Peter Orner is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer with eight books under his belt. He’s also a swashbuckling reader who doesn’t shy away from discussing his influences and making the case for reading great, lesser known like Wright Morris, Breece D’J Pancake, and Gina Berricault (as he did in Recommended Reading here). And yet, for such a dedicated reader, there’s nothing fussy about Orner’s prose. His sentences roll off the page with the cadence of a conversation. One moment he lands a pulpy punchline, the next he delivers a quiet, devastating observation. A doorway becomes the dissolution of a marriage, a rainy Sunday becomes a best friend’s death, a dime becomes a grandmother. Razor sharp observations that land without a hint of gravitas. He’s just talking on the page, just remembering family stories that were whispered in the hallways at night. These moments might appear within the space of a couple pages yet they don’t crowd each other out. There’s a lightness to the language that allows them to glom together and distill each other. That’s the intangible, contradictory magic of Orner’s writing.
Back in 2013, Recommended Reading published his short story “At the Fairmont.” For the release of his latest novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, we sat down to discuss the new book, the old story, and the experience of looking back on a multi-decade writing career. This proved auspicious because The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is a leap forward in Orner’s writing—it simultaneously reconstructs and fictionalizes a painful rift between his grandparents and famed Chicago columnist Irving Kupcinet. The novel becomes a genealogy, an autobiography, and also, in an unexpected turn, crime fiction. It follows a writer obsessively trying to understand the truth of Irv Kupcinet’s daughter’s death. Is it a murder? Is it a suicide? Why does she play a key role in JFK conspiracy theories? And why did the writer’s grandparents and the Kupcinets stop talking after she died? These questions might have answers, but The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter isn’t about that. It’s a gorgeous reckoning with the answers we can’t have.
We met continents apart via Zoom—Orner was in Namibia celebrating the rerelease of his first novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo—and dug into indelible questions of craft that fill writers’ days.
Willem Marx: Recommended Reading published “At the Fairmont” more than a decade ago. Is it a story you return to?
Peter Orner: Before you publish a book, you get an uncorrected galley. I wrote that story after the galley for the book Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridgewas printed. I had to insist that the story get included. It felt like the book needed to have it. So, it is an important story to me. I had heard an old story about my grandfather who was in the South Pacific during World War II, he was stationed in San Francisco for a little while. I was imagining him and my grandmother meeting in a hotel in San Francisco—things didn’t go very well in my imagination, I’m not sure they went so well in real life either. It’s a personal story and one I fought for.
WM: Why was it so important to have the story included?
PO: I think it was a story I always meant to try and tell—this reunion in San Francisco that was built up between two people and then doesn’t quite meet their expectations to say the least. The Fairmont Hotel is in a fancy part of San Francisco, Knob Hill, the area I did not live in, but I often walked by it. God knows, I’m not sure if my grandparents had anything to do with the Fairmont Hotel, but it was this iconic place. I think I hung out in front of it one day and wrote that story or a draft of it.
WM: Do you recognize ways that your writing has changed across books?
PO: I feel like I’m still learning. I’m still trying to figure out how to do this. The one thing I can say is that I feel less confident now than I did before. I look at earlier work, and I’m like, damn, you really thought you knew what you were doing. Now I’m like, did I?
But it was nice to feel like that. I took a lot of chances and I trusted myself. Now it’s different. Maybe I’m more at ease with myself, more contemplative. I rushed things earlier. There’s a time when everything you see is fodder for a story. Things are much harder now. I wish I had that sense of finding a story everywhere—right now it takes me a while to get a story under my skin. I’ve noticed that difference. There’s this old tale about Chekhov: Somebody challenged him and said, “You can write a story about anything, can you write a story about an ashtray?” And the next day, there was the story about an ashtray. I had a period of time when I could have done that. Now? No way! I would need three weeks to figure that one out. I’m lying in wait more than I used to, I’m not in as big a hurry.
WM: In another interview, you say that during Covid, you learned to “eavesdrop” on yourself and your memories. The phrase jumped out to me because it feels so relevant to the way you lace characters and family histories together across stories and books.
When I think about a character, I think about what that character remembers.
PO: Memory is what I work with. When I think about a character, I think about what that character remembers. That’s usually how I figure out a way into a story: What is it that my character can’t stop remembering? You’re supposed to ask, what’s that character doing? What kind of movement? But what prevents your character from moving? Where’s the paralysis? I’m interested in that.
Memories are so personal to us. What else have we got that’s only yours? You’re going to have shared memories, but that’s where there’s going to be that friction because people are going to remember differently. I’m endlessly fascinated. What sticks?
PO: It’s a way of approaching an essay in a less pretentious way for me. I’m not trying to accomplish anything. I’m just taking notes. It’s a way of tricking myself into thinking out loud a little bit. I’m not building something up so I have to make a point, I’m just taking some notes. It’s helped me immensely—sometimes it’s copying stuff I’m reading, literally verbatim, and then maybe thinking of something off of that. And that, somehow, is movement towards some kind of essay…maybe.
WM: You’re leaning away from telling yourself what you’re doing.
PO: It’s a trick, but it’s also something I truly believe in. I tell my students this: just take some notes. It’s very, very hard to create a story or an essay that works, we know that. But what if we just take some notes and don’t worry?
I’ve even thought, what if I didn’t have a story, just notes for a story? Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary—those are literally notes for stories. In some ways, they’re better than the actual stories that grew out of that book. I’ve been thinking about that for 30 years, that particular process—not going back and fully realizing that those notes were in themselves extraordinary. Maybe the artifice he created out of the notes is slightly inferior. Arguably. I’ve taken that idea and run with it over the years.
Babel has a line in the diary that I steal in the new book. He writes, “Describe the wounded man.” When he went and wrote the story, he described the wounded man but in the diary it’s just “Describe the wounded man.” In The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter there’s a burial scene—Jews line up to put gravel and dirt on a grave—and I had a note to myself, “Describe this sound, the stones.” I just left it in the book. My editor was like, “Wait, what?” And I was like, “No, no, that’s what I mean.” I want you to get there with the sound—I can’t give it to you, the book doesn’t come with a soundtrack, but you probably know the sound, or you can imagine it.
WM: One thing that stands out in The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter—it’s also in your stories—is the way you shift between first and third person POVs. A lot of writers lean toward one perspective or the other, but you’re very much at home in both. You even blend the two within the context of a single character. How do you choose what perspective is right for a piece?
PO: This is something I’m obsessed with. Over the years I’ve become convinced—more convinced, because I was always suspicious—that it’s a limitation to name the point of view. My first-person narrators can talk in third-person. And my third-person narrators can talk in first-person, and all the shades in between. The worst thing is to be dogmatic about any of this, but I am dogmatic when it comes to people who are dogmatic about point of view. I think of them as “the point of view police.” They say, “wait a second, no, no! That is a third person!” First of all, go back and read some Joyce or Cervantes. Great writers are always slippery with point of view.
My first-person narrators can talk in third-person. And my third-person narrators can talk in first-person, and all the shades in between.
I try to open myself up to be free to make those slippages, and it’s only because I learned from other people. The less transition the better, a reader will follow you or not. In this new book, Solly, the uncle, is a favorite of mine. Sometimes we slide into his point of view, but more often it’s Lou, the grandfather. He’ll be being described in third-person, and then he’ll start thinking in first-person. I gave myself the freedom to do that.
WM: That’s a question I had, even when we are with Lou and Solly—the older generation—I could feel Jed, the grandson and the central narrator, behind them. I would wonder: Is Jed telling this? Am I in Jed’s imagination now or have I actually moved in time to see things that happened before he was born? You can’t tell. I mean, you can tell, but there’s always a small doubt. Maybe not.
PO: That’s what I’m looking for. I want you to forget, then remember; forget, then remember.
WM: As a writer, are there certain questions you used to ask yourself that you don’t ask anymore? And are there new questions that you ask now as you’re coming to a new project?
PO: I think the biggest one is: Do I have the stamina to do this? Time becomes different. It can become a killer if it’s in your head and you’re thinking: Do I devote my time to this story or this story? When I was younger, I would devote my time to all the stories. Now I feel, “all right, you’ve got to start choosing.” It’s not a good thing. There’s time, there’s time even if you’re ninety-five and have two more years. There’s time for these stories you need to tell. I’m trying to tell myself, “Chill out. You’re going to be able to tell as many as you want.” But part of me is nagging back…maybe you don’t have time.
WM: Is that nagging voice connected to the fact that there’s a story you want to tell that you’re sitting on?
PO: This whole new book is that idea embodied. Jed is trying to tell a story over many years. Jed is not me, but his struggle to tell the story mirrors my own. I did not rush this story as I might have when I was younger. I let this one have the fifteen years it needed. I wanted it to feel urgent, but to get that I had to be more patient. Isn’t there the phrase, “hurry slowly?” That is what I was doing here.
WM: Coming away from the book, I really wanted to ask why the Kupcinets? At a certain point, I started Googling their names and realized these are all real people. You know so much about this Chicago gossip columnist; the deep relationship Jed’s family has with the Kupcinet family feels so lived. Where did it all come from?
PO: This story’s been kicking around my head for a long, long time. My family was friendly with the Kupcinets, and there was a falling out. My grandfather—and this is all documented in columns that Kup wrote—was one of the people that would go on the annual fishing trip with Kup every year. And then between 1963 and 1964, suddenly my grandfather was no longer the captain of the fishing trip. The Kupcinets were never spoken of in my family. I was sort of haunted by this. No one else was, by the way. Nobody cared. People laugh at me. The Kupcinets are a little bit of a joke in Chicago. He was around for so long, he was a very powerful gossip columnist, but he ended up being a bit of a joke. So Jed is obsessed with somebody who people have long stopped thinking about. But my grandparents were friends with the Kupcinets at one time, there was a falling out, especially between the two women, and I was intrigued by that. That’s all I knew. I went from there.
WM: Did you have conversations about the Kupcinets with your grandmother the way Jed does?
PO: No, it was just something we didn’t discuss. I think I wanted to tell a story that was almost forbidden to tell. And I waited a long time to create the fiction around a real family mystery about why the relationship ended. It haunted me for my whole life, but it wasn’t something you could talk about. It’s sixty years old now, my grandparents have been dead a long time, so I had to recreate the whole world.
WM: The book does feel really different from your other writing. There’s the element of reality, actually weaving the real world into the story, and then there are these genre elements too. At a certain point it morphs into a detective story, and then Jed has a line where he addresses that explicitly: “This isn’t a detective story or a police procedural. It’s not a mystery. A mystery would leak through my hands like water. God knows I’d write one if I could.”
PO: I’m glad you pointed out that line. I was sort of trying to write an anti-true crime. I read a lot of Raymond Chandler and Charles Williford when I was writing this book. I learned a lot from them, but I come from where I come from—my preoccupations are different. There was a cover up. There was an attack on an actor who had nothing at all to do with Cookie Kupcinet’s death. There were real world consequences that I was interested in, in a true crime sense. But the crime here was more of the heart. This is where the fiction comes in. It’s about punishing your friends for things that happen in your life. It seems cruel to me, but also very human.
WM: Jed’s a writing professor, you’re a writing professor, and the book lampoons writing maxims and teaching writing in general several times. Do you have any writing maxims that you do ascribe to?
PO: I try to stay away from them. I feel like you invoke them at your peril. There are some metaphors I can appreciate, but are they helpful in terms of writing a story? Probably not.
If I have any maxim, it’s just hang in there. Hang in there with a story. Hang in there with the writing life. Anyone who loves it enough is gonna be able to do something. I’m hanging in there, that’s been my career motto.
WM: Finally, so much of your work brings attention to other writers—your essays, and your podcast, The Lonely Voice, in particular, discuss influences and drawing lines between overlooked authors. Do you see that as a kind of overarching project?
PO: When it comes to literature, there’s always stuff we don’t know out there—stories that may have a huge impact on us that we just don’t know yet. I’ve made it my small task to help people understand that this is not a finite universe. Go into a library and you’d be amazed to see what has been overlooked. I wouldn’t do what I do if I hadn’t found what I found. There’s a beautiful line of Kundera where he says something like, if he hadn’t found certain works in translation, he wouldn’t do what he does. He needed to go out of his own language—which he had a weird relationship with anyway. He almost needed another language. If we box ourselves in, only reading certain kinds of work or only reading work by certain kinds of people, we miss out on significant human experience. Even my characters are always looking for what’s been overlooked. And since so much is overlooked, it’s a never-ending business.
After my father died, I stopped watching television. It was the beginning of the summer in Riyadh, notoriously hot and dry—a suffocating heat that commingled with grief to create a force field of loss and longing. For months after he was gone, I stuffed my nose into the headrest of his navy La-Z-Boy and smelled him—Lagerfeld cologne and that intoxicating human scalp odor of sweat and grease and pillows. Baba would prop his thin, athletic legs onto the large footrest and often called out to one or all of his daughters to sit across from him so he could simultaneously watch the screen and talk to us. Whether in Amman—where I spent most of my childhood and teen years—or later in Jeddah and then Riyadh, where my family now lives, the living room was where we congregated. Like all families, we have our own rituals and habits, and nothing was more classic Shaath household than spending an evening together with the television on in the background while we ate, talked, argued, laughed, and ate some more.
For as far back as I can remember, the soundtrack to my life has always been Baba’s television, with the volume increasing as the years went by, announcing both the worldly and the mundane. His television consumption could be grouped into three distinct themes with accompanying emotional valences: Arab politics instigating spiraling despair, Hollywood action films inciting a boyish excitement, and football—his true and lasting passion—eliciting the purest joy. I could have opposing thoughts on everything with little resistance from him, which gave me a wide berth to form my own views. Still, he had his red lines, never to be crossed: Palestine and football. These were sacrosanct. There was only one point of view, and it was his.
When I moved to New York City in September of 2022, awash in fresh grief after Baba’s too-quick death seven months before, I was relieved I didn’t have a television in my apartment. Football, or soccer as Americans call it, was far from the national psyche. It was a global obsession that had not caught on in the U.S. as much as that other sport they call football. I naively thought that avoiding certain stimuli would make the grief contract. I wanted to believe that the respite of New York City could help eradicate my all-encompassing sadness. But alas, Baba was everywhere.
In November of that year, the FIFA World Cup kicked off, bringing the football fanatics out from the woodwork with their special brand of feverish fandom. Mired with the controversy of the tournament being held in Qatar, the analysis in the media took on a noticeably prejudiced bent. I opted not to tune in. Racist coverage of Qatar’s winning bid to host the World Cup reached a fever pitch in the weeks leading up to the opening, and being so far away from home only fueled my disdain for how western media was portraying the game. Football, coupled with that exhausting narrative of the Arab world, was far too much Baba-territory to traverse alone.
For as far back as I can remember, the soundtrack to my life has always been Baba’s television.
On the day of the opening ceremony in Doha, alone in my tiny apartment in the West Village, eight time zones away from home and 254 days since Baba left us, I hid under a wooly blanket and flung my phone away. I would, I said to myself, I could avoid the addictive sound of football fans in a packed stadium for the next month. I didn’t want to hear that most ubiquitous, most uproarious, most jubilant of wails—“goooooooaaaaaaaaaaaal.” Why watch if Baba’s joy wasn’t on display? Why watch without his witty commentary? Why watch without his animated presence? Why watch and pretend to care without him there?
That sense of listlessness—what felt like an entrenching disenchantment—was new to me. I had made the decision to move to New York, energized by a sense of possibility; a burning, itching, twisting desire to live the dream version of my life as a writer in the only city that mattered. I chose an apartment on Carmine Street in the heart of the Village, perched atop Joe’s Pizza and overlooking Father Demo Square, a tiny park and garden that operated like an Italian piazza, gathering people of the neighborhood, tourists in search of the city’s perfect slice and the homeless in search of a bench. In the dream version, this was supposed to locate me in the heart of the city’s creative life with friends and books and ideas. The reality, however, was a hollow and emptied out facsimile, like a vacant Hollywood set waiting for a scene to begin.
Those first couple of months in the neighborhood, as New York gloriously turned into shades of red, orange and copper, I mostly spent sitting in the park staring at the pigeons drinking out of its fountain or else finding refuge in the nearby Our Lady of Pompei church—just a Muslim girl in a Catholic church, lighting candles and crying over the dead.
