “Ahh!!”

MLO: Ahhh!

AB: There’s something related to intrusive thoughts that I found so moving that I’d just like to talk about, which is this memoir by a lawyer named Elyn Saks called The Center Cannot Hold. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and what helped her most has been the medication. Now she’s medicated, she’s able to practice law, she’s married, she’s been able to create a life for herself. But she still started psychoanalysis because she had anxieties. In The Center Cannot Hold, she talks about going in and laying on the couch and saying, “Today, I murdered 40 people.” And she didn’t, but she felt like she really did! It took courage for her and her analyst to sit with the darkness of that thought and the confusion. I found that so beautiful. And that she was willing to write about the strangeness of our minds so openly. She knows better than anyone what it’s like to traverse between realms. 

MLO: In both this novel and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake the main characters don’t get to have a love story. There is beautiful familial love with Vicky for Francie, but both Francie and Rose from Lemon Cake have to deal with whatever is going on in their heads alone. What was the choice there? 

AB: There are people that can work out some of that stuff with a romantic partner, and can be part of the process, but there’s a time before you can even make that step with someone else. So Vicky, Francie’s cousin, plays a crucial role in Francie’s growth by saying, “I don’t think you’re going to kill me! I want you to leave the door open!” But there is a very small detail at the end where she’s looking at the two chairs on her balcony. I wanted to evoke a feeling that there was space made for someone to come into her life where there wasn’t before. If you’re locked in your room like that, you can’t really have someone over because you think you’re gonna kill them! Something has to be opened up a little bit to make that space for that second chair. It’s such a small detail but it’s an important shift. The direction of the ship for Francie had shifted enough. Same with Rose from Lemon Cake, some people are sad she’s not with George. And I love the character of George as a partner for Rose, but there’s absolutely no way that Rose was ready for that! George is leaps and bounds ahead of her relationally. He would be an old man by the time she was ready. But Rose and Francie are both on the right path. I want to see the character in a direction towards personal connection, to feel a sense of possibility for Francie without making it concrete.  

MLO: That’s really beautiful. They’re waiting for the right train while other people already got to where they needed to be. 

“Piranesi” Is a Dispatch from the Kingdom of Chronic Illness

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In the first pages of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the novel’s titular narrator is almost carried away by three converging tides. Plunged into a landscape of marble and bone, sea, sky and crashing waves, I felt equally immersed. By the time the tides receded, leaving behind a smooth object in Piranesi’s palm—the marble finger of a statue—I had the slight premonition that I, too, had been gifted something unique and unexpected.

My husband Marc and I contracted the coronavirus while traveling in early March. When Piranesi arrived mid-September, we still couldn’t walk a mile without chest pressure and fatigue. We began reading the book aloud to each other, skipping nights when our lungs ached or we were too short of breath to speak. Soon the novel became more than an escape—it was a world in which the emotional resonances of our new lives were embodied in a story we could recognize, something we could name. 

The novel became a world in which the emotional resonances of our new lives were embodied in a story we could recognize. 

The experience of a long, strange sickness that stretched well beyond the initial definitions of Covid-19 was not an easy thing to communicate: not to doctors, or even to family and friends. My husband and I often felt marooned from the rest of the active world with our intimate, bodily knowledge of this novel disease and its devastating effects. 

Piranesi is also alone, stranded in a mysterious House occupied only by himself, myriad statues and a character he calls “the Other.” As he looks out across a courtyard one morning, Piranesi sees the Other looking out a window opposite. “I waved to him,” Clarke writes, “He did not see me. I waved more extravagantly. I jumped up and down with great energy. But the Windows of the House are many and he did not see me.” 

Clarke is best known for her first novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a fantastical history of 19th-century England involving two rival magicians, published in 2004. After its success, Clarke didn’t publish again for fifteen years, overcome by an undiagnosed chronic disease. In her pages, Piranesi’s meticulous record of his surroundings takes on the obsessive, keen attention of an invalid, those gifted observers whose illness, although debilitating, also affords a close-up view of objects, people and places the rest of us might miss. 

When a leaf floats in on one of the tides that routinely flood the House, for example, Piranesi makes careful note of its arrival: “It was a leaf, very beautiful, with two sides curving to a point at each end. Of course it is possible that it was part of a type of sea vegetation that I have never seen, but I am doubtful. The texture seemed wrong. Its surface repelled Water, like something meant to live in Air.” 

As my own illness stretched on, I found myself pressed up against physical limitations. The slightest exertion brought symptoms sailing back, forcing me to rest for weeks on end. Whenever I felt claustrophobic, desperate to escape my body’s condition, Clarke’s book was a reminder that sometimes slowing down can open up new worlds. Small things become large; ideas coalesce, statuesque; and creativity flourishes within walls.

The studied details recorded in Piranesi’s journal build into the novel’s central tension: the mystery of his circumstances, insinuated in the tug of a dark current underlying his interactions with the Other. Clarke keeps the conflict just below surface, expertly orchestrating the movements of her characters. When Piranesi discovers a clue, torn pages woven into the nests of herring gulls in one of the House’s many halls, he decides to return in “late summer—or, even better, early autumn,” so as not to disturb the birds—prolonging a reveal and building suspense until the story has crested beyond containment.

Though occupying the same halls, Piranesi and the Other live in two different realities. Piranesi is ensconced in a landscape of cold, sweeping seas; deep, menacing pools and bitter winters. The Other arrives to their weekly meetings immaculately dressed in various suits, and appears to have access to an endless supply of ham sandwiches. I began to feel uneasy about their exchanges, fearing Piranesi’s trust in his only friend was misplaced. 

Something in the dynamic between the two characters was familiar. During the first months of the pandemic, we’d monitored oxygen levels from home, conserving hospital beds for those who needed them most. But as symptoms persisted into summer, I began to see specialists about our ongoing ailments—from a pulmonologist to cardiologists to an infectious disease doctor. Finally, I thought, we were going to get help. 

As is the case for many patients experiencing post-viral syndrome after a Covid-19 infection, my lab tests showed nothing abnormal. Because they were not objectively measurable, the pain and fatigue that consumed my world were not recognized in the realm of medical science. The infectious disease specialist told me I was just anxious. The cardiologist, that I was just dehydrated. The pulmonologist, that I was just fine. My tears on their exam tables were met with cold recommendations to see a psychiatrist. The Other holds a similar power over Piranesi, and uses his superiority to convince him that he is mad.

