Wayne Scott and Matthew Nienow are Cultivating a “Safer” Masculinity

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What is the story boys and men are told about how to be fathers and husbands, and how does it change when they’ve made big human mistakes? How, in the aftermath of crises—whether it’s addiction, depression, or infidelity—do men reimagine masculine identities that allow them to move more comfortably, peacefully, and safely in the world? 

We, poet Matthew Nienow and memoirist Wayne Scott, are both husbands, fathers, and psychotherapists. Both of us had books published in early 2025. 

Nienow’s book of poetry, If Nothing (Alice James Press, 2025), tackles his struggle with addiction, mental health, and shame through poems that build a new vision of how to be a man moving into accountability. Scott’s memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press, 2025), follows a married couple, a straight feminist woman and a queer, bisexual man, with school aged children, as they move down the path toward divorce, only to surprise themselves by falling in love again, creating an unconventional template for their marriage. 

Both of us are trying to form new, evolved narratives around masculinity that break up the patriarchal templates we inherited as boys growing up. Given the resonances and commonalities in our work, we had a recent conversation on Zoom to explore the questions: What does it mean to reimagine masculinity in an era where toxic manhood is glaringly, aggressively dominant across Western cultures? How does shame become a portal to new ways of being? And how are narrative-building and healing connected?

I didn’t know how to be

a friend or a father I didn’t
know what a lover was I stopped

pretending the world was to blame

I was inside with no story
to save me from myself.

Matthew Nienow, If Nothing

In the conventions of marriage, there are good husbands and bad husbands; keepers and exiles; mensches and schmucks. I have been pretending to be a good husband. But because I accept the dark anti-order of things, the way things unravel; because we are married, and I have strayed: I left and now we must divorce.
Because I am a deadbeat. 
Because I am nobody.
I am supposed to leave.

Wayne Scott, The Maps They Gave Us

Wayne Scott: Our books explore vulnerable, emotional aspects of our struggles as men on healing journeys. I’m curious, since your book launched, what have dinner parties been like? Social events with your friends?

Matthew Nienow: For the most part, we don’t talk about my writing. When it comes up, I tend to deflect. Occasionally, there is room to talk about the confusing and uncomfortable parts of publishing deeply personal work.

WS: I get that. With my friends who are writers, folks in critique groups, we talk about it all the time, but with extended family, other friends, neighbors, they don’t know what to do with me. 

MN: I live in a small town. The majority of people in my life know me through other contexts aside from writing. Some of these folks lived through the parts of my life that ended up in the book. Other people are more removed. Sometimes I wonder when running into different people from my past: “Is this person not saying something to me right now, because they feel awkward about what they know from the book?”

WS: Right? Writing my memoir, I worked through a lot of the shame that attached to the experiences in my marriage—like I was trying to spin gold out of these hard experiences. But then if I give the book to someone who asks for it and the next time I see them they don’t make eye contact, the shame comes back full force. “They must feel judgmental about me. It’s too awkward for them to say anything.” Actually, it’s more likely that they just didn’t get around to reading it! 

MN: Exactly.

WS: I reread If Nothing four times. It’s wise and vulnerable. You’re covering ground that feels like forbidden territory, something people are not going to be comfortable with: the unrelentingness of addictions, the ways it hurts family and children. I love this line: “Fuck up / in the most beautiful way possible– / every error a mirror / revealing something you may have been / unwilling to see”. That could have been the epigram for my memoir. We both wrote books about fucking up that we also clearly wanted to make beautiful. What’s beautiful about fucking up?

MN: There’s a risky temptation, especially when you’re talking about ugly or uncomfortable parts of the human experience—shame, betrayal, all kinds of harm—to make something too beautiful, too neat. While in my poetry I’m striving for a certain kind of presentation on the page, I had to work against that impulse at times in order to be true to the messy life underneath the poem.

WS: It’s important not to prettify it.

MN: You don’t want to make it too beautiful which would be somehow false or inauthentic. There is a need for the music to be there, for the beauty to be there, even when looking at off-putting and off-limits topics. For a time, I was a total fuck up, and I caused so much pain. Over the years, I wrestled and stayed with this discomfort and it became the core of the book. An essential element of the human experience, especially if we’re talking about growing and changing and transforming, is to acknowledge the places that we fuck up in our lives, to like really get in there and not just gloss over them: That’s the mirror.

If I give the book to someone and the next time I see them they don’t make eye contact, the shame comes back full force.

I’m remembering early on in your memoir, after you’ve been kicked out of your home. You’re up late and you can’t sleep and you keep thinking about politicians who are unfaithful: 

“They follow a formula. There is an affair, often conducted via the internet, that dark highway of the collective unconscious. Maybe there is an ugly dick pic. The news spills out, often because of sloppy computer use or misunderstanding about the public record of the exchanges. At first the man responds defensively, shocked, testing to see if he can still hide. When facts emerge, he shifts to a more contrite stance. He apologizes. He admits he is human. He asks for forgiveness, A minister stands nearby.”

There’s a recognition that the formula of pat contrition is too simple. There’s no real redemption. There’s no real change. And that was definitely not going to allow me to exist in the kind of life I wanted to live.

WS: It doesn’t reveal anything new or get at any deeper, more complex truth. The idea of errors as mirrors compels us to look at something we don’t want to see. For me, that’s where the fuck up becomes beautiful. It reveals something deeper, truer and messier than what we might want to acknowledge.

MN: That formula isn’t serving our world. 

WS: Closely related to fucking up is talking about shame. I love the last poem in your book, “And Then.” I first saw it in The Missouri Review. “Beneath my shame, / the body / was a raw red thing / untrained in acceptance.” Do we ever transcend the shame?

MN: That was the very last poem I wrote for the collection, after I thought the book was done and had already been accepted. It was one of those gift poems—I had no idea where it came from—and it tied things together in a way that made everything more coherent, more potent. 

There are parts of my past where the shame doesn’t go away because I acted so out of alignment with my values. I never stop feeling bad about it. But because of the way that I show up and have shown up for years and years now, the impact of that shame is smaller, not because it’s less significant, but because my capacity to be with the discomfort is greater. I know who I’ve become, and yet, I keep looking at those parts of myself and my past that I will never be okay with. I don’t know if it’s something you ever transcend, but to continue looking at it is a part of what makes something greater possible, and may allow for people to know us in more complex ways, and to still love us right for all the flaws.

WS: I am reading a book with some other therapists about shame. The writer, Pat DeYoung, refers to “ethical shame.” There’s a type of shame that is part of being human, living in community, that is actually okay. It’s okay for us to feel a certain amount of dissonance when our actions don’t line up with how we want to be. She talks a lot about how it applies to whiteness, white supremacist culture, things that are kind of embedded in us, as white men. If we confront it truly, we will feel what is called an ethical shame. And that’s okay.

This is different from a more chronic shame that causes anxiety and depression and interferes with having healthy relationships. 

MN: I agree with that. The ethical shame is when we’ve acted out of alignment with our beliefs. 

But there is also a destructive shame that comes from a story that our culture supplies us, that tells us there’s something wrong with us. It makes me curious about your relationship with shame. A lot of your memoir explores your challenges to speak to your full identity in a culture that’s constrained by either/or, gay/straight binaries. For your gay friends, during the AIDS pandemic, it feels like a betrayal when you’re in a relationship with a woman and getting married. 

WS: A lot of the queer writers I was reading when I wrote the memoir—Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin, for example—are preoccupied with prisons. The preoccupation with shame and wrong-doing and condemnation is endemic to the queer experience, like a genetic thread of intergenerational trauma. In my experience, growing up, there was a lot of shame before I even got to my marriage, because I did not fit the mold that my brothers fit. I was the Misfit Gay Kid. You had to be quiet and hide if you were going to survive.

MN: You also address the idea of monogamy versus consensual non-monogamy. There’s still a binary there, as in marriage or no marriage, right? Those limitations in language inform the spaces we inhabit in the world, as you consider in your book, noting that certain labels lead to feeling smaller and smaller. I feel like that’s one of the impulses that shame leads to—this feeling of worthlessness and hiding. 

Writing about those experiences runs counter to the shame.

WS: I was talking about this with another therapist who’s really smart about shame. She told me, as soon as we speak about the shameful experience, it’s not shame anymore. We’re in the process of translating it into something else. The visceral, emotional condition of shame is wordless, voiceless, and immobilizing. Shame is actually part of our nervous system’s freeze response. It’s that part of our bodies that helps us shut down when we’re getting close to death. Writing about it—in poetry or memoir—is what breaks it up.

MN: You mentioned when you were sharing parts of the memoir with your partner, you would fall back into the same arguments that were referenced in the text. In recreating or preserving these moments of betrayal or regret, do you have any momentary re-experiencing of that original shame? Even if you think you’ve transformed it, you go back in? 

WS: I don’t think I’ll ever feel good about the betrayal in my marriage. It was very injurious. I have tried to make amends with my honesty and the way I show up for the relationship today. We’ve also kind of collaboratively reconstructed our marriage so that it doesn’t require lying, or hiding or secrecy, or anything like that. 

I don’t think my story would have happened if the world hadn’t developed more inclusive ways of talking about queerness.

There’s an acknowledgement that we had kind of set ourselves up to be in a difficult situation. When we decided to get married, the language was very constrained. The word ‘queer,’ in the expansive sense we use today, or LGBTQ+, did not exist when I was younger. This way that bisexual men feel erased when they partner with people of the opposite sex. You were compelled to choose to be straight when you made a vow to be monogamous, which ultimately wasn’t healthy for me as a bisexual man.

MN: At one point you write, “I don’t know how to tell the story of who we are, because I don’t know how to tell the story of who I am”.

WS: I don’t think my story would have happened if the world hadn’t developed more inclusive, more diverse ways of talking about queerness and intimacy.

MN: At one point in the book—you’ve been kicked out of the house, and you’re laying immobilized on a hard hotel mattress—you start thinking about when your father left your family without explanation when you were a teenager. 

WS: I start the memoir with certain stories about who I am, like my perception that my father rejected me, that part of the reason he left my mother and us was because he couldn’t stand having a misfit gay-acting son. And then as an adult, when I was kicked out of the house, I felt this immobilizing shame. It was so hard to get through the cloud of it, to get back home. I realized, “Oh, maybe him not coming home again had nothing to do with me. Maybe he just fucked up really bad and he was debilitated by the shame. But I don’t have to be debilitated by the shame. Actually, I’m gonna figure out some damn way to get back home. But it’s going to be so painful walking through that door again.”

MN: I want to honor you for that work. For me, that is one of the most powerful parts of the memoir. I’m always looking for people who are going to stay for the hard stuff, to dig in when it feels impossible. We don’t have many good public models of this, because we don’t get to see the inside of people’s lives in the same way. And it’s completely counter to the narrative of your experience with your father, too. 

WS: One of the other thematic overlaps between us is this idea of narrative, whether it’s poetry or memoir, as a kind of rebuilding, restoring or healing. You describe addiction as the absence of a coherent story. “I was inside with no story to save me from myself.”

MN: In order for addiction to continue as long as it did, I had to have a story that I was still functional in my life as an addict. Then it became non-functional. But the story that kept me there was so powerful. As my life around the addiction got worse, the dissonance was too great. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was a jumble of lies. 

WS: I love this question you pose: “All the second chances, / what did they teach me, if not to dream / more wildly toward a kingdom in which the king / was not so cruel?” There’s a different fairy tale we can imagine and inhabit.

MN: Without that imagination, it’s like there is no going forward into something different. I don’t shed all the parts of my past, even though I’m so much healthier than I was. I have to be constantly imagining that kingdom. My willingness to do this is strengthened by continuing to look closely at these places of fucking up.

WS: Like me, you are an artist who is also a therapist. How do those two roles you play influence each other?

MN: It’s probably true that most writers have a different way of listening to other people and a different way of hearing. I used to call my practice of poetry “the long listening.” It requires being open and attentive and curious, noticing and tuning myself to the sounds of a conversation. If we’re good at our work, what we hear isn’t just the specific word we say back, it’s the thread underneath and the subtext.

WS: Some of the best training I got as a therapist actually happened in my MFA program. Therapy really is about helping people find a different story, a more creative story that reaches deep, to describe the things that happened to them.

Some of the best training I got as a therapist actually happened in my MFA program.

MN: One last question I want to ask you: What is a safe man in a time when toxic masculinity is lauded? Why is it important to ask this question, as opposed to “what is a good man?”