After his family fled their home in Gaza during the ongoing Nakba in 1949, Baba first landed in Alexandria, Egypt where members of the larger Shaath clan had relocated. My grandfather, Tawfiq, who at the time of leaving Gaza thought it would be a temporary move and a return to Palestine was inevitable, heard of an opportunity for work in the rapidly developing Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and decided to take his family there. At the time, Jeddah was a small port town with only the beginnings of the infrastructure demanded by cities. Baba, then only seven years old, found his footing, so to speak, in the streets, playing football with neighborhood kids. One of twelve children, Baba was in the middle of the order and had the personality to match. He assumed responsibility at a young age, helping keep the family in balance and, later in life, becoming the fulcrum that maintained its stability. The family relied on his moral sturdiness and street-smart charisma he showed from childhood up until his last days, a seductive combination of responsibility and mischief.
He would spend his days walking the streets of Jeddah in western style shorts which contrasted the conservative, long, white robes worn by Saudi kids. Learning how to make his own way, he struck up friendships with older men who taught him the ways of the world, both good—how to negotiate—and not so good—low-stakes poker. I think it was those shorts that marked Baba’s slow assimilation into and embrace of both a Palestinian and Saudi identity, finding a delicate balance he would maintain for the rest of his life. While my grandfather left Gaza as a temporary measure, the creation of the state of Israel changed that relocation to a permanent one, one that ushered in a new identity, that of refugee. My grandfather, because of his access, was able to request an audience with King Abdul-Aziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and ask for his support, which was duly granted, giving him and his family Saudi citizenship, thus changing their status once again, and in many ways, their destiny. This adjacency contributed to my father’s sense of belonging to this new country as well as his eventual path towards a more legitimizing profession and a small part of Saudi lore.
Unlike millions of football fans all over the world, Baba was not only a fan, but also what people dream of yet rarely become—a professional player. Baba’s career as a footballer was brief but brilliant. He played for the newly established Al Hilal, Arabic for Crescent Moon, today one of Saudi Arabia’s most beloved clubs, as a defense player starting in 1964. His stories about those years are filled with markers of how different the world was back then—often playing barefoot, which would yield him a lifetime of painful, gnarly toenails that we grew up making fun of. His tales about his teammates, many of whom were not literate and operated on a mixture of simplemindedness and superstition, were never disparaging. Instead, these stories pointed towards how fitra—what Muslims believe is an inborn state of purity and what some liken to Kant’s philosophical equivalent of “ought”—guided people towards their righteous paths. As one of the few players with a school education—the 16-year-old Baba was given a moniker by the other players of “Ustaz”, which is Arabic for “teacher.” I have a handful of memories of Baba bumping into one of his teammates. I would watch him transform into someone I didn’t know, a more jocular, mano a mano performance where it appeared like he was speaking a whole other language. Clearly, Baba existed in many worlds separate from the one he inhabited with us, and in this one, he was a revered athlete, the Ustaz.
Baba only played a few short years, but he became one of the team’s board members in the early 1980s. He pushed to hire the first foreign coach to elevate the team’s standards. He recruited a Brazilian coach, a move that elevated the team to be one of the best in Saudi and gain prominence across the Arab world. As a child, I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the television with my sisters, watching my father, pitch-side, reflected back to us from the screen. A tiny Baba on a television set, far away and close all at once. That part of my father’s life barely intersected with his family life, two worlds that remained separate and only touched when we watched a match together. So many of those people from his football days reached out to offer their condolences on the passing of Captain Ziad. A tweet by the Al Hilal account on the night he passed shows him in an archival image—black and white and smudged by time—standing with nine other teammates on the football pitch. Everyone is staring straight at the camera except for Baba, who is glancing to the side as if staring at the horizon, a point in the future. They had asked for a more recent photo to accompany the archival image, and I sent one of him in the barr, the Saudi desert, with his head wrapped up in a red and white shemagh, the Bedouin headdress. He has a wistful look in his eyes, as if he’s staring back at a younger self.
For Baba, Al Hilal was the only team that mattered. Its position was only trumped during the World Cup, when the Saudi national team would take precedence above club rivalries.
Two days after the Opening Ceremony, I successfully avoided watching. I got up early, vaguely aware that the first Saudi match against Argentina would be airing, but firmly committed to my stance. As I scrolled through my phone, it became obvious that social media would foil my plans before it even began. Countless videos revealed a manic energy surrounding the match. The excitement surprised me because a matchup against Messi could only result in one way: a defeat. My oldest sister Reem, chief archivist and record keeper of our clan, sent a photo on our family WhatsApp group of my mother watching the game, eyes glued to the screen back home in Riyadh in their early evening, her hair in curlers, an air of celebration permeating the tableau. I felt a pang of resentment, which I later realized was a combination of wanting my father in that chair instead, as well as the broader bitterness that she didn’t care much about football when he was alive. Haya, my youngest sister, was also in the frame, leaning forward towards the television, a visible tenseness in her hunched shoulders. At first glance, the photo landed with a thud of vindication, confirming a belief that my grief was more encompassing than theirs because I chose not to watch the match. But the photo told me something else:My family was continuing a ritual despite their pain, one that I decided to avoid fully, a pattern I had repeated throughout my life, trying to carve a place for myself that was in opposition to everyone else, a classic middle child move.
I kept zooming into the photo, looking for clues that might lead me to some conclusion that would make the heartache soften. I searched for myself, or at least a spirit of myself, and could not locate it. My escape to New York, far from the pain born of familiarity, was proving to be a botched attempt at reconciling with death; the photo was proof. Instead of communion, I chose isolation, and now, far away from home and hurting, my awareness struck me hard. I did not want to face what a new configuration of family would feel like and chose distance as a route to imagined salvation.
That match ended with an unprecedented win for Saudi Arabia, making it the greatest upset in World Cup history, made all the more gratifying when Argentina eventually went on to win the grand title, a series of unlikelihoods that would have prompted Baba to say something like, “Once upon a time, we beat the winners.” The Saudi win made me cave; not watching the game, even after the fact, would be a betrayal. I wish I could recount those two goals the way Baba would have, with spare and elegant language that would give the listener a full-throttle emotional immersion. I can’t. Gripping my phone tightly, I watched again and again, that second goal fly in a soaring arc, enter the goalpost and then after a beat, the cameras panned towards the stadium filled with fans going absolutely crazy, erupting into euphoric joy. I watched the striker, Salem Al Dawsari, stave off his incoming teammates, barreling towards him in congratulations in true football fashion, and execute a graceful and instantly iconic backflip with ballet-esque precision. I got to my feet, my body unable to contain the adrenaline rush, and softly whispered “goooooooaaaaaaaaaaaal”, understanding why people call it “the beautiful game.” I never expected to cry. But at that moment, tears began streaming down my face, a combination of grief and patriotism that was completely new to me. It dawned on me then that football was becoming a generational glue connecting our family with Saudi across decades and lives.
My family was continuing a ritual despite their pain, one that I decided to avoid fully
I watched the ripple effect of this win play out across the world, ranging from disbelief to celebration. Nine of the players on the Saudi team are Hilalis, and I fantasized about how Baba would’ve reacted to what everyone called an “upset” but to me felt more like a coup. I canceled all my plans, went deeper into my feed and blanket, manically switched between news reports, articles, and TikTok videos of Saudi men and women dancing in the streets of Doha to the tune of electronic dance music from the 1990s. A particular video entranced me, where a group of Saudi men outside the Lusail stadium in a mishmash of local wear—classic white thobe and red & white shemagh while others were draped in emerald green football jerseys—crowded together and danced to “Freed from Desire,” an iconic Eurodance song from 1996 that reaches a famous crescendo before dropping with a “na na na na na na na, nah, nah, nah, na na.” This was the most animated I’ve ever seen Saudis, which revealed the scale of the win against Argentina and its significance not only to Saudis, but to Arabs and Muslims all over the world. For the first time in a very long time, that part of my identity—the Saudi part—felt legitimized without explanation or defensive arguments. This victory ushered in me a new understanding of Baba’s embrace of his identity—that being Palestinian and Saudi could exist as a refuge outside of politics and perception, signified by something as simple and as universal as football. This win was about skill, tenacity, strategy and perseverance. And perhaps, a dose of good luck. But in that moment, there was no reason to listen to or defend Saudi from the usual attacks—autocracy, money, oil, Islamic extremism, human rights abuses, or whatever else is deployed to flatten an entire country down to a string of labels. This was just Saudi beating Argentina, fair and square, as Baba would always say.
When people ask me where I’m from, I’m quick to rattle off the list of countries I belong to in some tangential way, because all of my belonging feels tangential. I say I’m Palestinian but my father’s mother is Iranian. I say I’m also Saudi, not because of blood but because I’m lucky to have the passport. I say I grew up in Jordan and that my mother was formerly Jordanian but is now Saudi because of that passport. But she’s originally Syrian. I usually say this with a mixture of weariness and pride, as if I’m revealing something special about myself. All my life, I’ve wrung my hands and contorted myself into an all-defining identity crisis which feels like a comfort zone but operates like an enormous limitation, disavowing any chance for a real stake in the ground. My father, on the other hand, was dignified in balancing the different parts of his identity, able to gracefully blend in wherever he was and rise up to what was required to perform that identity. Without a doubt, his football career demonstrates this but a kind of historicity was at play as well. Baba experienced and existed within the major eruptions in the modern Middle East that defined the era I was born into in 1979—the dissolution of the British Mandate in Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel, the rise of Saudi Arabia as the wealthiest Arab state, Iran’s dramatic shift to becoming an Islamic Republic. But history aside, in his personal life too—whether in football or later as a businessman during Saudi’s oil boom in the 1970s onwards or even more ephemerally as part of the first generation of displaced Palestinians—his posture was active. I could go on but I suppose the point is this: My father lived the thing that culminated in creating my own complex identity. He was able to assimilate and maintain a sense of belonging because he had in fact belonged and I suspected that a part of that belonging had to do with witnessing and participating. That belonging may not only be about a nation-state but a culture-based connection that ties you forever with place.
I, on the other hand, inherited all that in adjacency, not truly experiencing any sense of belonging to any one of those different legacies, a kind of arm’s length existence. The two things I held onto my whole life were first, that the Shaath family name was immediately recognizable for anyone who followed Arab politics because my uncle, Nabil Shaath, was a long time member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and had been one of the chief negotiators for the now defunct Oslo peace process, therefore legitimizing my Palestinianness. And the second, that if my father was a founding player for Al Hilal, it meant I was, I am, a bona fide Saudi despite having no blood, no customs nor even the right accent to match that nationality. With his death, these two claims have largely disappeared, and I find myself gasping for air.
Baba’s illness was too quick. The four months and eleven days between diagnosis and death were breathtaking, as if we were experiencing cancer at 2x speed, as if swiftness would make the loss more tolerable. I could understand muscles weakening and strength waning. I could read medical reports and navigate hospital bureaucracy and feed and bathe and lift Baba. I could do all that forever if I had to. But the measure for that quickness which threw me was how a man defined by his charisma—a storyteller par excellence—became in a matter of months someone who hardly spoke, his voice a mere whisper, his appetite to regale us with tales gone. He lost the ability to walk quite suddenly, a mere two months into his diagnosis and two months before his death. He fell in the bathroom one night and, from that day on until he passed, was unable to walk unassisted and, gradually, not at all. I think that was a turning point for him. It had always been a source of immense pride that he had an athlete’s physique and agility, able to maintain a trim and fit figure his whole life, erect posture, and an uncanny knack to “fall well,” as he would say. A couple of months before his diagnosis, he slipped down a flight of stairs in an attempt to swat away a gecko with his slipper because Mama was scared of them. I wasn’t there to see the fall, but Mama says she looked down in horror, convinced his body was broken beyond repair. But because he knew how to fall, he emerged with just a dislocated finger on his right, slipper-swatting hand. Later, when he proudly recounted the story to his friend Abu Abdulrahman, his friend responded, “Ya Sheikh, don’t repeat this story or you’ll be hit with the evil eye.” Baba, never a believer in the occult or even slightly superstitious, dismissed the advice. A part of me believes Abu Abdulrahman was right.
During his last two long stays in the hospital, my sisters and I insisted on daily physical therapy, optimistic that this was all temporary, and that we were not anywhere near the point of no return. That soon, he would start responding to the treatment. That soon, his atrophying muscles would bounce back to their fullest capacity. That he could “fall well” into his cancer. I remember the first physical therapist who walked into the hospital room, a Saudi man, slight but seemingly capable. He introduced himself to my father. I, overbearing and always trying to strike harmony, urged Baba to converse with him, “Why don’t you tell him who you are?” I said, “Tell him that you’re an athlete.” And Baba, not wanting to disappoint me despite his recent reluctance to engage, grudgingly told him that he had been one of the original players for Al Hilal. The young physical therapist was in absolute awe despite being a fan of Al Nasr, one of the other major Saudi clubs, drilling him about the history of the club and the years that my father was the manager. Baba indulged him, albeit in a voice raspier than his usual clear and round pitch but animated nonetheless. My father could put anyone at ease, and in a strange reversal of roles, he took command of the dynamic between him and the physical therapist. Their bonding over rivaling Saudi clubs made the desperation of the situation feel a little lighter. Standing up on his skinny legs, made even skinnier from his illness, Baba circled his hospital room, regaling us with tales of the past. The storytelling seemed to revive Baba, to give him a reason to push forward, to try to stand up and take a few steps, to lean into his athleticism.
When people ask me where I’m from, I’m quick to rattle off the list of countries I belong to in some tangential way.
The last time Baba spoke was the morning of Thursday, March 3rd, 2022. We brought him home from his third stint in the hospital the evening prior, a long stay where he caught Covid-19, adding a further layer of strain on his lungs and a palpable silence as he struggled to breathe without the support of an oxygen tank. That complication probably had an exponential effect on the amount of days we had left with him. We knew we were close to the end because we were relieved to be home, happy that if it were to happen, he would be in a familiar place, the house of love he and Mama built for us. That morning, propped up on his navy-blue reclining chair, he looked so small. My sisters and I, along with my mother, who remained a reluctant bystander, incapable of accepting this reality, crowded around him as he seemed to momentarily regain his older self. His voice, full bodied and creamy, rose up as if readying himself for one last story.
Since my father died, Saudi football has risen in stature, skyrocketing in both reputation and skill. They’re in place to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, unleashing a fresh wave of accusations for “sportswashing,” echoing the outraged reactions to Qatar’s winning bid a decade prior, which presumes that wealthy nations in the Arabian Gulf should be scrutinized through a different lens with different rules meted out. They’ve recruited global superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to the local clubs Al Nasr and Al Ittihad and attempted to woo Lionel Messi, who after losing to the Saudi team at the Qatar World Cup, went on to win the trophy for Argentina. The wooing party was none other than my father’s team Al Hilal. Messi went on to join Inter Miami but his name is constantly bandied about as a possible addition to Saudi football anytime international players are newly acquired. In moments when time and reality collapse, I imagine Baba, reclined on his blue chair, his arm resting behind his head, wryly commenting that he was never a Messi fan anyway and settling back to watch the beautiful game.
Back in real-life New York, change kept apace and life, miraculously, moved forward. The seasons turned; each one offering a kind of distraction that led to the eventual softening of that grout-like grief. The starkness of winter was for burrowing, the fecundity of spring brought with it the possibility of joy and with the summer, glimmers of lightness returned. I spent the better part of those months walking the length and breadth of Manhattan on what I came to call “grief walks”, logging in 30,000 steps at a time, convinced I was crossing an invisible void to go back to a place where I could feel fully alive again. And then the fall crash landed with all its glory and I remember towards the beginning of October walking from 116th on the west side all the way down through Central Park and then flanked by the Hudson River winding towards the Village with a sense of clarity and presence descending upon me that signaled whatever it is people mean when they say, “I’ve moved on.”
The Village and specifically my little corner of the neighborhood also changed. New places cropped up where old establishments once held court, a cruel double reminder of the city’s two truths: the real estate market rules our collective fate and everything has an expiry date—places, people and above all, cultural currency. A cool Yemeni coffee shop opened next to Joe’s, replacing a pandemic-era Italian spot and bringing with it throngs of the city’s young and hip, predominantly Arabs and Muslims and with a healthy smattering of the brown-curious community, not to mention, a solid population of football-obsessed young baristas. On the other side of Joe’s, a bodega, also owned by Yemenis, quickly became a daily stop for me—for water, snacks, and breezy conversations with the guys manning the cash register. By breezy, I mean politics (Palestine) and religion (Islam), of course and by guys, I mean twenty-something men already too burdened by life, displacement, and loss but burnished with inherited wit and wisdom, reminding me of different versions of Baba from throughout his life.
