“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” goes the old, though sadly still relevant joke. Political conflicts have always had a way of monopolizing the public’s attention, and this extends well beyond the geography lessons of current events coverage, into the culture section, too. Along with the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, for example, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the works of Black authors: platforms encouraging their voices, listicles promoting their books, the National Book Awards acknowledging and trying to compensate for their marginalization.
The definitive model for this relationship between political conflict and literary trend may be the Cuban Revolution. In 1959, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the other Cuban guerillas succeeded in ousting Fulgencio Batista, a U.S.-backed dictator who had terrorized Cuba for nearly a decade. The Cuban Revolution would go further though, catalyzing not only other anti-imperialist movements, but a literary movement too—namely, the Latin American Boom, a widespread celebration of the works of authors from Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.
The definitive model for this relationship between political conflict and literary trend may be the Cuban Revolution.
The Cuban Revolution today is overshadowed in the U.S. imagination by later events of the Cold War, but the contemporary perspective was quite different. As Tony Perrottet explains in Cuba Libre!, his nonfiction account of the era, many average Americans were at first supportive of Castro’s revolution. Throughout the ‘50s, Batista’s dictatorship received institutional backing from the U.S. government, but news of his forces torturing civilians in peace time, and committing war crimes against suspected guerilla strongholds once the revolution began, aligned public sympathy firmly with Castro, Che, and the other rebels. It undoubtedly helped that Castro, formerly a Cuban lawyer, had yet to embrace communism, instead framing the revolution as a war of independence.
The push of Batista and pull of Castro resulted in a cultural phenomenon dubbed “Fidelmania,” in which media coverage of the Cuban Revolution inspired new fashions, like beards and berets. Fidelmania reached its apex on January 11, 1959, when 50 million viewers tuned into The Ed Sullivan Show to watch the host’s interview with Castro, which was recorded just hours before the latter entered Havana, victorious.
“The people of the United States, they have great admiration for you and your men,” Sullivan told Castro. “Because you are in the real American tradition—of a George Washington—of any band who started off with a small body and fought against a great nation and won.”
The literary corollary of “Fidelmania” was the Latin American Boom. While the love affair between Castro and the U.S. public fizzled by 1960, following Cuban land reforms which threatened U.S. business interests on the island, the reading public’s interest in Latin American literature was just beginning to take hold, aided by both Cuban and U.S. efforts. As John King notes in “The Boom of the Latin American Novel,” from The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, the new Cuban state directly promoted Latin American literature by offering residencies, awarding prizes, organizing events, and even publishing a journal, Casa de las Americas. To counter communist influence, the United States promoted “developmentalism,” pushing for the integration of Latin American countries into international markets, including the arts.
While contemporary critics seldom mentioned the Cuban Revolution, the writers themselves acknowledged their debt.
The critical praise that would usher in the Latin American Boom soon followed. In 1966, the Times Literary Supplement declared Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar to be the “first great novel of Spanish America.” The next year, it won the National Book Foundation award for fiction in translation, while Miguel Angel Asturias received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming only the second Latin American so honored. In 1970, The New York Times described One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” While contemporary critics seldom mentioned the Cuban Revolution, the writers themselves acknowledged their debt even decades later.
“In a sense, the boom in Latin American literature in the United States has been caused by the Cuban Revolution,” Garcia Marquez told The Paris Review in 1981. “Every Latin American writer of that generation had been writing for twenty years, but the European and American publishers had very little interest in them. When the Cuban Revolution started there was suddenly a great interest about Cuba and Latin America.”
But if it was the Cuban Revolution that birthed the Latin American Boom, it was also revolutionary Cuba that laid the Boom to rest. King notes in his essay that the subsiding of the Boom as a literary trend in the 1970s coincided with rifts between the new Cuban state and the wider literary community. In 1971, the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, once a supporter of the revolution, was imprisoned for criticizing the government in his work. Padilla faced a show trial, where he was forced to confess his “crimes” and make accusations against other writers, including his wife.
“This infuriated a number of intellectuals, from Latin America, North America, and Europe, who wrote two open letters to the Cuban regime complaining about Padilla’s shoddy treatment,” writes King. “Fidel Castro replied in a furious manner, castigating bourgeois intellectuals who were the lackeys of imperialism and agents of the CIA…”
(As absurd as that accusation may sound, the CIA was in fact connected to the literary establishment. Peter Matthiessen, co-founder of The Paris Review, for example, worked for the CIA in the 1950s and used the magazine as his cover while spying on communists and others.)
The question remains why it takes a revolution for readers to consider new writers.
The Boom still echoes, most clearly in the lasting appreciation of virtuosos like Garcia Marquez, but its relationship with the Cuban Revolution also demonstrates that popular political movements can inspire corresponding literary trends, much like the Black Lives Matter movement continues to inspire interest in the works of Black authors from a literary community that had previously been more hostile. The question remains why it takes a revolution for readers to consider new writers—but as Garcia Marquez suggested in his interview with The Paris Review, the search for such validation is, in part, what makes political conflict necessary.
“It was discovered that Latin American novels existed that were good enough to be translated and considered with all other world literature,” he said of the Boom. “What was really sad is that cultural colonialism is so bad in Latin America that it was impossible to convince the Latin Americans themselves that their own novels were good until people outside told them they were.”
To build upon Garcia Marquez’s criticism: The common hope of revolutionaries and writers should not be to momentarily gain access to either the rights or the recognition that have been withheld from them by gatekeepers. If revolutionaries and writers can find common cause, it should be in tearing down those gates, so that they can never be put out again.
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re talking to Dario Diofebi, author of Paradise, Nevada, who will be teaching an eight-week seminar on plotting your novel: how do you structure a story without getting bogged down in formulas and rules? Dario shared with us his thoughts on pursuing lepidoptery, taking care of your reader, and coming out of writing class with a valuable network of friends.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Writer friends. A network of talented people who are eager to talk about unpublished fiction with you for hours each week. It’s hard to overstate how rare this is, and how valuable. When you’re starting out especially, when it’s hard to tell yourself what you’re doing matters, being part of a group is a real blessing.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I feel like students at times make the mistake of focusing too much on the one class when their pages are workshopped, and coast the rest of the time. It’s selfish, obviously, but also shortsighted: the most vital learning you’ll do in a workshop, I find, happens while you’re reading and editing for your classmates. It makes you a better reader of your own work, which long-term is the one skill you want to take away from a workshop. In a couple years, you might not care at all about the story you were working on during that class, but the skills you’ve acquired as an editor will stay with you, and make you a better writer.
The most vital learning you’ll do in a workshop, I find, happens while you’re reading and editing for your classmates.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Love your reader. This has been said in many ways by many great writers, and it feels to me like the foundation all other writing advice is built upon. Writing may well be self-expression, but the most important person remains the one who chooses to give you their precious time and attention. Take good care of them.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
It’s plausible that everyone owns at least one really interesting story, somewhere. Not everyone has the persistence, the discipline, and, frankly, the luxury of time at their disposal to do so in novel form. Nor should they want to: there’s lots of ways to tell stories, novels are just one (and not a particularly popular one at that).
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
No, I really don’t see what the point would be. But I do try to give students realistic expectations about what writing careers look like, these days. It’s easy to idealize the writing life, and the reality of it can hit hard. Ultimately though, if someone really wants to write, they’ll find a way to do it anyway.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
In a vacuum I’d say both are equally necessary. If I think back to my own experience, though, it’s definitely praise (or really, support and encouragement) that’s helped me more.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
It’s easy to idealize the writing life, and the reality of it can hit hard.
If by publication we mean the publishing industry, then no, it’s pointless. Chasing trends or trying to predict what that singularly irrational system will end up valuing next gets you nothing but frustration. If by “publication” we mean should we think of the reader, then yes, constantly.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: Cut/paste your darlings onto a separate file you promise yourself you’re going to revisit soon (though probably not). Do keep some of your darlings though: over-edited fiction feels dry and lifeless.
Show don’t tell: If you’re good at telling in an exciting, engaging way, go ahead and tell me things too.
Write what you know: Maybe, but know lots of things. Be aware of the limits of your knowledge, respectful, and diligent, but by all means be curious. Fiction is exploration.
Character is plot: Sometimes, sure. But other times plot will be the thing that drives you, and your characters will have to scramble to adapt, and that’s fine too.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
Lepidoptery, I hear. I myself am partial to Rubik’s cubes though.
What’s the best workshop snack?
I could never really feel comfortable snacking during class, but I do recommend a cup of tea.
Despite a lifetime of being compulsively apologetic and avoiding conflict, my favorite fictional characters are just the opposite.
I’m drawn to the reckless and impulsive, those who refuse to toe the line. Perhaps even more so since the birth of my daughter, when there suddenly seem far fewer opportunities for heedless behavior. Instead, I live vicariously through the hedonism of others. Take Josephine, for example, the narrator of my debut novel, The Divines, who hides her past from her husband, books secret motel rooms, squirrels away a lockbox of explicit Polaroid pictures and holes up in a dive bar at nine months pregnant.
In this vein, the books on this list are an ode to the risk-takers and thrill-seekers in novels, the wild women (and men) who make some pretty questionable life choices, throwing caution to the wind so that we don’t have to.
At some point, haven’t we all wanted to disappear? In The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, a woman’s backpack is stolen from her Casablanca hotel, stripping her of both her passport and identity. Faced with the prospect of returning to her old life—the regrets and bad decisions—she opts for reinvention.
