If every crosswalk is an equals sign,
then every block’s an equation
that needs balancing. On Kansas City’s
State Line Road, the median
divides one whole state from another:
this side’s Missouri and that one’s Kansas.
Want proof? You’ll find two Starbucks
kitty-corner, each with different taxes.
K & M have variable trash theories, too:
apparently Kansas takes anything
so Missourians pile up their wagons and head west
with mildewy fridges and gullied mattresses
to dump. It’s All-American math, writ large:
we add and subtract, we go forth and multiply,
we divide and conquer, we raise and raze
and remodel. The signs are everywhere
on a street that zips up miles and miles
of mom and pop shops, that connects country
clubs and cattle country. We show our work
so proudly. But what about the woman
in rags stumbling along the median?
Can you tell me what state she’s in?
How will we divine the answer?
Skin-Deep
I spied the snake in the middle of shedding:
its former jacket half-attached,
baking and blanching like a corn husk
in August, almost to bone-white.
I got to wondering what it had touched,
this older skin: the underbrush it split, the loose soil
it furrowed, the scalding stones it coiled around
and cooled, soaking in heat from every side...
I've heard it's a painless process, this days-long
unzipping. It's just a surface, they say: the body feels
nothing as it pulls away. Soon the snake will glisten again—
slick and unencumbered; re-striped; ready to race.
I don't know if a goodbye is better fast or slow:
a violent rip, or a subtle sloughing off.
If it's healthier to see the skin go—
a scroll of our lives unfurling, with legible scars—
or to lose pieces of ourselves without knowing:
rushing down the drain with the soap flakes,
gathering as dust on an uncracked book,
swirling in the air when the light is right...
Five million transformations every minute.
First and last impressions raining
all around us. Drier than dry. Weightless
and impossible to carry. Here and gone.
As we head into a holiday season unlike any other in our lifetimes, many of us will be thinking of our families, the ones that we may not be able to spend the end of the year with. Instead, spend some time with these stories, essays, and poetry about family relations.
Escoffery’s short story shows us the world of first-generation Jamaican-Americans as two young brothers navigate their neighborhoods, their worlds. Fittingly for 2020, this story is about a pestilence—locusts, not viruses—but it’s also about families, how they love and touch each other, and the stories they tell each other.
There’s an alternate ending to my father’s goat story, but on this occasion, he punctuated it with unbridled laughter, and my mother slapped him with the dishtowel, saying, “You’re too cruel, man,” but her eyes brimmed with love.
Kelli Jo Ford’s “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave” is a ghost story, as much as it is a story about mothers and daughters. The story deals with the role reversal of a daughter having come back home to take care of the mother, and all that has changed in the home that she has left.
Lula had the seizure while she was out on one of her countryside drives, taking in scenery she’d seen a million times—probably on her way home from McDonald’s. Thankfully, she’d only run through somebody’s barbed wire fence. No one was hurt, though she was still having the seizure when a man stopped and called 911. Lula came to in the back of the ambulance and demanded to be brought home.
In this essay, Hemans faces down the possibility of losing her grandparents’ home in Montego Bay. She digs deep into her grandparents’ personal history, her family’s immigrant experience, and the history of Jamaica to discuss how she’s given all of this a home within her own writing.
The fate of the abandoned house in my novel—and that of my family—is not a unique story. It is a story most every immigrant in America can tell of family land left alone too long or lingering in limbo, of migrants who had great plans to return home but who, after years abroad, find it hard to return to a place they’ve long left, a town empty of friends and family.
“Mixed” is a poem by Jessica Care Moore that talks about lineage, and how the actions of our family stick with us. “Mixed” also showcases the theme of identity, and the importance of being true to oneself.
I pray on my great GrandFather’s feathers —the ones you don’t respect— That you never dare call me Mixed
In this essay, Tia Glista writes about how stories revolving around the dynamics of sisters have always fascinated readers. From the March sisters in Little Women to the Lisbons in The Virgin Suicides to the Kardashians, sisterhood exerts a powerful gravity on culture.With this essay, Glista explores the role that sisters have played in film and literature, and asks what role sisters should play in art.
Maybe this is what storytellers find so perplexing about sisters—that they cannot conceptualize a world in which women rely more on each other than they do on men. Where notions of female friendship, love, or solidarity have seemed too radical for our culture to grapple with, we instead access the bonds between women through sisterhood, and find an easy way to reroute women and girls back to the heterosexual, patriarchal, nuclear family.
Two years after Prince’s death, Hillery Stone muses on another disappearance: her mysterious and troubled cousin who introduced her to the singer’s work. Stone connects Prince’s catalog and history to her own personal and familial loss.
He was also a master of the disappearing act, the epitome of reinvention, receding and returning from rock god to mystic to sex kitten in the blink of a gold-shadowed eye. At some point, I saw Prince and I saw my cousin, not a physical likeness so much as a shared absence — a part in each of them that had existed and been taken away.
Verma contrasts the stoic grandfather she knew as a child with the romantic, deeply emotional young man she discovers in his poetry after his death—and realizes that by teaching her to love books, he gave her the tools to get to know him through his writing.
My mother, knowing I would feel lonely and distant upon his death, pulled me aside to show me something…It was a book of poetry, which in itself was not surprising. I had graduated from college with a degree in creative writing, and had a few poems in small journals and zines. My mother must have known a book of poems would cheer me up. And it was Nanu, after all, who by turning me to books, had led me to poetry as the one friend I always turn to in times of distress.
Alcoholism memoirs don’t exactly help Held understand her mother’s drinking—but, she says, books like Mary Karr’s Lit, Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering help her to give shape and structure to her family’s story, and envision a more hopeful end.
In these memoirs, relapses are absorbed in the rhythm of the story. Personal history is arranged into a structure of how things got to where they were, their undoing similarly templatized. The narratives follow identical trajectories, a characteristic that gets them panned in critical reviews but celebrated in the comment section on Goodreads and Amazon. “It feels like this book was written about me,” readers say. The drama of addiction becomes mundane, the same moment again and again. What feels acute and personal is neither. It’s just part of it, a story every addict has.
The narrator of “The Neighbors” is getting to know Luisa, who is new to the block. When she notices the “ghost of a bruise” on Luisa, she decides to try to reveal her own bruise, hoping that they can share their secrets with each other.
The man put his hand on her head, right at the nape of her neck. She looked so vulnerable there, at the back of the head, with her hair so short, short like a baby’s, so close to the soft skull. His hand there was familiar to me, the gesture full of the brutal tenderness of husbands. I couldn’t see her face to tell if she was happy or sad.
In “Randy Travis” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, the narrator’s mother is completely enthralled with the country singer Randy Travis. This story is about how a refugee family tries to live out their American Dream, which includes trying to cross paths with the country singer whom the matriarch has grown to love.
The only thing my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the refugee settlement program. There were other items in the box, such as snow pants, mittens, and new underwear, but it was the radio she cherished most.
Look, we’re all tired of hearing snobs declaim, “Well, the book was better, you know?” I’m even tired of hearing myself say it, which I’ve occasionally been known to do. And there are plenty of film adaptations that I enjoy as much as or even more than their literary counterparts (see, for instance, much of Saoirse Ronan’s filmography). But there is something quite enervating about seeing a beloved classic—or even a not-so-critically acclaimed novel!—being turned into a limp, listless vehicle for an A-list actor, a sullen would-be blockbuster with horrible special effects, or just an outright unwatchable piece of drivel we’re all supposed to take seriously because it was a book first.
The following list could easily have been twice as long—thrice, even! But this set of movies is especially emblematic of the many ways filmmakers in the 21st century have botched and butchered novels in their translation from the page to the screen.
Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel had already been famously adapted back in 1940 into an Academy Award-winning film (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, no less). The black and white film mined the novel’s gothic aesthetic for a sumptuous and terrifying tale about a young woman who weds a moneyed English man and moves into his estate only to be haunted by his dead first wife. In Ben Wheatley’s hands, du Maurier’s psychologically probing character study is refashioned into a rather steamy and only occasionally scary Lifetime TV movie romance between Maxim de Winter (a much too dashing Armie Hammer) and the new Mrs. de Winter (Lily James, in full doe-eyed mode). “I can see the woman I am now,” she beams in its closing moments, “And I know I have made the right decision. To save the one thing worth walking through the flames for: Love.” Compare to the last lines of the novel: “The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.” Is it surprising that so many of us found ourselves rolling our eyes at such absurd reframing of one of literature’s most gripping final images?
The tale of Beowulf, chronicled in an untitled Old English poem, has all the hallmarks of a 21st century comic book movie: epic battles, heroic protagonists, bombastic fight scenes, monstrous villains, and even dragons. Shot with motion-capture technology, it was billed as a way to bring this ancient story into the modern world. But focusing on painstakingly created special effects (like the choice to give Angelina Jolie’s near-nude character cave-dwellinghigh heels?) meant we got less of a comic book story and more of a Boris Vallejo painting, with no movement or depth.
Set in modern-day New York, Rob Letterman’s Gulliver’s Travels follows Jack Black as “Lemuel Gulliver,” a sad sack wannabe travel writer who considers Shakespeare, Krakauer, and “the hot mom who wrote Twilight” his writing inspirations, as he finds himself stranded in Lilliput (on his way to Bermuda; don’t ask) where he’s imprisoned and proceeds to, in broad strokes, gesture toward a Cliffs Notes version of Jonathan Swift’s seminal satire. Do I actually need to explain why it belongs on this list? But lest you need more convincing, the script further includes nods to Guitar Hero, Yoda and Kiss, glaringly obvious attempts to “hip” up Swift’s story that further showed how much of this was merely a Jack Black comedy that used Gulliver’s Travels as the most tone-deaf marketing ploy on this list.
Like its “Picture”-less title, this dreary 2009 adaptation completely misses the point of Oscar Wilde’s infamous novel. (Who cares about Dorian without his picture?) With a listless Ben Barnes in the title role, this filmed Dorian may look the part but lacks the pristine charm (and later his unnerving cruelty) of his literary predecessor. In attempting to turn The Picture of Dorian Gray into a brooding, gothic superhero origin tale Oliver Parker muddles Wilde’s colorful prose in ways both literal and metaphoric, offering us what has to be the straightest (pun intended) take on this dandy protagonist as we’ve gotten yet. I mean, any film that wastes casting Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy himself!) as Lord Henry Wotton truly deserves our scorn.
The title of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010’s mashup novel was always, perhaps, destined to become a “blockbuster” movie. Or a movie that desperately wanted to be a blockbuster (it ended up grossing only half as much as it cost to make). Instead of conjuring up a winking playful lark with impressive historical set-pieces, director Timur Bekmambetov delivered instead a laborious bore that didn’t live up to the absurdity its title promised. You’d think casting the studly Benjamin Walker as Lincoln would at least make this incongruous adaptation worth watching, but you may as well get your Walker fix elsewhere (may I suggest YouTube clips of his roles on Broadway in American Psycho and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson?).