It wasn’t just storefronts. It was the mood. Long before Mamdani became the enfant terrible of Muslim New Yorkers, I began sensing a vibe shift wafting up from below my fire escape. I would yank up my windowsill in the morning and instead of hearing the usual expletive-laden cacophony of the city’s homeless moving locations and the last drunks of the night, I would catch the pronounced lyricism of the Quran wafting up to my first-floor walk-up. Instead of the aloofness of a New Yorker nod of recognition, I was now greeted with a “salam sister”, multiple times a day. I would sit on the small wooden bench that the bodega guys propped up in front of the store for evening tea-drinking purposes and watch that little strip between Bleecker and Sixth become a modest fashion runway; an aesthetic marriage between hijabi chic and cool urbanite that made me want to cover my bare arms. There was a quality of subtle sweetness to it all and it felt good. My tall and lanky neighbor John, who has lived at 11 Carmine for over 40 years, sits at our building’s entrance every evening at around six o’clock with his long legs crossed on a foldout wooden chair, a Tupperware of finger sandwiches next to him and a gin tonic garnished with a thick cucumber slice in hand. He usually has a tattered paperback on his lap, alternating between reading and people watching with the old timers stopping to say hello. One evening that fall, as I crouched down next to him enjoying the cool breeze and talking conspiracy theories, he looked over at me with his doe-like eyes and said in his thick, gravelly voice , “All of a sudden it feels like we live on a nice, quiet street.”
Just like a fragile peace however, my momentary relapse into a state of normalcy was not meant to be. By November 2023, just one short year after that World Cup win, I found myself back on my white boucle couch, with a few more stains and a lot more sunken, unable to get myself out of the house. It was early days, but many already knew what we were witnessing—a full scale genocide, an unspeakable horror then, now. Gaza, the seaside town of my Baba’s youth, became the center of the world and the bleeding heart of the collective consciousness. And my grief, what I whittled down into a manageable nugget and began to carry lightly, exploded into a mushroom cloud of something else. Something unrecognizable that barreled through me and over me, flattening me into a mere wisp of myself. It went from being an insular and individual experience to a larger, all consuming, many-tentacled monster of an emotion rattling with white-hot, capital R, Rage. The flood of sorrowful tears and fetal positions and listlessness of Baba’s loss transformed into a clarifying fury, sinewy and muscular; dominated everything. It was an electric rod version of that grief but with a forcefield of destruction with an ever-widening scope. All to say, it ate me up.
But unlike losing Baba, instead of avoidance, I went the opposite way. I bought a television. The news cycle, relentless and endlessly enraging, became a twisted kind of raison d’etre. Every morning till evening, for days and weeks, just like Baba had done for his entire lifetime, I would sit on the edge of my couch, head in my hands and alternate between watching with utter disbelief and cursing in despair and devastation. Countless days, pacing up and down the uneven floorboards of my railroad apartment, hyper conscious of the booms and bombs and screams emanating out of my state-of-the-art speakers connected to my screen and into the hallways of my building. Countless nights, walking in a safe loop up Sixth Avenue onto Cornelia Street down Bleecker and back to Carmine, frantic and at a loss, listening to voice notes from friends echoing identical bafflement. Finishing up my degree at Columbia and focusing on my writing receded quickly into the background and time took on a different quality, forcing all energy for practically everything to just dissipate. Like Baba, I found myself slumped in front of the screen, chain-smoking, heartbroken.
For so many people in New York City and around the world that fall and winter, my life began revolving around marches and protests and talks and vigils and sit-ins, getting me out of the house and into the street. Prior to that I had no history of protesting, no experience in activism, nothing that I could point to as an expression of solidarity beyond financial support for causes that I believed in. And I remember, I remember so clearly trying to ignore the loud and admonishing voice of Baba in my consciousness telling me it is futile. I didn’t want to hear it then and I don’t want to face it now but after every one of those acts of solidarity—ones that absolutely feel futile almost three years into this horror—I would walk home to my little corner of the city, stopping by Qahwa House for a Yemeni chai and a little chat on the bench in front of the bodega, trying to convince myself I had made a difference, even if infinitesimal. I don’t know how many nights I spent like this, indulging in idle people watching, by far the city’s greatest pastime, and tuning into the patois of Arabic and English and Urdu and Farsi, of dialects and accents and regional tonalities, mingling together as droves of people walked past me, that sonic background drowning out a truth I did not want to acknowledge. I don’t know how many times I was momentarily pulled out of a mindless reverie, to find myself locking eyes with a younger guy—they were always younger—and smiling, something of their posture reminding me of Baba, mistaking that flash of recognition as some kind of sign from the afterlife, a signal of his approval. I would shoot out a message to my sisters saying something to the effect that I feel Baba would be proud of me for doing this or saying that, for marching here or chanting there. I did all I could to ignore what he would have actually said with a long and weary shake of his head that spanned the length of time and said everything about his despondency.
By March, I made a decision to pack up my dream and my apartment and my life and leave New York. By the end of August, I was out, leaving America and an unshakeable sense of complicity behind and a once-again shattered heart. As hard as I tried, in the end I had to face the reality that Baba would have told me what he always told me—come back home to where you belong.
Poetry is having “a moment.” Beginning with the first Trump presidency, through the dark days of the pandemic, and carrying into this time of extreme chaos and uncertainty, even sworn poetry-haters (I mean really?) are shaking the dust off English lit textbooks, scrolling the web, and tuning into poetry podcasts in search of the solace and enlightenment that poetry offers. Meanwhile, poets do what we do, writing through the darkness of this dystopian moment.
That’s how my latest collection tic tic tic came into being. I woke up on January 1, 2024, thinking about all that has happened in this short decade. Then, after a strong cup of coffee, I turned to the page to make sense of how to live through this urgent, tumultuous time, and frame it within the long expanse of history. How did we get here? What are living through? And what can we call on? These are the questions I wrestled with as I wrote in the months that followed. tic tic tic wonders if love’s small affections can buffet the storm, and if faith is a last resort or an act of defiance in a wrathful world. I arrived at more questions than answers in the process of writing, yet I came to realize that the human spirit is a persistent creature and that “the quick tsk of hope” is at the heart of our resilience.
Along the way, I gathered inspiration from poets who are responding to the rise of Trumpism, enduring violence, war, racial targeting, technology’s spiraling reach, and the increasing peril presented by the climate crisis. Their books give lyrical voice to fear and anger but also resolve. The ten collections gathered here brim with restive, resistant poems that speak into our moment, and nonetheless shed light on how to keep living with honesty, humor, faith, love, and an extra helping of hope.
The lyric sequences in Deborah Landau’s collection name our vulnerabilities, the soft targets of our bodies and our beings in the spaces we once thought safe. Fear is in the cities and our bedrooms, “Stay off the beach, the street, the plane—.” It takes the shape of leaders and terrorists and a raging earth. If there is any sense of refuge, Landau rips that away line by line: “I’ll antioxidize as best I can/bat away death with berries and flax/but there’s no surviving/this slick merciless world.” These are smart poems laced with, albeit gallows, humor. Yet Landau offers up love and, in the final poem, the hope of “something tender, something that might bloom.”
American hymns and patriotic songs play through Alexandra Teague’s collection [ominous music intensifying] with titles such as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” and “My Country, Tis of Thee” that set the reader’s earworm in motion. The familiar song thrums in one’s head as the poem rings with the discordant tune, “and thee I sing of the sacred into and the clamped quiet/woods of shame bottle spatter and condoms spent…” an imagining of human cries and lives trampled by the industrial beast of our own making. In these poems, something is always out of tune, like the country riven by politics, gun violence, climate crisis and a pandemic. Teague probes this landscape of horrors with playful outrage—turning Americana inside out like a soiled sweatshirt.
In the face of rising political tyranny, Leah Umansky has given us a book of poems that name the tyrants all around us. What these poems discover is that, in being named, the tyrants are diminished. These are poems that march in the street, that chant their resistance with fury and urgency: “gather/gather your good/gather your good appetite/gather your filling/gather your filling/of hate.” These are not poems of solace, they are angry, demanding action, inciting the reader to shout them out loud. Go ahead, run out in the street and rage with the poems from Of Tyrant.
John Murillo speaks to the violence afflicting our communities with the voice of someone who has lived through it. The opening poem describes a moment when the speaker nearly shoots a man, “because I loved the girl, I actually paused/before I pulled the trigger–once/twice, three times–then panicked/not just because the gun jammed,/but because what if it hadn’t.” With his strong sense of musicality, Murillo creates a powerful chorus of voices that serve as witness to racial violence and social injustice in his spectacular crown sonnet, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn.” Within the framework of ars poetica, KontemporaryAmerikan Poetry realizes the role that poetry has in chronicling and illuminating our life and times.
Cyrus Cassells wrote The World That the Shooter Left Us as an urgent response to the “Stand Your Ground” murder of a friend’s father. These poems stare the reader down with their honesty and brutality. They rage against a multitude of horrors such as child sexual exploitation and slavery and what has sadly become the backdrop of our lives, police brutality, political violence, plagues, school shootings. Cassells seems to dare the reader to look away. But we can’t. In the long poem for immigrant children forced into cages, “Icebox,” Cassells asks: “Was it your callous voice/Refusing the herded girls/Sanitary napkins, insisting/Let them bleed….”. Cassells’ invigorating and vivid language stands in powerful resistance to systemic violence and hatred.
What does the world look like after we’re extinct? Jorie Graham has been writing the clarion call as we barrel toward extinction in book after book. With To 2040, Graham brings us poems that are quiet in their warning: “…You there. Wake up. But/nobody’s here,/just the earth.” These poems contain the silence of what’s been lost, what remains, and what survives us. I am reminded of how the birds empty my garden and a quiet descends when the wildfire smoke arrives where I live. Despite, or maybe because of its spareness, To 2040 is a terrifying and energizing leap into the near future that climate catastrophe portends.
Consider Regaining Unconsciousness a missive from the near future, as AI’s sentient soldiers take over, as the light is extinguished from the skies. Yet rather than dwell on the ravished landscape of our own creation, Mullen’s writing surprises with lush lyrical illustrations of the world we live in, “Origami-folded toads/lost in arched lands/where mountain snows might/whet the thirst of desert flowers” while slyly taking it away. Mullen shakes us awake with poems from our broken world delivered with bite and humor.
Rachel Richardson confronts the challenges of raising children in a burning world with a mother’s courage and care. Smother is an embrace of motherhood, in all its challenges and complications. How exactly does one protect and nurture children in the face of catastrophic wildfires? How do you mother a family and a planet? Richardson responds to the questions of our times with poems that sing with heart and humor. In the title poem, smoke is personified: “The smoke never appears in family pictures./The smoke got up this morning and ran a marathon./She came in/first in her age group without trying.” Wildfire smoke may not appear in the family photos, but it is a real and present danger in Smother.
When Hamas terrorists breached the Gaza-Israeli border, slaying and kidnapping civilians, Spruijt-Metz started writing daily poems that chronicle the borders of her emotions and faith. In dialogue with God and biblical Psalms, questions and prayers accumulate like days, poem by poem. Each calling out to the divine from the remove of daily life, “ You get up/every morning,/dress in blacks/and greys, and/write poetry/about the war.” These are poems grounded in the self and aspiring to the spiritual.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has been a powerful voice for the Palestinian people as long as she’s been writing poetry. In the National Book Award-winning Something About Living, she meets the genocidal moment we are in with poems of protest and anguish. Unflinchingly, Khalaf Tuffaha brings the devastation waged against the Palestinian people onto the page and into the reader’s mind,, “We bury our dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home..” And yet offers a thread of hope, “Let the stars fall. I have no idea/what hope is, but our people/have taught me a million ways to love.”
Dream-me is acting all batshit again. Husband is mad, asks why I can’t act normal in his dreams at least? I’m not sure how to respond. Honestly, I kind of like the idea of dream-me pulling stunts. The last time real-me did anything out of the ordinary was when I used the 3D printer at work to make a model of my left boob. I use the boob as a dish to hold keys, paperclips, spare change, etc. Husband says it freaks him out. It’s supposed to be ironic or something, since that boob no longer exists.
Unclear if dream-me has use of both breasts. Note to ask husband.
Apparently dream-me has a bit of a wild side. Which is funny, since husband thinks I’m too passive in real life. Too much of a procrastinator. Let’s make a bucket list! he says. YOLO and all that!He gets out a block of Post-it notes and waits for my ideas. I try to explain that it’s not passivity on my part, it’s survival. (Bad word choice, he says.) Dying is actually pretty exhausting, I don’t know how other people have the energy to do the whole bucket list thing. My plan is just to hang out until the end? Husband isn’t too happy about it. He asks am I really going to procrastinate death, too? I tell him that Death Procrastinator would be a good band name.
In comparison, dream-me is the freakin’ energizer bunny. Husband’s latest dream involves me burning everything I own. I’m sitting pretzel-style on the living room rug with an armory of candlesticks. (So romantic.) I pick up my possessions one by one and singe them over the flames like a real pyro. Birthday cards and sweaters and houseplants. Husband says that dream-me even burns the rug, which technically belongs to him. He’s so outraged by this that he gets up in the middle of the night to check that it’s still intact.
Crazy, I say, though now I’m thinking that dream-me has a point. I mean, no need for the fire hazard—our building alarm goes off even from burnt toast—but I don’t think I want husband and other well-wishers poking around my things once I’m gone. My old diaries, photos, mixtape CDs from ex-boyfriends, personalized World’s Best mugs, sexy lingerie I wore like maybe once—it’s all got to go. Once husband leaves for work, I sit on his living room rug and start bagging it all up. I save only a love letter from husband and some tax documents.
It’s official: dream-me is smarter than I am.
When husband gets home, he doesn’t put his keys in the 3D breast dish, but I let it go. I don’t want to annoy him. I need more info about what dream-me has been up to. Luckily, everybody loves to talk about their dreams, even husband. He tells me dream-me’s wackiest exploits, which are less useful than I imagined in preparing for the afterlife. In the last few weeks, dream-me has taken to biting people as a greeting, hijacking metro cars, and planting plastic gnomes in all the neighbors’ yards. We should make a drinking game for dream-you, says husband with a yawn.
I tell him I’ll put it on the bucket list.
Secretly, I’m hoping that dream-me will send real-me an important message via husband. I haven’t been sleeping much anyways, so I watch him at night. While I’m waiting, I do crossword puzzles and draft semi-inspirational emails for friends and family. It takes a few nights, but finally husband gasps awake and I hit the jackpot.
Dream-you is 3D-printing the world, he says.
What do you mean? I ask.
Like the boob, he says, but worse.
Intriguing, I think, except I don’t really understand the logistics of it. I ask husband to clarify how dream-me manages this. Can skyscrapers and donuts and trees be put through a 3D-printer? Husband is reluctant to give details, turns over and falls back asleep. I mull it over and decide that dream-me is a genius. I could go into my old office tomorrow and start 3D-printing more shit. I’d start with my heart, I think, that would be a romantic gesture for husband. He could put it on the coffee table and use it as a conversation starter.
Next, I could try to recreate the whole world, though I probably won’t have time. (Doc says three months.) But I could at least preserve some things in one-thousand-year plastic for husband. I could even make a 3D-printed dog to keep him company. And before husband snuffs it, he could 3D-print his heart too and set it on the coffee table and there our hearts would remain forever or at least until the sun got too hot and melted them back into red goop. There’s nothing normal about ceasing to exist, I think. But dream-me gets it. In the end, we procrastinate death as long as we can.
Memoir and speculative fiction are often treated as separate spheres, burying the truth that these two genres can go far deeper when brought together. If the mermaid is more potent, more expansive in its possibilities, than either fish or woman alone, then so, too, is the speculative memoir more punchy than either the autobiography or the work of speculative fiction. Like the monsters they feature, the power of the seven books on this list is derived from their very hybridity. There is also a cultural critique at the center of each of these books, showing another feature of this hybrid genre’s power— speculative writing allows questions of this world to be transformed from the frustration of what is to the wonder of what could be. This is speculative writing at its mightiest because it’s aimed directly at realities that require revision, realities that the memoiristic aspects of these books elucidate.
Holding that quality of playing with truth in mind, my book,Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir, tells the story of someone who is and isn’t me, on a surreal journey through a dystopian Brooklyn full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on the subway. This character lives a life that is and isn’t mine—teaching and writing, raising two rowdy kids, dealing with the daily fallout of being a woman, in a world on fire, in a house that may be haunted—when along comes a goblin. Throughout the book, you’re never sure if the goblin is actually there or not. Is it an eccentric, intrusive, slimy metaphor? Or is there a monster in this story? Either way, the goblin is there to provoke this woman to live more fiercely, whatever that may mean for her. I call this book a speculative memoir because it blends elements of memoir and speculative fiction, but also because it speculates on various ways a book could be, a reader could be, a woman could be, the world could be.
