You’re trapped in your house. Every attempt to leave it is charged with danger. You’re overwhelmed with housework. You feel like you’ve aged 20 years. For many of us, that’s been our experience of the pandemic.
It’s also the plot of Diana Wynne Jones’s children’s fantasy classic, Howl’s Moving Castle.
In the novel first published in 1986, Sophie Hatter, a young woman growing up in the fairy tale land of Ingary, is turned into an old woman by the villainous Witch of the Waste. As a result, she decides to leave home to seek her destiny. Jones seems initially to adhere closely to the traditional arc of the fantasy genre established before her by writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, albeit with a female protagonist and a lot more hat-trimming. Sophie’s first encounter is with the castle of the supposedly wicked wizard Howl, which is lurching across the countryside near Sophie’s town. But rather than serving as the initial trial in a grand quest, as it might for Frodo or Bilbo, the castle becomes Sophie’s new home. There are quick excursions outside—the castle has a magical door to four different locations—but Sophie and the novel always return to the castle, and mostly just its one main room. Indeed, whenever Sophie, exasperated by the selfish Howl, resolves to leave permanently, she is prevented, whether by a magical scarecrow, by the arrival of guests, or by her own self-doubt.
The claustrophobic quest of Howl’s Moving Castle is a perfect read for this pandemic year, when many of us are trapped inside, or when the outside world that we need to navigate is historically perilous. Not only is it delightful and psychologically complex, but it focuses on a topic that dominates our contemporary lives: housework. As my wife and I talk over and divvy up the never-ending series of domestic tasks—I do the cooking, she does the meal planning, I sweep the floors, she scrubs the sinks—it’s refreshing to encounter a fantasy novel that actually validates that people can’t just cast spells all day, but have to shop for food and clean. This year of course has brought domestic labor to the forefront of popular consciousness.As article after article has chronicled, the pandemic has been especially brutal on women: our lack of a strong federal response to the pandemic and deep-seated devaluation of carework has forced many women to continue in their jobs while simultaneously shouldering a disproportionate burden of child care and domestic chores. Meanwhile, the ever-present risk of infection renders help from the community—from family, friends, or professionals—literally dangerous.
Like so many women, in Howl’s Moving Castle it is Sophie who does the housework. A lot of housework. One of Jones’s chapter titles is, “Which is far too full of washing.” She also makes spells, but whole chapters of the novel are devoted to Sophie cleaning the castle, cooking breakfast, or mending Howl’s suits. This may sound like regressive gender politics, but Jones always points out how Howl’s relationship to Sophie is, at least at first, fundamentally exploitative. Indeed, the word “exploit” is used constantly in the novel. At one point, Sophie’s half-sister remarks that her mother “knows you don’t have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them.” And Howl, who also seems to know this, likewise acknowledges that he is exploiting Sophie in the novel’s final pages.
Through this focus on housework and exploitation, Howl’s Moving Castle is clear-sighted about how gender functions in society.
Through this focus on housework and exploitation, Howl’s Moving Castle is clear-sighted about how gender functions in society. Sophie is remarkable because she remains so unaware of herself and her own powers, a trait she shares with protagonists of other of Jones’s novels like Fire and Hemlock and Hexwood. We as readers—and certainly the other characters—may pick up on the fact that Sophie is a powerful witch from the first few pages, but Sophie only recognizes her own magical capabilities near the end. Her negative self-perception derives, the novel implies, from her stepmother, who has her work without pay in her hat shop at the beginning of the novel. But that sense of inadequacy is also a function of larger ideology: the first sentence of the novel reads, “In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.” Sophie—the eldest of three daughters—has internalized this story that “everyone knows” so thoroughly that she has become completely unaware of her own exceptional agency. This is how gender ideologies work as well, with “being born a daughter” carrying with it a set of implicit messages which confer a sense of internalized inferiority onto women, just like “being born the eldest of three.”
Habituated to this subordinate position once she arrives at the castle, Sophie quickly puts herself to work doing housework for Howl. While she grumbles and curses Howl as she cleans up after the green slime left behind by one of his frequent tantrums, she has a hard time imagining alternative ways of existing. Nor is she compensated for that labor, except through room and board in the castle. As such, the novel works as a companion piece to the work of a feminist theorist who has been increasingly cited as the pandemic has progressed: Sylvia Federici. Federici was one of the founders of the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, and in her classic essay “Wages Against Housework,” from 1975, she rails against how domestic labor has been systematically devalued: “To demand wages for housework is to make it visible that our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society.” Sophie too has been literally “distorted” by the spell that has turned her into a “hale” old woman, but the idea that she must conform to this model of selfless service remains the same whether or not she is young or old.
It’s one of the few fantasy novels to focus not on grand quests but on the cyclical never-ending tasks like childcare and cleaning.
But, crucially, Federici declares that housework is about economics, not just ideology: “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose he fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking.” For Federici, capitalism is only possible through the fact that it creates a category of work—housework—and of workers—overwhelmingly female—that are not compensated for that work. Indeed, Jones is hyper-aware of the importance of pay and markets in the novel: Sophie grows up in the parallel world town called Market Chipping, and Sophie’s sister complains about her mother not paying Sophie a wage for trimming hats: “That hat shop is making a mint these days, and all because of you!” Hats are themselves an interesting choice of profession, since their production straddles the line between housework and the market economy—they are trimmed as a kind of domestic craft labor within the home, but then are sold in Sophie’s family’s shop. It’s unclear how familiar Jones, writing in the mid-’80s, was with the transnational Wages for Housework movement established the previous decade, but Howl’s Moving Castle similarly represents housework as uncompensated, exploitative, and difficult to escape.
Through the focus on Sophie’s housework, Howl’s Moving Castle risks naturalizing domestic labor as “women’s work.” But women in the novel are not just doing the housework. They are also, or instead, powerful—and professional—witches: the Witch of the Waste, Mrs. Pentstemmon, Mrs. Fairfax, Sophie’s sister Lettie, and, eventually, Sophie herself. Indeed, the witch is central to Federici’s theories in her classic book Caliban and the Witch, in which she argues that women who resisted the devaluation of their labor in the transition to capitalism were demonized and terrorized as witches. As a witch specifically, then, Sophie is particularly caught in the middle of these conflicts about the relationship between the market and the home. Witches are of course common in YA fantasy, but they function for Jones to break down the gender binaries which normally structure fantasy, and specifically the divide between domestic space and the public sphere. For interestingly Jones does not make the narrative trajectory of her novel Sophie leaving behind her housework and becoming a more traditional fantasy heroine: she doesn’t become, for example, Lucy Pevensie sitting atop a throne or Hermione Granger slaying Voldemort’s minions. The novel does not reject domestic space and domestic tasks: it’s one of the few fantasy novels to focus not on grand quests but on what Hannah Arendt calls “labor”: the cyclical never-ending tasks like childcare and cleaning. Rather than having to choose between the domestic space and the outside world, Sophie is able to turn domestic spaces and features—kitchens, and bathrooms, and cleaning supplies—into the stages and tools of adventure. Sophie helps craft spells for duels and sea voyages in the kitchen, deploys magical powders to absurdly enlarge one of Howl’s suits, and cooks breakfast each day on a fire in the hearth that is actually a demon named Calcifer.
The moving castle that provides the backdrop for almost all of the novel’s scenes provides a spectacularly apt metaphor for how Jones dissolves the divide between the public and the domestic, the famously specious “separate spheres.” In a moving castle, your home moves around with you; Sophie is able to go on quests without leaving home for long. She can meet the King, tangle with the Witch of the Waste, pick flowers, journey through a portal to Wales, and still be back in time for lunch and to tend the (demon) hearth.
Yet this is not a fairy tale ending, despite the fairy tale setting, and despite the fact that Sophie gets to have by the conclusion power, a profession, and love with Howl. Like Sophie, Howl changes over the course of the novel, gaining a heart (literally) and becoming more honest, so that he can serve as a more suitable romantic partner. Yet he remains Howl: still manipulative, still on some level afraid of commitment, or a “slitherer-outer,” in the novel’s parlance, a nice phrase for those who are always finding ways to avoid household (and other) labor. You can’t quite imagine Howl sitting down and dividing up the chores with Sophie like my partner and I do, but you also can’t imagine Sophie not giving him hell for leaving the kitchen a mess. Sophie and Howl at novel’s end are not so much equals as equally matched: when they finally acknowledge their feelings for each other, with Howl saying, “I think we ought to live happily ever after,” Jones writes,
Sophie knew that living happily ever after with Howl would be a good deal more eventful than any story made it sound, though she was determined to try. “It should be hair-raising,” added Howl.
“And you’ll exploit me,” Sophie said.
“And then you’ll cut up all my suits to teach me,” said Howl.
At a time when much of our lives and our relationships are a muddle, Howl’s Moving Castle provides a satisfying ending while not insisting that all problems are solved, all characters fully redeemed. After a year in which most men seem incapable, even under historically adverse circumstances, in doing anything more than the bare minimum of caretaking responsibilities, Howl’s Moving Castle does not magically turn Howl into a perfect partner, and instead insists even at its end on the potentially exploitative conditions of housework. Rather than disavowing or solving the unequal conditions of domestic work, or accepting its exploitative basis, the novel by its end acknowledges and makes visible the domestic space as a place of inherent and ongoing struggle over labor.
When I’ve taught Howl’s Moving Castle to undergraduates this pandemic year in my online class on children’s fantasy literature, I’ve found that of all the novels we read it provokes the most enthusiastic reactions. When all year long you’ve been stuck inside of the same house, it’s liberating to imagine being able to flip a knob and have your door open to four different locations, as it does for Howl. When all year long you’ve been relentlessly doing housework—often without the essential caregiving help you need—it’s exciting to fantasize that those chores might themselves be part of a magical journey. And when all year long you’ve been at best repeatedly rehashing how to parcel out the endlessly required chores with your housemates or at worst trying to get your partner to accept their fair share, it’s gratifying to read a novel that acknowledges and centers that deeply gendered conflict. So in a pandemic we might not need to turn to fantasy literature simply as an escape from our locked-down lives. We might turn instead to Howl’s Moving Castle to represent both the possibilities and the limitations of those at-home explorations.
Ladee Hubbard’s sophomore novel, The Rib King, may take place a hundred years ago but it touches on just about every pressing socio-cultural issue in the zeitgeist. The book deftly examines the theft of Black genius, entrepreneurship, and art, through its central character, the indelible August Sitwell, whose prim and proper countenance is swiftly replaced by a well-earned streak of vengeance. A groundskeeper for a white midwestern household in the early 1900s, Mr. Sitwell possesses an unusual olfactory gift. He can identify all of the ingredients in a dish by simply smelling it. A white businessman takes notice and sees a potential for profit. When Mr. Sitwell is then backed into a corner, he’s forced to enter into a business deal that places his racialized likeness on a label for a sauce he created.
While reading The Rib King, one can’t help but recall Bon Appetite’s refusal to adequately compensate food writers of color for their video series, Test Kitchen. Or the calls for John T. Edge, the white founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, to step down. Or corporations’ long overdue jettison of racially stereotyped brands like Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemima. The Rib King strikes a nerve, and in the process, delivers a dazzling story that navigates the fine line between revenge and justice.
Anjali Enjeti: Where did your interest in exploring special talents or powers, and having them shape your stories, come from?
Ladee Hubbard: That element of The Rib King is an effect of its specific origins. The Rib King, as a character, was initially mentioned in my previous novel, The Talented Ribkins, as the deceased patriarch of the Ribkins family, making this book a prequel.
The Talented Ribkins evolved from my interest in the cultural impact of W.E.B. Dubois’ essay, “The Talented Tenth,” published in 1903. The essay is about the need to cultivate and educate a Black leadership class and posits that 1/10 of the Black population is born with the innate talent that, if properly trained, will make them naturally fit to assume this leadership role.
In The Talented Ribkins, I gave the characters “talents” that are physically manifested, a part of their tangible reality as opposed to being an abstract potential. They struggle with themselves and each other about how to put these talents to good use, thereby troubling the idea of “talent.” I think it was easier to represent the limitations of the concept that way, as well as the specific pressures brought to bear on the characters themselves.
AE: The book feels so timely for so many different reasons. It could have been set in the present day, but you set it in the early 1900s. I’m curious about what drew you to that time period.
LH: The book was written in reaction to current events and my desire to draw links between the past and the present. I began writing it while I was still working on the first novel, right around the time the Black Lives Matter hashtag first emerged in response to the acquittal of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin. The specific vulnerability of African American children to racial violence influenced the development of the plot. As a mother of a teenager, the fact that Trayvon Martin was a child was stark, as was the fact of how obscure this aspect of their deadly confrontation was in many media accounts. More broadly, I was struck by how disturbing it was that we were still grappling with many of same social tensions as 100 years ago—namely, the fundamental difficulty to respect the rights of African Americans as equal citizens.
AE: The Rib King is an important conversation about how white people profit off of Black images and iconography. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben brands have been recently redesigned, but other brands and professional sports teams, like the Atlanta Braves, are still putting up a fight. How do you hope this book will advance the conversation on the theft of likeness?
LH: On a fundamental level, it all seems to go back to a tendency to identify nonwhite people with commodities, which is what Black people literally were prior to emancipation.
In terms of advancing a conversation, I think it would be enormously helpful to strive for a level of honest reflection about the persistent appeal of these icons, to really address their origins and what they say about the society we live in and its values. Whose likenesses are they really?
AE: This is such an important point—the images never did resemble any real people, just grotesque stereotypes. What’s interesting to me, is that despite the fact that there are far greater representation and visibility of nonwhite races in positions of power (certainly more than when The Rib King takes place) our society still clings to these images and reproduces them. Is it fair to say that representation alone will not solve the issue of the widespread dissemination of stereotypes? Is more representation the panacea or is it simply one part of the equation?
It all seems to go back to a tendency to identify nonwhite people with commodities, which is what Black people literally were prior to emancipation.
LH: I think it is part of the equation. It wasn’t too long ago that people were describing the U.S. as post-racial in part because of the greater visibility of certain, individual nonwhites in power. Images of Black people who had “made it,” who had money and power, were held up as proof that race was no longer an obstacle to success, an idea which, on the level of representation, culminated with the election of our first Black president. I think that what has followed Obama’s time in office proves that the issues mediating the persistent saliency of Black stereotypes, the persistence of racism and its very real repercussions, are far deeper than that.