A pregnant pizza delivery girl becomes obsessed with one of her customers in this firecracker of a debut by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Downing cans of beer in her garden shed, Frazier’s loveable teenage narrator decides to follow her heart in the wake of her father’s death.
From Lila in My Brilliant Friend to Olga in TheDays of Abandonment, Ferrante specializes in nonconforming women. In this slender thrill of a novel, Leda’s seaside vacation takes an unexpected turn when she steals a child’s doll from the uncouth family who threaten to interrupt her peaceful days on the beach.
Luster was a blazing light in the dark days of 2020. Leilani’s irreverent and imperfect protagonist, Edie, is a woman who acts on impulse. After starting a relationship with a married man, Edie sneaks into his family home, slugs milk from his fridge and, moments later, comes face to face with his wife. Sensual and provocative, this is a story about a young black woman—an artist—fighting to be seen.
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way,” begins The Vegetarian, the story of a Korean woman who refuses to eat meat after experiencing a bloody dream. While foregoing pork might not seem overtly reckless at first, this is a tightly drawn story about female agency in a patriarchal world.
Cassie was born with a knot, a genetic abnormality that led to her twisted torso. But that’s not the only unusual part of Etter’s story. In this surrealist gem of a novel about society’s obsession with female appearance, meat is harvested from a quarry by the menfolk. Bucking tradition, Cassie breaks through the gates in a visceral act of defiance, presses her cheek against the fleshy wall, lets the blood soak in.
Published in the ’60s, Poor Cow is the story of a working-class London girl living on the edge of poverty, so “skint” she doesn’t even have a pair of knickers to wear. A perennial daydreamer, Joy’s husband is in jail and her lover’s a thief, but that doesn’t stop her looking for fun. “Men are terrific,” she announces, slapping on her pink lippy, heading to the pub to find one.
The astragalus is part of the ankle, the bone that Sarrazin’s teenage narrator shatters as she leaps from her jail cell in the opening scenes of this semi-autobiographical French novel. Anne is rescued by fellow criminal, Julien, and there begins this kaleidoscopic story of a woman on the lam.
I’m fascinated by liars—their audacity, their bravado—none more so than the fabulists in Kispert’s short stories. Take the man who pays an actor to play the role of his phoney best friend, or the narrator who dons a gold crucifix, faking religion to seduce a Catholic hunk. Kispert’s stories are as much about the lies we tell ourselves, as they are characters being willingly deceitful.
Early Saturday morning I drove up the coast from the border, toward Thy. I drove past meadows with flocks of game birds. The geese don’t want to migrate anymore. They think it’s just as easy to stay in the farmers’ fields, so now they hunker there through the winter by the thousand, feeding on winter wheat and old corncobs. They trample, they compact the soil and make it hard.
As I stood on the ferry, crossing the Thyborøn Channel, I was thinking that it was a long way to drive for a woman I’d only spent a single night with. But Anja had been nice when she was waiting on us during the seminar in the national park. She’d wanted to join the dancing after dinner and seemed eager as we walked through the crowberry. She didn’t want to do it in the hotel, but there’d been primitive shelters in the area. My performance hadn’t been that impressive, yet now her ex-husband had the kids for the weekend. And she had the family summer cottage.
“Come,” she’d whispered on the phone.
There’s a powerful riptide in the Limfjord. I had to grip the railing tightly on the trip across. The fjord looked as though it were a river flowing toward the North Sea, and up on the Agger Isthmus I saw how everything that no longer had to fly away lay pooling in the lakes, and if she hadn’t been standing in the lyme grass by the driveway to a cottage a little farther north, I might well have stayed.
“But here I am,” I said as I stepped into the dunes to greet her.
She wore a light-colored dress with small sun-yellow flowers. It was a pretty dress, and she said I looked just like she remembered, and that she was awfully sorry. There’d been some sort of double booking. She’d forgotten that her mother was coming, among others. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, and said it was too bad I’d had my cell phone switched off.
Within the cottage stood a woman in blue, with brushed bangs. She was standing with one of those cast-off mugs you find in summer cottages. It was the mother. In front of her, Anja’s sister was gesturing, and behind her sister, a niece sat in a creaking wicker chair. Out on the dunes, her brother-in-law and nephew were kicking a ball.
“The party slipped my mind. My aunt’s turning eighty,” Anja said, rubbing her forehead. There was a luncheon at a nearby inn. She had to go, she explained. For a couple of hours at least. I could stay and enjoy the cottage. “You’re very welcome to join us,” Anja’s mother said, and stepped closer. “In our family, there’s always room for one more at the table.”
I shook her mother’s hand, then I shook her sister’s. I said hi to the niece, and to the brother-in-law when he came in the door with the boy. “Anja says you work at the Society for Nature Conservation,” he said. “What are you doing about the barnacle geese?”
I never managed to answer, because Anja pulled me out onto the porch. She said she understood if I’d rather go home now. She was sorry she’d mixed things up so badly, but she was tied down. I said that she looked pretty with those freckles on her nose. She said her aunt had been recently widowed. Then she poked a forefinger into my palm, and I clutched at it.
There was some lighthearted confusion a little while later when Anja kissed me back by the outdoor shower. It wasn’t a good kiss. The yellow flowers on the sleeves of her dress seemed to be elsewhere beneath my hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered, and behind the clapboard wall the others were talking about driving to the inn together. There wasn’t enough room in her brother-in-law’s Audi, so I ended up in the passenger seat of Anja’s car, her mother behind me with her hands on my headrest.
We took the main coast road north, trailing her brother-in-law. We drove like this for a while through the national park. From the backseat, Anja’s mother spoke of the view and the place names, and she wanted to know exactly where I lived. “Tøndermarsken,” I said. “By yourself, right?” she asked, and I confirmed that I was a widower. I also mentioned that my wife had been a pastor, but that seemed to land awkwardly. Then Anja’s mother gave a recapitulation of some article she’d read in the weekly paper. It had to do with wolves and how they communicate across long distances by howling. “They’re social creatures,” she said.
In this way we drove along behind the brother-in-law until he turned into a rest stop. Anja conferred with him, while her mother worried about not getting there in time for the first course. As for me, I was looking at the flowers on Anja’s dress and the clusters of game birds lifting off from the vegetation. In the winter they would stick around: compaction birds.
What had happened was that the brother-in-law had gone north by mistake, and after a half-hour excursion in the wrong direction, we arrived at the inn well into the first course. There was a burst of applause and general merriment when we crossed the floor. If I’d known who the other guests were, I would have attempted a bit of clowning, but Anja’s was the only face present that was somewhat familiar, and she wasn’t looking up.
Seats had been set aside for the family. I sat down in the only available chair at a table that wasn’t the head table. To my left was a little man who introduced himself as a cousin from the other side of the family. He explained that it was his wife’s place I’d taken. “She never goes anywhere anymore,” he said, and then I turned to my right, where a bearded man was seated. After that, a fish landed on my plate. “Cheers!” exclaimed a wrinkled face across from me. It belonged to a woman. “It’s a good thing you made it.”
I patted Anja’s hand every time it rested on my shoulder in passing. “I’m terribly sorry about this,” she whispered, and at such moments there were eyes upon us, so Anja stopped doing it, and I didn’t feel I could go over to her.
In this fashion, the luncheon proceeded. Now and then I went to the restroom to make the time pass, and it was when I was trying to urinate again that a man stepped into the stall next to mine and unzipped. A profuse pissing commenced. I finished up discreetly, flushed, and opened the stall door, but not fast enough to escape the brother-in-law.
“Oh, it’s you!” he said, coming over to the sink. “Now we’ve pissed together.” I said it was almost as good as being blood brothers, after which we returned to the party, where the coffee had been served.
“What are you people planning to do about those barnacle geese?” he asked, pulling me down at the deserted end of a table. “And the whooper swans and the pinkfeet? I’ve had to resow my fields. My neighbor too.” I glanced around for Anja, who was being detained at the head table. “What do the ag associations suggest?” I asked. “Can you spray for them?” he said, and laughed.
I have this conversation every day, and I pointed out that it was really due to climate change. Then he wanted to know if it was also the climate’s fault that the wolves had come north to harass his cows. I explained, as I usually do, that wolves have adapted to a Europe at peace, and he maintained, as no doubt he usually does, that he didn’t want to let his kids play in the tree plantation anymore. Finally he said, “I hope you have a great view from your ivory tower, but you should know that we’re rather fond of Anja. Why don’t you try a widows’ ball down in Southern Jutland instead?”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Anja. The yellow flowers spread across the dress fabric and resembled creeping potentilla. That was something she had loved, and I always see it when I go out into the marsh. It blossoms abundantly in the groundcover, and there was something about her face, especially her mouth. Yet restless, that she was. Couldn’t be in the place she found herself. Once when we were at a dinner, she whispered to me that she felt naked without her vestments and wanted to go home. She had a way of leaving me, also in bed. When her legs began to get twitchy under the comforter, I’d place a hand on one of them and say, “A little while yet,” but it was no use, and now here was this woman Anja, sitting in the bosom of her family, tearing a napkin to pieces.
I suggested that we take a little walk, down to the water. She cast a sidelong glance at her aunt and mother and ended up standing on the beach, backlit at the water’s edge. As she stood there in silhouette, we agreed that it would be best if she drove me back to the cottage. My car was there, after all. “I feel terribly embarrassed,” she said a couple of times on the way, and I said she shouldn’t. “I did get a nice drive out of it.”