The House itself holds sway over its inhabitants, casting a spell of amnesia that returns its residents to a more primal state. Piranesi fixates on food, detailing methods for securing sustenance. “It is important to keep the body well nourished,” he reminds himself, collecting seaweed for fuel and making careful calculations of the tides to ensure he has shelter. 

In the absence of medical guidance, I began trying alternative methods to help us heal. I obsessed over nutrition, blending anti-inflammatory smoothies until our mouths were full of citrus-induced canker sores. I found myself thinking with affection about my apartment, which became a womb I rarely ventured from into the harsh world outside. Like Piranesi’s, our lives became shaped around survival.

Like Piranesi’s, our lives became shaped around survival.

Each of Piranesi’s diary entries is subtitled with his mode of time-keeping: “Tenth Day of the Seventh Month in the Year I discovered the Coral Halls,” he writes, or, “Ninth Day of the Fourth Month in the Year I named the Constellations”—epithets that strain to capture illusory hours. As our illness extended into autumn, calendar and clock were no longer sufficient gauges. Our time sense had warped with the year’s unexpected turns. Symptoms of a fourteen-day disease lingering for months. Seven hours in the ER stretching longer than a week of repetitious days. The breathlessness of a thirty-minute run after a five-minute walk. By winter, I was borrowing one of Piranesi’s appellations for 2020: “The Year of Weeping and Wailing.” 

It was a year filled with apocalyptic scenes: bodies piled in the makeshift morgue of an ice rink, bones of the first dead barely buried before joined by the latest victims of the virus. Often I’d look down the long hallway of my pain and it would seem interminable. At times it felt like the world was coming to a close, or that it must end soon, flooded by tides of grief sweeping in, unceasing. 

Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke’s second book is haunting—Piranesi visits the remains of others, scattered throughout the halls, caring for the bones of his unnamed dead. Yet the innocent nature of Piranesi’s voice keeps the reading experience light, as he describes objects precious to him within an ominous world. His observations are both grounded in his moment and weighted with metaphors that escape the walls of his labyrinth to echo in the rooms where it is read. “In all these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead,” he tells us. “I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance.” 

In many ways, a book is like a house, filled with undiscovered chambers, hidden hallways into vicarious experience. Familiar rooms you can return to, rooms with windows looking out onto new landscapes. These rooms, these pages, are a gift, washed up from the shores of another person’s world, reaching us in our own houses of pain and bewilderment, speaking, like Piranesi’s leaf, of other times and places, some lived through, some yet to come.

I often imagined the author writing from her sick couch the book I was reading from mine.

I don’t know how much Clarke’s long illness consciously informed Piranesi. I often imagined the author writing from her sick couch the book I was reading from mine. Through her words, I glimpsed a land I’d only begun to inhabit. I got the sense that I was visiting her halls—sometimes, even, that she was marking the way. “My life has been spent largely housebound for many years…Yet I don’t think I realized, straightaway, all these resonances,” Clarke told The New Yorker in a recent profile. “As soon as I started working on it seriously, then I could see them.” 

The experience of being ill is notoriously difficult to describe. Susan Sontag calls it “the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” in Illness as Metaphor. And though that text warns against overlaying damaging metaphors such as war onto the sick, Sontag herself resorts to the figure of speech to describe the experience—dividing humanity between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. In On Being Ill Virginia Woolf uses a similar metaphor, alluding to those “undiscovered countries that are then disclosed” to the invalid. But how to describe this new world to those back home?

Perhaps the extended metaphor of story gave Clarke room to play with the elusive experience of illness; maybe in fantasy she found the flexibility to move with pain’s shifting wavelengths. Sometimes illness is the blinding white brilliance of marble, the shaved edge of it, razor sharp. Other times it’s the fog of a mind’s torn pages, mucked with bird shit and woven into twigs. It’s the maze learned only by treading its paths, memorizing halls with an intensity only the desire to survive can produce, until they are a part of you—so much so that you wonder if, given the chance, you’d have the strength to leave them. Other times you are running down a corridor, energy returned, intent on escape, only to hit the hard, sheer surface of a wall. The floor gives way and you fall into the dark, still waters below to float in the cold silence of your pain. 

When Piranesi’s hunger sends him searching for food in a “Derelict Hall” filled with an obscuring cloud, he drops through a gap in the floor and is sent plummeting towards one of the “Drowned Halls” below, caught at the last moment by a statue’s outstretched arms. If you consider that the House’s sculptures are meant to represent metaphor itself—aesthetic representations of knowledge, ideas embodied from another world, meta-metaphors—then it’s not hard to see Clarke’s book in Piranesi’s rescue. As a reader, I felt caught up in the shared experience of the sick. As a writer, I gained the hope of one day communicating something to those back in the kingdom of the well.

I don’t know if the reader who is in good health will read illness in Clarke’s pages. No doubt for them the book holds its own found treasures. Many readers, for example, have likened the experience of quarantine to Piranesi’s labyrinth. And perhaps quarantine isn’t a bad metaphor for a protracted illness: its box-like limits, the endless days. 

As a writer, I gained the hope of one day communicating something to those back in the kingdom of the well.

Even if they don’t see the invalid experience in this book, I imagine most readers can glean something from Clarke’s character 16—named for being the sixteenth person in Piranesi’s world—who arrives from somewhere beyond the House near the end of the book. Sixteen seems to embody the kind of care longed for by the chronically ill. At first, Piranesi mistrusts 16, but 16 is persistent. Ignoring his disheveled appearance, 16 sits with Piranesi, listens to him, touches him, and lets him cry for a long time. Sixteen accepts who he is without forgetting who he was. Sixteen says: “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

Sixteen also lets Piranesi show off his world, such as his favorite “Coral Halls,” where sea life has bloomed over marble, “changing the Statues in strange and unexpected ways.” He points out the sculpture of “a Woman crowned with coral, her Hands transformed into stars or flowers,” and “Figures horned with coral, or crucified on coral branches, or stuck through with coral arrows.” The statue of one man has been so ravaged that “half of him appears to be engulfed in red- and rose-coloured flames, while the other half is not.” 

Sixteen admires the beauty Piranesi has discovered—the splendor of a world others have feared, reviled or disbelieved. Sharing these hidden wonders fulfills a deep longing in Piranesi. When, at the end of the book, he likens 16 to a statue, it is to that of an androgynous figure, holding a lantern aloft—leading, if not out of illness, then at least from the halls of its loneliness. 