Sometimes a film adaptation misses the mark not because it doesn’t honor its source material but because it merely reveals the source material’s limitations. Take Hillbilly Elegy. In many ways Ron Howard’s take on J.D. Vance’s memoir about his life growing up in Ohio is a perfectly fine film. And I do mean fine in that backhanded Southern compliment sort of way. With two overly histrionic performances at its center (who knew Amy Adams and Glenn Close could chew so much scenery?), Howard has created what feels like a parody of one of those Trump voter/diner articles we’ve been fed for the past few years: there’s an attempt here to empathize with the plight of Vance and his working class family but it is all so nakedly self-congratulatory and melodramatic that it just comes off as a grating piece of ill-conceived liberal leaning ethnography.
I’ll admit right off the bat: I am Goldfinch agnostic. I didn’t get the love showered upon the novel when it came out and I definitely did not feel any different by the time this limp adaptation was released. Donna Tartt’s prose is impeccable and I loved the pre-Vegas first third of the book. But, and here we get into why John Crowley’s take somewhat falters, the tale of Theodore Decker (yet another tortured white guy) so depends on the inner turmoil of its protagonist that his somewhat epic bildungsroman is blunted by Ansel Elgort’s tepid performance.
Some books just should stay books, you know? I think, at times, we’ve been trained to believe that our beloved novel or cherished childhood fave deserves to be adapted into the big screen, as if this is somehow a marker of success or a chance for them to be introduced to newer generations (have we so forsaken the role of librarians?). But not every adaptation is a tribute—take this ill-fated version of one of Dr. Seuss’s most famous texts. Mike Myers’s nightmarish take on the titular role made this top hat wearing cat sound like a never-made-it-to-air SNL character, replete with a befuddling Brooklynite accent and an utter lack of charm. It’s no surprise Seuss’s widow refused to allow any further live-action adaptations (not even she, though, was able to spare us from that recent catastrophe that was the live TV Grinch musical.)
I don’t know who picks up Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and thinks, you know what? I’m going to turn this Victorian-era surreal ode to language and wordplay into a Tim Burton-directed CGI spectacle that feels like a Disneyland ride for sugar-high kids (and actually-high teens). But perhaps that just shows why I will never grow up to be a studio executive. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, after all, grossed more than $1 billion (!) around the world, proving there was a market for Johnny Depp’s unhinged acid trip of a Mad Hatter. We know it’s possible to bring Carroll’s cast of characters to the screen while keeping the spirit of the original stories somewhat intact (see, for instance, the classic-in-its-own-right 1951 Disney animated film). But there was something quite grotesque about seeing Carroll’s playful rhymes being traded in for a vision of Alice as a 21st century “kickass” protagonist.
There’s no mistaking Augusten Burroughs’s prose. His dry wit is what made his 2002 memoir such a sensation. The promise of Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brian Cox (among others) tackling the wild menagerie of characters that populate Burroughs’s coming of age tale would otherwise have guaranteed a fascinating black comedy. Sadly, Ryan Murphy, then still mostly known for hit-and-miss shows like Popular and Nip/Tuck, found little ground on which to anchor this would-be biting comedy about a young man and the dysfunctional families around him. Showing early signs that shoe-horning earnest histrionics and cutting one-liners into outrageous scenes was his preferred method of crafting comedic set-pieces, Murphy flattened Burroughs’s delicious dialogue and made his story near-unpalatable, making us all stress yet again that, yes, the book was infinitely better.
“The Little Restaurant Near Place des Ternes” by Georges Simenon
The clock in its black case, which regular customers had always known to stand in the same place, over the rack where the serviettes were kept, showed four minutes to nine. The advertising calendar behind the head of the woman sitting at the till, Madame Bouchet, showed that it was the twenty-fourth day of December.
Outside, a fine rain was falling. Inside, it was warm. A pot-bellied stove, like the ones there used to be in railway stations, sat in the very centre of the room. Its black chimney pipe rose through empty space before disappearing into a wall.
Madame Bouchet’s lips moved as she counted the banknotes. The bar’s owner stood patiently by, watching her, while in his hand he was already holding the grey linen bag into which he put the contents of the till every evening.
Albert, the waiter, glanced up at the clock, drifted over to them and with a wink motioned towards a bottle which stood apart from the others on the counter. The landlord in turn looked at the time, gave a shrug and nodded his assent.
“Just because they’re the last ones here, there’s no reason, why we shouldn’t give them a drink like the others,” he muttered under his breath as he walked off with the tray.
He had a habit of talking to himself while he was working.
The landlord’s car stood waiting by the curb outside. He lived some distance away, at Joinville, where he had had a villa built for him. His wife had previously worked the tills in cafés. He had been a waiter. He still had painful feet from those days, as all waiters in bars and restaurants do, and wore special shoes. The back of his car was filled with attractively wrapped parcels which he was taking home for the Christmas Eve festivities.
Madame Bouchet would get the bus to Rue Coulaincourt, where she would be spending Christmas with her daughter, whose husband worked as a clerk at the town hall.
Albert had two young kids, and their toys had been hidden for several days on top of the tall linen cupboard.
He began with the man, putting a small glass on the table, which he then filled with Armagnac.
“It’s on the house,” he said.
He made his way past several empty tables to the corner where Jeanne – Long Tall Jeanne – had just lit a cigarette, carefully positioned himself between her and the till and muttered:
“Drink up quick so I can pour you another! Compliments of the landlord!”
Finally, he got to the last table in the row. A young woman was taking her lipstick out of her handbag as she looked at herself in a small hand mirror.
“With the compliments of the house …”
She looked up at him in surprise.
“It’s the custom here at Christmas.”
“Thank you.”
He would gladly have poured her a second glass too, but he did not know her well enough. Besides she was sitting too near the till.
All done! He tipped the landlord another wink by way of asking him if it was at last time for him to go outside and pull down the shutters. It was already stretching hospitality to have stayed open this late just for three customers. At this point in the evening in most of the restaurants in Paris, staff would be scurrying around setting out tables for the late-night Christmas Eve supper trade. But this was a small restaurant which offered a regular clientele modestly priced menus, a quiet place to eat just off Place des Ternes in the least frequented part of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
Few people had eaten there that evening. More or less everyone had family or friends to go to. The last ones left were these two women and a man, and the waiter was not bold enough to show them the door. But the fact that they went on sitting at their tables, from which the cloths had been removed, surely meant that they had no one waiting for them.
He lowered the left-hand shutter, then the right, came back in, wavered over lowering the shutter over the door, which would force the reluctant customers to crouch down to get out. But it was now nine o’clock. The takings had been counted. Madame Bouchet had put on her black hat, her coat and her tippet of marten fur and was looking for her gloves. The landlord, his feet turned outwards, advanced a few steps. Long Tall Jeanne was still smoking her cigarette, and the young woman had clumsily caked her mouth with lipstick. The restaurant was about to close. It was time. It was past the time. The landlord was about to say, as politely as he could, the time-honored words:
“Ladies and gentlemen …”
But before he could pronounce one syllable, there was a single, crisp sound, and the only male customer, his eyes suddenly wide open as if he’d been taken completely by surprise, swayed before toppling sideways on the bench seat that ran along the wall.
He had walked in casually, without saying a word, without warning anybody that just as they were about to close he would put a bullet in his head.
“It would be best if you waited here for a few moments,” the landlord told the two women. “There’s a policeman on duty on the corner of the street. Albert has gone to get him.”
Long Tall Jeanne had stood up to get a look at the dead man and, pausing by the stove, she lit another cigarette. The young woman in her corner sucked her handkerchief and, although it was hot there, was shaking all over.
The policeman came in. His cape glistened with rain and gave off a barrack-room smell.
“Do you know him?”
“He’s been eating here every day for years. He’s Russian.”
“Are you sure he’s dead? If he is, we’d better wait for the inspector. I’ve phoned through to him.”
They did not have long to wait. The police station was close by, in Rue de l’Étoile. The inspector wore an overcoat which was either badly cut or had shrunk in the rain, and a hat that had faded to no particular color. He did not seem in a good mood.
“The first of tonight’s crop!” he muttered as he bent over. “He’s early. Usually it comes on them around midnight, when everybody else is having most fun.”
He straightened up, holding a wallet in his hand. He opened it and from it took a thick, green identity card.
“Alexis Borine, fifty-six years old, born in Vilna.”
He recited the words in an undertone, as a priest says mass and the way Albert talked to himself.
“Hôtel de Bordeaux, Rue Brey … Engineer … Was he an engineer?” he asked the landlord.
“He might have been, a long time ago, but ever since he’s been coming here he’s been working as an extra in films. I recognized him several times up on the screen.”
“Any witnesses?” asked the inspector as he turned round.
“There’s me, my cashier, the waiter and the two ladies there. If you’d like to take their names first …”
The inspector found himself face to face with Jeanne, who really was tall, half a head taller than him.
“Fancy seeing you here. Papers.”
She handed him her card. He wrote down:
“Jeanne Chartrain. Age: twenty-eight. Profession, none … Oh come on! No profession? …”
“It’s what they put me down as at the town hall.”
“Have you got the other card?”
She nodded.
“Up to date, is it?”
“Still as charmless as ever, I see,” she said with a smile.
“What about you?”
The question was directed at the badly made-up young woman, who stammered:
“I haven’t got my identity card on me. My name is Martine Cornu. I am nineteen and I was born at Yport …”
The tall woman gave a start and looked at her more closely. Yport was very near where she came from, not more than five kilometers away. And there were lots of people in the area by the name of Cornu. The people who ran Yport’s largest café, overlooking the beach, were called Cornu.
“Address?” growled Inspector Lognon, who was known locally as “Inspector Hard-Done-By”.
“I live in an apartment building in Rue Brey. Number 17.”
“You will probably be called for questioning at the station one of these days. And now you can go.”
He was waiting for the municipal ambulance. Madame Bouchet asked:
“Can I go too?”
“If you want.”
Then, as she left, he called Long Tall Jeanne back as she was making her way to the door.
“You didn’t happen to know him?”
“I turned a trick with him ages ago, maybe six months … At least six months, because it was at the start of summer … He was the sort of client who goes with girls to talk more than for any other reason, who asks you questions and thinks you’re a sad case … Since then he’s never said hello, though whenever he comes in here he always gives me a little nod.”
The young woman left. Jeanne followed her out, keeping very close behind her. She was wearing a cheap fur coat which was far too short for her. She had always worn clothes which were too short. Everyone told her so, but she persisted without knowing why, and the effect was to make her look even taller.
“Home” for her was fifty metrer further along on the right, in the total darkness of Square du Roule, where there were only artists; studios and single-storey maisonettes. She had a small first-floor apartment with a private staircase and a door opening directly on to the street to which she had the key.
She had promised herself she would go straight home that evening. She never stayed out on Christmas Eve. She had hardly any make-up on and was wearing very ordinary clothes. So much so that she had been shocked in the restaurant to see the young woman piling on the lipstick.
She took a few steps into the cul de sac perched on her high heels, which she could hear clacking on the cobbles. Then she realized that her spirits had drooped because of the Russian: she felt she needed to walk in light and fill her ears with noise. So she turned and headed towards Place des Ternes, where the broad, brilliantly illuminated swathe that runs down from the Arc de Triomphe comes to an end. The cinemas, the theaters, the restaurants were all lit up. In the windows, printed pennants advertised the prices and menus of Christmas Eve suppers and on every door could be read the word “Full”.