AE: The theme of cultural appropriation in The Rib King has been a hot topic the past few years especially in the food industry, though it’s oftentimes misunderstood and discussed with disdain. Why do you think there’s still so much resistance when it comes to understanding and acknowledging the harm of cultural appropriation?
LH: Since it’s systemic, it is a difficult problem that requires conscious and dedicated commitment to confront. There is a deep-rooted pattern whereby many peoples’ cultural productions are not recognized as culture but are instead regarded as raw materials that do not truly acquire value until after they have been appropriated, as if appropriation itself were a form of refinement and acculturation. I think it is important to recognize how deeply this type of thought and behavior has impacted the history of this country as a whole. Certainly, the history of enslavement and colonialism made cultural appropriation—and the right to profit from appropriation—a habitual gesture of racial entitlement.
AE: There is a very dark, sudden turn in the novel, one that shifts the narrative in the complete opposite direction of where I expected it to go. The Rib King defies formulaic kinds of storytelling – it’s one of the reasons why the book appealed to me so much. How do we as readers and writers nurture and encourage different forms of storytelling? How do we help these types of books be discovered?
People were describing the U.S. as post-racial in part because of the greater visibility of certain, individual nonwhites in power. Images of Black people who had ‘made it’ were held up as proof that race was no longer an obstacle to success.
LH: I think it is important to have and cultivate outlets that can highlight and provide access to a broader range of work that is being done both in the United States and outside of it. There are a lot of really good stories that may be considered unconventional because people are not aware of them, because of the clear tendency for some types of stories and cultural perspectives to be promoted and celebrated over others. Different forms of storytelling are often marginalized, as are different types of storytellers whose voices are not always acknowledged as being of value and so are ignored.
AE: And it seems that the search to publish more nontraditional forms of storytelling might need to be more intentional. I’m wondering if you think part of the publishing industry’s reliance on expected/traditional/formulaic forms of storytelling has anything to do with the fact that, compared to other countries, we publish so few books in translation here.
LH: Yes, I do think so. A certain amount of disconnect from other parts of the world makes many things seem “new” when they in fact aren’t. And yet it is important to engage with other parts of the world– both within and outside of the United States. People cannot participate in a wider dialogue if they do not even know that dialogue is going on because there is no reference to it available in a language they can understand.
AE: We’ve seen a lot of big changes in the publishing industry over the past year, including the appointments of Black women to high positions at major publishing houses. Is the publishing industry finally reckoning with itself? Do you think these changes will be long-term? What more needs to be done?
The history of enslavement and colonialism made cultural appropriation—and the right to profit from appropriation—a habitual gesture of racial entitlement.
LH: I hope so! I certainly think it is important and am encouraged by the current push for more diversity in publishing—I hope to see a lot more. At the same time, like the question above, I think a lot of the problems are systemic and therefore not dependent on the actions of any one person.
AE: And it seems to also depend on sustainability. I worry that too many people in power see members of marginalized communities in certain positions of power, and then think, “Oh, okay, we did X, Y, Z, so now we’re done.” Is there a risk, do you think, in becoming complacent—in folks thinking change is finite, instead of continuing to themselves accountable and push to do better?
LH: Again I would note that the Trump presidency was preceded by several decades of assertions that the U.S. was a post-racial society. I know many people recognized this as a falsehood, but the diffusion of that idea did seem to breed a lot of complacency and confusion that was very harmful to efforts to actually address the myriad implications of the persistence of racism in our society. If nothing else, I would hope that what this country had gone through over the course of the past few years has demonstrated the seriousness of the issue, the gravity of the stakes and the extent to which they will require persistent, active commitment on the part of all people who actually care about these issues in order to overcome them.
AE: After a string of police and vigilante killings of Black people, including Ahmaud Arbery, Brionna Taylor, and George Floyd, a number of Black-authored books entered and stayed on bestselling lists. I’ve been wondering, in light of a very close presidential race, whether you think these sales actually reflect a better understanding of racism and anti-racism. Have non-Black people made any progress? Or is what’s happening now purely performative?
LH: It’s not really for me to say whether it is performative or not.
Aunt Jemima has been sitting on the shelf for over 100 years. I am cynical and so suspect that company executives tend to only really listen when they believe that not doing so is affecting their bottom line.
At base I think the answers to all these questions—about appropriation, valuing a more inclusive range of stories and cultural perspectives, whether or not current interest in understanding racism is a performative gesture—at this current moment, ultimately circle back to the significance of public protests. I have a hard time believing that institutional changes happen from within unless people demand those changes or else they would have happened a long time ago. Aunt Jemima has been sitting on the shelf for over 100 years. I am cynical and so suspect that company executives tend to only really listen when they believe that not doing so is effecting their bottom line.
AE: Yes, public protest seems to be crucial. It seems that over the last four years, especially the last year, protest has become a more common and widespread activity in the U.S. Is this a new era for protest?
LH: I hope so. Right now it seems pretty clear that real change will require sustained, committed resistance—of both thought and action—to the stunning inertia of complacency.
Minari, the gorgeous semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, opens with Monica Yi’s first glimpse of the wide, empty landscape that is her new home. Jacob, her would-be farmer husband, bounds out of the moving truck, ready to boost his children up into the stairless trailer. He digs his fingers through the tall grass, holding up the dirt. “This is the best soil in America,” he tells his increasingly panicked wife. “This is why I bought this place.”
The film follows the Yi family as Jacob pursues his dream of growing Korean vegetables in the Ozarks, embarking on a financially challenging and socially isolating life that threatens to break his marriage and family. Before being (rightfully) nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, Minari became the center of controversy surrounding the Golden Globes’ rule that candidates for Best Picture must be at least 51% in English. Otherwise, they are relegated to the “Foreign-language film” category, an award which Minari ultimatelywon.
I keep on returning to the feeling of watching the film, of seeing something distinctly representative of American culture.
I already knew about the Golden Globes insult before I sat down to watch Minari, but during the movie I realized just how absurd the “foreign-language film” categorization really is. The film just feels so American. When expressing outrage about the Golden Globes, critics and filmmakers tend to point out the circumstances under which the film is made. American director, American producer, filmed in America with American financial support. But I keep on returning to the feeling of watching the film, of seeing something distinctly representative of American culture. Lulu Wang, who directed The Farewell (also nominated for a foreign language Golden Globe), stated on Twitter, “I have not seen a more American film than Minari this year.” I repeated similar versions of this to my partner, even though I struggled at the time to pinpoint exactly what I meant.
The film immediately reminded me of a novel I had to read as part of my Midwestern high school curriculum, My Ántoniaby Willa Cather. Told from the point of view of Virginia-born Jim Burden, Cather’s novel reflects on the narrator’s boyhood on a Nebraska farm and the family of immigrants from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) next door, the Shimerdas. Their daughter and Jim’s boyhood love is the titular Ántonia. As a teenager, I fell deeply in love with the novel and the possibilities of literature that Cather opened up for me. Before reading the book, I’d never seen the Great Plains, the place I was from, so lovingly depicted in writing.
Chung, it turns out, loved the novel as well, and Cather is in fact essential to the origin story of Minari. In an article for the LA Times, Chung described calling out desperately for inspiration and hearing a voice in his head respond, “Willa Cather.” He went to the library and checked out what seemed to be her most popular book, My Ántonia. Chung also found himself in the novel, in the story of immigrants struggling with farm life. Like Jim, Chung also moved from the heartland and ended up among the East Coast elite. Chung in fact wanted to adapt My Ántonia into a film, but when he realized that Cather would not have wanted it, he turned to his own memories instead in a process that led him to write Minari.
Both My Ántonia and Minari are homesteading narratives, stories driven by the incredible difficulties of remote farming life. In such tales, the landscape becomes a character, both the antagonist and the beloved. During their first winter, the Shimerdas go hungry, their poorly-kept potatoes rotting and their sourdough bread turning out sooty and poor. In Minari, the soil that Jacob Yi loves betrays him when his well runs dry and he has to start paying for water to keep his Korean vegetables from withering. Both the film and the book also take care to depict the extreme beauty of their settings. In My Ántonia, Jim returns again and again to the light on the long red grass that will soon be cut down for farmland, and in Minari the camera pans across the wild woods as David runs in his cowboy boots and thigh-high shorts. At any moment in either work, a gorgeous hot summer day can bring immense pleasure or turn into a dangerous electrical storm.
Minari is not described as a film about the Ozarks, even though the land and place are essential to the story.
But while My Ántonia and Cather have become closely associated with the prairie, Minari is not described as a film about the Ozarks, even though the land and place are essential to the story. The Golden Globes did not even identify Minari with America because of the race of the main characters. Instead, the film has become a flashpoint for how narratives centering non-white characters are othered in the United States and what it even means to be an “immigrant story.”
Chung, in a New York Times roundtable interview with other Asian American directors, expressed discomfort with characterizing Minari as an “immigrant story” and said that he did not set out to make an “identity piece” or an “Asian American film.” Critics such as Jane Hu have identified this intense self-awareness and concern about falling into stereotype as “the most Asian American thing” about Minari, while also emphasizing that it is, of course, still a film telling a very specific story of an immigrant family. Other Asian American writers, such as Jay Caspian Kang in his profile of Minari lead Steven Yeun, also express discomfort with the phrase “immigrant stories,” which has been used to describe narratives that exploit the suffering of people of color for the entertainment of a white audience. The problem is not the term itself, but the way the phrase “immigrant story” traps characters of color in relation to whiteness. The use of “immigrant narrative” and “identity piece” in the current cultural conversation assumes that whiteness is the center against which everything that is not-white is compared to.
The reason Minari feels so American to me, I believe, is because it shows the Yi family struggling with ambition, optimism, and obligation while also being enormously unconcerned with white people, a reflection of my own personal American experience. The main axis of conflict is not between Korean and American culture, or the Yis and the white people around them, but among the Yis themselves. Jacob’s ambition is in direct conflict with Monica’s loneliness and concern for the health of her mother and son, and the core question of Minari is whether their marriage will survive. The film does not care about how the white peripheral characters see the Yis and shows very few interactions between the family and the white townspeople. And the Yis themselves are generally indifferent to whiteness, too occupied by their own lives to think about how they are received by others.
In my daily life as a Midwestern Asian turned East Coaster, I really only consider my relationship to whiteness when forced to.
In my daily life as a Midwestern Asian turned East Coaster, I really only consider my relationship to whiteness when forced to, an occasion that actually became more frequent once I moved to the cities. In graduate school, I faced a lot of assumptions about how Midwesterners must have treated me, meaningful pauses and implications about the “importance of my story” that were perhaps well-intentioned but left me feeling othered as well as confused, as I could tell my own experience did not line up with the speaker’s expectations. No matter the purpose, I’m always left after these interactions feeling at best uncomfortable and at worst violated or invisible, the actual story I am trying to tell subsumed under a broader cultural narrative.
American mainstream culture is still not used to seeing people of color depicted as actors, rather than those who are acted upon, as subjects directing their lives rather than objects suffering at the hands of others. The difference between what is assumed to be an “American story” versus an “immigrant story” is that in one we see whiteness doing or performing, and in the other we expect to see whiteness acting upon an other. Minari refuses this binary by leaving out the concerns of white people altogether.
Part of Minari’s success in avoiding the white gaze is the lack of white interference in its creation. After the Golden Globes, Chung revealed to CNN that he’d written two scripts for Minari, one with the Korean and one without, due to concern that he would not find distribution for the film if it was not in English. But his producer, fellow Korean American Christina Oh, pushed him to keep the film in Korean in order to preserve a picture of the way they grew up. Having other Korean Americans involved in the process helped him resist the pressures and expectations of white gatekeepers in the creation of his own particular story.
Minari refuses this binary by leaving out the concerns of white people altogether.
My Ántonia is actually considerably more concerned with xenophobia and culture clash than Minari. Part of this has to do with its first-person framing, as the reader sees the world through the perspective of Virginia-born Jim. When Ántonia moves to work for a family in town, she and the other foreign-born “hired girls” are viewed as exotic, potentially dangerous and deserving of pity as they have to work to send money back to their families. Town life turns out to be dangerous for Ántonia, as American-born white men try to assault and take advantage of her. Jim is criticized for being too interested in Ántonia and her friends, rather than girls of “his own set,” and when, as a college student in Lincoln, he reconnects with his old friend Lena Lingard, his professor worries that he will be ruined by the “handsome Norwegian.” He’s whisked off to Harvard instead to complete a law degree.
Like Jacob in Minari, Ántonia ultimately finds satisfaction once she moves back to the country and marries another Bohemian, turning away from town life. The world she creates with her husband and many, many children is inwardly focused and connected to the land. When Jim visits his old friend at the end of the novel, he finds a woman worn down by hard work but still full of purpose and life, caring for her orchards of fruit trees so she can make spiced preserves for kolaches to feed to her Bohemian-speaking children. Her family seems to have little interest in integrating or assimilating, preferring to keep company with other Bohemians. And, like the Yis, this inward turning allows Ántonia to integrate further with the landscape that she loves.
We seem to only notice foreignness when that foreignness is non-white.
Even though Cather is fixated on the foreignness of her characters, her books are not often characterized as “immigrant stories.” The difference, of course, is that she writes about European immigrants, who are not othered in American culture. Even now, one can still drive into a small town in my home state of Iowa and purchase an obscure Dutch pastry or, until recently, attend a Lutheran church service in German. But such markers are viewed more as quirks rather than cultural differences.
The double standard of the treatment of European vs. non-white immigrants is apparent in the Golden Globes. While films like Minari and Wang’s The Farewell were barred from Best Picture, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was not, despite failing to meet the 51% English-language requirement due to its dialogue in French and German. Even The Crown, a show about the British monarchy, was treated more like part of American culture by the award association than Minari. We seem to only notice foreignness when that foreignness is non-white.
Much of Minari’s power comes from its disinterest in the language of white American culture, in what Chung referred to “the discourse that’s out there” during the New York Times roundtable interview. Chung, in his Golden Globes acceptance speech, slyly acknowledged the anger and controversy over the outdated rules that put his film in the wrong category while turning the attention back to his own vision. “Minari is about a family. It’s a family trying to learn how to speak a language of its own,” he said. It’s a language that ultimately exceeds—and expands—our culture’s limited understanding of what a movie like Minari can do.