WS: My friends who are people of color are speaking in my ear right now, reminding me that the best I can do is to be a safer man. I have been too socialized in the ways of white men and their unearned privileges, so I’m always vulnerable to the kinds of toxic masculinity I‘m the first to criticize in other men. I’ll always make mistakes and ruptures, no matter how hard I try. The other day I was doing a workshop with another therapist–she’s Latina and an amazing friend to me–and I said something half-assed without thinking, and she said, “Well, that was some pretty good mansplaining going on right there.” And I realized, Jesus Christ, I did just do that, sometimes it just spills out when I’m tired or not thinking. I’m so glad we have the kind of relationship where she can say something, even tease me about it. Nobody is 100 perfectly intentional in every interaction. And so I think the best I can aim for is to be a safer man.

MN: Agreed! This, for me, goes to the heart of some of what it means to be a safe man: men who are willing to look at the ugliness within themselves, who are willing to be honest about what they see there, and to acknowledge the ways that they hurt others, and then to lean into the work of growing and changing. It’s not a fixed position. It’s not a destination you arrive at, and then you’re done. This is lifelong work.

Searching for Meaning in What’s Been Broken and Repaired

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“Kintsugi: Art of Repair”, an excerpt from Wedding of the Foxes by Katherine Larson

The story begins with a teabowl that was shattered. When fifteenth-century shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent his beloved broken teabowl away to be repaired, he was disappointed to find the teabowl returned with mended seams of ugly metal staples. According to historians, it was more than disappointment. He found this solution unacceptable.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” the sunburnt teenager squinted, standing in front of the juvenile fin whale skeleton. “But I just don’t see why it matters.” She looked at the teenager, a ponytailed brunette chewing a hangnail. The heat was ferocious, the tiny creases of her eyelids stung with sweat. This was at the end of the free natural history talk she gave on Sundays at the field station in the northern Gulf of Mexico, after she’d explained the homologous structures of the whale flipper and human arm. “Look here,” she’d gestured to the wooden paddle fixed on the side of the fin whale rib cage (its arches towering above her head). “See how alike they are.” The whale phalanges—stuck through with metal pins—were strewn against the salt-swollen wood like a cupful of dice.

Ashikaga challenged his craftsmen to find a new form of restoration. So they pulled out the staples. Painstakingly mended the seams with layers of tree sap dusted with gold. In this talk, she’d been describing species that were threatened or endangered. Whale species and, in particular, the vaquita, a small endemic porpoise on the verge of extinction. “Suppose,” the teenager had continued, “we didn’t know they existed—if we were unaware of them completely, would it matter, really, if we lost them?” The teenager doesn’t say this flippantly but with a kind of bleary bewilderment. It is the kind of terrifying question—both the significance and the explanation of it— that she will spend her life trying to come to terms with.

The teabowl was again returned to Ashikaga and the art of kintsugi, or “golden joinery,” was born. Each piece unique, not in spite of, but because of the way it was both broken and repaired.

She must have said something to the girl in response, something stark and brittle, though now she doesn’t remember. She remembers instead what she wanted to say: The world is full of secret and invisible machinery, our expression and understanding of which are utterly inadequate. She feels them, of course. Those threads that link the vaquita to the hedgehog cactus at her feet that’s tossing its fuchsia blossoms at the sun. The threads that tie herself to this strange girl asking her a question she feels entirely unprepared to answer. She’s felt them tug at her since she was small.

When she thinks of her time at the field station now, she remembers how she used to drag a thin sleeping mat out onto the porch to sleep. And of the picnic table that held the objects she used for her natural history talks—the fragile ones the children loved to stroke with their fingertips: the sea lion and bottlenose dolphin skulls, the seaweedish-looking egg cases of sharks and rays, the life-sized model of the small porpoise that was quickly becoming a ghost. That particular sound of the palms that shook their fronds at night while the ocean chewed its way up and down the shore.

The Sengoku period of Japan—when the art of kintsugi flourished—is noted as a time of near-constant civil war and social and political upheaval. It was also marked by several devastating earthquakes. Japan straddles multiple fault lines with the densest seismic network in the world. Fractures are part of its elemental substrate.

Her friend HG is making plaster casts of estuary mud from the sea where they met. Recording creatures that have passed, capturing transient marks that will be erased with the incoming tide. This feels to her an apt metaphor—that the change can be nearly imperceptible yet all-encompassing. How we may inhabit a new kind of being or expanse yet, in a moment, be brought back to selves that we have left behind or outright discarded. Like standing in a room of broken statuary. Rows upon rows of frozen objects, some of them truncated, maimed. Some of them still scraping their way across the floor. If we can’t leave those selves behind, she thinks, how do we integrate them? She thinks about her own selves. The she that is the third-person excavator of memory’s shifting constellations; the I that writes letters at night to Japanese authors she’ll never meet.

In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, the authors explain, “The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts—the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present. [. . .] Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade.” She is reminded one day on a walk with her children that the mourning dove eggshell they have found could be thought of as another smaller, intimate teabowl.

According to Kyōto kintsugi practitioner Kiyokawa Hiroki, “The fractured part where kintsugi is applied becomes a new landscape in itself.” In this landscape, an artifact’s unique history is honored. “Our imperfections,” he says, “can be the birth of something new.” There are times that this metaphor seems almost like a living thing to her—a cipher to be captured and held close like a rare and lovely moth. And then there are times when she finds toilet paper piled up so high inside the toilet bowl it resembles a wedding cake, and her pockets are full of mangy gift-feathers and Band-Aid wrappers, and while she’s brushing the children’s teeth, there’s a voice inside of her that’s sobbing and little fragments of poetry burning in incandescent images that she can’t decipher, much less write down. There are times during the COVID-19 pandemic that she falls asleep in her clothes for the fourth night in a row.

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist, argues that a human being is not a being at all, but a process, “like a cloud above the mountains.” This echoes the Buddhist idea that there is, in fact, no permanent self to cling to. What’s the difference between the self and a ghost?

She remembers one day at the field station when a pickup truck pulled up. A Mexican government official had confiscated the carapaces of sea turtles—he didn’t say from where. “I didn’t know where else to take them,” he said. “I thought you could use them to teach.” She remembers what it felt like as she helped unload them from the truck. It was like standing there watching someone cut the throat of an elephant. There are seven species of sea turtles. Six are counted as threatened or endangered. Most of the carapaces were still spongy in places where they hadn’t been scraped clean of meat. The smell of mute, rotting things. Flies all around.

History must be recognized in a way that gives the breakage meaning.

“Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying,” Donna Haraway tells us. “Human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think.” Sometimes when the house is very quiet at night, empty of the sounds of young children, she thinks about the ghosts of things. The ghosts of previous selves. The future ghosts of birds.

The methods of repair fall into three distinct categories:

Crack, the use of gold dust and resin or lacquer to link broken pieces, usually appearing as a running vein or seam of gold.

Piece method, where the shape of a missing fragment is filled in completely with gold or a gold and lacquer compound.

Joint-call, where a nonmatching ceramic fragment of a similar shape replaces the missing fragment of the original vessel, giving the vessel a “patchwork” look.

When teaching her students poetic forms in graduate school, she realized how little she understood about the nuances of haiku. The skill of their compression, the “kireji” (cutting word), the punning, the symbolic sophistication of seasonal references. She studied them. Then haibun, tanka, renga, sedoka, haikai. Fiction writers followed: Ōe and Kawabata; Abe, Tanizaki. Decades of her life steeped in Japanese writers and metaphors. Literature—and this is not an exaggeration—that has kept her afloat. She thinks of Deborah Bird Rose exploring the idea of “reciprocal capture.” Rose says, “For philosopher Isabelle Stengers, ‘reciprocal capture,’ is ‘an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence’ in which neither entity transcends the other or forces the other to bow down. It is a process of encounter and transformation [. . .].”

Because of the pandemic, she teaches her daughter, a fourth grader, about tropical rainforests and other biomes at home. But between the words ecology and mutualism and symbiosis, other words creep in. Deforestation, habitat fragmentation, sea level rise, ecocide, ecocatastrophe. Her daughter builds a rainforest habitat out of a small cardboard box. Makes bromeliads from tiny scraps of tissue paper and cuts out a three-toed sloth to hang on a vine. In her report, she writes, The beaks of adult toucans can be blue, orange, yellow, green, fuchsia, and white. They are like living forest rainbows. Her daughter tells her that during mating season, certain toucans toss fruit back and forth as a courtship ritual.

It’s been asked: Did the life of the bowl begin once it was shattered? She doesn’t particularly like easy metaphors for suffering. Finds it quietly abhorrent when people speak of being “enlarged by suffering” or “given the opportunity for suffering’s gifts: empathy, sensitivity to the pain of others, a sense that impermanence means we must live deeply, and not anesthetized.” Not because it isn’t true but because it seems reductive. What she loves is metaphor that contains space for both insight and the inscrutable. You can say, for example, that history must be recognized in a way that gives the breakage meaning. You can say that beauty can be made more whole. Or you can say that a whale is a mirror above treetops. The self is a kingdom of air.

When she was pregnant and so sick she spent months broken on the tiles of the bathroom floor she read, sentence by single sentence and with terrible clarity, Mishima Yukio’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Some of the loneliest books she’s ever lived. She remembers having to lie down on the floor the one time she went to Target to try to buy maternity clothes. Under a wall of enormous bras. The carpet—a palpitating blue—was stained with something indescribably filthy. Her partner had to leave her there to find a wheelchair. Most days, she couldn’t shower without help. Most days, she couldn’t stand without help.

Another story of the beginning of kintsugi mentions a bowl that was shattered, and a clever guest, Hosokawa Yūsai, knowing the host’s hot temper, quickly intervened by improvising a poem about the bowl whose deftness dispelled the host’s dark mood. Language was a part of the mending. Even now, this story is a part of the mending. Mending is a thing that continues.

Discovering Japanese women writers was another revelation. Enchi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Nogami Yaeko, Uno Chiyo. Notice that she’s writing their full names and didn’t with the others. She hadn’t realized how underrepresented they were— if she’d talked to someone that happened to have read Kawabata, they wouldn’t know Sakiyama Tami, Nogami Yaeko, or Ozaki Midori. She began to dream of writing a book in which small fragments of certain stories could slip in. Not in her voice. But more like joint-call pieces. As the writers themselves had written them.

Vulnerability. Mistakes. The history of what’s been broken and how we managed or didn’t manage to mend it. The word nagori can be translated as “remnant, traces, memory.” In those last two weeks of October, the nagori-no-chaji tea ceremony in which the mended objects are not just displayed, but used, involves savoring the last tea leaves collected the previous November. It is a time to let go, to enter the sadness of passing even as one recognizes the old season must die before the new one begins. To live alongside ghosts is to live in recognition of their warning. And in honor of their remembrance.

If she hadn’t been in the police station filing the paperwork for her stalker. If the officer hadn’t shown her the stack of papers that was a single night’s domestic violence calls—many of them repeats, she was warned. If she hadn’t decided then and dragged her mattress down the street to the dumpster in the middle of the night to dump illegally because it was too stained with cat pee to give to anyone. If she hadn’t had to drive across the country and into another to get as far away as possible. She would have never arrived at the field station. She would have never started this life. This self would have become a different self.

She met her friend HG in that country of whale bones and palms. HG had driven to the field station as part of a project to clean the curio cabinets and set them up as an educational exhibit. Together, they pulled black widows and their messy webs out of the cavernous spaces. Hung mako shark jaws against the wall. When they sat for a break at the picnic tables in the courtyard, the ones where the sea wind gusts through, they noticed a jumping spider. It followed their conversation, swiveling its head when each of them spoke, as if listening in. They would remember it always as a sign. Like being inducted into the secrets of the ruins at Delphi.

To live alongside ghosts is to live in recognition of their warning. And in honor of their remembrance.

Chanoyu, or “Way of Tea,” practitioner Christy Bartlett explains, “Mended ceramics foremost convey a sense of the passage of time. The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, an empathetic compassion for, or perhaps identification with, beings outside oneself.”

She thinks of how it’s an invisible language, the language of species. When one studies ecology, one studies relationships between living and nonliving things. What it meant to her was that one studies the invisible in order to make it more visible. The astonishment of which she sometimes has to hide. Like the time in her botany class when the TA chastised her poetic language. He’d circled the phrases with red ink, explaining that a lab report was no place to describe that under the microscope the chloroplasts had seemed to tumble around like green, sentient pearls.