The streets were almost unrecognizable, for there was hardly anyone about.
The young woman was now walking ten metres ahead of her, looking like someone who is not sure which way to go. She kept stopping in front of a shop window or at a street corner, uncertain whether to cross, standing and staring at the photographs hanging on the walls of the warm foyer of a cinema.
“Anybody would think she’s the one touting for custom!”
When he saw the Russian, Lognon had muttered:
“The first of tonight’s crop … He’s early.”
Maybe he’d done it there rather than in the street, because it would have been an even more miserable end outside, or alone in his furnished room. In the restaurant, it had been quiet and peaceful, almost a family atmosphere. There a man could feel he was surrounded by familiar faces. It was warm. He’d even been offered a drink on the house!
She gave a shrug. She had nothing else to do. She too halted outside shop windows and looked at the photos while the luminous neon signs turned her red and green and violet, and all the time she was aware of the young woman who was still walking just ahead of her.
Who knows, perhaps she had come across her when she was a little girl. There were ten years between them. When she’d worked for the Fisheries at Fécamp – she was already as tall but very skinny – many a Sunday she had gone out with boys to dances at Yport. Sometimes she had gone dancing at the Café Cornu, and the owner’s children were always running around the place.
“Don’t trip over the tadpoles,” she would tell her partners.
She called the kids tadpoles. Her own brothers and sisters were tadpoles too. She’d had six or seven of them back then, but there wouldn’t be as many left there now.
All the people she passed either were in groups, already in high spirits, or were couples clinging to each other more tightly, it seemed, than on ordinary days.
It was strange to think that this girl was probably one of the tadpoles from the Café Cornu!
Above the shops all along the avenue were apartments, and nearly all of their windows were lit up. She gazed up at them, raising her head to the refreshing drizzle, sometimes catching a glimpse of shadows moving behind the curtains, and she wondered:
“What are they doing?”
Most likely they would be reading the newspaper or decorating the Christmas tree as they waited for midnight. In some cases, the lady of the house would soon be receiving guests and was now worrying about whether the dinner would turn out right.
Thousands of children were sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. And almost all the people who had flocked to the cinemas and theaters had booked tables in restaurants for their Christmas Eve supper or reserved their seats in church for midnight mass.
For you had to book your seat in churches too. Otherwise perhaps the girl might have gone there?
All the people she passed either were in groups, already in high spirits, or were couples clinging to each other more tightly, it seemed, than on ordinary days.
Lone pedestrians were also in more of a hurry than on normal days. They gave the impression that they were on their way somewhere, that they had people waiting for them.
Was that why the Russian had put a bullet in his head? And also why Inspector Hard-Done-By had said that there would be more to follow?
It was the day that did it, of course it was! The girl in front of her had halted on the corner of Rue Brey. The third tenement along was a hotel, and there were others too, discreet establishments where rooms could be taken for short periods. Actually it was there that Jeanne had gone with her first ever customer. The Russian had been living until today in the hotel next door, very probably on the very top floor, because only the poorest rooms were let by the month or the week.
What was the Cornu girl looking at? Fat Émilie? Now there was a tart without either shame or religion. She was there, even though it was Christmas, and she couldn’t even bother to walk a few steps up and down so that she wouldn’t look quite so obvious.
She stayed put in the doorway, with the words “Furnished Rooms” emblazoned just above her purple hat. But there she was, old, well past forty, enormously fat now, and her feet, which over time had become as sensitive as those of the owner of the restaurant, were almost terminally tired of ferrying all that flab around.
“Evening, Jeanne!” she sang out across the street.
Jeanne did not answer. Why was she following the girl? For no particular reason. Probably because she didn’t have anything else to do and was afraid of going home.
But the Cornu girl did not know where she was going either. She had turned into Rue Brey automatically and was mincing along unhurriedly, tightly buttoned up in her blue two-piece suit, which was far too thin for the time of year.
She was a pretty girl. A touch chubby. With a diverting little rear end which she wiggled as she walked. In the restaurant, seen from the side, the way her full, high breasts had pushed out the front of her jacket had been very noticeable.
“If any man comes on to you tonight, dearie,” thought Jeanne, “it’ll be your own stupid fault!”
Especially that evening, because respectable men, the ones with family, friends or just social acquaintances, weren’t out wandering the streets.
But the little fool did not know that. Did she even know what Fat Émilie was doing standing outside the entrance of the hotel? From time to time, as she walked past a bar, she would stand on tiptoe and look inside.
Ah! She was going into one. Albert had done her no favors by giving her that drink. At the beginning, it had been the same with Jeanne too. Unfortunately for her, if she’d had one drink, she ‘d have to have another. And when she’d had three, she no longer knew what she was doing. It wasn;t like that any more, not by a long chalk! Nowadays she could certainly put it away before she’d had enough!
The bar was called Chez Fred. It had a long, mahogany counter and the kind of high stools on which women cannot perch without showing a lot of leg. It was virtually empty. Just one man at the back, a musician or maybe a dancer, already in a dinner jacket, who would shortly be going to work in some night-spot nearby. He was eating a sandwich and drinking beer.
Martine Cornu hoisted herself on to a stool by the door, against the wall. Jeanne went in and sat down a little further along.
“Armagnac,” she ordered, since that was what she had begun drinking.
The girl looked at the rows of bottles which, lit from above, formed a rainbow of subtle colours.
“A Benedictine …” she said.
The barman turned the knob of a radio, and sickly-sweet music filled the bar.
Why didn’t Jeanne just walk up to her and ask her straight out if she really was a Cornu from Yport? There were Cornus in Fécamp too, cousins, but they were butchers in Rue du Havre.
The musician – or dancer – at the back of the bar had already noticed Martine and was languidly giving her the eye.
“Got any cigarettes?” the girl asked the barman.
She wasn’t used to smoking, as was patently obvious from the way she opened the packet and blinked as she released the smoke.
It was ten o’clock. Another two hours and it would be midnight. Everyone would kiss and hug. In every house, the radio would blare out verses of “O Holy Night,” and everybody would join in.
Really, it was all very silly. Jeanne, who never had problems speaking to anybody, felt quite incapable of approaching this girl who hailed from her part of the world and whom she had probably met when she was just a child.
But it wouldn’t have been unpleasant. She’d have said:
“Seeing as how you’re all alone and looking sorry for yourself, why don’t we spend a quiet Christmas Eve together?”
She knew exactly how to mind her manners. She wouldn’t talk to her about men or about being on the game. There must be a whole lot of people they both knew at Fécamp and Yport whom they could talk about. And why shouldn’t she take her home with her?
Her place was very neat, very tidy. She had lived for long enough in rented rooms to know what it meant to have a place of her own. She could take the girl there without feeling any sense of shame, because she never brought men home with her. Other girls did. For Long Tall Jeanne, it was a matter of principle. And few apartments were as trim and spotless as hers. She even kept felt undersoles behind the front door which she used like skates on rainy days so as not to dirty the wooden floor, which she kept highly polished, like an ice-rink.
They would buy a couple of bottles, something good but not too strong. There were charcutiers still open which sold different kinds of pâté, lobster, scallops and assorted tasty and attractively presented dishes which they could not afford to eat every day of the week.
She knew exactly how to mind her manners. She wouldn’t talk to her about men or about being on the game.
She watched her out of the corner of her eye. Perhaps eventually she would have spoken to her if the door hadn’t opened at that moment and two men hadn’t come in, the kind Jeanne disliked, the sort of men who, when they enter a room, always look around as if they owned the place.
“Evening, Fred!” said the shorter of the two, who was also fatter.
They had already taken stock of the bar. An uninterested glance at the musician sitting at the back, and a closer look at Jeanne who, now that she was sitting down, did not seem as tall as she did standing up – which, incidentally, was why she often worked out of bars.
Of course, they knew at a glance exactly what she was. On the other hand they stared insistently at Martine then sat very close to her.
“Do you mind?”
She shrank back against the wall, still holding her cigarette as clumsily as before.
“What are you having, Willy?”
“The usual.”
“The usual, Fred.”
They were the type of men who often have foreign accents and are heard talking about horse-racing or discussing cars. They were also the sort who knew how to choose the right moment to give a woman the glad eye, walk her into a corner of the room and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. And wherever they happen to be they always need to make a phone call.
The barman started mixing them a complicated drink while they watched him closely.
“Hasn’t the baron been in?”
“He said he wanted one of you to call him. He’s gone to see Francis.”
The taller of the pair went into the phone booth. The other moved closer to Martine.
“That stuff’s no good for the stomach,” he said, clicking the catch of a gold cigarette case.
She looked at him in surprise. Jeanne wanted to call out to her:
“Don’t answer!”
Because the moment she started talking to him it would be difficult to shake him off.
“What’s no good for the stomach?”
She was behaving like the dumb cluck that she was. She even forced herself to smile, probably because she had been taught to smile when talking to people, or maybe because she really believed it made her look like something off the cover of a magazine.
“That stuff you’re drinking.”
“But it’s Benedictine!”
She really was from Fécamp, way out in the sticks! She honestly thought that saying the name was the last word on the subject.
“Of course it is! There’s nothing like it for upsetting the insides! Fred!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring us another here, for the lady, and make it snappy.”
“Coming up.”
“But …” she tried to protest.
“Just a drink between friends, no need to be scared! It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it, yes or no?”
The tall one straightened his tie in the mirror as he stepped out of the phone booth. He cottoned on quickly.
“Do you live around here?”
“Not far.”
“Barman!” call Jeanne, “give me one of the same.”
“Armagnac?”
“No. One of whatever it was you just poured.”
“A sidecar?”
“Go on, then.”
She felt furious, for no good reason, and wanted to say:
“Listen, darling, it won’t be long now before you pass out … These guys play dirty … If you wanted a drink, couldn’t you have chosen a more suitable bar? Or gone home and got drunk there?”
Of course she herself hadn’t gone home either, even though she was used to living alone. But does anybody want to go home on Christmas Eve knowing there is no one waiting there and with the prospect of lying in bed listening to the sound of music and happy voices coming through the wall?
Soon the doors of cinemas and theaters would open and out would spill impatient crowds who would rush away to the tens of thousands of tables they had reserved in the most modern restaurants in the most far-flung parts of town. Christmas Eve junketings to suit all pockets!
Except – and this was the point – you couldn’t reserve a table for one. Not least because it wouldn’t be fair on folk who go out to have a good time with friends, not fair at all for you to sit by yourself in a corner and watch the goings-on. What would that make you? A wet blanket! You would see them form into huddles and whisper to each other, wondering if they should ask you to join them because they felt sorry for you.
Nor could you go out and roam around the streets, because if you did, every cop on the beat would eye you suspiciously, curious to see if you intended to use some dark corner to do what the Russian had done, or if, despite the cold, one of them was going to have to jump into the Seine and fish you out.
“What do you think of it?”
“It’s not very strong.”
If her parents really ran a bistro, she should have known about such things. But it was what women always say. It’s as if they’re always expecting to be given liquid fire in a glass. But when it turns out to be not as strong as they’d thought, they stop being so suspicious.