As Goblin Mode speculates on how to reinvent the world, the book, the writer, and the reader by way of experimental forms and monsters, so to do these seven groundbreaking books. Most striking of all, these authors use the monstrous to tear apart the bodies of those old chestnuts—“genre,” “self,” and “literature”—and build something entirely new and audacious. Although not all their authors may think of them this way, I consider these books to be speculative memoirs—books that mix the autobiography with the tools and techniques of speculative fiction. Whether it is literal monsters, or more figurative wonderings about what could be, what could have been, how any given story can be radically reimagined because of the way it is framed, these book tell familiar stories in brand new ways.
Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial hymn to hybridityis the kind of book that resists definition. The closest I can come is to call it a memoir for weirdos who love poetry, speculative fiction, and theory (I count myself as one of these, so I’m allowed to say it). Laloo, our resident monster-cyborg, much like the book she inhabits, refuses to stay within the bounds of definition. Instead, she hitchhikes across borders both literal and figurative, creating ornate literary patterns of social critique. Laloo is the artist who refuses to be domesticated so that she can create art, but she’s also tied to biological creation, a baby-mother who gives birth to herself, and becomes a monster just after. Laloo is an immigrant to a nation and world whose narratives don’t include her, so she rewrites them.
In her experimental manifesto, with haunting illustrations from her brother Del, Samatar uses monsters to explore the contours of both imagination and mixed-race experience. She works towards a theory of how monsters have been used when it comes to culture, race, gender, and genre. Samatar recounts calling up her brother one day to ask if he wanted to, “tell our lives through monsters.” Monster Portraits shows what it is to be a hybrid, a monster, a woman, a writer, a Somali-American. This bookoffers the autobiography of how Samatar monsters herself into art, refusing to abide by all the rules that were never written for her.
In this gorgeous graphic novel, Barry uses monsters as section headings to examine the haunting memories that made her. These specters resurface in the form of her demons (ranging from “girlness” to the “Aswang” of Filipino folklore), inventively illustrated through text and image without pinning down any single notion of “truth”—a technique Barry refers to as “autobificitionalography.” Barry zooms in on forms of darkness within herself, the spaces where demons-monsters-ghosts thrive, as she wrestles with trauma and the complexities of growing up as a Filipino American. Special care is given to how monsters have origin stories that render their monstrosity legible, almost predictable, unlike her unpredictable, sometimes violent mother.
Hoang fuses myth, monster, and fairytale to create something all her own with this book. She even examines the process of getting there—transforming a more conventional book to speak in a language of magic-tinged fragments. Using the Chinese zodiac as a structuring device, Hoang explores elements from her life—the diasporic Vietnamese American experience, troubled romantic relationships, the loss of her sister, illness of her mother, and addiction of her nephew. She muses on the “other Lily,” the lifesaving doctor her parents wanted. This other Lily pops up in the book from time to time, a speculative take on who she could have been if she’d followed her parents’ dreams. And in another speculative take that earned A Bestiary its place on this list, the animals of the Chinese zodiac are at times rendered monstrous by human misunderstanding, foregrounding the way Hoang doesn’t feel understood herself. These fables, too, seem to come from another Lily—one who speaks only in parables because that is where she finds truth.
Japanese myth and narrative structure gives this book shape, as do the bestiary illustrations of Lin’s sister, Cori Nakamura Lin. Yet it is, ultimately, a creation all Lin’s own. Lin stresses the power of writing as a speculative form immediately. From that first once upon a time, she makes clear how she will play with narrative, that this will be a writer’s story of monsters, loss, and invention. Lin employs the monstrous as a way of discussing her experience of being both creative and bipolar. She explores mental illness in ways that transcend the typical stories, replacing the more conventional Girl, Interrupted type tale with her own wildly inventive mythologies.
Electric Literature’s former Editor-in-Chief, Jess Zimmerman, uses the lady monsters of Greek mythology to understand her own woman self while moving through a world not constructed for her. Her memoir uses the stories of female monsters to recount attempts to fit into the stunningly slim confines of “womanhood.” Zimmerman reflects on what her life might look like if this sort of monstrous power were respected, but also on how she can rebel by harnessing it, respected or not. Throughout the book, Zimmerman draws provocative connections between monstrosity, trauma, ambition, power, and creativity. She wants you to know that, through the monstrous, “The stories we’re given can be rewritten, reconceived, even redacted.”
From the first pages of Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal aims to rewrite everything from the tropes of so-called “magical realism” to the hero’s journey—which she reimagines as the Migrant’s Journey. She breaks old boundaries, borders, and forms to make room for the immigrant woman’s experience, reminding us why a hybrid approach is necessary when, as she sees it, such things as trauma and magic are intertwined. She refers to the speculative mode as “the reparative imagination” that can go back and right old wrongs, give voice to the formerly silenced and conceive of new ways of being. Whether it’s The NeverEnding Story, Game of Thrones, or The Witcher, Villarreal tells her story through pop culture and its monsters because they are legible in American culture, and she wants her story to be heard.
The symbolic mother is impossible to get away from. Across cultures and throughout history, in folklore, film, and literature, mothers have been given a symbolic weight that serves as an anchor within both the narrative and the family she created. They are portrayed as nurturers: warm and tender, stern and noble, fiercely protective. Their absence creates a vacuum, a vulnerable opening for evil step-mothers, paranoid governesses, bad influences, or vice.
This abstract, larger-than-life mother has the ability to haunt all of us. While writing my debut memoir, Holding,I discovered her role in my own narrative. As an anxious child and a risk-averse teen, I was not the type to get wrapped up in intravenous drug use. And yet. What I’d been after in all of those dopamine blasts, in that dreamy fog of opiates, was not thrills but solace. I was seeking my mother, the comfort and safety she provided when I was an infant, before I was aware of my separateness from her, of the pressing demands of society.
In my book, mother is both flesh-and-blood woman and the figurehead of my anxieties: she is a void, an enigma, a mirror. Sometimes she is not my mother at all but someone or something else entirely—a less-crucial stand-in for the relationship I both desired and denied, one I could test the limits of. Or keep in my pocket, put in my body.
The following reading list is comprised of both fiction and nonfiction books that engage with the symbolic mother. These works push her away and pull her in, stare into her harsh reflections. They acknowledge the gifts she bears as well as the scars she’s left. They attempt to scale her outsize dimensions, to remember, in the end, that she is human.
Bankole’s debut novel follows three generations of women as they navigate trauma, tradition, independence, and desire. Beginning in Nigeria, Esther makes the first passage, leaving her husband despite cultural taboo and social ostracization, to start anew in her own flat with her daughter, Amina. Though Esther herself is headstrong and individualistic, she is unsettled to notice those same attributes in her daughter. After Amina moves to the United States, Esther writes in a letter to her: “I wanted you to be like me, yet walk a separate path. I prayed to see you become who I had hoped to be.”
In New Orleans, two pivotal events—the birth of Amina’s daughter Laila and the landfall of Hurricane Katrina—bring about tragedy and hope, forgiveness and regret, reunion and loss. The Edge of Water is a poignant portrayal of lineal ongoingness, the infinite echoing that’s passed from mother to daughter.
In her searing debut memoir, St. Pierre attempts to grasp the slippery complexities of her mother, a woman whose adult life was bookended by self-set fires—first to her body and then to her home. Because her mother’s undiagnosed schizophrenia was camouflaged in the esoteric language and practices of New Ageism, St. Pierre could never quite see it for what it was. Her mother’s delusions “formed the boundaries of [her] own imagination.”
Through deep examinations of mental illness, spirituality, poverty, and art, St. Pierre reconciles the woman who both protected her and potentially exposed her to danger, who kept their lives adrift and ungrounded as a means of rebirth, not destruction.
British writer Susie Boyt’s first American offering is a study of quiet grief, gentle affection, and steady, watchful hope. In gorgeous, somehow autumnal prose, Boyt tells the story of three generations of women. Ruth’s adult daughter, Eleanor, is a semi-estranged heroin addict whose infant daughter, Lily, is not only exposed to the drug and its hazards at home, but was in the womb as well—spending her first weeks in the neonatal unit on a morphine infusion. To keep her granddaughter safe, Ruth assumes custody of Lily and raises her from the preternaturally wise child she is to the sensible, mature, and caring teenager she becomes.
Throughout the novel, Eleanor rebuffs Ruth’s attempts at family. She flakes out, pulls away, recoils at any hint of intimacy. Ruth chastises her own “forced mildness” around her seldom-seen daughter, which she suspects may be the reason for Eleanor’s feral-cat temperament. “I wished she would hand me a script, a set of instructions, what to say what to do what to feel…. Sometimes I thought the more Eleanor evaded and erased me the more I needed her.” For Lily, her mother’s absence—or worse, avoidance—eventually surfaces as tidy, self-aware rage that she allows herself to feel. It is precisely Eleanor’s occasional resurfacing, her near proximity, that are so difficult for both Lily and Ruth. Not a complete severance, Eleanor haunts the edges of her mother’s and daughter’s lives, reminding them that they are not worth her time or effort. Yet despite the bleak acceptance of this, the story is limned in the soft glow of resilience and beauty.
The works in Kincaid’s slim 1983 collection resist definition. They’ve been described as short stories, prose poems, and essays, but transcend these limiting taxonomies, becoming, instead, words and ideas that stick in our minds long past reading them. I first read “Girl,” the book’s opening piece, in high school. I’ve never let go of its rhythms, its fully-lived advice, its refrain about resisting “the slut you are so bent on becoming’’—both an accusation and admission, the blurring of mother and daughter.
“My Mother” is made up of several vignettes, all of them surreal and vivid, tracing the evolution of a mother-daughter relationship. They illustrate the necessary and normal push and pull between mother and daughter: instruction and rebellion, anger and adoration, longing and rejecting, impressing and repulsing. In the penultimate vignette, the daughter comes to understand what they are to one another. “We eat from the same bowl, drink from the same cup; when we sleep, our heads rest on the same pillow. We merge and separate, merge and separate.”
In her memoir, Carrière takes the reader through a childhood of disorder and neglect amongst the celebrities and freewheeling bohemians of New York City’s art scene. Her mother, Jennifer Bartlett, was a larger-than-life visual artist, not only in her success or by the vast scale of her paintings, but in her singular personality. “She brought her own atmosphere with her wherever she went,” Carrière recalls, “—a cloud of perfume, a cloud of smoke, a cloud of utter fucklessness…. She was the center of attention all the time, but the way she tugged on the spotlight seemed protective, as if she were trying to conceal herself with the glare.”
This hiding Bartlett did—behind her star power, her artistic genius, her unconventionality and over-the-top stories—kept Carrière astray in her own home, unprotected and detached from any intimacy. This detachment found its way into her mind: She suffered from dissociative disorder in her teens, which was further fueled by overmedication, self-obsession, and an inappropriate relationship with her laissez-faire father. It isn’t until Bartlett receives a cancer diagnosis that her godlike enormity comes into correct focus, shrinking to the dimensions of a human, a mother that now needs her daughter to care for her. Though she finds her mother’s change in demeanor infuriating and alien, it is also where she locates a tenderness she theretofore had no access to.
Defamiliarization in art (or ostranenie) is the idea that by making something strange, the viewer or reader will regard it anew and therefore understand it more completely. In this robust anthology, the mother is gazed at with impartial, sometimes clinical curiosity. Removed from her taken-for-granted role in the essayist’s life, she is made strange.
This book is chockablock with literary heavyweights, featuring essays like Carmen Maria Machado’s “Mother Tongue,” in which Machado grapples with the shame she feels around her unrelenting mother, whom she describes as an “immovable, illogical object”, and Alexander Chee’s “Xanadu”, throughout which his mother seems off to the side until her curious near-omission ultimately reveals itself as the center, the eye of a storm created by tragedy, abuse, and guilt. A place where Chee keeps her safe.
Clove, the central character in Bieker’s gripping novel, has a gorgeous, Instagram-worthy life, one she meticulously constructed from lies and facades. She is a wife to a supportive husband, a mother of two cuties, and a minor social-media momfluencer whose trad-lite, woo-ish aesthetic earned her almost 40k followers—but the people who orbit her life know nothing about her at all.
Though Clove’s life has been built around countless secrets (her name is not even Clove) the biggest secret—the mother of all secrets—is that of her mother, who is carrying out a life sentence for pushing her violent husband—Clove’s father—off a high-rise lanai. Now, Clove’s mother has a chance for retrial and ultimately, freedom, but only if Clove is willing to testify on her behalf, an act that would unravel Clove’s entire life. Like Godshot, Bieker’s 2020 novel about a religious cult and an estranged mother, Madwoman is populated with mentors and guardians who stand in the void the mother has left. There’s Christine, the feminist neighbor who hatches Clove’s escape plan; Velvet, the straight-talking matron who runs a de facto boarding house for wayward girls; and Jane, the luminous woman Clove fortuitously meets in a roadside fender bender. Though this book has the movements of a thriller, complete with a satisfying twist, its essence lies in its allegorical rendering of domestic abuse and the lengths its victims will go to for survival—the backstories fabricated, the realities curated, and the men shoved off balconies.
“Are you teaching me how to live without you?” Jeannie Vanasco asks in A Silent Treatment, her new book about the silences her mother imposed when they shared a house together. On certain days, only their smoke detectors were on speaking terms. Some silences went on for a few hours, while others stretched for months at a time, adding up to a year and a half across a five-year period. The cause for the abrupt distancing usually appeared inexplicable or mundane, such as being left out of a household errand or chore, and often were only broken by a medical issue, such as her mother fearing she was having a heart attack before realizing it was actually a panic attack.
In her third memoir, which began as an essay published in The New York Times, Vanasco tenderly, searchingly captures the intimate, often fraught connection with her mother—and implicitly invites the reader to do the same with their own loved ones. Vanasco nods to various research that has been done about silence and power in relationships, including a psychological study that indicates 75% of Americans have received the silent treatment. She tenderly crafts a portrait of her mother, who was born into the Silent Generation during the McCarthy era, the daughter of an especially cruel and physically abusive woman. Vanasco’s mother, who wants everything for her daughter that she couldn’t have for herself, and who wanted most of all to be a mother, is an eager subject. She is perhaps as anxious as her daughter to understand why she does what she does. “She expects me to interpret,” writes Vanasco. “And I interpret. Every day.”
Often reflective, sometimes poetic, the work echoes so much of the pacing we all do in our own heads when it comes to aging parents. A Silent Treatment reads as a plea to be heard—and a vow to listen with generosity.
Jeannie and I spoke over Zoom about female rage, how silence can be both powerful and punishing, and how hard she worked to get Nicolas Cage into the book.
Annie Liontas: Is silence annihilating?
Jeannie Vanasco: So many of us say we want silence. Some people pay a lot of money for it. Silent retreats, quiet neighborhoods, special lounges in airports. It can be a luxury. But it can also be upsetting. There’s that anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. It’s supposed to be the quietest place on earth—so quiet people can hear themselves blink. They freak out. They don’t know how to orient themselves. When I first read about it, I thought, Well, that’s a nice metaphor for my mom’s silent treatment. Her silences were so disorienting I’d often get dizzy listing all the reasons she might be mad. So when silence is a punishment, and it’s from someone you love, and you don’t know why they’re doing it, “annihilating” is a good description. Because you reach a point—I did anyway—where you ruminate about all the ways you’ve failed that person. And the longer the silence lasts, the more ways you can imagine. I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.
AL: You write, “Artists tend to put their fingers in the wounds, in the silences, and in the wounds in the silences.” How do you understand loneliness and silence, and even suffering in isolation, after writing this book for you and your mother?
I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.
JV: My mom isolated herself when she already felt lonely, and at first it seemed so counterproductive. She was hurt that I wasn’t spending more time with her, yet she was choosing not to spend time with me. But when you feel profound loneliness, self-isolation can make sense. You’re showing your pain. You don’t have to deal with words. If finding the right words were easy, I would have met my book’s original deadline. And I sure wouldn’t have obsessed over whether a comma belonged between “wounds” and “in.” But that’s what I often do when I’m stuck with writing: prioritize punctuation instead of confronting the subject matter.
An inability to confront, though, makes for good narrative conflict. It’s often a character’s tragic flaw. If they would just do or say this one thing, the story would end. Had my mom and I confronted the situation sooner, the book would be very different. For the record, my lack of confrontation had nothing to do with preserving a narrative arc. (laughs) I told myself I was giving her space. Really, I was afraid. Her loneliness and suffering were hard to acknowledge, for both of us. And the longer the silence went on, the more I tried to avoid her.
