11 Thrillers Set in Toxic Workplaces

Posted on by Jo Lou

“So I bit a coworker yesterday. Obviously, I’m mortified.”

This is the opening line of a legendary letter written to the advice blog Ask a Manager, which I read religiously despite the fact that it’s been ages since I worked in an office. The infamous “I bit my coworker” letter is a case study in the lengths to which people may be driven by a toxic work environment. Work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours. When a job is miserable, we adjust ourselves because we have to, but those adjustments can change us in unexpected ways. I love that Ask a Manager letter because it shows an otherwise rational human being becoming suddenly feral, childish, and violent, in a way that’s all too easy to imagine.

Well, I can imagine it, anyway. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life: waitress, high school teacher, receptionist, drugstore cashier. I’ve been a fraud detector for online reviews. I’ve temped everywhere on earth, from glossy ad agencies to libraries, media conglomerates to fire alarm vendors. I’ve been a fashion writer and a seasonal gift-wrapper and once even posed nude for a life drawing class (I threw out my back and never did it again). Each workplace had its quirks, but only a few truly qualified as toxic. The most toxic of all, for me, was grad school, where I set my latest thriller, Bad Habits.

What makes a workplace toxic? There are a few common factors: A rigidly enforced hierarchy, with a huge gap between the well-being of the top and bottom workers and significant obstacles to advancement; an emphasis on the “good of the company” over workers’ health and safety; poor boundaries between personal life and work life. In a toxic workplace, “bad apples” are coddled rather than kicked out; bosses are allowed to become petty tyrants, passive-aggressive co-workers hold the supply closet hostage, and harassment and abuse are swept under the rug rather than punished.

Thrillers set in toxic workplaces will always fascinate me, because they illustrate what we already know from that Ask a Manager letter: that a corporation doesn’t have to be operating outside the law to drive its employees to desperate acts. The books on this list aren’t like the eponymous “firm” of the John Grisham novel; for the most part, there are no massive, company-wide conspiracies or cover-ups. Instead, these books show the toxicity so ingrained in company cultures that most people never even question it. Unsurprisingly, many books on this list were written from the points of view of women and minorities in the workforce, for whom “business as usual” frequently means discrimination and marginalization.

These books revel in the dirty details of how people get and stay ahead, expose the hypocrisies of corporate power structures, and imagine what would happen if the grunt in the next cubicle really meant it when she said she’d kill for that promotion. I like to think that if she did, her story would start: “So I murdered a coworker yesterday. Obviously, I’m mortified.”

#FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar

Fashion Magazine: #FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar

Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada, we all think we know a little something about the nastiness of the fashion world, but La Vie—the fashion mag in Amina Akhtar’s darkly comic debut #FashionVictim—makes Miranda Priestly’s viper pit look like a safe space. A former Elle editor herself, Akhtar’s book echoes recent revelations in the New York Times and Andre Leon Talley’s memoir The Chiffon Trenches that at top fashion magazines, beauty, wealth, thinness, and whiteness are prized over talent, and outsiders are kept firmly in their place. It’s enough to make you want to murder someone—especially if you’re a little hangry from skipping lunch to fit into sample-size Prada. Assistant editor Anya understands that in a workplace this toxic, only a sociopath can make it to the top: “God, there was always so much work to do. Update this, kill so-and-so,” she complains. An editor’s work is never done. 

Law Firm: Whisper Network by Chandler Baker

Four women working at the same corporation—three as in-house lawyers and one as an office cleaner—are shaken to the core when their serial-harasser boss, the head of General Counsel, seems set to take over as CEO of the whole company. The multiple POVs, mom woes, and snippets of depositions and police interviews in Chandler Baker’s debut recall Big Little Lies, but the Greek chorus of working women’s voices describing the endless maze of small and large indignities they have to navigate in corporate life make it feel almost like a manifesto at times. More than just the sleazeball partners whose names circulate among the women via a secret list reminiscent of the Shitty Media Men list that made news in 2018, it’s the interruptions, the chronic undermining and credit-stealing, and the delegation of secretarial tasks to female VPs that render this particular brand of toxic workplace all too believable.

The Herd by Andrea Bartz

Co-Working Space: The Herd by Andrea Bartz

A trendy co-working space painted #GirlBoss pink is the perfect backdrop for a brand-optimizing Instagram pic—or a murder. The flawless, “lean-in”-style CEO of The Herd—an exclusive all-women’s workspace about to go public—vanishes just when she’s supposed to be announcing the big news to the shareholders. Recalling news stories about a rash of women CEOs accused of creating toxic work environments and exploiting their female employees’ labor like the best (or worst) of their male counterparts, Andrea Bartz’s The Herd points up the hypocrisy of corporate feminism and asks whether co-opting “girl power” as a marketing strategy can ever be anything but a sham.

Necessary People

Cable Newsroom: Necessary People by Anna Pitoniak

There’s something about newsrooms that makes for riveting drama, and the rise of cable news is particularly enticing—maybe because the idea of pulling back the curtain on the people who craft the narratives carries an extra frisson right now. Anna Pitoniak’s NECESSARY PEOPLE, though at its heart a classic story of toxic friendship, shows how the feverish ecology of the newsroom—a delicate balance between the talent (clever, hotheaded, a little shallow), the producers (Machiavellian behind-the-scenes types) and the money (new or old, the buck stops here)—fans the flames of jealousy and magnifies inequalities. 

Tech Start-up: One by One by Ruth Ware

Tech companies, as all viewers of Silicon Valley know, are their own special brand of toxic workplace. Nerdy brogrammers, buzzword-juggling VC-magnet CEOs, upbeat influencers, and early stakeholders who just happened to be in the room at the right time make for a heady mix of personalities. Add the notorious chauvinism of the tech world and the high stakes of multi-million-dollar buyouts, and you’ve got a perfect setup for a murder. Ruth Ware’s One by One brilliantly isolates the employees of a hot new music app in a luxurious, remote ski retreat in the French Alps for a working retreat—itself one of the indignities-disguised-as-perks of the modern workplace. The scene quickly devolves into the kind of addictive, locked-room, Agatha Christie-plus-action thriller for which Ware is famous. 

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Factory: Out by Natsuo Kirino

The women of Natsuo Kirino’s thriller Out all work the night shift at a depressingly dull factory that makes pre-packaged lunches, and the descriptions of their unappetizing and repetitive work on the assembly line bring home to the reader how little leeway or control they have in their personal lives. Each of the women is desperate in her own way, or else she wouldn’t be there; and when one cog in the machine snaps, the ripple effect throws everyone’s lives out of sync. By turns exhilarating and horrifying, Out presents its female characters’ lives as chillingly circumscribed, and murder as just one more reason to feel exhausted at work the next day.

Medical Research Center: Lakewood by Megan Giddings

Where I went to college in Austin, there was a giant billboard for a medical trial center right next to campus. The message was simple: need cash? Be a lab rat. I knew lots of people who took them up on it. (Ask me about the guy who got his wisdom teeth taken out for free—and was given a placebo painkiller.) Megan Gidding’s sly debut Lakewood not only capably explores the creep-factor inherent in such exchanges, but also the racial inequalities that it exploits. Tapping into real anxieties about America’s history of using Black bodies as unwilling guinea pigs, Giddings manages to create not one toxic workplace, but two—the sinister lab itself, and the hilariously generic front company, where protagonist Lena and her fellow lab rats are forced to pretend to work in cubicles and have fake arguments about who’s stealing yogurt out of the break room fridge. It’s a tour de force of grim, absurdist office satire.

Temper

Theater Company: Temper by Layne Fargo

Theater people are the orchids of creative types: gorgeous and hotblooded, flamboyant yet fragile. But where personalities are larger than life and dedication to capital-A “Art” is the only thing that matters, boundary-crossing behavior can be justified in the name of “genius”—especially if the genius is a man. Layne Fargo’s debut—loosely inspired by a Chicago theater director who rained psychological, physical, and sexual abuse down on his colleagues for years—skillfully dissects the intense dynamics in a group of people who’ve fallen under the sway of a real-life art monster.

Wall Street Bank: The Escape Room by Megan Goldin

Is an all-day meeting your personal version of hell? Try a team-building exercise where you get trapped in an elevator with backstabbing colleagues, and your only goal is to make it out alive. Goldin’s full-throttle locked-room thriller has a grabby premise, but it’s the depictions of the cult of rampant, amoral greed at a top Wall Street firm that make this book compulsively readable. 

Upcoming Titles

Other Black Girl

Publishing House: The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

In this deliciously scathing send-up of the blindingly white world of New York City book publishing, a big house hires their second Black editorial assistant, and chaos ensues.

Law Firm: All Her Little Secret by Wanda M. Morris

Okay, there just might be a conspiracy in this twisty psychological thriller set in a corporate law firm. But unlike The Firm, the main character of Wanda Morris’s debut is the only Black attorney at her company—and, unlike Tom Cruise, this gives her a reason to be paranoid before the first gunshot.