“Work in a shop, do you?”
“No …”
“Typist? …”
“Yes.”
“Been in Paris long?”
He had teeth like a film star’s and a moustache made of two commas.
“Do you like dancing?”
“Sometimes.”
Oh, they were laying it on very thick! How pleasant the thought of exchanging idle chat like this in such company! Maybe the girl believed they really were men of the world? The gold case held out to her and the Egyptian cigarettes too probably dazzled her eyes, as did the large diamond ring worn by the man closest to her.
“Fill us up again, Fred.”
“Not for me, thanks. Anyway, it’s time I …”
“Time you? …”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s time you … did what? You can’t be going home to bed at half past ten on Christmas Eve! …”
It was weird! Sitting on the sidelines and watching a scene like this being acted out always makes it look so utterly stupid. But to be involved, to play a part in it …
“What a birdbrain!” Jeanne muttered as she smoked one cigarette after another without taking her eyes off the trio.
Naturally, Martine did not dare to admit that, yes, she was, actually, intending to go home to bed.
“Have you got a date?”
“Don’t be so nosy.”
“Got a boyfriend?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Well, I’d be more than happy to keep him waiting for a bit.”
“Why?”
Long Tall Jeanne could have recited the whole script for them. She knew it by heart. She had also caught the look aimed at the barman which meant:
“Keep it coming!”
But in her present condition, the erstwhile tadpole from Yport could have been plied with the stiffest of cocktails and she would have found them not strong at all. Likewise her lipstick: didn’t she have enough on already? Yet she still felt the need for more, to open her handbag and show she used Houbigant lipstick, but also to demonstrate her pout, because all women believe they are irresistible when they push out their lips to receive that impudent little implement.
“Think you’re gorgeous? If you could only see yourself in a mirror, you’d soon realize which of the two of us looks most like a tart!”
But not quite, because the difference is not just a matter of a little more or less warpaint. The proof of this was provided by the two men who, as they came in, had needed only a quick look to pigeonhole Jeanne.
“Ever been to the Monico?”
“No. What is it?”
“Hear that, Albert? She’s never been to the Monico!”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
“But you do like dancing? Now look, sweetheart …”
Jeanne was expecting the word, but later rather than sooner. The man wasn’t wasting any time. His leg was already pressed tight against one of the girl’s in such a way that she could not draw it back, for she was too close to the wall.
“It’s one of the most amazing night-spots in Paris. Regulars only. Bob Alisson and his jazz band. Never heard of Bob Alisson either?”
“I don’t go out much.”
The two men exchanged winks. Obvious where this was leading. A few minutes from now, the small fat one would remember that he had an urgent appointment so that he could leave the field clear for his friend.
“Not so fast, you creeps!” Jeanne murmured, her mind made up.
She herself had also downed three drinks one after the other, not counting the free ones she’d had courtesy of the landlord of the restaurant. She was not drunk, she never was, not completely, but she was beginning to attach great importance to certain notions.
For example, the idea that this silly kid came from the same place as she did, that she was a tadpole. Then she thought of fat Émilie standing in the doorway of the hotel. It was in that very hotel, though not on a Christmas Eve, that she had gone upstairs with a man for the first time.
“Could you give me a light?”
She had slid off her stool and, with a cigarette dangling between her lips, now joined the smaller of the two men.
He was also aware what this meant and was not best pleased. He gave her a critical once-over. Standing upright, he must have been a good head shorter than her, and the way she carried herself was mannish.
“Like to buy a girl a drink?”
“If you insist … Fred!”
“Coming up.”
While this was going on, the kid eyed her with a feeling close to indignation, as if an attempt was being made to steal something that belonged to her.
“Hey, you three don’t look like you’re having much fun!”
And, laying one hand on the shoulder of the man next to her, Jeanne started belting out the words of the song the radio was playing softly in the background.
“Of all the bird-brained …” she kept saying to herself every ten minutes. “How can anyone be so …?”
But, oddest of all, the birdbrain in question continued looking at her with an expression of the utmost contempt.
But one of Willy’s arms had now entirely disappeared behind Martine’s back, and the hand wearing the diamond ring lay heavily on the front of her blouse.
She now lay slumped – literally – on the red plush seat against the wall of the Monico, and there was now no need to put her glass in her hand because more often than not she herself kept clamouring for it and gulped down the champagne greedily.
Each time she drained her glass, she burst into a fit of convulsive laughter and then clung even more tightly to the man she was with.
It was not yet midnight. Most of the tables were unoccupied. Sometimes the two of them had the dance floor to themselves. Willy kept his nose buried in the short hair at the back of his partner’s head and ran his lips over the pimply skin of the nape of her neck.
“You in a bad mood or something?” Jeanne asked the other man.
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t win first prize. Think I’m too tall?”
“A bit …”
“It doesn’t show lying down.”
It was a crack she had made thousands of times. It was almost a chat-up line and just as vapid as the sweet nothings the two others were whispering to each other – but at least she wasn’t soft-soaping him because she was enjoying it.
“Do you reckon Christmas Eve is fun?”
“Not especially.”
“Do you think anyone really enjoys it?”
“I suppose some people must …”
“Earlier on, in the restaurant where I had dinner, this man shot himself in a corner, without making a fuss, looking like he was sorry for disturbing us and making a mess on the floor.”
“Haven’t you got anything more cheerful to say?”
“All right, order another bottle. I’m thirsty.”
It was the only option remaining. Get the tadpole blind drunk, because she was stubbornly refusing to realize what was happening. Make her sick to her stomach, so sick that she puked, then all she’d be fit for was to be packed off home and put to bed.
“Cheers, sweetie, and likewise to all the Cornus of Yport town and district!”
“You’re from there?”
“From Fécamp. There was a time when I used to go dancing in Yport every Sunday.”
“Cut it out!” snapped Willy. “We’ve not come here to listen to your life stories …”
When they’d been in the bar in Rue Brey, it had seemed on the cards that one more glass would have finished the tadpole off. But instead the opposite had happened.
Perhaps being out in the fresh air for a few minutes had been enough to revive her? Maybe it was the champagne? The more she drank the wider awake she became. But she was no longer the same young girl she had been in the restaurant. Willy was now slotting cigarettes ready-lit between her lips, and she was drinking out of his glass. It was sickening to see. And that hand of his never stopped pawing her blouse and skirt!
Not much longer now until everyone would be hugging and kissing and that repulsive man would clamp his lips on the mouth of the girl, who would be stupid enough to faint away in his arms.
“That’s what we’re all like at her age! They should ban Christmas altogether …”
And all the other public holidays too! … But now it was Long Tall Jeanne who wasn’t thinking straight.
“What say we go on to some other place?”
Maybe this time the fresh air would have the opposite effect, and Martine would finally pass out. And if she did, most likely the two-bit gigolo wouldn’t try to take her home and go up to her room!
“We’re fine here …”
Meanwhile, Martine, still glaring suspiciously at Jeanne, talked about her in a whisper to her beau. She was probably saying:
“Why is she interfering? Who is she? She looks like a …”
Suddenly the sound of jazz stopped. For a few seconds, there was silence. People rose to their feet.
The band struck up “O Holy Night”.
Oh yes, it was here too! And Martine found herself squeezed tightly to Willy’s chest, their bodies melded into one from feet to foreheads and their mouths scandalously stuck together.
“Hey, you disgusting pair! …”
Long Tall Jeanne bore down on them, shrill and loud-mouthed, arms and legs moving jerkily like a puppet with its strings crossed.
“Aren’t you going to give anyone else a look in?”
And then raising her voice:
“Shift yourself, girl, and make a bit of room for me!”
When they didn’t move, she grabbed Martine by the shoulder and yanked her back.
“You still haven’t got it, have you, you stupid cow! Maybe you think your precious Willy here has got eyes only for you? But what if I got jealous?”
People at other tables were listening and watching.
“I haven’t said anything up to now. I didn’t interfere, because I’m a decent sort of girl. But that punter is mine …”
Startled, the girl said: “What’s she saying?”
Willy tried to push her away but failed.
“What am I saying? What am I saying? I’m saying you’re a rotten little tart and that you stole him off of me! I’m saying you’re not going to get away with it and that I’m going to smash your pretty face in. I’m saying … Take that for starters! … And that! … And this! …”
She went at it with a will, punching, scratching, grabbing handfuls of hair, while onlookers tried in vain to separate them.
Long Tall Jeanne was as strong as a man.
“You’ve been treating me like dirt! You were asking for it! …”
Martine did her best to fight her off, scratching back, even sinking her small teeth into the hand of her opponent, who had her by one ear.
“Calm down, ladies! … Gentlemen, please! …”
But Jeanne kept screeching at the top of her voice and managed to knock the table over. Glasses and bottles shattered. Women customers fled from the battle zone screaming while Jeanne finally succeeded in tripping the girl and putting her on the floor.
“Ah! You’ve been asking for trouble and you’ve come to the right place for it! …”
They were now both on the floor, grappling with each other, spattered with flecks of blood from cuts caused by the broken glass.
The band was playing “O Holy Night” as loudly as possible to cover the noise. Some of the customers went on singing. Eventually the door opened. Two officers from the cycle-mounted police patrol marched in and headed for the fighting women.
Unceremoniously they nudged them with the toes of their boots.
“Come on you two! On your feet!”
“It was that bitch who …”
“Shut up! You can explain down at the station …”
As chance would have it, the two men, Willy and his pal, seemed to have vanished.
“Come along with us.”
“But …” Martine protested.
“Keep your mouth shut! Save it for later!”
Long Tall Jeanne turned to look for her hat, which she had lost in the scuffle. Outside on the pavement, she called to the doorman:
“Jean, keep my hat safe for me. I’ll come and get it tomorrow. It’s almost new!”
“If you don’t keep quiet …” said one of the policemen jangling his handcuffs.
“Aw, put a sock in it, dumbo. We’ll be as good as gold!”
Martine’s legs gave way. It was only now, all of a sudden, that she started to feel sick. They had to stop in a dark recess to let her empty her stomach against a wall on which was written in white letters: “No Urinating”.
She was crying, a mixture of sobs and hiccups.
“I don’t know what’s got into her. We were having such a nice time …”
“Come off it!”
“I’d like a glass of water.”
“You’ll get one at the station.”
It wasn’t far to the police station in Rue de l’Étoile. It turned out that Lognon, the hard-done-by inspector, was still on duty. A pair of glasses was perched on his nose. He was busy, probably writing up his report about the death of the Russian. He recognized Jeanne, then the girl. He looked at each of them in turn, not understanding.
“You two knew each other?”
“Looks like it, sunshine.”
“You’re drunk!” he barked at Jeanne. “What about the friend? …”
One of the policemen explained:
“They were both rolling on the floor of the Monico, tearing each other’s hair out …”
“Inspector …” Martine started to protest.
“That’s enough! Lock ’em up till the van comes on its round.”
The men were on one side, not many, mostly old down-and-outs, and the women on the other, at the far end, separated from them by a wire grille.
There were benches along the walls. A pint-size flower-seller was crying.
“What are you here for?”
“They found cocaine in my posies. It wasn’t nothing to do with me …”
“You don’t say!”
“Who’s she?”