AL: Your mother goes quiet, even cold, when she is upset. When I’m upset, because I’m a hot-blooded Greek, I sometimes get too loud. What does it look like for you?
JV: I used to say, “I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.” Or, “I’m not angry. I’m just sad.” I want to talk through things. But if somebody is being unreasonable and won’t listen, I just apologize. Usually, I apologize. I’m probably afraid to confront the fact that I’m angry, or confront that somebody else is angry, because I want to make people happy.
AL: In your experience or research, does it seem like the silent treatment is often employed by women working in a patriarchal framework that alienates them from their own expression of anger, disappointment, rage? Is there power in silence for someone like your mother?
JV: Silence can be a really effective tool when people won’t listen to you. Psychologists say that women and men use the silent treatment equally, but I wonder if that percentage was different in, say, the 1940s, when my mom was born. Women of her generation—the Silent Generation, appropriately enough—had way fewer rights. So maybe they inflicted silence more, I don’t know. Research into social ostracism, as a formalized area of study, only started in the 1990s.
Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is.
I do think silence was my mom’s way to gain power and independence. She used it on my dad—more than I realized at the time. And after she moved in with me, she used it fairly regularly. She depended on me for a lot, and I know that bothered her. Later, she told me, “You know, I think I was on a power trip.” So there’s one reason of many. I know she had a hard time communicating her anger and sadness. I’m not saying her silent treatment was okay behavior, but context is important. She was in a really difficult situation. She’d retired, sold her house in Ohio, moved in with me—it was a lot at once. On a certain level, I admired how long she could go. She used the silent treatment for six months during the pandemic. This was pre-vaccines. I remember thinking, If anybody makes it out of this alive, it’s my mom. She is a pro at social distancing.
But while silence can be a powerful tool, if you’re repeatedly using it to punish a loved one, you’re alienating them when you actually want a closer relationship.
AL: You talk explicitly about your mother’s agreement—even enthusiasm—about this book, yet you also grapple with the responsibility of exposing her, not wanting to hurt her. I’m struck by how thoughtful and reflective you are in these conversations, and I’m wondering how this project feels genuinely collaborative for you both. Can you take us to those early conversations with her when you suggested the project?
JV: My mom should be the patron saint of memoirists. From the very start, she said, “Write what you need to write. You don’t need my permission. If I were to tell you what to put in or to take out, then it wouldn’t be yours anymore.” When I told her that the silent treatment would be the narrative frame, she responded that [it] was a great idea. She said, “A book needs conflict.” I don’t think many parents would necessarily be that understanding. Still, I worried about her response to being written about. So I used my New York Times essay, which addressed her silent treatment, as a test, and I guess I passed. Her response was, “Seeing it in print, I realize it was kind of stupid what I did.” But then she did it again. (laughs)
A lot of our collaborating has to do with her permissiveness and her openness to answering difficult questions, like, Why are you doing this to me? She said she didn’t know. I think we’re both a bit wary of clear answers, of any story that shows an easy cause and effect. She did write her story out—her life story—for me. And for a while I thought maybe I was going to reconstruct some of that. But then I risked implying: okay, she’s doing this because her mother abused her, or she’s doing this because…And I wanted to avoid reductive logic. Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is. Conventional wisdom is, Wait to write about something until you’ve got enough distance. But I doubt we ever have perspective on our feelings, which is why I prefer to write from within an experience. My experience with my mom’s silent treatment is kind of like my experience with memoir writing. When it’s happening, I’m often miserable. When it’s over, I’ve forgotten how bad it felt. I’m just happy it’s done.
AL: Have you heard from other mothers and daughters after they read your essay in The New York Times?
JV: I have, and that’s been wonderful. Readers have said it helped them feel less alone. But with the essay, I had maybe nine hundred words. With the book, I could address more of the nuances. Just the other day, a librarian emailed. She read an advance copy of A Silent Treatment and said she felt like she could give my book to her mom and it wouldn’t feel aggressive. She thought it came from a place of love.
AL: In addition to traditional methods, you often employ parentheticals to introduce your mother’s voice into the narrative, such as (Mom: you are such a disappointment.) How did you arrive at this structure and how does it function to create not only a longitude of your relationship with your mother, but also allow her voice to interject on the page when she has gone silent in real life?
JV: I remember being really bored by the manuscript. It read as this happened then this happened then this happened. And I had too much exposition. I forget when the parentheticals became a solution, but I remember feeling suddenly excited. Because they offered narrative momentum, texture, a means of transition. Whenever I needed to pivot or make a leap, I could interrupt a scene with something she said and see where it took me. And that was true to my experience. I’d remember her words at unexpected moments. They became intrusive thoughts. And because she wasn’t actually talking to me, parentheticals seemed like the right formal trick to bring in her voice. They could show how she was simultaneously absent and present in my life.
AL: You reference films and television and films, such as The Old Dark House and The Conjuring. How do such texts help you understand or frame your own relationship to your mother, and perhaps other mother-daughter relationships?
I love the challenge of writing out of love.
JV: Watching possessed mothers felt cathartic. In The Conjuring, the mother gets possessed in the basement—my mom was living in the basement—and she becomes horrible to her children. You can’t really blame her. It’s the demon. So, from a child’s perspective, the possession allows for emotional distance. The mother isn’t herself anymore. And as soon as the possession is over, she’s hugging her kids, and they’re okay with it. Everybody’s acting like nothing happened. I was like, Yeah, that’s kind of how my mom wants to act when the silent treatment’s over. Like nothing has happened. Like we didn’t just live out this painful experience. Weirdly, Nicolas Cage helped me frame my mother-daughter relationship. I think he’s a brilliant actor. My mom disagrees. What do I care? We even got into a dumb argument about whether he was handsome. Including it offered some levity. And I think other daughters can connect with that—that urge to argue with your mother just because.
AL: Seeing your mother as you do—in all her complexity, with all she’s lived through—seems like a great gift. Are memoirs, perhaps at their highest existence, both for and about the people we love?
JV: They can be. I love the challenge of writing out of love. It’s hard to do and make interesting. I also think it’s impossible to portray anybody accurately. My mom in the book is like my mom. It’s her and it’s not her. I selected the details. But I tried to write as honestly and lovingly as possible. I hope she sees the love. She hasn’t read it. She’s waiting until after it’s published. She’s the reader I most care about.
Sitting in the sky-blue Chevy Bel Air, he behind the wheel with both his hands on it, a man who took driving seriously, who understood that the weight and speed and thrust of a car are as full of latent danger as a bullet nestled in the chamber of a gun, and she his trusting passenger, not only willing but also eager to shed responsibility in favor of frivolity, which in this moment meant keeping the little dog, Dee, curled on her lap while her eyes freely roamed the landscapes flying by, endless woven tapestries hanging on either side of the black asphalt corridor. It was a cold autumn night in 1961.
They knew how to be quiet together, these two.
But not always, nor even frequently, for each was brimful with thoughts and opinions, and it was in their particular natures to take pleasure in vocalizing these. Both, moreover, had learned long ago when and where to stay silent in order to preserve their own sense of dignity, not to mention their physical safety, and had spent quite enough time keeping their mouths shut and faces impassive even as they yearned to contradict, correct, or at the very least challenge the record in rooms full of white men. Together, then, there was no need for self-imposed muzzles.
Among their earliest joys, these mutual funnels of sometimes suppressed speech, tornadoes of words twining round one another as they sat up late at night in those early days, when he was still married to his first wife and she was trying very hard not to appear to wish it were otherwise. In those white wicker chairs on the porch of the boarding house where they first encountered one another, his family slumbering, they talked about everything under the moon, he offering her cigarettes first, until his case ran out and she told him to hang on a minute and dashed to her room, all five feet of her, elevated another one and a half inches by her sensible, black, thick-heeled shoes. He knew he desired her when she returned unshod, a half-full pack of smokes in her small hand for them to share, but this was nothing new nor particularly alarming, only a measure that he was as much a man then as he had been at thirty and twenty-five and eighteen and sixteen. Desire, anyhow, did not always lead to divorce, so he lit her cigarette that first night and lit one himself and they continued discussing the state of the world and the wrongs they saw in it, and if sometimes she said the kinds of things that he heard in rooms full of white men, well, they were alone on a porch together. Later, after he had divorced his first wife, they were alone in motels together, until, eventually, they were alone under her own roof as often as he could get a weekend off work and then, finally, once they had married and he got the transfer to Boston and moved in with her, they were alone together in the home that was now theirs, shared, and when it was just the two of them, he felt fully within his rights to contradict, correct, and at the very least challenge her ideas. He noted that first night that she did not flinch like other small white women might when he did this, but rather leaned forward as if to shorten the distance between her eardrums and his mouth, her eyes a little narrowed either with the effort of listening or from the smoke.
There was intimacy in this shared silence too, now, only months after he had moved in with her, his second wife, to whom he was, too, a second husband.
They had set out from the Canadian border some hours ago, and it was now after midnight. She wished this brief, belated honeymoon would not end, but there was a storm coming and they had not brought enough money with them for a third night at the motel. She hoped her husband did not blame himself for this. The weekend was his idea, a welcome and romantic surprise, sprung on her when he returned from work in the morning just four days before. Oh, she hoped he was not in a bad mood now. He got mad at himself sometimes, a quiet anger like parental disappointment, his expression similar to how she imagined he must look at his boys if they were up to something naughty or got a low grade at school. He held himself to such high standards, became annoyed when he had missed a turn on Route 3 an hour or two ago. They doubled back and stopped to ask for directions at a restaurant, had ended up eating there, too, and the moist slice of chocolate cake she had gotten sat in her stomach, its weight welcome, sweetness still lingering in her mouth. She shuffled nearer to him on the bench seat—Dee slunk off her lap to the floor in response—and leaned forward to kiss the fat knuckle of his thumb. He did not like taking his hands off the wheel except to shift, especially when it was as dark as all this, which she knew, and so she nuzzled her forehead against his shoulder, just once, quickly, and moved back. He smiled, eyes still on the road, and she knew he was all right.
He was indeed in good enough spirits, although distracted. He was tired, and the hamburger he had eaten hoping it would give him energy had instead made him lethargic, his eyes heavier now. He should have had a coffee, but his ulcer had only recently subsided and he was limiting himself to three cups a day, none later than 5 p.m. He tried to fix his mind on something. The radio was off. It had begun emitting too much static, that gray shuffling noise, in the twists and turns of the highway making its way through the White Mountains. He did not wish to engage in conversation with his wife; he was too tired to feel intelligent, and the road was dark, demanding his concentration. He knew he instinctively glanced at her when they talked in the car and the margins were narrow on this road. It was better not to risk it.
His mind turned over the events of the weekend, the good food and the music, the Negroes he had noticed in Montreal and how surprised he was, never having considered that men of his race might live in such a strange, somewhat exotic place, all that French. Silly, he realized now, driving, as of course Negroes lived all over the world. He had friends in the service who told him about Negro Frenchmen and even Germans, although they had had a bad time of it during the war. He thought again about a conversation that he occasionally found himself having with certain men over the years, a talk that always went the same way, about how they noticed themselves, sometimes, thinking about things as if they were white, with the same advantages handed to them and thus the same ease of bestowing judgment upon others. As if the way white folk talked and lived, their innocence or, more commonly, their willful ignorance or outright racism, had permeated something in them. He and his wife had recently attended a scientific lecture about the blood–brain barrier, a set of selective cells in the brain that form a semipermeable border that only some substances can penetrate. That was what it felt like: the prejudices he saw all around him doing just what they should not do, what he wished he could prevent them from doing, and jumping the blood–brain barrier.
Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge my choice of racial terminology, which in my era is outdated and offensive. But the couple did not live in my era, and this is their story, the couple’s. For their time, and specifically their generation and class, the use of the term Negro was widespread and politically correct. Younger people, students and activists mostly, were just beginning to reclaim the word Black, but this wouldn’t achieve widespread acceptance and popularity until the end of the decade. Not until the mid-2010s did it become consistently capitalized in written media. I’ve chosen to use the terms contemporary to the couple in order to avoid anachronisms.
Language changes. What is widespread or preferred or acceptable changes from one era to the next. The language I use in my asides—preferred and respectful in my era—may well read as old fashioned, rude, or downright bigoted by the time anyone reads this.
His musings were interrupted by his wife asking him to look outside, at the bright star near the moon. Was it moving? He glanced up, puzzled. It did seem as if a speck of light was slightly farther from the bright moon every time he took his eyes off the road. Surely there were no satellites orbiting above New Hampshire, but perhaps, he ventured, one had drifted off course.
She kept watching the speck grow brighter, wondering if it was a trick of their own progress that made it seem to move. The moon hung like a big, beautiful lamp that night, drowning out many of the stars nearest it. The sky looked for a moment like the pictures in a storybook she had read when she was a child, during the days when her mama had limited her to one a day because no one had time to go to the library as often as she wanted, and there certainly was no money for books, not even before the Depression. The book was loaned by a neighbor, children’s stories about the constellations. She remembered so few of them now, but she had for a while begged her mama to stay outside after dark on weekend nights with a small flashlight so she could look up at the stars and down at the book and try to find all the constellations she could in the sky above her. There had not been any moving stars then, never, except when one fell, lucky, and she would make a wish. But the roving light she saw now, one hand nervously fiddling with a blue earring, seemed to be going much too slow to be a good luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.
But the roving light she saw now seemed to be going much too slow to be a good luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.
At her feet, the dog was whining just a little bit. Dee was a good dog, well trained, did not make a fuss when she needed to go to the bathroom, and never went on the floor at home or in the car, but just asked quietly, like this, whether her needs could be attended to. So her owner asked her husband to stop the car, for the dog, but also so she could look at the light, and see if it really was moving.
He stood outside the car, smoking, while his wife walked the little dog down a stretch of highway. He kept looking back and forth up the road, worried that a trooper might come by or a policeman or just a driver out late and bored and looking for trouble.
She took the cigarette out of his hand and smoked it and called him a sleepyhead, for he had not noticed her coming right up to him with the dog, not until she touched him. He could be like that, lost in thought and space, and she thought him almost too handsome in this stoic state. She loved his smile too, of course, even if his teeth were fake. They fit well and looked very natural on him, so that most people did not know.
He stretched once more and put an arm around her shoulders, asked if the dog was all right now, and she said yes, so they climbed back into the car. She settled herself and Dee as he pulled back onto the road. The cold night air and the little walk had refreshed her, and she looked out the windows with renewed interest.
There it was, the same peculiar light movement, and she began to track it again, the comfortable joy of a moment previous turning liquid inside her, sharpening into nervous curiosity. She pointed and asked her husband to look again, and told him he was being ridiculous if he thought the growing light could possibly be a star or even a satellite, so much farther away would it have to be then.
He raised his eyes cautiously. No, she was right, it could not be a star, and he said so, told her that he had made a mistake, that it was simply an airplane on its way to Canada. Yes, he soothed himself as he kept driving, it was just something regular like that, no need to get excited. The turns were getting sharper, and he wanted to pay attention, for there were too many stories in the paper of cars crashing in these mountains, usually when a driver was drunk or fell asleep at the wheel. He did not want to become a story in the newspaper, and he did not want such a pleasant trip to be ruined by his inattention, by his wife’s fixation on this perfectly ordinary airplane.
Still, he wished they would see another car, anyone who they might be able to shine their high beams at to say hello to, maybe even stop for a moment to ask if they, too, were seeing the persistent moving brightness overhead. He knew better than to be spooked just because it was dark, but his wife’s nervousness was putting him on edge. She had her face right up to the window on her side, he noted, keeping watch, and just as he was about to say something coolly rational to her, to himself, he heard her gasp and instinctively his foot hit the brake pedal. When he looked out past his wife, he saw the Canada-bound light, bigger now, as if the plane’s altitude were dropping—which could not be, it had many miles to go before the next airport, why would it be descending already?—and he saw it shudder in stillness that seemed entirely unnatural and change course, no longer northbound, passing them, but reversing entirely from its former direction and heading south. Toward them. After them.
Unnerved, he pulled the car sharply into the next rest area he saw, a little clearing with picnic tables and some trees and what looked like an outhouse tucked sheepishly far back. He got out, and she followed.