The metaphor shifts: I glimpse Clarke in her character, showing the reader her domain, reminding me of the riches that can be revealed to those who inhabit this new land. For months I’d been paralyzed by the trauma of losing my health, spending what little energy I had searching for a way back to a former self. Without negating the horror of what had happened, reading Piranesi gently turned me back from that locked door, inviting me to venture beyond its threshold. “Show me the labyrinth,” 16 says to Piranesi, and he does.

How Do You Care for a Mother Who Has Never Wanted You?

Posted on by Jo Lou

“I would be lying if I say my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”

In Avni Doshi’s debut novel, Burnt Sugar, a woman named Antara calls a life coach for help in dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. “Reality is something that is co-authored,” the woman tells Antara over the phone, after warning her that her mother’s dementia could shred Antara’s own grasp on reality. These words comfort Antara, but only as an affirmation of what she already knows: memory is unreliable, an easily altered thing. 

As Antara struggles with supporting her declining mother, she reveals their complicated relationship—an alternating dance of dependence and loathing that stems from a chaotic childhood following her rebellious mother after she fled her husband for an ashram in Pune. Everyone in Antara’s orbit seems to have their own version of the events of her childhood, creating a knotty web of threads that Antara is trying desperately to unpick.  

Doshi’s vivid, propulsive prose and original riff on the links between mothers and daughters, art and science, and influence and agency has earned her a 2020 Booker Prize nomination. I had the pleasure of connecting with Doshi from her home in Dubai, where she currently lives with her husband and two children. 

Carrie Mullins: Your novel made me very aware of my own brain in a way that was simultaneously fascinating and disarming. Many of the things that Antara does to understand and improve her mother’s dementia were new to me, and it made me think about how we tend to take our brains for granted when in fact they need upkeep like the rest of our bodies. Were you versed in the science of the brain before writing the novel or did you research it specifically? 

Avni Doshi: My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago, and I knew nothing about the disease. I was already writing the novel, and memory was a central theme in the story, but as I began to research Alzheimer’s and try to make sense of it, I realized that I was relying on narrative to think around chemical formulas and medical protocols. Slowly the research began to make its way into the book, and the narrator, like me, had to use her art to understand what was happening to her mother. 

CM: Of course we can’t talk about the brain without considering the mind half of the mind/body equation. Throughout the book Antara’s mind becomes a kind of adversary that she can’t trust to tell her the truth. Her art project–where she draws the same image from memory to chart the inconsistencies over time–struck me as the perfect way to illustrate how subtly our mind deceives us about its own biases. What drew you to the themes of memory and the unreliable brain?

AD: I’ve been thinking about memory for years. I worked in the art world for a while, and since reading A Hundred Years of Solitude in my 20s, memory and the archival impulse have all inspired my curatorial practice and my art writing. I even did an exhibition where the curatorial note that I presented to artists was from Marquez’s novel. The artist Louise Bourgeois has also been inspirational to me, her work relies deeply on the way memories are transformed, the way they terrorize, their possibility for symbolic value. 

CM: The ashram where Tara flees with the young Antara is very creepy. It reminded me of the cultish groups in The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwan or The Girls by Emma Cline in that there can be a strange seductiveness, almost sensuality, to cults, and women in particular seem vulnerable to getting caught. 

Tara never should have become a mother. But she lives a life that is assigned to her, marries a certain type of man, enters a loveless marriage, and then decides to leave.

AD: Ashrams have always been in the corner of my vision, for as long as I can remember. When I was young, my mum’s cousin left her life in Pune behind and moved to an ashram in the Himalayan mountains. She was young, about 18, studying to be a doctor. She had no interest in spirituality or ashrams. In fact, her mother belonged to the Osho ashram in Pune, and she thought it was ridiculous, and refused to be a part of it. It never made sense to me why she left. What had pulled her there? I think I was writing into that question with this book.

In Burnt Sugar, it seems clear to me that Tara never should have become a mother. But she lives a life that is assigned to her, marries a certain type of man, enters a loveless marriage, and then decides to leave. What is compelling about the ashram for a woman like Tara? We all have holes, but what particular holes might she be trying to fill?

CM: Burnt Sugar is a tale of mothers and daughters and how fraught that elemental relationship can be, so I was interested to hear that you became a mother yourself after submitting the final manuscript to your editor. I have two small children and I’ve been shocked by how much motherhood changed my perception of certain texts (mostly I have a lot more sympathy for the mother characters!) — did it change how you viewed your depiction of motherhood?

AD: I think I understand the depth of ambivalence you can feel as a mother much more clearly. In fact, I don’t think I’ve known an ambivalence as complex as the maternal one. In a sense, my sympathy for both Antara and Tara has increased: I have a deeper understanding for the kinds of experiences they are having. But in another way, I’m more uneasy about their decisions at time. I have a different sense of what’s at stake. They’re both walking along a cliff—I suppose now I know what they see when they look down. It’s a long way to fall.

CM: From the corner tobacco seller to the Club, Pune comes across so vibrantly in the novel, it almost feels like its own character. Can you tell me a little about your connection to the city? 

I don’t think I’ve known an ambivalence as complex as the maternal one.

AD: My mother grew up in Pune and I spent a lot of time there as a child. It’s a second-tier city, not as big and overwhelming as Mumbai or Delhi, but because of the Osho ashram, I think there has always been a lot of interest in Pune. For me, it was a nurturing place because of my family but also a little terrifying. My mother and I would stay there for a month or two every winter, away from my father, who I just adored and couldn’t bear to be away from. So my memories of Pune are tinged with an anxiety, a feeling of powerlessness, which was useful to think about as I was writing. I didn’t want to describe Pune as it is, it was more about mapping a feeling, the Pune of my memories, which is layered with sensory experiences. Especially smell. Memory and smell constantly inform each other in the novel.

CM: I love hearing about an author’s writing process and from what I understand, you wrote the book over the course of many years while living in different places. What is your writing process like? Does it change depending on where you’re living or as time has passed?

AD: I’ve really experimented with this over the years. I’ve tried planning, plotting, I’ve tried going sentence by sentence. I’ve created complex rituals, which have included crystals and candles and sage, and other embarrassing things. I’ve pared everything down, I’ve written by hand. I’ve changed pens. Scrivener seemed interesting for a while but I got over that rather quickly. I’ve tried running and walking because Murakami and Joyce Carol Oates have said I should. Waking up at four in the morning was useful for a time, particularly when I was interested in getting down a certain word count. I’ve realized all of this can work for a while and stop working too.