“A tadpole.”
“A what?”
“A tadpole. Don’t try to work it out. Careful! She’s going to throw up again. That’ll make it smell like roses in here if the paddy-wagon’s late!”
By three in the morning, there were a good hundred of them in the lockup at police HQ on Quai de l’Horloge, men still on one side and women on the other.
In thousands of houses, people were still probably dancing around Christmas trees. Digestive systems were certain to be struggling with turkey, foie gras and black pudding. The restaurants and bars would not close until it started to get light.
“Have you got the message at last, you silly cow?”
Martine was curled up on a bench as highly polished by use as any church pew. She was still feeling sick. Her features were drawn, her eyes unfocused, and her lips pursed.
“I don’t know what I ever did to you.”
“You didn’t do anything, girl.”
“You’re a common …”
“Shush! Don’t say that word in this place! Because there are several dozen of them here who might skin you alive.”
“I hate you!”
“You could be right. Even so, maybe you wouldn’t be feeling so clever at this moment if you were in some hotel room in Rue Brey!”
The girl was clearly trying to make a big effort to understand.
“Don’t bother trying to work it out! Just believe me when I say you’re better off here even if it isn’t comfortable and don’t smell so good. Come eight o’clock, the inspector will give you a short lecture that you thoroughly deserve and then you can get the Métro back to Place des Ternes. Me? They’ll give me the usual medical and take my card off me so I can’t work for a week.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh forget it! Did you really think that spending the night with that creep – and on Christmas Eve too – would have been nice? Did you? And how proud of your precious Willy you’d have been tomorrow morning! Do you really think people didn’t feel disgusted when they saw you hanging round the neck of that cheap crook? But now at least your future is still in your hands. And you have the Russian to thank for it, you know!”
“Why?”
“I dunno exactly. Just a thought. First because it was on his account that I didn’t go straight home. Then again maybe it was him who made me want to be Father Christmas for once in my life. Now move up and make room for me …”
Then she added, already more than drowsy:
“Just imagine if, once in their lives, everybody behaved like Father Christmas …”
Her voice grew softer the deeper she drifted into sleep.
“Just imagine it, right? … Just once … And when you think of how many people there are on this earth …”
Then finally, still muttering, with her head on Martine’s thigh for a pillow: “Can’t you stop your legs jumping all the time …”
Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other depicts the complexities of identity through the interconnected stories of twelve Black British women, painting a portrait of the state of contemporary Britain that also examines the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Though Black women are not a monolith, there is something about the shared experience of a certain collection of people who identify together in gender-related experiences and the results of coming from places where colonialism—from the standpoint of the colonized and the colonizer—played an importance on how your skin color dictates how others treat you. For an African American woman who has read many British writers, reading Girl, Woman, Other was the first time I felt any affinity to such authors and their works.
It was not surprising to me that this book won the 2019 Booker Prize. Although what was surprising is that Bernardine Evaristo is the first Black woman to receive the literary honor. Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, Evaristo has written eight books that cross multiple genres and styles. Evident in Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s willingness to play with style, voice, and lyricism. I spoke with Evaristo with an “American Black woman interviews British Black woman” kind of vibe. We spoke about Girl, Woman, Other with the context of understanding it from and for a Black American reader, the similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood, specifically, and the depiction of such in literature.
Tyrese L Coleman: I loved this book so much and found it hard to put down. When I told a white woman I met that I would be interviewing you, she said to me that she was surprised you won the Booker Prize but when I read Girl, Woman, Other, I knew exactly why you won the Booker Prize. I also read where a BBC anchor referred to you as “another author” when discussing the shared award with Margaret Atwood. Both incidents made me wonder whether or not you have noticed a racial and/or gender divide in the book’s criticism and, specifically, the reaction to you winning the award. If so, why do you think that is?
Bernardine Evaristo: I’m glad you enjoyed the novel so much. I’ve had very little feedback from individual American readers, mainly because the novel came out much later there. You don’t say whether the woman mentioned had read the novel or not—which makes a difference. People have opinions on the Booker Prize shortlists and winners without actually having read all the books. Or they’ve read one and decided that book is their favorite, without knowing anything about the competition. I’ve had incredibly positive responses from all kinds of readers to Girl, Woman, Other and since winning the Booker, the novel has gone out into the world to land in the laps of readers who wouldn’t usually read my work, even if they came across it. In the U.K. the main reading market is older and female, but since winning the prize my events have also been packed with men, often elderly men, some of whom have already read the book and loved it. I find this incredibly reassuring in the sense that they are responding to the humanity in my work and that they have encountered my twelve primarily Black British women and found them interesting and perhaps, even, relatable. We are all human beings, after all, with shared emotional drivers.
TLC: As an American who is slightly an anglophile (meaning, I watch a significant amount of British television and movies and am specifically obsessed with The Crown), Girl, Woman, Other felt familiar to me. Not because of what I think I know about what it means to be English, but rather what I know about what it means to be a Black woman. I was drawn to those moments of knowing that feel unique to Black womanhood, such as Carole’s constant respectability performance as she is surrounded by white people daily, especially white men, and her struggle to outperform just to remain equal.
I find myself and I see other Black women always saying, “we aren’t a monolith,” but we do have shared and relatable experiences. What were you hoping to say about the shared experience of Black women?
BE: As Black women in the U.K. and U.S., we will share certain experiences in that we are living in societies where we are racialized and where women are also discriminated against. My novel explores many women, one of whom is non-binary, from multiple perspectives, and this includes experiences of queer and straight sexuality, different classes, occupations, family set-ups, and cultural backgrounds, migration histories, rural and metropolitan women, and women of every generation through to a nonagenarian, and so on. My aim was to create as many stories as I could about Black British women and in so doing to counteract our invisibility in literature to present my characters as complex, flawed, and very real beings. All of these areas lattice across the text, so that while the novel is specific to individual narratives, there are so many points of connection for the reader, especially for Black women readers, and women of color more generally.
TLC: What are some similarities and differences between American and British Blackness and Black womanhood as they are depicted in literature, specifically?
BE: I don’t claim to be an expert on this and I’d hate to generalize, but I can talk more widely about the differences between the U.K. Black experience and its American counterpart. The recorded history of Black Britain goes back to the Roman occupation of two thousand years ago (something I wrote about in my 2001 novel, The Emperor’s Babe and picks up in a big way from the 16th century, but we don’t have Black ancestry here with unbroken lineage beyond the 12th century.
I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands.
Most people of color in the U.K. arrived post-WWII so our lived history is very recent compared to America’s history of four hundred plus years of African Americans. We are also a small minority in terms of race in this country. There are about 2 million people of African descent here, as opposed to some 40 million in the U.S. This is reflected in our literature, with little of it and most of which was very male-dominated until the 90s, with Black women putting in rare appearances, most notably in the works of Nigerian novelist, Buchi Emecheta, who migrated to the U.K. in the 60s.
It’s really only in the past 20 years that we’ve seen more Black female presence in U.K. literature, but certainly not enough of it. I can count the number of Black British women novelists publishing today on two hands. The same can’t be said for the U.S. In the 90s young Black British women writers were writing similarly young protagonists in coming-of-age novels. Most of those writers disappeared. Since then we’ve had a few writers writing Black female protagonists who are still mainly young, also urban and contemporary. African American women’s fiction and literature—which so inspired my younger self—far outperforms our own production here in the U.K. in terms of the quantity of this work. One of my aims with Girl, Woman, Other was to break through these limitations. I think any wider comparison with the U.S. will require something of an academic thesis.
TLC: In your interview with the New York Times, you talk about writing about the African diaspora. Girl, Woman, Other, are stories about womxn whose parents or grandparents immigrated or worked in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dominique was the only character where it was mentioned that her ancestry could be traced back to slavery and Hattie’s lineage included slave traders, but otherwise, that part of the diaspora is not explored very much.
Coming from an American perspective where so much of our literature involves slavery, even when it is about other aspects of the diaspora, I am curious about your decision not to touch heavily upon the impact of slavery for Black British people—slavery in England and the slave trade outside of it involving the English.
BE: I’m not sure why my novel should draw more on the slave trade when it’s not a novel looking that deeply into British history. And if there’s one aspect of Black British history that continues to be mined in all media, it’s the transatlantic slave trade, to the extent that it alone is synonymous with our history, even though, as I said earlier, our history goes much deeper. My novel is about British women living in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it delves to some extent into their ancestry but it’s touch on slavery is light, as it should be. Britain was a major player in the transatlantic slave trade but there weren’t that many slaves living in the U.K., rather they were in the West Indies. Some of the women in my novel have Caribbean origins and some have direct African origins. Many, many writers continue to explore the slave trade and indeed my own 2008 novel, Blonde Roots, is all about slavery—a satirical inversion of this slave trade where Africans enslave Europeans. It’s very much an indictment of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. My focus with Girl, Woman, Other was to explore so many more areas of our lives that go under the radar.
For the last eight years, the Tables of Contents series has been using food as a lens for creating unique gatherings, experiences, and conversations around literature, music, and the arts. Our monthly readings in Brooklyn pair food-themed work with a corresponding tasting menu, and we also organize literary dinners, multi-course gourmet meals inspired by new and classic books. This year, of course, we can’t gather for a reading or a meal. So we decided to bring authors and food into people’s homes instead, initially via our newsletter A WINNING CAKE, and now through the Tables of Contents Community Cookbook, a collection of notes and recipes from the home kitchens of 36 of our favorite poets, essayists, and fiction writers from our reading series.
One author I knew would not disappoint is Carmen Maria Machado. Her cheese ball is a thing of Midwestern beauty. The recipe doesn’t call for it, but we camped up ours with a real pineapple crown… and I think Carmen would approve. The TOC Community Cookbook is available for pre-order now through www.tablesofcontents.org, and all profits will go to the food relief and justice efforts of FIG (Food Issues Group) in NYC.
—Evan Hanczor, founder, Tables of Contents
Make fun of Midwestern cuisine all you want—my mom is from Wisconsin; I do it plenty—but there’s something to be said about a colorful, texturally pleasing sweet-and-salty appetizer that you can whip together in no time at all and serve with crackers.
This recipe is endlessly variable. For example, many versions that you can find online include finely chopped red and green bell peppers, mostly for crunch and color. You can use shallots instead of scallions in a pinch, and probably other alliums as well. I also imagine you could also swap out the pecans with walnuts, though I never would because pecans are wonderful.
The cheese ball in all its glory, as created by Tanya from Tables of Contents
You can also fuss around with the spices. Right now, we’re using seasoned salt, which includes lots of lovely flavors—garlic, paprika, onion, chili, oregano, pepper—and a little extra paprika for a smoky kick. But I bet there’s a wonderful adaptation of this recipe that uses turmeric and ginger and coriander and cumin (and garlic and salt and pepper) instead of seasoned salt. I’ve also seen variations that call for a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce—which would make the recipe non-vegetarian, if that matters, but also give it a lovely umami. You’re only limited by your imagination and palate—just taste as you go. Good luck, and happy eating.