Gloria Naylor Showed Us the Quiet Monster of Classism in the Black Community

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I wish I’d discovered Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills earlier in life. The acclaimed novelist’s 71st birthday would’ve been on January 25, and I’ve realized her book, which calls attention to the modern-day classism rooted in Black culture, probably would have saved me a lot of anxiety and heartbreak if I had first encountered it as a teenager starving for acceptance in a Black middle-class neighborhood. 

When I was 17, I found my place in the world through clothes. A passion for fashion pulled me out of my shell as a shy, awkward girl. I was no longer the kid in middle school who retreated into books to cope with the realities of an “ugly duckling” stage. 

I strayed from my bookworm-ish tendencies and placed more importance on my appearance to fit in. I ditched the eyeglasses I’d been wearing since first grade for contact lenses. I got dental braces to close the gap between my two front teeth. I started getting perms that straightened my hair on a regular basis. 

Finally, I felt what it was like to be accepted and I was terrified of having that feeling taken away.

My physical makeover helped me develop friendships with a small group of girls who were popular. They introduced me to my first boyfriend who was a football jock, which further grew my social circle. Finally, I felt what it was like to be accepted and I was terrified of having that feeling taken away. 

On weekends, I started using the money I made from my evening jobs to buy stylish, expensive ensembles. I loved the thrill of browsing clothes in stores, smelling the crispness of new fabric as it went over my skin, and absorbing the compliments from other people in the hallways of our high school. 

My fashion fetish was more than a vanity tool and means of self-expression; it was a way of adapting to the social hierarchy in my neighborhood. Having brains didn’t matter unless your Honor Roll status put you in good standing with one of the Big Four families in our community. You weren’t special for having your first car if it was the average hand-me-down Honda; you were applauded for having a Lexus or Mustang convertible, vehicles that implied your parents were straddling a different tax bracket. Similarly, wearing the right clothes from the right stores signaled that you were poised to mingle with the right folks who were going to the right places. 

Despite the difference in decade and location, Naylor thoroughly examines the same egregious class code in Linden Hills. The book contains the author’s signature poetic lyricism and biting insight, as first seen in her claim-to-fame novel, The Women of Brewster Place, all the while serving as a critical reminder of how classism remains an understated issue in Black communities. 

I believe the dilemma concerning Black America’s class divide doesn’t get enough attention for several reasons. For one, many people—including a number of Blacks—think fighting against one injustice at a time is sufficient. Sometimes a focus on combating classism gets avoided because it’s assumed that the issue will undermine the fight against problems that are perceived to be more threatening, like racism and misogyny. 

To some, success is success, no matter how one attains it, or at what costs.

Another cause could be that many people still don’t see the socioeconomic hierarchy as harmful to our communities. To some, success is success, no matter how one attains it, or at what costs. The majority of Blacks in the U.S. have suffered deprivation and inequality for so long that some of us are willing to endure the drawbacks that come with financial security and a high social status. 

Naylor continually points out this indifference to the dangers of classism in Linden Hills. Set in the mid-1980s, the novel centers a fictional upper-middle class suburb that, for over a hundred years, has prided itself on becoming a symbol of Black wealth. Luther Nedeed, a ruthless third-generation real estate mogul and mortician, rules with an iron fist, much like his great-great grandfather who established the town in 1837. 

The story’s context aligns with Naylor’s belief in Black-owned businesses and social progress. In her lifetime, she also advocated for land ownership as a way for African-Americans to gain equal footing in a world that doesn’t always have our best interests at heart. 

“Don’t be running after white folks for a few crumbs, “said Naylor in an interview. “Build your bakery. Build your own house. Get yourself some land and a basic profession so that people will have to come to you. If Black folks had taken that advice, the texture of the Black community would be very different today.” 

Naylor shows the negative effects that can spawn from Black enterprise when it meets unchecked financial privilege.

Still, in Linden Hills, Naylor shows the negative effects that can spawn from Black enterprise when it meets unchecked financial privilege. The author writes the novel through the lens of two poets, Lester Tilson and Willie Mason, who barely straddle the line between have and have-not. In an effort to make extra money during the Christmas season, Lester and Willie decide to work odd jobs in Linden Hills, discovering firsthand the hypocrisy, vile secrets, and generations-old tradition of “selling out” that riddles a community preoccupied with upward mobility and affluence. 

From the dialogue to the character descriptions, Naylor takes the reader on a journey that highlights what Linden Hills residents are willing to risk in order to maintain their power in a town where self-worth is determined by who they know and what they own. 

Maxwell Smyth, a business executive, is one of the locals painted as a composed and calculating individual who’s overly concerned with his reputation and determined to leave no room for error on his quest to live the good life. He tries to convince his friend and subordinate, Xavier Donnell, that marrying Lester’s sister, Roxanne, is not good because she’s a Black woman who’s not as socially adept or financially well off as Maxwell thinks she should be. 

“But, you’re going to have to face some hard, cold facts,” Maxwell tells Xavier, “there just aren’t enough decent ones to choose from. They’re either out there on welfare and waiting to bring a string of somebody else’s kids to support, or they’ve become so important that they’re brainwashed into thinking that you aren’t good enough for them.” 

Naylor also addresses intraracial issues, like homophobia and colorism, which further complicate relationships and the class divide among residents in Linden Hills. She highlights the tendency for locals to involve themselves in image-hungry, loveless marriages steeped in convenience and tradition. 

Lester and Willie, for instance, witness the wedding of a groom that Luther convinced to abandon his same-sex liaison to marry a woman and start a traditional family, the more socially acceptable choice for a young man climbing the success ladder. 

“No one’s been able to make it down to Tupelo Drive without a stable life and family,” Luther tells Winston, the groom-to-be.

On the other hand, Luther’s great great-grandfather, the town’s founder, was rumored to have brought his “octoroon” child bride with him when he first set out for Linden Hills in the 19th century. An emphasis on his spouse’s light skin is continually emphasized, which drives home the point that a fair complexion was, and often still is, viewed as more valuable and a symbol of privilege. 

To me, the genius of Naylor’s story lies in what many considered a play off the allegory of The Inferno by 14th-century writer Dante Alighieri. Like the main character in The Inferno, Linden Hills residents confront more inner demons and a loss of identity as they aspire to move further down the hill of the decadent neighborhood. The closer they get to the bottom, the more success they’ve attained, along with misery and corruption. 

“You know, my grandmother called it selling the mirror in your soul,” Lester says in the novel. “I guess she meant giving up that part of you that lets you know who you are. So you keep that mirror and when it’s crazy outside, you look inside and you’ll always know exactly where you are and what you are. And you call that peace. These people have lost that, Willie. They’ve lost all touch with what it is to be them. Because there’s not a damned thing anymore to let them know.” 

She helped me describe the isolation, the insensitivity, and the hyper-awareness of class differences that shaped the psyches of youth like me.

Reading passages like these, I often felt like Naylor wrote Linden Hills just for me. She helped me identify the language that describes the isolation, the insensitivity, and the hyper-awareness of class differences that shaped the psyches of youth like me in search of acceptance. As early as high school, and without fully realizing it, I’d learned how to navigate the community politics of my neighborhood and how to treat people based on who I thought they were, in terms of economic and social standing. My fashion addiction eventually led to a superiority complex and helped me fall further out of touch with reality as I nursed my own delusions of what constituted Black success. 

It wasn’t until I won “Best Dressed” during our Senior Superlatives contest that I recognized my foolish behavior. I remember feeling elated that I’d beat out every other so-called fashionable student in my class, but when I showed my mom the small trophy I’d won, all she said was “Is that it?” with a look of sincere disgust on her face. Her words stung because they allowed me to see myself for who, or what, I was turning into, and I hated that person.

In college, the allure of being part of the “it” crowd that fueled my fashion fetish eventually waned, and I reclaimed my love of reading and creative writing. Had I not felt compelled to make a change for the better, chances are I wouldn’t have picked up Linden Hills and discovered Naylor’s in-depth examination of classism in our community. 

Like racism and sexism, class division isn’t a new phenomenon impacting Black culture. With each generation, “keeping up with the Joneses” gets packaged differently to the masses, but a deeper look shows that it’s the same hurtful actions meant to keep Blacks in needless competition for material gain at all costs.

There’s plenty of work to do when it comes to bridging the gap between classes in our communities. I believe one way forward is to diversify our networks. It’s crucial to resist echo chambers and silos that encourage groupthink and closedmindedness. To meet and interact with those who think, work, move, and live differently.

In recent months, we’ve been inundated with charged political rhetoric and attacks on democracy that should make all of us, regardless of class, race, or sex, re-examine the role we play in harming each other. I believe Naylor’s Linden Hills is one of those timeless works that urges us to do better, if we want better. 

Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” by Pauline Melville

Of the many invisible cities described by Calvino, there is one remarkable city that is missing. If you approach this city by road you can see the main station on the outskirts. A handful of people loiter on the platform. It is only when you enter the missing city that you understand it consists of nothing but linked waiting-rooms: private waiting-rooms, public waiting-rooms, foyers, lobbies, public waiting spaces. The entire city is constructed for the sole purpose of waiting.

In high-ceilinged rooms with crimson silk wall-coverings and elaborately embossed carpets, ambassadors and dignitaries wait to be presented to the emperor or caliph or president.  Liveried servants hang around waiting to usher the chosen elite into the hallowed presence but, of course, that moment never arrives.  Then there are dentist’s and doctor’s waiting-rooms where patients flick through magazines but no-one is ever called in to see the consultant.  Passengers wait in the dank, badly-lit waiting-rooms of railway stations with old benches and dated posters where, naturally, no train puts in an appearance. People mingle in theatre foyers for drinks before a show which they will never see. Students gather together and talk a little as they wait outside the examination room. Through the window they can see the invigilator laying out exam papers meticulously, one on each desk, for an exam they will never sit. And, of course, two actors, costumed as tramps, wait endlessly in the wings ready to step onto a brightly lit stage whose set is nothing more than a country road and one tree.

Rooms on different floors are linked by moving escalators where people wait to progress from one level to another, slowly rising or descending until they can resume waiting elsewhere. From a distance the city appears to be full of people moving around meaningfully occupied, but this is not the case.

Some people believe that the city is really an enormous art installation where people wander from one period of history and from one experience to another but in reality the experience is always the same, the experience of waiting. All the same, there are no signs of serious discontent in the population. Hope keeps people quiescent. Expectancy is all.

The meeting between the two women took place in a spacious room on the second floor of a large four-story house. They were seated, engrossed in conversation, on a high-backed oak settle which also served as a storage chest. Anna Karenina was in a light-hearted frame of mind. Over her blue dress she wore a pale cashmere shawl embroidered with thin wool in a floral pattern round the edges. Her face was animated, her grey eyes alight with surprise and curiosity as she turned to Emma Bovary:

Do you mean that your husband never suspected anything?

Emma Bovary, the shorter of the two, had a sturdy body suggesting peasant stock. Her shiny black hair was styled a la Chinoise, parted in the middle with a neat knot on top. She wore a cream cotton dress that fitted tightly over her plump breasts and smart black boots that showed off her ankles to advantage. Mistaking Anna’s curiosity for admiration, Emma cocked her head to one side and gave a small smile of satisfaction:

Charles never had any idea. Not a clue.

How did you manage that? Anna managed to suppress a hint of disapproval.

Well, in some ways I always thought Charles was an imbecile. He had absolutely no ambition. I would have liked our name to be famous. He was just content to bumble about as a country doctor. I was furious once when he botched an operation that could have made our names. Anyway, my beloved Charles never noticed a thing. I even used to slip out of bed early in the mornings to meet my lover, Rodolphe, in the arbour at the end of the garden and Charles never knew. Emma giggled. Oh yes. And he never knew about Leon either. Heaven knows why he didn’t spot what was going on. Didn’t your husband ever suspect anything?

Anna raised a disdainful eyebrow as she recalled the early days of her affair with Vronsky:

Oh Karenin – he sniffed something from the first moment. He didn’t exactly suspect anything himself but he noticed that people were talking about me and Vronsky and he didn’t like that. It was all a matter of appearances for him. I think he just refused to believe it was possible that I should do such a thing. But anyway, in the end I told him.

Emma looked appalled:

You told him?

Anna nodded and smiled:

I really don’t like living with that sort of deceit. And Vronsky hated being involved in lies. He was too honourable. He couldn’t have tolerated it for long.

Emma looked directly at Anna, and the freshness, openness and self-possession she saw in that lovely face made her feel inferior and a little cheap. Perhaps Anna was not capable of being sly or duplicitous? And what was all this about honour? If confessing the truth to one’s husband was the price of honour she could do without it. But perhaps this was how the aristocracy always behaved, Emma wondered. How odd. She had been thrilled to find that her new friend was a member of the Russian nobility and listened enthralled as Anna talked about Prince This and Princess That and casually referred to footmen and servants. Oh, was your Vronsky a count? Emma had exclaimed in awe. And Anna had shrugged and laughed as if it were nothing.

Feeling that she had not been completely straightforward about her confession to Karenin, Anna hastened to explain:

Well actually, I was pregnant with Vronsky’s child. I had to tell him.

Oh how awful. Thank heavens that never happened to me. One child was bad enough. Emma lowered her voice to a whisper. Did you find that once you had fallen for someone else you suddenly couldn’t stand your child? I remember shoving my daughter away and thinking she was an ugly little so and so. But then I was obsessed with Rodolphe.

Anna was a little taken aback:

Oh no. I still loved my son with Karenin…at least I think I did. In fact, I once risked everything to visit him secretly on his birthday. But I know what you mean. When things were going well with Vronsky I never gave my son a second thought. And I do remember coming home at one point after I’d been with Vronsky and thinking what a disappointment my son was. He just seemed so tedious and unexceptional. Vronsky occupied my thoughts entirely.

Emma nodded in sympathy:

Children get in the way, don’t they? When Rodolphe and I were planning to run away together he asked what we should do about my daughter. Without thinking I just said ‘We’ll take her with us’. Emma shook her head in exasperation. That was my big mistake. It must have put him off. I should have said I’d leave her behind. Emma straightened the long skirts of her dress and pushed her lips out in a defiant pout:

Anyway, my husband ate slowly. That drove me mad.

My husband was stubborn and aloof. A shadow crossed Anna’s face and she twisted her hands together as she blurted out:  To be honest, when my daughter was born, Vronsky’s child that is, I just didn’t take to her. I felt bad about it but I never really liked her. Not even when she was ill. I think I was scared because I knew Vronsky had always disliked family life and here I was trapping him into domesticity. Worse still, according to Russian law I was still married to Karenin and so the child had to take the name Karenin unless my husband agreed to give me a divorce so that I could re-marry. That disturbed Vronsky no end. Besides, after the birth I nearly died. Vronsky was so distraught he tried to shoot himself.

Emma was impressed and a little envious. No-one had ever tried to kill themselves on her behalf. She searched for a comparable experience of her own: I was desperately ill too. I nearly died when Rodolphe sent me a letter saying the elopement was off. In fact, I was just going to throw myself out of the window when Charles happened to call me down to supper. It would have been better if I’d done away with myself then. Better that way than arsenic, I can tell you. Anyway, I had a nervous collapse that lasted for months.

The two women lapsed into silence, each of them caught up in her own thoughts.

After a few minutes, Emma got up and crossed to the window on her side of the room. Calico curtains hung there. The canary-coloured wallpaper around the window was peeling with damp. She leaned her elbows on the window-sill and looked out over the market square of Yonville l’Abbaye. Nothing had changed. The plaster figure of a Cupid with his finger on his lips still stood on the gate of the notary’s house opposite. In the distance she could see the flat and characterless landscape typical of that region of France. Before long she was overcome with the familiar feeling of suffocation. She was stifled with ennui. ‘Oh why, dear God, did I marry him?’ she repeated again and again. Down in her soul Emma Bovary was waiting and longing for something to happen. That was the enduring image of her existence. The summary of her life. Waiting and longing. After a while she broke away and returned to her conversation with Anna:

Was it love at first sight for you? Emma inquired, inspecting the heel of her boot as she settled back down beside her companion. I always thought love should strike like a clap of thunder.

Anna Karenina gave the matter careful consideration: 

Well no, not really. I met Vronsky in a railway station. Nothing happened at the time although I could sense I had made an impression on him. There’d been an accident. A guard died. Vronsky very generously offered money to the man’s family. I knew immediately that he’d done it to impress me. I saw him later in the house….there was something. But nothing really happened until the ball that was being held for Kitty my young sister-in-law. I shouldn’t have behaved as I did. Anna turned to Emma and made a slight grimace. Vronsky was more or less betrothed to Kitty. But what happened between me and Vronsky that night was irresistible. It was overpowering. We were both incapable of withstanding it. Anna rolled her eyes and threw her head back and for a moment Emma looked at her and saw in her eager face something strange and diabolical and enchanting. But when I was leaving Moscow the next day to catch the train home to Petersburg I remember thinking ‘Thank goodness that bit of excitement is over and from now on my life, my nice everyday life, will go on as before.’  But half way home when I got off the train for some fresh air, Vronsky was there on the platform. He’d followed me. Anna’s eyes were shining as she leaned against the high back of the settle.

Not to be outdone, Emma chattered on:

I went to a ball once. We were invited to the home of the Marquis de Andervilliers. Charles had cured his abscess. I wore the loveliest pale yellow gown with flounces on the skirt and three little pom-pom roses pinned to the neck. Charles sat to one side all evening but I danced the night away. It was after we got home that I looked around and realized my provincial life was dull, dull, dull. I longed to go to Paris and mix with…well…a better class of person. The day after the ball I bought myself a street-map of Paris and imagined shopping there.