I try not to be too attached now. I have two little kids and the time for writing is in between the moments I spend with them. But there is something about the time I spend with my kids that grounds me in the present and I think that seems to lead to interesting thoughts and ideas. I use a technique called sense writing that was developed by Madelyn Kent—where basically you enter this parasympathetic state in your nervous system to write. It takes the exertion away somehow, and puts the focus on process rather than product. 

The Life Destroying Magic of Parking Lot Sex

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“Akira Hirata” by  Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

On a playscape outside the Oyster Ridge Public Library, a woman in a dinosaur t-shirt approached Akira Hirata about recording his three-year-old daughter’s voice.

Although the woman was slight and boyish, Akira noticed a respectable snugness where the dinosaur’s face stretched over her breasts. Akira’s fingers moved unconsciously to fix his hair. The woman handed over a foil-printed business card that read, “Faye Imamura: Voice Talent, Multi-instrumentalist, Children’s Media Consultant.” 

“Her voice has a newness to it,” Faye said. “A sort of warm ectoplasmic egg-yolky yum yum to it.”

“A yum?” Akira said. “I’m not sure I understand. You’re a researcher?”

“I’m an actress on television program called Mo Bananafish and Chums. I work out new characters using voices I think are unique.”  

“We know that show,” Akira said, gesturing to his daughter. “Banana chum-churum, Allie.” 

Allie’s wide-cheeked face looked up with a blank expression. 

“Hey Seymour! Keep it down! I’m trying to count my sheeps!” Faye said loudly. She was demonstrating a voice that was part whining parakeet, a little British, a little donkey squall. 

“Holy nuts!” Akira yelped. “That’s that clam on the show!”

“Scallop actually,” Faye said. “That’s me.” 

“Cool,” Akira said. “You think Allie’s voice is unique? She sounds like every kid here to me.” 

“Oh nope nope no dad,” Faye said. “I’ve got maybe ten thousand voices in my archive. Her voice is a five-leaf clover.”

“C’mon. No way.” 

“Oh yes. Very fresh and bright. Very thickwood whistlepig. Very Egyptian gerbil. Very pygmy rabbit-esque.” 

“Is your character going to be a gerbil then?” 

“No. It’s an octopus who falls in love with a bagpipe.” 

“Oh.” 

They exchanged details. Faye’s offer was four hundred dollars if Akira would bring his daughter to a local studio for some recording sessions.  

 “So this is a real thing actors do,” Akira said. “Study the voices of children.” 

“That’s right,” Faye said. “You know, like a painter’s basement is chock-full of palettes.”

“Or like when a serial killer saves a little toe from every body he’s hacked up.”  

“Yup, exactly like that,” Faye said. 

“I don’t want this to come off rudely,” Akira said. “But how much does a cartoon voice person make in a year?”  

“About 300k after taxes.”  

“Jesus Christ supernova. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What did you expect?” 

“I don’t know. 30k?”

“It just depends on the popularity of the program. I’m lucky. I’ll see you two on Friday then.”

Faye did a little fist bump with Allie, blew it up, and then did a little robot-in-distress dance. 

“See you later, Terminator!” Faye said, her voice returning to the squalling donkey-Brit.  

By Saturday night, Akira and Faye were having an affair. Around nine o’clock, Akira told his wife, Mariko, he was going to Starbucks to finish some homework. Akira had been plugging away at an online Brand Strategy and Positioning certificate. 

“Make us proud daddy,” Mariko said, patting him on the shoulder. “Go get it.” 

And then Akira drove to meet Faye in an Olive Garden parking lot just six blocks from his home. 

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” Akira said, a second before peeling off Faye’s t-shirt and taking one of her barbell-pierced nipples into his mouth. It was like someone was clumsily feeding him a ripe summer berry, a metal utensil clanging along his front teeth. 

Faye’s skin was warm and succulent. The entire van was bathed in the smells of her shampoo and perfume. Akira was in a blackened forest of orange honeysuckle trumpets. Faye’s shining hair fell in choppy layers over his naked skin.   

“Don’t sweat it,” Faye said. “I’ve done this lots of times. It gets better and better.” 

The affair lasted six weeks. Akira and Faye always met in the Olive Garden parking lot and stripped down in the back of Faye’s Chrysler Town & Country. It was a surprisingly good van to have sex in. 

On one occasion Faye and Akira met in an Applebee’s parking lot. But Faye felt like the energy was off, and so they carpooled over to Olive Garden. Akira was happy he did not have to spring for hotel rooms. 

Akira knew making love with Faye was textbook betrayal, but a current ran through him that made him feel beyond reproach. After all, Faye had pursued him pretty aggressively. Akira believed there was a big difference between the betrayals you pursued and betrayals that fell into your lap. He was reminded of his first sexual experiences in high school, when Oyster Ridge High’s valedictorian, Samantha Hershlag, had given him a summer of blowjobs in the basement of her family’s beach house. 

Had it been wrong? Samantha had been all over him that summer. True, Samantha was his swim coach’s daughter. A swim coach who had once declared, “Anyone tries something with my daughter I’ll kick your little dick off its hinges.” 

On the other hand, Coach Hershlag was a laughing stock until Akira came along and vanquished every backstroke and breaststroke record in the county. 

On the third hand, Samantha had been dating Channing Shriver, who had also been Akira’s childhood friend. But on a fourth hand, Channing ended up stealing Akira’s bike and trading it for a Ziploc sack of marijuana. Didn’t one or more of these details mitigate the bad behavior?  

Akira had found himself stretched half-naked on a borrowed beach towel, Samantha’s warm lips sliding up and down his cock ten thousand times. Akira knew the scene would’ve horrified everyone’s parents. 

But Akira was struck by a sense of impunity. He had been fifteen-years-old and a C- student. Samantha Hershlag had been seventeen and the smartest person in school. She was going to Yale to study Philosophy and Political Science. Didn’t Samantha have a superior understanding of what was acceptable? Of what was customary high school mischief? It felt like the most qualified mind was in command of the situation. The commander wanted a cock in the mouth. Akira had decided the blowjobs were beyond his control. They were somehow key in developing the attitude of this future professor or senator. 

Was Akira being disloyal to Allie and Mariko? Sure. Had he told his beautiful and trusting family lies? Sure. Did he feel guilty? Sure. But at his core, did he own a mean, awful, disgusting soul? 

