“What’s Mine and Yours” Navigates the Boundaries of Family and Race

Posted on by Jennifer Baker

I was lucky enough to read an early draft of Naima Coster’s second novel What’s Mine and Yours in February 2020. I was halfway through my pregnancy, and I saw everything through the lens of impending motherhood.

What's Mine and Yours

In the pages of What’s Mine and Yours, I found myself drawn to the central and complicated mother figures, Jade and Lacey May, who are both fighting for their children’s futures in drastically different ways. The narrative moves back and forth in time, starting in 1992, but what holds the storylines together is a county initiative to integrate students from the east side of town, which has a predominantly Black community, with the predominantly white west side of a town in the Piedmont of North Carolina. The integration is the narrative catalyst—but this deeply affecting book is about so much more. Coster tells the story of two families stitched together through circumstance and choice. This is a tender, fearless examination about love, legacy, and the bounds of family.

Naima Coster’s debut, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Last year, she received the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor and her sophomore effort continues to look at the connections between family and trauma. Over the course of a few days, Naima and I chatted about anti-Blackness and racism, motherhood and loneliness, writing Latinx characters, and how we make sense of our losses in life and in our fiction.

Crystal Hana Kim: How did you come up with this premise?

Naima Coster: I first thought of it after listening to “The Problem We All Live With”—two episodes of This American Life reported by the brilliant Nikole Hannah-Jones. She covers the integration program at a school district in Missouri—the one that Michael Brown attended, and I was so moved and challenged by her work. She includes audio footage of a meeting where white parents oppose the integration efforts, as well as the response of a Black girl who is in attendance and looking forward to the opportunity the integration will create for her. It left me wondering about how the effects of integrating a local high school would ripple through a community. What would happen between parents and their children? What would be the conversations around the dinner table? At after-school rehearsals? What tensions and intimacies would be created? How would the integration challenge the way people see themselves and what they’re entitled to? I had two characters I’d been thinking about—two mothers—and I decided to bring them and their stories into this situation to see what would happen.

CHK: Your novel also features this confrontation between Black and white residents. How did you decide to approach the racism and anti-Blackness inherent in the white residents’ opposition to the high school integration proposal? Did Hannah-Jones’s reportage influence the way you approached this subject matter? 

NC: I was definitely thinking about all the coded language that is used to circulate the same old, racist ideas. I heard some of it on “The Problem We All Live With,” but I’ve also heard it my whole life—at school, at work, on the news, at parties. At the town hall about integration in the novel, Lacey May grandstands about how much she’s fought for her girls in order to argue that her kids deserve something that other kids don’t. She brings up this idea of merit as a way to reject the reality of her privilege. She believes she’s gotten everything she has through her own character and individual effort, and she thinks it’s right that other families have far less. Other parents at the meeting talk about being colorbind or that they don’t see race to dodge the implications of their position. They suggest that the worst thing you could do is call somebody racist and manage to make it seem as if they’re the ones being persecuted. It’s very gaslighting and strategic. 

CHK: I’ve experienced that gaslighting time and again in my own life. On the opposite side of this integration debate is Jade, who fiercely advocates for her Black son Gee to attend Central High. How did you view Lacey May and Jade when writing? 

The question I’m always turning over in my work is, ‘How do we live together?’ And the answer to that question is shaped so much by what we’ve inherited.

NC: I think about my characters always in relation to one another. They aren’t who they are in a vacuum. When I create characters, I am trying to get a handle on the web of complicated interpersonal dynamics that have shaped who they are. With Lacey’s daughters, the Ventura sisters, I thought a lot about how the three of them relate to each other and to each of their parents. And with Jade and Gee, I thought a lot about their relationships to themselves and how that contributes to the trouble they have connecting as mother and son. They’re both carrying so much and have lost so much. As a writer, I’m very interested in trauma, largely because I live with it every day: I often feel limited by things that have happened to me or are a part of my family story, but I’ve also figured out and am figuring out ways of surviving and reckoning. The question I’m always turning over in my work is, “How do we live together?” whether that’s in a marriage or in a high school or in a city. And the answer to that question is shaped so much by what we’ve inherited.

CHK: Lacey May is white, and she insists that her three half-Latinx daughters are white. This tension brought up interesting questions in the book about what it means to be a person of color, the relationship between race and ethnicity, and what it means to be Latinx. How did you decide on the Ventura sisters’ background? 

NC: I identify as Latinx and yet I am constantly perplexed by the meanings of Latinidad, the boundaries it draws, the ways it’s constructed. The Ventura girls created an opportunity for me to parse through many of my own questions. It’s not uncommon in my Caribbean and Latinx family for relatives or siblings to all identify differently and present differently, and this is true also of the sisters in the novel. Noelle is white-presenting, Margarita appears ethnically ambiguous, and Diane is brown and regularly seen as Latina. But the way others see them doesn’t always align with how they see themselves. Noelle, for instance, strongly identifies as a person of color. Just charting the sisters’ movement through the world and their relationships to one another, I got to ask, What’s it like to be Latinx in North Carolina? What does it mean to be Latinx the further you get from the source of that heritage—the language, the parent, the place? When we say someone is white and Latinx, what are we talking about—their ancestry, their privilege, their presentation in public? Which public? At which point of time? Does it matter how they self-identify? What are the points of solidarity and shared experience between Latinx communities and other communities of color? The points of tension? 

CHK: You’re working with a larger cast and a longer time span than your first novel. How was writing this different from the first? Did you have strategies for keeping track of all these lives? 

How would integration challenge the way people see themselves and what they’re entitled to?

NC: The process for What’s Mine and Yours was wholly different from Halsey Street. I spent about two years thinking about the novel before putting any words to paper. I thought about Jade and I thought about Lacey May, and I thought about the premise. Since I knew I had such a large cast—the book includes nine points of view overall—I spent a lot of time writing about each character, their preoccupations and desires, before I started drafting. Also, this novel spun out unexpectedly from a short story I’d written, “Cold,” about Lacey May struggling to keep the heat on for her daughters while her husband is away. Although it has nothing to do with the integration plot, that story gave me a set of themes for the book: motherhood and loneliness, rifts within families, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our hardship, and how parents set out about securing their childrens’ futures, and the costs to both them and their kids along the way.

CHK: I love when a short story sparks new currents of thought that can then be expanded in novel form. You mentioned motherhood and loneliness. As a new mother myself, I was deeply drawn in by this theme. How has motherhood impacted your writing, if it has at all?

NC: I finished the book and sent it off to my agent a week before my due date! So, it was this interesting process where I wrote the book while I was pregnant and then I rewrote it while my daughter was a baby. First, I’ll say, that I can’t recommend being on deadline for a book during the first year of motherhood. It was very stressful, and I often felt squeezed. But rewriting the book while I was in the thick of new motherhood was really interesting. I had a much deeper sense of how difficult the postpartum period can be physically and emotionally, and how the needs of mothers are so often made invisible by society and often by the people nearest to them. I was able to use all of that. And every time I sat down to work on the book, I had to confront the tension of wanting to be with my daughter and also wanting to tend to myself through writing. I think that tension is something all the mothers in the book must face. How do I look after my children, how do I make sure they’re set up for a good life, when I also want to tend to my own life and desires? How do I do that without support or without good models for what it means to love yourself and to love a child at the same time?

CHK: A week before your due date! Congratulations. That is a feat. You mentioned “the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our hardship.” How does this play out in your novel and why did you want to investigate this idea?

The two families in the book have suffered tremendous losses. And they create narratives to make sense of what’s happened to them.

NC: The two families in the book have suffered tremendous losses. And they create narratives to make sense of what’s happened to them, who they are, and to find reasons to keep living. The story Jade tells herself is that no matter how much she and her son have lost, their futures don’t have to be ruined. It’s a story she tells herself out of love and also fear. Lacey May tells herself the integration is jeopardizing her children’s future because it’s easier for her to focus on that imagined threat than to deal with the ongoing instability of the girls’ father and how that affects them. And, like many people who have benefited from systemic racism, she wants to believe she’s rightfully earned everything she has. And then there are the children who learn to see themselves one way as kids and carry that view into adulthood. Diane sees herself as a peacemaker, so she tries to hide parts of herself as she grows so as not to make waves. Margarita sees herself as unloved in comparison to her sisters and so she tries to make herself remarkable, impossible to ignore. And Noelle feels a lot of rage and disapproval toward her mother, so it’s painful to admit the way she winds up mimicking some of her choices and behavior. If you’re friends with anyone for long enough, you begin to see that the things they say about themselves out loud don’t always map onto what you know of them. It’s intimacy that uncovers those contradictions and sticky parts. I try to create that intimacy with my characters, to write them in a way that the reader becomes like a very good friend, who knows all their bullshit and inconsistencies, but remains close to them anyway.

CHK: It seems like the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our hardship is directly tied to the tension of “rifts within families.” As adults, Gee and Jade have a strained relationship, as does Lacey May with her daughters. This fracturing between parents and children was also present in your first novel Halsey Street. What draws you to this theme?

NC: I’ve always felt alienated from uplifting platitudes about family because they haven’t felt true to my life. And I know so many people for whom they don’t ring true either. I suppose in my fiction I’m always trying to lean into some of those discomfiting realities—that home isn’t always a safe place, families aren’t always close, people who love each other aren’t always able to reach an understanding. I’ve been grateful every time I’ve read a book, whether fiction or memoir, in which family relationships are complicated, unstable, or strained. And so I try to be honest in my own work about how hard it can be to be in a family. 

We Can’t Believe Survivors’ Stories If We Never Hear Them

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

When we started sheltering in place at the beginning of the pandemic, in a burst of energy and optimism I haven’t experienced since, I started a social distance book club. I selected Lara Williams’s debut novel Supper Club, which I’d recently read, because I thought a book that centered on women gathering in person would offer some vicarious comfort in a time of so much loneliness and uncertainty. The novel is about Roberta, a young and somewhat lost woman who forms an intense friendship with a woman named Stevie, a quirky artist who is everything Roberta is not—brash, self-assured, magnetic. Together, they form a supper club, a space for women to eat as much as they desire. “What could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?” Roberta muses.

Over the course of the novel, the reader gets glimpses into Roberta’s backstory: her father left when she was young, she was raped by an acquaintance at university, and she was in a relationship with an emotionally and psychologically manipulative older man named Arnold. What seems, on premise, like an almost indulgent tale of food, friendship, and female debauchery, is in fact a story of women convening in the wake of trauma to create a safe space. 

Toward the end of the novel, years after her breakup with Arnold, Roberta agrees to meet him for lunch. In a cafe, in a particularly characteristic move, Arnold mansplains the dangers of using the label “feminist.” When the server arrives with their food—a watercress soup for Roberta and a bánh mì for Arnold—something shifts. “Can I have that?” Roberta asks. “Your sandwich. Can we switch please? I don’t want this soup. I don’t know why I asked for it.” Williams elaborates:

I lifted up my bowl and handed it over. Arnold received it because he had no choice and watched as I lifted up his bánh mì and deposited it in front of myself. I wrapped both hands around it and took a large bite before he could protest. I felt the tiny slices of chili deliciously tingle my lips. I made a full-bodied sound to demonstrate my pleasure. Then, with my mouth full, I began to speak.

“You must be really embarrassed,” I said. “You must be really embarrassed you just explained feminism to me.”