But Anna Karenina was not listening. At that moment, she left the seat, frowning, and hurried towards the window on her side of the room. The tall leaded window was set in wooden panelling. It overlooked a Moscow courtyard which had its gates already wide open to receive a carriage. Anna glanced out of the window and then began pacing up and down. Why did Vronsky always have to stay out so late? He was growing cold towards her, no doubt about it. He must know how miserable she was in Moscow. And there was still no news from Karenin about a divorce. She thought she heard the sound of carriage wheels on the cobbles and hurried back to the window. No sign of him. This is not living, she thought. Waiting for a solution that never comes is not living. I know he’s getting tired of me. Why doesn’t he come? It doesn’t even matter if he doesn’t love me. As long as he’s here. The strain and anxiety of her situation caused a permanent change in Anna’s characteristically cheerful temperament. She bit her lip, shook her head and returned slowly to where she had been sitting.

Emma could not help noticing how graceful Anna was when she walked:

How do you keep that lovely figure? I had to drink vinegar to keep slim.

Anna ignored the question and posed one of her own as she sat down:

What happened anyway with your Rodolphe and your Leon? There was something sharp in the tone of her voice. Emma sighed:

Well Rodolphe was rich. We went riding together. Charles encouraged it – he thought it was good for my health. We started an affair. I became really bold. I couldn’t stop myself. One morning when Charles was at work I ran all the way over to the chateau and burst in on him. Emma held her hand to her mouth and her eyes flashed with amusement as she recalled her own behaviour. It was lust, she admitted. I couldn’t keep away from him.

Anna found Madame Bovary entertaining and a welcome distraction from her own thoughts. She could see how men would be attracted to this pert creature with her red lips and wayward manner. Emma rattled on: 

After that I went to the chateau whenever I could although he warned me that I was becoming reckless. Now I realize I gave him too many gifts, expensive riding-whips, cigar cases, that sort of thing. I became over-sentimental, talking to him in baby language which got on his nerves. And I was borrowing money like there was no tomorrow, ordering clothes and traveling bags for myself, thinking we were going away together. Then, out of the blue, he did a bunk. How despicable is that? Emma let out a hiss of disgust. She took some eau de cologne from a small bottle in her bag and sprinkled it on her arms.

Go on. At that moment Anna chose to be a listener, fearful of what she might reveal about herself if she talked. Feeling flattered, Emma continued:

Well then, Leon was somebody else I’d taken a fancy to. You’ve no idea how boring life is in the country. But Leon moved away to Rouen before anything happened. Then after the disaster with Rodolphe, I bumped into Leon again. He was sweet. We had this amazing ride in a horse-drawn cab. We just pulled the curtains and got on with it. I’d been worried that he’d be too timid. But he wasn’t. I don’t know why but after that I became more careless, sort of slapdash. I didn’t really bother about anything anymore. I paid everything on credit. Signed promissory notes. Spent a lot on clothes. I forged bills for the piano classes I pretended to Charles I was having – my excuse for going to Rouen. I was getting into huge debt. Trying to dodge bailiffs. Now I can see that everything was going to pieces.

Were you jealous? Asked Anna.

Emma held her hands in front of her to study the nails she had shaped so carefully. She thought for a moment and then replied:

Not really. But I was pushy. I see that now. I demanded Leon write me love poems. I kept turning up at his office and he didn’t like it. I’d made the same mistake with Rodolphe. Were you jealous of Vronsky?

Anna stared straight ahead with a brooding look in her grey eyes:

I was jealous of everything. I was even jealous of my child’s nurse. I wanted total possession. ‘Love for man is a thing apart. ‘Tis woman’s whole existence’. Have you read any Byron?

Emma shook her head:  I used to read Walter Scott at the convent. And I loved all those romances and the stories about martyred women. Passion. That’s what I wanted.

Anna gave a wry smile:

I wrote a little myself. Children’s stories, mainly. And I once re-wrote the first sentence of that famous novel by Jane Austen. My version went:  It is a truth not universally acknowledged that all married women, even when they are reasonably contented, are still looking for a husband. It’s a sentence almost as famous as the one at the beginning of my own life story. She pointed to the Penguin Classic copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that lay beside her on the bench

Emma gave a puzzled shrug and pulled her own Penguin Classic copy of Madame Bovary out of a draw-string bag. She frowned at the cover:

I don’t know why they’ve put me in that weird outfit. They could have shown me in the gorgeous yellow ball dress I wore with my little bouquets of pom-pom roses all trimmed with green. And I had satin slippers. That would have been a lovely picture.

Emma flicked through the pages:

Oh I’m such a fool. I hadn’t realised that Leon held such a candle to me for all that time. I should have guessed and done something about it before he left.

She came to the part of the book which described her long drawn out death. Her lips puckered with distaste:

Why did he have to say my tongue was protruding like that? And black liquid was coming out of my mouth? Sometimes I wonder if Flaubert even liked me.  

Anna felt a surge of affection for her:

Why did you do it?

Kill myself? Emma took a deep breath:  Debt. It was poverty that did me in, not adultery. I was desperate. Always fleeing debt-collectors. Running from bailiffs. I just rushed into the pharmacy, grabbed a handful of arsenic powder and that was that. What about you?

Anna Karenina took a while to reply. She played with a loose strand of her curly black hair before turning directly to Emma, a strange gleam in her eyes:

Vengeance. A vague fury and a craving for vengeance. She shuddered as she remembered the heavy iron blow of the train’s wheel on her head. That was more or less my final thought. Of course, I was upset and confused too but if men knew our capacity for vengeance they would tremble in their socks. Never have I hated anyone as I hated that man. Love turned to hate. I can still see his stony face when we began to quarrel. All I wanted to do was hurt him. Death was my way of reviving his love for me, punishing him and finally gaining victory in the contest.

Emma was slightly shocked. For the first time she felt a little superior to her new friend. She did not think she had it in her heart to be as ruthless as Anna. She closed Flaubert’s novel and laid it on her lap. Anna looked at her in surprise:

Have you stopped reading? Do you not want to know what happened after you died? I do.

Emma, with some reluctance opened her book again and turned to the last few pages. She reached the point when her mother-in-law moved in to comfort Charles after her death:

Oh I see the old bat got him back after I’d gone. She was always jealous of me.

Anna laughed:

Vronsky’s mother hated me too. He’d given up a prestigious military career for me. She adored me at first then she thought I’d ruined her son’s life.

How do you mean? Emma tried to hide her prurience. The colour rose up through Anna’s neck and into her cheeks at the memory: 

Well Vronsky and I chose to live together without my being divorced. That meant we were social outcasts. We were refused invitations. Spurned by old friends. Nobody would visit us. And once I was at the opera when the wife of a couple in the next box ostentatiously rose and left rather than be seen to be sitting near me.

For a few moments Emma was quite glad she did not move in those circles. It crossed her mind that maybe the French revolution hadn’t been such a bad thing. She read on:  Oh it seems that Charles really did love me. He kept a lock of my hair and gave me a very grand tombstone. Then her hand shot up to cover her mouth. Oh no. She looked up in horror at Anna. He’s found all my love letters. The ones to Leon and the ones to Rodolphe. Now he knows everything. She continued to read:  Shit. Now he’s actually bumped into Rodolphe in the market at Argueil. This is dreadful. She covered her face with her hands and then peeped back at the book:  Oh and now he’s died. Just as well, probably.

Anna was studying the last pages of the Tolstoy novel with great intensity:  Good. I’m so glad I was looking beautiful when Vronsky came to see my dead body at the train station. She put the book down and said with some sarcasm:  I suppose we have to be thankful that Kitty and Levin carry some hope of happiness in the world. She explained to Emma:  Kitty couldn’t get Vronsky so she had to make do with Levin. Vronsky always thought Levin was a crackpot with his communist ideas. Anyway, I got what I wanted. Vronsky rejoined the military and went off to war. He would almost certainly have been killed. At least nobody else would have him. She snapped the book shut with triumph and offered it to Emma:

Do you want to read mine?

I don’t think so. Not if it doesn’t have a happy ending. Emma continued to gripe about her author:   I don’t think that Flaubert could have approved of me if he gave me such a long drawn out, unattractive death. In the books I read when I was at the convent death was romantic and brought tears to your eyes.

I’m not sure that Tolstoy liked me either. Anyway apparently Tolstoy was a complete pain in the neck but look at what he created. Anna’s eyes flashed with humour and she pulled the cashmere shawl around her shoulders in a shiver of delight.

Do you think people will remember us? Asked Emma.

Oh yes. Said Anna, smiling. People will remember us more vividly than they remember their own relatives.

But soon the women were drawn back to their respective windows. As long as they were residents in that city of waiting they spent most of their time at the window re-living certain short but very particular moments of their lives.