She’s been teaching her daughter haiku: Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa. Still, she is startled when one late night she reads this haiku of Katō Shūson:

I kill an ant

and realize my three children

have been watching.

She, too, feels inexplicably ashamed.

Items for the nagori-no-chaji tea ceremony are carefully curated. To drink from a bowl that has been cared for by another is to recognize a lineage to which one belongs. To recognize in a single moment both rupture and continuity. Inheritance.

Her favorite is a teabowl from the eighteenth century. Arita ware. A joint-call where a fragment of a bird from another teabowl has been spliced into the broken section of the bird of another. When she looks at the fragile veins of gold that mend that joining, she thinks of words like palimpsest. She thinks of breakage and repair as the intimate history of an object. Sometimes, she thinks of her own body as a bird’s.

This is not just metaphor—one of the genes involved in human language has a homolog in the song genes of certain birds. We share DNA in common with zebra finches, sea urchins, daffodils.

Her daughter has broken her favorite pot: one with hand-drawn marks that look like waves. For a while, she keeps the pieces in a little pile above the washing machine. There are kintsugi kits one can buy off the internet, but one morning, after looking at the pieces, so many pieces, she takes the pieces outside and throws them in the trash. She almost immediately regrets the decision, and as she stands there with her wild hair and ratty pajamas (her neighbors always seem to catch her in her ratty pajamas) she thinks she could do it—she could be that crazy person who empties out and then digs through her entire trash and finds each piece—but the whole thing has an air of finality, of something that’s already been unequivocally and quietly decided, and even though she knows that she will likely regret it, she walks back to the house instead.

As a child, she was terrified of fire. Of the house beginning to burn as she slept. That she would wake trapped in flames, hearing the screams of her family—she couldn’t make it out of the fire to reach them. She’d lie awake in darkness that felt malignant, felt it skim her body like oil. Even at the time, it embarrassed her to have such a secret, dramatic anxiety. In her family, drama was frowned upon. They were pragmatists and stoics. They were not burning alive in lakes of fire.

And yet. Once she woke and the house was filled with the smell of smoke. When she screamed, her father came crashing from the bedroom and into the kitchen. On the stove was a pot of bones her mother had left on low heat, wanting to sterilize before giving them to the dog. The smell of singed bones: like having your lungs stuffed full of burnt sand.

Collectors became so enamored of the art form that some were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so that it might be repaired with golden seams. Were there ever pieces that once broken, they realized they could not mend? There must have been.

She wants to believe that the extinction crisis can be slowed, halted. She wants to believe that something can be born out of it that does not negate the understanding of the damage that’s already been done. Yet she secretly fears the tipping point at which the cascade will produce an uncontrollable unraveling.

They say some of the teabowls would simply fall apart and then again be remade. Those many hands, those many ghosts, those many years.

One studies the invisible in order to make it more visible.

“We have never been individuals,” biologist Scott Gilbert tells us. “If most of the cells in the human body are microbes, which ‘individual’ are we? We can’t segregate our species nor claim distinctive status—as a body, a genome, or an immune system. And what if evolution selects for relations among species rather than ‘individuals’?” She thinks again of the golden threads. Of entanglements. She thinks of her nine-year-old daughter’s haiku:

Raindrops so shiny,

And delicate on pavement The worms and snails slide.

Bartlett says, “One of the most deeply held values in the tearoom is that of collaboration, of multiple hands producing a seamless whole in which each individual contributor still remains distinct. [. . .] In this bowl, we can see the hand of two artists, the original potter and the later lacquerer who brought [. . .] remarkable sensibility to the way in which the repair is highlighted.” The plaster casts HG is making contain the tracks of hermit crabs, shorebirds, waves.

Maybe that golden thread of repair reminded Ashikaga of a river. Or the asymmetrical silhouette of a leaning mountain. Whatever it was, in its gold-seamed brokenness, Ashikaga found he loved the teabowl differently—more deeply than he had before.

When she teaches her daughter about mollusks, she shows her a video of the tiny blue orbs that line the edge of a living scallop. “Most people don’t know,” she says, “that scallops have eyes.” And later, with her son at the tide pools she used to wade into drinking her morning coffee, in whose hand she places a still-dripping clam. “Or that Venus clams have nervous systems. Hearts.”

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Let the Moon Wobble” by Ally Ang

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang, which will be published on November 11, 2025 by Alice James Books. You can pre-order your copy here.

In poems born of intense loneliness, grief, anger, and uncertainty at the convergence of multiple apocalypses: a raging pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, multiple global uprisings, and ever-persisting violence, Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble asks and seeks to answer the question: what makes the end of the world worth surviving?

Ang’s debut considers multiple speakers’ journeys through concurrent apocalypses: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. These poems span a wide range of forms and poetic traditions, full of humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity. They emerge from the speaker’s need to process their emotions and feelings of helplessness. As Ang aches for connection to their communities and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, their poems plumb the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.

Coursing through Let the Moon Wobble is the deep desire for wildness, freedom from convention and constraint, and to be seen; the speaker often takes up so much space that they’re impossible to ignore or erase. Ultimately, where we land is in a place of hope and possibility where what’s “freshly broken” can give way to blooming. Let the Moon Wobble is a testament to the ways queer joy and community can fuel resistance and allow us to imagine radical new ways of being.

Here is the cover, designed by Tiani Kennedy with artwork by Katherine Bradford:

Ally Ang: In 2023, I saw an exhibit titled “Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford” at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. I wasn’t familiar with Bradford’s work prior to seeing the exhibit, but I was immediately taken with her lush, bright colors; the dreamy, often eerie way she uses light; her cosmic settings; and how she renders people in a way that is both warm, with a sense of community and affection between her subjects, and distant, abstracting their features. I didn’t actually see “Swimmers Outer Space,” the painting that graces the cover of my book, at the Frye that day, but Bradford’s work stayed with me long after I first encountered it. When my press asked for suggestions for artists whose work I wanted to consider for cover art, Bradford quickly came to mind.

To encapsulate the spirit of Let the Moon Wobble, I knew that my ideal cover would be something colorful, whimsical, and celestial. Because so much of the book is grounded in connection—between the speaker and their self, their ghosts, their community, and the world around them—it feels fitting that the cover features people in communion with each other and with nature. Yet the moon, large and luminous and full, is undoubtedly the focal point of the painting. While the poems in the book are not directly about the moon, the moon appears as an image in many poems, and I think of it as a central figure of the book, even when it is merely an observer. 

I also adore how otherworldly the cover image is: as the title “Swimmers Outer Space” indicates, both the moon and the body of water that the swimmers are in appear extraterrestrial, as though the scene takes place on another planet. In Let the Moon Wobble, the speaker often imagines and yearns for a different world from the harsh, dismal one we currently inhabit, and this image feels like a portal into a dreamlike alternate reality that exists in the realm of play and imagination. 

Finally, in terms of design, I love how the title text is curved and off-center, mimicking the shape of the moon. It feels like the title is another celestial body that fits into this surreal landscape (or spacescape). I’m very grateful to Katherine Bradford for allowing me to use her painting, and to Tiani Kennedy for turning it into such a beautiful book cover.

Tiani Kennedy: To be able to design a cover using one of Katherine Bradford’s work of art was an honor and I’m grateful to Ally Ang for choosing a piece that’s both vibrant and complex. The swimmers seem on the edge of the earth, not exactly swimming, but reaching out to the moon longingly as if begging to be saved. It’s that same longing that’s echoed in Ang’s collection as they grapple with making sense of the senseless and what it means to exist in a body that society deems an “other” all while emerging defiant and standing firm in one’s desire. I wanted the art to be the focal point, to be a window into what readers would experience as soon as they opened the book. As a result, I opted for minimal typography and introduced the title in the shape of a half-moon to create yet another layer of movement without distracting from the painting.

My Strengths Are Primarily Avian

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

Brut Force

At last, I'm accepting the efficiency of having
the chest of a bird; why didn't I follow finches
first? My strength is mostly found in flapping:
forget rabbit sprints: flailing will make me rich
or force other walkers into the street grinning,
but what if I treat each person as a possibility
of love, declare it like a cicada's sexy keening?
Like my dog, as my hope rises, so does anxiety:
Scientists can't explain planets as hot as the sun; 
at least we know what close friends want (psych)!  
Oh, metrics: count a hundred meteorites in one
hour, a hundred mosquitos, or a hundred fireflies; 
instead, we must smear moth meteorites atop
the car's soft rooftop (just love in a new form)

The Only Deals Are Two for One

Why start the next great American novel 
when you can read the contraindications
on a bottle of Tylenol; it’s part of the effort
to live the dream: to live pain-free, to pass

time productively, in spite of inflammations 
that we either haven’t quite become inured 
to, or which we’ve endured till its familiarity 
becomes a craving; the “vroom” of another 

blended Vitamix bromide is its own reward,
an audio massage felt in the chest, or even
the pointless sharpness of the smoke alarm, 
testing automatically, in the coffee shop for

hours, first because no one can turn it off, 
ultimately left on at the patrons’ demand.

7 Love Triangle Novels That Are About More Than Romance

Posted on by Willem Marx

I’ve never much cared for the phrase “love triangle.” At best, it feels reductive—a term that flattens a complex web of multi-dimensional relationships into a simple geometrical shape. At worst, it’s a trope. So, while writing pitch material for my debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, I was surprised to discover that when I distilled the plot down to its central conflict, it took the shape of a triangle. Perhaps not a traditional one—my novel traces the complications of unconventional, contemporary relationships—but a triangle none the less. 

Slanting Towards the Sea is the story of two young college students, Ivona and Vlaho, who at the turn of the millennium in a newly democratic Croatia—a country in the midst of profound change itself—marry, divorce, and remain emotionally entangled. When new partners enter their lives, unexpected friendships develop between the exes and current lovers. Bonds form that are as surprising as they are precarious, until the unusual closeness forces a reckoning for all involved. Obviously, I hadn’t set out to write a love triangle. I was drawn to exploring different territory altogether—the stubborn persistence of love long after a relationship has ended; the challenges of coming of age in a country that’s still figuring itself out; and the slow, often invisible ways that family, culture, and childhood experiences shape what we believe we’ve chosen for ourselves. But, out of that rich context, a triangle is what emerged (or arguably, two triangles with a shared base). 

I encountered a similar shock while researching comp titles. As it turns out, many of my favorite novels also center around tripartite dynamics, though I’d never thought of them as “love triangle books.” In these novels, central tension is rarely drawn solely from having to choose between two people. Instead, the “triangle” serves as a lens for exploring deeper questions of identity, longing, and morals. Often, the true conflict lies between two versions of the self, like in Lily King’s Writers & Lovers; between past and future, as depicted in Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace; or the pull of societal expectations against the desire for personal freedom I see in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Sometimes the focus isn’t even on a single decision itself, but the quiet reckoning with paths that were taken, and their complicated aftermath. I’ve come to realize that the emotional geometry of a love triangle is fertile ground for exploring these and so many other themes. This is a collection of some of my favorite love triangles in literary fiction.

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

On an August evening, behind the cabin in Cape Cod where her family has spent every summer for generations, Elle makes passionate love to Jonas, while their spouses chat inside. Over the course of the following day, Elle has to decide whether to remain married to her loving husband, Peter, or to give in to her lifelong desire for Jonas. But the choice between the two is more complex than meets the eye. As Elle takes us back in time, disclosing generational cycles of problematic divorces, family dysfunction, and child molestation, we begin to better understand the real stakes of Elle’s decision.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

William Waters is a college student with a tragic past who meets and falls in love with Julia Padavano, a decisive and ambitious fellow student at Northwestern University. But Julia doesn’t come alone; she is one of four sisters, and a member of a tight-knit Italian family. While at first it seems like Julia’s drive and clear vision for the future are exactly what rudderless William needs, when tragedy strikes, it isn’t Julia who can understand him, but her younger—and closest—sister, Sylvie. The emergent love between William and Sylvie will spur an epic betrayal and cause a rift between sisters that will ripple through generations. Hello Beautiful explores the strength of three different kinds of bonds—sibling, romantic, and motherly––asking which is the strongest, and what happens when they’re stacked against one another.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

In this gorgeously written adult coming-of-age story set in 1990s Boston, Casey Peabody is one of the few people from her college days still pursuing the dream of publishing a novel and leading a creative life—and paying a hefty price to be doing so. Broke, working a low-paying job, and living above her obnoxious landlord’s garage, Casey is neck-deep in debt and grieving her mother’s passing. When she meets Oscar, she is drawn to his children first—having recently lost their own mother, she can relate to them on an intimate level, and soon it seems that she will finally slip into the balanced, reasonable, safe life that has always eluded her. But then she meets Silas. Unreliable, grieving the sudden loss of his sister, he is a heartbreak waiting to happen. As Casey’s life gets more complicated, so does her decision: should she finally wave the white flag and opt for a safer, more predictable, adult life, or should she keep vying for the unapologetic, full life she’s always dreamed of, despite the slim odds?