Ingredients:
2 8oz packages of cream cheese, softened
1 8oz can of crushed pineapple, drained
3 Tbsp of scallions, finely chopped
2 cups of pecans, roughly chopped and toasted
2 tsp seasoned salt (or to taste)
1/2 tsp smoked paprika (or to taste)
Crackers, to serve
Directions:
In a bowl, blend the softened cream cheese, drained crushed pineapple, chopped scallions, paprika, and seasoned salt, as well as half the pecans. Mix manually until everything is blended.
Roll into a ball with your hands, cover with plastic wrap, and put in the fridge for an hour.
After the hour is up, remove the cheese ball and roll it in the remaining pecans until the entire thing is coated. Put back in the fridge until you’re ready to serve. Spread on crackers.
Every other year of my life, I’ve drawn a hard line on Christmas celebration: no decorations before Black Friday. Let Thanksgiving have its three and a half weeks, with its milquetoast pinecones and leaves, so Christmas can be magnificent in its own window of time. But this is 2020, so when the orange and black bunting came down, I responded with a resounding “fuck it.” If we were going to be stuck in these halls, they’d better be decked as hell.
I’ve been collecting vintage Christmas decorations for six years, one small antique store bag at a time: miniature deer, paper Putz houses with their vellum windows, glitter-flecked bottlebrush trees, German mercury glass balls. If you’d asked me in any other year why I did this, haunting my go-to vintage shops as a capitalist poltergeist, spending hours staging my house into a snowflake-fueled time warp, I would have told you it’s because I liked this stuff. It wasn’t until this year that could say with any integrity that I understood it.
Packed holiday decorations are a time capsule. When I open these boxes I am in communion with each version of myself that put them up before, an echo that spirals into the better and the worse. There are inevitably surprises—things I bought at the end of the season, or received as a gift on Christmas morning, and didn’t have the chance to put up.
This year, one such surprise was a book, Midcentury Christmas, by Sarah Archer. It was recommended by some algorithm that had picked up on all my eBay and Etsy searches for “vintage flocked Santa” and “aluminum Christmas tree,” and I got it too late in the season to give it a read. In COVID hibernation mode, though, I had all the time in the world to savor it.
In the earlier sections of the book, Archer recounts the national mood and realities of World War II Christmases through her historian’s perspective. This was the era friends and I brought up on the phone in the early pandemic days of March and April, trying to put the madness into some kind of context. “I mean, I guess this is our World War II, right? It feels bigger than 9/11, doesn’t it? This is going to define us forever, isn’t it?” At that beginning of our current reality, one of the most significant parallels from that past was sudden shortages. Twitter became a bottomless photo stream of empty store shelves with a run on hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Through the spring and summer, the less obvious but unexpectedly vital quarantine supplies became PS5-level impossible to find: yeast for the requisite bread-baking hobby, jigsaw puzzles to whittle at hours, plastic pools to turn the backyard into some semblance of a vacation. Similar wartime shortages led to a rationing system which, as Archer describes, “meant scaling way back on all the things that had been associated with Christmas since the mid-nineteenth century; food and drink, material goods, the energy needed to power decorative lights, and even the use of the telephone for making long-distance calls. Since gasoline was rationed, travel was restricted, and annual visits to family in neighboring states had to be postponed.” Facing an echoing season with no shopping, no coffee breaks underneath my favorite light display, no family squeezing into my parent’s living room, I suddenly had the urge to call my 91-year-old grandmother and ask, how did you do it?
Although the sentiment has lingered all year long, it’s never been more poignant as it has this December, an entire month of traditions large and small, personal and cultural. Singing the same songs. Telling the same lies to children. In my case, living in a self-curated museum. For many of us, this month means dredging up some artifact from the past, whether it’s a relative’s recipe for an old-world baked good or an inherited decoration still clinging to the dust of your childhood home. This season is forever raising our hopes at the prospect that for one day, even in the worst of our years, things can be better.
This season is forever raising our hopes at the prospect that for one day, even in the worst of our years, things can be better.
According to Archer, the American public of the mid-20th century shouldered these responsibilities with grace and humility: “Coming as it did on the heels of the Great Depression, this kind of household thrift was already familiar to most Americans, and indeed, many felt proud to be doing their part in helping the war effort.” In years past I would have accepted this with no second thought. Of course people banded together. They were taking down Hitler. What could be more important than that? Surely everyone would have been on the same page about that singular task.
But that was before watching our tinderbox country spiral into chaos, as conspiracies and toxic individualism pushed back against the most basic mask recommendations and social distancing guidelines. Before conspiracy theories migrated from the fringe to national conversation talking points. The more individual heartbreaks of watching someone you considered a friend or respected family member not only ignore the rules we were all begged to follow for the greater good, but proudly flaunt their crimes on Instagram. In a calendar year flush with tough lessons, none was as strong as knowing that nothing—not fascism, not a virus, not human survival itself—could override our culture’s unapologetic egoism.
Having seen how the request for minimal sacrifice played out in 2020, I found it hard to believe that the “greatest generation” was as selfless and committed to the greater good as Archer claimed. There had to be Midcentury Karen ignoring the war bond posters and doubling up on ration coupons, unwavering in her exceptionalism. “I need to drive down Route 66 to see Aunt Gladys. I already gave up nylons for Hitler, and the war’s still going, so what difference does it make? Also, I’m going to need 3 pounds of butter for my shortbread. It’s a free country! Let me make my choices!!!!”
In fact, one trip to the National World War II Museum’s website confirmed that hoarding and cheating were rampant through the rationing system. Extra stamps and rationed goods comprised a thriving black market, even as the majority of Americans agreed that following these guidelines was extremely important to the war effort. From the occasional bend of the rules “just this once” to organized crime running counterfeit gas coupons, many people found ways to justify dispensing with the rules when they came in conflict with their desires.
It’s uncomfortable to examine the ways that we failed when history affirms that we won.
Directly addressing these inconsistencies in unity within Midcentury Christmas wouldn’t have played well with the gentle optimism and nostalgia that the book curated—after all, it was released in October of 2016, before the sky came down. It would have been a jarring hitch in the tone of a book with sweet chapters on the origin of tinsel and wrapping paper. It’s uncomfortable to examine the ways that we failed when history affirms that we won.
Still, these complexities can’t help but thrive in the subtext of Archer’s work, even when discussing these beautiful objects that seem innocuous in their sparkling light. The bulk of the text, in between gorgeous historical photographs and kitschy reproduced ads, shows the trajectory of national tragedy and cultural response through this extremely specific post-war Christmas style. Midcentury style has seen a resurgence in the early-to-mid 2010s, fueled by the fashion porn of Mad Men, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and poorly-aged hit film The Help. Popular fashion brands like Banana Republic created vintage capsule collections, while entire brands like Unique Vintage and ModCloth built empires on the aesthetic. Architecture shaved down the curves and stripped off the ceiling to make “midcentury modern” synonymous with aspirational millennial hipster culture.
What connects the period Archer writes about to our own, more than the sacrifices we’re asked to make or the way we resist them or the possible consequences of that resistance, is the sense that this is the year everything changed. Even a tradition as inherently conservative and tradition-bound as American Christmas completely transformed in the war and postwar era, as people’s mindsets, priorities, and resources were upheaved. The conflict and sacrifice changed people to the bone, even if the everyday realities of that experience have been sanded away into a past generation’s distant memory. For better or worse, the cruelty of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and every other shade of pandemic asshole will fade as we rebuild our lives. The story of human ingenuity, the miracle of an effective vaccine to put the world back together, will be the narrative that shapes our After. Those who stood in the way, who made things worse, will be thought of as a minority. A fringe. A reality specific to a less enlightened past.
There is a comfort I take in this truth, one I don’t imagine grasping if I weren’t living through a national disaster. The Americans of the 1940s weren’t any better than us, just as no generation has ever been more fundamentally good or altruistic than any other—just as American society isn’t magically more immune to the rallying energy of fascism or the mishandling of truth than any other country. There are always going to be wretchedly selfish, willfully ignorant people who not only believe themselves exempt from rules, but also impervious to the suffering and death that is surely reserved for “others.” Our society wasn’t made up exclusively of people sacrificing to do the right thing, but there were enough of those that did. There was another side to the shortages, the isolation, the giant maw of darkness. There came a time when the war was over, and we reinvented our traditions in the new world.
There came a time when the war was over, and we reinvented our traditions in the new world.
The decorations taking up every inch of my small home date from the post-war period. Many of them were manufactured in occupied Japan, where the once-thriving Japanese ceramics industry pivoted to European-style holiday decorations in order to skirt around embargoes placed by the Allies. The factories turned out scores of ceramic elves, angels, and Santa Clauses, which were shipped to the United States for sale in dime shops and drugstores. This industry thrived through the 1960s, leaving behind the sparkly bottle-brush trees, miniature cardboard glitter Putz houses, blow molds, and the iconic plastic flocked Santa Claus that I now chase in antique booths and Etsy listings.
Lining my mantle and crowning the china cabinet, these decorations have always been cute ephemera. They’re made of simple, forgiving materials that hint at childhood crafts, like cardboard, pipe cleaners and spun cotton. In the decades they’ve traveled a journey I can only imagine—from an assembly line in Nagoya to corner store to a housewife’s impulse buy to attic storage to the antique mall to my anxious hands—they’ve each developed a patina from pine-needle scratches, clumsy hands, stale air, brittling plastic, yellowing lace. There is a weariness to their joy, a quality I’d previous chalked up to age.
But this year I realize that these were tools of celebration created by those who survived unimaginable darkness. For these people, whether sketching tree dimensions in Japan or gifting a set of ornaments in the States, there was no going back to Before. They could not erase the worst of humanity that had been revealed, or say with confidence that such peril would never return.
As our very special Pandemic Christmas settles in, the past that Archer presents before delving into what we came for (drool-worthy pictures of lights and tinsel trees) offers clues into our future—particularly the fate of industry for the war’s losers. “Germany was the world capital of Christmas manufacturing across all categories: tinsel, ornaments, toys, games, and the revival of the Christmas tree itself in the 1830s,” she writes. “During World War II and after, American companies began producing toys and decorations on their own, even finding ingenious ways to adapt existing equipment… At peak efficiency, the Corning [production] method could produce more ornaments in a minute than a German glassblower could produce by hand in a day.” As the U.S.we sinks further and further behind every other industrialized nation because of our government’s callous response to Covid and fixation on undermining democracy, who, exactly, is going to replace us?
These were tools of celebration created by those who survived unimaginable darkness.
Much of what we associate with this bygone Christmas era, such as the iconic aluminum tree, came directly out of the war effort. Aluminum factories had revved up production to keep up with military demand, and in the lull of victory, designed a progressive and uniquely “evergreen” tree to diversify. The bold pink, blue and red glass ornaments that remain ubiquitous today were a response to the shortage and rationing of metallic substances, such as silver. The army wasn’t clamoring for pastels. The sudden abundance of the post-war saw the rise of early spon-con, referred to at the time as “corporate advice.” “How-to manuals, idea ‘treasuries,’ and recipe booklets proliferated, offering consumers glossy magazine-style inspiration for how to decorate and make merry in their own homes.” Decorative light manufacturers essentially invented a $90 million industry out of the question, “what the hell do we do now?”