Roberta has not avenged her rape—nor is there any way to undo the toll that such a violation wreaks on victims—but she has regained power, even if only by taking a sandwich that wasn’t hers to take. Though I didn’t realize it during book club, stories of women reckoning with their experiences of rape would feature prominently in my pandemic-induced year of rest and relaxation.

“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift croons in a song she released during the pandemic. “What a shame she went mad.” In this song, titled “mad woman,” Swift explores the concept of “madness” in both its gendered definitions of “angry” and “crazy.” Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, and Rebecca Traister, to name a few, have explored the power of women’s anger, and countless others have documented the historical tradition of dismissing women as “hysterical.” This sort of labeling is nothing new, and one of my friends and I refer to “crazy” as the “c-word,” a particularly offensive insult when it comes from a man. Yet it’s more than just offensive; it’s dangerous, as it discounts women’s credibility.

Cassie, the protagonist in Emerald Fennell’s recent film Promising Young Woman, spends her weekends pretending to be drunk, going home with men, and surprising them with her sobriety and a stern talking-to—and sometimes more than just a talking-to—all as part of a vendetta to avenge her best friend’s rape and subsequent death. Much like Supper Club, Promising Young Woman is a story of trauma that could be misread because of its candy coating and playful premise. 

It’s in this place of mistaking one type of madness—anger—for the other—insanity—that we further endanger women. If they’re crazy, we don’t have to believe them.

Juxtaposed with the film’s hyper-saturated hues—a neon-signed coffee shop and an old-school diner, Cassie’s painted fingernails, rows of brightly-colored pastries—and a saccharine soundtrack that includes Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind, we see a barrage of misogyny from men and women alike. Cassie is constantly dismissed as crazy. She’s called psycho. She’s called a sociopath. She’s called “a crazy fuckin’ bitch.” In response to being called insane, Cassie replies, “I honestly don’t think I am.” It’s in this place of mistaking one type of madness—anger—for the other—insanity—that we further endanger women. If they’re crazy, we don’t have to believe them.

Male vengeance, on the contrary, is the stuff of superheroes, something with a rich history and a mega-industry of its own. How many people wear a bat cape while they seek revenge? a friend recently asked, and it’s a great question. Men seek vengeance, while women are perceived as suffering from a bad case of PMS. Though we frequently see women’s rape and bodily harm on screen and in literature, what we don’t often see is women’s anger in response to such violations. And this erasure of rage can paint both the trauma and the victim’s reactions as “unbelievable.”

When we discussed Supper Club’s bánh mì scene in the social distance book club, a cis-hetero man in the group comented that this scene in particular—but also the entire novel—read like a woman’s revenge fantasy. He said this like it was a bad thing, as if it was so unbelievable that women would gather to eat like this. As if it was so unbelievable that Roberta would take Arnold’s sandwich. As if any of this was less believable than, say, a man developing superpowers after being bitten by a spider. Perhaps Supper Club might seem more believable if we were not desensitized to women’s anger in the wake of gendered violence. I imagine that the rarity of such moments explains why the man in our book club was dubious, and why everyone else enjoyed the novel. For the rest of us, Supper Club satisfied our desire to see angry women reclaim their power. Though her rapist is never punished, Roberta takes back agency by flipping the “make me a sandwich” script. 

Now, when I think about the reactions of the various members of the book club, I consider WHO statistics about the prevalence of rape. If the global average (more than one in three women) were to apply to a book club of ten women, I wouldn’t be the only victim of sexual assault in the Zoom room. But as we discussed Supper Club last April, I wasn’t considering myself a victim of sexual assault. Instead, I was merely a reader who was buoyed by Roberta’s newfound agency, even if it took the form of a stolen bánh mì.

About a month ago, I watched Michaela Coel’s limited series, I May Destroy You. Days before my weekend binge-watch, I’d signed a contract with a literary agent, a milestone I’d been envisioning for years, and I wanted to spend the weekend catching up on good TV. AlI I knew about I May Destroy You was that it was about the aftermath of a rape, and it came to me highly recommended by a friend. 

In the first episode, Arabella, a young Black British writer, realizes that she’s been raped at a bar, but she isn’t sure by whom because she was drugged. Arabella grapples with the emotional, personal, and professional fallout she experiences in the wake of being raped. There’s an investigation, there are horrific flashbacks, and as a Black woman, Arabella faces the intersecting forces of sexism and racism.

A few episodes in, when Arabella has sex with a new partner—already difficult for her in the aftermath of her rape—her partner, Zain, removes the condom during intercourse. I thought you could feel it, he tells her when she learns he’d removed it. That condom, he tells her, it was just so uncomfortable.

The next episode opens with Arabella in Zain’s bed, suggesting that the two have begun seeing each other regularly. Moments later, while Zain showers, Arabella tunes into a podcast and hears a story about another woman’s experience with non-consensual condom removal (also known as “stealthing,” the victims of which can be people of all genders). In that moment, Arabella understands: Zain has sexually assaulted her. She immediately leaves Zain’s flat, and it isn’t until she’s back in the police station following up on her earlier report of rape that she learns that Zain’s actions qualify as rape not only morally, but legally. At a writing summit that night, where Zain, also a writer, is present, Arabella acts on her anger and announces:

Zain Sareen is a rapist. He took a condom off in the middle of having sex with me. He placated my shock and gaslighted me with such intention that I didn’t have a second to understand the heinous crime that had occurred. I believe he is a predator… He is a rapist, not rape-adjacent, or a bit rapey, he’s a rapist under U.K. law.

Though this moment seems like a win for Arabella and other victims, it’s a moment of false victory. Over the next few episodes, Zain is “cancelled,” but then his book is published under a female pseudonym. Meanwhile, Arabella’s life continues to unravel. After all, she has been raped not once but twice. In the words of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently described the way the insurrection on the Capitol triggered her past trauma from being sexually assaulted, Arabella’s trauma “compounds.” On top of the horrific violations Arabella has experienced at the hands of men, she struggles with writer’s block. She loses her agent. She loses her book deal. She is consumed by social media, by her newfound role as a victims’ advocate.

Though I May Destroy You already felt relatable to me as an aspiring female writer, it wasn’t until I watched this show that I understood that a violation I’d experienced in my early twenties is, in other countries, considered rape. It was not just an isolated event that felt unsavory. It was a violation to be angry about, a violation that I could hypothetically avenge. 

When I was 20, I briefly dated a man who was, by anyone’s definition, a real asshole. (A different asshole than the one who assaulted me, I’ll add, for what it’s worth.) One evening after dinner, as we sat on the piece of Foamiture that adorned my student apartment, he made a reference to a “classic” novel I’d never read. It might have been Don Quixote; I honestly don’t remember, and I probably still haven’t read it. Instead of pretending to understand the reference, I asked him about it. He looked at me dumbfounded. 

“Do you read?” he asked scornfully.

If a story is so far outside some readers’ experience, the story need not even be considered, let alone believed.

I told him he was being rude, but what I didn’t yet understand was that if I had drawn a Venn diagram of books we’d both read, our circles might not have even been touching. They might have looked like planets in different universes. And that’s the problem with those lists of books you “must read” before you die; they favor dead white men, not women, particularly not women like Arabella: women of color who are dealing with the aftermath of a rape. For many men, these sorts of stories don’t even count as “reading,” let alone literature. If a story is so far outside some readers’ experience, the story need not even be considered, let alone believed.

In a recent critique of the documentary, Framing Britney Spears, writer Tavi Gevinson points out the fallacy of the film’s suggestion that a teenage Spears ever had true agency over her own sexuality. Gevinson explores issues of grooming and power imbalances in her own intimate relationships, particularly in an experience she had when she was eighteen. Gevinson writes of how she, now 24, understands her response to her own experience of sexual abuse:

I live with a low-simmering rage, accompanied by the knowledge that he could not possibly think about these encounters as much as I do, then wondering if my occasional wishes for vengeance or punishment — mere thoughts in my head — compromise my respectability, and therefore my believability, until I have convinced myself that nothing really happened, based more on how I might read as a victim (vindictive, heartbroken, always-knew-what-she-was-doing) rather than on the actions of another person (the whole reason we are here to begin with).

I wonder if Gevinson’s shame around experiencing rage and imagining a revenge fantasy, as well as her concern that such feelings minimize her believability, stem in part from this lack of visibility around experiencing such feelings in the wake of trauma. 

I feel for men who want to look away from stories about rape, stories that do not mirror their own experiences, stories in which they more closely resemble, statistically speaking, the perpetrator than the victim. But I don’t feel for men nearly as much as I feel for those who (statistically speaking, primarily women) have experienced sexual violence. In her memoir Know My Name, Chanel Miller encourages all readers to engage with stories about rape. She writes: 

Denying darkness does not bring anyone closer to the light. When you hear a story about rape, all the graphic and unsettling details, resist the instinct to turn away; instead look closer, because beneath the gore and the police reports is a whole, beautiful person, looking for ways to be in the world again. 

The need to embrace the uncomfortable is not merely an exercise in empathy; it’s a way of expanding the realm of believability, a way of discerning anger from the other kind of madness. For the 35 percent of us—and this is one of the first times I’ve ever written myself into the “us” of an us vs. them binary—who have experienced sexual assault, watching or reading these stories impacts us on a visceral level. This is not an abstract concept. We are back in the room where we were violated; we are waking up the next morning confused and ashamed and angry at the men who’ve hurt us and the systems that have failed us. 

In Know My Name, Miller reflects on the importance of imagination as a tool for recovering from depression in the wake of her rape and intense high profile rape case. “When I felt depressed,” she writes, “I wrote and imagined my future….The need for it to come true according to plan was not important. The act of imagining was.” 

The act of imagining must not be underestimated. If I hadn’t watched I May Destroy You, I might never have come to terms with my own trauma. I’m not sure that listening to a podcast like the one Arabella listens to would have had the same impact on me as watching the scene of Arabella listening to the podcast, watching her react to the news, watching her seek revenge on Zain. By watching her react, I had to use my imagination and extend the empathy I extended to Arabella to myself. 

Of course, the scene of Arabella calling Zain out was believable to me based on my lived experience, but I found the bánh mì exchange in Supper Club, as well as Cassie’s weekend hobby in Promising Young Woman believable, too, because after reading and watching stories that depict women acting out of anger, their anger has become normalized to me. It’s not shocking; it’s not the behavior of someone who’s unstable. And though I’d like to believe that knowing this is enough—that convincing cis men of such believability is beside the point—I know that there are tactical reasons to want to win them over, such as the gender breakdown of judges and legislators in America (spoiler alert: majority male). 

Though California Assemblymember Cristina Garcia has been working on the issue of “stealthing” since 2017, she recently introduced “Assembly Bill 453 on Nonconsensual Condom Removal/Stealthing,” which would include stealthing in the California Civil Code. In the press release, Garcia writes, 

I won’t stop until there is some accountability for those who perpetrate the act. Sexual assaults, especially those on women of color, are perpetually swept under the rug. So much stigma is attached to this issue, that even after every critic lauded Micheala Coel’s, I May Destroy [You] for its compelling depiction of the horrors of sexual abuse including of ‘stealthing,’ it got zero Golden Globe nominations. That doesn’t seem like an accident or coincidence to me.

Though I, like many others, suspect that I May Destroy You’s Golden Globe snubbing had more to do with racism than a cultural misunderstanding around stealthing, both reasons may be in play. Yet through this proposed legislation, Coel’s impact can be seen and felt with greater reverberations than those achieved by an award nomination. I May Destroy You created visibility for an issue, it showed rage in the wake of rape, and its existence makes room for other stories to do the same. And, as always, thanks are due to the women of color who lead the charge to make meaningful changes in our imagination, like Coel, and legislation, like Garcia. 