Was Faye an awful person? She didn’t look awful. She didn’t smell awful. Akira had watched Faye give leftover pancakes to a homeless person. And after all, wasn’t Faye’s job to strike joy into the hearts of thousands of children every single day? Wasn’t Akira also a part of that work in some small way? 

Akira and Faye made love exactly nineteen times. On the night of the nineteenth orgasm, Faye said she would be traveling internationally over the next month.  

“Let’s take a little break,” she said. “I’ll call you when I get back into town.”

That same night, Akira presented Faye with a gift. It was a lightweight cashmere scarf of darkened cobalt. 

“It was my grandmother’s,” Akira said. He stroked Faye’s neck. “She was an acclaimed singer. It’ll keep your instrument healthy.”  

In the first weeks that Faye was gone, Akira began to lay the groundwork for his escape. Akira told Mariko he felt underappreciated in their marriage. 

Hadn’t Akira started an Italian herb garden? Hadn’t he replaced their toothbrush mug with a Yamazaki alabaster toothbrush tower? Hadn’t he replaced the hanging toilet bowl cleaners with French vanilla candles? Other stuff too of course, but he felt like three was the correct number of examples to provide in the moment. Mariko didn’t acknowledge the efforts he made to keep their lives full of joy and vigor. 

Mariko never made efforts to be desirable anymore. After Allie was born, she never wore sexy underwear again. Outside of her working hours, Mariko slipped into more Adidas tracksuits than a Russian gangster.   

Was Akira wearing an Adidas tracksuit when he pointed this out? Yes he was. 

But Akira only wore Adidas tracksuits in retaliation for Mariko’s utter tracksuit resignation. Akira’s tracksuits were symbolic and defiant. This is why his were the ugliest color available. Crossing-guard orange.  

Akira suggested a Napa Valley getaway and couple’s counseling. He felt like all this would cushion the plummeting anvil of separation and divorce. Wasn’t it the natural progression? Disgruntled husband plus unflattering Adidas tracksuits plus marriage counseling plus impassive Napa Valley getaway equals inevitable anvil of divorce? 

Two months passed and Faye did not call. Communication via text had been curt and infrequent. Akira had Faye’s work email. But he did not have Faye’s personal email or home address. 

Akira began to worry. He had given notice at his job. Faye’s current salary was more than enough for both of them. And he felt he could improve her branding. Perhaps he could be Faye’s agent? Akira did not plan to be competitive about custody over Allie. If Akira was free during the workweek, perhaps he could go back to giving music lessons. His grandmother had always praised his singing voice. The grandson of the famous singer, Yuki Hirata, would turn heads. Could he even have the right stuff to become a voice actor himself? He thought about slipping the idea in passing to Faye.  

Then Akira ran into Faye at a Whole Foods smoothie bar. She was ordering a mango smoothie and wearing two scarves. One was Akira’s grandmother’s. 

“Faye,” he gasped. He gripped her arm from behind. 

“Oh hey!” Faye chimed. “Yowza! Olive Garden! I was just thinking about you. I see your face anytime I smell breadsticks.” 

“What in the fuck? I was sick worrying about you. You haven’t texted me in weeks.” 

“Yes yup yup sorry about that,” Faye said. “I’ve only been back in town for a couple of days. And then I’m leaving for Dubai on Thursday. I wanted to connect, but you know.” 

“But if you’re only doing voices,” Akira said, “does whomever really need you on location? The director?” 

“What?” Faye said. “Oh no. This isn’t a work thing. I’m going on vacation.”

“Oh.” 

“Listen,” Faye said, kissing Akira on the cheek, “I’ll call you soon as I’m back in town.”

The next time Akira saw Faye was six months later. She was giving a talk in the Film Studies department of Oyster Community College. It was a shockingly large and spirited event. Akira guessed two hundred people were in attendance. 

Akira considered confronting Faye during the Q&A. Did she know how much anxiety and embarrassment she had caused his family? Did her fans know she was a sexual predator? But once the microphone was in his hand, Akira just asked an awkwardly-phrased question about getting into the mind of a scallop. 

Akira had to wait more than an hour after the event to confront her. Many parents and fans had stayed behind to ask Faye to sign t-shirts, toys, Blu-ray disc jackets. Akira had to hide behind a thorny blackberry bramble and corner Faye in the parking lot, beside her van. 

“So this is the way you end things,” Akira said. “It’s real sweet.” 

“I’m sorry,” Faye said. “I thought I made my intentions clear. It was my mistake. But it was always sex in a van. Isn’t that the epitome of casual?” 

“Did you even think my daughter’s voice was special?” Akira asked. “You only did the one recording session.”

“Your daughter?” For an instant, Faye looked confused. “Oh your daughter! Allie! Her voice is pretty cool. Very saffron, very bourbon vanilla. Very woodchuck. I decided to go in another direction with my character though. I could tell from the initial recordings it wasn’t going to work.” 

“I don’t want her voice on that garbage show,” Akira said. “It doesn’t make any sense. All those talking crabs. I could probably make my own kids show, and it would be a hundred times better.” 

“Okay,” Faye said. “You’re entitled to your opinion. I’m not going to fight you on it.” 

Akira didn’t let Allie watch Mo Bananafish and Chums after that. In his spare time, he wrote negative reviews about the program on IMDB, Metacritic, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes. He badmouthed the stuffed animals on Amazon. He developed a number of different usernames and personalities to write the scathing reviews. 

In closing one of his reviews, he wrote, “I also heard from a friend that the voice actress who does the clam and eel is a real asshole.”

Thirty minutes later, a new review had replaced Akira’s at the top of the feed. The new review said that they had met Faye Imamura before and that she was one of the coolest people they had ever met. 

How Political Revolutions Spark Literary Revolutions

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” goes the old, though sadly still relevant joke. Political conflicts have always had a way of monopolizing the public’s attention, and this extends well beyond the geography lessons of current events coverage, into the culture section, too. Along with the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, for example, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the works of Black authors: platforms encouraging their voices, listicles promoting their books, the National Book Awards acknowledging and trying to compensate for their marginalization.

The definitive model for this relationship between political conflict and literary trend may be the Cuban Revolution. In 1959, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the other Cuban guerillas succeeded in ousting Fulgencio Batista, a U.S.-backed dictator who had terrorized Cuba for nearly a decade. The Cuban Revolution would go further though, catalyzing not only other anti-imperialist movements, but a literary movement too—namely, the Latin American Boom, a widespread celebration of the works of authors from Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.