In “Milk Blood Heat,” The Body Keeps the Score

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Proximity to self, the body, and womanhood is encapsulated in every story in Milk Blood Heat, the debut collection from Dantiel W. Moniz.

From the intrigue and connections of marine life in “Feasts,” to the unspoken yet palpable conflict between siblings trying to put the ashes of their deceased father to rest in “Thicker Than Water,” to the deep love and protectiveness of an older sister for her developing body and those she loves in “Tongues,” Moniz’s stories launch readers into the depths of emotions we may not be ready to face—especially since these characters aren’t equipped to go there either. What remains is the relatability in every story and a closeness and beauty in the fault lines within ourselves. 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Moniz about the connective threads in her stories, her creative approach to expressing her characters without judgment, and how the pieces inspiring her fiction become whole. 

Jennifer Baker: I think when we think about collections in general, we tend to look for those thematic ties. What are all the things that keep coming up for us? And I don’t want to prescribe what those are for your book, but I personally felt a lot of disconnections occurring in Milk Blood Heat. It felt like people were clamoring for connections in these pieces yet kept hitting a wall. Even in stories that stand on their own, were you searching for a level of cohesion in the collection? 

Dantiel W. Moniz: That’s actually a really good insight about connection or the want of connection. Or thinking that you’re doing it and it’s absolutely something else. We tend to present ourselves in public the way we would like to be observed. I think that has a lot to do with this stigma of not being able to be fully human and what all that entails a lot of the time. We have to always be positive and good. And what does goodness even mean? What does it look like? Is it really positive and good if we’re not fully who we are, which does include darkness. A part of what my project was for this collection was to explore what those terms we think of  as absolutes—good, bad, right, wrong—are actually subjective. Based on perspective. And they don’t mean anything when not pinned up against their opposites. We need both things, we need that fullness. I think I’m trying to get the reader to look at who is doing the defining in any one moment. Who is that privileging and who is that disprivileging? I definitely see all the stories as cyclical and connected even if they’re not all the same characters. I think people think it can’t be a linked story collection unless the characters are the same but that’s leaving out thematic ties and voice and location and all that stuff. 

JB: You also get into the body. Your work tends to be very much rooted in sensory detail and I love that. I’m thinking of the stories “Feast,” “Tongues,” and “The Loss of Heaven,” about how characters question other people’s perspectives of their bodies in relation to figuring things out. And we come back to the opposition and these dichotomies of what’s the expectation versus “who am I?” Can you talk a little about those stories or perhaps talk about one in pursuing those ideas of visibility? 

DM: Let’s do “Loss of Heaven.” Obviously that one stands out because it’s the only one where the protagonist is male. But even in that male gaze I’m still really focused on how the women are operating in this space. You have Hilda and you have Gloria, his wife, who’s going through a recurrence of her cancer. There’s a little bit of a layer between that, but I’m still thinking, how are women being seen? A lot of the time, you know how it is when it comes to women of color, especially Black women, owning their bodies. When you start out as your body being property through slavery and then your body being property through patriarchy. It’s a very cringeworthy process of getting to “Oh this is my body. This is something that is for me that carries me through this world.” 

If you’re thinking about your body as static, as a product, it’s very easy to disconnect from your entire world.

I’m glad you said that the stories and characters feel very in the body. That was something that was important to me. I wanted the stories to be felt in our physical bodies. Kind of like our emotions, right? Sometimes people can think of emotions as this thing that you’re projecting or just happening to you. But emotions happen in your body. You can physically feel euphoria and grief and all that kind of stuff. So, I’m really concerned with the body. The way capitalism does us, it’s very easy for us to think of our bodies as static or our bodies as products. When in fact we’re moving and changing and it deserves our care and attention, but it’s hard to do that sometimes in this world. And it’s hard to do this outside of capitalism. Self-care is “I need to buy like bubble bath or all these things.” But I wanted to be focused on our real-life bodies—and we aren’t our bodies, we’re what lives inside our bodies. And what does that mean? I think that’s always the question I ask myself, “What does it mean to have a body? Why do we have one? What do we do?” But our bodies are ways we connect to others too. So it’s this singular thing for you, but it’s also how you connect with other people in your life. If you’re thinking about your body as static, as a product, as something you’re not comfortable in or you don’t like, it’s very easy to disconnect from your entire world. 

JB: It’s interesting to think about that even more now. We’ve been in isolation for what feels like years but has been months (as of this conversation).

DM: And then March is in three months again, how?

JB: Right! It’s interesting to read a collection like this and especially a story like “Feast” where I felt the most in the body. That one felt like we’re dealing with so many things and the marine life correlations in terms of loss/pregnancy/life. But I felt even more isolated because I feel disconnected from my body even though I’m with myself all the time. And as writers we’re isolated too. Technically we are by ourselves. When you’re writing this how are you going about capturing those moments that are so internal?

DM: For “Feast” in particular, I had this image. Somebody that I know had posted a prompt “Somebody’s sick. There’s an aquarium,” and then I was like “What can I do with that?” And then I started thinking about “Feast,” and I read a piece about how an octopus, if it’s injured, it will start to eat the injured limb, so it can regenerate. It made me think of ouroboros and the phoenix rising from the ashes. But as far as getting into that character’s head, I just put myself in the bed. When there’s the moonlight coming in the window. I tried to ground it in these very real sensory things. The atmosphere this character lives in, and then once I got the environment down I can kind of pinpoint how the character would feel. Because for me, going through my life, I’m very much “This is where I live. This is my apartment. This is what my apartment feels like to me.” And then I’m able to use kind of an echolocation for the rest of the world in this story.

JB: The writing process is so unique in itself, right? It is never one thing. Sometimes you write in your most relaxed state or your most heightened state. 

DM: Just like it’s not the same for every book, whatever your writing process is, with a collection it’s not the same for every story. A lot of people will say “I had all these feelings/emotions when I was reading your piece.” I didn’t have those emotions while I was writing it the same as the reader might feel. I think I need to have this distance for me to be able to realistically portray [those emotions]. If I’m super in my feelings, trying to get the feelings that I want people to feel while they’re reading it, I’m probably less likely going to get that. When you’re in your emotions, you’re away with your emotions. So there’s a little bit of distance that I have to feel. I have to see it from outside the boat, kind of, instead of being in it. 

When you’re in your emotions, you’re away with your emotions. So there’s a little bit of distance that I have to feel.

JB: I’m similar in that way. I think you can capture the most emotion when you’re an observer, which I feel is our job.

DM: Exactly! It’s observation rather than participation. There has to be a certain level of coolness. Because if you’re participating, and it’s important to you, you’re missing things. But if you’re watching something play out then you’re watching everyone’s faces, what are the details going on? And you can see it all. I really like that about being a writer. 

JB: And as writers from that observational standpoint it really feels as though you cannot judge your characters. 

DM: You can’t! If you already have your biases towards someone or something you’re already creating with that lens. So it’s going to be harder for you to make a character or a world that feels whole. It’s going to feel stunted because your ideas about whatever that is feels stunted. Like, my characters judge each other. And that’s their world and that’s fine. And a reader will come to judge. But as a writer I didn’t want to put that in the text before [the reader] got there. My place is to show: here’s what the situation is. I feel tender towards all my characters. Like, oh, look at you, you little thing you. But at the same time I can’t judge them and effectively do my job. And I can’t protect them and effectively do my job. 

JB: You said you felt tenderness about all your characters. And I think about “Thicker Than Water.” With that story it’s very interesting how much it was obvious but also underlying the tension of what people were refusing to talk about. When writing the dynamic between the two siblings dispensing of their father’s ashes as supposedly a form of closure. How did you approach this story and the layers to it? 

DM: I’m the type of person who collects ideas and interesting things in my phone and after a while I’ll be like “Oh this idea connects to this idea connects to this idea and it’s a story.” And then I put them in a folder. I had wanted to write about siblings for a little while, siblings who had a complicated relationship. But I wasn’t sure how that was adding up. 

I feel tender towards all my characters. Like, oh, look at you, you little thing you.

With the way that story is presented, there’s enough in the story by the end to understand what happened. But I thought it was important to not just go out and say “this happened” because the main character, and this is a first-person story, has not resolved the complications of her relationship with her father. She is not at this moment ready to resolve that. So you have this wall. And I wanted to make sure that wall stayed in place. If you have a character who is in first person who is not ready to do this, how would [the reader] do it? So I had to rely on atmospheric clues about that kind of thing. I think it’s very interesting too, the way that, like you said, the trip is supposed to be closure. But really what the trip is is their mother being like, “I don’t want you all to be fighting.” And maybe this mother doesn’t have a full understanding, or has blocked her own self from having a full understanding, of what the problem is between her two children. And so I just really wanted this story to be about love, honestly, and the love for your own family. But how is that mixed up and really difficult? How are love and harm conflated a lot of the time and what does that look like in real time between these two characters? And you have this sister saying “This is your fault” and the brother saying “It’s not my fault, but we’re not all being real here. And now I have to strike out to make my own family and these connections.” What does that feel like between the two of them? 