She sensed he was rattled, her husband, and that he would not admit it. He had his superstitions, everybody did, whether they copped to it or not, but still, he was a man most often inclined to take the rational route through things. He believed, or tried to believe, that reason would prevail, that he could reason his way into people’s hearts, into legal justice, into equal protection under the law. He was a man who liked to learn, who fiercely sought out experts on matters he did not understand, whether in books or lectures or TV and radio broadcasts. She loved him for this, and for much else, but she also thought his cerebral bent could be rigid, limited, and in this moment knew she simply must shake him out of his stubbornness, for she was beginning to get really frightened now and told him that whatever he wished to call it, it was still there and it seemed now to be following them, and even worse, now that they had stopped, it seemed to be closing in on them.
He shook his head and lit a cigarette for her, handed it over, and lit another for himself. He insisted again that it was a commercial liner, nothing else, but she asked how that could be, since she had never heard of a passenger airplane with a destination reversing its course in the middle of its journey like that. Preposterous. She was right, he knew this, and was glad now that his boys had not come with them on this trip. When he was first imagining the vacation, on his long shift four nights before, he allowed himself an expanded fantasy, one where his former wife could be reached in time, where she would allow her sons to take a day or two off school and take this trip with them. The boys liked his new wife, perhaps because, while she was not as fine a cook as their mother, she did allow them dessert every night.
His boys would have become excited by this roving light. Or perhaps they would not, but only because they both would have been asleep in the backseat this late, after 11 p.m. already. His mind conjured the cozy image of the smaller one leaning his head on the chest or shoulder of the bigger, and another option, of them curled up, toe to toe, sharing the blanket that was always folded in the backseat, just in case the car ever broke down in the middle of the night or in winter and he had to wait until morning for someone to drive by and give him a hand or a ride to the nearest gas station to call for help.
Of course, this image of his sons was foolish; they were teenagers now, one still in high school, the other due to start college in the spring. Yet he always pictured them as younger than they were, missing the prepubescent boys who gave their affection freely, who had not felt the need to posture at manhood.
It was thinking of them, his sons, that brought another idea to mind, one that was so obvious that he almost laughed in relief as he exhaled.
They had visited him for two weeks over the summer—Philadelphia was nearly a six-hour drive away, a longer bus ride because of all the stops, and so their summers and Christmas were the only occasions he expected to be able to see them for an extended period, a reality that constricted his heart when he let himself dwell on it, as he sometimes did during the long nights at work, and which made him desperately unhappy in a way that caused him to nearly, if not quite, regret all his actions of the last few years—but when they had last visited, they did what they had sometimes done when they were younger: went plane-watching. In Philly, he had taken them to the road near the airport, and they would make a game of guessing where the planes were going and listing all the things they knew about the state or the country they were imagining as its destination. He taught them how to tell what designs on the tail belonged to which airline.
As he stamped his cigarette out, he told his wife it was a Piper Cub, surely, some hunters flying around in it who must have stayed out too late and gotten lost and now could not see very well in the dark and were trying to make contact with the nearest air traffic control. But she told him it was not hunting season, which was true, although they could be poachers, of course, and perhaps they were flying at night like this because their flight had never been approved in the first place. She also told him she could not hear any noise, and a Piper Cub would be making some, especially one flying lower, nearer. He suggested the wind might be carrying the sound away; his wife raised her brows at him. The night was still and windless.
She remembered the binoculars she had meant to get out of the car before and hurriedly retrieved them, handed them over to him. He put the strap over his neck; her mouth twitched. She had made fun of him just days earlier for doing the same thing at the Niagara Falls, which they had gone to see on their way to Montreal. He had said the binoculars were expensive. Such a careful man, she thought lovingly even as she teased him for his overabundance of caution, tickling him and making him drop them from his eyes over and over.
Now she watched his face as he looked up, his mouth widening as he squinted. Her heart was pounding, for she had a suspicion, but not one she was willing to voice quite yet, especially not as her husband, who had seemed so relieved only a moment ago, became increasingly agitated. He hated not knowing things, did not take well to the unexplainable. He would think her ridiculous for even considering it. Her sister had seen some years ago one of those unidentified flying objects people spoke about sometimes, more so back then than recently, she thought, and her sister had a good head on her shoulders, children, a husband, a nice home, and plenty to be taking care of without inventing silly stories. So, yes, she had believed her sister, what her sister had seen, while her rational husband clearly had not, although he claimed to be agnostic on the topic. She knew she should not bring this up now, not when he handed her the binoculars with a slightly shaking hand and lit another cigarette from the butt of the last one.
She brought the lens up to her eyes and was disoriented for a moment by the view of the stars, but then saw it—there!—flying in front of the moon. She could see its shape silhouetted at first, but she kept with it and soon saw some colored lights go on and off along the sides. It sped up and she lost it, then found it again and noticed it was slowing down as it passed in front of the moon again. Because she was prepared this time, she focused closer on it and could see its shape, longish and curved, with narrow bands of flashing lights, red and amber, green and blue. She asked her husband if he could see them too and he repeated that it must be an airplane, it had flashing lights on it like they did, and when she interrupted to ask where its tail was, where its wings were, he said it clearly was not a commercial airliner or a hunter’s private vehicle but rather a military plane of some kind.
She suddenly realized, as she handed the binoculars back to him, that their little dog was sitting at her feet and shivering as if cold or terribly afraid, much like when they arrived at the veterinarian’s office, the site of shots and other indignities. Taking pity on the sweet thing, she brought the dog back into the car, soothing and shushing while she waited for her husband, who was taking another look at the sky, cigarette hanging between his lips.
As he watched it, he wished again for some other nighttime driver to pull off the road, bear witness to this matter. He had read once about the phenomenon of folie à deux and was frightened to think that he and his wife might be going mad together. As he watched the plane—or whatever it was, for he had to admit that he had never seen any aerial vehicle change directions as fast as this one did, nor had he ever heard of any that could change altitude or speed as abruptly—he strained to hear something, anything, other than the soft rustle of leaves from the trees sheltering the picnic tables in the clearing nearby or the crickets singing in the grass. He had turned the car motor off, and although he could hear its mechanical clicking as it cooled, there was no whir from above, no slight buzzing, not even a hum. He had the distinct notion that the flying vehicle, which was moving back and forth still across the moon but seemed unwilling to go off in a direction that would take it away, away, away, was looking back at him.
Watching him?
Ridiculous.
No, he had to shake himself free from such nonsense. He got into the car and told his wife they really should hurry on so they could get home. At this rate, he grumbled, with all the stopping and starting, they would get no sleep at all. He repeated that the thing outside was likely a military plane, perhaps something they were not even supposed to see, and maybe that was why it was sticking close to them, to make sure that they would not tell anyone. His wife asked how anyone that far away could possibly know what they were going to do, and besides, they could pull off at the nearest gas station and make a phone call and whatever it was flying up there would not be able to stop them. He gripped the steering wheel tighter and suggested that perhaps they were playing games with them, then, some air force hotshots that got their rocks off by trying to frighten gullible women in the night. He knew at once that his voice was too loud, that he had given away his own fears, and regretted his lost temper. He hoped she took his anger as part of his usual ambivalence about the military, in which he had served, and which had torn his face open and killed too many of his brethren both here and abroad. He was a patriotic man, proud of his service, but he could not always put away his conscience, that voice that asked what good it was, fighting wars, especially wars that had nothing to do with them.
He had to admit that he had never seen any aerial vehicle change directions as fast as this one did, nor had he ever heard of any that could change altitude or speed as abruptly.
They drove, uneasy with one another in a way that felt new and vaguely itchy, as if their bodies were wrapped in sackcloth rather than their sensible garments of cotton and silk. He knew the car was going far too slowly for his stated impatience to get back to Portsmouth, but neither he nor she mentioned it. She kept her eyes fixed upward, through the windshield, occasionally leaning against the side window. Cannon Mountain was ahead, a looming shadow with a bright peak, the lights of the eatery and tramway terminus looking like a Christmas tree in a dark room, only the angel still switched on.
When the moving light disappeared behind the mountain’s silhouette, he pulled the car over again, breathing a little easier, waiting silently with his wife to see whether it would appear again. He hoped terribly that they would soon be laughing at this strange tension, attribute it, quite rightly he thought, to their tiredness and the long trip, their eagerness to be back home.
She clutched the edge of the seat as he started onto the road once again, her breaths a little shallow with anticipation. She had to admit that she was excited, even eager to experience something out of the ordinary. She desired this even after a trip that was as out of the ordinary for the two of them as it could be, for it was their belated honeymoon, and while neither of them was in their first blush of youth, nor was this her first marriage or his, it was still special to be alone with her beloved for days at a time without the imposition of work or friends or civic duty. She wished fervently that this could be enough; it was all she had ever really and truly wanted, to be desired by a faithful man and be his intellectual comrade and make a life together that was as unselfish as they could make it while also enjoying the fruits of their labor every once in a while, as when they had been sent that wonderful photograph of President Kennedy, signed by his own pen, thanking them by name for their work stumping for him in New Hampshire.
They breathed together, the dog panting a smile up at them, and he started to drive again. For a few quiet moments it seemed like whatever had been happening was now over.
But it wasn’t, of course. If it had been, I would likely have known nothing about them. The vast majority of us, after all, know little to nothing about the vast majority of us.
It was not over, he realized, a pulsing pain beginning to throb in his gut. The bright object came out from behind the mountain as they surpassed its breadth, and rather than returning to its earlier position directly above them, it remained to their right, dipping lower than ever so that it was obscured on and off by the trees.
They passed a small sign, illuminated by the high beams, that directed interested tourists to take a right for Flume Gorge. Flume. It sounded like a conflagration, a sudden and violent plume of fire, and he gripped the wheel harder. There were few lights on the narrow, curving highway. He slowed further, distracting himself with the sensible fear of a speedy driver coming round the bend without care and plowing into his wife’s pretty car. Fluming.
She watched for the bright object, a thrill trapped in her throat. She said nothing when they drove right past a motel, VACANCIES lit up in neon above a single yellow square. She imagined the night manager inside, feet on the desk, trying to stay awake with the paper or a small TV set. How glad the clerk would be to have the night’s boredom interrupted! But they did not have enough cash with them for a room, and besides, as frightened as she was, she wanted dearly to see what would happen next. Her whole body tingled with the fear, the adventure. She could not believe any real harm would come to them. Nothing so very bad had ever happened to her, even though many things had threatened to over the years. She had survived diphtheria, two bouts of pneumonia, a likely unnecessary appendix removal—the doctors were all so hot for appendix removals in the ’30s—and she believed in some quiet corner of herself that she was a little bit blessed, that God watched over her safety.
Around the next bend, the trees thinned out on the right, and when she looked through the binoculars again, she felt the early stirrings of what, much later, she would recognize as awe: the thing above was huge, round. She could clearly see now two rows of lit windows. Her heart raced. She told her husband he must stop and look, he must, and reached for his arm, tried to convey the urgency she felt, the need to share this moment. It was like nothing else he had ever seen, she told him.
They were in a stretch of emptiness just south of Indian Head, a kind of summer campground where two imitation wigwams sat empty in the middle of the clearing. He could picture his boys, when little, running in and out of the structures, could imagine them playing war games, holding sticks and yelling Bang! at each other, or mingling with the children of other families and putting together an impromptu baseball team. But it was dark and deserted now, cheerless, and she was still clutching his arm. He stopped, to humor her, and took the binoculars.
He left the car running and leaned against its soft, comforting vibration. The plane that was not a plane hovered at an angle a hundred yards away and maybe two hundred yards up, a treetop’s worth above those standing silent and tall below. His wife demanded to know if he saw it, her voice shaking. He was scared too. He knew planes well enough. He was a rational man. He understood that there were things the military did not share with the populace, but this—this hovering silence, bladeless, wingless, its lights all wrong—it seemed to be far beyond the capabilities of what he knew of modern engineering.
The thing swung over the road from one side to the other, and he followed it through the binoculars, his mouth dry. Small fins silently emerged from its sides, each with a red light at its end, and the two rows of curved and lit windows tipped toward him, as if the thing was looking at him, at them. He shut the car off and walked away, crossed the rest of the road, walked onto the dewed grass as if compelled; he had to get nearer, had to see it better.
In the car, his wife bent over to pet their dog with a trembling hand, murmuring nonsense comfort words to it, to herself. When she sat back up, she fully realized just how spooked her husband must be, because he had left the vehicle right in the center of the road, between southbound and northbound lanes. Anyone coming from either direction might smash right into them. Worse, the man took the darned keys with him. So while she could not move the car, she could keep her eyes peeled, watch the road while her husband watched what she was beginning to allow herself to call a UFO, at least silently. She would call her sister tomorrow morning, once she had slept.
In turning her head back and forth between the front and back windows of the car, her gaze caught something moving. Her husband. His figure blurred into the darkness and density of the trees, the field he was crossing, the shadow cast by the now enormous object above him. He looked so very small beneath it.
She screamed his name, and the dog yelped at the sudden loudness of her voice. He probably could not hear her, she realized, so she slid over to the driver’s side, to the open door, and called out for him again, again, again.
Whether or not he registered a sound in the distance, he would never remember later. He was too focused on what he saw above him through the binoculars. There, behind the windows, were a dozen figures crowded together, all wearing uniforms, black and shiny. They did not look quite right; something was wrong with their skin, with their eyes, those eyes that seemed to meet his gaze. For a wild moment, he felt he had the upper hand—after all, they did not have binoculars, so surely he was seeing them much more clearly than they could see him.
All at once, they stepped away as if called by something, someone, and moved to a wall full of lights and buttons behind them, which reminded him of a telephone switchboard or an electrical panel. Only one figure remained at the window. The husband’s fingers moved, trying to focus the lens on that face, a face he could not reconcile with anything he had seen before. It seemed to be getting closer, the face, the craft, descending. He felt powerfully that something terrible was about to happen.
That he was going to be taken.
Captured.
In a panic, he turned and ran to the car. Get away, get away, get away, he must get away, he thought, his entire body shivering despite the mild still air, even as he sprinted faster than he had since basic training. His bowels shifted in him, his heart raced, his ulcer pulsed. He heard his wife shouting for him, saw her coming out the driver’s side. She slid back in and babbled as he thrust himself into the car, put it in gear, and started driving, but he could not register any of her questions, so full was his head with the word run, so full his mouth with the word capture.
The best nights of my misspent youth were spent at rock and roll shows. I’d been addicted to the radio since early in my childhood, and as soon as I had a learner’s permit and a job that gave me permission to drive after hours, I went to every concert I could get to, even when that meant driving hell for leather through four states to get back home before my parents noticed how long I—and my mother’s car—had been gone. Usually I went alone; my taste ran in the opposite direction of most of my friends, who were busy swooning over boy bands and pop starlets who had started out as Mouseketeers. But I never felt a stronger sense of belonging than when I was surrounded by strangers who loved the same music I did, even when I stuck out like a sore thumb, too young and too female to be at the gigs I was going to. I craved it like a drug, that feeling of being swept up in a collective sonic transport where, for an hour or two, all my excruciating self-awareness and teenage angst dissolved.
I never kicked the habit, and instead only went deeper down the rabbit hole as I grew older, finding ways to get as close to the action as I could, whether it was as a rock writer, an unofficial roadie, or just a die-hard fan. (I once booked so many different gig tickets in one week that my bank assumed it was fraud and canceled my credit card, forcing me to call and explain that yes, I had intentionally purchased concert tickets for seven straight nights in a row.) Sadly, none of the talent I worshipped rubbed off on me, and my own attempts at music-making fell woefully short. I had a knack for a different kind of composition, but even as I carved out my identity as a writer of fiction, I kept coming back to live performance. My first novel, If We Were Villains, drew on another artistic obsession of mine, the works of Shakespeare, which captivated me with their lush musicality. But I’d never read a novel about the Shakespearean actors that captured that world as I knew it, so I decided to write it myself.
My next novel, Hot Wax, sprang from a similar place. While there are countless biopics and books about music out there, not many captured the transcendental experience of a truly pulse-pounding live show that kept me coming back seven nights a week. The ones that did stuck with me, like the best of those concerts, long after I finished them. The power of performance is tough to capture in prose, but these eight books showcase how triumphant and transformative live music can be.
Durastanti’s semi-autobiographical novel follows the daughter of two deaf parents as she navigates a chaotic upbringing divided between a small town in Southern Italy and New York City. Her early life is defined by her parents’ shared disability, the unique sonic landscape she and her brother—who are both hearing—occupy. Her mother loves to watch live concerts on TV, moved by the performances she cannot hear, prompted to ask the young Claudia, “What is music like?”
Their extended Italian family is inherently musical. Claudia’s grandfather and his friends try to share the experience with her mother by dancing tarantellas and stomping on the floor, “hoping the vibrations would sail up her calves, ripple in her hips, crash against her ribs.” Claudia’s mother eventually sours on music, while Claudia herself becomes a devotee, moving to London as a young adult in a doomed effort to join the fading punk scene. She too is disappointed, realizing she has arrived too late and moved there for the wrong reasons. But music still has enormous influence and becomes a defining feature of her identity outside of a family where there was little room for her.