Regardless of the modality—be it a violent tale of rape revenge, the story of a woman simply imagining vengeance, or that of a survivor regaining agency in her life in seemingly small ways—stories of coming to terms with rape are tools for inciting personal and cultural changes.

A few weeks ago, I watched the Instagram Live in which Representative Ocasio-Cortez said publicly that she was a survivor of sexual assault. As I listened to her speak about the way that the insurrection on the Capitol brought up her past trauma, I wondered if we were entering a new era, an era in which sharing these sorts of stories is not only accepted but praised. An era in which bravery looks like a politician making her trauma visible, rather than a masked hero fighting off villains. But then came the detractors, the deniers, the doubters, and as I read the responses, I couldn’t help wondering, Do you read?—as in, do any of you people making snide remarks regularly engage with the stories of survivors? If not, I’d be happy to share my reading list, though you might be surprised to discover that beneath that happiness I’m actually quite mad. 

“Justine” Is a Coming-of-Age Novel for the Tamogotchi Set

Posted on by Jo Lou

Perhaps it’s not surprising that even the prose in illustrator Forsyth Harmon’s debut novel Justine is deeply imagistic. Reading this short, powerful story feels like wandering through a museum exhibit about teenage girlhood on Long Island in the summer of 1999.

Narrator Ali and her friends feed their Tamagotchis, watch boys skateboard in parking lots, and pore over glossy fashion magazines to learn how they’re supposed to look. They have little language with which to describe the burgeoning class awareness, family dysfunctions, eating disorders, and repressed queer desires they’re trying to navigate, and so Harmon’s minimalist drawings emote for them, opening up more paths to understanding than the text alone can provide.

I sat down to talk with Forsyth Harmon about Justine and her larger project of examining the relationship patterns that recur in our lives even as we get older, how unprocessed trauma might drive these, and whether they are in our power to change.

Preety Sidhu: This story takes place in the summer of 1999, when teenagers were obsessing over glossy magazines and playing with Tamagotchis, rather than buried in cell phones and social media. What drew you to writing about this era? Did you find anything particularly liberating or constraining about writing a story set in this time?

Forsyth Harmon: I was drawn to writing about the time because it was an important time in my own life. For me, writing is very much a process of dredging and examining my own experience and processing it after the fact—in this case many years after the fact. 

You might guess that based on the novel and the drawings, because I do think of this as a project of minimalism. I liked the constraint of not just 1999, but a few weeks over the course of the summer. It was fun to see what I could do within a very short period of time at a very particular time in history when, you’re right, we weren’t dealing with everyone having the internet yet and being super instantaneously connected, which does change plot structures. 

It was also fun to, through research, dig really deeply into some of the things that I wasn’t as familiar with, even as someone who lived through that time. It was fun to do research on ’80s and ’90s hip-hop, which I had some understanding of. I really did love De La Soul—as a Long Islander you don’t hear the town of Huntington called out in rap music that often, so it was an important album to me. But it was really cool to gain an understanding of the Native Tongues movement, because Ryan’s character was so familiar with it. And to go down the rabbit hole of the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, although not specific to that time, and skateboarding tricks, fashion.

I was someone who as a teenager received Vogue, for instance. So what I did was order a bunch of old copies off of eBay, and re-immersed myself in the fashion of that period and was surprised by how many of those images had really emblazoned themselves on my mind. I remembered them so acutely. That was an interesting experience too, digging into that time capsule.

PS: It had a very similar effect on me, because I was a high school sophomore in 1999. I forgot how much magazines were a part of everything. The ones that had imprinted on my mind were also resurfacing as I read. I wonder if you think there are aspects of how these teenagers engage with each other that could only have happened in that era?

FH: I think it might be pretty universal to the age. The different accessories of adolescence change, but maybe their relations are dictated more by place than by time. There’s the really obvious things, like there are a lot of parking lots on Long Island. People spend time in basements because most of the homes made in Long Island have basements. Kids learn to drive early there, so there’s a lot of driving around in cars. The ways in which they come together have to do with the geography and the community. And, probably, some of it is dictated by class.

PS: That’s actually my next question! Ali is attuned to markers of social class throughout the book. When she hooks up with Ryan, she thinks she’ll never tell anybody because he’s “a dirty, drug dealing cutter.” Though when Ryan’s possible girlfriend confronts her about it, she notices the big diamond earrings, and BMW key on the yacht club fob, and the designer nail polish. It occurs to her after going to a party with Justine at a fancy house that they live on the wrong side of the tracks. How do you see social class as functioning in this particular group of friends? Do you see it as a factor in the other self-destructive behaviors—the eating disorders, the drugs and alcohol, the shoplifting—that they also engage in?

FH: They live in a community where displays of wealth are applauded, but having direct conversations about class is avoided and forbidden. Ali doesn’t have—she doesn’t have language for a lot of things—but she doesn’t have language for this burgeoning ability to distinguish around class. She notices objects and a lot of that is dictated by what she learns in the magazines. She has a sense for wealth geographies through neighborhoods. Those are two ways that she has some language for understanding those distinctions.

They live in a community where displays of wealth are applauded, but having direct conversations about class is avoided and forbidden.

She—and not just her, many people her age, or beyond her age—derives a lot of her sense of self-worth through comparison. Throughout the book, you can constantly see her stacking herself up against someone else or two other people up against each other and trying to figure out where she exists within this hierarchy, whether or not she’s aware of that. For Ali, class functions that way as well.

Whether I think it’s a driver in the self-destructive behaviors? I don’t know. These kids are also relatively well off, compared to a lot of other communities. Ali has a lot of relative privilege—she’s white, she lives in a pretty good safe neighborhood, she goes to a decent school. I don’t know that I would make that direct connection between class and their problems, any more than I would for anyone else.

PS: I got the sense that they’re not shoplifting because they need this stuff? They’re shoplifting because it’s forbidden so it’s a thrill, and maybe they want more than they can get with money?

FH: That’s right. They really bought into this matrix of longing and want to be—to put it bluntly—worthy of the wealthy white gaze, wherever they fall within that system. They do these things, even though it’s not based on need, and they’re so wrapped up in it that they have no consciousness of people who actually need these things. That’s not how the system around them is built. They’re built not to see that, only to see what they don’t have. And they act accordingly.

PS: All of these forbidden things seem like bonding rituals, or to be doing them together seems like part of the glue that keeps this group together.

They really bought into this matrix of longing and want to be worthy of the wealthy white gaze, wherever they fall within that system.

FH: Yeah, what is it about that? I was never a Greek system person, but what is it about the hazing? I don’t know if I have any insights about that.

PS: Although most of Ali’s sexual encounters on the page are with boys, there are hints that her feelings for Justine might be sexual as well, for example in the dream when Justine taps her shoe and warmth surges up her leg to her groin. One of their first encounters involves Justine teaching Ali the difference between cucumbers and zucchini “without once insinuating male genitalia,” which I read as a potential hint at queerness. In your mind, were you thinking of this as a queer relationship, even if the desire is really repressed or sublimated? Or were you looking more to explore the contours of obsessive female friendship, even without that element of sexual attraction?

FH: The sexual attraction is definitely there, that was a part of my intention. I do think that it’s—for both of those characters, especially Ali though—so repressed. That’s why it does come up in these really quiet ways throughout the book.

There was, to be transparent, one more explicit sex scene that was removed prior to publication. There were two concerns around it. I hadn’t thought of either of them myself, but when they were brought to my attention it really interested me. One was the adult gaze on minor activities and the other was—you may remember the scene that could have led to this—that Justine was quite a bit more drunk than Ali, and it didn’t put Ali in a very favorable light that she might take advantage of that.

But that piece is definitely there, and different readers have both read it as being there and not read it as being there. I was really thrilled to see it come up on Oprah’s LGBTQ list, because that was my first indication that there were readers who were seeing it that way and it was very much my intention that they did.

PS: You’ve illustrated books for other people before illustrating your own debut novel. In what ways was the process different when engaging with your own text?

FH: All of the projects I have worked on have felt quite different, in terms of the process. In The Art of the Affair with Catherine Lacey, which is about chains of relationship between artists and writers, we worked together to co-curate the content. Beyond that, it really was as simple as drawing portraits of those aforementioned. It’s a pretty direct translation of the text, if we think about images as translation.

To repress your physical appetite is also to repress your sexual desire, often the two are inextricably linked.

In Melissa Febos’s Girlhood—coming out at the end of March, very excited about it—I drew chapter frontispieces for each essay. That was different in that I was—this is probably the wrong metaphor, but—sifting through silt for gold, like image gold. I was reading each essay and looking across essays for images that would be representative of the material and flow nicely as a piece. There was a bit more artistic freedom in what I decided to represent.

In my own work, when I started this project, the images actually came more easily to me. I started doing a ton—they were actually full-color watercolors at the time—of these ’90s objects that came up, to borrow from the book’s subject matter, like vomiting up all of these images. That is how I first wound up creating the world of the characters and the writing. The more intense and constant writing came after that. After revising and rewriting, I saw that the images needed to be remade. The writing became more minimal and streamlined. I moved away from the watercolor images that I had initially drawn as a kind of mood board and toward the more spare black and white style of images that you see in the book.

PS: I’m so impressed with how this story makes fat-free strawberry yogurt so viscerally disgusting by the end, and feel more like a drug than any of the actual drugs the teenagers are doing. How do you see this shared eating disorder as fueling the relationship between Justine and Ali? It’s a thing that sets them apart from other friends even, the thing the two of them have together. Or does connecting primarily over this type of forbidden thing point to their failure to connect in deeper ways?

FH: Yes, to all of it. They connect in self-hatred and self-destructiveness and, although this is true almost everywhere, they are growing up in a specifically conservative, misogynist suburb. They are both at an age where the world starts treating them differently in a more visceral way, as women or burgeoning women. I can think back on my own experience as a teenager with an eating disorder, like maybe I don’t want a part in this. Maybe I would not like to make this transition to womanhood, maybe I’ll just step aside. That’s one part of it, outside of the really obvious answer, which is Kate Moss. That’s there too, obviously. The European beauty standard looms pretty large in this book.

You did bring up the repressed queer desire piece. To repress your physical appetite is also to repress your sexual desire, often the two are inextricably linked. Melissa Broder talks about this in a very different way, but around a lot of the same issues, in Milk Fed, which just came out and which I really recommend. There’s a piece of this desire between them that—not that they need help repressing it, but—it’s further repressed by the repression of their own bodies functioning.

The Ballad of Existing in Santa Monica

Posted on by Kelly Luce

The Ballad of Existing in Santa Monica

Let me tell you about just existing
in a place where people don’t want you
let me tell you about Santa Monica

lost saint and what you lost!

and 2010ish and a trendy restaurant
and my lower back all fucked up from the car
accident ten years prior because my pain
was not a family priority
not a line item to pay off but a lesson:
a “serves you right!” for living in my hometown
and not yearning for suburbiopia

and anyway I am fat, not “big fat” but “small fat” my body
not California nervosa but California bitchweed
(Latinx but not in the Latin – you understand!)
and I am bisexual, with a fresh sidecut

hanging out with friends we
ordered okay food and the chairs

are really awful
not made for comfort, or with any love
but MONEYMONEYMOVEYOURASS
in their bones
I gotta get up!
gotta stretch!
go go!
go go!
free!
my!
spine!
so I did!

and I stood outside
and gazed at the traffic and passersby
and daydreamed a while, thinking words up
WHEN!!!