It was still warm when I drove south, and somewhere on the Agger Isthmus I pulled over at a scenic rest stop. A light breeze was flowing across the terrain. Into the landscape went a path, and I followed it until it vanished in the dunes. Then I took off my shoes. Down by the breakers, flocks of gulls. When they weren’t climbing the wind they stood frozen on the beach, gazing outward. Oddly abandoned and always on the lookout for a fish. After a while I pissed and went back to the car. There I sat, next to Route 181 southbound. The key in the ignition, the sunset, the night.
About the translator:
Misha Hoekstra is an award-winning translator. He lives in Aarhus, where he writes and performs songs under the name Minka Hoist.
In traditional folklore, villainous women wield more power than their lawful good contemporaries. The sea witches and evil queens of European fairy tales shapeshift, scry in magic mirrors, and live in cool houses with chicken feet or gingerbread walls. Their step-daughters and maidenly nemeses kind of just…get married.
In Japanese folklore, vengeful women often appear as yūrei, or ghosts (more specifically translated as “faint spirits”), with varying techniques for frightening those who have wronged them in life. Translated by Polly Barton, Aoko Matsuda’s collection Where the Wild Ladies Are takes these “monsters” from Japanese folklore and gives them room to breathe in the contemporary world. Human women revamp themselves into canonically monstrous forms, comfortable in their power.
In “Smartening Up,” a woman’s body hair grows so long and dark that she becomes “some other being entirely.” After earlier attempts at depilation, she ultimately embracesthe hair as strength: “It doesn’t bother me if I stay a nameless monster,” she says.
In “My Superpower,” the narrator reflects on Okon and Oiwa—two famous ghosts whose faces became disfigured. The narrator’s eczema has given her “keen observational skills…to see what the person I am talking to is really like underneath.” She observes that “Those who see others as monsters don’t notice that those monsters are looking back at them in turn.”
“A Day Off” riffs on the kabuki story Shinobiyoru Koi wa Kusemono, in which an avenging princess appears on top of a giant toad. In Matsuda’s tale, a woman and her giant toad, Gum, “provide support for women facing problems with groping, stalking, harassment, and other kinds of abuse.” But the magnitude of their task leaves the narrator with “no desire to leave [her] bedroom, where [she] can just loll around with Gum like this.”
The stories are connected by the thread of a mysterious company run by a man named Mr. Tei. Initially, we see the business as an incense company, but it soon becomes clear that they offer much more. Mr. Tei’s factory is a home for powerful women—for wild ladies. In “The Jealous Type,” a woman receives a missive from the company praising her talents: “Recognizing your capabilities at this stage, we have extremely high expectations for what you could accomplish with us into the future. In terms of arrangements for your appearance on the spectral stage, rest assured that we have a wide variety of options available…when you do pass away, please be sure to get in touch.” Some vengeful ghosts are so ahead of their time, they haven’t even died yet.
Over email, Aoko Matsuda and I discussed horror tropes, the nature of monstrousness, and, of course, the desirability of living with a giant toad.
Deirdre Coyle: In “My Superpower,” the narrator says: “I never thought of Okon and Oiwa as terrifying monsters. If they were terrifying, so was I. If they were monsters, that meant I was a monster too.” What do you see as the primary difference between human women and monstrous women in these stories?
Aoko Matsuda: In my opinion, there is no fundamental difference between human women and monstrous women. Rather, I see a lot of resemblances between them. They’re like mirror images of one another. Monstrous women are born from this cruel men-centric world, and so are human women. Once I realized that, it struck me that I wanted to write stories to connect these two existences in a timeless way so that they can support each other. That was the starting point of this short story collection.
DC: These stories turn a lot of grudge-based horror tropes on their heads—and in different ways. Can you talk about how you reimagined ghosts’ relationships with earthly resentment, especially in stories like “Having a Blast” or “The Jealous Type”?
AM: From childhood, I’ve always been fascinated by female ghosts and monsters. So, in my eyes, jealousy and resentment seem interesting even though they’re said to be bad things that you shouldn’t feel. And if you read folklore, you can easily see the reason why human women and monstrous women come to feel jealousy and resentment: they are treated very unfairly and harshly by men and their communities. But the people around me seemed not to care about that, and were focused on how “scary” women were. It didn’t make sense to me when I was young. Now I see it’s because this is a male-centric world we live in. So, I thought, in my stories, I should consider these two negative feelings from a different viewpoint, creating a place where women can freely express their jealousy and resentment, and where these things can function as superpowers.
DC: How did you relate to ghost stories growing up? Did you feel differently about them as a child than you do as an adult?
Human women and monstrous women come to feel jealousy and resentment because they are treated very unfairly and harshly by men and their communities.
AM: I was easily frightened as a child, so I have no idea why I’ve always been so enchanted by ghost stories. Actually, when I was a kid, I loved all stories which feature non-human beings, including Greek myths and legends about the constellations. I guess I was fascinated by the idea there is always something you can’t actually see, and ghost stories are one indication of that.
And after I became an adult, I came to love them more than ever. Maybe that’s because now I can relate to the female ghosts, and understand how they might feel. I also realized they are such bad-asses, even though they look miserable and sad. One of my favorite ghost stories when I was child was Kosodate Yurei in which a female ghost tries to buy candies at a store to feed her baby in their grave. I guess I just loved it because the ghost trying to buy candies seemed a little humorous to me. Also, I loved candy. But now I can feel her, feel how desperate she was trying to save her baby. I love her so much that I decided to write her story in Where the Wild Ladies Are.
DC: In “A Day Off,” a woman relaxes with her giant toad, Gum, with whom she works as a vigilante to protect women from men. The story takes inspiration from the kabuki play Shinobiyoru Koi wa Kusemono, in which a vengeful princess tries to defeat a warrior with magic. In the very end of the play, the princess appears on a giant toad. Personally, I would love to live with a protective toad like Gum. In thinking about Shinobiyoru Koi wa Kusemono, why did you choose to have the toad be the central focus of “A Day Off”?
AM: I’d love to live with Gum, too. It would be very safe! But since it’s not possible, I wrote this story by imagining my cat as Gum. As for Shinobiyoru Koi wa Kusemono, to begin with, I just loved the title so much. This is such a great title. I haven’t actually seen this play, but I read about it and liked the image of a woman on the giant toad. I also thought the ending, with a woman and a man just glaring at one other, is so cool. Although, actually, it made me a little uncomfortable. It seemed to me as if this was a picture of the actual makeup of the world: men vs. women. Deep down, nobody wants to quarrel or fight, but the current situation in this society makes that impossible. So, in “A Day Off,” I wanted the protagonist and Gum to take a day off from it all.
The reason why I put Gum as the center of the story is that I really wish from the bottom of the heart that someone like Gum existed, that there was some system of Gums, so that no one had to be a victim of sexual violence. It kills me that it goes on happening.
DC: What would your ideal job be at Mr. Tei’s incense company?
AM: At first Mr. Tei’s company seems to be an incense company, but it’s actually a wide-ranging and very fluid company, which we don’t have a full grasp of. All sorts of jobs are newly created to help people in need. I wanted to make a loose community where socially vulnerable people are always watched over by someone and can get help whenever they need. Because in reality, companies and societies don’t work that way, even though they should. There are also groups like Team Sarashina, made up of women who are competent in every field. Personally, I’d definitely want to join the same department as Gum. Whenever I think about sexual violence, I always wonder why I don’t have a superpower to save people.
DC: If you could be any kind of folkloric monster, what form would you choose?
AM: I would like to be a hybrid of various monsters. Saying that, I realize that the abilities of female monsters are born from the gruesome aspects of their lives or their irrepressible emotions, so maybe it’s a shallow idea to want to be a hybrid…but I do think that being a hybrid would be great.
The movie industry had to suffer a pause unlike anything it had ever seen before when theaters had to be shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The delay in film releases came at an inopportune time for many of us, who would love to watch new cinema while isolating at home—either because it reminds us of the world we feel cut off from, or because it distracts us from a world that feels more and more dystopian. But between Netflix series and HBO streaming some new films on release, we’re still finding ways to go to the movies without going to the movies—and with these screen adaptations of classic and contemporary novels set to hit in the next year, you can also read books without reading books. Here are some of the books that will be brought to life in 2021.
The White Tiger is a film about a driver for a rich upper class’s couple in India who is forced to cover up a crime for his employers. Touching on the implications of India’s caste system, The White Tiger promises to be an emotional rollercoaster and a darkly funny consideration of class akin to Parasite.
Nella Larsen’s Passing is a novel by Nella Larsen that focuses on childhood friends Irene and Clare, who cross paths as adults when Clare is living as a white woman, keeping her race secret from everyone including her husband after one writes the other a letter. Written and directed by Rebecca Hall, Passing stars Tessa Thompson and Andre Holland, which like everything they’re in, means it can’t help but going to be good.
Firefly Lane is another Netflix adaptation, from acclaimed author Kristin Hannah. The series follows two friends, played by Katherine Heigl and Sandra Chalke, from the beginning of their friendship to the present, as they experience life through three decades together.
GuantánamoDiaryby Mohamedou Ould Slahi (movie title: The Mauritanian)
Release Date: February 19, 2021
Guantánamo Diary was written and published while Slahi was still imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. The film, starring Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tahar Rahim (in the titular role), was made and is being released after Rahim is finally free, and with material that was previously censored.