Gruen’s claims to fame are many. He befriended John Lennon when that was tremendously difficult to do, had a rare window into the fraught home life of Ike and Tina Turner, and toured Japan with KISS—to name just a few. His biography doubles as history of rock and roll in the twentieth century, as he grows up and grows into his considerable talent alongside many of the stars he documented. What made Gruen a great photographer was his “performance IQ”: because he loved live music, he had an impeccable instinct for when and how to snap a photograph that might capture the spark of the performer in the flesh. It’s impossible not to get caught up in his excitement when he’s seeing David Johannsen and the Dolls for the first time, or to feel his trepidation on the bus with the Sex Pistols when he wakes up from a nap to learn Sid Vicious nearly slit his throat to steal his boots. Gruen got closer to the action than anybody else ever did, and it’s a thrill to go along for the ride.
This slim volume is difficult to define—is it memoir or autofiction or lyrical snapshots of a certain place in time? It’s all of those things and more, an intimate history of Jess Hopper’s transformation from Midwestern punk to respected rock critic. Hopper and her friends careen around Chicago on their bikes, speaking a strange pidgin English of slang and song lyrics as they bounce like pinballs from gig to gig, club to club, misadventure to misadventure. If you didn’t have a youth like hers, it makes you wish you had, because no matter how grim and grimy it gets—stealing cigarettes and getting high on Theraflu and dancing in bars where the scene looks like “Chuck Klosterman’s birthday party, staged at a Sandals resort”—every page crackles with life. Night Moves reads like my own teenage diary, if I had ever kept one, the passage of time marked less by the calendar than by album releases and DJ sets and early Hold Steady gigs and mixtapes swapped with friends. Music—not just heard but seen and felt—is the defining feature of Hopper’s unusual memoir; she’s uniquely qualified to do it justice.
Nick Kent, like Bob Gruen and Jess Hopper, got up close and personal with the best and worst of the music business. He started writing for NME in the early 1970s when he was barely a legal adult, and before he was thirty had toured with some of the biggest acts in rock. At the end of ’72 he observes, with characteristic dry wit, that “Just eighteen months earlier, I’d been a gangly, girlish figure in a school blazer… Flash forward to just three weeks ago though, and I’d suddenly gotten all brash and extrovert, dressed up like a glam-rock Christmas tree and snorting cocaine with Led Zeppelin at 3 o’clock in the morning in some four-star hotel.”
Kent’s transformation at the mercy of live music is extreme; he finds and then loses himself in catastrophic fashion, succumbing to a crippling heroin addiction in the company of pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and getting beaten half to death with a bicycle chain by his former bandmate after a brief stint as a member of the Sex Pistols. It’s a minor miracle he survived the bloodbath of the hard rock heyday, but that makes him one of the best raconteurs to tell the tall tales of that era.
Total Chaos is just that: total chaos. It’s one part interview, one part memoir, one part scrapbook, and one part museum exhibit. The Stooges’ legendary live shows are documented not only through Iggy’s colorful firsthand accounts, but with photographs and gig posters and newspaper articles and other artifacts from the Godfather of Punk’s coming of age as an artist. What I love most about this book, though, is how Iggy’s performance continues through the interviews; he’s liable to break into song in response to Gold’s questions, offering the reader a rare glimpse inside the demented mind of one of the greatest frontmen of all time.
Like Durastanti’s autofiction, Vonnegut’s first novel is a meditation on what happens when human beings lose access to live music. Eerily prescient, especially as generative AI threatens the lifeblood of artists and the survival of manmade art, Player Piano follows a star engineer at the Ilium Works, a tech company which has nearly succeeded in replacing all human labor with machines and human intelligence with supercomputing. Dr. Paul Proteus, the story’s reluctant protagonist, begins to question everything after encountering the titular player piano in a bar that caters to the “unskilled” laborers who live on the wrong side of the river. The instrument’s uncanny imitation of human performance—which “stop[s] abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy”—sends Proteus spiraling into an identity crisis which makes him rethink everything he’s ever worked for and question the wisdom of handing the very things that make us human over to machines.
This is a coming-of-age novel like no other. The ten-year-old narrator, Molly, lives in a Quaker commune in the wake of a fiery tragedy until the arrival of dirt-biking ex-con Jeanie turns her whole world upside-down. Molly’s infatuation with Jeanie is inseparable from Jeanie’s heavy metal anti-heroism, and soon she takes off for Chicago to prove she, too, is a badass and—quite literally—raise the dead.
But the headbanging soundtrack to Molly’s metamorphosis is just one musical element in this raunchy, rollicking carnival ride of a novel; music becomes a secondary language for many of the characters, who fall back on sung verse, spoken lyrics, and even tap dance when more pedestrian forms of self-expression fail them. Wilson’s prose is no different, moving to a weird, wild music entirely its own.
John Wray’s sixth novel hits as hard and fast as the howling guitars the book’s resident pop-culture preacher, Leslie Z, waxes poetic about from the very first pages. Stranded in the socio-cultural wasteland of the Florida Gulf Coast in the ’80s, Leslie is Kip Norvald’s unlikely gateway drug to the world of “bangers.” His first experience seeing a band called Death live is instantaneously life-changing. “I can feel it in my teeth, man,” he says, before they even make their way into the building. Cast out by every community he’s ever tried to be a part of, Kip finds an unlikely chosen family with the Black bisexual glamazon Leslie Z and the mysterious Kira Carson, a girl “with an actual death wish.” Wray’s outcasts and outsiders find themselves and each other in the tarry mosh pits of death and doom which fueled the furor of the Satanic Panic. Wray writes with an insider’s intimate insight, and brings every concert scene, like Frankenstein’s monster, wondrously and horribly to life.
Laura van den Berg: By now we’ve all published, or will soon publish, the paperbacks of our most recent books, which means we’re all around a year out from hardcover publication. If you could go back in time, what would you tell the 2024 version of yourself?
Katya Apekina: I love this question because it invokes these versions of ourselves talking to one another. The idea of a coherent self is an illusion. I’m always surprised when I stumble on a note or something from my past self. I think I am still too close to Mother Doll coming out to have really useful advice for my previous self, but I will tell her that some stuff will be exciting, and some stuff will be disappointing, and that I’ll get to meet a lot of interesting people–which, when I was writing the book during the isolation of COVID would have been the dream.
Gabriella Burnham: With Wait, I was very nervous about how to talk about Gilda, the mother character who is deported early on in the novel. I worried that most readers wouldn’t want to pick up a book about such a politicized topic, even though I knew it was a topic that needed the emotional nuance that fiction offers. I even suggested we remove mention of the deportation from the copy on the back of the book so as not to dissuade readers (my agent convinced me this was the wrong move).
In the year since Wait has been published, the situation around ICE in the United States has become increasingly dangerous. There have been several ICE raids on Nantucket, where Wait is set. Conversations around abolishing ICE have resurfaced in the mainstream. I wish I could remind my 2024 self that it’s our job as writers to push the boundaries of what’s considered palatable social discourse.
Emma Copley Eisenberg: I love all these answers and retweet them and will only add that if I could go back in time to talk to the version of myself before my debut novel Housemates was published, I would tell her to keep it weird, or maybe make it even weirder. Some readers have been delighted and some confused that the first person narrator of the novel is not the main character; she’s talking from the side about two young queer people that she maybe stalks, maybe imagines, maybe…who knows? My only regret, if I have one, is that I could have made this narrator EVEN WEIRDER. Also, I’d tell myself not to schedule more than two book events back to back – you think it will work and it could, but only if you don’t have a body that has needs and might get sick!!
The more I paid close attention to the one-on-one human connections I was making, the less I fixated on specific press hits or looking at numbers.
Julia Phillips: Oof, yes to all of this, and an especially emphatic yes to the mention of a body with needs that might get sick. The early-in-2024 version of myself expected this year to be ruled by book and publishing concerns, but it actually ended up being defined by body and medical concerns, so I’d tell my past self that in the midst of all this exciting book stuff, it’s always worth it to care for one’s physical being—to make sure to eat well and sleep well and go to doctors’ appointments and take medicine. It was easier than I realized for me to lose track of those things in the midst of professional fun, stress, and travel.
LVDB: I published the book before State of Paradise, a story collection,in 2020, so of course everything was virtual. I was really excited to be able to travel irl for SOP, but when the moment arrived I found that I was a little uneasy doing front-facing stuff (events, interviews) in a way I hadn’t been before. I’m not sure if there was a little pandemic life hangover or if it was because this particular book contains so much personal material, but there was an internal tension I hadn’t felt before. I really wanted all my events to be group events, because I love a good party and collaborating with writers I admire, for sure, but also I think I was trying to hide a bit. So don’t hide! would be one thing I’d tell my 2024 self. Also, I had forgotten how much a few weeks on the road can take it out of you. If I could go back in time I would have blocked off more rest in my schedule.
Priyanka Mattoo: I actually got the exact piece of advice that 2024 me needed from my husband. He told me, just before the publication of my memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, that I was going to get a wave of love for the book, but it probably wouldn’t be in the shape I imagined it would be. That was incredible insight. I think in this wildly unstable publishing climate it can be easy to get caught up in where attention for the book is coming from–for whatever reason it feels so make or break with a debut, like am I going to get this immense avalanche of love and sales, or is my career over before it started–and it reminded me to pay attention to the shape the love was actually taking–the reviews and press were lovely, but notes from readers, notes from awkward far-removed acquaintances who picked up the book and read it, and were touched, in some way, were the crest. The more I paid close attention to the one-on-one human connections I was making, the less I fixated on specific press hits or looking at numbers.
KA: Based on when our books came out, we were probably all writing them during COVID, right? How do you think the pandemic influenced the books and the writing?
GB: My debut novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone, published in July 2020, and I think that experience shaped Wait more than writing the book during the pandemic itself (in some ways quarantine was the ideal condition for writing a novel, which is a long, solitary process). 2020 was a period of deep political unrest in this country; many authors were questioning the slow pace of book writing as an effective tool for change, even as readers were turning to books to learn, to make sense of our moment, to fill the time. It was also a very strange year to be marketing a book–most of us felt too ashamed to ask people to pre-order our books when so many were dying from or struggling with COVID. From the book business perspective, I know there was a big push for publishing houses to buy Black and POC authors, but then by the time their books came out years after, the initial enthusiasm flagged. Basically, it was a very contentious and unusual time to navigate the publishing world, especially as a first-time author, and it taught me that ultimately, we cannot predict what will happen when our books enter the world. That period made me appreciate the process of conceiving, writing, and editing a book even more.
ECE: Yup yup, when I wasn’t watching Love is Blind or collaging during lockdown, I was writing Housemates, and the writing continued into seasons 2 and 3 of the pandemic (2021, 2022). I had started writing the novel in 2018 but writing fiction in my little room while people were out there in the streets dying of COVID or working to save peoples lives put the whole enterprise of what I was trying to do in stark context and not in a good way. What is the point of doing this? I wondered many, many times. So I put that question into the novel; Housemates is maybe most about the question of why make art at all, and if art can save your life. I was writing the novel to actively figure out my answer to that question, and so I gave that question to the narrator and made it her quest to solve over the course of the novel. For a while I couldn’t figure out why the most common response to reading Housemates was people telling me it made them revive some art or craft practice of their own, but when I think about it now I do know – it’s because the book is a twisty argument for the kind of aliveness and the kind of presence making art requires of us. I felt about 50% less dead when I finished writing the novel than I had felt before writing it.
LVDB: I don’t think State of Paradise would exist had the pandemic not happened. The novel takes place in the aftermath of an unnamed sickness that is distinct from Covid (this sickness has a speculative edge) but / also SOP is very much about what I did during the pandemic: return to Florida, where I grew up, and live there, surrounded by my family, for several years. This was a massively difficult time and also ended up being one of the most beautiful, transformative, surprising, and healing periods in my entire life. There was no way to not write about it. But at the start of 2020 I had plans to work on an entirely different book. The pandemic changed the course of my life in a day-to-day sense–as it did for all of us–and also altered the path of my work. I actually found this pretty humbling, as a person who has a lot of plans; all of a sudden I was in the thrall of this unexpected and paradigm-shifting moment in time, as opposed to following the design I’d envisioned for myself.
JP: So much of what you all are saying here matches up with my experience of this book: the blown-up plans, the scrambled path, the transformed work, the shocking more-alive feeling that came with writing it. Because of the pandemic, I came into this project with so much more desperation and came out of it with so much more joy that I ever imagined was possible before.
KA: I remember writing Mother Doll while I was hiding in the attic from my child who was not in school. I was taking these mediumship classes over zoom, as research for my novel. It was these guided meditations that I was doing in the cramped attic room, and it was an escape. At one point in the pandemic we drove across the country and I took care of my grandfather. I’d visit him in the hospital and he would dictate his memoirs to me into a recorder. He just wanted to talk about his early childhood. He would talk at me for hours, and this feeling of receiving another person’s story was also a big plot point in my book that I was writing at the time. The heaviness of being this type of receptacle. He died and I arranged his funeral, and then we went back to LA and I finished the book. I think there were a lot of books that were written during COVID because people were at home, and writing can be an escape or a coping mechanism.
PM: Like Laura, I don’t know if I’d even have this book if not for the pandemic. I was screenwriting just before, and then the TV/film sales machine abruptly stopped (and then we had the WGA strike). I was home with the kids, and had very little time to write, but still felt the urge to get stuff out, so I wrote a few essays that became op-eds for the NYT, and then a piece that landed in The New Yorker. They were all about my itinerant childhood and my displaced Kashmiri community, and there was a tipping point when I had published about ten in quick succession–they were pouring out of me–that I knew I had a book. I sold it on proposal, via zoom meetings. And man, was I grateful to have a reason to squirrel myself away during the zoom-school years. I’ve blocked most of it out, but not the energy that writing gave me.
GB: I want to ask about money! Most people, I think, know that when an author publishes a book, they receive a sum of cash for that book (“an advance”). But many people may not know that the amount of money you receive for your advance directly correlates to the marketing budget for your book. If you receive a huge advance, the publishing house will pour more money into making sure your book is a hit. The books that get the most money are positioned to make the most money. On the other hand, if you receive a huge advance, the risk of failing to meet sales goals might be higher. How do you square this with the personal work we do as writers, typing away in a word processor day after day?
ECE: So much to say!! Basically yes, publishing is capitalism so the more they pay for a book the more they are incentivized to try to make back their investment by pushing that book. I’ve written before about how this system impoverishes readers, as readers are then only going to hear about maybe 20 books a year and these will be the ones that publishers want you to hear about not because they think these books are the “best” but because they think these books will do well as objects under capitalism. This stuff matters, materially and culturally, as I want to live in a world where I hear about and read more books than just the ones deemed profitable.
But also I know enough to know now that I really can’t control how much my books sell for, how much my ideas or my humanity is valued in the marketplace. I can control how I interact with and talk to readers of my books though – we are living in a moment where authors can talk directly to their audiences in ways that were previously unimaginable. Ideally this kind of direct communication goes hand in hand with in-house marketing efforts that amplify the book on a bigger scale, but I think some of the successes I’m most proud of for this novel came directly from connections I forged with readers independent of my publishing house. I can influence the narrative of what people think my book is about – I’ve done that with Housemates via making original video content about the book, investing effort in a Substack that tells my audience what I want them to know about the book, and the ways I talk about the book at events.
LVDB: I agree that the only solution is to write the things we must write–our obsessions, our terrors, our loves. I worry when students talk about writing to the market, because it’s not a fixed target; it’s always shifting. It also seems like such a narrow lens to be looking at the world through. We have little control over the value the market places on our work, or the moment a book will be published into. But of course knowing this stuff and then living it out in the context of a capitalist system are two very different things.
I published my first book with a small indie press, for very little money, and I loved a lot about the community at that moment in time–there was little expectation of being profitable. If you sold a thousand copies you were, like, amazing. I did a lot of events at friends’ apartments. I crashed on a lot of couches. I was happy for friends who sold their first books for huge amounts of money, but that level of visibility and the attendant stresses seemed to belong to a different universe. My press didn’t have a marketing department or a publicity team. The additude was very DIY and let’s-try-shit-and-see-what-happens.