The definitive model for this relationship between political conflict and literary trend may be the Cuban Revolution.

The Cuban Revolution today is overshadowed in the U.S. imagination by later events of the Cold War, but the contemporary perspective was quite different. As Tony Perrottet explains in Cuba Libre!, his nonfiction account of the era, many average Americans were at first supportive of Castro’s revolution. Throughout the ‘50s, Batista’s dictatorship received institutional backing from the U.S. government, but news of his forces torturing civilians in peace time, and committing war crimes against suspected guerilla strongholds once the revolution began, aligned public sympathy firmly with Castro, Che, and the other rebels. It undoubtedly helped that Castro, formerly a Cuban lawyer, had yet to embrace communism, instead framing the revolution as a war of independence.

The push of Batista and pull of Castro resulted in a cultural phenomenon dubbed “Fidelmania,” in which media coverage of the Cuban Revolution inspired new fashions, like beards and berets. Fidelmania reached its apex on January 11, 1959, when 50 million viewers tuned into The Ed Sullivan Show to watch the host’s interview with Castro, which was recorded just hours before the latter entered Havana, victorious.

“The people of the United States, they have great admiration for you and your men,” Sullivan told Castro. “Because you are in the real American tradition—of a George Washington—of any band who started off with a small body and fought against a great nation and won.”

The literary corollary of “Fidelmania” was the Latin American Boom. While the love affair between Castro and the U.S. public fizzled by 1960, following Cuban land reforms which threatened U.S. business interests on the island, the reading public’s interest in Latin American literature was just beginning to take hold, aided by both Cuban and U.S. efforts. As John King notes in “The Boom of the Latin American Novel,” from The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, the new Cuban state directly promoted Latin American literature by offering residencies, awarding prizes, organizing events, and even publishing a journal, Casa de las Americas. To counter communist influence, the United States promoted “developmentalism,” pushing for the integration of Latin American countries into international markets, including the arts.

While contemporary critics seldom mentioned the Cuban Revolution, the writers themselves acknowledged their debt.

The critical praise that would usher in the Latin American Boom soon followed. In 1966, the Times Literary Supplement declared Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar to be the “first great novel of Spanish America.” The next year, it won the National Book Foundation award for fiction in translation, while Miguel Angel Asturias received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming only the second Latin American so honored. In 1970, The New York Times described One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” While contemporary critics seldom mentioned the Cuban Revolution, the writers themselves acknowledged their debt even decades later.

“In a sense, the boom in Latin American literature in the United States has been caused by the Cuban Revolution,” Garcia Marquez told The Paris Review in 1981. “Every Latin American writer of that generation had been writing for twenty years, but the European and American publishers had very little interest in them. When the Cuban Revolution started there was suddenly a great interest about Cuba and Latin America.”

But if it was the Cuban Revolution that birthed the Latin American Boom, it was also revolutionary Cuba that laid the Boom to rest. King notes in his essay that the subsiding of the Boom as a literary trend in the 1970s coincided with rifts between the new Cuban state and the wider literary community. In 1971, the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, once a supporter of the revolution, was imprisoned for criticizing the government in his work. Padilla faced a show trial, where he was forced to confess his “crimes” and make accusations against other writers, including his wife.

“This infuriated a number of intellectuals, from Latin America, North America, and Europe, who wrote two open letters to the Cuban regime complaining about Padilla’s shoddy treatment,” writes King. “Fidel Castro replied in a furious manner, castigating bourgeois intellectuals who were the lackeys of imperialism and agents of the CIA…”

(As absurd as that accusation may sound, the CIA was in fact connected to the literary establishment. Peter Matthiessen, co-founder of The Paris Review, for example, worked for the CIA in the 1950s and used the magazine as his cover while spying on communists and others.)

The question remains why it takes a revolution for readers to consider new writers.

The Boom still echoes, most clearly in the lasting appreciation of virtuosos like Garcia Marquez, but its relationship with the Cuban Revolution also demonstrates that popular political movements can inspire corresponding literary trends, much like the Black Lives Matter movement continues to inspire interest in the works of Black authors from a literary community that had previously been more hostile. The question remains why it takes a revolution for readers to consider new writers—but as Garcia Marquez suggested in his interview with The Paris Review, the search for such validation is, in part, what makes political conflict necessary.

“It was discovered that Latin American novels existed that were good enough to be translated and considered with all other world literature,” he said of the Boom. “What was really sad is that cultural colonialism is so bad in Latin America that it was impossible to convince the Latin Americans themselves that their own novels were good until people outside told them they were.”

To build upon Garcia Marquez’s criticism: The common hope of revolutionaries and writers should not be to momentarily gain access to either the rights or the recognition that have been withheld from them by gatekeepers. If revolutionaries and writers can find common cause, it should be in tearing down those gates, so that they can never be put out again.

The Real Writing Workshop Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re talking to Dario Diofebi, author of Paradise, Nevada, who will be teaching an eight-week seminar on plotting your novel: how do you structure a story without getting bogged down in formulas and rules? Dario shared with us his thoughts on pursuing lepidoptery, taking care of your reader, and coming out of writing class with a valuable network of friends.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Writer friends. A network of talented people who are eager to talk about unpublished fiction with you for hours each week. It’s hard to overstate how rare this is, and how valuable. When you’re starting out especially, when it’s hard to tell yourself what you’re doing matters, being part of a group is a real blessing.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I feel like students at times make the mistake of focusing too much on the one class when their pages are workshopped, and coast the rest of the time. It’s selfish, obviously, but also shortsighted: the most vital learning you’ll do in a workshop, I find, happens while you’re reading and editing for your classmates. It makes you a better reader of your own work, which long-term is the one skill you want to take away from a workshop. In a couple years, you might not care at all about the story you were working on during that class, but the skills you’ve acquired as an editor will stay with you, and make you a better writer. 

The most vital learning you’ll do in a workshop, I find, happens while you’re reading and editing for your classmates.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

Love your reader. This has been said in many ways by many great writers, and it feels to me like the foundation all other writing advice is built upon. Writing may well be self-expression, but the most important person remains the one who chooses to give you their precious time and attention. Take good care of them.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

It’s plausible that everyone owns at least one really interesting story, somewhere. Not everyone has the persistence, the discipline, and, frankly, the luxury of time at their disposal to do so in novel form. Nor should they want to: there’s lots of ways to tell stories, novels are just one (and not a particularly popular one at that).