Cherry teams up the Russo brothers and Tom Holland in a movie adapted from Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel, written while the author was incarcerated, Holland stars as the title character, who is an ex-soldier dealing with PTSD and a drug addiction, and decides to try to rob a bank.
Ness is involved in writing this screenplay, so fans of his science fiction YA novel, about a world with no women where everyone can hear each other’s thoughts, can at least be assured that it will be faithful to the book. The fact that Mads Mikkelson and David Oyelowo will get the chance to out-cool themselves in scenes will only make this movie even better.
Infinite is based off of the book The Reincarnationist Papers, about a man who realizes that the images he is seeing are not just hallucinations, but visions from the past. Directed by Antoine Fuqua of Training Day fame, this movie should be a lot of fun.
Ben Affleck and Cuban actress Ana de Armas star in anthis adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel. Director Adrien Lyne (Jacob’s Ladder) will head this project starring the real-life couple playing a husband who is the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife. Highsmith novels make great adaptations (see: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley) so we have high hopes for this one.
There may not be a movie that is as anticipated as Dune this year, a rare feat since that might have also been true last year. Ever since David Lynch’s acid-dream of an ‘80s adaptation, it feels like Hollywood has wanted to A.) never try to remake Dune again and B.) couldn’t wait to try to remake Dune again as soon as possible. Because it is a giant space opera, half of Hollywood is involved, but piloted by Denis Villeneuve, who has slowly shifted to more and more sci-fi films since Sicario (with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049), this film looks like the rare combination of Oscar bait and potential box office hit (assuming we can go out and see movies again.)
The Nightingale is directed by Mélanie Laurent, whose prior directorial work includes Galveston (and who is also know for her role as Shoshana in Inglourious Basterds) and stars the Fanning sisters, Dakota and Elle, as sisters who are torn apart during the start of World War II.
Moburg’s novel was published a few years after World War II and focuses on rural families. The novel, which is about a few people emigrating from Sweden to the United States in the mid-1800s, spoke to a lot of what was felt and going on at the time. Sixty years after it was first published, this story still speaks to the immigrant experience not only the moment it was written about the immigrant experience.
The Power of the Dog is a dark book about two brothers who get into a fight after one of them gets married. New Zealand writer/director Jane Campion heads the film, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst.
Ana de Armas plays a fictionalized Marilyn Monroe, with Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale starring alongside her. Directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford) fame, this will be a beautifully shot film that brings Joyce Carol Oates’s novel to life.
Australian author Liane Moriarty’s latest novel is about nine strangers who all end up at the Tranquillum House, hoping to put the stresses of their lives and the cities away. For many of us stuck in isolation looking for a way out of our troubles, following these characters as they go through the Tranquillum House during this Hulu Series will be sure to be a treat.
Taylor Sheridan (of Sicario and Hell or High Water fame) writes and directs this film based on the Michael Koryta novel of the same name. As is often the case with Sheridan, the stakes are high from the beginning, as a teenager who witnesses a murder has a survival expert trying to protect him from two assassins and a forest fire. Starring Angelina Jolie and Jon Bernthal, this will be an intense film.
Shadow and Bone is set in a folklore-inflected fantasy world, where protagonist Alina must develop her previously hidden magical power under high-stakes conditions. The Netflix series also includes elements of Bardugo’s bestselling Six of Crows, a magical heist novel set in the same universe. Starring Jessie Mei Li of All About Eve, this promises to be a beautifully shot series.
Based on the bestselling novel by Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love tackles the themes of love amidst different classes and divisions of people—and during one of the more divisive periods of recent history, this seems like a timely adaptation. Originally published in 1945, The Pursuit of Love is set between the two World Wars, and will star Emily Beecham and Lily James. This show will air on BBC One.
Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing is a murder mystery starring Daisy Edgar-Jones. The film, set in North Carolina, follows Kya, who lives in the Deep South and is a suspect in the murder of her former partner.
There are—to begin, unforgivably, with a cliche—two kinds of readers: those who forget all about secret bookcases and gardens and wardrobes once they’ve reached adulthood, and those who, when they move into a new home, still immediately check every loose floorboard and knock on every wall in the hopes they’ll encounter a treasure map, a hidden room, a keyhole under the layers of paint. Of course I belong entirely to that second group, and I have spent admittedly far too much of my adult life still looking for these passageways. I have long wanted to walk through one of these secret doors, the place where the mundane—the bookstore, the country house, the nursery in Kensington—transforms into the wondrous: Fantasia, Narnia, Neverland. But lately, as the pandemic drags on into nearly a year of relative confinement, I’ve been wishing instead to stop at the threshold, to open the door of the spare room and crawl into that wardrobe and not come out again.
When I was young, I wanted the wondrous more than anything. It’s not a new story, or even a very interesting one: the child, lonely, bullied, unhappy, finds a book. And in that book, a child, lonely, unhappy, finds a place where a kind of low, slow magic still exists, where gym class doesn’t, where underdogs are issued powerful weapons and magical powers. I wanted desperately then to have adventures, to fall in love, to be a hero. And crossing over into a fantasy world was the only way I thought it could happen.
Now, it’s not the wonderland that intrigues me; it’s the in-between, the space between the worlds.
But like children eventually do, I grew up. And I had plenty of adventures, and plenty of love affairs, and got to be a hero and a villain sometimes, too. I still looked for secret doors, but mostly out of the habit of hope. And I had a daughter of my own, and I started reading aloud to her the same children’s adventures I grew up on. As I related how cold and miserable Edmund was in the White Witch’s dungeon, or how Wendy was shot down by the Lost Boys, I realized: I’m too tired and too old for a real adventure. Now, it’s not the wonderland that intrigues me; it’s the in-between, the space between the worlds. At 42, let’s be real, I can’t imagine a talking animal giving me a magic talisman without snickering a little. The first time I thought about how the Pevensie children’s mother must have broken her heart with worry when she sent them to the country, I think I wept a little to be so grown up at last.
This is always the way of fantasy. The true wonderland is only for children, a place to escape the world of grown-ups like me. Even the most fervent believers in fairies among us will eventually take on the role of tooth fairy ourselves, slipping money under the pillow of our children or nieces or nephews. It feels sad, but it’s part of the magic; those other worlds belong to the young, a place to work out your fears and your bravery far away from the bland good intentions of the adults who make you wear bicycle helmets and eat your vegetables. The wonderland is sacred, and sealed off from adults, which makes it all the more bittersweet for those of us who continue to search for its entrance. (Of course, as the Narnia books make clear, you can still get back to Narnia as an adult: but that is a one-way passage only, at the very end of this life.)
But the wardrobe, the nursery? They are the most liminal of spaces; the place you go before and after you put away those childish things. They are the place you go before and after you grow up, like Wendy, like Susan and Peter, before and after the magic slips through your fingers. And they are still left to us; in fact, I feel they can only be truly appreciated when we are grown. They are many, and varied, and everywhere: parking lots and lobbies and stairwells, anywhere you go on your way to somewhere else. But while these mundane spaces can be uncanny or unsetting—especially during a pandemic—I am looking still for the very particular kind of secret door or false wall or grandfather clock that you step into and watch the old world fall away. The liminal space, as it relates to children’s literature, is a truly transitional place into magic, a hushed, dusty hallway between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Perhaps the most tragic thing about them is that you can’t stay there, no matter how much you may want to. They are not like Oz, or Narnia, where you can stay for a hundred years, becoming kings and queens and heroes before you finally decide to go home. They are not stopping places at all.
They are the place you go before and after you grow up, before and after the magic slips through your fingers.
Lately, my whole life feels like a liminal state. Maybe that’s why these spaces feel so seductive—maybe I’m still having trouble finding somewhere to belong. I am not old, but not young; I’m a mother, but not for so long that I can’t remember childless days; I’m supposedly past my artistic peak, but I long to create a masterpiece. And like everyone else, I am living in the waiting room of the pandemic, itself an increasingly unbearable space with both too much dream and too much reality to bear. The pandemic has forced upon us the most static and dull of all liminal spaces; who would not long for the more fertile secret highways of children’s literature, where you can hunker down while somewhere nearby, an adventure is being born?
Even at my most practical, I’ve always felt only a tenuous hold on this world. In his The Divided Self, R.D. Laing writes about the “ontologically insecure,” who at some level, have never quite accepted or felt comfortable in reality. And so lately, with reality pressing heavy on me, I feel a deep need for a physical manifestation of the Wardrobe in Spare Oom. I want to sit surrounded by soft coats and the smell of mothballs, but also holly and fir, and fresh powder over clean untroubled earth. I want to be warm and safe but perched at the precarious edge of possibility, ready to leap into adventure though I never actually will. Though I blame this new desperation on the dull duality of liminal spaces in the pandemic, I also understand it comes, too, from my role as a parent, where I create miracles daily for my child but suffer the lack of miracles for me.
In children’s literature, the passageways always pop up at the children’s most desperate hour of need. James is being horribly abused by his aunts when he finds his way into the giant peach. Bastian is being hunted by bullies after the death of his mother when he finds the Fantasia book in the antiquarian’s shop. Wendy has been told she must grow up and leave the nursery. The Pevensie children have been sent to the country to avoid the horrors of the Blitz in London during World War II. The passageways here are liminal spaces functioning as escape hatches from trauma and pain—too much reality. And so it’s not when our heroes and heroines get to Narnia or Neverland that the world falls away; it’s immediately on opening the wardrobe door or nursery window. Mary’s life doesn’t change on entering the garden, but rather on finding the locked door that leads to it. The children in Peter Pan learn to fly in the safety of the nursery, charged suddenly with the energy of adventure. It’s not transformation, but rather the possibility of it, that creates the space for healing for so many damaged children in literature.