When writing and revising my novel Call It Horses, I spent time in the narrator Frankie’s two spiritual homelands—the desert and the bog. I tromped in the desert scrub and camped in the Appalachian bog, the deep sandstone reds and the verdant greens, respectively, providing a physical correlative for Frankie’s restless spirit.
This epistolary novel, in which Frankie Donne and her aunt Mave undertake a road trip in 1990 from the small town of Caudell, West Virginia to Abiquiú, New Mexico, attempts to connect the often-estranged body and spirit, not only the human body, but also the body of the wounded world. In writing the account of their westward flight, Frankie tells a story of spiritual liminality and yearning which butts up against religious tradition. Writing the novel raised the question for me: what makes spiritually-oriented literature effective and alive? Not preachy, not reductive, not sentimental, but alive?
I recently read Desert Notes, an early Barry Lopez classic, having heard he died this past Christmas. “You must come with no intentions of discovery,” he writes in the intro. “You must overhear things, as though you’d come into a small and desolate town and paused by an open window.” This imperative struck me as a description of successful spiritual writing: it does not come in through the front door with agenda in hand. At its most resonant, such literature picks up on the hints, shadows, and murmurs of ineffable reality as manifested in our everyday lives and bodies.
I have drawn books around me, like a dense cloud of witnesses, that bear witness to the union of body and spirit, of mystery and the mundane. Here is a small collection of them.
C.E. Morgan’s debut novel All the Living thrums with a slow electric current. The main characters, Aloma and her lover Orren, are people hardened by hard places and hard work. Aloma is orphaned, raised by aunt and uncle; she learns piano at a Kentucky settlement school and falls for Orren who has lost his family to a car accident and is worn down by trying to get the family tobacco farm through a drought alone. She joins him in the project, and theirs is a love between two solitudes, a love formed from loss:
“Aloma had learned of loss only by hearing that it had once happened to her, but Orren had lived that heavy change in the undying instant when the steel rumpled like hard cloth… And now Orren was like a man who had not heard the thing was finished, begun but not yet ended, no final word yet from that empty road… She spied a tree that had begun to turn early in defeat. Her eyes were wide to the miscarriage of the summer, the ruth and pity of it. She suddenly desired the betterment of everything, for herself and Orren and every single thing that had ever died, or would.”
Aloma finds solace in playing piano at the local church, and in the young pastor there—that context is her source of softness and a chance to test beliefs and try on another self while in Orren’s stark house, their sexual energy and burnt silence offer her fire but also closedness. The theology in this novel is felt in blood and bone and in the rural Kentucky landscape that presses Aloma thin. “She couldn’t trust the world to make her happy for more than a minute at a time, and generally less than that, but her life had to be borne.”
The passionate characters in Deesha Philyaw’s fierce new story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, are decision-makers; they’re decisively scrubbing off a Christian theological grime that has needed attention for some time. The men and women in these nine stories seem to say, collectively, “Finally, I am living and breathing and loving myself out of the corners in which a moralistic script has kept me. I’m writing a new script.”
There’s a lot of reckoning with scripture in these stories; scraps float around, making accusations about same-sex relationships as an abomination, about desire as something to tamp down. The reckoning is especially layered and forceful in the story “Jael,” in which 14-year-old Jael—named, if inadvertently, for the biblical character who deceives a general and drives a tent peg into his forehead to, reputedly, enact the judgment of God—crushes on the pastor’s wife and discerns her own form of justice for an older man who preys on young girls. But spiritual tradition is not only an oppressive weight here.
Philyaw’s narratives sometimes revise conventional interpretation to nudge toward a version of liberation inherent in a not-so-airtight story of God: “‘Do you think God wants you, or anybody, to go untouched for decades and decades?… maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it’s not doing you any favors.’” But religious heritage is equal parts familial and cultural heritage, and for these characters deeply rooted in the Black community, raucous claims on freedom still hold space, in these stories, for the grief inherent in any departure from the fabric of tradition.
In “Snowfall,” a woman chooses her female partner over reconciliation with an intolerant Southern home and mother, and there is room here for the beautiful litany of things missed by two Southern women living in the frigid Midwest:
“We miss their bare brown arms reaching to hang clothes on the line with wooden pins. We miss their sun tea brewed all day in big jars on the picnic table in the backyard, then later loaded with sugar and sipped over plates of their fried chicken in the early evening. We miss lying next to them at night in their four-poster beds with too-soft mattresses covered by ironed sheets and three-generation-old blankets.”
The decisions of these characters are clear, often joyful, even when they hurt.
Amy Leach’s essays in Things That Are focus on the body of the world, creatures very “strange and themselves”: jellyfish, beavers, donkeys, ostriches, moons. This is a slantwise book of praise as well as a book of science writing, a book of fables, tales, spiritual inquiries, even jokes! Leach is all wonder and tumble and tuft, as effervescent in language play as in the way she sees and depicts the animal kingdom. About the caterpillar and people’s impatience for its metamorphosis, she writes: “This is understandable of course: when that which is like a plodding lozenge turns into that which is like an angel, everything that belongs to the lozenge’s time seems mere preliminary.” But is it? People cannot “infest the caterpillar with their anxious urges to ‘Become!’” That tiny caterpillar hanging from a leaf over a creek does not think, “‘Alack!…I will never, now, wrap myself in silk and wake up with powdery, iridescent blue-and-green wings’…Rather, it thinks, ‘I’m swinging, I’m swinging, I’m swinging.’”
In rendering this inner landscape of creatures, Leach turns us toward our own glowing innerness. These essays shine with the holy but do not make use of conventional holy words such as God because “the hoopoe and the bat do not say this word. Neither do the eagles or the vultures or the black vultures.” But spirit does strum through this book, in each wingbeat and scurry, each movement of the moon, each piling-up of surprising descriptors and similes:
“The Sun is so loud, like a million bombs all the time, that fine-spun sounds cannot be heard, like birds wading or figs tumbling or the muttering of mathematicians. On the Sun all private qualities disappear into the main loud yellowness.”
Of Marilynne Robinson’s four novels set in the world of Gilead, Iowa, Lila is my favorite for its enfleshing of scripture, its midrashic embodiment reminiscent of her treatment of the story of Noah’s wife and the deluge narrative in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. In Lila, a lesser-known passage—from Ezekiel 16—is the central text and is the text in which Lila sees herself. Israel is compared to an infant cast out and abandoned. God says to this infant in the sixth verse: “And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’”
Lila sees her own lonely youth and sees in Doll—the vagrant that took her in for a life of togetherness, homelessness, and poverty—the prophetic power of someone who has said to her: Live. But Doll’s godlessness lies outside of salvation in the theology of Lila’s new husband, the minister John Ames, and so she sets out to reconcile theology with lived experience.
Though steeped in Calvinist thought, Robinson manages to create a liminal character in Lila, exploring a spirituality deeply inscribed into the Christian tradition while remaining outside of it. An outsider’s perspective can apply pressure to theology and ask more of it than an insider knows how to, exposing its strangeness, elasticity, possibility. And Lila’s spiritual yearning beautifully infuses the physical and the mundane:
“She liked to do her wash. Sometimes fish rose for the bubbles. The smell of the soap was a little sharp, like the smell of the river. In that water you could rinse things clean… Her shirts and her dress looked to her like creatures that never wanted to be born, the way they wilted into themselves, sinking under the water… But when she hung them over a line and let the water run out, and the sun and the wind dry them, they began to seem like things that could live.”
Savannah Sipple’s debut collection, WWJD and Other Poems, wrestles with an Evangelical culture known for its focus on a “personal savior” and making choices based on asking “what would Jesus do?” But Sipple’s Jesus is more intimate chum than lord, more likely to accompany you to Wal-Mart or sign you up for a dating app than chastise you. This is a book full of sexual hunger, a coming-out narrative that reckons not only with religion but also with the complicated layers of place: Sipple’s rural Appalachian homeland. “I never wanted to stay I never wanted to/ leave I never wanted to come back to gravel dust… I hate/ the mountains I love.”
My favorite sequence is the last third of the book in which Jesus serves as a vehicle for exploring the nature of desire itself and all the ways it is muted or thwarted—or sometimes celebrated—along the difficult road that leads to self-acceptance. When “Jesus rides shotgun”: “We go balls to the wall,/ windows down,/ aviator sunglasses always on./ …I used to be afraid. Sometimes/ I still am. Maybe./ Don’t hit the brakes, Jesus says./ Turn the wheel. That’s how you know/ the way you want to go.” Sipple’s poems are heartrending but also hilarious, and her mix of sincerity and humor creates a push-pull with faith that goes deeper than easy mockery.
In Places I’ve Taken My Body, the first essay collection by poet Molly McCully Brown, the disabled body entangles itself with faith and doubt. These essays intimately render the experience of living in a body with cerebral palsy and compromised mobility—what that means for sexuality, travel, artistic achievement, belief, and the furnace of anger (as well as an inexplicable tenderness) that a human being feels toward her own limitations.
In writing the body’s brokenness, Brown helps her reader defamiliarize the fact of living in a body; in “Muscle Memory,” she describes her dissolved memories of once standing and walking without pain as “just some strange, exaggerated version of what it means to age: huge sections of our lives lost to the way memory buckles and muddies and fades, the versions of ourselves we couldn’t find our way back toward if we tried.”
These essays are honest about loss but also, very unsentimentally, about accepting, even cherishing, life in a body that suffers. In “Bent Body, Lamb,” an essay about Brown’s conversion to Catholicism, she tests out in her mouth: “I don’t have to hate my body.” I most love how Brown writes about her former selves, as if these essays were really a letter to them. In “What We Are,” an essay about teaching creative writing to inner-city kids in Texas and coming to grips with her anger, the narrator addresses her child self:
“Hey, stubborn little blond-haired girl, we won. We are alive. And now the work is to be gentler with ourselves and with the world. I want such a sweet life for you. I want the fierceness of attention, of the light coming over the hill, of your own hand bringing a cup to your mouth. Of love, which will abide so much longer than the fire.”
The stories in A Sense of the Whole, by Siamak Vossoughi, explore the inward bloom of life in characters I desire to know in the world as they treat small things with great compassion, thinking and feeling their way through non-scripted, non-ironic interactions. The collection is written in a language that helps us stay soft and not harden.
The narrator in the story “So Long” says, “I wanted to write like people still had stories. Not just things they could say, but things they really wanted to say.” Indeed these characters, Iranians and Americans and many who are both, discern and articulate love in small moments: children learn to play games without guns, immigrants tap into a largeness in watching the World Cup, a man learns a new language because “language had everything—people and what they’d said and what they’d only ever said to themselves, and even somehow, something unsayable, too.”
I’m reminded of the fiction of Noy Holland by these stories’ unapologetic interiority and fable-like quality; Vossoughi’s stories are brief and often focus keenly on a singular issue that is densely layered, like a formerly imprisoned Iranian forgetting his email password, trying to remember his password which is the name of a man who died in that prison; or an Iranian American boy grappling with his huge feelings when his teacher is teaching his American classmates about Iran which, until then, had been his “home thing,” a secret world. Vossoughi writes the emotions and large souls of children especially well. And, with great subtlety, his stories push us readers toward a more just and whole world. When the first Black realtor comes to work at a real estate office, the white racism is exposed as the thing it is—false living: “It is not living because when I put a wall between myself and another person, I put a wall between my heart and me.” The spiritual radiance of this book comes not from interaction with spiritual tradition but from the belief in the miraculous in each person and that person’s connectedness to the whole human community.
“I’m sorry,” my boss said, “I just can’t afford to have an assistant right now. I might know of something for you, though.”
He handed me a business card. It was white with bright red lettering. It said: Echo Enterprises.
“I met this guy last night at a party,” my boss said. “He said he’s looking for someone.”
I thanked my boss for the lead, then I gathered my things and went outside. It was a Friday, a summer afternoon, and very hot. I walked until I found a payphone and then I dialed the number on the card. The phone rang ten, fifteen times, but no one answered. I walked until I found another payphone and tried again. Once again, it rang and rang. On the eleventh ring, a woman answered. She sounded young, around my age, and told me to come in the next day for an interview. I thanked her and hung up. Later that night, I realized she had never asked for my name.
At the interview I was greeted by a middle-aged man wearing a red tie. He gave me the usual spate of grammar, spelling, and typing tests. After I finished those he took me to a small, windowless room.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You passed all your tests. Now it’s time for your interview. First question: Do you mind working on a temporary basis?”
“No, that’s fine. I’m just looking for something to tide me over until I figure out what I’m doing with my life.”
“Great,” the man said. “You’re hired.”
He escorted me into another small, windowless room. There was a square table in the center of it. On the table was a beige telephone.
“When this phone rings, your job is to not answer it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a very simple job,” the man explained. “Don’t answer the phone.”
“If you don’t want anyone to answer the phone, why do you need someone to sit here? Why not just shut the door and let the phone ring?”
“I’m not paying anyone to answer the phone. I’m paying you not to answer it.” He glared at me. “You should bring something to read tomorrow. It usually takes a while for it to start ringing.”
I arrived the next day with a newspaper and a novel. I took a seat at the small table and moved the telephone to the corner. I spread the newspaper and began to read.
By then end of the morning, the phone had not rung and I had read the entire paper. I was pleased with myself; I felt as if I had learned more about the world in one morning than I had in several years.
I took a long walk during my lunch break. When I returned to the office, I began the novel I had brought with me. The phone remained quiet and the afternoon passed peacefully.
At the end of the day, the man in the red tie came by.
“Did the phone ring?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Great.” He handed me an envelope filled with new bills. I counted the money. It was three times what I was typically paid for a day’s work.
That night I treated my friends to dinner. I told them I was working as a secretary at a big law firm. My primary responsibility was to answer the phone. Easy money, I said.
Two weeks passed by in this manner. I went to work, read in the windowless room for seven hours and collected envelopes from the man in the red tie. In the evenings I went out with my friends or to the movies. I was happy, but sometimes I felt guilty. My life was too easy.
Nearly a month passed before the phone started to ring. But when it rang, it really rang. It rang like rain beating on the windows; it rang like locusts in summer — incessant, unstoppable, freakish.