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

Set in 1950s London, Small Pleasures is a gem of a novel that follows local newspaper journalist, Jean Swinney, on a task to investigate one woman’s claim that her daughter is the product of a virgin birth. But as Jean interviews the woman in question, Gretchen Tilbury, and her lovely family—the exact kind Jean has always coveted—she finds herself pulled into their life, and falling in love with Gretchen’s soft-spoken, kind-hearted husband, Howard. With sensitivity and wit, Chambers explores the power of self-denial, and why it’s often easier for us to settle for less, than strive for the full scope of what we really want from life.

Dream State by Eric Puchner

In Dream State, Charlie Margolis asks his college best friend, Garrett, to officiate his wedding to Cece, the woman of his dreams, at his family’s idyllic estate in Montana. The request is more than symbolic—it’s Charlie’s way of offering Garrett a lifeline as he grapples with the aftermath of a devastating accident he can’t forgive himself for. In the days leading up to the ceremony, Cece and Garrett form an unexpected connection, and within weeks of the wedding, she leaves her new husband for his best friend. What follows is a sweeping family saga, with Charlie, Garrett, and Cece at its center. The consequences of this choice unravel slowly and painfully, irrevocably shaping their lives and the lives of everyone around them.

Fault Lines by Emily Itami

Mizuki is a housewife in the bustling city of Tokyo. Despite seemingly having it all—a lovely home, two adorable children, and a hardworking husband, Mizuki is lonely and crumbling under the weight of everyone else’s needs and expectations while ignoring her own. On a rainy evening out on the town, she meets Kiyoshi, a handsome, successful restauranteur who sees her as she used to be before assuming her domestic persona: fun, interesting, full of life—a person she herself has forgotten. As the two get closer, it becomes clear that Mizuki will have to make a painful choice between abandoning her family, or returning to the gray oblivion of domestic dissatisfaction.

Leaving by Roxana Robinson

Sarah and Warren fall passionately in love during college, but the relationship ends over a misunderstanding. Now in their sixties, a chance meeting at an opera house brings them back together, and the passion reignites instantly. While Sarah is divorced and ostensibly free to start a relationship, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after being devoted solely to her children for so long. Warren, on the other hand, has no such reservations. But when he tries to leave his apathetic, dull marriage, his adult daughter steps up to defend her mother. Ultimately, Leaving asks whether there ever comes a time when parents’ needs outweigh the duty to their children, and where the line lies between obligations to family, and the right to pursue personal happiness.

Yiyun Li’s Latest Memoir Illuminates My Responsibilities and Limitations as a Parent

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Early in Yiyun Li’s latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, she writes of parenthood: “There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end.” That combination of “blind courage” and “wishful thinking” are prerequisites for any parent, and in many cases they’re enough. “A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long,” she argues. “A mother cannot follow a child’s every step of life, just so that she can make sure he remains alive.”

Any parent, no matter how helicoptery or anxious, would be hard-pressed to disagree. In Li’s case, however, a dreadful fact lurks beneath the truism: her two sons died by suicide as teenagers, six years apart. She has written previously about the death of her older son, Vincent—Li is an esteemed professor and prolific author of both memoir and fiction—but this book, drafted in the aftermath of James’s suicide, resounds with the absence of both her children and reckons with her status as a mother “who can no longer mother”.

Li—an economical writer whittled to austerity by these successive tragedies—has produced a book which is slim, spare, and almost devoid of emotion, more philosophical treatise than moving tale of a mother in mourning. This makes it difficult for the reader to connect with her experience, but Li’s pursuit of radical acceptance may necessitate her intellectual remove. As she puts it, “sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks…sometimes people don’t have the luxury to wallow in clichés.”

Li is not much of a wallower regardless. She writes that the book is “written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” She knows it’s Sisyphean to climb back out, and so doesn’t even make an attempt. Instead, she picks back up her piano lessons, resumes writing, and settles into the weary rhythm of her new existence. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life,” Li declares, “the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.”

You might wonder how much of a masochist I must be to plunge into Li’s abyss alongside her. Doubly so, since I am both the mother of young children and the daughter of a man who died by suicide—which makes their odds of suicide greater as a result. My 11-year-old son is also trans, which confers its own harrowing statistics around self-harm. I hesitated to read Things in Nature Merely Grow even as it pulled me in like a black hole: stories of suicide, and stories of losing a child, threaten to puncture the armor I’ve fashioned to make it through each day. But, once in a while, I am compelled to look. If we don’t understand profound vulnerability, we can’t access profound love. In the absence of that, what is life for?

Stories of losing a child threaten to puncture the armor I’ve fashioned to make it through each day.

Despite my own past descents into depression, my periodic panic attacks and unrelenting (though well-medicated) anxiety, the thought of suicide has never intruded on my consciousness. As I told my therapist early in our relationship, “The only scenario in which I could conceive of wanting to kill myself would be if both my children died.” Until encountering Li’s heartrending narrative, my imagination had only stretched as far as a car accident or plane crash—now the notion of losing them in successive suicides haunts me, when I let it.

This is why I insist on giving them the concepts and language to discuss their inner lives, however turbulent. It’s been my approach from the beginning, along with being open and honest in an age-appropriate way about their grandpa’s suicide despite the pervasive stigma.

In the spring of 2021, my newly vaccinated mom was coming to visit for the first time in months. While my husband and I raced to tidy up the house, E. and S., then seven and four, were absorbed in a Zoom art class; we listened in from the kitchen.

“Would anyone like to tell us about their drawing?”

E. unmuted. “I drew a picture of Gaga, my grandma. She’s on her way here, and I’m so excited!”

“That’s great. Will you hold your paper up so everyone can see?”

His paper fluttered as he tried to angle it just right.

“What a beautiful drawing! Is it just your grandma or is anyone else coming with her?”

“Not our grandpa!” S. chimed in, her little voice still rounded by a toddler’s soft sounds.

“Oh, why not?”

E. cut in. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself.”

I raced toward them as time turned to Jell-o.

“Before we were born.” S. added.

The teacher’s face froze. “Um…. I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be really sad.” Her eyes searched the mosaic of boxes for help, just as I reached the laptop.

“Yes, it is.” I hit mute and slammed the screen shut.

I sat next to E. on a burnt-orange chair. “Remember when I told you about my dad’s suicide?”

“Yes, Mama. I was really sad for you.”

“Me too,” S. chimed in.

“I said then and I’ll say it now: it’s okay to tell people your grandpa died before you were born. But it’s better not to share how he died. Lots of parents don’t talk about suicide with their kids, so they might be confused or afraid. We talk about it because we don’t keep secrets in our family. You two can never think or feel or do something scary or bad enough to make us stop loving you. You can always come to me and Papa. You know that, right?”

“Right, Mama. But what should I say if someone asks me how he died?” E. was a step ahead of me, as usual.

“Maybe just that…his brain stopped working?”

“It must have stopped working if it told him not to keep living, right?”

“Right.” I left it there. It’s a fine line between being instructive and forthright with my children about dark or controversial matters—like sex, politics, and their grandpa’s suicide—and leaving them susceptible to society’s penchant for shaming in a way that’s unfair to their guilelessness. So much of parenting boils down to this tricky balance between preparing our children for the world and protecting them from it.

Parents who lose their children, Li writes, “either live or follow their children down to Hades”. The ones who live do so “because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths…Dying is hard. Living is harder.”

In its own context, living was certainly harder for my dad. I’ve pieced the narrative of his suicide together from fragments, clues. But I know him almost like I know myself. The rationale, the response, it all makes sense to me. Like the suicides of Vincent and James make sense to Li.

Of course, any insight I have to offer derives from inference and projection, not the marrow-sticking pain of lived experience. Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children. The onus was not on me to keep my dad alive—but that is the most fundamental responsibility I have to my children. The drive to ensure the survival of our offspring (and of the species) is encoded in our DNA and manifested in the deepest, most reptilian quarters of our brains. How gut-wrenching it must be to feel like you’ve failed at this evolutionary mandate.

Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children.

I don’t wonder whether I could have, should have, done more to stop my dad, not that I knew what was in the offing. Those questions are impossible for either of us to answer because, as Li puts it, “on this side of death no answer can be trusted.” It was also his life to end.

Li views her sons’ suicides in a similar vein. “It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”

That perspective, controversial as it is in a culture which places primacy on happy endings, may be necessary in retrospect. I agree, in part. I know better than to discount my fortune that my narrative as a parent continues in the present tense, while Li’s has crashed to its conclusion. I can love E. and S. here in front of me, hold them, project them into the future. I can still mother as a verb. To the end of my days, I hope. An essential aspect of that mothering involves the first part of Li’s sentiment: that we should honor our children’s peculiarities so that they can grow to be their own individuals. I couldn’t endorse that more. Our children are not carbon copies of us; they exist outside our experience. No one has argued this more eloquently than Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, in which he writes, “In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.” 

In order to prop up those fantasies, adults often discount children’s self-awareness and identity formation. This comes into play when parents refuse to relinquish control over decisions as mundane as what their children eat, wear, and read—and even more insidiously when adults deny children the right to assert their gender identity. 

Today’s toxic climate offers countless examples of this diminishment, as adults from the White House, Supreme Court, and Elon Musk to local school boards and sports leagues deny the self-determination of trans and nonbinary kids and teens out of fear. They worry about what will happen if children are allowed to develop and grow without the pressure of their parents’ thumbs forcing them into the desired shape. This is far from a new concern in our culture: from the Fifth Commandment to Locke’s “blank slate” or even the lengths to which the Wormwoods go to quash precocious Matilda’s curiosity, the dominant narrative is that children do not, or should not, have agency. From fascists on down to patriarchs, parents, it’s all about control.

As the cisgender parent of a trans child, I have had to jettison any semblance of control from the moment my son came out to us in fourth grade. Transness is the epitome of what Solomon coins “horizontal identities”, those aspects of ourselves which are not handed down from our parents by nature or nurture but diverge from their own experience and, often, escape their understanding. Since then, my understanding has unfolded alongside E.’s transition—as has my determination to help others empathize and accept.

A piece of hate mail I received in response to my recent essay in HuffPost says the quiet part out loud: “Your daughter is going to regret the day she decided to transition and look to you as the adult who should have had her best interests at heart and exercised mature judgment with regard to life altering steps at 11 years of age. Do you recall when you were 11 years old? Unless you were a child prodigy, I seriously doubt you had the maturity to make any drastic decision about what you wanted to be as an adult.”

My son E. is smart, empathic, and mature beyond his years. When he came out, he’d only landed on the language to describe his transness a week or so earlier but arrived at the dinner table with a fully fleshed out understanding of his identity.

“Mama, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said while awaiting his cheeseburger, his serious tone incongruent with his broad smile. “I’m trans. My pronouns are he/him. And I’m changing my name.”

He looked happier than I’d seen him since kindergarten. His “best interests” are exactly what we acted on, when his dad and I embraced him as the person he knew himself to be. What hubris it would be to think we know him better than he does. 

To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially. But, in order to function, we must keep it tucked away in some inaccessible recess of our minds, must tell ourselves we are in control even when the evidence across millennia threatens that necessary delusion. One of the ways we maintain the pretense is by transforming experience into narrative. Shaping and sharing our stories. The storyteller exerts a mastery of causality, linking events into chains which seem to add up to truth. In the retrospective, however, one is left with the feeling that the story could have had a different ending.

To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially.

This is especially true of stories that end in suicide. We perceive the act as a decision—which leaves open the possibility that the deceased could have chosen otherwise. That their survivors could have intervened to change the outcome.