I want to be warm and safe but perched at the precarious edge of possibility, ready to leap into adventure though I never actually will.
This, to me, suggests that liminal spaces have a regenerative power of their own. They are often seen as uncanny, as creepy, because they are neither fish nor fowl, and because waiting is uncomfortable, unsettling. Waiting is, in fact, a repellent concept for most children, eager to be in action, eager for answers. But the older I get, the more restful I find the idea of waiting, of the dark cool wardrobe and the nursery at night, just before Peter comes. I think about the part in the story where the protagonists begin their journey, when they open a door and step into a darkness and the voices of the outside world fall away. I think of Dorothy, one hand on the doorknob, still and hushed in black and white, no farmhouse noises, no technicolor chaos and dead witch quite yet. I think how perfect it would be to live in that pocket in-between, when magic is possible but not yet here, when the strain and stress of heroism isn’t yet required. But as Sondheim writes in Into the Woods—an entire musical about liminal spaces and the consequences of fairy tales—“who can live in the woods?” The Baker’s Wife goes on to sing, “Must it all be either less or more / Either plain or grand? / Is it always ‘or’? / Is it never ‘and’? / That’s what woods are for.” That’s exactly why children, uninterested in complexities, hurry to leave the liminal spaces, while adults want so much to linger in them. The truth is, no one can live in those woods.
These days, though, I console myself—foolishly perhaps—with the thought that writing is a kind of liminal space, with all the possibilities of wonder and none of the risk. We can’t get back to Neverland once we are grown, but we can write a path through the midnight sky. We can spend the afternoon immersed in creating new secret gardens and fake walls and hidden passages. Perhaps we can live in the uncanny comfort of the liminal space after all, through writing the hallways and highways and phantom toll booths that will lead new readers there. Perhaps we liminal adults can feel we, too, belong, that the world is almost a good place for us, too, if we can remake it in these spaces. It’s pretty to think so, anyway.
In The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez lures us on road trips with a zombie baby, and a group of catty teenager girls to quarry, and into neighborhoods besieged (by a curse) in Buenos Aires and (by a stink) in Barcelona, and to a sleepover on Buenos Aires’s outskirts, or the first-person plural narrator describes it, “East Bumfuck” (incredible rendering from Spanish by the collection’s translator, Megan McDowell).
The short story collection, Enriquez’s second in English after the 2017 English debut of The Things We Lost in the Fire, features witchcraft, hysterical teenagers, and heart fetishists. Enriquez carves the horrors—madness, cannibalism, and cruelty—and then twists them at full tilt, racing us to endings that terrified even on a second read. In particular, “Our Lady of the Quarry,” spirals hellward when a teenage girl’s rabid envy of an older woman and younger boyfriend, whose attention the girl and her friends covet, hits a delirious point of no return. The collection’s final story, another teen girl group saga, is even more disquieting. In “Back When We Talked to the Dead,” the state-led terrors of Argentina in the 1970s and its disappeared people are dealt with through a Ouija Board seance.
I spoke to Mariana Enriquez—who lives in Buenos Aires where she is the director of literature for Argentina’s Fondo Nacional de las Artes—about her grandmother’s stories, Instagram witches, the country’s very real and horrific past, and passing the blame for collective responsibility.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: Your collection is terrifying! What’s the earliest scary story you remember hearing as a child? I read that your grandmother was an influence for your stories. Did you make up your own stories and if so, what was your first (or an early) horror story?
Mariana Enriquez: I didn’t really make up my own scary stories, or they weren’t good enough to scare. I was a pretty good liar as a child, as most writers are I think. My first horror story came from my grandmother, as you mention. I added things to it: she told me that, when she was a little, her baby sister died and was buried in the backyard. The girl, dead and in her grave, cried at night when it rained. Well, that was scary for me but the whole story—that to my knowledge it’s true, except maybe the crying–happened in Corrientes, a state in the north of Argentina, where she grew up. She didn’t specify this, so I thought she mentioned our backyard. Subsequently, I was quite scared of hearing the dead baby crying every rainy night. My grandmother was terrified of storms. The first story in this collection is based on this—I ended up thinking about family secrets and the fate of lost bones and bodies, and of course, it’s a ghost story with a very “palpable” ghost, but the origin was this tale of the baby sister of my grandma.
JRR: In “Angelita Unearthed” and “The Well,” you have families where the women believe in what the occult but the men don’t. For the father in “Angelita Unearthed,” the grandmother “could talk some nonsense.” Similarly, in “The Well,” Josefina’s dad is furious at the grandmother “for filling up her head with those superstitions.”
Would you talk about this gender divide in belief, which seems to be quite common in many cultures?
ME: Yes, of course. But only this kind of belief I would say. A certain superstitious belief in the supernatural, not the occult. The occult has been a territory of men, from mysticism to more organized systems, indeed the famous occultists, except maybe for Madame Blavatsky, are men: Aleister Crowley, Allan Kárdec, Éliphas Levy. The occult has been much more open to women and minorities than other belief systems, but still dominated by men, especially before the late 19th century. And of course priests of almost any religion are men in the high ranks. So I won’t say at all men are less inclined to the occult or the magical thinking or religious thinking, cause it’s just not true. But there’s a certain specific belief that is less hierarchic, popular, secret, transmitted from generation to generation that yes, it’s more the terrain of women. The “healer” in “The Well” is an example, here these women are called “vencedoras”; or women like my grandmother, who grew up knowing recipes made of plants and stuff to make you feel better and were devoted of certain pagan saints or believed in forest beings. These more earthy beliefs fall in the gender divide, but not the belief in the occult. It’s just one belief it’s more respected than the other. The father in “Angelita Unearthed” could very well be a minister, someone who in the end also believes in the supernatural, and still he would have contempt for the grandmother’s beliefs.
JRR: What do you think about the popularity of occult/witchcraft/tarot/divination with social media, for example the “influencer witches” of Instagram, in recent years? It’s quite fashionable and accepted in the way I would imagine your character The Woman in “The Well” would not have been treated (i.e. probably is publicly shunned as evil).
I was a pretty good liar as a child, as most writers are I think.
ME: I don’t pay much attention to them, to be honest with you. I know they exist and I guess in a way, as many are women, it has to do with the current situation of how, for example, Tarot or astrology are claimed by feminists (or some of them anyway, or in any case, they are censored). But I don’t think it’s the case with The Woman in “The Well.” She comes from a very different tradition that still exists and there’s nothing remotely fashionable about it. It’s not only a different generation but a different social status: a woman like the one in “The Well,” now or then when the story is supposed to happen (the ‘90s) is a poor woman from the country that would not have a clue about social media. It’s also a South American woman, which changes the game completely here: she didn’t learn about this from books, but from her mother and she would not talk about what she does, because she believes in the power of secrets.
JRR: I was so taken by this line in “The Cart”: “We were scared, but fear doesn’t look the same as desperation.” Would you discuss this line? The family are privileged even in the chaos that has descended upon their neighborhood since the homeless man cursed it.
ME: Well they were spared, that was what happened. The mother and the children didn’t curse or insult the man, so the curse doesn’t fall upon them, or at least not that hard. It’s a pretty moral story really, more than I would think! But I’ve seen a lot of very racist and bad treatment of the poor in lower-middle-class neighborhoods to the poorer (let’s say people from the slums), and really there’s not much difference between the two, just the fear of falling deeper into poverty, that really can make you a monster. So it’s a bit of a curse story that spares the one family that had some class consciousness and decency.
JRR: The ending that shocked me the most was in “Our Lady of the Quarry.” The jealousy the girls have towards Silvia is intense. Natalia does the worst but the “we” are complicit in what happens in the end. What was the inspiration for this story?
ME: Reality. My own teenage friends. The quarry is real, what Natalia does with her menstrual blood is something a friend of mine did and the utter jealousy of other girls was something that was rampant when I was a teen. I like to think I wasn’t like that, but I don’t know, maybe I am trying to think I was better. Teenage girls can be awful as we know.
JRR: You take the horror trope of the Ouija Board to the next level in “Back When We Talked to the Dead,” where the teenage girls are trying to contact the dead, disappeared people from Argentina’s Dirty War, including the parents of one of the girls. In the end, it is Pinocchia (her name!), the one girl who didn’t have anyone disappear, is most affected, and it seems “disappears” in a way herself. It seems that the message the reader is supposed to channel is that even the ones who were not directly affected by the terror of this period, were affected. I wonder if you agree with this reading of the story? Also would you talk about the fact that the other girls refuse to take responsibility for what happens and believe the result was because Pinocchia bothered the spirits? Like it was almost her fault?
ME: First, and not to correct you, but I don’t use “Dirty War” and most people don’t here, we use dictatorship. The term “war” implies there were two sides and really it was state terrorism. Yes, there were organized militias that had to be stopped but that had to be done legally in whatever legal terms—taken to court, jail, whatever—but to make bodies disappear is a whole different game.