The strange thing was, I didn’t have any desire to answer the phone. I wanted it to stop, yes, but I wanted only in the way you want a headache to recede, or a car alarm to shut off. That is, I didn’t feel like I had much control over it.
At the end of the day I went to the office of the man with the red tie. “The phone started ringing,” I told him.
“Good.” He handed me my cash. “See you tomorrow.”
The next day, the phone was already ringing when I entered the room. I wondered if it had been ringing all night. Something about the way it sounded made me think it hadn’t been. That the phone waited for me.
I actually started to feel better about my job, because now I was actually doing something. There was a challenge. It was hard to concentrate but after a while, I learned to read between the rings.
It wasn’t until the phone stopped ringing that the job began to get to me. After two weeks of ringing, it stopped midday. The silence was luxurious, a sea of quiet. But at the same time I felt as if I had missed a terrible opportunity. As if a window had been open and now it was shut. I began to feel anxious. It was hard to concentrate and I couldn’t read as much. I kept thinking: What if it never rings again? And then: If it does start ringing, should I pick it up? And then: But what if never rings again?
And then: Who had been calling?
To my great relief, the phone began to ring again. But this time it was excruciating to hear, an itch that couldn’t be scratched.
“Why can’t I answer the phone?” I asked my boss.
“Because you aren’t supposed to answer it.”
“Then why does it keep ringing in my room?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to answer it.”
“Then why doesn’t it ring in the room of the person who is supposed to answer it?”
“Because you’re the one who’s not supposed to answer it,” the man said, exasperated. “Are you going to be just like the other girl? It’s so simple, it makes me want to scream!”
The phone stopped ringing again. Once again, I was overcome with anxiety. When the man with the red tie came by at the end of the day I told him I wanted to quit.
“The only way you can quit this job is to answer the phone.”
“Are you saying I can’t quit this job if the phone isn’t ringing?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m not going to sit around and wait for the phone to ring so I can quit. That’s absurd. I’m quitting.”
“You can’t quit.”
“I just did.”
He looked at the phone. “No you didn’t.”
The next day I did what people do when they call in sick to work. I washed my clothes, cleaned my apartment, drank wine with lunch, and went to a matinee. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my job. It was as if there were a beige phone in my mind, perched at the corner of all my thoughts. I saw what the man in the red tie meant and I hated him for it.
I had to wait another two weeks before the phone started ringing again. When it first started I felt a strange and physical elation, as if I were in a plane that was just taking off, but a moment later I had vertigo and couldn’t even look at the phone without getting a cold feeling in my chest. I listened as it rang five, ten, fifteen, times. Then it stopped and my heart stopped, too. I thought to myself, that’s it, I’ve ruined my chances, I’ll be stuck with this job forever. Even when I die that phone will somehow still be with me; I’ll drag it like Jacob Marley and his chains, its spiraling cord will bind my wrists and ankles, its spurts of ringing forever curtailing my unwound thoughts.
And then the phone rang.
I waited to answer. I don’t know why. It was like I wanted to make sure it was real. It rang five, ten times. On the eleventh ring I picked it up.
“Hello?” I said.
A young woman responded, “Hello. Is this Echo Enterprises?”
“Yes.” There was something familiar about her voice but I couldn’t place it.
“I’m calling about a job? Someone told me there was an opening there?”
“Yes, there is. You can come in tomorrow for an interview.”
I gave her directions and then we said goodbye. It was only after I hung up that I realized I had not asked for her name.
A year ago, I abruptly moved from New York City back to my parents’ house in Southern California. Suddenly, after spending years living with my closest friends and loved ones, I was thousands of miles away. But mine isn’t a unique story—since the start of quarantine roughly a year ago, almost everyone has been separated from the people they care about, from neighbors to favorite coworkers to their closest friends or partners.
But at the same time, over the last year, plenty of new relationships have formed. From starting new jobs to falling in love over TikTok, we are still finding ways to reach out to each other, albeit remotely.
If you feel like you’ve reached the limits of Zoom and Netflix Party, there is a rich history of stories that show ways to persevere through separation. Here are seven books about staying connected across the intervening miles.
When Patsy, a queer Jamaican mother, sees an opportunity to move to Brooklyn, she takes it, leaving her young daughter, Tru, behind in their working-class neighborhood in Kingston. Once in New York, Patsy dreams of finally being together with her childhood best friend and crush, who has married a man and adapted to a new life. Across the sea, Tru struggles with her own feelings towards her mother, whom she desperately misses, and her relationship to her identity.
This epistolary novel is split between authors el-Mohtar (writing Blue) and Gladstone (Red), whose characters take turns sending threats and boasts to an opposing agent in a time-traveling war who they are sworn to kill. Amid a world torn apart by collapsed timelines and chaos, Agent Red of the Agency finds a letter from an enemy Garden spy, Blue. The spies poetically weave through time, history, and war, slowly realizing that the soldiers of war have more in common than the powers behind their commands.
In 1949 New York, Helene Hanff struggled to grow her collection of antique and rare British literature. Then after seeing a newspaper ad, she started writing to Frank Doel, the chief buyer of Marks & Co., a London-based bookstore. What follows is 20 years of recorded letters. The correspondence of Hanff and Doel may start as stiff, but over the years melts into passionate discussions about obscure authors, a life-long loving friendship, and a testament to finding community an ocean away.
Pik-Shuen Fung dives into the tale of an “astronaut” family in her forthcoming debut novel. The unnamed protagonist grows up with her mother and grandmother in Canada, while her father stayed in Hong Kong for employment. Years later when he passes, she has to navigate the landscape of grieving for someone who she barely knew both because of his physical and emotional distance. While trying to find answers, she connects with her family through their combined sorrow and love.
Kentukis, remote-controlled stuffed animals, are ubiquitous and potentially dangerous in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes. Location is not an issue for these creatures as they are connected to an online network, meaning anyone can buy one and become a voyeur across the globe—from Oaxaca to Berlin to Tel Aviv. The characters in these stories navigate this new, almost adorable, form of mass surveillance and discover what it means to be the one watching, and the one being watched.
Ludwick is a gay Polish man who has recently fled to New York from the Polish People’s Republic. A few summers before while working at an agricultural camp, Ludwick met Janusz, a student and staunch believer in the Communist Party as a way out of debt. The two bond over James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and over time fall in love in a country that has outlawed their relationship. Told in second person, this novel acts as a letter of reflection to Ludwick’s lover who remains across the world.
When Lisa McKay received an email from Mike, a humanitarian worker in Papua New Guinea, she wasn’t surprised. After her nomadic childhood and finishing her degree in psychology, Lisa developed a career of coaching and aiding humanitarian workers globally. What Lisa didn’t expect from Mike’s email is that their relationship would blossom into something more and would finally teach her what “home” really means.
Without want, there is no personhood. Whether the flush thrill of sex, or the gratification of a good meal (or both, and then some!), our desires constitute and catalyze us. But while the act of desiring might seem automatic—something both feral and essential—understanding why we want what we want can be a fraught endeavor.
Erotic desire, in particular, seems to bewilder most everyone it inhabits. What is it about that person, that touch, that kink? And how do we embrace what gives us pleasure without turning on ourselves with shamefaced scrutiny? There’s a certain ineffability to our erotic inclinations, and perhaps, for this reason, they preoccupy us all the more. And so they always have, from the far-flung age of antiquity, when Sappho committed her agonies to lyric poetry, until today, when nearly every cultural entity celebrates or curses the niceties of erotic life. For all desire’s inconvenience and even, sometimes, misery, we can neither stop wanting nor trying to master it.
Sex writer Tracy Clark-Flory is both a student and a philosopher of want. It is the province of her intellectual enthusiasm and, most recently, it is the organizing concept for Want Me, a memoir of her sexual desires and a topography of straight women’s erotic culture. Clark-Flory understands sexual want as an exquisite conundrum. On the one hand, it is a site of possibility: for pleasure, for play, and for the enduring work of self-knowledge. But it is, simultaneously, territory occupied by culture. As Clark-Flory argues in her book, it is impossible to detach our desire from the influences of our milieu, thick as it is with normalized ideologies, all of which tell us stories about how we ought to engage our libido. As she sifts through the archive of her own sexual coming-of-age—comprised of naively salacious internet chats, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and of course, grainy internet porn—Clark-Flory considers her personal history with the compassion of an elder sister, the intellectual curiosity of a social critic, and the ethical rigor of someone pushing towards progressive clarity.
I recently caught up with Clark-Flory about Want Me, self-disclosure in internet writing, and the various pernicious impacts of normative sexual culture.
You’ve been writing about sex on the internet for over a decade, a beat that entails a significant amount of self-disclosure. The internet has also shaped our respective careers—we’ve both even blogged for Jezebel! So, we are both familiar with the tricky negotiation between personal boundaries (what am I comfortable sharing about myself?) and the awareness of certain mercantile realities endemic to internet writing (will sharing intimate details help my career?). And we are familiar with the frequently-relitigated debate about the Personal Essay Industrial Complex: women-identified persons are so often asked to bleed onto the page, to narrate our traumas.
I am curious to know how this context has shaped the way you write about sex, particularly when it comes to personal testimony. How do you make decisions about what stories to tell?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Early on, I had a mentor of sorts tell me, “I know you’re capable of so much more” with regard to my covering the sex beat, as well as writing about “women’s stuff.” Meaning, as I interpreted it, you could be writing about important topics. I’ve long resented the idea that sex, and “women’s stuff,” are not important topics. At the same time, I think the media’s devaluing of sex writing places an overemphasis on quick turnaround personal writing that is either clickbait or service-oriented. I was well into my career before I was given the support to develop my reporting skills and approach sex as the important topic that it is.
That shift gave me greater power to decide when, and how, to publish personal writing. So far, it seems I’ve decided to mostly save the personal writing for longer, bigger projects—like this book.
RVC:Towards the end of Want Me, you recount a conversation with your husband in which you share a deep-seated wish: “Sometimes…I want to step outside of our culture, or to pretend for a few moments that I can.” I’m sure that yearning resonates with many readers; after all, it’s noisy out here! In fact, one of the many things your book does is make manifest the work—the exhaustion!—involved in cultivating and holding fast to one’s sexual subjectivity, especially in a world that flagrantly caters to straight white cisgender men. How do we learn to differentiate ourselves from our context, which so often annihilates sexual nuance, rendering it, as you say “one size fits all”?
TCF: This question speaks to the conundrum of sexual authenticity, which I wrestle with throughout the book. Sociologists like Erving Goffman argue that basically everything in social life is a performance, that we’re always gauging other people’s reactions to ourselves and managing impressions within cultural norms. He would say that there is no authentic self, really—the self only exists through these unending performances. Of course, Judith Butler has made related arguments around gender. If all of social life is a performance, if sexual scripts are adapted from cultural norms, then what the heck is authenticity?
I don’t think that there is a pre-cultural self. We’re all the result of cultural and social influence, and our sexual fantasies in particular so often draw upon cultural and social meaning and symbolism. I spent a lot of time interrogating my fantasies for authenticity, but ultimately I arrived at an interest in my own bodily feeling and pleasure as being an important measure of authenticity. The most basic measure being: Does it feel good? Are you in your body? Feminist scholars like the developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman talk about subjectivity in terms of girls being in touch with their own embodied sexual feelings, even as “a variety of contexts constrain or make their expression dangerous, difficult or even impossible for girls themselves to discern.”
Unfortunately, I think sexual subjectivity and authenticity, whatever you want to call it, requires sitting in that ambiguity.
RVC:Public discourse about sex and sexuality is generally pinned to cisgender, able-bodied experiences, thereby excluding the myriad genders and bodies that exist in the world. How can we effectively chisel away at these normative structures, and—once and for all—unhook our understanding of sexuality from an illusory gender binary, with its tethered assumptions about what all bodies should and can do?
I’ve long resented the idea that sex, and ‘women’s stuff,’ are not important topics.
TCF: So much of my book depicts my struggling against normative assumptions about sexuality within the gender binary. There are my assumptions about “straight men’s desire,” which are incorrect, because there is no “straight men’s desire,” there are just men and desires, emphatically plural. There are my own insecurities and uncertainties around my own desires and whether they are “normal” for a woman. Normative assumptions are most of what we’re fed around sex—and those assumptions are almost always a tragic misdirection. I don’t exactly know how we unhook from that, but I do know that over the years the best sex advice I’ve encountered has nothing at all to do with gender, and everything to do with context, connection, and creativity. It has to do with letting go of those normative injunctions and reaching for unscripted territory.
RVC:As a teenager, I watched porn every now and again, but more often than not, I turned to Cosmopolitan’s famous listsicles—10 Ways to Suck His Toes, or whatever—in order to learn about straight male desire. Seemingly, we are inundated with this sort of information from the moment we’re aware sex exists until the day we die. It’s the ultimate quest—to learn what men desire, what women desire. But oftentimes, this information says so little: for all my poring over Cosmo, I don’t think I retained one useful lesson. What if we just didn’t worry about it? Is it possible to reach a place in the realm of human sexuality where we no longer treat desire like the conclusion to a detective story, or a fossil to be excavated?
Sex education should begin at birth.
TCF: Those questions around what men or women desire are so endlessly fruitful because they don’t have a real answer. It’s incredibly appealing to imagine that you can master desire, just grab the key and unlock the secret. We want to believe that desirability is something that can be bought and sold, learned and taught. Ironically, that grasping for generalizable expertise takes us away from the vulnerability of exploration. It forecloses intimacy and discovery.
RVC:In Want Me, you refer to the shameful state of American public schools’ sex education programs, and it occurred to me that you are the sort of person who should be designing these curriculums. Please humor me: what does a robust, progressive sexual education program look like? What age does it begin? What are the most important things for kids to learn about this unwieldy realm of human experience?
TCF: This would make for quite the clickbait headline but: Sex education should begin at birth—but not in the way we usually think about it. I’m borrowing here from countless feminist academics and sex educators whose ideas I have absorbed over the years, but: sex education should begin with age-appropriate lessons about bodily autonomy, boundaries, consent, and biology. I have a 3-year-old, so at that age it can mean everything from naming body parts accurately to never instructing him to hug or kiss such-and-such relative.
We’re so afraid that young people will have sex that we drain all the good from it in our telling.