“EXCUSE ME, ARE YOU GOING TO SMOKE?”
and lo! there stood a pregnant woman!
holding her belly and peering hot eyes at me!
and though bemused/annoyed

(what about me spoke: smoke!?)

I was honest (begrudgingly!)
so I said: “No.”
“BECAUSE I AM PREGNANT!” she said. I was confused, silly dreamer!
“Yes!” I said helpfully. “I can see that!”
she did not appear to like my answer?

“I’m not smoking!” I added, hoping
maybe she just needed a reminder?
she was confused now, but still

ANGRY
AT
ME

“AND I’M SITTING RIGHT OVER THERE!” she pointed
at a table so I grinned at her friends and they looked uncomfortable

she had more to go! a speech!
about health risks, but I don’t care.
I know more about carcinomas than she spits at me
her tapas breath

making my grin wider and wider
I stare back out at the street.
I try to remember my word thread

before this rando tangled it all up

when she needs to inhale again:

“What does that have to do with me?” I say.

her curse

breaks! her speech runs empty!
she looks a little afraid now
and forever

she staggered back to her seat
unable to plant a tiny paper flag
from her mocktail
into my joy

I took a long time

longer
than
she
likes
I stood and watched
stood and watched

and I smiled
and mourned the poem
that you could’ve gotten
instead of this

8 Books By and About Afghan Women

Posted on by Jo Lou

In a time when Afghan women have been forgotten from the world’s consciousness and priorities, it feels more vital—either as an act of protest or desperation—to collect books that center them. 

Earlier in 2020, a U.S. envoy signed a “peace” deal with the Taliban to formalize the withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan. Although the liberation of Afghan women from their brutal and misogynistic regime had become a cause celebre and helped justify American military involvement, the four-page treaty did not once mention women. 

I sat in a medical school lecture hall in Brooklyn on the day al-Qaeda launched horrific attacks on American soil. In the weeks that followed, the smell of ash and shock and devastation seeping into my apartment, I watched the world train its eyes and military might on the country that was homeland to my parents, who left behind a Kabul that thrummed with music, wanderlust, ambition, and faith. Somehow, the same country is also homeland to the green-eyed refugee on the cover of National Geographic magazine, and the burqa-clad women cowering beneath the whips and rifles of Taliban militants.

I mined this complicated history to write Sparks Like Stars, a novel about a girl who survives a brutal coup in Kabul’s presidential palace (a product of Cold War tensions). By turns, the little girl finds herself lifted by Americans and taken to the United States where she becomes a physician. Her traumatic past resurfaces in the form of a patient sitting on an exam table. Unanswered questions and deep scars pull her back to her homeland where she must reckon with her identity, her pain, and the road to healing. Like so many Afghan women, she recognizes that only she can determine whether she sinks or soars. 

Here are a few books that not only center Afghan women as subjects, but also honor their contributions as authors:

Above Us the Milky Way by Fowzia Karimi

Karimi’s book, one that defies categorization, moves through the alphabet and time with breathtaking recollections and artwork. It is a rich and immersive experience for the eyes and the heart. 

Dancing in the Mosque by Homeira Qaderi 

Qaderi’s letters to her son are intimate reflections of her long walk across hot coals to be reunited with her son, and her life in defiance of the Taliban. Complex and raw, there is certainly more to come from this inspiration of a woman. 

The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi

Born to a family long awaiting a son, Fawzia Koofi had been left to die under the hot sun. Not only did she survive, Koofi went on to become a leading parliamentarian in Afghanistan. Her steely composure and insistence on equality have won global recognition. 

The Secret Sky by Atia Abawi

The Secret Sky by Atia Abawi 

Afghanistan might not seem like a likely setting for a YA love story but it’s in the gardens of hardship that love grows wildest. Atia Abawi takes on ethnic tensions and patriarchy in this gut-punch of a tale. 

Opium Nation by Fariba Nawa

Fariba Nawa traveled across Afghanistan, inserting herself into tight spaces and hair raising situations, to connect the dots of the opium trade. Warlords, child brides, and international pressures collide in this deeply personal work of journalism. 

Woman Among Warlords

A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya

Joya’s memoir is sobering, illuminating, and brave. This is as much a story of a refugee turned leader as it is about a country blighted by corruption and flawed interventions.

The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah

The Storyteller’s Daughter by Saira Shah

Conflict and extremism have made homecomings troubling for the Afghan diaspora. Shah’s personal account reflects the divide between the fairytale land her father had written of, and the scorched earth she encountered as a young war correspondent.

Load Poems Like Guns translated by Farzana Marie

Farzana Marie has done an elegant translation of the poetic works of eight women from Herat, an Afghan city with a resplendent literary tradition. Nadia Anjuman, one of the eight, wrote poems that seemed to foretell her brutal death at the hands of her husband. My forthcoming novel’s title was extracted from one of her works, a humble tribute to the brave legacy of Afghan women writers.

A Literary Guide to Combat Anti-Asian Racism in America

Posted on by Jo Lou

In the last year, the Asian American community has seen an onslaught of verbal harassment and physical attacks, triggered by the onset of COVID-19—still called “the Chinese virus” by many Americans. Despite the continued violence, however, U.S. media has kept relatively silent on the matter. As Anne Cheng writes for The New York Times, “When it comes to Asian-American grief, do Americans want to know?”

We’ve compiled this list as a way to better understand the deep roots of Asian American discrimination in the U.S. We hope we can help amplify the urgent need to acknowledge anti-Asian racism and the complexity of Asian American identity today. Staying silent exacerbates the portrayal of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” ignoring the violent and potentially fatal consequences of anti-Asian racism. This, in turn, creates internal division within BIPOC communities, de-validates Asian American experiences, and continues to perpetuate the vicious cycle of white supremacy. We’d like to emphasize that we should not look towards increased policing as a way to combat the violence; the U.S. police force—as these books note—is a system that perpetuates anti-Black violence and upholds white supremacy. Combating anti-Asian racism means looking beyond the black-and-white binary of racial discussions in America, and understanding how white supremacy pits minority against minority.

The term “Asian America” itself encompasses a broad array of nationalities and accompanying differences; though we’ve approached this list with an eye towards a variety of perspectives, we recognize we are constrained by our own experiences as Korean American and Chinese writers. While we have tried to include a variety of genres, this is also a limited introduction to an array of books on this topic. However, we hope it offers a starting point to better understand the systematic structures of racism, inequity, and silencing that have let anti-Asian violence in America flourish. If you’re moved to take action against anti-Asian violence and help those who have been affected, here is a site of compiled resources; Next Shark is also a non-profit media source that addresses Asian American issues, particularly those that have gone unseen in mainstream media.

Thank you to Dieu Ho, Matt Chan, Jayne Nguyen, Kiki Nakamura-Koyama, and Dana Nguyen for sharing their book recommendations!

We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang

Beginning with “Is Diversity for White People?,” Chang’s collection of essays is a thorough look at how racial inequity functions in America today. Through personal reflection, cultural analysis, and journalism, Chang tackles topics like Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and the whiteness of Hollywood. The last essay, “The In-Betweens: On Asian Americanness,” addresses the unique predicament of Asian Americans in this country, contextualizing it within the broader discourse of race in the U.S. Chang emphasizes the necessity of Asian American communities standing in solidarity with movements like BLM; as he states in an interview, “I think racial justice impacts us all, and now is not the time to be neutral.” 

Yellow Race in America Beyond Black and White

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White by Frank Wu

A mix of personal anecdotes, journalism, and legal analysis, Yellow offers an intersectional way of dissecting race beyond Black and white. Wu questions the absence of the Asian perspective in America’s discussion around race and touches on the complex ideas that have led to our understanding of Asian America via the model minority myth, perpetual foreigner stereotype, affirmation action, interracial marriage, and more. 

Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats

We may think that jokes about cheap junk being “made in China” are a recent phenomenon. The truth is that this anxiety surrounding Asian influences, or “yellow peril,” has been around in Europe since the Enlightenment. Scholars Tchen and Yeats compile a comprehensive archive of “yellow peril” paraphernalia and offer critical insight into this Western paranoia, shedding new light on the structures of current-day anti-Asian sentiments. 

The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad

An homage to W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Souls of Black Folk, Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk takes a look at the complexities of being South Asian in America. Prashad gives a complex analysis of the model minority myth, particularly as it is deployed against Black America. He takes a deeper look at both Indian and American history, tracing the ways in which Indian culture and thinkers have influenced American issues, and explores not only how South Asian American identity is defined, but also how Americans define and view themselves.

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

Written by psychotherapist Shinhee Han and critic David L. Eng, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation combines critical race theory with case studies to explore the predicaments Asian American young adults face. Han and Eng take a closer look at Gen X and Gen Y Asian Americans who deal with challenges such as depression, coming out, adoption, parachute children, and a racial discourse in America that excludes Asian America. Eng and Han use psychoanalysis to illuminate the larger social and historical questions and challenges around Asian American identity in our times. Throughout the book, Eng and Han explore and define the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation, taking a closer look at the experiences of loss so many Asian Americans face.

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics by Lisa Lowe 

Immigrant Acts is a well-researched, nuanced look at how Asian American culture and identity have been constructed in the U.S. today. Lowe offers acute analysis of Asian American texts (such as No-No Boy), legal proceedings, and historical events—including the history of interracial division within Asian America. In order to better understand the systems of inequity—like racism, capitalism, and neoliberalism—that help shape and reinforce anti-Asian violence, this academic study is a must-read.

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

A radical look into the reality of walking through the world as an Asian American, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings weaves the personal with the political and brings the tough questions around race and identity to the table. The title phrase, “minor feelings” refers to the sense of American optimism that is often forced onto Asian Americans; consequently, Asian Americans often experience a cognitive dissonance that creates a sense of failure. Going beyond the theoretical, Hong grounds us in lived experiences that perhaps create more questions than answers, and opens the table for actual discussion.

Model Minority Imperialism by Victor Bascara

Asian American racialization, economics, and the U.S. empire take center stage in this academic study. Analyzing geopolitical events alongside media representations of Asian America, Bascara tracks how the model minority myth and Asian American assimilation interact with American imperialism. Ultimately, Model Minority Imperialism challenges readers to examine the current-day U.S. empire, particularly how it is rooted in racial exclusion. 

Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People by Helen Zia 

Asian American Dreams looks into the time period when  the Asian population in America grew and Asian American identity began to form. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen Zia was born in 1950s America when there were only 150,000 Chinese Americans in the country. From the murder of Vincent Chin to the LA Riots, this book is a historical and personal account of the events that have transformed Asian identity in America. Zia is also the author of Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution, a dramatic account of the real-life stories of those who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, when Zia’s family first left for the States.

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel The Unpassing tells the story of a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet in Anchorage, Alaska. Against the bleak and cold backdrop of Alaskan winter, ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, falls into a coma and wakes a week later to find out his little sister Ruby was infected and died. As grief envelops the family, we see the remaining five members of the family struggle to stay afloat, navigate marginalization and alienation, and search for a sense of belonging in a foreign land. What does it mean to lose the ones you love in a place that is not home? What does it mean when there is no home to return to?