I’m grateful for the support I have now, especially editorially–I am lucky to have worked with two outstanding editors who always pushed my work towards its best self. But I also kind of miss that indie energy. Traditional publishing is at a moment where they recognize a lot of the usual models aren’t working in the way they once did and yet there can be a real reluctance to experiment. There’s a lot of entrenchment. I think it’s useful for writers to understand where we simply have very little control, which can be a helpful form of release, and also to understand where we do have agency. I appreciate the way you’re speaking to the latter in your response, Emma: how we can shape the way our work is described to readers, how we can connect with readers directly.
KA: I think after you see how things work a little bit from the inside it doesn’t get any less baffling. Why are some books pushed over others? It’s very rarely for artistic reasons. Most journalists don’t even read the books they put on the lists they compile. The books that get hyped, that take off, it seems like a confluence of factors that one can’t control, but also, most of the time, it’s not an accident. That’s why it’s maddening when you’re the writer, because on one hand it feels like it’s outside of your control, but then it also isn’t entirely, and that loop can make you nuts. Of course it’s somewhere in the middle–there are things you can do, but hard to know what, if any impact they will have, but I guess ideally you just do everything you can or want to do and then move on. It is helpful to think in terms of a career rather than about individual books.
I think some of the successes I’m most proud of for this novel came directly from connections I forged with readers independent of my publishing house.
PM: As a former Hollywood agent, I need to point out that I find the sales/PR/marketing aspect of publishing excessively confusing–at least Hollywood is super open about how things are marketed and sold. Because I also know a lot of authors who got nice advances and then felt their books were completely ignored? I think we have a system that makes a lot of good product, and is then at an utter loss as to how to sell the crap out of it. From what I can see, marketing spend (for non household-name authors) seems actually to be allocated after the book catches on fire via pure luck. Basically I don’t talk to a lot of authors who are happy with how their books were taken to market, and the joke I make is that yeah Hollywood makes its messes, but book people are supposed to be the smart ones, surely we can figure this out?
GB: I hear that too, Priyanka– even authors with sizable advances end up feeling disappointed in how their books are marketed (and yet, it is still true that an author who gets a six or seven figure advance will receive way more attention than an author who gets a five figure advance). I think this speaks to the consolidation of the market. There are so few places to publicize and market books, and the places that seem to “work” are celebrity book clubs (impossibly thin odds) or going viral on BookTok (also impossibly thin odds, and highly unpredictable). Basically, even a Big Book can hit a limit in terms of publicity channels, and in the end we’re all relying on a big heap of luck.
JP: This is my favorite subject, Gabi. But, yeah, I don’t know if there is any squaring the two: the arbitrary and capricious capitalist machine on one hand and the art-making we do on our own on the other hand. In this moment of my career, it feels like the only way to exist with these irreconcilable things is to talk as plainly as possible about how they do (and don’t) work, treasure the luck we get, not blame ourselves for the luck we don’t, and keep typing.
LVDB: On that note, I have a follow-up question! It feels like we’re in a moment, in publishing, where the landscape is really shifting. There is a lot less space in terms of review coverage, which has been true for a while, and also the things that would normally supercharge a new book (a glowing NYTBR review, an NPR interview) don’t seem to be impactful as they once were. On the flipside, new doors are opening (as you noted, Emma, writers have more pathways for speaking directly to our audiences). I’m wondering what discoveries you made about connecting with readers: approaches that turned out to be more impactful than you’d anticipated (or vice versa)? Things your publishers were a little reluctant to do that turned out to be really successful?
KA: I’m so curious what other people will say about this. I am not savvy about this stuff. When strangers write to me about my book I write them back, but it’s always sort of strange–since it’s a one-sided intimacy. But I find it moving to know that what I wrote helped someone or made them feel seen. When I think of the book more as an act of service than some extension of my ego, it makes it easier to do things for the book.
I don’t have an impulse to write a newsletter, to share my thoughts or ideas in that way, though I think it’s such a nice and direct medium, and maybe that could change. For my first book, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, for the book event, we had a drive-in reading–it was very LA–people drove up to this beautiful park on a hill, and we put a radio transmitter in my friend’s jeep, and I did an interview and reading from my car, and people listened in their cars, or from radios, sitting in the park. It was actually pre-covid, but it would have been the perfect social distanced event.
ECE: Damn, I love the sound of that book event Katya! Oh to be in a park on a hill listening to you read! It’s so true – reviews, even an NYTBR review, do not move the needle anymore because so few people read them, a bummer indeed. I am not trying to say “look on the bright side” because there IS no bright side – I want more carefully considered criticism and more places for people to talk about books rather than less – but I do think that the places that do move the needle now are more democratic and unexpected and that this state of affairs is remaking the industry in some generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment (advance) as the sole determinant of a book’s sales. TikTok, Substack, and literary podcasts are the places that can make a difference where I’m seeing the most interesting and serious literary criticism – long posts about a single book, direct to consumer cultural criticism magazines like The Metropolitan Review, and long TikTok or Instagram videos analyzing the structure of a novel. Two things that were unexpectedly impactful were a single video from a wonderful, taste-maker BookTok account (which did not come out of nowhere, but came out of about a year I spent learning and engaging organically with interesting literary booktokers) and being featured on Virginia Sole Smith’s Substack and podcast, Burnt Toast which happened because my book interrogates body size and diet culture and so was a topical fit for that pod. When people come up to me at events and say they learned about my book, it’s almost always from one of those two places.
JP: Emma, I’m so impressed with your long engagement with BookTok and the different ways you directly engage with your readers! Your description of that one tastemaker video and your appearance on Burnt Toast as “unexpectedly impactful” rings true to me—that some aspect of this landscape is determined by long-term work on the author’s part, which can then wind up in surprising connections and unanticipated results. I was amazed this past year to see how some of the relationships I formed with readers around my debut, five years ago, grew to be newly meaningful with this publication. People I met then, sometimes only once, showed up patient, generous, and invested in my continuing career. It meant the absolute world to me. I didn’t anticipate that connecting with folks in a bookstore five years ago would forge a relationship that would last to the next book (and hopefully beyond!)
PM: If anyone ever figures out the answer to this, let’s clone them and put them in charge of publicity for every book. I truly have no idea what was effective or not! I thought I could figure it all out, but I did not, and trying to make sense of it was making me anxious. So I took a deep breath and thought about how I wanted to celebrate my book, had some lovely DIY-type events in cities where I had a lot of friends, and did a bunch of book clubs and readings, and a couple of festivals. Then I got back to writing–both the next book and my newsletter, which is small by design. Maybe this is a boring answer but it’s the one that keeps me sane.
When I think of the book more as an act of service than some extension of my ego, it makes it easier to do things for the book.
GB: Like literally everything, the book media landscape has been remade in large part by algorithms that drive engagement (Substack, Tiktoks, podcasts, Instagram reels etc…) While I do agree it has evened the playing field in some ways and opened up new possibilities, every author now has to decide how much to share about their personal lives for the purpose of selling books. I was kind of stunned when in a review of Wait in NPR, the critic parsed out which aspects of my novel were fiction and which parts were taken from my actual life, all based on an interview I did with my publisher. Even memoirists feel this push–I have several memoirist friends who say, “I wrote everything in the book– why do I have to keep finding new ways to say it to a front-facing camera?” The answer seems to be that your personal life feeds the algorithm (way more than a book cover does), and if the audience connects with you as a person, then they are more likely to buy your book. It’s a mixture of social media voyeurism, a dearth in rigorous book criticism, and perhaps an unintended consequence of the OWNVoices movement (i.e., prove to me you are qualified to write this novel about X group of people by revealing your own personal history and background). That doesn’t totally answer your question Laura, I’m realizing; this is more to piggyback on everyone else’s answers, which are spot-on and I co-sign each one!
LVDB: Emma, I’m so interested in what you’re saying about how the industry is getting reshaped in some “generative and genuinely interesting ways that have the power to disrupt the old model of initial publisher investment.” It does feel like we’re in the midst of a real shift in terms of how readers find their way to books. It’s exciting to see new spaces and pathways opening up.
ECE: Totally, and I also hear what Gabi is saying. It’s such a tough double bind. I recently taught a class about “diving into the wreck” of fiction, aka how to embark on a new project when everything in the world screams “who cares?” and how we as writers carve out a space of belief and of possibility. How are you diving back in, into your next project, or into something else creative? Or are you not/what are you doing instead??
LVDB: Truly a question for the ages! At this point in my life there are few things I believe in more than the power of story. And I don’t mean this in a hokey “literature-will-save-us” kind of way (I do not think it will!). Because story is so fundamental to how we understand ourselves and our environment. If our own internal story is fucked, we’re going to be operating at a big deficit. Something will always be a little misaligned. If a nation’s self-narrative is fundamentally dishonest it’s going to be hard for that society to move toward real justice and equity. Stories can reveal the world to us in powerful and important ways, and they can also be dangerous–so many people are out there weaving stories that warp reality for their own profit. I think it’s the artist’s job to do the opposite, to say something true. That is a kind of foundational thing I come back to. I am nearly always working on a story of some kind. It’s how I process being alive.
KA: It seems like a question of faith. For me writing has required a lot of faith and what at times felt like magical thinking. Will this all cohere in the end into something? And then, after that, will I be able to shepherd it out into the world? If you start thinking about it too much, it can feel hopeless and discouraging. Better not to look down, to keep moving forward. When everything DOES cohere, and the novel clicks into place, it’s like a very satisfying sensation I feel physically. I don’t think too much about “who cares” as long as I care. I’m usually writing to understand something, a behavior or way of seeing the world that is different from my own. It’s driven by a curiosity, and requires a presence or empathy that feels like some sort of religious fervor? I don’t know actually, since I have never had a religious fervor, it’s just what I imagine it would be like–because it does feel like I am given access to something divine, and it’s hard to find that space, that portal or whatever you want to call it, but when you are in it, and it is carrying you along somewhere, it feels amazing and suddenly things feel alive and pulsing with meaning. All of this is great, but sometimes it is too great, and it takes me too far afield of my life, and I find it hard to toggle back and forth, to be present in the actual world. I don’t know, I’m making it all sound very woo. I started another book, but I am not working on it currently, because I am ghostwriting something else to make money.
JP: It is very woo! Art making is magic! Creating something that wasn’t there before—connecting to something greater than, outside of, beyond ourselves! I agree wholeheartedly, Katya, that it’s not necessarily meaningful to me whether someone else thinks this activity is a sensible or meaningful or worthwhile way to spend my time, whether someone else cares. I care. I’m deep in another manuscript and it’s thrilling to me. Creative work makes me feel human and alive.
I think it’s the artist’s job to do the opposite, to say something true. That is a kind of foundational thing I come back to.
PM: Maybe it’s because I came to writing late, and was so eager to get here, but I start a new project the second I hand one in. I just handed in my next book, am wrapping up a screenwriting thing, and then I have a proposal for a third book I need to pull together. But also, the process of diving into another project is wildly different for me as a nonfiction writer, because I’m not world-building and harnessing my imagination to craft people out of thin air. A new project starts with observing, thinking, reporting in detail on the things I see/read around me, and a book-shaped narrative comes from patterns and connections I make while I’m engaging in daily life. I didn’t exactly set out to write about myself, I like to write about the human experience, and I’m the closest human I can investigate without being rude. I used to worry that focusing on memoir and personal essay would reveal me to be indulgent and ridiculous, but then I saw that the more specific I could get about my life and feelings, the more it opened up conversations with people who were feeling the same. I was a profoundly lonely child, and this has been the remedy.
And I, too, fall into the pit of “what is the point,” but if the goal of art is human connection, and that’s what we most need in this moment, then… the work is the point. When I’m flailing around about the state of things, I give myself the time off I need to tend to my family and myself. But I find, more weeks than not, that I am itchy to come back to writing, even just as a way to process everything that’s going on. And then of course, there’s the spite. Maybe it was because I didn’t get to be a writer for so long (I was agenting and producing until my late 30s), but I have a backlog of things I’m dying to write, and I’m not letting the end of the world stop me.
GB: If we as a people have learned anything in the last, I don’t know, 100 years, it’s that, to change, we need a movement built across disciplines and styles, and art is a central part of that constellation. My “who cares?” comes more from the story itself and less from the act of writing, which I gave up apologizing for a long time ago! I’m getting better and better at sharpening my instinct around which are stories worth telling and which aren’t. I totally agree with what you said, Laura, about how stories are used to mystify and obscure reality (let’s look at the American Dream mythology, for example), and so it’s especially important to tell stories that are specific and true, as Priyanka said. It may be that novels are not always the right form for the moment, and I’m trying to get back into journalism for that reason. But, novels are what I love to read and write most, they make me happy, and that’s important too.
ECE: I recently went to a talk where a very smart older woman writer listening carefully to the excellent answer of her conversation partner and then when the attention turned to her, she said “Yes, it’s that.” I have nothing to add. Yes. It’s all that you have said!
JP: Let’s try to project ourselves forward: as we leave the hullabaloo of this particular publication period behind, anything you want to tell the 2026 version of yourself? What would you like to say to the person you might become a year from now?
LVDB: I’m working on a novel called Ring of Night that’s tentatively scheduled for 2027, so by next year I’ll be sliding back into the pre-publication gear (lol what). I’d like to encourage my 2026 self to boldly try new things, with the understanding that deciding something is not for me doesn’t mean I failed. It was just an experiment! Also: I normally have a sequence of books I’d like to write in my mind, but I don’t know what my next project is beyond Ring. I’d like for my 2026 self to see this open space as a beautiful quiet field to roam around in, trusting that the next project will emerge in its own time.
Teen me was pre-med, and pretty miserable about it. We’ve come a long way, and we have to remember to enjoy it.
KA: I love that, Laura. A beautiful quiet field. I hope to be wandering in it soon too. I guess that’s what I would tell my 2026 self–to remind her to roam around and think and be less reactive.
ECE: (Un)fortunately I am already back in pre-publication gear as you say, Laura, since my next book of fiction, Fat Swim, will pub in April 2026. I feel (at this moment! Ask me in six months!) strangely calm this time. I never thought I’d get to write one book, let alone three. All the systems that once gave us feedback on if our book is good, if it “succeeded”, have crumbled (see above) so I feel this time that I am publishing a book into a kind of open clearing. The clearing has weird blue-ish grass and trees you don’t recognize and is filled with fog and no one can see anything. So what I would tell my 2026 self is to do a little dance in that clearing. Dance dance dance, because no one can see you anyway.
PM: I would like to remind myself to slow down. I always think I’m going to learn to do this without reminders, and then I get overwhelmed or frazzled, short with the family, puzzled about my work, wondering why things aren’t working or why the world is frustrating me so much, and I wish there were a more complicated solution than just take a breath and slow my brain and body down, times infinity. I hope you’re slowing down, future me! Faster is never the answer!
And also that cliche of—- what is it? The teen version of me would freak out, seeing what dreams I’ve achieved? I try to have some perspective when I’m disappointed in my work life. Teen me was pre-med, and pretty miserable about it. We’ve come a long way, and we have to remember to enjoy it.
GB: Yes to slowing down, Priyanka. At the end of 2024, I was churning out a new novel at the speed of light. Some of that energy was genuine enthusiasm for the new project, but I think most was pent up drive from the book publication year. I didn’t want to be talking about my books anymore; I wanted to be making them. When 2025 hit, my energy came to a grinding halt. I had thought I’d have a new draft by the summer! Lol! Not even close. And guess what? That’s not only OK, it’s totally necessary. The book will be better if I take my time, let it develop. Remember that, 2026 self. It is OK if the book isn’t where you thought it would be. You’ll be busy reading Laura and Emma’s new books anyway!
Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026.
Katya Apekina
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film “New Orleans, Mon Amour,” which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.
Gabriella Burnham
Gabriella Burnham is the author of the novels Wait, which was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and was named a Vulture best book of the year, and It Is Wood, It Is Stone, which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Burnham holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph’s College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and the Verge. She and her partner live in Brooklyn, NY with two rescue cats, Galleta and Franz.
Julia Phillips
Julia Phillips is the bestselling author of the novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Priyanka Mattoo
Priyanka was formerly a talent agent at UTA and WME, as well as Jack Black’s partner at their production company, Electric Dynamite. Priyanka co-founded EARIOS, the women-led podcast network, and co-hosted its critically-acclaimed beauty/wellness podcast, Foxy Browns.
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture, and The Hairpin, and her film work in festivals from Sundance to Cannes. She was raised in India, England, and Saudi Arabia before moving to the U.S. in high school, and holds degrees in Italian and Law from the University of Michigan.
Priyanka is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, and her piece How to Extract a Mother’s Rogan Josh Recipe Over Zoom was noted in Best American Food Writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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