As for adolescents and teenagers, the feminist academic Michelle Fine noted the “missing discourse of desire” in sex education, in which an emphasis is placed on avoiding risk. We have to talk with young people about desire and pleasure, too. Adults discredit themselves not just by overemphasizing the dangers of sex, but also by oversimplifying the act into a biological event. There is a whole wide world of sex beyond basic anatomy diagrams—one that encompasses fantasy and community, play and experimentation.
I want to see adults talking with kids about sex with… excitement and wonder. Can you even imagine? We’re so afraid that young people will have sex that we drain all the good from it in our telling. We turn ourselves into unreliable narrators. Kids know when they’re being lied to—and they will seek their information out elsewhere.
RVC: Writing about sex means writing sex. How did you learn to narrate the experiences of desire and pleasure? What writers or books have served as models or inspirations for what sex writing can be and what it can achieve?
TCF: I cherish Sallie Tisdale’s Talk Dirty to Me and Lisa Palac’s The Edge of the Bed for numerous reasons, including their poetic and unflinching honesty about their own desires, as well as their feminist sense of conflict around those desires. I like sex writing that allows for a sense of turmoil and conflict. This also more generally makes for good personal writing—Mary Karr writes of the importance of depicting the “inner enemy.” I’ve also been deeply inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s treatment of sex as a vital part of emotional life, especially in her essay, “Love Of My Life.” More recently, Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness—well, I bought the e-book, and then immediately after finishing, I rush-ordered the physical copy because I needed to hold this beautiful piece of art in my hands.
The work of resisting normative injunctions, the reaching for unscripted territory, doesn’t just impact our sex lives. As Melissa Febos wrote, “I suspect that to write an awakened sex scene, one may need to be awake to their own sex. “
I might argue that the sea is literature’s greatest character, living as she does among the best mysteries ever written. And yet she is modest. She rarely takes center stage. Instead, she washes around the drama’s edges, an ever-present, ever-changing companion. She is a shining, shifting backdrop, quietly reflecting all that’s worth knowing about the story and its players.
There is no better setting for a mystery than the sea. I once read that we know more about outer space than we do some regions of the ocean. The sea represents the unknown, her depth and darkness calling us on a voyage of discovery. Her changing moods harness the breadth of our own emotions: she can be calm, brutal, quiet, monstrous, peaceful, passionate. Her presence in literature invites the imagination in a way little else does—the sea exists on a curious plane between the thinking and the unconscious, a place where dreams and nightmares surface, where invented shapes can form and dissolve.
A few years ago, I came across the real-life disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in 1901. Immediately, I was hooked. The vanishing alone spooked and thrilled me, but the sea setting deepened the magic. What happened to those men? I had the uncanny sense that only the sea knew the truth. My new novel The Lamplighters moves this event to 1972, as we follow the keepers and their wives on a path to unraveling what happened.
Here are my top seven mysteries set by the sea, in which the seascape plays as important a role as any in the story:
A tale of love, loss and sacrifice set on an Australian lighthouse, where Tom and Isabel make a harrowing decision that will ripple through generations to come. The sea acts as a foil for the couple’s troubled conscience, as they come to accept that some lies can never be drowned.
The sea represents the highest stakes in this haunting suspense novel about a group of strangers forced together after their ocean liner sinks on passage to New York. Newlywed Grace faces a struggle to survive—not just against the ocean but the people she’s with, in an elegantly horrifying work that asks how far we’ll go to protect ourselves.
Writers have long used the sea as a metaphor for yearning, its tides and cycles returning desires as fast as they sink them. Here, Sarah Woodruff stands on the famous Cobb—a stone jetty in Lyme Regis, Dorset—staring out at the indifferent water and awaiting her lover’s return. But what tragedy has befallen her, and can she ever pursue the freedom promised by the sea?
Backpacker Richard follows a map to a mysterious Thai island in search of paradise—only to discover that the sea can hide the worst secrets. Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness in this stylish ’90s thriller, which captured a moment in time and served as a warning for traveling 20-somethings everywhere.
Glamour and deception weave an intoxicating web in this gripping tale of murder and mystery, played out against the glittering Mediterranean. The sea holds a mirror to Tom Ripley’s slippery identity and uncertain motivations, as well as one of the most memorable boat scenes of all time.
A young unnamed narrator is swept into romance with mysterious widower Maxim de Winter—but what happened to his first wife? And why is Manderley, his home, steeped in secrets? Du Maurier is the queen of the Gothic romance novel, and here she uses the rugged, atmospheric Cornish coast to exemplify her narrator’s vulnerability and isolation.
Both a survival story and a modern fable, this is the unforgettable tale of Piscine, a young boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger. Martel employs the sea to devastating effect: under his pen it becomes a magical, illusory, all-seeing pool from which miracles surface and truths become fluid.
For years, I convinced myself I couldn’t grasp the sense of a sentence without paper and ink. The same letters, flashed on a screen, never seemed to hook their way into my brain. I’d scan whole books’ worth of grad school readings at the campus library just to print them out again. When I worked my way through them, I’d crease and crimp the pages with restless hands.
Now I read on my Kindle app, sneaking a few paragraphs between inbox refreshes and desultory tweets. On my phone, the words look manageable enough—each about as small as the pale moon-edge of my thumbnail, hovering just to the right of the screen.
I’ve dropped my phone so many times by now, but I can only see the cracks on the screen against the white of simulated pages. At certain angles, lines of gray score their way through sentences, cleave words in two, and lop the serifs off some letters. It’s my only reminder that reading this way is corporeal too, an interaction with something that has substance and can be broken. But when I turn the page, the scarred glass is almost frictionless underneath my thumb.
There’s a scene in Kristin Lavransdatter that made me think about reading physical books again. The titular protagonist—already, unknowingly, near the end of her life—thinks back on a book she once saw as a young wife. It was a thick volume in Latin, filled with the words of the thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure.
Illuminated in gemmy ink, this book was “written on such thin and dazzling white parchment” that Kristin couldn’t believe “calfskin could be prepared so finely.” Her memory of that vellum, so fine and so white, now sounds to me like an apt description of my phone screen, a foreshadowing of the smooth glow I hold at my fingertips when I read.
Set in fourteenth-century Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter is a trilogy that follows one woman’s life from childhood to death, unfolding it at the scale of historical epic. True to its setting, it makes the rarity and value of every book clear. We learn that Kristin’s father, a wealthy landowner, owned five of them, which passed into her possession after his death. Her husband gifts her with another three. For Kristin, who learned to read in both Latin and the Norwegian vernacular as a girl, access to this library—lavish for the time—signifies her place among “the land’s best lineages,” like the meat at her table and the gold adorning her hands.
Written by Nobel Prize-winning author Sigrid Undset in Norwegian, the trilogy was published a century ago: volume one, The Wreath, came out in 1920. The digital omnibus I borrowed downloaded within seconds—in print, those megabytes would have come out to over a thousand pages.
I can picture that physical copy weighing down the empty space on my bookshelf, a volume with a scriptural heft. But on my phone, translator Tiina Nunnally’s language slipped into my head easily enough. Each paragraph felt finite and possible, like text from a friend I hadn’t seen in months. As I went, I found myself reading continuously for longer, instead of toggling to a different app every few swipes.
At certain points, Kristin Lavransdatter felt more real than the life I was living. I started thumbing through it last October, when I’d already been in my apartment for five months. The local library that sent the .mobi file to my phone was less than five minutes away on foot. I’d strolled past it before, on the walks I took my first few weeks in town, but I’d never been inside. It had been closed to physical patronage since before I arrived from the Bay Area.
Minnesota, where my partner’s family lived, seemed like a good place to wait it all out. And so we packed our stuff into cardboard boxes and sat in a socially distanced plane with an empty seat between us, breathing nervously into surgical masks while the chilled air circulated around us. Before we left, I got rid of so many books, abandoning them inside the glass-doored hutch of a Little Free Library that stood up the street from our apartment in Berkeley.
Reading Kristin Lavransdatter took me back to a time when my body wasn’t just an automaton but organ of feeling.
This was in the early days of the pandemic, when gloves seemed much more de rigueur than they are now—at least, people mentioned wearing them on Twitter, even if you rarely saw them on anyone in the street. I had a box of blue rubber ones that I used to rub purple coloring conditioner into the bleached ends of my hair, and I wore a pair of them to drop off my books. When they no longer fit in the Little Free Library vertically, I started stacking them horizontally, just a few slim volumes stacked over the top. I stacked the last of them on the grass, around the post that held up the little birdhouse that I’d stuffed with books.
I left well-thumbed foreign language dictionaries and textbooks spidery with annotations, readers I’d used to teach undergrads, and novels that I’d loved. A slick coffee table volume on Japanese street fashion, culled from the Half Price Books in town. This work didn’t pain me as much as I thought it would—I became just a body, jittery with energy, muscles strung too tightly for any other feeling. All I wanted was to be done with it quickly, so I could get back inside where the air didn’t seem ambient with potential harm. I remember the powder on the inside of my gloves mixing with sweat, forming a paste that made the rubber cling to the backs of my hands.
By the time I started reading Kristin Lavransdatter, the fearful, high-wire intensity of the move had faded to a dull memory. My adrenalinated gratitude at pulling it off safely had calcified too. What remained was a sense of roteness, as if the nerves had been abstracted out of me. I wasn’t scared anymore, or sad, or anything—I was a wind-up toy. I tried to take care of myself, drinking eight glasses of water a day and marking each of them in an app. I cycled between a series of easy Instant Pot stews and ate without tasting them. Three days a week, I made time to exercise, dancing along to ballet barre videos on YouTube without feeling whether my legs were turned out or my feet made the right shape. I stopped often between combinations to check my phone.
Reading Kristin Lavransdatter, though, took me back to a time when my body wasn’t just an automaton but organ of feeling. That’s because Undset clings so closely to the concerns of her protagonist, reporting her every sensation with tactile precision. Across her three volumes, Kristin’s existence unfurls in densely textured detail. From the lusterless quiet of my sealed apartment, the vividness of Undset’s language disoriented me, like a bottle of too-strong perfume.
Partway through the book, I ordered fragrance samples online, little vials filled with the smell of balsam and incense.
As Undset tells it, Kristin’s maiden years are wind-dried reindeer meat and the cool touch of golden-yellow silk—then, when she meets the man who becomes her husband, the feel of ardent fingers sliding into her hair. Later, marital life emerges as an accumulation of rough textures, muddying over the smoothness of her pampered girlhood: coal-black dung on her hands, the itch of her homespun wimple, her arms going knotted with muscle from farm work. Even her emotions are rendered in thickly corporeal language, sentences prickly with feeling. Thinking of her grown sons leaving home, Kristin grieves that they “would take with them bloody threads from the roots of her heart,” an image that made the skin at my breastbone physically itch.
Inside Kristin’s exhaustively rendered world of cotton and tallow, mud and sweat, I found myself remembering the reach of my own senses. Partway through the book, I ordered fragrance samples online, little vials filled with the smell of balsam and incense. I wore them in two dashes on my wrist when I read, sometimes bringing the inside of my arm to my nose. But then, inside the story, the Black Death entered Norway on an English ship.
I know I’m lucky. My parents were vaccinated last month, and I’ve been able to keep working from home, running little errands in a succession of floral-printed masks. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve drunk my water and eaten my stew, danced without feeling the strain or the joy of dancing. I can imagine myself holding still in this pattern, for years if necessary. I’ll almost certainly be safe at the end of that waiting.
From the beginning, I knew that Kristin Lavransdatter ended with the heroine’s death from plague. In truth, I started reading it in the vague hope that I could use it as a narrative mirror for these strange times. Instead, I found escapism into a more vivid life, a body that felt more precisely and deeply than my own. As I read, Undset’s thickly textured descriptions of Kristin’s sensory experience brought me back to a détente with my own senses. But then the Black Death slashes the story wide open.
Kristin Lavransdatter renders the physical reality of death in its usual, unsparing detail. Feverish and vomiting, the dying Kristin slumps, “soaked with sweat,” inside her convent dormitory, feeling “a sharp, stabbing pain” on every breath. Yet after weeks nestled inside her perspective, I felt strangely unaffected by her death. Her last, fevered hours felt abstracted to me, in a way the small sensations of her life never did. They were unfathomable from my place of safety.
I found escapism into a more vivid life, a body that felt more precisely and deeply than my own.
As Kristin’s body burned away from the inside, it became closed off to me. Instead, what undid me was Undset’s account of the early plague—the collective disorientation, not the individuated pain. When the Black Death first arrives, the narration disentangles itself from the nerves threading Kristin’s singular body for paragraphs at a time, hovering above to survey the anonymous mass of bodies instead. From that distant vantage, we see people, undifferentiated and unmoored, attempting to make sense of “a world without time”: “No more than a few weeks had passed, if the days were to be counted, and yet it already seemed as if the world that had existed before the plague and death began wandering naked through the land had disappeared from everyone’s memory — the way the coastline sinks away when a ship heads out to see on a rushing wind. It was as if no living soul dared hold on to the memory… nor was anyone capable of imaging that things might be that way again….”
When I encountered that passage for the first time, it left me reeling from recognition. Nothing else I’d read—not first-person essays, or reportage, or other pandemic novels—nothing had captured that early shock so precisely. But here, Undset gets at what it feels like for the impossible to take hold of your own small life and break it open, emptying out your sense of futurity like yolk.
Afterwards, I had to stop reading. I set my phone down to pace the length of my apartment—just a few strides from window to wall, from wall back to window. There was the same view I’d been looking at since I moved in May, adjusted incrementally by the shifting of the seasons.
This is the only view I can imagine having for months, a year, longer, as the snow slushes off the ground and the spiny trees grow back their leaves. In this world without time, there’s nothing else to look at—except for the pages on my phone, smoother and more dazzling than the finest vellum.
You’ve read the story, but there’s no forest here, no wolf. No subterfuge is necessary; the boys are everywhere, out in the open, an infestation. Like cockroaches, they’re most visible at night.
We stiletto them in the bellies and elbow them aside to clear a path down the hallway. We roll our eyes at their begging or pout and wag our fingers. We invite them in or pretend later we invited them in or slam the door in their faces or slam their fingers in the door. We grab one by the hand and continue down the hallway because he’s cute or because we want to fend off other boys or because we want to make someone jealous. We pretend to be angry at them or we pretend to like them or we feel angry or we like them.