No-No Boy

No-No Boy by John Okada 

No-No Boy received practically no public recognition upon its publication in 1957, when Americans wanted to leave behind the atrocities of WWII—including the Japanese American internment and the nuclear bomb. Thanks to the efforts of Asian American writers Jeff Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong who reissued the novel in 1976, No-No Boy is now recognized as a canonical Asian American text, one that deals head-on with the long history of anti-Asian racism.

The protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, refuses to serve in the American army and pledge loyalty to the U.S., remembering how the same country forced him and his family into internment. Because of his “No”s, Ichiro is forced to go to prison; and finds himself the target of his community’s anger upon his return. Okada’s novel examines both the collective and individual trauma of racialized violence against Japanese Americans.  

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita 

This wide-ranging novel centers on “I Hotel”—short for the International Hotel in San Francisco—as a way to explore the Yellow Power Movement in the ’60s. The Yellow Power Movement—started by UC Berkeley students who were inspired by the Black Power Movement—is credited with coining the term “Asian American”. I Hotel is meticulously researched, including memorabilia like pamphlets and news clippings from the era; it is also radical in experimentation as well as content, exploring with multimedia modes like comic strips. Yamashita poignantly conveys the historical struggle for Asian American rights, and the many shifting identities the term “Asian American” can encompass. 

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

Set in both New York and China, The Leavers follows a Chinese American boy whose undocumented mother Polly vanishes one day. Deming Guo—later renamed Daniel Wilkinson by his white adoptive parents—is forced to reckon with what it means to be an “all-American” whose sense of belonging has vanished. What does it mean to belong? Does assimilation mean learning a new language, a new home, a new family, a new house, or a new name? And what happens to the person you used to be?

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo 

In Castillo’s debut novel, Hero De Vera moves from a politically turbulent Philippines to suburban San Jose. America is Not the Heart explores social inequity and racism amidst the Filipinx American community, as well as what it means to pursue the “American Dream.” Castillo also pays careful attention to the code-switching that often happens for immigrant families; her characters speak Spanish, Tagalog, Pangasinan, and Ilocano. The title nods to Carlos Bulosan’s groundbreaking novel from the 1970s, America is in the Heart, which describes a Filipino migrant worker’s experiences with brutal racism on a California farm. For more books on Filipinx America, check out Castillo’s reading list. 

About the Authors

Jae-Yeon Yoo is an MA candidate in English at New York University.

Stefani Kuo (郭佳怡) is a poet/playwright/performer and native of Hong Kong and Taiwan. She received her B.A. from Yale and is an MFA Playwriting Candidate at the Yale School of Drama. Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, French, and English, she is interested in crafting multicultural, multilingual narratives for an international audience. She has been an awardee of the Jerome Fellowship at PWC, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, finalist for the National Playwrights Conference, Jerome fellowship at Lanesboro Arts Centre, Many Voices Fellowship at PWC, the Working Farm with SPACE on Ryder Farm, Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, NAP Series, DVRF Playwrights’ Program, BRIC Lab, semi-finalist for the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship, Princess Grace Fellowship, Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Scratchpad Series at Playwrights Realm. Her play, Architecture of Rain, premiered at the Iseman Theatre at Yale and received a reading in the DVRF Roundtable and Checkmark Theatre Company series. She has received commissions from the Rubin Museum, Roundhouse Theater Company, and Yangtze Repertory Theater Company. Her play delicacy of a puffin heart was produced with the 2018 Corkscrew Theatre Festival and The Parsnip Ship. Her play on the Hong Kong protests, Final Boarding Call,will be presented as a virtual reading co-produced by WP and Ma-Yi Theater Company in March 2021, and was workshopped as a part of the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival at Playwrights Foundation and the 2020 Irons in the Fire Series with Faultline Theater Company. It was also a semi-finalist for Barrington Stage’ Company’s Burman New Play Award. Her play on the work of Dr. Wu Chien-Shiung, the only Chinese woman to work on the Manhattan Project, will be workshopped and co-presented by the Kitchen and Ma-Yi Theater Company in March 2021. She was a member of Interstate-73, Page 73’s Writers Group, in 2019. Her work in creative non-fiction, poetry, and translation have appeared in The New York Times, China Hands, Yale Literary Magazine, and more. Her poetry has been displayed as an installation piece, as part of Berlin Art Week 2017 at the Centre of Substructured Loss. She is represented as a playwright by Kevin Lin at CAA and Jacob Epstein at Lighthouse Management. (www.stefanikuo.com) 

Lauren Oyler’s Narrator Is Unreliable, but So Are All of Us Online

Posted on by Jo Lou

Lauren Oyler’s debut novel brings the reader down a rabbit hole of endless, mindless scrolling, online identities, and conspiracy theories.

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Fake Accounts follows the journey of a young woman after she discovers that her boyfriend is running an Instagram account spouting dangerous conspiracies that may or may not have contributed to the election of a dangerous president. Following her disturbing discovery, she moves to Berlin and sets up an account on a dating app, telling her story through a popular contemporary literary structure that she despises but admits is difficult to execute.

In this dark and satirical—at times hilarious—novel, Oyler masterfully describes the feelings that can arise from using social media; from dueling personal identities to screen addiction. 

I spoke with Oyler about performative online presences, and what it’s like as a book reviewer to read reviews on your own work. 

Frances Yackel: Speaking directly to the reader, you mention that the novel is semi-autobiographical. How did the idea for your novel originate?  

Lauren Oyler: It’s more that the character is a version of me projected, it’s not that anything in the book happened to me necessarily. I don’t have any ex-boyfriends who were conspiracy theorists, for the record. But I got the idea in two ways: I really wanted to write a novel about social media and I really wanted to do a social novel, sort of like a dark comedy of manners, about what goes on with social media. Also, my boyfriend at the time, at the end of 2016, wrote an article about Instagram conspiracy theory accounts. And the thing that fascinated me about them was if they actually believe this stuff or were they just doing it for attention. Were they posting to get paid attention to? We couldn’t really figure it out because their motives were just totally inscrutable, and it was unclear just how much of it was serious. And that was an extreme version of what happens online. People are constantly making really dramatic declarations on social media and it’s very difficult to determine how serious they are and if they really believe what they’re saying.

There is a tendency to say that a semi-autobiographical narrator must share all the same feelings and I think that’s not true. My experience writing this was very fun because if I’m writing non-fiction, I really have to think about the things I’m saying and determine if they are actually true, and if they hold water. But when you’re writing a character who’s thinking a lot, you can stick with your extreme impulse and just move on. This is illustrated when she’s at her job as a blogger and she’s saying that she’s the only person in the office who knows how to use a semicolon. I worked at Vice, the office in the novel is sort of based on Vice but I imagine it’s a combination of all the websites that are like that. The character says “I am the only person that knows how to use a semicolon.” That is a feeling that I have had at Vice, at times, but it is not literally true, obviously. So, if I were to say that, it would be mean, because there are people who work at Vice who know how to use semicolons. However, the number is much lower than it should be in my view. It’s sort of fun because you can get into the character and do the persona and I think that fiction is a healthy version of persona construction that goes terribly wrong on the internet. 

FY: By depicting a narrator—particularly a narrator admittedly aware of her audience—who engages so thoroughly with alter egos, you introduce the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Why did you decide to use an unreliable narrator and where do you see this fitting into the unreliable narrator pantheon?

LO: I wanted the point to ultimately be made that there is a sense that a lot of the things she does in her life have no reason and she’s lacking any kind of structure. So she’s constantly throwing things at the wall, trying to see if they work. And it doesn’t really matter what she does, and so I think that the unreliable narrator ties into that by emphasizing that she is just one person, if she’s lying to all these people, it doesn’t really matter—which is sad, and I think that that is what is so alienating about life now, and particularly life online. You’re watching this unreliability take place all the time, and nobody really cares. Somebody can blatantly lie online and people would just let it happen, unless it has to do with a certain type of politics. But often, you’re surrounded by people all the time and you’re just sort of ignored.

I was interested in doing a character who is constructed through her voice and through your relationship with her rather than anything that she is telling you. So that the content of what she’s saying, sometimes it matters and her approach to things is straightforward, but you can’t make assumptions about her based on her background and her childhood and her relationship with her parents and things like that. 

FY: I like what you said about how what we say doesn’t matter, especially because we’re usually hiding behind a screen. By using dating apps, she ends up having to talk to these people face-to-face and she has to face the consequences. But then again, there really aren’t any because she can leave them after the date and never see them again. 

Somebody can blatantly lie online and people would just let it happen.

LO: Yeah, I think she has these fantasies of them realizing what she’s done and finding her out, but they never come to fruition because everyone just thinks she’s bizarre and never talks to her again. Which is probably what we would do if we were faced with someone who was acting weirdly towards us on a date, but not in any kind of extreme way. Hopefully, it’s representing this absurd chaos, that’s also very banal, that’s around us all the time. You know, it’s very hard to make a dent. 

FY: The narrator admits to wanting to be plagiarized in order to feel like her writing is being seen and has made a lasting effect, but when it actually happens she is humiliated. Plagiarism plays an interesting role in the novel as a whole, as the narrator adopts entire backstories other than her own.  Do you believe that imitation is a form of flattery? 

LO: Sure, I do believe it. And I think, too, for the part where she imagines, or wishes someone would plagiarize her, she understands that that’s not going to give her anything. It’s not going to be satisfying in the way that she hopes because, as I see it, it’s a fantasy of being victimized. A fantasy of being put into a situation in which she is unobjectionably good, because if she’s been plagiarized, she’s been wronged. I think that that relates to how she feels about Felix when she realizes that he’s been doing his conspiracy theory accounts, and she thinks “I’m the good one now, I win this interaction. It’s not a difficult interaction anymore. The roles can’t be reversed.” And so, I think when you have lots of mimicry going on, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who is in the wrong and who is in the right and what are your motives. That’s how I see the plagiarism elements relating to the novel as a whole. In terms of whether it’s flattery, I mean sure, but it’s also kind of cheap. 

FY: This novel is a frightening reminder of the vastly different ways that people use, and abuse, social media; and that an online presence could be (and usually is) nothing like the person behind the profile. Do you think that there is such a thing as an authentic way to engage with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc? Is engaging with these applications necessarily a performance? 

The internet just makes very explicit all of these terrible impulses that we have.

LO: I think you can go into it with more good faith than the narrator does, and I think that it depends on what you’re like. If you’re someone that doesn’t question things then you’re probably going to the Women’s March super authentically and you’re like “Oh I had a great time” and you’re not really thinking about it. But I think for someone like me, the authentic portrayal is this sort of hyper-analytical, hyper-critical, parsing things from all sides style that if I didn’t do that then I would feel like I was being dishonest in some way. And I think our trouble with authenticity, or our views of what authenticity, is that people think it means something specific rather than that it’s a frame or structure. They think that if you have a tearful confession or an epiphany, like one of these ten epiphanies that we are used to seeing people in movies have, then that’s real authenticity or vulnerability but if I’m being mean, and I’m saying something that I think is really true, then why isn’t that as authentic as me crying about… whatever. 

FY: You write, on dating apps:

“Even the come-ons were illusory, inspired by my virtual persona and not myself, which rendered the paranoid analysis initiated by each private message even more ridiculous, a whole person analyzing a composite’s response to a composite.”

I think this describes how we engage on social media in general, not just dating apps. This is essentially what we do with social media, we interact with curated versions of other people. But then, in your novel, she goes on to show a composite of an imagined person when she meets up with these men in person, breaking down the barriers between social media and real life. In a way, your novel illustrates that we can create a “fake account” of ourselves in person just as easily as on the internet. The boundary between our online self and our in-person self can be dissolved. 