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

No, I really don’t see what the point would be. But I do try to give students realistic expectations about what writing careers look like, these days. It’s easy to idealize the writing life, and the reality of it can hit hard. Ultimately though, if someone really wants to write, they’ll find a way to do it anyway. 

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

In a vacuum I’d say both are equally necessary. If I think back to my own experience, though, it’s definitely praise (or really, support and encouragement) that’s helped me more.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

It’s easy to idealize the writing life, and the reality of it can hit hard.

If by publication we mean the publishing industry, then no, it’s pointless. Chasing trends or trying to predict what that singularly irrational system will end up valuing next gets you nothing but frustration. If by “publication” we mean should we think of the reader, then yes, constantly. 

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

  • Kill your darlings: Cut/paste your darlings onto a separate file you promise yourself you’re going to revisit soon (though probably not). Do keep some of your darlings though: over-edited fiction feels dry and lifeless.
  • Show don’t tell: If you’re good at telling in an exciting, engaging way, go ahead and tell me things too. 
  • Write what you know: Maybe, but know lots of things. Be aware of the limits of your knowledge, respectful, and diligent, but by all means be curious. Fiction is exploration.
  • Character is plot: Sometimes, sure. But other times plot will be the thing that drives you, and your characters will have to scramble to adapt, and that’s fine too.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Lepidoptery, I hear. I myself am partial to Rubik’s cubes though. 

What’s the best workshop snack?

I could never really feel comfortable snacking during class, but I do recommend a cup of tea.

8 Books About Reckless Decisions

Posted on by Jo Lou

Despite a lifetime of being compulsively apologetic and avoiding conflict, my favorite fictional characters are just the opposite. 

I’m drawn to the reckless and impulsive, those who refuse to toe the line. Perhaps even more so since the birth of my daughter, when there suddenly seem far fewer opportunities for heedless behavior. Instead, I live vicariously through the hedonism of others. Take Josephine, for example, the narrator of my debut novel, The Divines, who hides her past from her husband, books secret motel rooms, squirrels away a lockbox of explicit Polaroid pictures and holes up in a dive bar at nine months pregnant.  

In this vein, the books on this list are an ode to the risk-takers and thrill-seekers in novels, the wild women (and men) who make some pretty questionable life choices, throwing caution to the wind so that we don’t have to.  

The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

At some point, haven’t we all wanted to disappear? In The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, a woman’s backpack is stolen from her Casablanca hotel, stripping her of both her passport and identity. Faced with the prospect of returning to her old life—the regrets and bad decisions—she opts for reinvention.  

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

A pregnant pizza delivery girl becomes obsessed with one of her customers in this firecracker of a debut by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Downing cans of beer in her garden shed, Frazier’s loveable teenage narrator decides to follow her heart in the wake of her father’s death. 

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante 

From Lila in My Brilliant Friend to Olga in The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante specializes in nonconforming women. In this slender thrill of a novel, Leda’s seaside vacation takes an unexpected turn when she steals a child’s doll from the uncouth family who threaten to interrupt her peaceful days on the beach.   

Luster

Luster by Raven Leilani

Luster was a blazing light in the dark days of 2020. Leilani’s irreverent and imperfect protagonist, Edie, is a woman who acts on impulse. After starting a relationship with a married man, Edie sneaks into his family home, slugs milk from his fridge and, moments later, comes face to face with his wife.  Sensual and provocative, this is a story about a young black woman—an artist—fighting to be seen.   

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way,” begins The Vegetarian, the story of a Korean woman who refuses to eat meat after experiencing a bloody dream. While foregoing pork might not seem overtly reckless at first, this is a tightly drawn story about female agency in a patriarchal world.   

Page 77 – Electric Literature

The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

Cassie was born with a knot, a genetic abnormality that led to her twisted torso. But that’s not the only unusual part of Etter’s story. In this surrealist gem of a novel about society’s obsession with female appearance, meat is harvested from a quarry by the menfolk. Bucking tradition, Cassie breaks through the gates in a visceral act of defiance, presses her cheek against the fleshy wall, lets the blood soak in.   

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Poor Cow by Nell Dunn

Published in the ’60s, Poor Cow is the story of a working-class London girl living on the edge of poverty, so “skint” she doesn’t even have a pair of knickers to wear. A perennial daydreamer, Joy’s husband is in jail and her lover’s a thief, but that doesn’t stop her looking for fun. “Men are terrific,” she announces, slapping on her pink lippy, heading to the pub to find one.  

Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin

The astragalus is part of the ankle, the bone that Sarrazin’s teenage narrator shatters as she leaps from her jail cell in the opening scenes of this semi-autobiographical French novel. Anne is rescued by fellow criminal, Julien, and there begins this kaleidoscopic story of a woman on the lam. 

I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert

I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert

I’m fascinated by liars—their audacity, their bravado—none more so than the fabulists in Kispert’s short stories. Take the man who pays an actor to play the role of his phoney best friend, or the narrator who dons a gold crucifix, faking religion to seduce a Catholic hunk. Kispert’s stories are as much about the lies we tell ourselves, as they are characters being willingly deceitful.      

One Fjord Away from a Second Date

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

Compaction Birds

Early Saturday morning I drove up the coast from the border, toward Thy. I drove past meadows with flocks of game birds. The geese don’t want to migrate anymore. They think it’s just as easy to stay in the farmers’ fields, so now they hunker there through the winter by the thousand, feeding on winter wheat and old corncobs. They trample, they compact the soil and make it hard.

As I stood on the ferry, crossing the Thyborøn Channel, I was thinking that it was a long way to drive for a woman I’d only spent a single night with. But Anja had been nice when she was waiting on us during the seminar in the national park. She’d wanted to join the dancing after dinner and seemed eager as we walked through the crowberry. She didn’t want to do it in the hotel, but there’d been primitive shelters in the area. My performance hadn’t been that impressive, yet now her ex-husband had the kids for the weekend. And she had the family summer cottage.

“Come,” she’d whispered on the phone.

There’s a powerful riptide in the Limfjord. I had to grip the railing tightly on the trip across. The fjord looked as though it were a river flowing toward the North Sea, and up on the Agger Isthmus I saw how everything that no longer had to fly away lay pooling in the lakes, and if she hadn’t been standing in the lyme grass by the driveway to a cottage a little farther north, I might well have stayed.

“But here I am,” I said as I stepped into the dunes to greet her.