From the moment I heard my dad had killed himself, however, I understood and respected it. Like Li in the wake of her sons’ suicides, I felt in the aftermath like that reaction was more sublime than love, or perhaps its ultimate manifestation. However, while Things in Nature Merely Grow offers readers Li’s philosophical musings on this, it fails to grapple with what James’s state of mind actually was, dismissing it as irrelevant or insignificant. In doing so, she creates the unintended perception that she felt neither responsible for it nor capable of trying to help.

“Parenting—is that not the ultimate effort to hold a place for children, so that, to the best of one’s ability, they can be given all they need to grow?” Li wonders, but quickly dismisses it as futile. “The children are bound to outgrow the space the parents provide.”

Yet even in light of that, we must do anything, everything, we can to protect our children and keep them alive. This is our most fundamental responsibility as parents—not just understanding them, and emphatically not asserting dominion over them—even if that alone can’t always prevent the worst from happening. Our limitations do not obviate the need to do whatever we can. They make it more important.

As fertile as I’ve found this foray into existential dread, I have to put it back on the shelf. Parenting in the present vs. the past requires that separation from the theoretical. The day-to-day takes place on a more physical and practical plane, and my children demand every ounce of functionality I can muster.

Still, beyond meeting their needs on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s incumbent on me to make sure they have the space to imagine a life for themselves. A life that’s authentic and right to them—no matter the extent to which it exceeds my own imagination.

“It’s been my experience that adults…are extremely good at underestimating children,” Li writes. “A 10-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness.” They also have the capacity to know themselves, if not always the words to express it.

But allowing E. to self-actualize is not only about honoring that ability. It’s also about the basic need to keep him alive. According to the Trevor Project, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year and 16 percent made an attempt. Living in a supportive home reduces the incidence by a third. When E. came out, supporting him was our only option.

In this fractious climate, however, our support of his transition—social and then legal and medical—is insufficient. We must also ensure he can survive the bleakness, which is why my husband and I are doing all we can to help create a future our son wants to live in, not just imagine.

We have to hope that it’s enough.

Geovani Martins Wants Brazil to Stop Denying Its Past

Posted on by Willem Marx

Geovani Martins has been making waves since his 2018 debut, a story collection titled The Sun on My Head, was instantly translated into tens of languages around the globe. A few years removed from its release, the collection has been named one of the best Brazilian books of the century. Now, his equally brilliant debut novel from 2022, Via Ápia, has finally arrived in English. 

Via Ápia is a big book. It spans three years and five central characters. It’s a story about police violence rooted in the moment in 2012 when a special police force, designated the Pacifying Police Unit, began invading and occupying favelas around Rio. Politics and history constitute the book in the way water constitutes an ocean—they create a world and background against which other stories unfold. Via Ápia is the story of young men and women becoming themselves, deciding what kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives, while, at the same time, their community is upended by senseless government aggression. What is there to do in the face of a small army of cops? The characters adapt, sacrifice, and try to keep living until, eventually, the police make that level of pragmatism impossible. 

As a writer, Martins stands out for many reasons—he’s young but writes with a voice that is fully formed, at once funny, rambunctious, and wise. He portrays the favelas of Rio, where he’s from, in a way that few writers have done before, capturing the unique sense of community and joy that exists in a place often pigeonholed by descriptions of violence, drugs, and poverty. While all of that exists in Martins’ work, his are stories of family and friendship, love and parenthood, the ever-strange experience of growing up. In writing the landscapes of dismissed places, Martin is making space for people who don’t usually find themselves in books. To read Via Ápia is to experience the rush of emotion that comes with encountering a story for the first time and feeling a deep sense of recognition, like it’s been there all along.

Over several weeks, Geovani and I wrote back and forth via email in a sort of call and response that bent around the shape of our lives. Geovani generously spoke about his origins as a writer, his connection to the world he writes about, and the techniques and styles he’s drawn on to recreate that world on the page. 

Willem Marx: Your novel is so rooted in time and landscape. It’s in the title, Via Ápia. What is it about the specific days and months of 2011 and 2012 in Rio de Janeiro that you wanted to capture in this book? 

Geovani Martins: It’s been over fifteen years since the first Pacifying Police Unit was introduced in Rio, and by now we can see the impact that kind of state repression had on the favelas. While writing Via Ápia, I wanted to capture that moment of transition. I wasn’t interested in focusing only on the police presence, but on everything it stood for politically.

In doing that, I felt it was necessary to retell the story from the perspective of the people who actually live there. To look at that history through the everyday lives of those whose lives were reshaped by a state policy they were never consulted on, not before, not during, not after. That’s why the chapter structure, organized by exact dates, is so central to the book. It was a way of saying these characters are part of the official history of the city.

WM: Did you experience that moment when the Pacifying Police Unit started taking over the favelas first hand?

GM: Yeah, I was living in Rocinha during the whole period the book covers. But the truth is, even before the police officially came in, we were already dealing with the weight of that expectation. With every new favela that got occupied, the questions kept getting louder: When’s it gonna be our turn? And what’s gonna happen when they do come?

WM: To step back a moment, can you describe what the favelas are? In my reading of Via Ápia, they’re both places of extreme poverty where basic services like water aren’t guaranteed and, at the same time, kind of utopias that have a unique freedom and sense of community not found in Rio’s richer neighborhoods. 

 
GM: Favelas are quilombos embedded within the metropolis. Quilombos, for those unfamiliar with the term, were and still are places of Black resistance against slavery. A great quilombola thinker named Nego Bispo once told me that favelas are not part of the cities, they exist on the borders of the cities. So from that perspective, Rocinha is not in Rio de Janeiro. It borders the city of Rio. That’s why, within the space of the favela, we live by different rules of social interaction and coexistence. We raise our children differently. We learn from an early age to live less individualistically.

Within the space of the favela, we live by different rules of social interaction and coexistence. We learn from an early age to live less individualistically.

This resistance, this refusal to conform to the dominant patterns of white supremacy, comes at a cost. The stories of the first quilombos, founded by people who escaped enslavement, are marked by violent invasions carried out by the Brazilian state. That same violence continues today in the favelas. On top of the brutal operations by police and the military, there is another form of repression: the denial of basic rights, like access to sanitation.

With that context in mind, I’d say favelas are the places where Afro-descendants can most fully express their culture. But unfortunately, we still pay a very high price for that pursuit of freedom.

WM: There’s a scene near the end of the book where Murilo, Biel, and Douglas—three of the central characters—find a bag with decades old photos of Rocinha. I was struck by their fascination and joy at seeing a piece of their home’s history. A kind of recognition takes place when they look at Rocinha’s past. At the same time, this moment underscores how little they know about that past. The fact that old images of Rocinha are preserved at all seems like a small miracle. I wonder if those pictures might be a metaphor for Via Àpia itself? And more so, why is the history of place in Rocinha so rare and unpreserved? Why are those pictures so exceptional? 

GM: A great Brazilian thinker, Millôr Fernandes, used to say: “Brazil has a great past ahead of it.” In other words, we were built as a nation that ignores its own history. There’s a strong political project rooted in denying our past. All throughout the 20th century, the dominant slogan was “Brazil is the country of the future,” which basically suggested we should stop thinking about what’s already happened and just look forward. So these gaps in historical knowledge aren’t exclusive to the favelas. They’re a problem that cuts across all social classes and territories.

That’s why it’s so important that they find those photographs. Because in that moment, we see the history of that place begin to unfold in front of their eyes. At a time when everything seems to be falling apart, they’re gifted—almost miraculously—with this realization that Rocinha has a history. And that realization makes them think that they too are part of that history, a story that’s still being written.

So yes, I’d say that moment of finding the photos is absolutely a metaphor for the book, both in terms of its ideological foundation and its formal construction.

WM: At a craft level, I was fascinated by the precision each date has in the arc of the book. In one chapter it’s January 8th, in the next it’s February 13th. These swaths of time aren’t seen, but they’re felt in story and character development nonetheless. How did you go about tracking and accounting for events that occur off the page across 5 different character arcs? What did that look like in your writing process? 

GM: When I started putting together the ideas for Via Ápia, I knew from the beginning that I couldn’t work with a single protagonist. I wanted to portray a very specific generational snapshot of young Black people, drug users, whose lives were shaped by that state policy. Each character was designed to help me go deeper into different aspects of that story. My goal was to cross perspectives in order to reach an idea of reality built collectively, rather than through a single point of view. From the very beginning, when I was developing the characters, I had clearly defined roles for each of them. With these clearly drawn archetypes, I felt I could get closer to a collective view of that generation at that moment in time.

My goal was to cross perspectives in order to reach an idea of reality built collectively.

Having to balance five characters really helped me take on the challenge of the book’s timeline and ellipses. I realized that the structure would only work if I could constantly weave the characters’ perspectives together. Like, if something happened to Wesley on a given day, but the next chapter is told from Washington’s point of view, I kept asking myself: how can I bring in the previous chapter through this new perspective? What happened in the time between those days that can carry into the next scene? That also helped me shape each character’s personality, because by crossing perspectives, the book keeps shifting between how each character sees themselves and how they’re seen by others. The same logic applies to the bigger events in the city.

WM: In many ways, there are two sides to the novel: a grand piece about politics, society, and norms, and another that focuses on lived realities. How did you think about balancing the enormous forces buffeting the characters—drugs, police brutality, the scarcity of work, the absence of parental figures with the day to day intimacies, the wants and needs, the simple joy of sitting on the beach or surfing? 

GM: While writing the novel, it was important for me to understand that I wasn’t interested in writing about the police, but about how the arrival of the police affected the life of a community. How that major change in the environment impacted people’s intimacy, disrupted social codes, and gave rise to new fears. 

To do that, I worked with narrative situations where questions of violence remained at the edges, building offscreen tension and, in that way, painted a picture of this shift slowly and carefully. There’s a very different rhythm from the fast-paced action usually expected in stories set in favelas or dealing with urban violence.

As I worked on each chapter, I tried to build a main situation rooted in the characters’ personal world. Then I would weave in elements of the broader social and political changes, letting them collide with the personal. I think the first two thirds of the book work like that, until the political and social forces start crashing into the characters’ lives in a way that makes it impossible to separate the two.

WM: Can you tell me a little about your background coming to writing? When did you realize you were a writer and what did that realization look like?

GM: I grew up surrounded by great storytellers—my grandmothers, my parents, my neighbors. I’ve always loved stories. Maybe that’s why I got into books really early too. My family noticed and started encouraging it, always giving me books and comics. It didn’t take long before I started writing. I must’ve been around nine when I wrote my first poems.

But even though I’d always been close to words, it took me a long time to even consider that I could be a writer. I didn’t know anyone who did that for a living. Most of the books I read were really old, which kind of made writing feel like something only dead people did, laughs. 

Then in 2013, a friend recommended I check out the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP). That’s where I wrote and published my first short stories. I met other readers and writers from favelas all over the city. I found my people. Being part of FLUP was a deep dive into my own identity. Through that process, I started to understand the aesthetic richness I had access to, the language, the stories from the places where I grew up. I began experimenting, bringing the sound and the street stories into the writing. And people really connected with those stories.

I had dropped out of school and was bouncing between all kinds of precarious jobs. In 2015, I published a short story in an anthology and got paid for it. After buying myself an açaí with that money, I decided I was really gonna be a writer.

WM: How does FLUP function as a literary community? And how did it help you dive into your identity? What did it look like? 

In 2015, I published a short story and got paid for it. After buying myself an açaí with that money, I decided I was really gonna be a writer.

GM: FLUP has been active in Rio de Janeiro since 2012. But the cultural impact of this literary festival, which has been committed for years to cultivating new writers and readers in the favelas of Rio, is something that resonates across all of Brazil. FLUP has definitely played a key role in giving visibility to writers from the margins and has contributed to this moment of greater diversity of voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. 

As for diving into my own identity, here’s what I mean: like I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always written, too. At the same time, I’ve always lived in favelas. I moved around a lot, but always within different favelas. And until I got involved with FLUP, I saw those two parts of my life — being a reader and being from the favela — as separate. As if one had nothing to do with the other. At FLUP, by meeting other writers and readers who also came from favelas, I had the chance to bring those two worlds together. I realized that my lived experiences, the slang I spoke, the stories I’d grown up with, and my critical perspective shaped by the favela could and should coexist with my knowledge of literature. That was when I stopped trying to emulate distant realities and started writing about the world around me. It was incredibly freeing, and it really raised the quality of my writing.