These innovations in technology and advertising coincided perfectly with the public’s wild shifts in priorities and focus. People discovered crevices of themselves that sat dormant in more tranquil times; their best and worst selves. Just as we have, holed up in our homes for months, finding a new way to live. They couldn’t simply revert back to what they’d been before. They had changed, and so had everything else. All the way down to this tiny little niche of holiday decorating. The new materials, ideas, hopes and fears were all present in these kinetic posing figures, bursting ornaments, bubbling lights and pom-pom trees. They tell a story of a wiser world, a wearier world. So grateful for this future, yet overwhelmed with its uncertainty.
I see that truth in midcentury Santa’s furrowed forehead, a design repeated on each version of him, whether he’s an inch or a foot tall. Always wrinkling his brow and gazing off to his right side, eternally prepared for the other shoe to drop. I see it in the spun cotton angels with their heartbreaking delicate wings, eyes closed, hands clasped, no smiles. Occasionally a faint mouth drawn in an O, a silent plea. Even the Putz houses with their vellum glow windows are quiet, unoccupied, muffled by snow and marooned on their own separate cardboard islands.
This collection I’m now surrounded with for the remainder of my quarantine holiday is the answer to a question I wouldn’t have dreamed to ask. How did you know it would get better?
This sparkling, melancholy, fading world is its own reply. We didn’t. But we celebrated anyway. As you do. As people always have.
I have picked up the same book five times this year to read the first 30 pages. I always stop at 30. In between attempts, I have ordered more books to add to my already bulging bookcase. The bookcase, one of the few things I have left from my mother, has taunted me all year—“there are no parties, no flights to catch. You work right here. What are you waiting for? Read something.” So I tried. Every other week, I picked up a book and prayed to fall in love with words the way I used to before the virus came, hoping to do what I’ve always done—to outrun my anxiety by diving into sentences and plots on pages. Yet, I, like many other voracious readers, haven’t been able to concentrate on anything but the virus, our inept administration, and hoping that it will all be over soon. Unable to carry the complexity of sentences along with the weight of 2020, I turned to young adult novels written in verse. These books—full of dreams, young love, heartbreak, and growth—reminded of what has been and what can be.
and in short lines I caught my breath and used the white space around Black words to learn to feel again.
This year has taken more from us than it deserved. Here are eight YA novels in verse to hold our grief of 2020 and fuel our dreams of what comes next. May they be our guide for breathing, dreaming, and loving as deeply as possible as we close out this year.
This ain’t the year for sugarcoating the truth. Jason Reynolds’s 2017 novel, Long Way Down, gives it to us in heart-wrenching verse that demands we pay attention—not only to the story, but also to our own truth. Readers spend the novel on an elevator ride full of grief, memories, love, and possibility with the protagonist, Will. A story that addresses the complexities of family, loyalty, and violence, Long Way Down is a meditation in duty and love in its rawest forms. Often, Reynolds’ truth is a gut-punch (especially in this year): “People always love people more when they are dead.” A book of promises, regrets, and “I love yous” that reads like a part-diary, part-family reunion, Long Way Down stares you down and dares you to deal with your loss, isolation, and grief of 2020.
“I’m just happy we’re both here / alive,” Candice Iloh writes in the first pages of Every Body Looking, and we’ve never felt more seen in 2020. A coming-of-age tale of Ada, a Nigerian-American college freshman and aspiring dancer, Every Body Looking is a stunning debut from the brilliant Iloh. Like so many great coming-of-age novels, Iloh peppers Ada’s college experience with glimpses of her past complicated by family division, race, gender, sexuality, and faith. With verse that explores the joy and struggle of living in the in-betweenness of growing up, Iloh presents us with a familiar discomfort—the pain/pleasure of becoming our best selves. In some ways, Iloh’s Ada is all of us this year—longing for understanding, thirsting for freedom, and needing love more than we would like to admit.
I don’t remember where I was when I heard about Covid-19, when I learned that life would never be the same. Nine months later, I am still trying to reconcile with this new normal of grief and isolation. In her highly-lauded sophomore release, Clap When You Land, Elizabeth Acevedo tells us we’re never prepared for these moments,“When you learn news like this, there is only / falling.” In many ways, we’ve been falling since March. Clap When You Land won’t break your fall, but Acevedo’s poetry will hold your hand, reminding you you’re not alone. In this gripping story about the messiness of family, death, and love, Acevedo chronicles the lives of two sisters, Yahaira and Camino, as they grieve and connect following the tragic death of their father. Acevedo’s verse reads like a dope NYC cipher—brilliant, unorthodox, and beautiful; it is the fire we need to keep us warm this winter. Like her previous bestseller, The Poet X, this novel honors the nuances and beauty of Dominican-American culture, slaps with its authenticity and richness; and makes you long for the beat to drop (and never stop).
Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo is just as exquisite as its namesake. As far as 2020 young adult novels go, there are no pages more graceful and unapologetically queer than Atta’s novel from across the pond. I’ve been raving about it since I first put it down. Widely celebrated British poet, Atta offers a “queer and here” portrait of Michael, a young Jamaican-Greek Cypriot gay protagonist living in Britain. I dare you to try finishing this book without wanting to blast Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé’s “Feeling Myself.” Atta’s poetry of Michael’s triumph makes us all feel more alive. In a year plagued with hate, trauma, and doubt, The Black Flamingo is a prescription of self-love, pride, and joy. In “What It’s Like to Be a Black Drag Artist,” Atta writes, “it’s reviving your history. It’s surviving / the present. It’s devising the future.” Most of us will never be a Black drag artist like Michael, but perhaps we could channel just a bit of his fierceness as we enter a new year.
If we can’t travel right now, reading Margarita Engle’s Enchanted Air might be the next best thing. In Engle’s breathtaking memoir of growing up as the daughter of a white American father and Cuban mother during the Cold War, the whimsical and truthful meet to create a magical retelling of a childhood full of dreams, heartbreak, and the search for belonging between two worlds. The tropical air rises to your face when Engle writes of the memories and dreams of Cuba, a place where “ordinary people do impossible things.” Her story is a first-class ticket to traveling backwards to our memories and forward to our next adventure. Despite the pain of war, family separation, and confusion that plague Engle’s childhood narrative, she leaves us with a declaration of hope: “All I know about the future is that it will be beautiful.” I think we could all use a little hope for a beautiful future these days.
“Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory,” Jacqueline Woodson writes in Brown Girl Dreaming, a lyrical novel in whichshe gifts readers her memories and so much more. Published in 2015, the biographical novel chronicles Woodson’s adolescent years. At its core, Brown Girl Dreaming is an invitation. Woodson takes us home to meet her people, to show up the place, events, and family that molded her into who she is today. Through her poems, Woodson illuminates the impact of race, class, and geography on her growth and dreaming as a young Black girl. When we arrive to the end of her beautiful verse, we’re family and dreamers alike. In this novel of both homegoing and looking forward, I sought the answers to my own making. Reading good books while the world is on fire does that; they make you wonder how you started just as you think you might be ending.
Most days, I don’t want to get out of bed (much less dance) but that changed when I picked up Padma Venkatraman’s A Time to Dance, a book that makes readers want to twirl, spin, and shimmy across dance floors (or at least across our living rooms for now). Released in 2016, A Time to Dance is a mesmerizing lyrical tale of rebirth, love, and hope in the life of Veda, a classically-trained Bharatanatyam dancer struggling to rebound following a tragic accident. Set in India, Venkatraman’s verse beautifully weaves themes of spirituality, friendship, and perseverance to gift us some hope in a year with much too little of it. Venkatraman reminds us there are three kinds of love, “A healthy love of one’s physical self / compassion for others, / and an experience of God.” As we close out 2020, Venkatraman’s reminder makes the case for giving ourselves (and those around us) a bit more grace.
There is nothing we can’t do and Russell Tofu Quilt doesn’t let us forget it. In this short memoir of her youth in Hong Kong, Ching Yeung Russell tells the story of finding her passion despite the odds stacked against her as a girl in a male-dominant society. She masterfully pairs snapshots of daily life with childlike reflections on dreaming, reading, and writing herself into existence. Make no mistake—this isn’t a young girl’s feminist manifesto. Instead what Russell offers is an inspiring self-portrait of a girl who said yes—to daring to do the impossible, to saying yes to her dreams and purpose. For young Russell, “books are [her] world, / [her] best companion.” Reading Tofu Quilt is like watching your best friend fall in love for the first time; you can’t help but smile and hope for the same.
I am so grateful each morning
that we have not yet eviscerated each other
completely.
it sticks in my teeth (the
being alive / the not dying).
maybe the sky will fall eventually,
but today: fervent ripeness,
this day another thing to taste the
sweetness of.
I hold my own hand. call it the
response to a suicide note, call it the
process of elimination. whatever.
it is still soft & sure.
tell me: if I stretched out this love
do you think it might cover us both?
I do. an orchard breath-ed morning
swelling around us.
nothing like an apocalypse.
the optimism will not hold
so I change my name to the middle of July.
all long days and stifling nights.
now, my heart does not threaten to
break free from my chest.
now, every startling noise is a celebration,
every head that turns to see has a smile.
I clear my throat and even the silence leans in.
everything good has a tangible likelihood;
especially living into tomorrow.
now, my mouth is both gun & firework;
I am struggling to let the right one speak.
listen; there’s singing from somewhere,
but I don’t think it’s me.
now, my face is a clock always striking
midnight; my throat opens only to close.
I am told to ask for what I want; instead I
bleed out into a stranger’s flower bed,
break a stained glass window
that might’ve been mine.
now, there’s nothing here that couldn't
be a grave given time.
We’ve learned to live without a lot this year—movie theaters, indoor dining, Thanksgiving with family, bars. But the news that Literary Review would be canceling the annual Bad Sex in Fiction awards was too much to take lying down (as it were). The judges offered the justification that “the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well,” but come on—the bad things we’ve weathered in 2020 are exactly the reason we need to laugh and cringe at phrases like “Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey.” Where will we get our vaginal ratchets now???
Well, we’ll have to invent our own.
The Literary Review judges admonished writers not to take the cancellation as “a license to write bad sex”—but they abandoned us in our time of need so we don’t have to listen to them. In the spirit of the awards, which have gone to such luminaries as Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, we’ve assembled a group of extremely legitimate writers. Not at all in the spirit of the awards, we’ve asked them to deliberately write something embarrassing and awful. (We’ve also included one actually-published scene, from Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, but he volunteered it!) The results are hysterically funny, mildly-to-extremely upsetting, and not at all hot, which is exactly what we’d hoped for. Also, one of them has an interactive element, which we could never have predicted. At this Bad Sex in Fiction awards ceremony, we all win.