LO: I think so too. And I think that when people hear that the internet is involved, they think that it must be trolling. There’s this rush to compartmentalize the internet as only an internet thing, because the internet just makes very explicit all of these terrible impulses that we have. Certainly, if you develop the things that you care about online, you’re obviously not going to just turn them off when your phone isn’t on. I think there is this wishful thinking, this “I’ll pretend I do not see it” attitude towards social media even though it clearly has all these ramifications in the “real world” all the time.

There are all these interesting things that happen, your physical self interacting with your virtual self, right? You’re having all these conversations all the time. Like “I sound really stupid when I look at my tweets. But when I write them, they seem really funny. I have this sort of burst of emotion that is aided by the ephemerality of it.” But then when you go back and read them you’re like “this totally doesn’t work.” I think the book is full of lots of these moments where you’re seeing your virtual doppelganger in different ways and it’s kind of disturbing. Cause you made it, you know? You have no one to blame but yourself.

FY: The feeling I got while reading the passages in which the narrator goes down the rabbit hole of addictive social applications and endless internet meandering was unsettlingly familiar to the feeling I get when I scroll through my own applications (including dating apps). How has your relationship with social media or your phone evolved since writing about them so intently? 

The thing that I don’t like is people taking the bait and painting me as a negative critic and then reading into that in the book.

LO: It hasn’t changed that much. I really resist learning lessons and growth, so it would be hypocritical if I learned anything about it. I do get the sense when I’m critiquing something that I overcome my obsession with it, so I do think I have this sort of distance from social media and I think—even though I’ve become more public and more people are talking about me—I can look at that much more as a sort of sociological phenomenon that I find very interesting. So, in that sense maybe I have become a little bit more healthy about it. 

FY: I think if I had just written a book about social media, I would have to take a break from it after. 

LO: I want to, I think when I’m done with my publicity, I will probably get off it. Cause I find it really boring and luckily I’m also bored of reading the reviews too. I already know what the book is about, I don’t need to hear your thoughts about it anymore. 

FY: Do you think being a book reviewer yourself has any impact on the way you experience book reviews as an author?

LO: I think I have a much more measured approach, I’m much more prepared. Especially because I write negative reviews sometimes. The thing that I don’t like is people taking the bait and painting me as a negative critic and then reading into that in the book. Of course, you’re supposed to do some of that but also when I review books, I try to look at them really holistically and see what the author is doing. 

An Argentinian Underworld Haunted by the Ghosts of the Disappeared

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Daniel Loedel’s haunting debut novel Hades, Argentina, Tomás Orilla returns to Buenos Aires—“a city made for forgetting as much for nostalgia”—ten years after fleeing the military dictatorship whose regime disappeared upwards of 30,000 thousand political opponents, including Isabel Aroztegui, the love of Tomas’s life. 

Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel

This contradictory struggle—between the heavy burden of memory and an urge to sever oneself from the past—animates this powerful, evocative, and intelligent novel.

The Argentina that Tomás returns to in 1986 is a country that has dedicated itself to a collective amnesia with respect to the political violence that seized it from 1976-1983. The Full Stop Law passed in 1986 ended the prosecution and investigation of those accused of political violence during the Dirty War. As such, the victims of the military junta had to go “about their daily lives with the possibility of bumping into their torturers at train stations and random intersections or having to wonder, because they’d been blindfolded back then, if the man giving them a funny look on the bus had raped them.”  

The country rushes to forget; the individual is saddled by memory.

Such is the case with Tomás. He has been living in a purgatorial state for the past decade, numbed by guilt and shame for his own actions during the military junta. These actions and the choices and the conditions that guided them are what immediately awaits him upon his return to Argentina. There, he accepts the invitation to travel to the underworld—Hades, Argentina—to attempt to rescue Isabel. To get to her, though, he must first confront his mistakes and regrets and his own complicity in the face of state-sanctioned atrocities, all of which contributed to Isabel’s death. 

As with so many conversations these days, Daniel Loedel and I conducted ours on Zoom, sipping Argentine wine on a weekday afternoon. 

Julian Zabalbeascoa: You dedicated this novel to your half-sister Isabel, who was disappeared by the junta when she was 22-years old. How long had you been trying or wanting to tell this story? 

Daniel Loedel: Not as long as you might expect. Partly because growing up, she was not talked about very much in my house, both because she was obviously such a painful topic for my father, but also because the silence the dictatorship pushed on people inevitably gets internalized. So there was a lot of silence around it for most of my life growing up, and it was a very slow process of discovering that I needed to know more about her and that her story was one I needed to tell. 

When someone who you never knew—or even someone you did know—was killed in that way, in that unjust kind of way, you have a tendency in fiction to idealize the person, to write them as a hero, as someone sort of pure who an unjust world removed from it. And, yeah, Isabel was heroic in her way. She was very brave, very determined, very morally passionate. But she was not perfect, and she was not pure. It wasn’t until I came to terms with that and tried to write her as a real human being, with all of the faults that come with being human, that I could finally tell her story. The other part of it was that for a long time I was interested in particular in her impact on my father. I grew up with a father who had suffered grief for the entirety of my knowing him, so the story wasn’t yet Isabel’s. It took me so long to really look at it directly, to look at her life directly. 

JZ: Having interred Isabel’s remains in 2019 and now publishing this novel in 2021, has that changed your relationship to your idea of Isabel?

DL: Interring her remains is the biggest thing that changed my relationship to Isabel. I had a lot of fear in writing this book that I was a fraud, that I was plundering her tragic life and death for a story, for an effort at art. That in a world with this much art and social duress this book may not be necessary. Was it selfish? Was I really trying to memorialize her or was I just stealing her story? And I really struggled with that for a long time.

That slowly started to change when I was doing the research and talking to people who knew her, who hadn’t had a chance to talk about her in years. You could tell they opened up. They felt this sense of—not of relief or of being unburdened—but that there’s this pain inside them and they haven’t been giving access to it, voice to it. So it began there.

I started to feel less of a fraud on a trip to Argentina in 2017 when I started to talk to people. [On that trip], I connected with her partner’s brother. He was very instrumental in both the research and in interring Isabel’s remains. And he was so glad to hear from me, because no one on the Loedel side of the family had been at the internment of his brother’s remains in 2013. I was just shocked that people were so glad to finally have a chance to talk about all of this. So that was one part that was helpful. But the actual interment ceremony was sort of the apex of that. So many more people came than I thought would. My father and brother didn’t. It was still too close for them, and there were other logistical complications. But Isabel’s childhood nanny was there, crying. People who didn’t know her were there. There was this sense of urgency of recognizing what had happened to her, recognizing not only her death, but also her life. Of saying what a wonderful person she had been. There’s also that: when you only talk about someone in the tragic terms of their demise, you don’t get to appreciate that she was funny or that she was a good friend. So that moment really made me feel less of a fraud in my relationship to Isabel and therefore less of a fraud in continuing with the effort of the book and putting this out, this kind of tribute to her. It’s not just a tribute. It’s also art, it’s fiction, whatever. But it certainly wouldn’t have been written without her. I felt a lot cleaner, morally. And now that it’s out in the world, to see people engaging with what someone like Isabel’s life and death means has been extremely rewarding.

JZ: Talk about the silence that the victims or their loved ones had to internalize as a result of the dictatorship. In which ways did you inherit that silence and in which ways was this book perhaps a creative response to that?

When someone who you never knew was killed in an unjust way, there’s a tendency to idealize the person, to write them as a hero.

DL: In every way. Unlike, for instance, the Nazis in World War II who were defeated, the military dictatorship in Argentina essentially won. In the sense that, yes, the dictatorship lasted seven years and the junta leaders were put on trial, but the major players in this, the vast majority of them—all the subordinates—were basically given immunity pretty quickly, and they continued to live in society. The resistance, of which my sister was a part, was not only defeated but crushed. There were no remnants really of the Montoneros in Argentina. 

Especially with the type of oppression that the junta used—of disappearance—it also meant people who had lost loved ones often maintained their silence in the hope of getting their loved ones back. So you have this huge combination of factors that winds up meaning that grief and injustice are not really processed, for a very long time. It’s sort of cast to the side.

There’s a shame that comes about for people who, like my family, lost someone who was engaging in the fight. The shame that is both brought on by their own guilt in preventing her from fighting and therefore dying; and a shame in just her choice to literally fight. My sister took up arms against the regime, and, you know, there can be a sense of why didn’t she try to fight back peacefully? If she fought back peacefully, she would have also died. But that shame was a part of it, too. I grew up in a household and in a family, sort of a familial universe let’s say, that had a ton of guilt and shame and denial about what had happened, why it had happened. 

JZ: Hades, Argentina sent me around my bookshelves, and, at one point, to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. In it, he writes:

“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty. ‘You cannot mourn someone who has not died,’ the Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman once observed.”

DL: Yes, when someone has disappeared and there’s no funeral and there’s not an openness about the death, I think that is inevitably part of it. Even in the case of my family that knew how she was killed. Isabel’s mother basically figured out the address in which Isabel had been living in hiding. She went to the house, saw that there were bullet holes in the wall, spoke to the landlady who came out wearing a dress of Isabel’s, and she knew what had happened.

Even with that knowledge, the fact that the rights of mourning were taken away means that there is an incompleteness to that death. You know, we finally interred Isabel’s remains in 2019. It was a very long, protracted, and emotionally complicated experience for my family. I don’t know to what extent notions of closing wounds when you bury someone are true. I know that it is impossible to close wounds unless you do bury someone in some way, unless you memorialize them. My father would probably say that even having interred Isabel’s remains 40 years later, the wound is not closed for him. But for other people who were at that ceremony, it might be a little more closed 

And to tie it to the book, I would say that that sense of incompleteness that comes from disappearance—from not having a memorial, from not celebrating a life as it was lived—means that you are forced to look at the past and wish you could change it, to hunt for a ghost as Tomás does in the story. And even with the knowledge of what happened, even when you know what happened, you still feel, I think, that incompleteness, and you search in futile ways to complete a mourning process that is sort of derailed.

JZ: One of the things I really admire about your novel is how for most of your characters—regardless of the horrendous historic moment they’re living through—their lives in all their ordinariness continue. It’s not hard to imagine, decades from now, our children and grandchildren looking at pictures of us and saying, “Wait, so Trump was president, a national reckoning of systemic and structural racism was taking place, a once-in-a-century plague was decimating the country, insurrectionists were attempting to overthrow an election, and you still went to the lake that weekend?” 

DL: I might have, until 2020, answered this a little differently. I might have said that I felt that this was a very Argentinian phenomenon born out of the fact that they were somewhat uniquely used to military coups and things like that. Not to the extent that the dictatorship of ’76 presented itself, the extent to which it was truly horrific, but when the coup happened there was—to some people anyway—a bit of a shrug of the shoulders, like it’s about time, “We knew this was going to happen.” So it was easy in some ways for people to keep living. And, of course, a lot of the oppression, the torture, the deaths, were happening semi-secretly in Argentina behind closed doors. So some people could easily go on living without awareness of what was happening.

I had a lot of fear in writing this book that I was a fraud, that I was plundering my sister’s tragic life and death for a story, for an effort at art.