That was in 2013. While I was going through that internal process, I was also taking part in FLUP’s weekly meetings. Each of those meetings happened in a different favela across the city. Moving through those different neighborhoods, connecting with residents and their stories, and meeting other writers who were thinking and writing about their own territories—all of that was absolutely key to the kind of writer I’ve become over the years.

WM: Your first two books have both been translated into almost a dozen languages. Does the fact of being a writer who gets translated change your perspective now when you begin writing a new project? Has it impacted the way you think of your audience? 

GM: Yes, after The Sun On My Head, I started thinking about how my stories were reaching an international audience, how my language might be translated, and things like that. But those thoughts don’t influence the decision about what my next project will be. I always choose a project based on a need to speak about a specific topic or issue. I believe it’s that sense of truth that allows me to be an author who’s recognized and translated in different countries.

Within the world’s globalization, where everything tends to get pushed toward uniformity and artificiality, working from your own truth, from the intimacy of your questions and thoughts, carries real strength and has the potential to reach readers who are genuinely interested.

When it comes to the readers who follow my work, I feel like there are two main forces that bring this group together. There are the readers who connect with my books through identification, and those who are drawn in by a sense of unfamiliarity. Personally, I think that’s one of the most powerful things about literature—that the same text can reach and engage such different people, for entirely different reasons.

Divorce Made Me Into A One-Armed Scissor

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje

Sometimes I stalk my ex-husband.

I open his socials and sift through his photos. I know their sequence like I know the palm of my hand. Better even, because I can never memorize what my palm looks like, how the life line twirls into the love line, how it begins tight and uniform, but then turns ropey. It scares me to look at it, to trace the lines, to see where they might lead me in years to come. But I know Vlaho’s photos by heart. They start with the most recent ones, his son, who turns six in a week, frowning at a drawing of imaginary monsters; and his daughter, an angelic creature just short of four, with the kind of wispy hair that slips through your hands like corn silk. His lovely wife, a blonde with an oversized nose but gorgeously high cheekbones, laughing into the air on their sailboat.

Once upon a time, he told me he didn’t like blondes. He whispered it in my ear, brushing his fingers through my then long, lush hair. We’d been together for maybe a few months, and I’d asked him what would happen when we broke up. If he would find someone like me, or someone exactly the opposite. “That will never happen,” he said. “Besides, I don’t like blondes.”

Lie.

Lie.

I always get stuck on a single photo. It’s not a photo of their wedding day, or the birth of their first child. In fact, it’s probably the least spectacular photo in the album. They’re not even the main subject—whoever took it aimed for their daughter, in focus in the foreground. But behind, her mother is looking up as my ex-husband is passing her a glass of juice, and they share the look. The one I used to be on the receiving end of. The one that had long ago made me feel like I was a pink diamond carved straight out of a rock. And it’s for her.

I remind myself that this was my decision. I let him go, willingly. But despite reason, the image spreads through me like ink in cold water.

The first thing I hear in the morning is the clanks of a spoon hitting the side of the džezva, the same coffeepot that’s been in our family since I can remember, and then some. Always the same six clanks, in even succession, as my father prepares his Turkish coffee. The sound invades my sleep, and I want to scream, Could we not do this for one fucking day?

Six clanks, and then it takes a couple of minutes for the smell of coffee to crawl under my bedroom door. Despite my earlier grumbling, when the aroma reaches me, I’m grateful for it.

Lying sideways, I stare at the shelves and dressers lining the opposite wall. Every morning I tell myself I’ll pack the rag dolls, the snow globe, the bright red-and-yellow babuška, and other knickknacks, and store them in the attic. They have no business cluttering a grown woman’s room. But they’ve been there since my childhood, and on some level, I’m afraid that if I remove them something bad will happen. As if more bad things could happen to me. I’m thirty-eight, single, barely employed, and living with my dad. Sleeping in the same room I’ve been sleeping in since the day I was born, save for the ten years I shared a room with the love of my life.

Vlaho.

Of course I think of him, imagine where he is, what he’s doing. It’s a compulsion, like being unable to look away from a car wreck. If I still had a therapist, which I probably should, I’m sure she’d tell me I’m slightly obsessed, but I can’t help it, filling my days with thoughts of him the same way I used to fill them with his presence. It’s a source of pain that’s somehow become pleasurable. The kind that reminds me I’m still alive.

I see him lying on his back, in his boxer shorts because he never wears pajamas, Marina’s hand resting on his chest, caressing the place over the heart that once beat for me. Then Tena and Maro jump onto the covers like a baby avalanche, their chubby arms and legs flying every which way until they land in their parents’ embrace, the smell of family rising as they lift the covers to tuck themselves in.

In that moment, despite everything, I’m happy for Vlaho. I am.

I focus on the babuška that my grandmother gave me a long time ago, its plump wooden figure, its bright reds and yellows, the typical Slavic ornamentations. In the eighties, before the Homeland War, almost every household in Croatia had one. Now, it’s just a relic of old times, a forgotten little figurine on a shelf. It’s just a doll, within a doll, within a doll, but there should be two more dolls inside her. I lost them, somewhere, sometime. Now, it’s as hollow as I am, and we stare at each other in mutual understanding.

When I make my way into the living room, Dad is already watching the news. “You won’t believe this, Ivona. Our finance minister wants to raise taxes again. The parasite.”

“Good morning, Dad.” I reach for the džezva and pour coffee into my cup, then add a few drops of almond milk. Bogus milk, my father calls it.

“Seriously, how much do they think we can take? We’re the country with the highest tax rates in the world by now.”

I sit at the dining room table instead of next to him on the couch. His ability to get worked up over events he has no control over can be strangling. Mom was different. She couldn’t care less about politics. Instead, she obsessed over things on a smaller scale. A tear in the couch upholstery, a mark on the hardwood floor. She and Dad canceled each other out beautifully. She couldn’t understand his fuming over state affairs any more than he could understand her boiling over household ones, their respective fires eventually dwindling to embers. Now that she’s gone, there’s nothing to stop him from rambling.

Dad turns the TV off, throws the remote on the couch. “Screw the lot of them. They’re ruining this country, one tax at a time.”

I focus on the garden outside, the bare branches of the hibiscus, and the always green, leafy top of an olive tree swaying in the salty bura wind.

Dad limps around the kitchen counter and pours himself another cup of coffee. It must be his third by now. Per his neurologist, he shouldn’t be drinking more than two cups after his stroke, but I’ve stopped warning him. It falls on deaf ears.

“Where are you off to this morning?” he asks, taking stock of my outfit.

“The bank.”

“Because of Lovorun?”

“Yeah, Lovorun.” Funny how the taste of a word can change with circumstances. Lovorun used to melt on my tongue like honey, a magical place from my childhood where I spent school holidays with Baba—my maternal grandmother—eating grapes and blackberries straight from vines and brambles. A place where things grew, beautiful and strong. For a while after, it turned salty, like grief. Now it tastes like curdled milk.

A few years after Mom died, Dad made a unilateral decision to turn Baba’s old estate into a heritage hotel. “This place has a soul. Tradition and history seep from it,” he said, “and tourists will eat that right up.” Never mind that the renovation ended up chipping away at the very soul of the place, no matter how careful Dad was to preserve it. Turning a humble peasant abode into a luxurious villa will do that to a place.

“I have a meeting with the personal banker. I’ll try to get another extension on our loan,” I say, even though I know the effort will be futile. Vlaho told me as much when we talked the other day, and he should know. He works at the bank and knows its policies inside and out.

Dad nods, his right hand trembling as he raises the cup to his mouth. He steadies it with his left. I avert my gaze, because I know it bothers him when I see all the ways his body is failing him.

Dad used to be a presence one couldn’t ignore. One of those people who would change the energy in the room as soon as they entered. It wasn’t his physical appearance that made people take notice of him, though he is tall. It was his confidence, the way he took up space, claimed it as his own. When he spoke, people listened with gazes of hypnotized cobras.

I didn’t like that aspect of him, the attention he garnered, the opinions he bestowed with little consideration for those opposing ones, but there’s always a subtle pang when I notice the absence of that power in him, when I see how his illness has reduced him to a man who can’t even control his own shaking.

“Did I ever tell you how rampant insolvency was back in the nineties?” he asks.

Of course, he’s told me, not once but so many times we could recite the story in unison. It’s such an old people’s trait, regurgitating past events to the same unfortunate listener over and over again, and he’s not that old.

He launches into the familiar tale of how those banking leeches asked him to declare bankruptcy when he himself was owed money, how they had a bureaucratic, backward way of looking at business because Croatia had just emerged from communism, and many people and companies were struggling with switching to free market. Not Dad, though. He’d been made for capitalism, and when it finally came to Croatia, he took to it like a lung to breath.

Outside, a single ray of sunlight cuts through a cloud and falls on my hands, folded around the cup in front of me. My father’s words blur into the background, and that distinct sense overcomes me, when I’m both inside my body and not there at all, like my skin is a mere husk and I am absent from where I should be inside it. And the thought that always follows: How did I end up here?

All those years ago, I blew out into the world like a dandelion seed looking for a place to take root, the horizon ahead immense and unlimited. And then, somehow, cruelly, I landed right back here, being preached to the same way I used to be preached to when I was eight.

Cruelly, I landed right back here, being preached to the same way I used to be preached to when I was eight.

“I went in for the meeting at the bank with an Excel sheet on a floppy disk.” Dad’s words sharpen in my ear. “None of them used a computer regularly and had no clue how to use Excel. I tossed the floppy onto the table and demanded they check out the numbers. It took them half an hour to find a person who could even open the damn document.” He chuckles, and drones on about how he persuaded the bankers to give him time until he managed to pocket some money from his own debtors, how he convinced them that great things awaited his company, and how they were swayed, partly because of his imposing personality, and partly because of his, then unparalleled, computer skills.

He puts his cup in the sink. “Have you done your prep work?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I run my finger around the rim of my cup, not meeting his eye. Any amount of prep work wouldn’t help us now. Times have changed, I want to say. There are policies and structures in place that weren’t there in the early years of capitalism. But I know better than to voice this. Everything was the hardest, toughest, the most difficult when my father had done it.

Which is not without merit, I guess. Dad kept his construction company alive through the war, when no one in their right mind was building anything. He kept it alive through all manner of financial crises that swell like tsunamis here in Croatia, huge waves sent from elsewhere that leave our economy floundering years after all the other countries have recovered. If he hadn’t had a stroke, I’m sure he would’ve found a way to finish the Lovorun project too. Instead, the task of converting my baba’s old estate into a hotel fell on me. Then the prices ballooned and the project stalled, and now we owe money, and simultaneously need money to finish the project so we can make money to return what we owe.

Dad walks by me on his way back to the living room where a new bout of television-watching is about to commence. He kisses the top of my head. “You’re a smart girl. You’ll do fine.”

Only I’m not. And I won’t.

Potential, people used to say to my parents—teachers, friends, strangers on the street. The girl has so much potential. I used to believe that great things awaited me. I was reading before I’d turned four. I could calculate before I was five. I recall this vividly because my brother paid me to do his math homework when he was in first grade. I would do the adding and subtracting in his workbook and he would pay me in small coins, gum, and Snoopy stickers. I’ll never forget the day my mother found out about our ploy. Before she started yelling and sent me to my room, there was a moment when she looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

I understood then that knowledge bore power. It made people take notice.

The story became a part of the family lore, something my mother complain-bragged about to the three neighbors she always had coffee with. And I became ravenous, hoarding words and their meanings, facts, and trivia. I wanted more of that power, more of that sense of self. Striving became a hook in my chest, always lurching me upward.

But I’ve learned the hard way that book smarts mean nothing here. Neither would street smarts, if I had any. It’s a special blend that works here, the bureaucratic smarts, paired with a talent for wielding connections and bending rules. Better yet if it comes with a penis.

I can’t remember the last time someone said I had potential. But the thing about potential is that it doesn’t go away. If you fail to realize it, you don’t simply lose it. Instead, it sediments inside you, like tar or asbestos, slowly releasing its poison.

Zagreb was at its coldest when Vlaho and I met, on a sleety January night, five months after I’d moved there to study biology. The millennium was still so young that its turn felt like a stake in the ground, a moment that would stabilize the world I’d so often seen slip off its axis.

I was only nineteen, yet the country I had been born in had dissolved, the state I was born in had fought its way back to independence through a bloody war. The currency had changed three times before I turned eleven: Yugoslav dinar to Croatian dinar to Croatian kuna. I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

On top of that had been the broader changes, those of the world in general. Phones having longer and longer cords, until they had no cords at all; computers being contraptions out of sci-fi movies, until they became cubes perched on our desks, getting thinner and sleeker over the years.