Also, Pinocchia was how we called a friend those days because she was quite thick in school matters. Argentines can be brutal with the naming, mostly people take it with humor and it’s not offensive (depends obviously; she wasn’t). Yes, the story is about how a dictatorship is a trauma and a scar for everybody that lived through a period like this; even if you weren’t directly affected as, let’s say, your mother was taken, you lived in a society where this was happening and to grow up in this is traumatizing for everybody in different ways. Also the blaming of Pinocchia… I always thought about it in a very human way, it’s difficult to take responsibility and we always end up blaming someone else, especially the most vulnerable or the more daring, for our collective mistakes.
JRR: The “we” point of view in this last story, as in “Our Lady of the Quarry,” chilled me. It made me think of the Chilean writer Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders, which is about how young people come to terms with the brutalities and memories of the Pinochet era. Have you read much about the ‘70s and ‘80s in other countries in Latin America and considered it with your own experience of this period?
It’s difficult to take responsibility and we always end up blaming someone else, especially the most vulnerable, for our collective mistakes.
ME: I feel many writers my age are writing about those periods (that are roughly the 70s, except in Chile where it was much longer, and the effects it had on our minds and bodies, and on our parents and the way they raised us. And of course, the institutions. I love Nona’s work and the literature about the dictatorship in Chile is the one I feel closer to. Even when they are not “direct” about it, and even when the experiences in my country and Chile are quite different. There’s a huge literature in Argentina written by sons of the disappeared and the range is wild: you have poetry, humor, autofiction, diaries, very grotesque fiction, you name it. It’s intense and it opened a door for everybody of the younger generations to talk and write about those years and its consequences from our perspective.
JRR: For readers unfamiliar with the contemporary literary scene in Argentina, which emerging writers should we be looking out for (either in translation and in Spanish)?
ME: Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Agustina Bazterrica, Ariana Harwicz are the translated ones that come at the top of my head. Roque Larraquy is pretty wild, too. I wish too that they would translate Camila Sosa Villada and Leo Oyola or Luciano Lamberti soon.
My mom says every mother needs a daughter. It’s not that she doesn’t love and appreciate her two sons. My middle brother knows best how to comfort her in times of grief. My younger brother is the child she buddies around with, the precious youngest by quite a few years. But I—her only daughter and her oldest child—share something fundamental with her: I go through life as a woman.
Maybe that’s why I was more scared to have a daughter than a son. While I don’t know firsthand the pressures of boyhood and manhood my son will face, I do have preconceived and experienced notions about growing up female. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I worried that having once been a girl might make it harder for me to see her objectively as her own person, to mother her and help her navigate the world.
Throughout literature, there are examples of the simultaneously special and fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. And there are many motherless daughters whose overarching narrative asks, How will she survive without a mother to guide her through life?
My novel, Bride of the Sea, tells the story of Hanadi, a daughter separated from her father when her mother, Saeedah, abducts her. In the end, though, the true rift is with her mother. That’s not a spoiler—I tell readers so on the first page of the book. By disappearing in America, Saeedah also strands herself far from her own mother, severing one bond in the interest of strengthening another.
In Saeedah’s culture of origin, people often repeat these words of the Prophet Muhammad: “Heaven is beneath the mothers’ feet.” Yet in life and in books, mothers and daughters often are torn apart. Here are eight books in which that happens.
Margo Crane’s mother disappears from their rural Michigan home one day, leaving only a note. After surviving rape and family violence, 16-year-old Margo flees in the teak rowboat her grandfather bequeathed her, embarking on a river odyssey that leads her to her mother and then away again. Margo’s life current pushes her toward her own motherhood; in the story’s coda, a pregnant Margo floats in the river, “a paradise for a girl swollen up the way she was.”
In the second volume of Satrapi’s classic graphic memoir, her parents have sent her to Austria to escape the religious strictures of revolutionary Iran. Her mother’s best friend vows to care for teenage Marjane “like her own daughter,” but instead abandons the girl at a boarding house run by nuns. When Marjane’s mother finally is able to visit, she walks right past her daughter at the airport. “She hadn’t recognized me,” Marjane writes, “and with good reason: I’d almost doubled in height and size.” Similarly, the sacrifices mother and daughter have made for Marjane’s freedom alter their relationship forever.
When young Plum Valentine becomes pregnant in her native Jamaica, the baby’s father doesn’t want to stunt her future in America. Or so he tells himself. He steals the newborn and raises her in secret. Searching constantly for the little girl who was taken from her, “Plum pictured her daughter like this: hair parted in four distinct sections, each section a mini afro puff; pudgy cheeks; a smile that opened up dimples; skin the color of chocolate batter; pudgy arms and legs in a frilly yellow dress. Except the baby wasn’t hers. Just a stranger on the train, a baby who smiled openly at anyone who caught her eye.”
Lee’s rich family saga spans much of the 20th century, with mother and daughter Yangjin and Sunja enduring multiple separations. Yangjin orchestrates the first and longest, convincing a young pastor to marry Sunja —who is pregnant by a wealthy, married man—and adopt her child. “Of course it would be far better for them if she went away,” Yangjin tells the pastor, who plans to leave Korea for Osaka, Japan. Yangjin’s maternal sacrifice, as much as Sunja’s doomed love affair, sets the family’s fate in motion.
Kirabo Nnamiiro, heroine of Makumbi’s brilliant coming-of-age novel, spends much of her Ugandan girlhood searching for her lost mother. She seeks the counsel of a village witch, who is also her grandfather’s mistress, and later hangs posters asking after her mother in her boarding school’s hallways. When the father of Kirabo’s great love, Sio, dies, Kirabo wishes her mother were dead, rather than merely missing: “A dead mother gives you options. You can imagine and create and give yourself the perfect mother.”
Deya, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants to Brooklyn, attempts to escape the strictures of womanhood in her paternal grandparents’s conservative household. She doesn’t realize she’s following in the footsteps of her long-dead mother and her paternal aunt, who ran away as a teenager. Motherless Deya discovers dark family secrets, but also the possibility of healing and forging her own future.
Afaf Rahman is ten when her older sister runs away from their Palestinian immigrant home in suburban Chicago. Wracked by grief, Afaf’s mother never overcomes the loss of her elder daughter or the depression that follows. Afaf feels motherless, although she lives with her parents well into her 20s. When Afaf grows closer to God and decides to wear hijab, her irreligious mother scoffs. Afaf wonders if she’s made a mistake. It is as though “her mother’s power over her outweighs the Lord’s.” Isn’t that so often the case for daughters, even when our mothers are not with us?
American chattel slavery systematically ripped children from their mothers. In Morrison’s masterpiece, an enslaved woman named Sethe, who never had a mother’s love, feels she must choose between mothering her child and saving her from slavery. The loss of her daughter haunts Sethe— literally and figuratively—long after she gains freedom. In Beloved, ghosts are real and a mother’s love cannot undo the terrors of slavery.lee
“Just,” his son corrected him at the airport. “Just ‘Just.’ ”
Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he’d been hoping for. “Harry, Harry Krier,” he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.
“I know,” Just said, horrified. “I know your name.”
“I know! I know you know. It was a joke.” Harry had insisted on meeting his son at baggage claim rather than at the curb outside, but now he was dismayed at all the witnesses. Also, Just didn’t have any luggage. Only a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder. Harry went in for a hug instead of the handshake. Just raised his arms, awkwardly returning the embrace, and Harry caught a whiff of body odor. His son had grown tall enough that Harry’s nose was armpit height. Willow had been tall, Harry remembered. Willow had been an Amazon. Maybe she still was.
After fifteen years without seeing Just, Harry had steeled himself for almost any physical manifestation of his son, for Just to look exactly like his mother, Willow, or exactly like Harry himself. He was ready to be bludgeoned with memory, or guilt, or joy. But Just was a nearly blank slate — brown hair and eyes, a body that gave no hint of what its occupant used it for, no swimmer’s shoulders or runner’s wiriness. Jeans and sneakers and a plain black T-shirt. Such an ordinary boy, Harry thought, and the words seemed heartless, but not the emotion. Whole and healthy and ordinary. He could deserve no better fortune. He didn’t even deserve that.
“Sorry,” Just said, breaking the hug. “I probably need to shower.”
“You’re fine,” Harry said. “You’re perfect.”
Commentary on the flight (okay), the autumn weather (chilly, gray), and the traffic (heavy) got them out of Logan and onto I-90 heading toward Brookline.
“There are a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts here,” Just observed, looking out the car window.
“Do you want to stop for anything?” “No. I was just saying. There’s a lot.”
“I thought we’d have dinner at home, if that’s okay.
Miriam’s picking something up.”
“That’s fine,” Just said, and he asked Harry how he and Miriam had met.
“I sold her a condo.” After closing, they’d gone out for a celebratory drink. Six months later he’d moved into the condo with her. There was no stipulation against this in the National Association of Realtors bylaws. Second marriage for her. First for him, technically.
“Do I want to know what technically means?” Miriam had asked.
“I was very young,” he’d said, and the truth of this had hit him with unexpected force — a load of bricks, a piano out a window. He’d been very young when he was living in Arcosanti with Willow, and he wasn’t any longer, and he never would be again. Wherever else his life might take him, it would not take him back there, to the red desert hills and the bleached sheet of sky snapped open every morning above them, their baby squalling in a hand-painted card-board box. Now that baby was sitting in his Lexus, six feet tall and applying to Harvard.
On the phone, Willow had rattled off names like she was reading an online list of Boston-area colleges, not just Harvard, MIT, Tufts, but the off-brand schools out-of-staters never applied to, like Lesley, Suffolk, Simmons. “I thought Simmons was a girls’ school,” Harry had said. “I mean, women’s. A women’s college.” Was his son transgender and no one had bothered to mention it to him?