We have time to kill so we’re watching a movie. The movie is Heathers. We’re in sweats with the school’s initials on our butts, and Sarah A. is eating broccoli that was once frozen but is now microwaved with yellow I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray pooled in its florets. Last quarter, Sarah A. was bent on gaining the Freshman Fifteen, dousing her cafeteria fro-yo in chocolate syrup and gummi worms, ordering three a.m. pizza and saying, eat girls. College was supposed to be fun, and the Freshman Fifteen was proof you were having it. This quarter, though, Sarah A. was poking at the slight curve of her belly above her low-rise jeans and proclaiming, “I’m o-beast!” In this new phase, Sarah A.’s room smelled perpetually of microwaved broccoli and Febrezed-over farts.
It is a time when I have, without trying, fallen into a group of Sarahs—Sarah A., Sarah B., plus me. I am also a Sarah A., but no one calls me that. They call me Dr. Sarah, kind of mocking my premed major.
“Are you serious, you’re so pretty,” said the real Sarah A. when we first met in line at the frozen yogurt machine in the cafeteria. “You really don’t need to do all that work.” Sarah A. was always very certain about what you did or didn’t need to do. But after she said it, I looked around in chem class and saw that, yeah, I was prettier than everyone.
No subterfuge is necessary; the boys are everywhere, out in the open, an infestation.
“We’re just here for our MRS degrees,” Sarah B. spun around and added. Sarahs A. and B. were both five foot zero and bird-boned, with dark hair. Sarah A.’s was glossy and long and Sarah B.’s was poofy and pyramid-shaped. Next to them, I was a giant: four inches taller, salon-blond, an obvious nose job. “Ambition’s attractive to guys, though,” Sarah B. said. “You have to show them you’re not like other girls or whatever.” She popped her lips, pocketed her gloss, and pulled the fro-yo lever. “I’m going to be prelaw until I get engaged. I’ll go to law school if I have to, but hopefully I’ll never have to practice.”
It was a weird plan, so weird I wondered if Sarah B. was lying, like, was she stating her deepest fear as her goal so it would feel like success when it came true? My own secret plan was to be premed until I could figure out how to be one of those ocean scientists who spends a bunch of their time swimming naked in a pack of dolphins. It seemed like the beginning was the same—introductory bio, o-chem, et cetera and then somewhere a secret level unlocked, and you underwent a series of quests you didn’t know about yet, and boom: dolphins.
We lived in a privately owned off-campus dormitory where 90 percent of the girls were named Sarah, or else Rachel, Alyssa, Jamie, Becca, Carrie, Elana, or Jen. The other 10 percent were named Bari, Shira, and Arielle. The whole dorm was Jewish. I never understood how these things happened. Nowhere on any of the dorm’s advertising materials, which had succeeded in making me so excited to live with no parents in a building of studious eighteen-year-olds with a frozen yogurt machine, did it say the word Jewish, but it seemed wherever I went in my life, everyone was Jews. While I might think I was making independent choices and moving around freely in the world, it was as though a secret groove had been carved, and some invisible bumpers were going to push me gently back into that groove, the Jew groove, Sarahland, and Sarahland would trick me and trick me into thinking it was the entire world. It was confounding when I learned Jews were only 3 percent of the country, because, where was everybody else?
“We’re like Heathers, but Sarahs,” Sarah B. says.
“Sarahs are just Jewish Heathers,” says Sarah A., touching up her manicure with a stroke of light pink.
“Sasha’s totally the Winona Ryder,” Sarah A. loud-whispers.
Sasha’s phone rings a few minutes later and she springs out of bed and cups her hand over the mouth part as she sidles into the bathroom.
Sasha is Sarah A.’s roommate. She wears black leggings and tank tops and when we’re there at ten p.m. flat-ironing and measuring shots of vodka into our cranberry juice or back in the room at three a.m. holding each other’s hair back for puking and/or eating baked ziti pizza, Sasha is locked in the bathroom, on the phone with her boyfriend who goes to some other school in some other state. Her eyes are always puffy around the bottom, but she’s skinny with naturally straight black hair and she doesn’t seem to give a shit about us or what happens during our nights out and this makes her glamorous. I’m stuck in a horde of Sarahs but Sasha’s on her own, crying alone in the bathroom or smoking alone on the dormitory’s front stoop like someone’s divorced mom.
“I want to be Winona Ryder,” I say.
“You’re so weird Dr. Sarah,” says Sarah B.
“The Heathers are who is cool in this movie,” says Sarah A. “Winona Ryder is demented. She’s friends with the fat girl in the end.”
It isn’t the right way to even watch the movie I was pretty sure. You’re supposed to want to be Winona Ryder, attached to a cool boy in a leather jacket who shoots up princesses and jocks and thereby shoots up culture itself. There seem to be only two options in Heathers and probably everywhere—either you’re attached to a group of girls and obsessed with diets and clothes or you’re attached to a boy and obsessed with freedom and killing people. Sasha seems to be breaking the rule: she’s attached to a boy, I guess, but he’s an absent boy, a phone boy.
I am feeling unsure about my own level of pleasure, being subsumed into a Sarah horde but I’m also unsure how to extricate myself, where I would even go. My own roommate Shira clearly wants a bestie with whom to flat-iron while trying on clothes and taking vodka shots, but she’s desperate and therefore a worse version of the thing I already have. The Sarahs at least have an ease with which they flat-iron and match shoes to outfits and take vodka shots and when something comes easily you can shrug it off like you barely even want it, and then you’re more or less cool at least.
I ended up in this group partly because my best camp friend Ayelet was best friends with Sarah B. in high school. Every time I look at Sarah B. I remember how Ayelet and I swore to each other that camp was the only time/place that counted as Real Life, how we promised that our real selves would hibernate for ten months and only reemerge upon entry, next summer, into the North Woods. We held each other each August in the Minneapolis airport like a couple about to be separated by war, and wept.
Sarah B., I’m realizing as I watch her smash her eyelashes between those medieval-looking metal clampers, is only best friends with Ayelet’s non-camp self, her impostor self, the shell of Ayelet. But now I’m stuck. Sarah B. invited me along on an early Bed Bath & Beyond trip based on our mutual Ayelet friendship and later invited me to sit with the Sarahs and soon Sarah A. made a laminated chart of all our schedules so that we could only walk to and from class in a group and suddenly, without getting to fully decide, I was a Sarah.
The Nice Jewish Boys live in the dorm across the street, but for some reason, they are always in our dorm, leaning on hallway walls, sprawled across furniture, lying ghoulishly under our covers when we return from nights out. This is no grandma/wolf situation because there’s no trickery—instead, the NJBs are in plain sight, drunk and wanting. They pound on our doors and shout our names, scrawl WHERE ARE YOU SARAHHHH on our dry-erase boards in all caps, materialize next to us while we’re passed-out drunk. We wake, sometimes, with their slobber on our faces, their shoes in our sheets, their palms clawed around our boobs in a way they didn’t try that hard to make look accidental.
Sarahs A. and B. are excellent at fighting the boy infestation. They spray disinfectant constantly, are always wiping things down. Possibly it’s their pack mentality that keeps the boys away. They are clicked into each other, satisfied with doing nothing but taking cab rides to TCBY, working out on the elliptical downstairs, making popcorn and watching rom-coms until they meet their husbands, who certainly aren’t going to be any of the infesting boys. The infesting boys aren’t ready to be met yet, as husbands. I have a wandering eye though—I’m not looking for a husband but I am looking for something and, for the boys, my curiosity is like a small glob of peanut butter on the countertop in the summertime must be for ants. It makes them swarm.
Going Out is something we have to do every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. I’m not sure if any of us like it, but we show up for it like we show up for class, like we would show up for a job if we had one. I’m not sure how everyone found out about Going Out, how everyone discovered it will make these The Best Years of Our Lives but at eight p.m. on Thursdays, my roommate Shira starts automatically flat-ironing her hair and Sarah B. sends out a group text saying, What are we doing tonight? and Sarah A. says, Meet in my room at 9.
We walk down icy streets in high heels with peacoats covering our almost-bare skin and arrive at a bar where drinks are expensive and sit in a crowded judgey room and talk mostly to each other or else to people we like even less. In the best case scenario, Sarahs A. and B. feel that we might meet our husbands when we Go Out because the older boys are there, too, but this is a real outside chance so mostly we just go spend nine dollars apiece on cosmos and stand around in uncomfortable shoes.
We try on halter tops, tank tops, boatneck tops, cowl-neck tops, scoop-neck tops, cold-shoulder tops, tube tops, sparkly tops, sheer tops, stretchy tops, and silky tops. We use little paint brushes to cover our zits and freckles. Every time we look at ourselves in the mirror, we jut our lips forward and gaze serious and sexy like we want to fuck our own reflections, and I wonder if any of us know what our actual faces even look like. We measure shots of vodka into cups of cranberry cocktail. We line up in a row and set our camera timers to take photos.
We lean over Sarah A.’s digital camera to scrutinize our looks. We can see ourselves a little differently in the camera’s display screen than we do in the mirror. We’re smiling now, convincing the viewfinder we’re having the best time.
Sarah A. grabs the camera and pouts at it. “I hate my nose,” she whines. “When I get my nose job, I’m totally taking photos of Dr. Sarah with me.”
Sarah B. laughs, leaning over Sarah A.’s shoulder to look, too. “Good plan, I’m going to also. Dr. Sarah you truly have the best nose job in the whole dorm.”
“Thanks,” I say.
The truth was, I didn’t even want my nose job. My parents had returned from Vegas “up fifty thousand” as they said. They pulled up in a limo, champagne-drunk and ecstatic, and announced their plan to divvy the money toward projects they’d been meaning to attend to: spider vein removal for my mother, a dining room table finally, a nose job for me.
I cried and slammed my bedroom door and refused to go but somehow I ended up in the surgeon’s chair shot up with drugs anyway and when I woke up my face was black and blue and three weeks later everyone agreed I looked like a shikse.
We put finishing touches on our looks and sing “Dancing Queen” while flat-ironing the bumps out of the backs of each other’s hair.
“Come here, Dr. Sarah, you always have schmutz on your face,” says Sarah A., clutching my jaw between her thumb and middle finger and turning my head from side to side for inspection. She licks a finger from her other hand and swats my cheek. We all check our little silver snap cases for our fake IDs and then we go to the bar.
The bar is called Stillwaters. Everyone calls it Stills but I think of it privately as the Stagnant Pond. The Pond’s packed with Jewish girls from our dorm and Jewish boys from the boys’ dorm plus all the kids who have ever lived in those dorms.
The boys are at the bar, but they barely talk to us there. At the bar, they’re busy doing boy things—taking tequila shots and clapping each other on the back, shouting. We stand at the bar checking out other groups of girls and the truth is everyone looks like there was a memo: dewy skin and dark eyes, lightly glossed lips, hair meticulously flat-ironed, one of two models of jeans.
I chose this college because of a barista during my campus visit, I think. The barista’s head was shaved on one side and she had piercings all the way up her ear. She seemed angry in general but like she liked me and I thought I would come to know girls like her here. But since Sarah A. created the Excel schedule chart, I only ever went anywhere in a pack. If it was blizzarding excessively, Sarah A. demanded we take a cab. The cab would go on streets we didn’t normally take. I’d see a group of kids with Kool-Aid hair and fingerless gloves standing around outside a coffee shop smoking, probably talking about deep things. I felt like they might know the locations of some of the keys to the levels I’d need to pass through in order to be a dolphin scientist. But I was destined, it seemed, only to ever get glimpses outside the Jew groove from a cab window.
Tonight, it’s blizzarding excessively. Luckily we have scarves with us, which we wrap around our heads and necks, like babushkas, Sarah B. says, and run screaming in our stilettos through the wind and snow into the pizza place. Sarah A. gets a white spinach slice, I get a baked ziti slice, and Sarah B. gets margherita, which she daubs with napkins until there’s a pile of see-through napkins on the table and the cheese looks putty-dry.
Everyone who was at Stagnant Pond is in here now, drunk and eating various permutations of cheesy complex carbs. After pizza comes the worst part, which is the part where we have to stand out on the street corner in our stilettos with two hundred other people, all of whom were in the Stagnant Pond with us, and then the pizza place. Here is where we start to talk to other people for the first time. An older boy named Jon approaches and says, “Hey, how you been?” and I say “good” and he says “Cool wanna come over?” The thing is I’d gone home with him the week before and I was starting to understand that this is how it went: you gave someone a blow job and then once you gave the blow job and they never called, you felt rejected and a little sad even if you hadn’t liked them very much and so then you stood outside the next week with wind whipping snowflakes in your face in case they wanted another one. I’m not looking forward to trying to make my way through the boy infestation in my dorm and also I’m freezing and don’t want to stand in the snow anymore, so I say okay, and we run two blocks to his apartment, where I get under his covers, give him a blow job, and fall asleep.
When I wake up, I hear a voice say to me, To thine own self be true! I collect phrases I like, like this, in my quote book and eventually they become internal voices, reverberating in my head as though they’re my conscience or spirit guides. I feel guilty about giving a blow job I knew in advance I’d find unpleasant, to a boy I knew would never call, and then I feel, I am a social animal! We’re hardwired to form complex societies, so why should I be some loner animal that is trying to resist everything asked of me? I can stand around in the freezing wind and then give boys blow jobs if that is the ritual of my society! I put on my tank top and jeans from the night before and walk out of the older boy’s apartment in my stilettos, headache searing behind my eyes, in the snow.
I thought college would be exactly like summer camp, that there was a magic formula where you put a bunch of girls in an enclosed space without parents and we’d become Real. But, I deduced after major sleuthing, two factors were getting in the way: money and boys.
Neither existed at camp and here both were everywhere. The annual social we’d have with the nearby boy’s camp was the worst day of the year: everyone unearthed makeup and flat-irons stowed under bunk beds for the other fifty-eight days of camp. Normally we spent our days and nights sailing and tie-dyeing towels and weaving macramé wall hangings and trying to get up on one water ski and singing along to Joni Mitchell and the Indigo Girls around a literal bonfire but suddenly on the day of the social we only cared about having the straightest hair and the clearest skin and someone was always being a cunt to her best friend and someone was always crying.