And then, of course, the constant changes at home. My parents operating between their three standard settings: togetherness, indifference, and vile fighting. I never knew when I walked through the door after school if I’d find them threatening divorce or laughing over coffee. Me too, morphing over time, from the dutiful daughter always trying to appease them to a rebellious one, until, after the yellow boot incident, I turned into a clammed shell, waiting out the last two years I had to live with them.

Those first months after I moved to Zagreb marked a new start. Everything smelled of freedom and possibility, my lungs stretching out for full inhales, my shoulders relaxing.

I went to classes, met new friends, and partied with the few old ones I had. I ate in student cafeterias redolent of fried chicken, kale, and pasta Bolognese, the smells alone making the space feel overcrowded. In these first months it was easy to believe that I could be a different person, one unaffected by my life back home.

But as the winter tightened its cold grip, the newness of Zagreb started to wear off, and I found myself longing for the stone-built walls of the hometown I’d been so eager to leave, for its blue skies and sea, for its familiar pulse and rhythm. The hole I thought I’d left back in Zadar revealed itself again, and between all the coffee dates and loud student parties and crowded college classes, I couldn’t find a way to weld it shut.

That night in January, my best friend Tara talked me into going out. It was her birthday, and she was throwing a party in a bar in Zagreb’s center. The bar was small and packed with students, Red Hot Chili Peppers pumping through the speakers as we poured cheap beer down our throats. My boyfriend was there, if that’s what I could call him. He was someone I’d been seeing for a month, but I could already tell we weren’t going anywhere. I sat next to him with eyes glazed over as he and his friend droned on about some video game.

Suddenly, “One-Armed Scissor” cut straight through “Californication.”

The room jolted to a halt. Everyone stopped talking and looked toward the stereo behind the counter, where a tall guy with dirty blond hair wearing a gray hoodie was pushing buttons, grinning at his own ingeniousness.

The familiar angry voice yelled the staccato verses through the speakers, reigniting the rebellious spirit of my high school days, and before I could control myself, I was on my feet pushing closer to the stereo. It was instinctual. I wasn’t moving with a plan. There was just this need to come closer to the music, to be in the middle of it. Or perhaps to pull it inside me, to fill myself with it.

When I reached the bar, he was still there, the tall guy in the gray hoodie, his back turned to me. I lifted my voice at the refrain. His voice joined mine as he turned to face me.

The moment condensed.

His face was incandescent, as though it were lit from the inside. The room was otherwise dim and filled with cigarette smoke, and of course people don’t glow, but that’s how he looked to me. There was something in his eyes that offered itself to me. It was so immediate, so intense, it felt almost like voyeurism.

Of course people don’t glow, but that’s how he looked to me.

Like I could see more than I was supposed to, looking into his eyes.

Like I was allowing him to see more than he should, as he looked back into mine.

Time snapped back into place, and we were back in the room, at the party, people and music pulsing around us.

“You know At the Drive-In?” he leaned in to say in my ear over the loud riffs.

“Do I know them? I fucking love them,” I said, the alcohol making me bolder than I was, the profane word moving something in me, him being so close.

“You may have just become my favorite girl,” he said, his words dragging in a singsong accent. I couldn’t pinpoint if it was from Herzegovina, or Neretva Valley, or Dubrovnik. All I could tell was that he was from the south, where tangerines and watermelons grow, where beaches are pebbled, and the sea is turquoise blue. “Vlaho.” He offered me his hand.

Dubrovnik then, I thought, the name of its patron saint typically given only to boys from that region. We shook hands. Skin against skin, the grip lasting too long but not long enough. “Ivona.”

“Do you want to get a beer or something?” he asked, a patch of red igniting his left cheek. I’d never seen someone blush in this particular way.

The song ended. A man, presumably the manager, because he had a pissed-off expression and was mumbling expletives, pushed his way behind Vlaho and turned Red Hot Chili Peppers back on.

“I’d love to,” I said, glancing behind my back to the guy I was dating, who was draining his beer in dull light, and I regretted the words before I even spoke them, “But my boyfriend’s waiting for me.”

Vlaho’s lips turned into a lopsided smile, the electricity of the moment frizzing away with my admission. I turned and walked over to my seat, Vlaho’s stare trailing me like an echo following a sound.

That mistake would haunt me for days. I should’ve gone straight back to my boyfriend and told him we were over. But I waited until we were alone, later that night, to do it properly. To be considerate, polite. It was still in me, then, that need to appease, to not cause commotion or harm. Not that he cared. He just shrugged at my “I don’t think this is working,” and said, “Yeah, I agree.”

That small courtesy might’ve cost me my only chance with Vlaho, and that’s all I could think about a week later, as I was mustering the courage to send him a text. I deleted the fifteenth version of “hi, this is ivona, the at the drive-in girl from last friday,” and before I could challenge myself, I wrote, “send transmission from the one-armed scissor,” and hit send.

The same lyrics we’d sung together that night.

I envisioned the text traveling over Zagreb’s rooftops, through its grimy smog, and into his dorm room. He lived in Cvjetno, Tara had told me when she’d gotten me his number; he was twenty, and studying economics. That was all the intel she’d had, given that he’d been a friend of her friend, not hers.

The minutes passed. I got up, circled my studio like a frantic cockroach in sudden light. I turned the TV on. The Mexican soap opera that always rolled after the noon news filled the room with heated words that made me feel less alone.

I picked up my Cellular and Molecular Biology textbook, but the words were too fuzzy to read. I checked my phone every twenty seconds even though I’d made sure I’d turned the sound on.

Minutes distended into hours.

I got creative, coming up with excuses for why he hadn’t replied. Maybe I had the wrong number. Maybe he didn’t have any money on his phone card. Maybe he was in class and he’d left his phone at the dorm. Maybe someone had stolen his phone.

And then the more agonizing reasons. Maybe he didn’t remember me. Or maybe he did, and he was choosing not to respond. Maybe he read the text and laughed at my audacity, at the thought of the two of us together.

I went back to that night, dissecting it in detail. That moment, when it had all stilled between us, was it real?

I couldn’t tell. I had no idea how that was supposed to feel.

Just a year before, in my senior year in high school, our Croatian teacher had tasked the class with writing an essay on the topic of Shakespeare’s quote “To thine own self be true.” The quote dug into the pain that had lain dormant throughout my teen years, that duality of life I had embraced—the armor offered up to the world, and the gentle essence it was meant to shield. How I’d learned to hide the soft parts of myself, like a crustacean. Writing that essay, I didn’t censor myself. I couldn’t bother to; it was our last high school essay, and the teacher only proofread them anyway. It was not like she would dwell on the meaning behind the words. But when she returned the notebooks to us, there was a note inside mine, right under the grade:

Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly­ intelligent people.

I laid the notebook on my thighs under the desk, ripped the page with her note off, and folded it in a small square to store in my wallet. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, holding my breath as my legs carried me down the corridor. After locking myself in a stall, I pressed my forehead against the cold tiles and struggled not to cry.

I had been hiding for so long I didn’t believe it possible that someone could see me. But someone had. And that felt even worse.

But this had been a coincidental sighting. There was an intentionality to how Vlaho looked at me that night. A curiosity. So much of seeing is in that willingness to look. And, more importantly, it came paired with a feeling that under the careless, messy hair, and tattered Nirvana T-shirt, and love of angry music, he too was someone surprised, maybe even eager, to be seen.

But maybe he’d only been buzzed, and that’s what had glinted in his eyes. Only now I couldn’t unknow how much I wanted it, to find someone like him.

Three hours after hitting send, the hope grew so oppressive, so overwrought in my chest, that I let it out in low, humming sobs. I didn’t cry for Vlaho, not really. I didn’t know him yet. I cried because I was only nineteen and I was already so tired of carrying around that jagged grain of loneliness on the inside that always threatened to cut me if I made a wrong turn. I cried because I had all this love inside me, and it had nowhere to go.

The text sounded. “what do you think it even means?”

Then, another one. “i mean, to send a transmission from a one-armed scissor. what is a one-armed scissor anyway? how does it differ from a two-armed scissor?”

I stared at the message through wet eyes. Then I typed, fingers still trembling, “i don’t think even at the drive in know what it means. but still, in a weird way, it makes sense, right?”

“i like the part about dissecting a trillion sighs,” he wrote.

“and writing to remember,” I wrote back.

The phone started ringing then, his name filling the screen. I turned the TV off, cleared my throat. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he said, and I could see him smiling, pulling fingers through his hair, the way he’d done that night. “I thought this would be easier. Given that each text costs twenty lipa and there are a lot of lines in that song.”

“Smart thinking. True economist talking.”

He laughed. “You’ve done your research, I see. I’m at a disadvantage.”

“That’s a bummer,” I said. “That you didn’t ask about me.”

“Not because I didn’t want to know. But I have this policy of not messing with girls who are . . . spoken for.”

“Well . . . not anymore.”

A beat of electrifying silence. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?” he asked, his words swaying in his southern accent. Relief coursed through me, the first layer of nacre coating that grain of loneliness inside me, smoothing its barbed edges.

7 Books About Women Doing Dirty Jobs

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I went on submission with what would become Wildfire Days, a memoir of my time fighting wildfires in California, a message I received more than once was: “Sorry, books about women in ‘military-like’ professions just don’t sell. People don’t want to read about that.” The implication seemed to be that women’s books should stay more “girlish” to have wide appeal. I am determined to prove that stories about women doing the most technical, filthy, physically arduous, dangerous, and male-dominated jobs are exactly what we should be reading. In a time of backsliding progressive policy, when Roe v. Wade has been repealed and women’s rights and bodies are under attack, it’s more urgent than ever to uplift stories about female diversity and strength. 

Perhaps readers and literary gatekeepers fear such stories will become little more than a litany of woes, the feral moan of the oppressed woman-among-monsters. To be sure, a number of the books on this list detail harassment, exclusion, and even rape. It’s vital that these stories be shared and discussed, because women (and nonbinary and trans people) continue to be subjected to misogyny and mistreatment in many, if not most, male-dominated spaces.

But the dark side of these professions isn’t the whole story. These are books about women finding joy, coming into their prowess, and discovering their place in the world through the toughest jobs. In hard labor, they reclaim their animal selves and find satisfaction, camaraderie, and belonging—even within male dominated groups. Often, the protagonists also grapple with a changing world as global warming, economic instability, and ever-widening inequities make low-paying, weather-dependent jobs increasingly precarious.

These women’s stories, then, are beautifully complex. They’re about ladies who work hard in mysterious, misunderstood industries. They suffer and struggle and can’t find anywhere to pee. Sometimes they’re victimized. And yet, in each of these stories, the women grow stronger than they ever imagined. Their books are about finding strength, resilience, joy, belonging, and so much more in the grittiest, most “masculine” workplaces. 

Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach

I have to admit straightaway that, before reading Thick Skin, I didn’t know exactly what a boilermaker was, but I knew it sounded tough as hell. A boilermaker is a construction welder, which, as Peach’s book humbly demonstrates, is an entirely badass and rather terrifying job (picture being lowered in a basket with a crane to weld a plate onto the side of a massive cruise ship). In this memoir of episodic stories, Peach tracks her many assignments and the progression of her skills as a welder in Canada—where she was based—and on assignment in the U.S. While misogyny is rampant in the male-dominated field of boilermaking, Peach’s approach is even-handed: she shows villains who tell her to “go home” alongside lovable mentors, allowing her male colleagues to be as human as herself. Peach, also a poet, writes beautifully (and humorously too!). I love this one and it deserves more attention than it has thus far received.

Hotshot: A Life on Fire by River Selby

This is the story of Selby’s years as a wildland firefighter on elite hotshot crews throughout the American West. While Selby now identifies as nonbinary, they identified as a woman and were treated as such during their time firefighting, suffering discrimination, sexual harassment, and outright bullying (trigger warnings abound, but it’s important that writers like Selby tell their stories in full). This is far more than a tale of female struggle against adversity; Selby also weaves in a deeply-researched account of fire history, indigenous ecological knowledge, land management and beautiful, affecting scenes that follow their relationship with a cruel, unstable mother. The combination of firefighting action, personal memoir, and rich scientific context makes this a powerful read.