“He’s still narrowing down the list,” Willow had said. “There’s a school counselor who helps.”
Harry hadn’t realized that tiny Jerome, Arizona, even had a high school. After Arcosanti, Willow had ended up in a mining town turned vertiginous ghost town turned artist colony / tourist trap. She’d bought a house and a metalworking studio for almost nothing because it was at geologic risk of sliding off the mountain. Uninsurable, but she hadn’t cared. She’d sent photographs of Just posed with the lawn ornaments she made and sold; birdhouses on sticks were popular.
“He buses to Cottonwood,” Willow said, like she could hear what Harry was thinking. “It’s a good school. Pretty good, I guess.”
“It’ll have to be if he’s applying to Harvard,” Harry said, pointlessly.
“Look, everyone understands how competitive it is. Can he stay with you or not?”
Harry hadn’t wanted the conversation to go this way. He felt like no conversation he’d ever had with Willow had gone the way he’d meant it to. “Of course he can stay.”
“He just needs a place to sleep. He can get himself to the campus visits on the subway. Right? I think that’s right.” Her voice was suddenly uncertain.
She’d never lived in a town with more than five hundred people, he remembered. Neither had their son. “I’ll show him around,” Harry said. “I’ll take time off work.” “You don’t have to.” Willow never told him he had to do anything. She hadn’t made him the bad guy. He was the no- guy. Not the villain, just written out of the script entirely, and he’d let her do it. Miriam had rented that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, the one where his character screams, “I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!” At least that guy abandoned the little deaf boy to become an oil baron, Harry thought. I abandoned my boy to become a real estate agent. The saddest movie never made. Or maybe it was a road-trip buddy movie after all, now that Just was finally here, and the real movie of Harry’s life had simply had a very, very long setup.
Harry had first encountered Arcosanti as a single slide in a darkened college classroom. The freshman course was a year
long and quixotic, lectures three times a week on subjects like “the urban consciousness.” Paolo Soleri’s work came after images of Babylon and Alexandria, Levittown and Detroit, and immediately after a slide with a big question mark on it, symbolizing, the professor felt the need to explain, how no one knew what the future of cities would hold. The next image was an architectural drawing of insane complexity, a palace of tunnels and arches, pencil lines so fine and densely clustered, the city looked woven. Harry felt an immediate sense of loss when the instructor clicked it away. The drawing felt like the maps that appeared on the frontispieces of all his favorite novels, a key to an alternate world, its promise of transport. He used interlibrary loan to get hold of all Soleri’s books, even The Omega Seed: An Eschatological Hypothesis and The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit. At a copy shop, he had the drawing made into a poster, blown up until the lines bled, the city an unraveling skein of wool. No, not a city — an arcology,a system that functions so perfectly with and for its inhabitants that the place and people become a single living organism. “Like a snail in its shell,” an acolyte explained on the first day of the summer workshop Harry signed up for at Arcosanti, an experimental arcology being built in the desert north of Phoenix.
Soleri lived south in Paradise Valley, coming to Arcosanti only for master classes, which sometimes felt like the only class; most of the workshop turned out to be manual labor, digging foundations or pouring concrete or repairing the buildings that had already stood long enough to start crumbling. Arcosanti had been founded in 1970, and a quarter century later the future had not materialized. The towering
arches from Harry’s drawing were covered in peeling paint. The round, porthole-style windows, a Soleri trademark, made the buildings look like concrete ships, a fleet that had set sail for the future and run aground in rough weather. The nicest building was the cafeteria, where tourists could join the residents for communal meals. Upstairs was the gift shop, where tourists could buy metal wind chimes forged on-site. This income, plus workshoppers’ tuition fees, financed the city.
“But isn’t arcology also about humans taking responsibility for our own relationship to the natural world?” a girl asked that first day of the workshop. She did not bother to raise her hand. “I feel like a snail’s not the best metaphor. I mean, a snail’s got no agency.”
She was white with blond hair braided into cornrows that left pale furrows of scalp exposed and rapidly reddening in the sun. Despite this, Harry thought she was beautiful. She was wearing steel-toed boots, overalls, and a sports bra, her body underneath rangy and tan. She was sexy, although this was a word Harry’s brain gained the confidence to use only after they’d actually had sex, after the miracle of Willow choosing him out of all the architecture students and career-changers and spiritual seekers in the workshop.
Miriam had picked up sushi on her way home from work. Harry knew it was meant to be a treat — it was from the best place in the neighborhood — but seeing how carefully Just observed them mixing wasabi into soy sauce, Harry guessed that Just had never had sushi before.
“If you don’t like it, we’ll get something else,” he assured Just.
“It’s fine,” Just said and gamely thrust a raw shrimp in his mouth.
Harry felt proud, then ashamed — nothing his son did was anything Harry could take credit for.
“So why Harvard?” Miriam asked.
“That’s the one school nobody ever asks that about,” Just said. “It’s Harvard.”
“But what makes it somewhere you want to go?” “It’s Harvard?”
Miriam gave him a confused look. “You need an answer to that before your interview.”
“It’s a group thing. Like, an informational presentation.
Individual interviews are with alumni in your region.” “There’s a Harvard alum living in Jerome?” “Prescott. About an hour.”
“Still. They’re everywhere.”
“Like roaches,” Harry contributed.
“Preparing Earth for the alien invasion,” Miriam said, “when they’ll team up with our new extraterrestrial overlords.”
Just looked at them as if this conversation were causing him physical pain. Harry supposed it might be. He tried to remember being eighteen.
“You should have a question ready to ask,” Miriam said. “If there’s time for Q and A.”
She was really throwing herself into this college-counseling thing, Harry thought. He wondered if she were wishing she had her own child to go through this. But no
kid of theirs would be anywhere near college age. If she’d gotten pregnant the very first time they’d ever had sex, the kid would still be learning to read. And Miriam had talked about it that very first time in her direct way — not just pills or condoms but how she didn’t want children, then or ever. “Me neither,” he’d said. He’d omitted mentioning that he already had one.
“What majors are you interested in?”
“Miriam. Leave the grilling to the admissions people.” “I wasn’t grilling, I was making conversation.” Making it, manufacturing it, because it wasn’t happening naturally. “Not everyone’s born knowing what they want to do. Just you.”
“What do you do?” Just asked her, making conversation, except that now Miriam would think Harry had never bothered to tell Just one single thing about her.
“I’ve told you that,” Harry protested.
“I’m a lawyer,” Miriam said, and Harry knew the fact she didn’t specify what kind meant she didn’t think Just was savvy enough to understand or care.
“That was what you always wanted to do?”
“My parents watched a lot of TV-lawyer shows. I thought I’d get to make lots of speeches.”
“So you’re in litigation?” Just asked. Miriam nodded, surprised, and Harry wanted to cheer.
“Knowing what you want out of life, it’s a superpower,” Harry joked. “Rarer than radioactive-spider bites.”
“So in the absence of spider bites, you joined a cult?” Miriam sniped.
“You were in a cult?” Just asked with sudden interest, not understanding that Miriam was talking about the place his parents had met, the town he’d been born in.
“It wasn’t a cult,” Harry said. But it had been, a little. The least effective cult in the world, making you dig holes and eat generic peanut butter until all your illusions were crushed. He’d been looking for the jobs that weren’t on television, he thought. He’d been looking for the secret options he was sure existed. But there weren’t options, not really. TV had it pretty well covered. He didn’t want to think the world was like that for everybody, but it had been like that for him.
“I don’t see how he’s competitive for Harvard,” Miriam whispered that night in bed.
Harry flicked the sheets aside before he got in, to see what she was wearing. Nothing, as usual. She wasn’t going to let Just’s presence in the guest room change that. Hopefully, Just wouldn’t change anything else between them either. Harry stripped off his own pajama pants.
“It’s cold,” Miriam complained and pulled the covers back up as he climbed in.
“You’ve only known him for four hours,” Harry protested.
“Four long, monosyllabic hours.”
“He’s a teenager. They’re all like that,” Harry said with false authority.
“Not the ones who get into Harvard or MIT.”
“Look, I can’t say whether his mom’s had a realistic conversation with him about it, but there’s no way to ask without making everything worse. I’m not proud that I don’t know enough about my own son to tell whether this whole college-visit trip is deluded, but I don’t.”
“Okay,” Miriam said. They were both still whispering or her voice might’ve lowered with surrender. With tenderness, Harry thought as she brushed his hair off his forehead. He reached for her hip under the covers. She was bony in a deliberate way, sleek as a greyhound. They didn’t even try to work out together because he couldn’t keep pace with her on her runs. He wasn’t soft, exactly, but he was softer than her.
He’d been softer than Willow too. Even after his summer of hard labor, she’d looked like she could break him. Willow was his first, and it took him years to understand that much of what he thought he’d been learning about sex, or about women, were things unique to that summer: the layer of concrete dust their sweat lacquered to their unshaved bodies; the calluses over her hip bones where her tool belt rubbed; the challenge of fitting themselves onto the bunk beds in the plywood dormitories or behind the shelves at the wind-chime foundry; lying on a blanket in the desert at night, stars flickering above them as the temperature dropped and they both pretended they weren’t cold. Maybe Willow hadn’t been. She’d seemed superhuman, impervious to discomfort or doubt. This was why he hadn’t believed her when she’d told him she was pregnant. It seemed like a mistake her body wouldn’t make. He’d thought she was joking.