But 2020 does shine an interesting light on this, which is that I think people inevitably reset to normal. No matter what is happening around them. Or they try to figure out a way—whether they’re fighting a regime, fighting systemic racism—to still have some sort of fun or a connection with their family or friends or whatever it may be. I also think that it’s from those banal efforts to have fun and just have a nice dinner with your family or whatever that a lot of that kind of oppression and horror can happen in a society so long without much focus on it.

In Argentina, a lot of these torturers—a lot of the people participating in political oppression—were family people. They went home to their wives and kids after a long day of literally torturing people. Some of them, I’m sure, were very loved by their families. It makes you wonder, of course, if that is exactly how things like this happen, which is to say that people with very normal lives can still go on doing terrible things just because they have normal lives. That they enjoy red wine or meat or whatever does not mean that they are not incapable of horrors.

JZ: They’re as much of the landscape as perhaps the torture centers. The novel had me googling various Argentinian torture centers, and what struck me about them was how terrifyingly mundane they were. For Automotores Orletti, it’s not an elaborate nightmare dreamed up by some fevered sadist but simply an old mechanic shop in a residential neighborhood. You’d walk right past it unless you knew to be looking for it. Yet, behind those walls, terrible things were occurring.

DL: Yeah, I think that it’s both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing, the degree to which human beings can get used to anything and acclimate themselves to realities. It’s a great thing in terms of our ability to endure shutdowns during a global pandemic. It’s a horrible thing in terms of what you’re talking about which is people’s ability to either just walk past systemic racism in the U.S. or to walk past what they may know is a torture center in an old mechanic shop, as they bring their kids to school. I think the ability to readjust one’s eyes to whatever is before them is surprisingly powerful and resilient and sometimes for the best, but sometimes definitely not.

JZ: So your book came out less than a week after the insurrection. You’ve got that line. “There was always going to be a coup. This is Argentina.” This is Trump, there was always going to be an attempt at a coup. 

DL: I started writing this book in earnest after Trump was elected. I remember when Trump was elected, my father said to me that he remembered when Peron won in a sort of strange election in the ’40s. Peron was definitely different from Trump in many ways but certainly had some overlap. My father basically said that you felt the door had been opened back in the ’40s. Hades has a lot about what happens when you have one oppressive politician, followed by another, followed by then a coup. These cycles begin to entrench themselves and become normalized. And that’s a slow process that can take 30-plus years, but it gets worse and worse until you end up with a dictatorship like the one that they had in the ’70s. So when Trump got elected, my father said it felt the same way: the door’s been opened. Trump may not be the one who murdered, but down the road there could be another Trump who could get either elected or not elected who could murder thousands. The impulse is there because we are humans, and that impulse was given voice and acceptance by Trump in a way that had not happened before in the U.S. So it made perfect sense in a way that the culmination of his presidency was the literal manifestation of that voice, of a coup attempt.

JZ: There’s a long literary tradition of the map of the afterworld mirroring the national borders of the living. My current favorite example is that episode of The Sopranos where Christopher Maltisanti returns from a near-death experience to report, in a traumatized state, that hell is playing cards in an Irish pub where the Irish win every hand. In your Argentinian Hades, the occasional Uruguayan or Brazilian might wander in, but otherwise it’s a strictly Argentinian affair. How did you go about constructing the map of Hades?

People with very normal lives can still go on doing terrible things just because they have normal lives. That they enjoy red wine or whatever does not mean that they are not incapable of horrors.

DL: Well, for me, the concept of Hades was governed primarily by the concept of the greatest pains you could ever experience or that you did experience in your life, whether that means the pains of what you actually endured or the pains of what you didn’t get to do, you didn’t get to enjoy. It’s sort of similar, right? Clearly Christopher Maltisanti has been in an Irish bar. True pain for people is not fire and brimstone, it’s the wrong choices they made in life. That is, I think, the thing that is most painful for people. I do think that is sort of where the greatest emotional and psychic pain can come from. It’s like looking at your life very closely.

JZ: Exactly. I saw the book as this really exciting take on the idea of eternal recurrence. If you chose well through your life, it’s going to be a pleasure trip, but if you haven’t, as for Tomás, you’re damned to revisit and repeat your worst mistakes. There are these lines from the book: “Is this all hell is, just your life again?” And then, “You’re never done wondering here.” They can wonder, but they can no longer act because they’re defined by the decisions that they took while they were alive.  

DL: This also sort of ties into my personal background in the sense that my father is haunted by regret about what he could have done to save Isabel. Maybe he couldn’t have done anything, but that regret will always haunt him, and he will always relive the choices he believes he made incorrectly. It’s not just true of my father but of many others. I do think that the greatest torment a person can experience is that of a life lived wrong, a life lived incorrectly. Whether that means immorally and having to confront those immoral actions or just making the wrong decisions in a more casual, practical way and seeing your life go off on the wrong track and having to live with that forever is horrible. Conversely, I will say, though, that in reflecting all those choices that seem wrong and that you would do over again, I hope that something the book can show you is that maybe if you relived your life, it actually turns out you made more right choices than you thought you did, more choices that you had to make the way you did.

I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but later in the book the character of the Priest basically tells Tomás:

“In reality, all these things you did that you’ve been haunted by, you really would have done them all again and there’s only one decision that you would have done over differently.”

I think as humans we’re tormented both by the fact that we could have chosen differently and by the fact that we might not have even if given the choice. But I think if we can learn to embrace the latter, we will perhaps be a little better off.

What We Need Right Now Is the Gentle Novel

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

For those of us who are both responsible and fortunate enough to protect public health by staying home, the past year has raised questions about what we should be reading and watching and listening to during periods of crisis. In the early days, a lot of people I know reached for stories about disease outbreaks, like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven or Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Later, those same people opted for a kind of numbing escape in Tiger King or Emily in Paris. But I have been craving a different kind of experience: in my solitude, I have wanted art that takes pleasure and sociability as its central themes, and that wants to share its pleasures and its community with me. I have wanted the kind of art that I have taken to calling “gentle.”

Gentleness is not one of our more celebrated aesthetic categories, but I want to insist upon its value, especially during historical moments like our own, with overlapping crises and ubiquitous violence. At its best, gentle art can create a fictional space of freedom from the grosser aspects of our world. And it can do so, importantly, without emptying itself out, or becoming like the “ambient TV” that Kyle Chayka recently wrote about for the New Yorker. Gentle art demands, and rewards, our attention. I am, more than anything, a reader of novels, and I was inspired to think of gentleness as an aesthetic category by one particular novel: The Ambassadors, by Henry James.

In my solitude, I have wanted art that takes pleasure and sociability as its central themes, and that wants to share its pleasures and its community with me.

When Lambert Strether—James’s protagonist—enters the scene, he is relieved to discover that his friend Waymarsh is not there to meet him. He has just sailed from the U.S. to Europe, and feels, upon apprehending his solitude, “such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn’t known for years.” On the ship, where passengers consorted, “he had stolen away from everyone alike,” and remained “indifferently aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in being, unlike himself, ‘met.’” Unburdened by Waymarsh’s presence, he will now, he decides with a purity of pleasure, give “his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible.”

So much for the novel’s first two paragraphs. In the third, Strether recognizes, and is recognized by, another American in Europe, “a lady,” Maria Gostrey. In the fourth and fifth, he responds to her inquiry—yes, he is meeting that Waymarsh—and is surprised by his own sociability: “It wasn’t till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much there had been in him of response.” In the sixth paragraph, they have laid “the table of conversation,” and by the end of the first chapter Maria has “led him forth into the world,” toward, Strether thinks, “his introduction to things.” In this otherwise meandering novel, Strether’s shift from luxurious solitude to amiable intimacy is remarkably sudden.

The Ambassadors follows Strether as he travels from Chester, briefly to London, and then, for the bulk of the novel, to Paris. He has been sent on a mission by his fiancée, Mrs. Newsome, to bring her son Chad back to America, where the family business awaits him. The orders are clear: time is of the essence; don’t get distracted. The problem is, Strether immediately gets distracted—by Maria Gostrey first, in the third paragraph, but there will be others. In Paris, where “the cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow,” he finds himself committed not to retrieving Chad, but to “the common unattainable art of taking things as they came.” From the moment he sets foot in Europe, he is just having the best time.

An impartial observer of our cultural landscape might conclude that violence and its effects are the most fitting subjects of “serious” literature, television, and film—that the value of art lies primarily in its willingness to confront the traumatic experiences that all-too-frequently characterize people’s actual lives. Of course, serious art should address real world traumas, but we should not make the mistake of reducing it to trauma, or to a particular politics of trauma. In part, this is because art about trauma can itself be traumatizing or gratuitous. It is also because, in a violent world, it can be difficult to see, as I think James saw, that the absence of violence—the basic fact of co-presence—is no simple matter, and is matter enough for art.     

In a violent world, it can be difficult to see that the absence of violence is matter enough for art.

It seems fairly clear what gentle art is not: it is not violent or traumatic. But what motivates it, instead? The Ambassadors is, I think, James’s gentlest novel, and it gives us a chance to sketch out some of the criteria of this aesthetic category. Strether is “in tune” with Europe: he “floats,” he lingers, he enjoys “slow reiterated rambles,” he works, against a sense of guilt, to appreciate “the full sweetness of the taste of leisure”; he goes to the theater and the museum; he breakfasts at noon. To a high, if not absolute degree, gentle art is about pleasure. This is, in some ways, its most straightforward criterion. But it is not entirely so: for Strether, as we have seen, living for the moment is an “art” both “common” and “unattainable.” You might say he’s having a midlife crisis: his youth, he reflects, was not spent to advantage. “One has the illusion of freedom,” he exclaims to the much younger Little Bilham, “therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion.” The pleasure Strether advocates is no simple hedonism: it is an existential effort, Sisyphean.

The second criterion for gentle art is that it finds its drama—its tensions as well as its pleasures—in what Simone Weil calls the “indefinable influence that the presence of another human being has on us.” Strether, James writes, “had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be hanged if he were not in relation.” With whom or what is not named. With Chad? Yes, but also no, because as the next sentence specifies, he is never more “in relation” than when he stands alone outside a Parisian theater. “In relation” with Paris, I think—or Europe, and with everyone in it. After he is taken in hand by Maria Gostrey, Strether, “pleasantly passive,” never stops entering into relation with, well, everything.

One of the inspirations for The Ambassadors is the simple but amazing fact that people can exist in relation with each other at all. The philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell calls language—language itself, alone—“a thin net over an abyss,” but one strong enough to hold things together. That is what inspires his philosophy: that we are able to avoid the abyss of solipsism. I think there is something similar in James—a sense of wonder at the fact that people can share meaning, that they can not only coexist but affiliate. James is a master of conversations where a shared sense of meaningfulness is like an ethereal substance, one that is somehow connected but not entirely reducible to the words spoken, floating between and around the speakers. Often, meaning is shared wordlessly: a silent glance with Waymarsh “was one of those instants that sometimes settle more matters than the outbursts dear to the historic muse.” Their eyes meet, and somehow, that “indefinable influence” makes itself felt.

But relation is a dangerous game to play, as Strether discovers. Gradually, he shifts from trying to get Chad home for Mrs. Newsome to protecting Chad from Mrs. Newsome. He fails utterly, intentionally, as an ambassador. He is taken in by Chad and his circle, including Little Bilham and the glamorous Madame de Vionnet—with whom Chad is having an affair, although Strether allows himself to be convinced that they are not. When he realizes his mistake, late in the novel, “he kept making of it that there had been simply a lie in the charming affair—a lie on which one could now, detached and deliberate, perfectly put one’s finger.” At the point of Strether’s revelation, readers will likely have already inferred that Chad and Madame de Vionnet have been sexually entangled all along. Our revelation, as readers, is that Strether didn’t get it. The many vectors along which the “indefinable influence” of co-presence, the “thin net” of meaning, travel include misunderstanding and bad faith.