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

This is the tale of a woman who leaves her quintessential Manhattan writer’s life (Lower East Side apartment, heels, and at least four casual non-boyfriends) to start a farm with a man she’s fallen in love with. This book diverges from the others in that Kimball didn’t exactly enter a male-dominated profession; rather, she entered a partnership. But in every other way, Kimball and her beau face the fight of their lives, trying to feed not just themselves but a community of 100 people–members of a subscription program who pick up weekly farm-share boxes year-round. Struggles abound, from endless labor to blizzards to rat infestations. Food itself plays a central role, and Kimball’s descriptions of her meals made my mouth water. The writing is deft and lovely, not a word out of place. I couldn’t put this one down.

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North by Blair Braverman

I had heard of Braverman in the ambient way that anyone into outdoor adventure will know about the token “women in the wild” books. I was prompted to grab a copy because I loved Braverman’s social media presence, in which she chronicles the antics of her sled dogs. The book’s tone is different, less playful, the narrative voice sometimes as severe as the landscapes she inhabits. Braverman returns to Norway—where she studied abroad as a teenager—to run sled dogs and search for herself, “trying to answer private questions about violence and belonging and cold.” Her story is full of danger, action, dogs, and ice, but it’s primarily a tale about the vulnerability of living in a female body, being constantly scrutinized and threatened by men, and living in mostly-male communities. Braverman’s true battle is to feel safe in her own skin.

Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front by Mary Jennings Hegar

“Many don’t think that there are women serving in combat roles. Others think that the women who do serve in combat shrink in fear when the bullets fly. I know differently, and I wanted you to know, too.” Hegar could be writing a manifesto on behalf of all the women on this list. Her memoir tracks heroism on two fronts: first, as an Air Force pilot who, despite sustaining an injury during a medevac mission, saves the lives of her patients and crew; second, as an activist in the battle to end a policy that excluded women from ground combat. I love all the little moments I can identify with, like when Hegar wonders how she’ll pee while flying a helicopter, noting that the men around her can pee in a bottle anytime. But more than that, I love that she puts a name to the invisibility of women in male-dominated fields and the rampant underestimation of their strengths.

My Fishing Life: A Story of the Sea by Ashley Mullenger with Lynne Barrett-Lee

A memoir from one of the few female commercial “fishermen” in the UK, this book follows Mullenger’s struggle to learn the trade under the tutelage of her benevolent skipper, Nigel. I knew fishing was filthy, smelly work because I almost married into an oyster farming family, but I hadn’t considered just how dangerous the profession could be. Mullenger illustrates how a line of pots dragged off the end of the boat can snag your ankle, pull you into the ocean, and drown you—not to mention weather, underwater hazards, and all the other ways the sea can take a life. Her story is full of action, helpful explication of the mechanics of the work, vivid landscapes (waterscapes?), and endearing characters. My fellow Yanks may be as charmed as I was by the Britishness of the prose, complete with crab bait that’s “a bit whiffy” and a town named Wells-next-the-Sea. Color me fascinated and inspired. I mean, sorry, colour.

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press

Press is our honorary man here; I decided I would allow about as many men on this list, percentage-wise, as there are women on the average wildland firefighting crew. But with any luck, we won’t make Press feel tokenized. His book is a smart, deeply-reported study of “essential” jobs in America, so many of which fall to women, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. Press defines “dirty work” in terms of morally-ambiguous, underappreciated tasks like animal slaughter. The financial precarity and physical toll of such jobs can leave scars seen and unseen, including PTSD and the invisible “moral injury” of having done something, out of necessity, that doesn’t align with one’s ethics. 

Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I was nine, I wanted to be Harriet the Spy. I stalked my neighbors with the same misplaced confidence Harriet brought to her rounds on the Upper East Side, clutching a Mead composition book and scribbling down whether Mrs. Pine smoked in the house (she did) and if the mailman liked cats (he didn’t). I told myself I was practicing observation and discipline, preparing myself for the writer’s life, or whatever my understanding was of it at the time.

I didn’t yet understand that this was the central act of writing, especially for girls. That the journal—often dismissed as “just a diary”—wasn’t merely a space for confessional wallowing, but a scaffolding for becoming, a place to contain a life in progress. I didn’t know that this habit I began in childhood—one that I’ve continued through adolescence, motherhood, grief, addiction, and recovery—was part of a lineage. To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.

To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.


Lately, it feels like the world has finally caught up to the journal girl. There’s a resurgence of interest in diaries and notebooks as both literary practice and cultural force, particularly among women, queer writers, and others who’ve long been dismissed as “too personal.” There is also a distinct shift from the oversharing of the early-2010s blogosphere toward something more distilled: emotional depth endures, but it’s no longer being performed. It arrives gently, having been lived through first.

Originally launched as a pandemic-era online project, “The Isolation Journals” is one such example. It began as a daily journaling initiative created by Suleika Jaouad to help people find meaning through writing during uncertain times and has since grown into a creative community of more than a quarter of a million people. In the spring of 2025, the project expanded into print with The Book of Alchemy, a hybrid of memoir and creative prompts that weaves together Jaouad’s reflections on journaling and creativity with contributions from the vibrant community she helped cultivate.

Journals offer different portraits of the creative self depending on how (and why) they’re made public. Some, like Jaouad’s, emerge accidentally or posthumously, revealing a rawness the writer never intended to share.

Joan Didion’s Notes to John, published posthumously, is of the latter variety. The book pulls from her private notebooks where she recorded detailed conversations with her psychiatrist. It gives us a Didion voice stripped of its signature detachment—unguarded, repetitive, almost childlike in its grief as she describes difficulties with her daughter and struggles around her work.

In yet another iteration, Kelly McMasters’ Substack series, Show Me Your Diary, creates a living, intentional conversation about the role of diaries in creative life. Each installment invites a writer to reflect on their personal journaling habits and history through a set of thoughtful questions, paired with photographs of their actual notebooks. The series showcases journals as windows into the mess and method of each writer’s mind, revealing an unfiltered backdrop to their creative world.

Even pop culture has caught the scent. Chappell Roan, following both her VMA and Grammy wins, read her acceptance speeches from her diary, indicating that she’d written them ahead of time—just in case. It felt historic to watch her place her Grammy on the floor so she could hold her butter-yellow notebook with both hands. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the journal girl ethos: hope, ambition, and an almost ceremonial belief in the power of the page.

This sensibility is reverberating in music as well, where intimacy and raw vulnerability are making a quieter, more interior return. Take Sophie Hunter—a rising artist whose lo-fi, lyrically driven pop evokes the texture of diary entries. Her songs ache with lines that feel written first for herself, only later offered to an audience.

What’s remarkable about this moment is not just that people are journaling, but the journal is moving beyond its traditional role as a warm-up for “real” writing or a quirky affectation. It’s finally getting the spotlight as a site of art and inquiry unto itself. Notebooks are being published with less polish, less shame. Readers seem hungry for texture, and for the granular mess of a consciousness unfolding in real time.

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. It comes at a time when self-expression has been flattened into brand. On social media, every caption, image, and story carries the pressure to be aesthetic, monetized, and shareable. We’re encouraged to perform authenticity rather than live it. Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy. And paradoxically, that privacy is what makes it feel more honest—and more valuable—when shared.

Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy.

I recently participated in a journaling workshop led by Amy Shearn through the Writing Co-Lab. Each week as a group we read excerpts of the diaries of other writers, not for their prose, but for their patterns. We delved into selections from the notebooks of Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Octavia Butler. We read them not as drafts but as documents of self-construction. Woolf tracked her daily rhythms with obsessive precision, toggling between household minutiae and metaphysical despair. Ernaux wrote in bursts, urgently trying to pin time to the page. Butler filled her notebooks with affirmations and imperatives: “I write bestselling novels. My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!”

The magic isn’t in the polish of these writers’ journaling, but in the persistence. Each writer, in her way, was narrating herself into being.

Of course, there is a long tradition of belittling this kind of narration. The journal girl has always been culturally suspect. She’s been framed as too sensitive, too self-absorbed, too inconsistent. Her subject—herself—considered too boring, too indulgent, too much. We’ve long internalized the idea that the personal is frivolous unless made universal, and even then, only if filtered through irony or male detachment. But what happens when we refuse to filter? What if we take the journal girl seriously?

Didion wrote with surgical detachment in her famously reserved essays. But in the 46 diary entries that comprise Notes to John, each of which are addressed to her husband after his sudden death, her voice frays. “I sat down and immediately began to cry,” she writes. “‘What’s on your mind,’ Dr. MacKinnon asked. I said I didn’t know. I rarely cried. In fact I never cried in crises. I just found it very difficult to sit down facing somebody and talk.” This is not just recording. It’s raw admittance. The journal, here, is not a mere routine, it’s a refuge.

When my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, I didn’t begin processing the trauma by writing an essay. In the early days of her treatment, I wrote in my journal. I catalogued medications, smells, beeping machines, nurses I liked, nurses I suspected were judging me. I wrote about how my daughter’s face changed shape during pulses of steroids, and about the baby in the room next door whose parents I never saw. I wasn’t trying to be profound—my notebook was a place to pour out what I didn’t know how to speak aloud. It was a place without an audience, without polish, and most importantly, without the pressure to be fine.

As I’ve been working on a book about our cancer years, I’ve gone back and read those early entries spread across physical journals and, as we spent more time in the hospital, my phone’s notes app. The writings are disjointed, repetitive, ugly in places—fragmented lists, pages blotched with tears—but they hold a feral truth I couldn’t fake. They don’t just remind me of what happened—they reveal what I didn’t then understand. I can trace the path of my thinking during that crisis, peek through the window into that past version of myself. That’s the other function of the journal: it doesn’t just record your thoughts; it gives them room to form.

Of course, there’s risk in opening that private space to others. Publishing a journal, or even quoting from one, means forfeiting some of its power. Vulnerability becomes commodity. You’re no longer writing in the dark, you’re curating. McMasters touches on this through her interview series. By asking writers to share their diaries, she is also asking them to decide what gets left in and what gets cut in the curation of their most private thoughts. These are especially sharp questions for women, who’ve long been expected to share their pain (and just as often punished for it.) We valorize the brave confessor until her honesty becomes inconvenient.

There’s power, too, in reclaiming the journal as literature—not as spectacle, but as form. In a 2021 interview with NPR, Suleika Jaouad shared, “Journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.” What would it mean to believe in the journal as the work, and by extension, to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?

What would it mean to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?

Substack has become a sort of public diary, a digital throwback to the messy vitality of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writers post dispatches that read like letters, lists, fragments. There’s an appetite for first-person writing that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, something between the tweet and the essay—something more raw and alive.

At the same time, younger creators are rejecting the pressure for constant polish. On TikTok and YouTube, lo-fi video diaries abound. You’ll find soft-spoken narrations, overhead shots of annotated pages, and girls whispering aloud lines they’ve just written. A new visual grammar of the diary is forming—one that prizes immediacy over perfection. The journal girl, once derided, is now an aesthetic. You can buy pre-distressed notebooks and faux-vintage pens. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to bullet journaling, “aesthetic routines,” and stationery hauls. This commodification is both frustrating and fascinating. On the one hand, it risks flattening something deeply personal into a lifestyle accessory. On the other, it’s a sign that something about the journal girl—her mess, her earnestness—has struck a nerve.

Maybe it’s because she offers an alternative to the endless performance of the internet. Maybe it’s because she reminds us that we’re allowed to write things we’ll never publish. Maybe it’s because she believes, so radically, that her life is worth documenting.

I see this in my own daughter, now 13. She keeps a blue-covered journal in the drawer of her nightstand, the metal spiral of its binding stretched and unraveling. When I go into her room to say goodnight, I often find her propped against her headboard, her face a mask of concentration. I feel the ache of recognition, and I wonder what she’s discovering in those pages—what truths she’s unearthing about herself, what small wounds she’s tending. I imagine she’s building a map of her inner world, one line at a time. In a world that will expect her to perform or edit herself into palatability, I hope her journal is a place where she can be whole.

When I look back at the journals I kept as a girl, I’m struck by how little I held back. There’s something embarrassing about the openness, but also enviable. I hadn’t yet learned to second-guess every sentence. I wrote because I wanted to understand something, not because I wanted to be understood. That’s what I see in the journals of Didion, Woolf, Butler. Their journals are not just the seeds of books to come, but whole selves in process: the page as confidante, as experiment, and as mirror.

In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.