JB: I’m really glad you brought that up. I felt that evasiveness is a way of trying to preserve love and that happens a lot throughout this collection too. 

DM: Yeah, you have to actually sometimes be honest with yourself about the people that you love. Would that love still exist in this kind of spotless, pure way? Our ideas of what constitutes love… or I can’t love you if you don’t XYZ. It’s about our conditional relationship with love all the time. I didn’t want the evasiveness to be coy like, “Oh, this person withheld this information for a twist at the end.” But it felt more natural for it to be a layer underneath what’s happening. 

JB: My last question is: what are some story collections you’ve learned the most from? 

DM: Obviously, Danielle Evans. I had a workshop with her when I was at UW and she was my professor. Every single thing she says is just genius. I’m super excited to get into the new one, but Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was just doing things that back then were new and exciting. I was really into Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater. The way she handles darkness is very interesting to me because I’m always interested in what’s stigmatized or what we can’t talk about. Antonya Nelson’s Female Trouble was instrumental to me in writing these stories because it was: here’s a whole encapsulation of being female, of being a woman identifying in this world, which I felt was really true in a way that felt like “I want to do this.” 

If I Don’t Go to Heaven, at Least I’ll Have Mariah Carey

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I kept a tally on the wall calendar in my bedroom: four bars and a strikethrough for the days I prayed all five times. I marked my streak of fasts in the month of Ramadan with a yellow highlighter. I wasn’t trying to go to heaven, but to avoid hell. 

Temptation was everywhere in suburban America: sleeveless shirts and short skirts, boys I wanted to be alone with, the glee of being gossipy and unkind. In Islamic Sunday school in Silver Spring, Maryland we read accounts of hell: hot lead poured into the ears of eavesdroppers and backbiters, burning ropes tied around the necks of those who were cruel to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). We learned about the sin of looking at yourself naked in the mirror, of jealousy, of impure thoughts and immodesty. Nothing promised in paradise seemed better than my life. Nobody I loved had died; I had no yearning for reunion. I never went hungry. I didn’t have anything urgent to pray for. Honey and nectar didn’t seem extraordinary; America was full of sugar. I prayed to be saved.

Almost suddenly, hell seemed a long way off and not worth worrying about. Mariah’s heaven was right here.

I was fourteen in 1995 when Mariah Carey was at the top of the charts with “Fantasy.” The chorus: I’m in heaven with my boyfriend, my lovely boyfriend. Maybe it was puberty awakening my desire—maybe following all the rules became too hard. Maybe it was that my eldest sister, who made the religious fervor somehow fun, left for law school. Maybe I outgrew my friendships with the Sunday school girls. But when Isabel laughed at one of my jokes in World Studies and decided I was cool enough to hang out with, I shed my preoccupation with the afterlife. I discovered what it felt like to hug boys and sit close enough to them for our baggy-jean-clad thighs and bare elbows to touch at lunch. I expanded my potential crush pool beyond Muslim boys to include Dark-Haired Boys Who Read Books, and Dark-Haired Boys Who Were Funny. Almost suddenly, hell seemed a long way off and not worth worrying about. Mariah’s heaven was right here. 

The 1994 Bollywood movie “Hum Aapke Hain Koun?” (which translates to “who am I to you?”) opens with young adult Nisha, played by stunning megastar Madhuri Dixit, roller skating through the halls of the university where her father works. She is immature and childlike and impulsive and loveable, playing pranks and fulfilled by chocolate. Her serene older sister Puja receives a marriage proposal from a well-to-do family, gets married, moves to her in-laws’ mansion in another city. Nisha falls in love with Puja’s husband’s younger brother, Prem. In a musical interlude, she dances around her bedroom (decorated with posters of desserts) and wonders in song about what has happened to her, how her preoccupation with chocolates has suddenly disappeared, replaced with a longing for Prem. She trades her western clothes for traditional garb and waits impatiently to be rescued by him from the childhood she’s outgrown.

The story takes a sudden, tragic turn: after Puja is told about the love between her baby sister and beloved brother-in-law, but before she can tell anyone the delightful news, she dies, leaving behind an infant son. To step in as a mother to her nephew, Nisha is engaged to marry her sister’s widower. The formerly childlike, impulsive Nisha resigns herself. This is the trajectory to adulthood: wonder and freedom in childhood, a brief bloom of erotic desire, sacrifice and resignation. In Nisha’s case, the gods (acting through Tuffy the dog) make her true love known, and the family swaps grooms so Nisha and Prem can be together. I watched the three-hour movie more than 50 times by the time I was fifteen. As I typed the above account, I could pause, rewind, replay the entire movie in my head with less effort than it would take me to recount the steps of prayer. Though the family portrayed is Hindu, and Nisha’s clothes are more revealing than I was allowed, my parents encouraged my obsession with the wholesome movie and my connection to their culture, my heritage. They ordered me (modest) reproductions of the outfits, bought me an enormous poster of the beautiful Madhuri-as-Nisha looking over her shoulder in a backless blouse through thick eyelashes. I worshipped her.

At school we separated ourselves: the Brown and Black kids from the white kids. We (but really they—I was soft, young for my grade, babyish, pampered, and goofy) were tougher, badder, ready to fight. After school I got high with a few girls in the creek behind McDonald’s, smoking mostly stems and seeds from the flattened side of a Coke can. We went back to Isabel’s house and painted our fingernails and watched MTV on the television in Isabel’s frilly bedroom. Boys would stop by, calling through her first-floor bedroom window facing the street. They were never there to see me, but I usually didn’t mind. Boys were alien, sublime, rough creatures, a little dangerous, fascinating. I regarded them with universal interest, and they laughed at my jokes, regarded me with little-sister affection. 

She isn’t waiting, doesn’t choose between fun and erotic, doesn’t wait to be chosen.

In the video for “Fantasy,” Mariah rollerblades on screen, cleavage perfect, crop-top stopping a few inches above her belly button. “Mmm, baby, I’m so into you/Darlin’, if you only knew…” the love she sings about exists only in her mind. Her bangs falling perfectly, hair wavy behind her. She isn’t waiting, doesn’t choose between fun and erotic, doesn’t wait to be chosen. Her heaven is immediate and all her own. My breasts were small and my hips were already wider than hers. I was still outgrowing a haircut like the wig ODB dons comically for a few seconds in the video: a thick bob like a helmet with bangs, except I’d cut the bangs myself and they were crooked. That year, an oral surgeon cut into the gums on either side of my four wildly-spaced and jutting incisors, pulled up the flaps, and affixed braces to my shy adult canines. At monthly visits over the next two years, my orthodontist dragged the reluctant teeth into place using rubber bands attached under the gum. For much of 1995 I had only vast space around my front four teeth. I covered my mouth when I laughed and pushed my lower lip up over all my teeth when I smiled. I sat at the white wicker dressing table in my suburban bedroom and stared at my face disapprovingly for what felt like hours. Too-pointy chin. Too-short eyelashes. A mustache. Blackheads on my nose. There was nothing redeeming about it. From the wall, soft-focus-perfect Madhuri looked back at me. 

I got my braces off when I was sixteen. Met my second-ever boyfriend at seventeen, married him at eighteen, had my first child at nineteen. My second at 25. Divorced at 30. Had a bout of disordered eating and obsessive exercise and went on a rampage. Every other weekend, I was kidless and completely free. I worked hard and I played hard. Made up for my wasted early academic potential by sharpening my focus and doing. Made up for my wasted youth by refusing to settle. For each year of my life after the divorce, there is a list of accomplishments: publications, degrees, art exhibitions, speaking engagements. There is also a shadow list, one that my close friends know: people I was entangled with, who I loved and didn’t love me, or who loved me and suffered for it. People I disappointed by wanting different things than them.

The hope is that one day, if we’re good enough, if we achieve enough, we might be able to finally stop apologizing.

On the 2016 New Year’s stage at Times Square, revealed from behind a fan of feathers, Mariah in a beige bodysuit is escorted around the stage by male dancers clad in black. She makes mild efforts to sing along until finally, over pre-recorded back-up tracks of herself hitting the high high notes in the song “Emotions,” she says, defiant in her low speaking voice, “Whatever. This song went to number one.” She does not apologize. Even when performing badly, even when she has clearly messed up. The hope is that one day, if we’re good enough, if we achieve enough, we might be able to finally stop apologizing. I watched the New Year’s Eve performance from a sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor of a living room in a brownstone in Philadelphia. On mattresses around me: my sons, two dear grad school friends and their partners. At midnight, we popped open a bottle of champagne and passed it around, took little sips and then turned out the lights and after a bit of giggling and whispering to one another, went right to sleep. In the morning, we took a family portrait—all seven of us, plus Newton the dog. Then my sons and I piled into our little car and drove the two hours back to Maryland. With money I earned, I paid for the gas, and the tolls, and the car, and the denim shirts we all (including Newton) donned in the pictures.