Here we had the boy infestation, and money that came in seemingly endless forms. One form was the purses that hung on everyones’ doors, Pradas and Kate Spades and Louis Vuittons. I didn’t understand these purses, what they meant, but I sort of understood they had something to do with the Holocaust. These girls’ grandmas wanted them to know that here in America they could not be turned to soap, and these bags proved it. The bags were a display of patriotism; American flags might be goyishe and tacky but Prada bags were little markers of belief in liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the land of the free. Granddaughters could send pictures of themselves standing in a row of flat-ironed and haltered girls, each with a Prada bag, and their bubbes would feel, these girls were so safe.
I don’t have a Prada bag. My own mother celebrates her freedom by finding excellent deals at Loehmann’s on purses she swears look expensive but, I can see now, do not. My Loehmann’s purses are one of the reasons the other Sarahs feel like they need to teach me how to live.
“Dr. Sarah,” Sarah A. says. We’re sitting at a lunch table eating salads. It’s the day after the blow job. “I’ve been paying close attention. You actually eat super healthy foods, so I think you’re just eating too much of them.”
Embarrassment blooms rosacea-like all over my skin. Eating is the world’s greatest shame. I just learned the word slut-shaming from a flyer posted to one of the student union bulletin boards, but as far as I can tell, you can swallow dick in any quantity and no one cares. It’s true that if you were bad at fighting the boy infestation you were known as a slut, which I was. People thought being a slut made it ridiculous that I also planned to be a doctor, but I was a science major and I didn’t see how the two were correlative. Anyway, food and not sex was the real source of humiliation.
“Maybe try just eating half of whatever you were going to eat,” says Sarah A.
Sarah A. is putting me in an impossible position. Either I’m going to eat half and act like I didn’t know how to go on a diet by myself or I’m going to keep eating the same amount and make Sarah A. think I have no self-control.
I’m fatter than the other Sarahs, but I haven’t always been fat. Fourteen transformed my thighs into Spanish hams that spread out wide and flat, sticking to bleachers and peeling off painfully in summertime. My chest sprung overnight C cups. At fifteen, I reduced my calorie count to 400 daily. Four hundred seemed like enough for basic metabolic processes, yet few enough to strip the meat from my thighs and breasts, to make me less like a bucket of chicken and more like a super skinny girl. On 400 calories, I could wear crop halters and black leggings to musical practice. On 400 calories, my mom rewarded me with shopping trips. On 400 calories, I no longer went poo, which was nice because poo had always disgusted me and I no longer bled from my vag, which was also nice because I had been praying not to bleed from my vag ever since I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and really really didn’t identify with Margaret but did learn about certain kinds of negotiations you could make with God. Four hundred calories made it difficult to hang out with other people, but this, too, was okay, since only camp was Real Life. I could go home and sit in my room and record tape-letters to Ayelet and listen to tape-letters from her, especially the mix tapes she’d make at the end when she was done talking, Tori and Ani, Fiona and Liz. I listened to her tapes like they were church, or what I imagined church would be like. I listened for secret meanings, for lines about me. At open campus lunch, I could drive home in order to eat one microwaved frozen veggie patty. After musical practice, I declined fro-yo invitations from the naturally skinny girls for whom sugar-free was promise enough. When the taffeta dress I was meant to wear as my costume for the musical arrived, the entire top half fell off my shoulders and down to my waist where it gathered in ripples around my hips. “Did you send in the wrong measurements or did you shrink?” the woman fitting me joked. “You girls are so tiny,” she said. She went to find an extra, smaller dress somewhere, and I beamed.
At camp, we bonded by sneaking chocolate into our cabins. In the dorm, though, chocolate’s allowed so we have to sneak vodka. One tiny shot glass is 100 calories and then you have to chase it with some kind of juice, and at three a.m. you’re starving and when you get to the pizza place, spinning with vodka and a snow-blasted face, it’s impossible not to devour the whole slice.
It’s Sarah A. who has, in the first place, encouraged us to get burritos, beer and vegan hot wings, Doritos and wine. Sarah A. with her long black hair and super selective smile and overall tininess is convincing. And while the other girls are still petite even with their fifteen pounds, I am fat now and trying to distract from it with glitter powder on my eyes and décolletage. While the other girls stay in their packs, puking and having snacks, I am bent on being independent. I relish the time after two a.m. when there’s no laminated information about where I should be and I’m suddenly free. But I’m also drunk, even after puking and/or snacks, and terrible at fending off my own boy-infestation—I wake with them lying on top of me, breathing into my mouth.
This is what eating leads to. You start recklessly putting things into your body and you just become permeable. When I become a dolphin, I will eat only raw fish, catching them in my teeth as they swim by.
Even though all the kids in the private dorm have a list of the easiest classes the university offers and enroll en masse for Scandinavian Literature in order to meet their Comm B requirement, I care about learning and do not care about Scandinavia. I am a rebel in this small way. So spring quarter I enroll in a class called Integrated Liberal Studies, which promises to “imagine a method of critical thought that produces writing with the potential to change the world.” This is exciting—I’ve been discovering the pleasure of getting stoned and writing in my journal under the covers—and secretly I guess I do want to change the world, to make it void of money and boys at least.
For the first day of Integrated Liberal Studies, I wear my edgiest outfit, a kelly-green minidress over jeans, and let my hair dry wavy instead of flat-ironing it. Still, I feel like an impostor, an obvious JAP, when I see the other looks in the lecture hall—dreadlocks and pants held together by patches; cropped hair dyed yellow. Leaving class, I see Sasha, in a gray V-neck and skinny jeans, putting a notebook into her brown leather bag, which looks like the kind the professors have. Sasha’s hair falls to mid-back, straight without being flat-ironed, just a few choppy layers in the front. She looks like a celebrity photographed at Starbucks in the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” section but also like a serious philosophy student.
“Hey,” she says. “How’s it going?”
I have never been someone who knew how to answer this question. I nod enthusiastically.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” she says. “I didn’t know you cared about philosophy. No offense.”
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“Wanna get lunch?” Sasha asks. I do. I text the Sarahs: Have to meet with my TA; I’ll see you guys later, but I worry that they’ll wait at our meeting spot anyway, so I lead Sasha down a side street where we’ll miss them. We walk to the Mediterranean place where you get a plate of whatever combination of vegetarian things they’re serving that day for $5: spinach pie, olives, hummus, rice, cucumbers. We start arguing about the thinkers from class. I love Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wants us to live free of society, to throw off our JAP-y chains and roam wild like bears or geese.
Sasha rolls her eyes, pours hot sauce into her soup. “Rousseau is just some clueless dude with a dumb romantic fantasy of living like the savage brown people,” she said, using bouncy single-digit air quotes around savage brown people. I’d never heard anyone talk like this, in a way that could make me feel like the Great Men were just dudes we could know. It makes so much sense though. What other kinds of dudes would they be? “It’s all about Rawls,” she insists. “The original position. We have to design our morality imagining we’re all sitting in a boardroom, all starting over, and we don’t know where in society we’ll start out.”
Rawls is boring to me. I hate boardrooms. I don’t need society, I tell her—I can roll around in the dirt and eat fruit from trees.
Sasha rolls her eyes. “You’re such a white girl,” she says. Sasha was raised in a Jewish suburb, but she was born in the Caribbean. This is part of what makes her a little exciting, I know: you look at the Jewish girls and just see your own issues, your same mom trauma, a little fun-house-mirrored but still. The white kind of goyim are mysterious, too, but not in a way we care about—we mock their taste for mayonnaise and floral print, for promptness and guns. We avoid them in our classes without even trying.
“Let’s get a drink,” Sasha says once we’ve eaten every single thing on our plates. It seems like Sasha can eat whatever she wants, like eating involves neither shame nor calculations, and she still ends up a super skinny girl. We go into a bar with our fake IDs, where Sasha orders a dark-colored microbrew. The bar is dim and empty, we sit on stools. I somehow hadn’t realized you could just wander into a bar in the daytime. The possibilities for interacting with the world feel expanded and I don’t know what to order. I’ve never been in a bar except for Going Out on Thursday through Saturday nights, and it seems like it would be weird to order a Cosmo here. I ask for what Sasha has. It feels cool to drink something heavy and bitter on purpose.
I tell Sasha about the boy I’ve now given two blow jobs to, only I don’t phrase it like that, I say, hooked up with, and how I can barely find anything special about him to like, except that now that he’s not calling me I feel like I’m not special and want his attention. And I start thinking, well, he does have a really cute smile and he plays the guitar, which is cool, and he talks so little that he’s probably secretly really smart.
“I’m going to read you bell hooks,” Sasha says, and fishes a book from her professor bag, opens it. She reads an underlined sentence: “If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining.”
“I guess,” I say. I only feel real, I know, as a reflection, as part of a Sarah horde. I feel like Sasha’s full of shit also because what is she crying about in the bathroom, then, if she doesn’t want to be legitimated.
“I want to at least not have to be legitimated by anyone in our stupid dorm,” Sasha clarifies, as if reading my mind. “Or by boys, generally.”
I feel a surge of very intense feeling in my chest because I’ve never heard anyone acknowledge that our dorm is stupid or that boys ruin everything.
“You think our dorm is stupid?” I say. “I do, too.”
“It’s a Jewish marriage machine,” Sasha shrugs. Sasha has this cheery nihilistic vibe that makes it seem impossible that she spends her evenings crying in the bathroom.
“I think boys are stupid, too,” I blurt.
“Yeah. I made out with my girl TA last weekend,” Sasha says. I don’t know what to say to that; I feel shocked in a way like the world has exploded open and anything on earth is possible, like I could be a dolphin after all.
“What about your boyfriend?” I ask.
“I think I’m done with him,” Sasha says. “I’m over Jewish boys.”
She says it as though I haven’t heard her crying in the bathroom over and over, as though she’s the coolest person on earth.
“It’s not like they’ll ever be serious about me anyway,” she adds. “I’m, like, a fun island vacation before they find their Jewish wives.” What she’s describing sounds painful, but she is smiling, so I don’t know what to say.
A pasty bearded dude in a beanie and flannel next to us asks Sasha what she’s reading.
“It’s bell hooks,” says Sasha, “but we’d like to be left alone to enjoy each other’s company please.”
The guy looks startled, and when Sasha turns back to me, he mutters “Bitch” under his breath but loud enough that we can hear. I look at the way Sasha’s hair curves around her elbow, the way a combination of smoking and crying has made her look so sick-good in her V-neck tee tucked into high-waisted jeans.
We walk back to the dorm sharing a clove cigarette and talking about bands Sasha likes. She promises to burn me CDs. It’s my first clove and it makes me feel like we’re art kids in some movie in the ’70s instead of 2000s JAPs, like with Sasha I can time travel. When we get back inside, boys are seeping from wall crevices and popping around corners. Sasha waves her Longchamp tote around like a dangerous wand and the boys seep back into the walls.
The following Thursday night, Sarah B. IMs us: Hey girls, what’s the plan?
Sarah A. IMs back, My room at 9? Everyone’s going to Stills. Sarah B. sends back a sideways smiley. Fun! See you girls soon! I feel a sick fluttering feeling. I feel weird about being in Sarah and Sasha’s room in my halter and glitter décolletage, weird about Sasha watching me take vodka shots with the Sarahs, or else only seeing her as she slams the bathroom door behind her, revealing her over-it-ness to be a lie. I need to do what I can to preserve our idea of ourselves as girls who day drink, arguing about philosophy. I write back, I’m feeling kind of sick, I think I’m gonna stay in.
Are you really sick, Dr. Sarah, or are you just being weird?
The Sarahs are always calling me weird and it’s oddly effective. I don’t want to be weird. I hesitate. I’m going to stay in, I type.
She’s being weird, Sarah B. IMs. I roll my eyes and shut my computer.
I sit on my bed with the Bible open in front of me. We’re reading it for the Integrated Liberal Studies class, focusing on the red parts, what Jesus said. It’s my first introduction to Jesus. Jesus is all right. I always thought Jesus was tacky because I’ve mostly seen him rendered in pastels made out of cheap-looking plastic or all boo-hoo anorexic and tacked up for display. Along with reading, I’m sitting on my purple flannel sheet watching Shira straighten her hair in her vanity mirror with adjustable zoom and lighting. “Do I look okay?” she asks, watching me watch her in the reflection. Shira is slightly too fat to ask if she looks fat; it’s embarrassing, I think, for the word fat to even come out of her mouth. The best she could try to make you say was okay.
“Yeah,” I say, not really wanting to say anything more, even though I think she would look actually pretty if she didn’t look so anxious and sad. She has the right brand of jeans and the right pointy-toed boots, a good haircut and highlights, heavily mascaraed yellow-green eyes. Somehow I can’t be nice to Shira, though. She wants so badly this thing that I feel stuck in. The dorm’s Shiras didn’t cluster the way we did and even though Shira has friends of camp friends in here, too, none of them seem to want to hang out with her. “Where are you going?” I ask, deadpan and staring like she’s probably going somewhere dumb.
“I think people are going to Stills?” she says like a question. “Jenny’s coming to get me.”
Jenny is Shira’s one friend and it’s clear they don’t like each other that much, just both failed to work their ways into the group of girls they’d wanted. It’s sad to see them together— Jenny has curls cut into a bushy shape, a too-obvious nose job, and darting owl eyes that make her look like she wants to gouge yours out. She arrives, and after she and Shira greet each other awkwardly, they leave. I lie on my bed and read about Jesus.
Like an hour later there’s a knock on my door. I don’t want to deal with any of the infesting boys. SARAHHH one yells. I don’t respond. He keeps banging. I realize that the boys aren’t slithering through the crack in the bottom of the door or emerging from the walls: Shira’s just opening the door and letting them in. She’s so desperate to be a cool girl, I think, and the way to be a cool girl is to be in cahoots with the boys. I feel mad at Shira and then smile a little at the loyalty of the boys, who wait just for me.
The knocking stops finally and then starts again and persists and I hear a decisive voice say, “Sarah!” but the voice is female. It’s Sasha’s voice. I’m wearing sweats with the school’s initials on the butt and even though she’s seen me in these sweats countless times in her room, I feel embarrassed by them now. “One sec,” I call. I throw on a floral baby-doll dress that covers my butt. Is a baby-doll dress with sweats cool and arty looking? I’m not sure but I look in the mirror and the overall impression is: cute. I gather my unstraightened hair into two giant buns, with fuzzy waves dangling from each. I open the door.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” says Sasha. “I was wondering if you felt okay.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just didn’t feel like Going Out.”