She wore a light-colored dress with small sun-yellow flowers. It was a pretty dress, and she said I looked just like she remembered, and that she was awfully sorry. There’d been some sort of double booking. She’d forgotten that her mother was coming, among others. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, and said it was too bad I’d had my cell phone switched off.

Within the cottage stood a woman in blue, with brushed bangs. She was standing with one of those cast-off mugs you find in summer cottages. It was the mother. In front of her, Anja’s sister was gesturing, and behind her sister, a niece sat in a creaking wicker chair. Out on the dunes, her brother-in-law and nephew were kicking a ball.

“The party slipped my mind. My aunt’s turning eighty,” Anja said, rubbing her forehead. There was a luncheon at a nearby inn. She had to go, she explained. For a couple of hours at least. I could stay and enjoy the cottage. “You’re very welcome to join us,” Anja’s mother said, and stepped closer. “In our family, there’s always room for one more at the table.”

I shook her mother’s hand, then I shook her sister’s. I said hi to the niece, and to the brother-in-law when he came in the door with the boy. “Anja says you work at the Society for Nature Conservation,” he said. “What are you doing about the barnacle geese?”

I never managed to answer, because Anja pulled me out onto the porch. She said she understood if I’d rather go home now. She was sorry she’d mixed things up so badly, but she was tied down. I said that she looked pretty with those freckles on her nose. She said her aunt had been recently widowed. Then she poked a forefinger into my palm, and I clutched at it.

There was some lighthearted confusion a little while later when Anja kissed me back by the outdoor shower. It wasn’t a good kiss. The yellow flowers on the sleeves of her dress seemed to be elsewhere beneath my hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered, and behind the clapboard wall the others were talking about driving to the inn together. There wasn’t enough room in her brother-in-law’s Audi, so I ended up in the passenger seat of Anja’s car, her mother behind me with her hands on my headrest.

We took the main coast road north, trailing her brother-in-law. We drove like this for a while through the national park. From the backseat, Anja’s mother spoke of the view and the place names, and she wanted to know exactly where I lived. “Tøndermarsken,” I said. “By yourself, right?” she asked, and I confirmed that I was a widower. I also mentioned that my wife had been a pastor, but that seemed to land awkwardly. Then Anja’s mother gave a recapitulation of some article she’d read in the weekly paper. It had to do with wolves and how they communicate across long distances by howling. “They’re social creatures,” she said.

In this way we drove along behind the brother-in-law until he turned into a rest stop. Anja conferred with him, while her mother worried about not getting there in time for the first course. As for me, I was looking at the flowers on Anja’s dress and the clusters of game birds lifting off from the vegetation. In the winter they would stick around: compaction birds.

What had happened was that the brother-in-law had gone north by mistake, and after a half-hour excursion in the wrong direction, we arrived at the inn well into the first course. There was a burst of applause and general merriment when we crossed the floor. If I’d known who the other guests were, I would have attempted a bit of clowning, but Anja’s was the only face present that was somewhat familiar, and she wasn’t looking up.

Seats had been set aside for the family. I sat down in the only available chair at a table that wasn’t the head table. To my left was a little man who introduced himself as a cousin from the other side of the family. He explained that it was his wife’s place I’d taken. “She never goes anywhere anymore,” he said, and then I turned to my right, where a bearded man was seated. After that, a fish landed on my plate. “Cheers!” exclaimed a wrinkled face across from me. It belonged to a woman. “It’s a good thing you made it.”

I patted Anja’s hand every time it rested on my shoulder in passing. “I’m terribly sorry about this,” she whispered, and at such moments there were eyes upon us, so Anja stopped doing it, and I didn’t feel I could go over to her.

In this fashion, the luncheon proceeded. Now and then I went to the restroom to make the time pass, and it was when I was trying to urinate again that a man stepped into the stall next to mine and unzipped. A profuse pissing commenced. I finished up discreetly, flushed, and opened the stall door, but not fast enough to escape the brother-in-law.

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, coming over to the sink. “Now we’ve pissed together.” I said it was almost as good as being blood brothers, after which we returned to the party, where the coffee had been served.

“What are you people planning to do about those barnacle geese?” he asked, pulling me down at the deserted end of a table. “And the whooper swans and the pinkfeet? I’ve had to resow my fields. My neighbor too.” I glanced around for Anja, who was being detained at the head table. “What do the ag associations suggest?” I asked. “Can you spray for them?” he said, and laughed.

I have this conversation every day, and I pointed out that it was really due to climate change. Then he wanted to know if it was also the climate’s fault that the wolves had come north to harass his cows. I explained, as I usually do, that wolves have adapted to a Europe at peace, and he maintained, as no doubt he usually does, that he didn’t want to let his kids play in the tree plantation anymore. Finally he said, “I hope you have a great view from your ivory tower, but you should know that we’re rather fond of Anja. Why don’t you try a widows’ ball down in Southern Jutland instead?”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Anja. The yellow flowers spread across the dress fabric and resembled creeping potentilla. That was something she had loved, and I always see it when I go out into the marsh. It blossoms abundantly in the groundcover, and there was something about her face, especially her mouth. Yet restless, that she was. Couldn’t be in the place she found herself. Once when we were at a dinner, she whispered to me that she felt naked without her vestments and wanted to go home. She had a way of leaving me, also in bed. When her legs began to get twitchy under the comforter, I’d place a hand on one of them and say, “A little while yet,” but it was no use, and now here was this woman Anja, sitting in the bosom of her family, tearing a napkin to pieces.

I suggested that we take a little walk, down to the water. She cast a sidelong glance at her aunt and mother and ended up standing on the beach, backlit at the water’s edge. As she stood there in silhouette, we agreed that it would be best if she drove me back to the cottage. My car was there, after all. “I feel terribly embarrassed,” she said a couple of times on the way, and I said she shouldn’t. “I did get a nice drive out of it.”

It was still warm when I drove south, and somewhere on the Agger Isthmus I pulled over at a scenic rest stop. A light breeze was flowing across the terrain. Into the landscape went a path, and I followed it until it vanished in the dunes. Then I took off my shoes. Down by the breakers, flocks of gulls. When they weren’t climbing the wind they stood frozen on the beach, gazing outward. Oddly abandoned and always on the lookout for a fish. After a while I pissed and went back to the car. There I sat, next to Route 181 southbound. The key in the ignition, the sunset, the night.

About the translator:

Misha Hoekstra is an award-winning translator. He lives in Aarhus, where he writes and performs songs under the name Minka Hoist.