I dedicated that year, my 35th, to fulfilling the quietened desires of my thirteen-year-old self, the one who counted her sins. When making decisions about what to wear, what to buy, I thought of her. More eyeshadow. Redder lipstick. A sparkly case for my laptop, strapless dresses, a sequined jacket, dazzling gold leather boots to celebrate my own accomplishments. Dangly earrings all the time. When feeling miserably not-enough, I reminded myself of how proud my thirteen-year-old self would be of my dinner dates with fascinating people, nights alone in hotel rooms, lunch meetings in the city. How impressed she’d be by my driving effortlessly at high speeds, by how often my phone rings. The stacks of books I’ve read. The books I wrote. Deadlines. Bylines. An apartment in a high rise and no one to answer to but myself. That year, I stopped removing my facial hair. There wasn’t any time. Or rather, the money was better spent at yoga, or sitting on the couch ordering groceries and any book I wanted. The time was better spent reading. Writing.

I would like the moral of the story to be: out of the depths of self-loathing emerges a woman who is exactly who she’s supposed to be.

I would like the moral of the story to be: out of the depths of repression and self-loathing emerges a woman who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, who is exactly who she’s supposed to be. Who eats what she wants and wears what she wants and loves every photo taken of her, because she has earned her place. Because how she looks is the least interesting thing about her. I wanted to say that I outgrew the vise grip of fear when I stopped tallying my fasts and prayers, and outgrew a culture that taught me marriage as ultimate accomplishment. I wanted to point to Mohammed or Madhuri as the source of the equation: Sacrifice + Devotion = Good. But even without those deities, the theorem rests inside me.

In a 2018 Genius Level interview, Rob Markman compliments Carey on directing the iconic video for “Fantasy” herself. He shows a photo of her standing in the black crop top and jean shorts, pointing with authority, directing the video. She rolls her eyes. “I hate that picture, but yes. I directed it.” I scroll the bar back, pause on the photo. I can’t see what she sees. Here’s what I think I’m trying to say: When someone tells me how impressed they are by how little I care what anyone thinks, I am surprised and uneasy. I am trying so hard. The truth is, I am still keeping count. I think about my stomach with some disgust within hours of waking. The hairs on it, the way it folds over itself. I have written two books, I pay my own bills, I make very good coffee, write very good sentences. My chicken korma would rival anyone’s grandmother’s. I’d be better if my arms were less flabby, if my breasts were a cup size larger. The judgment I am still trying to learn to outgrow is my own.

China Is Too Big to Fit Inside One Reality

Posted on by Jo Lou

As a college student, I traveled to China for the first time in my life. Growing up, I frequently visited relatives in Hong Kong, then under British colonial rule before its handover.

But setting foot on the mainland, a place my maternal grandparents had fled and died without ever returning to, I was not at all prepared for what I would encounter. I had to concede that I, in fact, knew very little about the country of my family’s origins. 

Chinese American author Te-Ping Chen seeks to make sense of this so-called Land of Big Numbers in her debut short story collection. She draws on her real-life experience as a journalist who spent years on the ground in Beijing, while also playfully gesturing to the surreal nature of living in the world’s most populous nation. I dove into her book as if reconnecting with a long-lost friend. Later, over a video call, Chen and I traded stories about our time in China and discussed what it means to commemorate a sense of place in fiction.

Mimi Wong: When I was in China, it definitely felt bigger than life. There was this very hyper-real quality about being there. I really appreciated that, interspersed between the more realist, slice-of-life fiction, you had these speculative satirical stories that had magical realism and absurdism in them. What motivated you to write these tonal shifts?

Te-Ping Chen: I think China is just a place that demands both genres. The surrealism, the hyper-realism, as well as the realism. It’s a place where the government literally will decide when it’s going to rain. It can control the weather, which seems like a detail straight out of a science fiction novel, but it’s real life in Beijing. That would happen so often when it was really polluted before a big political event. We would just wait for the government to fire up those cloud-seeding implements and make it rain, so the skies would turn blue again. There’s just that incredibly rich, visual lexicon of things that you would never expect to see.

When I was living in China, I just had a sense of propulsive-ness about the place. Like the sense that anything could happen at any moment and often did. And so, I think when I was living there as a reporter, I was so much engaged in the headlines and the day-to-day and the news. But at the same time, also feeling like you’re right on the edge of things happening. One of the cliches is: if you want to visit the future, you go to China. I think some of that does inflect the stories in the book.

The different mixing of genres for me also came about because I just wanted to play in some ways and have fun writing them for me. So many stories would start with a little kernel of something and then your imagination starts running away. One of the stories, “New Fruit,” is one of my favorites.

MW: Mine, too.

TPC: You visited Beijing during your time there, so you’ll know the kind of neighborhood that I was trying to evoke, one that I lived in for a number of years when I was in Beijing. It was the kind of neighborhood and community that I loved so much. On weekends, I really loved nothing more than just walking through these narrow hutongs and people-watching and seeing all the vegetable and fruit vendors coming in and out, and the old men and women playing chess and gossiping. I loved it. At the same time though, you would just look around and think, “My god, what these people have seen, what they’ve been through.” Whether we’re talking about the Cultural Revolution or other historical tragedies that the country has been through. I was looking around and the kernel of the story for me started there. But then I was thinking, “Well, what if a fruit arrived in the neighborhood that made everyone start to remember things that they wanted to forget?”

So many of the stories in the book have had that sort of genesis, when you wonder what if, and then the stories start. Then everything falls from there. Side note on that story: there’s a particular kind of nectarine that is everywhere in the summer, which is the fruit in that story is based on. I loved it. I just would eat bagfuls every day. The story is an ode to that neighborhood in Beijing and also to the fruit that I loved eating.

MW: I’m glad you brought up this feeling that visiting China is almost like going to the future because I feel like time really operates differently there. I just felt like life was really sped up and things moved really fast. I’m sure you witnessed this in that time you were going in and out, but I felt like every time I returned, everything would change. All the buildings would be brand new. The one restaurant I used to go to would be gone, replaced by something else. They’re just moving so fast. As you were reporting or writing about China, were you aware that things were happening faster than you could record it?

When I was living in China, I just had… the sense that anything could happen at any moment and often did.

TPC: Absolutely. I think you’re really conscious of that as a reporter, certainly just the incredible speed of events in China. I think that’s partly what prompted me to write the stories, just the sense that what I was being immersed in every day was so precious. It could be something mundane, just someone biking down the street with their dog and kid on the bike. All these little vignettes that you’d see as soon as you stepped outside your door. Just fast forward a year, and these things will vanish or be changed in some way. Like this neighborhood that I was describing in “New Fruit,” that really special community that in so many ways makes traditional Beijing what it is and has been. When I was living in Beijing, they started this campaign to break up all of these small shops that make up the fabric of hutong life. And it was the most surreal thing because one day you would walk down an alley that the previous weekend had been this incredibly bustling street with jianbing carts out and people selling temple incense and fruit and vegetables, everything. And then the next week, you’d walk down and they had all been bricked up, all these shops. It was as though it had never existed, and it was the saddest and most eerie experience. That kind of change, you would just see at a granular street level so frequently when living there.

MW: It’s pointed out in the story “Gubeikou Spirit.” I remember the first time I went to Shanghai, there were only two subway lines. The next time I went back, there were 14 or more lines. That’s very real, how rapidly that happens.

TPC: Thinking back to what we were saying before about the realism, hyper-realism, surrealism of China, it makes me think of one of my favorite details in the story, “Flying Machine.” It’s one story that I love so much partly it’s because it’s a story that’s told in a realist fashion, but it has certain elements that sound utterly made up. Like the funeral stripper, or this robot that makes noodles. And yet, those were some of the pieces of the book that actually were taken most directly from the headlines. Robots that make noodles, they’ve been a thing for a while. I actually wrote a news story about them for the [Wall Street] Journal because I just love them so much. Ditto, funeral strippers, which is just such a surreal thing but is actually something that happens. I was just like, “Oh my god, that’s amazing.” I would have loved to write a 10,000-word news story about them. Obviously, it was not exactly a new story, but I wanted to use it somewhere. That’s how it wound up in that story.

MW: At the same time, there’s a darkness that pervades a lot of the stories, too. The threat of violence underlies a lot of the narratives, whether it’s perpetuated by the characters themselves or it’s happening to them. I was wondering where that darker impulse comes from.

One of the cliches is if you want to visit the future, you go to China. I think some of that does inflect the stories in the book.

TPC: I’m trying to think now how much of that was the product of the environment I was living in and how much of it was just me. It’s hard to say. The darkness was specific to the environment in a lot of ways because at the end of the day, as a reporter, I was spending so much time talking to people who were in horrifically dark situations—wives of men who had been railroaded and thrown into jail, and human rights lawyers who were being persecuted. I think it’s really hard not to live in China and not feel struck by that environment and also moved, too. I think a number of the stories are trying to grapple with some of that and some of that duality. On the one hand, it is this place where it’s so wonderful to get to live there. It’s such a rich experience. At the same time, there is just that vein of incredible darkness running through events. I’m glad you asked the question. It’s a hard question. I don’t quite know how to answer it, but I do think a lot of it did emerge from just the reality of the place.