“Cool, I figured,” she says, walking past the threshold and into my room, just like the boys do. “Wanna listen to music?”
She’s brought Jameson. I’ve never tried whiskey and I feel, like, how did she come across these things in this vodka cranberry dorm? It tastes like men, I think, or it tastes like we’re men. We sit side by side on my bed and she opens her laptop and plays songs from Napster. Portishead, Zero 7, Radiohead, Erykah Badu. The Sarahs like Billy Joel and REO Speedwagon and with whiskey and Portishead swimming through my head I feel new.
“What do you want to be?” I ask her. It seems like this should be the obvious question of college because ostensibly we’re all here to become something but people mostly don’t talk about it, acting instead like we’re just going to be here in college forever.
With Sasha I was becoming not a Sarah but just Sarah, the only Sarah, Sasha and Sarah.
“Civil rights lawyer,” she says. “What about you?”
“Ocean scientist,” I say, “but only secretly. Publicly, I’m premed.”
Sasha laughs. “But probably you’ll be a middle school biology teacher and marry a doctor, right?” She swigs whiskey and then passes me the bottle.
“What?” I say.
“I mean ultimately you’re a Sarah,” says Sasha.
I feel stung. I felt like we were connecting, like she was seeing me in a way that was different from how the Sarahs see me, like with Sasha I was becoming not a Sarah but just Sarah, the only Sarah, Sasha and Sarah. I say, “I’m not.” I sip from the whiskey bottle.
We’re silent after that, sitting against the wall and smoking weed and listening to a whole Radiohead album and sometimes commenting on it. There are two colors in my head, it says, and says it again. The voice sounds too fast, all over the place, like it can’t get a grip on something important. It’s kind of how I feel, stoned and sitting on my bed with Sasha, who feels I’m ultimately a Sarah. She can’t see the other color, I think.
The next day the Sarahs IM to meet in the lobby at eleven. We get breakfast like we always do on Fridays and then we go to the town’s expensive jeans store. Sarahs A. and B. somehow know how to talk to the perfect-looking girls who work in this store that has clearly hired a multiethnic staff of girls who each look like the Barbie version of their ethnic group.
“What washes do you have in the new Citizens of Humanity?” Sarah A. asks. “I’m looking for something with a medium wash but I’m short-waisted,” explains Sarah B. I stand there feeling weird as the other Sarahs chat with the girls who work there using terminology I seem to have failed to learn. “Look at this white V-neck, Sar,” Sarah B. says to Sarah A., ignoring me. I look at the V-neck, too, even though I haven’t been invited to. “It’s sixty-eight dollars for a T-shirt?” I whisper loudly. Both Sarahs glare. “Here, Dr. Sarah,” Sarah A. says, passing me a purple halter. “This would be cute on you for Going Out.”
“I don’t know,” I say. The truth is the store is so expensive that it feels pointless to look at anything.
“Come on,” she says.
“It’s cute, Dr. Sarah,” says Sarah B. “You need to show your boobs more.”
I try it on. Both Sarahs and two of the salesgirls gush and gush and gush and I can’t see what’s so special about the purple halter, but it begins to feel as though I’m stupid for not being able to see what’s so special about the purple halter, and without the ability to discern whether it is or is not special, I have no language with which to defend my disinclination to buy it.
When the salesgirl swipes my debit card for $61.48 including tax, I feel like she’s stealing my money.
Still, I wear the halter to Sarah A. and Sasha’s room that night for Going Out and Sasha says “That top looks amazing on you” and I blush. Sasha keeps looking at me and while she’s looking she says, “I want to go out with you guys.”
“Sashy!” Sarah A. says. “Yes, come.” She doesn’t say it fakely but in a genuine way because they’re friends, too, Sarah A. and Sasha, even if Sarah A. makes fun of Sasha and thinks she’s totally weird.
Sasha puts on a yellow T-shirt from Urban Outfitters that says Blondes Have More Fun, which is funny, I think, and then flat-irons her already straight black hair and does her lip gloss and eyeliner.
“Where are we going?” Sarah B. asks and Sarah A. says “Stills?”
Sasha says, “I hate Stills.” It’s so brave I think, to say that.
“I kind of hate Stills, too,” I try.
Sarah A. stops mid brushstroke, hip cocked, one side of her hair stretched all the way out in a diagonal. She meets my eyes in the mirror. “Fine,” says Sarah A. She’s not the type to fight when her authority’s not respected, which is part of why, I realize, I like her. If you don’t know what you want, she’ll definitely tell you, but if you do, she’ll roll her eyes and then lay off.
“Let’s do something more chill,” Sasha says.
Chill, I realize, means boots instead of stilettos. I stop in my room and change into tall brown boots, a knee-length denim skirt. I can’t find tights so I wear thermals underneath, thick wool socks with snowflakes on them. I keep the purple halter on and it’s a good outfit, I think. I put on my labradorite necklace to signify to the chill people of wherever we go that even if I don’t look like it, I have a connection to the universe, that I am available for a conversation that might be called “deep.” I throw a puffy on over the whole ensemble and we meet in the lobby.
It’s almost 40 degrees so we’re comfortable walking downtown in our scarves and hats. We check out the people standing in lines, look at what brand their parkas are and how they stand and how their laughs sound. We peer into doorways. Sarah B. gets intrigued by a blue-lit martini bar full of adults.
“Come on,” Sasha says, “I know a place.” We follow her down a set of stairs into a bar in a basement with a dirty checkerboard floor and a pool table.
“We are definitely not going to meet our husbands here,” Sarah B. says, brows hoisted, and Sasha and I exchange a look that feels so intimate, we both break out laughing.
“We’re just here to chill,” Sasha says.
“I don’t know how to chill!” Sarah A. confesses. Her eyes bug out and then she cracks up. This is why I like her, too, her solidity, the way she never tries to pretend to be someone she’s not.
We get drinks and then Sasha wants to play pool. Of course Sasha knows how to play pool, which of course is also shocking since she spends most nights crying in the bathroom. Sasha has a secret day life, I realize. Sarah A. weirdly knows how to play, too, and coaches Sarah B. while Sasha coaches me, standing behind me and talking about angles and ricochet. I do all right and Sasha is like, “fuck yes,” low-fiving me and clinking beers and I feel amazing.
Two guys come up, hippies, in my mind, because they’re wearing cargo pants and T-shirts, because they have scruffy beards and one has a necklace made out of some kind of fibrous material, with beads.
“You girls are skilled,” one says.
“Yeah we are,” says Sasha.
The other Sarahs stay huddled at the corner of the table as though these blond boys are strange animals.
The guys introduce themselves and immediately I realize I haven’t retained their names—Sean or Steve or Seth and Mike or Matt or Jeff.
We introduce ourselves and then I glance at Sarahs A. and B. at the other corner of the table. They’re engaged in conversation, like, they’re not going to bother.
Sean or Steve asks where we live and we tell him.
“Whoa, you girls seem too cool for that dorm,” he says. “You don’t seem snobby or stuck up at all.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“You girls want to dance?” asks Seth or Greg.
“Sure,” says Sasha and she tilts her head back and downs the rest of her beer. The boys are practically drooling because it’s all boys want, someone skinny with heavy hair that curls around her elbows but who doesn’t act like whatever they think of as a girl.
We all go over to the dance floor and the Sarahs kind of follow but stay huddled and apart. They’re wearing 7 for All Mankind jeans and Michael Stars T-shirts but they might as well be wearing pastel coats and pillbox hats and have their hands shoved in muffs. Bon Jovi is playing and we’re singing and pumping our hands in the air and I think, We’d never be doing this at the Stagnant Pond. The boys come back with shots and we swallow them.
Then “River of Dreams” comes on and the Sarahs can’t help themselves. They slide their Prada baguettes up beneath their armpits and jump around and sing. They stay and sing through “Sweet Caroline” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Sasha stands and watches, laughing and shaking her head. “This music is so terrible,” she says.
Sarah A. motions for us all to huddle and we do.
“This was fun but I think we should go,” Sarah A. says.
“I’m gonna hang for a little bit,” says Sasha.
“I’ll stay, too,” I say.
“With these anti-Semites?” Sarah B. demands.
“They’re not anti-Semites,” I sigh.
“Oh really? Did you hear what they said about our dorm being snobbish?”
“Our dorm is snobbish.”
“Okay, but you know that he means something different than you when he says that, right?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m not going to marry them,” I say, “I just want to jump around and sing and stuff.”
“Fine,” Sarah A. shrugs. “Be careful and stay with Sashy though, okay?”
“I will,” I say.
“Promise?” Sarah B. asks. “Don’t get drunk.”
Both Sarahs kiss my cheek and leave the basement and the boys go get shots and come back and we take them. This happens a few times. We get drunk.
Sasha and I dance to Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” which kind of moves us away from the boys, because we’re moving our arms like robots and just vibrating our bodies all crazy like they’re being controlled by a remote somewhere outside of us. We’re crashing our bodies into each other only it’s not us doing it, it’s the music making us crash and vibrate and run each other all the way into the wall and laugh hysterically and then this horrible thing happens: Sasha looks up and locks eyes with this other girl right behind me and her jaw drops and she leaps past me and I spin around and they’re embracing. The girl has a little golden fro, a septum ring and black overalls, and she is so so pretty. How does Sasha know this girl? Her secret day life? No one in the dorm has a septum ring. And then I realize they’re still embracing, embracing longer than I’d ever embrace either other Sarah, and kind of rocking, and I realize she’s the girl TA Sasha made out with, she must be. She looks sophisticated, like she knows things. Sasha introduces me, This is Shay!, but their arms stay wrapped around each other, right around each other’s hips and Shay is rubbing the bare skin of Sasha’s shoulder blade with her hand, with its opal and tourmaline rings and lavender nails.
For some reason my face heats up and my eyes start burning. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say. I lock myself in a stall and sit on the toilet. I ball my hands into fists and push my fists against the wall, and then kind of let my body fall to the side, gravity helping the side of my face, my shoulder and arm, connect with the plastery wall. I fall again and again, each time a little harder than the last, the time between falls lessening. I don’t know why, everything just feels really intense and it feels like I have to meet that intensity with something equal. When I’ve collided with the wall enough times, I stay sitting on the toilet and sort of gulp air.
I look in the mirror and see my face is flecked with red on one side, I’ve coaxed the blood out, made it rise, in dots, to the surface. Oh well, I think. It’s dark out there, and everyone’s drunk. The skin isn’t broken. I wipe away the black smear under my right eye and head back out.
Sasha and Shay are standing at the bar, Shay’s arm around Sasha’s waist and her fingers tucked into one of Sasha’s belt loops. They call me over and say they got us shots. It’s Jägermeister, all licorice and gross.
Sean or Seth or Jeff appears out of nowhere and grabs my hand, says “Let’s dance.” I’m obviously a third wheel and so I go with him to the dance floor and we’re dancing, kind of grinding. Sasha and Shay appear next to us, staring into each other’s eyes and doing robot dance type stuff and laughing. I feel my face starting to burn again.
“Hey, I’m gonna head out,” I shout to everyone.
“Sarah, stay,” Sasha says.
“I’m tired,” I say. “It was nice to meet you,” I tell Shay.
“It was nice to meet you,” says Shay sounding legitimately full of joy, which makes sense because she’s some sort of poli sci genius who is getting to study as like a job and is also making out with Sasha.
“You gonna be okay walking back?” Sasha yells.
“It’s like two point five blocks away.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“I’ll walk her,” says Seth-Sean.
“No need,” I say.
“Come on,” he says. He grabs my hand and we walk past the dance floor, up the stairs, and out to the street.
“So your friend’s, like, a lesbian?” Seth-Sean asks.
“I’m not really sure,” I say. “I think she’s just experimenting, as they say.”
“That’s cool. You really are a very cool girl,” Seth-Sean says. “It’s surprising that you live in that weird dorm.”
“Thanks,” I say. I feel like he’s just now picking up on my labradorite necklace and believing in it, believing that I’m connected to the universe.
“Do you want to come home with me?” he asks.
It feels sudden. I look at him and realize that maybe I am not that chill, not chill enough to go home with non-Jewish boys, or maybe it’s just that after seeing Sasha and Shay together, the idea of this big mannish person touching me feels gross.
“No,” I say. “I’m tired. I just want to go home.”
“Okay,” he says. “That’s totally cool.”
“Thanks,” I say, and then wonder what I’m thanking him for. “So what do you study?”
“Environmental science,” he says, “It’s great. I’m going to Costa Rica next year to study the cloud forests.”
“That’s so amazing. I didn’t even know environmental science existed. I’d love to do something like that. Cloud forests!”
He laughs. “It exists. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Are you sure you don’t want to go home with me? I can show you some really amazing nature videos.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I say. I smile. “Nice try, though.”
We get to the doors of my dorm.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
“No, no,” I say. “I really am tired. Just take my number.” This feels like an effective way to fight off an infesting boy that I am well practiced in—give him hope.
“It’s okay, I’ll just find you Out somewhere,” he says. “Good night.” He hugs me and I hug him back. I let it be a long hug, let him pull me in close and bury his face in my neck and let his hands slide down to my waist but then they slide down to my butt and from the butt, he lifts me, pushes me into the entrance vestibule of the dorm and against the wall. I’m not practiced in saying no so instead I say “What are you doing?” and “Hey put me down” or maybe I don’t say that and what’s coming out is a confused unghhh sound and then my skirt’s scrunched up around my hips and my thermals are down, so easily, like he’s done it all, lifted me and unzipped and slipped right in, in a single move and I try wresting free but I can’t and all I can think is someone might walk in. It smells like a clashing blend of expensive perfumes that in their combination have lost all subtlety and become something nauseating and then it’s over. He drops me, and says “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
And it is, I think, okay. It’s like everything. I reenter Sarahland.
In my room, there’s an infesting boy lying in my bed, looking dumb with the bill of his baseball cap curved like a duck or whatever and eyes closed and mouth open, periodically snorting up at the ceiling. His dumbness seems kind of sweet, I think. I change into pajamas my mom sent in a care package, pink flannel covered in cartoon lipsticks, and get in bed. I turn the boy on his side and push him toward the wall. He whines “Sarahhhh” but I just say “ssh” and then he resumes snorting and I crawl in, avoid touching him as much as possible, and try to sleep.
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