Georgia used to knock my rocks in the Oregon Theater. On the big screen porno girls squeaked like rubber pool toys on the hot, balmy, iridescent, saccharine summer days of my youth, vibrant beach balls buoyant in the chlorinated water which—come to think of it—remind me of Georgia’s breasts in her Contempo Casuals halter top, the one she wore the first time she dove down into the cave of me like a spelunking girl in The Descent, my ankles around the C of her neck, hooked all the way around, the tectonic edging of that O—that’s right—that’s how it was before I opined about retirement plans and a shared family sofa and she screwed off, like, chill, like, you’re ruining it, but before that we had days in the AC of the Oregon Theater sprawled out in the roped off Couple’s Section, everyone jealous (no one was jealous) the squelch of Georgia’s desire as she snapped the nylon harness around my hips saying this doesn’t exactly even fit, the tip of my silicone dick dipped in corn starch for better friction (and quality assurance) see I had her once, had love, had a lover, had a glistening purpose right in my lap, the way she called me daddy before the theater shuttered last year, an artisanal tea shop, now, where the building once stood, where my slick candied destiny once lived before melting like a cheap lawn chair—all tongue and hope and America! that’s the kind of love it was!—come to think of it, the pool toys always had bite marks in them.
He took off my panties and parted my outer lips. “Open up, little piggy bank,” he whispered; “let’s see if we can find any stray quarters!” His searching fingers pushed inside me, probing my walls as if hunting for spare change. I grabbed the tip of his cock and ran my fingers across the papercut of his urethra until the tiniest bead of precum appeared. “You’re drooling,” I said to his cock. “Perhaps there’s something you’d like to say?” With my index finger and thumb, I pretended to make its drillhole open and close like a tiny mouth. “If that’s the bank, then I’d like to make a deposit of valuable cum,” I mumbled in my best ventriloquist voice. He let out a moan not unlike a throaty elk bugle. “Yes,” he agreed; “my moneybags have grown so full and heavy.” I reached down and cupped his balls to confirm, weighing them in my hands. “Oh!” I replied. “Someone’s been saving up for days!”
I bet we won’t even get to breakfast before my lover ravages me. My lover is actually my husband but we’re so wild for each other, even after nine months shut inside, that I’ve started to call him that: lover. Roar!
Lover knows how much I miss the croissants at Balthazar so he has bought me some at CVS from their “Last Chance!” aisle because CVS is open and Balthazar is not. I used to get the fresh squeezed grapefruit juice for eleven dollars but Tropicana makes me hot. Lover asked me if I’d dress up for him one of these long, hot mornings as the Tropicana girl and I was like, first of all, she’s underage, and also like, Hawaiian or something, and cultural appropriation is gross!
I have on the same pair of Target panties as I did last night, only inside out.
As we sit at the breakfast table that is also our workspace, I can almost feel my lover-husband’s hands between my thighs, questing for their prize. He has to get through my sweatpants and my long johns to discover my morning treat: I have on the same pair of Target panties as I did last night, only inside out.
He climbs on the table and begins wilding his way toward me, the six-pack of expired croissants and Zazzle holiday cards be damned. My lover’s tongue tastes like coffee grinds and desperation: I swallow his tongue like a stimulus check. The breakfast bell has rung.
Kane and Margaret put out their lights at six o’clock. Then at ten o’clock they revived to fuck each other with everything they assumed was the power and frenzy of a newly-married couple. Some nights Kane wrote a script. Margaret insisted the Nakamuras and Otas hear them call out disturbing things to each other. She claimed she was out to spoil their libidos.
“You feel so tight,” Kane yelled. “God, a woman of your age. Still tight as a baby kitten.”
“Not so deep,” Margaret exclaimed. “I’m getting raw. I’m raw as an open wound. You’re making ground hamburger of me!”
“What is that smell? Something in here smells like tanning oil and bleach.”
On nights Kane and Margaret felt too tired to make love, they lay beside each other and groaned loudly until they fell back asleep. Over time, as it felt a bit insincere to groan without touching, they held hands until their groans reverted back to snores. Shortly after the start of their routine, the two slept soundly enough so other couples never reawakened them.
He’d been with many women in his life, women of all shapes and colors and ages, but he had never been with one who moved like this. She was a shapeshifter, this young student of his; instead of multitudes, she contained animals, a stable full of them. She moved on top of him like a snake, her long gleaming body slithering, sliding, moving down his length, as he slipped in and out of her. She was a tiger, biting, roaring, tearing. She was a panda, delicately nibbling, content and placid, breasts hanging pendulous yet pert. She was the gazelle and he the apex predator, and together they rode the hotel bed like a savannah: he consuming, she submitting. As she moved through this dance of beasts, he was exhausted, invigorated, insatiable. It was like fucking Noah’s Ark.
My nipples were pounding through my natural E cup bra like sexy worms rising from the earth after a rainstorm.
We met on the downtown express bus. I admired the geology of his firm bottom through his form fitting work chinos. It made my lady parts howl in moisture. Thank god it was too loud on the bus for anybody to notice. Except for him. He had the jawline of a foxy first term senator who had been a star in law school. I imagined his imperial chin soaking itself at the pleasure of my fresh scented labia as well as those other parts I forget the names of. Just thinking of being wet made me super wet. So wet if felt as if I alone was responsible for the rise in sea levels. As passengers boarded he made his way back to me. I could feel my nipples wanting to introduce themselves. They were pounding through my natural E cup bra like sexy worms rising from the earth after a rainstorm. We both knew we would get off at the same exit. And boy did we. We are married now. And ten years later I still adore his knowing pumps to my insatiable vagina. The end. (Whenever I dictate the words “the end” to my topless lesbian stenographer I think of his manly hindquarters, chiseled out of hot flesh, they’re just that fabulous. The end.)
The secret to a good Zoom call, Evelyn knew, was a great ring light. Waiting for Brad to join the chat, she adjusted her bosoms in her lace camisole, letting the light caress them from every direction. Lighting really was everything. She was a fruit tree, her bounty these two illuminated orbs. And suddenly, there was Brad, ready as a migrant orchard worker to harvest her fruit.
Of course, he wasn’t really an orchard worker but a dental hygienist, one who had first won Evelyn over with his gentle caress of her gums, his deft work with the waterpik. He’d said of the mouth-suctioning tool, “We call this one Mr. Thirsty.” Then he’d said, looking deep into her soul, “Don’t swallow till I say so.” They’d only shared one wild March night on his couch (“We call this one Mr. Thirsty,” he’d said again, no dental tools in sight) before the virus forced them apart. Now he masked up daily to see patients, while she worked alone from her basement.
Here he was, his lighting not as good as hers, but what did it matter if the shadows of his supply closet and the poor camera quality of his phone rendered him grainy and small? In these three square inches in the middle of her monitor, he was here, and he was hers, and she had ten to fifteen minutes to coax from him a stream of creamy foam, one infinitely lovelier than any of the foamy streams of toothpaste and saliva that Brad shepherded into basins all day.
Evelyn lowered the camisole and released her fruit. Here was the ripe flesh; here were the small, hard pits. The ring light ringed both breasts in rings of light.
Calvin Kasulke, author of Several People Are Typing (forthcoming):
Quick caveat: The below sex scene wasn’t really written by me. It was written by a predictive text keyboard, which is just like the predictive text feature in your cell phone’s texting app—except this keyboard’s only source material is all of the Bad Sex Award-nominated scenes highlighted in Literary Review since 1993. I used this keyboard to generate a bunch of sentences, which I then lightly edited for tense-matching and punctuation. You can try it for yourself here, and learn more about the Botnik predictive keyboard here.
He was in her and sort of jiggled there.
When Pete swallowed her panties he felt her hands gripping his shoulders and guiding him into her pubic assemblage. His dick had grown inside of her vaginal corners, gyroscopically guided by little pleasure sounds.
Thick typewriter testicles iridesced in alternation and he came hard in her mouth and pulled his tail out of her buttocks without interfering in her now restored geography. She sucked on her genitals and he came again and he was in her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a supplemental oxygen of her body. Her breasts spilled on her shoulders.
In a room choked with the smoke of hand-poured soy candles scented with cedar and Fritos, Alamar and Trudie entered their fourth hour of lovemaking. Theirs was a polyamorous relationship, very glamorous, because they were both not only disruptive tech CEOs but also heirs to great old houses of Europe, living in a funky fourteen-thousand-dollar-a-month loft decorated with many affirmations.
Trudie’s super long hair was so abundant that she had an assistant whose sole job was picking its leavings off her pert tits and who now stood facing the wall in her hooded brown jute shroud. Alamar’s endless pecs were covered in a coat of fine, shining down that most people mistook for baby oil. They were definitely real people who loved licking each other out.
From hole to hole their mouths roamed, serene Roombas, hoovering effluvia with no care for the clock. (It was large, and chimed their progress in the voice of Chandra, the hot AI Alamar designed as a two-week anniversary present: “Trudie is now reaching plateau ecstatic biorhythm. Increase ministrations.”)
How rimmed each orifice, how frilly its little skin doily. Thoughtfully, Trudie had had her labia skin trimmed into mafalde, Alamar’s favorite pasta shape. Over, and over and over, and over they turned, or attempted to turn, Trudie’s shoulder almost dislocating behind her head but not, because she did so much Pilates. Alamar was hard, but her workouts were harder and it was true: nothing tasted good as being thin felt.
She longed for him to fill her Venusian canyon with his hot love lava. But that wouldn’t be for hours yet. They were never so louche as to orgasm without first engaging in six hours of Tantric Processing™, a modality created by Alamar’s partner Dot.
“I am certain that the jealousy I feel that you began a new intermittent fasting regimen with Reginald without my permission is a sign of my unevolved spirit,” Alamar gasped, thrusting off-center, shocked by Trudie’s stubble, but trying to be a feminist about it.
They were definitely real people who loved licking each other out.
“I feel grateful for this recognition of your inherent problematics,” Trudie sighed, casting a sidelong glance at their Tibetan terrier Drone, who sat perched on her synthetic suede throne, gnawing a yoni egg. Inspired, Trudie began a series of kegels that ejected Alamar’s shrinking tumescence. In the light from the Himalayan salt lamps, his member was truly the “small log” of which bards had sung. They stared at their phones, scrolling the latest Brene Brown clips until they were horny enough to resume processing.
His touch was but a whisper… but the daylight was a shout. No, this wouldn’t do at all. Vanessa made her way to his exquisite drapery and asked, her honied voice dripping with honey, “How about we… close this drapery?” His response came in the form of a gruff laugh. She knew what it meant. He wanted her to close the drapery. She liked following his orders. Seductively, Vanessa untied the little decorative drapery tie, only briefly wondering if it was actually meant to be untied or if it was all just decorative and there was another way of blocking out the daylight there, like blinds, and then they were cloaked in darkness. “That’s better,” she said. He laughed. He was always laughing, in a manly way.
She felt around in the darkness until they could feel each others warmth once again. “Touch me where it feels good,” he said. “Here?” she said, touching his shoulder. “Lower,” he said. Vanessa slid her fingers down his his bulging bicep. “Here?” she said. “Lower,” he said. She moved her fingers about an inch down his bicep. “Here?” she said. “No… much lower than that.” Okay. She crouched to the floor. “Here?” she said, touching his toes. “Well, no but… I mean, since you’re—” “Okay, here?” she said, touching the floor. “What? No—” “Here?” she said, as she picked up a floorboard. It seemed to open into a secret room. She lowered herself into the ground as he watched her, hard as a rock. “HERE?” she said once she was completely hidden within the floor. “No!” he shouted down at her, “I can’t even see what you’re touching!” But it was too late. He already came.
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