MW: Something else I picked up on was the constant sense of competition that’s happening, where the characters are often under extra pressure because they’re comparing themselves to other people. There are a lot of class issues, but I also noticed this recurring figure of the model student, which felt really relatable to me growing up in a large Asian American community. You always know who the model student is, and that’s always the figure that you’re chasing.

TPC: I hadn’t noticed, but I think it speaks to the broader themes that come up in the stories, which is that of people striving and trying to make meaning for themselves and make an identity for themselves. To find their place in an environment where it feels like incredible demands are being placed on you and incredible strictures. Just how do you make meaning? It’s a theme that, whether you’re in China or not, we can all relate to, especially this year when it’s very easy to feel like you are living life where forces are beyond your control.

MW: You’re writing about China from the perspective of being Chinese American, and writing in English. Who was the ideal reader you were imagining when you were writing these stories?

I hope that the stories offer a bit of a window into a country that’s become increasingly hard to access.

TPC: No one because I didn’t think anyone was necessarily going to read them. That’s one thing that’s hard now that the book is coming out, and I’m trying to figure out how to talk about it. I didn’t know anything was going to get published. I think I was really writing [the stories] because there was just so much that I wanted to try and capture what I’ve seen. It came from that place and that impulse. There was a bit of a sense of trying to wrest beauty from the environment around me, too.

MW: Who do you hope the stories reach?

TPC: I hope that the stories offer a bit of a window into a country that’s become increasingly hard to access. Not long after I left China, China kicked out a lot of my colleagues from the country, as well as from the New York Times and Washington Post. If I had stayed much longer, I would likewise have had to leave the country. It’s a hard place to have a window onto and getting harder. And so, I hope it does offer that to readers. I hope that for readers, too, that there’s a feeling of being surprised. I think China is a place where you can feel like it’s a headline. It’s 1.3 billion people. I really hope that what comes across in the stories for people is a sense of specificity and some of the detail and surprises that you do get from living in the country, which I got it. It’s a harder and harder thing to do these days, especially as a reporter.

There’s a lot of good food in the book, too. I hope that, especially for readers who are stuck at home as so many of us are right now, the stories also offer a sense of transport and being taken away, which so many of us do crave right now.

MW: Something I personally struggled a lot with when I started writing fiction was negotiating the white gaze. A lot of writers of color have to confront this at some point. I was wondering how you thought about it, as you’re writing about this place that is often misrepresented, othered, exoticized. How did you grapple with trying to get it right?

TPC: I was wanting to tell a fuller portrait of this place that I had spent so much time writing about, grounded of course in events of the day and the headlines and all that. But I just felt like there was more to say, and fiction offered a different kind of canvas. In terms of thinking about how to negotiate that gaze, I guess the answer is I wasn’t thinking that hard about it. That was probably what was so wonderful about the experience. When you’re a journalist, there’s such scrutiny on the words, and that feeling of every single line and word being weighed, and thinking so much about audience. What was so wonderful about the process of getting to write these stories was just this feeling of getting to play and luxuriate in this really private sense of being. Just being awake early in the mornings and writing on my couch and not thinking that these would be published and, therefore, not having that sense of self-consciousness or pressure to think, “Am I conveying this in a way that’s going to be more readily parsed by readers in America?” I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was really just trying to just capture this moment that I was seeing around me.

MW: What were the challenges of writing from the point of view of Chinese characters? What kind of research went into that? What steps did you take?

TPC: I think it really was just the experience of living there for so many years. Of course, in my day-to-day work as a reporter, my job was just talking to as many people as I could across China and in different walks of life. So when I was writing these stories, a lot of the time I would have something in mind, who I’d met. Maybe it was my next-door neighbor, or maybe someone I’d met in the course of an interview. There were little things tucked in here or there, but I would have the voice of somebody who I’d met in my head.

In the story “Lulu,” there are a couple of instances that surface that [the character] writes about. One is the case of a woman whose mother died, beaten to death by the police, she says, and she had kept her mother’s body in a cooler to preserve the evidence for years. And that was just something that stuck in my head. I had met her in the course of reporting another story. She didn’t surface as part of that story, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was somebody whose voice was in my head when I was writing that part. There are lots of moments like that throughout the book, thinking about people who I had met in real life.

Why Don’t You Keep Your True Nature to Yourself

Posted on by Kelly Luce 





Ode to Boy





 Boy’s a murder of boys circling overhead, black feathers fluttering down the lens for
        effect, their appropriately creepy caws if pressed against your cheek cold or when
        boy rests his calves on your shoulders in indolence, rehearsed till perfected. 
  
 Or before boy, your true nature was something that could’ve come later, a point in the
        future unsure as a boy who intends to drop by but is deterred by another boy, the
        gate hasn’t opened and when he barks the neighbours overhear the night. 
  
 You could’ve kept your true nature to yourself. 
  
 Because the age of revolutions is irretrievable as an orgasm, boy thanks you with the
        sweetest shrug, throws in a story about his unstable father. When it’s your turn to
        share, boy butts in and spins a different trauma from a different parent. 
  
 Such a boy is hateful except when he’s beautiful.
  
 And Jesus, you’d have to look away after looking at him, and after he spares you a boy
        glance he’s at once all the holes your hands have made, boy’s the great flame that
        rises from your body, why’s he so bright he casts no shadow. 
  
 Boy when he flies lands on your thigh and the wind his wings make is three-ply. 
  
 Get on it, it says, the sonnet about the crisis of self that gives you purpose when boy
        enters through a sliding door, beauty preceding him the way sunlight opens a hurt
        in your eyes, a pack of him surrounding you, boys howling at daytime. He wears
        a plum-blossom kimono and bares his torso at the slightest request. 
  
 When boy’s too much, as he always is, there are other boys you could’ve always liked
        the best: the first boy, the third, fifth and sixth at the same time, ninth boy with
        bushy armpits, twelfth with research credentials, each boy its own particular
        charm and amulet. Especially delightful is the first week of every other boy, when
        mists so often shroud the otherwise universal sky: 
  
 while you’ve yet to wear the sky, boy’s already its IG-worthy image. 
 
 Boy proves his tyranny by switching allegiances from week to week, which dragons must
        you slay, layers of rust on your armour, although his real talent lies in having the
        world on his side, like a jagged tooth of a boy who’ll die young, and from a deck
        boy picks another queen. 
  
 Boy’s the big mistake, as expected, but taking the stairs on your way down, you feel your
        soul so gagged it’s no longer its own voiceover. Boy when he swims meets the
        crests, boy whose smirk you have to shake off, boy
  
 who fixes your quiff when he presses down, his body that’s acrid as wine in the forgiving
        night inspires mythic ideas: boy’s all Tadzio hair and bare feet, blue-and-white
        striped cotton and thin-lipped amusement, north star of a boy, boy with a
        reputation for virtue, old boy who’s lived to be too boy, frivolous boy, 
  
 mud boy who’s begun to crumble, you’re a pillar of salt, knowing boy can only do you
        boy harm, your boy in his boy voice tells you your boy future, inexorable, while
        he holds a boy pillow over boy you, not uncruel boy with potential, nothing’s
        broken yet.   







Author’s note: This poem borrows from Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, translated by Stanley Appelbaum, as well as the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, translated by J.M. Cohen; “In Search of the Real Tadzio” by Gilbert Adair; The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil, translated by Shaun Whiteside; “Who Is the Butcher, Jovito Palparan?” by Patricia Evangelista; “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” by Richard Crashaw; “Artillery” by George Herbert; and The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon, translated by Ivan Morris.

	


	





	

		
10 Spy Novels With Women Protagonists
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

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





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





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










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





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





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





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





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










Restless by William Boyd





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










Hannah’s War by Jan Eliasberg





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










The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff





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










Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht





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





Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan





Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan





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





The Expats by Chris Pavone





The Expats by Chris Pavone





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










The Alice Network by Kate Quinn





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










The Moscow Sleepers by Stella Rimington





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










Liar’s Candle by August Thomas





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





American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson





American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson





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

	


	





	

		
9 Books About the Dark Side of Girlhood
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

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





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





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










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





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





Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan





The Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan





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





The Secret Place by Tana French





The Secret Place by Tana French





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





Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng





Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng





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










Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman





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










You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott





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










Marlena by Julie Buntin





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





Bunny by Mona Awad





Bunny by Mona Awad





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










The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn





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





The Crucible by Arthur Miller





The Crucible by Arthur Miller





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

	


	





	

		
Imagining Life as an Inanimate Object
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

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





The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender





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





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










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





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





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








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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





AB: It is in a lot of ways!





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





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





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





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








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





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





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





MLO: Ahhh!





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





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





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





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