Gentle art can create a space of freedom from the violence of the world, without thereby becoming unserious.

The third criterion of gentle art is that it develops a style that acknowledges and reproduces the drama of putting oneself “in relation”—the sense, captured in Strether’s failure to understand, that successful communication and affiliation are challenging, even stunning, accomplishments. James’s late style is famously and idiosyncratically complex. Part of the pleasure of reading it is in solving the sentences, so to speak. As the critic Ian Watt puts it—in an essay tellingly titled “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication”—there is often “a delayed specification of referents.” Where we are and who we’re with and what we’re doing can be slow in their revelation, a characteristic of Jamesian prose made more demanding by his use of intransitive verbal phrases (in relation with whom?) and a healthy dose of syntactical subordination. One of the things that having a style means—or, as James puts it in his memoir, what it means to “cross that bridge over to Style”—is that one could pick a sentence almost at random to illustrate it: “But it was in spite of this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned, how.” Here, we see the abundance of pronouns and flurry of commas that makes his prose dense; and we also see the ways in which it is light in the triple, downhill rhyme “Chad had had.” This is what I mean when I say it demands and rewards our attention: we have to work to enter into relation with the text.

By meeting these three criteria, gentle art can create a space of freedom from the violence of the world, without thereby becoming unserious. Strether in Paris is an altogether different proposition than Emily in Paris. You needn’t rush out to get a copy of The Ambassadors to get gentle (though I doubt you’d regret it): I’ve found a similar aesthetic in more recent works like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. and the novels of Ali Smith, and I’m sure it’s visible in many other works. Such stories offer, perhaps, only an “illusion of freedom”—and it is important to acknowledge that this particular illusion is constrained by the fact that everyone in The Ambassadors is white, and most of them don’t have to work for a living. But these are not necessary conditions of gentleness. What makes gentle art gentle is that it finds the story of co-presence and affiliation in the posited absence of violence. As crises accumulate, don’t go easy on me, but please, be gentle.

Please Just Let Women Be Villains

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

When the trailer for Cruella dropped, Twitter greeted it with jeers. People mocked it for being too much like The Joker; too much like Disney’s earlier film Maleficent; too much like Warner Brothers Birds of Prey— and contributed tweet after tweet about what an odd choice it was to rehabilitate Cruella DeVil in particular: a character who spent her original 1961 film trying to kidnap and kill puppies to make their skins into a coat. 

This seems far from the response Disney expected. It introduced the trailer with the tag line, “Brilliant. Bad. A little bit mad,” calling to mind the oft-quoted characterization of Lord Byron by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb: “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The allusion carefully positions Cruella not as a villain, but a Byronic hero: a talented, melancholy rebel, tragically misunderstood by their society. Cruella’s dialogue also reflects this, as she explains: “From the very beginning I realized I saw the world differently from everyone else. That sit didn’t sit well with some people. But I wasn’t for everyone.” Cruella is not, therefore, a two-dimensional villain who likes to kill dogs and inspired a song that rivals “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” as a Renaissance blazon of bad qualities. She is a misunderstood #girlboss whose actions will be justified by the film, and whose actions most likely were in reaction to bad things other people did to her first… a hard sell for literally cartoon villain whose name is a pun on “cruel devil,” and who lives in Hell Hall.

Cruella is the reductio ad absurdum of a long trend of redemptive retellings featuring pop culture villainesses.

Cruella is the reductio ad absurdum of a long trend of redemptive retellings featuring pop culture villainesses. These female villains are introduced in two dimensions—quite literally, in many cases. But when given depth and turned from antagonist to protagonist, their narratives take on a curious similarity. These recentered stories aren’t a straight retelling of events, but a complete restructuring of the narrative. We don’t merely get the villain’s perspective; we get her justification. She had to kidnap Dorothy, curse a baby, smuggle a machine gun into a mental asylum, or kill a hundred and one puppies. We, the audience, just didn’t have the whole story. We didn’t know the context of her actions—which exonerate her. And in the end, she really wasn’t punished for her crimes in the end, but redeemed—so you see, she isn’t really a villain! She was just tragically misunderstood. She was good all along. 

We don’t see this sort of reboot with say, Jafar from Aladdin, or Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even Joker allowed its main character to exist within a realm of moral ambiguity; though it was clear social systems had failed him on every level, the movie makes no apologies for Arthur Fleck’s descent into murder. But when big media conglomerates decide to make their villainesses—their literally cartoonishly evil villainesses—into main characters, they also make them into heroines who repent of their evil ways, while also demonstrating that they were never really that evil after all. 

American culture tends to want to explain away the evil actions of women—mostly fictional women, but sometimes real ones—because female villainy rests uncomfortably with lingering cultural perceptions of women’s purity and virtue. The idea that all women must be innately virtuous took form in the mid-19th century, in the movement towards “True Womanhood,” which historians like Barbara Welter have dubbed “the cult of domesticity.” Building off of the late 18th-century idea of “separate spheres,” which claimed that innate gender differences made men more suited for public life and women for private life, the cult of domesticity provided social regulation for the rapidly expanding American middle class and a sense of social stability in a time of great political, economic, and societal upheaval. Middle and upper-class white women became revered for the domestic labor to which they had been confined: social regulation enshrined as near-religion. Women were the center of the family, the light of the home, and the angel of the house. “True Women,” as Welter put it, were known by their domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity. In a case of mingled cause and effect, women showed their mastery of the domestic sphere by displaying these qualities, and the display of these qualities proved that they were naturally fitted for that sphere because they were more pious and pure. Indeed, they were naturally religious and moral. Popular fiction of the time often showed criminal men redeemed by the virtue of a true woman. Their moral fiber was perceived to be so much stronger and purer than their male counterparts that a woman could never really commit a crime, and a woman who did commit a crime must have been tricked into it, or led into it by the bad influence of men. Within this structure, such a woman then becomes “fallen.” And yet the very language of exclusion centers on the angelic nature of woman. She is not bad or evil or a villain, she is fallen, like an angel into hell.

Middle and upper-class white women became revered for the domestic labor to which they had been confined.

More than 100 years later, this idea of women’s inherent goodness has proven hard to shake. The cult of domesticity centered around cis white women, whose virtue is still used as a pretext for violent rhetoric and action against Black and trans people, from whom their purity must be protected. And in fiction, when pop culture focuses on a woman who committed a crime, it’s either a cautionary tale or one of these rehabilitation stories, focused on the idea that the villainess’s fallen state is not her fault and is certainly not permanent. 

This justification (it isn’t her fault she’s a villain) and the means of showing it (recentering a popular narrative around a female villain) reached popular prominence in 1995, with Geoffrey Maguire’s novel Wicked, and with the musical adaptation in 2003. Both the book and the musical reconsider the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The witch, whom Maguire named Elphaba, does have a song in the second act of the musical where she makes a conscious commitment to give up trying to be good, but the show goes to great lengths to point out that Elphaba was not born wicked, and though she may make a big show of giving up good deeds, she never consciously chooses to do an evil one. Her greatest sin in the show—animal abuse in the form of magically creating flying monkeys— is something she was tricked into, and her villainous reputation thereafter springs mostly from Elphaba setting herself up as the Wizard’s enemy, and the Wizard mounting an extremely effective PR campaign against her. In the end, Elphaba regains her goodness by playing into stereotypes about her villainy and then completely rejecting her wicked reputation. The Wicked Witch dies because her soul is so unclean, water can melt her; Elphaba lives thanks to a trap door, and gets her “happily ever after” with her love interest, outside of Oz. 

Maleficent, Disney’s first retelling centering on a female villain, likewise uses its reframed narrative to prove the heroine’s inherent goodness but gives her even less agency in her fall from grace. In the original 1959 Sleeping Beauty animated film, evil fairy Maleficent curses the infant princess out of pique at being left out of the baby’s welcome party. This is an enjoyably petty reason for committing a villainous action—who hasn’t wanted to hex someone for a social snub?—but it’s not deep or detailed or justified, because it doesn’t have to be. Maleficent enters the movie a villain, spends the film acting like a villain, and then dies like a villain. By contrast, in Maleficent, the 2014 live-action movie that revisits the character’s early life, she begins in innocence in an almost Edenic forest, and falls in love with her childhood friend, Stephen. Maleficent is a fairy guardian of a beautiful natural landscape and fights only to protect it. But what turns her into a villain, complete with a costume change from earth-toned gauzes to heavy black draperies, is a heavily implied (the film is rated PG) sexual assault by an intimate partner: Stephen drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings. 

In pop culture, sexual assault is still one of the most common motivators for female vengeance—and, by implication, an acceptable justification for a woman committing a bad or violent action. If Stephen gave her “true love’s kiss” and then cut off her wings, thus proving that true love does not exist, then it is not only appropriate but righteous for Maleficent to curse his baby to die, with the caveat that only true love’s kiss can save her. (Elphaba, at least, chose to oppose the Wizard and thus be branded wicked.) In the end, Maleficent provides “true love’s kiss” herself, and regains her wings, returning her to the angel she really was at heart. 

Harley Quinn, in the 2020 Birds of Prey, also ascribes the heroine’s misdeeds to trauma. The film opens by showing how her father abandoned her and her boyfriend abused her and how this led directly to Harley’s transformation from psychologist helping to rehabilitate villains to becoming a villain herself. Once Harley is free of their influence, however, and has real female friends, she becomes a hero of Gotham. She does not choose to be a villain; the emotional abuse she experienced from the men in her life is the true cause of her crimes. 

They don’t commit evil actions because they want to; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice.

In an odd way, these updated villains have less agency than their initial incarnations. They don’t commit evil actions because they want to, even if the want is extremely petty; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice but villainy— which is more a reaffirmation of a damaging patriarchal stereotype than a refutation of it. But this still leaves us with the fact that the traditional literary and pop culture canon is dominated by male creators, and many of their best female characters are, in fact, villains. If we want to interrogate those traditional, familiar stories by centering the most interesting and compelling female character, how should we do it?

Madeline Miller’s Circe has one good way forward: allow female characters to exercise their agency by consciously choosing to do evil, and then to repent. Circe transforms her romantic rival Scylla into a monster not because she was tricked into it, or because she didn’t know what would happen, or because she was so wronged she had to redress it, or because someone had done something so bad to her it rattled her sense of right and wrong. She did it because she was jealous. She wanted to do it, so she did. Circe’s later regret over this evil deed drives her actions at the climax of the book, where she rights this wrong by killing the monster Scylla’s become. Having chosen to do evil because she wanted to, her choice to do good— again because she wants to—shows her growth and gives her moral journey real weight. 

Circe has the benefit of being a novel, rather than a corporately owned and produced piece of intellectual property. Miller had the creative freedom to rehabilitate her villain in a way that is truly transformative, rather than reinforcing outdated ideas. But the book shows that a villainous character can remain fully culpable—Circe deliberately turned another nymph into a monster and owns it at every opportunity—without being unrelatable, uninteresting, or unsympathetic character. Hopefully the HBO Max adaptation of Circe will preserve what makes it so truly interesting a retelling starring a female villain: its instance on and its acknowledgement of the fact that giving a female character agency means that sometimes the character will choose to be bad.