“Are we naming it Paolo? Or Soleri?”
“Fuck you. This isn’t fucking funny.”
“Oh. No, it wouldn’t be.”
“Wouldn’t?”
If it were happening to someone else, he was thinking. Which it must be, because surely it wasn’t happening to them. But her face convinced him that maybe it was. He was still groping for the right way to ask whether she planned to keep it when she answered his question. “We’ll stay,” she said. “We’ll raise the baby here.”
“What do you think of the costume?” Just asked in the morning over bagels and cream cheese, gesturing to his clothes. Miriam had already left for work. Just was wearing slip-on brown shoes, khakis, and a red polo shirt. “Do I look right?”
Costume? That implied Harry knew what Just dressed like normally, which he didn’t. “Honestly?” Harry said. “You look like you work at Target.”
Just looked down at himself, then got up from the table without a word. Poor kid, Harry thought, alone with his mom out there in the desert, has barely seen a Target. Maybe he isn’t allowed to shop there, at the big-box stores. Maybe it’s all thrift shops and farmers’ markets. Just returned in a forest green polo. “Is this the uniform for anything?”
“Dick’s Sporting Goods? Bennigan’s, maybe? But I don’t think there are any more Bennigan’s. I think they all went out of business.”
“So the shirt’s safe?”
“I’d say so.”
Compared with the other prospective students’ outfits in the MIT admissions office, Just’s costume turned out to be marginal. He wasn’t painfully underdressed, but most of the others wore button-downs. There were almost no backpacks, and none as ratty as Just’s. He’d unpacked since the airport, and the deflated bag sagged off his shoulder.
“Do you want me to take that?” Harry asked. “Leave it in the car?”
Just declined, clutching the strap like a security blanket.
One poor child had a sweater vest and puffy insulated lunch bag. Harry felt a flutter of relief—he was doing better than that kid’s father, at least. There were more girls than Harry had expected, wearing shorter skirts than he’d expected, and he felt creepy watching all the teenage legs.
“I’m doing the shadow-a-student program after the info session,” Just reminded him. “You can still meet me after lunch?”
“I’ve got a showing scheduled nearby, but I’ll be back in time.”
“Great. I’ve got your number in my phone,” Just said. “I should go get a seat.”
Harry could tell he was being dismissed. The reception area was emptying as students filed into a nearby room. But it wasn’t just students. “There are parents going too,” Harry said. He’d meant it to come out as a disinterested observation, but he could hear his own neediness.
From the look on Just’s face, his son heard it too. “Sorry. I didn’t realize other people could come. And now you’ve got that showing scheduled.”
Other people. That’s how far they were from Just ever calling him “Dad”; he wouldn’t even use the word parents.
The possibility of living year-round in Arcosanti had dogged the workshoppers all session as both promise and threat. Workshoppers had to be officially invited to become residents, but none of them knew who made the decision or by what criteria. At first, Harry had thought perhaps Soleri took notes during the weekly classes, peering into their souls. By the end of the summer, he suspected one of the beady-eyed foundation reps was looking through their financial declarations to see whose families might donate the most. By then, most of the acolytes were tired of the labor, of the food, of one another. They wanted to go home and feel, from a safe distance, like they’d contributed something, like they’d watered a pale green shoot so tender that it was nobody’s fault if it failed to thrive. Soleri was just too far ahead of his time. The foundation couldn’t build Arcosanti any faster without big donors, and big donors did not line up to support revolution. Actually taking up residence in Arcosanti seemed to Harry like believing in something that had already been lost, like pledging oneself to the Temple of Apollo while knowing the Christians were coming to raze it.
He wanted to look at Arcosanti and see what she saw, not the ruin of something, but its beginning.
“I didn’t realize you could just turn it on and off like that,” Willow said. “Belief.” She’d grown up in the Pacific Northwest on a succession of live-off-the-land efforts that all went sour: goats, organic tomatoes, mushrooms cultivated with a secondhand marijuana-grow setup. Then her parents gave up on the mushrooms and started growing marijuana — the kind of thing no one gets in real trouble for, they assured her, until they did, and she lived with a grandfather in Olympia until her mother got paroled. By the time Willow came to Arcosanti, her parents were living in a clothing-optional eco-village outside Bellingham.
“They’re in it for the long haul,” Willow told him once. He hadn’t been quite sure what she meant, but he’d liked that she thought he was the kind of person who would know. He was flattered and in love. Maybe he loved her in the way only a nineteen-year-old loves somebody, but most nineteen-year-olds don’t know there are other ways to love. And he still wanted to love their city. He wanted to look at Arcosanti and see what she saw, not the ruin of something, but its beginning.
At the residential interview the foundation rep asked about the tenets of arcology, then whether Harry and Willow understood that they would be classified as volunteers and paid only a modest stipend beyond room and board.
“We’re in this,” Harry said, “for the long haul.”
Miriam called to check in. Harry answered his phone in his car, waiting in front of a property he could already tell the buyer wasn’t going to want. He knew before he shared it that a description of the morning would rile Miriam, but as soon as she started in — “Does he know the difference between MIT and ITT Tech? Did he see the TV ads and get confused?” — he felt disloyal for having said anything. “Lay off him,” he told Miriam. “Please.”
“Okay, sorry. But I had an idea this morning: What if it’s all a pretext? Maybe he knows perfectly well that he won’t get into these schools, but he needed an excuse to come see you.”
“He didn’t need an excuse for that.”
“But maybe he felt like he did. To tell Willow, maybe.” “She would have let him come.”
“Would she?”No, not when Just was younger. She would have been too worried that Harry wouldn’t send him back. And neither of them had had the money for travel. But more recently? Just could simply have asked. He didn’t need to playact an entire college trip. It was both flattering and ugly — that Just might have invented a pretext to see him; that Just thought he needed one. It inflated Harry’s heart and cracked it all at once. Like having children, Harry thought. This was what it felt like from the moment they were born. He’d forgotten how it was, the light and the shadow. Still there, after all these years, his capacity to be destroyed.
“I thought you were named Justin, officially,” he told his son at a café in Kendall Square. Turkey sandwich and a Coke for Harry, coffee for Just, since he’d already eaten in the MIT dining hall. “For almost three years I believed that. Your mother and I had agreed on Justin. She never told me she changed her mind.”
They’d invented a last name, a combination of their family names. They’d agreed to pair it with Justin, and Harry didn’t mind Willow calling the boy Just, though it could be confusing: Just, go to sleep. Just go to sleep. But later, on the birth certificate, he saw that she’d actually named their son Justice. No middle name at all, although that was the place, he’d suggested, that you were supposed to put the risky, potentially embarrassing part of the name. “You think it’s okay for a child’s name to be embarrassing?” she’d said when he’d tried to explain this, about middle names. “You named him Justice,” Harry retorted. “Without telling me.” But Willow said she thought Justice was beautiful, not embarrassing. She had a way of making every argument into one he couldn’t win.
“How’d you find out?” Just asked.
Harry told him he’d finally seen his birth certificate. What he didn’t tell Just was that his parents, who were encouraging him to file suit for sole custody, had told him to make a copy. Harry hadn’t filed the suit after he and his parents were counseled by lawyers that the Arizona courts were never going to side against the mother.
Just asked him if he’d been mad, and Harry said that he had, but not about the name. “Justice is fine,” he said. “I just thought we’d settled on something different.”
“I like them both,” Just said diplomatically. “I would have been fine with either.”
He’d taken his coffee black, and Harry couldn’t tell from the way he was drinking it if he actually liked it or if he thought it was what he ought to want. Harry was tempted to offer something different. Root beer? Hot chocolate? Kid drinks.
“The info session,” Just said. “It would have made me nervous, having you there. That’s all.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I didn’t want it to be, like, something hurtful.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Harry lied. “I mean, I wish I didn’t make you nervous, but I get that we don’t know each other that well.”
“It’s not that,” Just said, then opened his mouth like he was going to add that they knew each other fine. Then he shut it.
An honest boy, Harry thought. He might not get into MIT, but he was honest.
The long haul — two years in, Harry thought he’d figured out what it meant. The only diapers they could afford were old dish towels from the cafeteria, which had given Just an intractable rash. The foundation refused to advance Harry the money he needed to take his son to a doctor. Harry was supposed to be grateful that they’d been moved out of the plywood dorm into a family apartment with leaky windows. The long haul — a lifetime of pretending you didn’t want or need the things other people wanted, not just TVs or fancy shoes but shampoo and diaper cream, a lifetime spent paying the price of pushing back against what your life was supposed to look like. Maybe Willow’s parents had moved to the nudist colony because after decades of the long haul, they didn’t have the money to buy clothes.
Willow kept the faith, kept it years beyond his ability to understand her. Did he understand how rare Arcosanti was, she asked, a place that really meant something? And he could hear how long she’d watched her parents look for such a place, how miserable they’d made her, trying. Arcosanti was supposed to be the city of the future, but he could see every single day of his future there and they all looked the same, dusty and exhausted and poor. The only other child living in Arcosanti was a four-year-old so grubby that tourists stuck money into the chest pocket of her overalls. Not Justin, Harry was determined. That would not be his son’s life.
Just had scheduled visits to Emerson College and Tufts the next day, nearly back to back. If he had more time that week, Harry offered, they could visit Northeastern. Or UMass Boston. Or even Roxbury, which, Miriam said, was a really solid community college. “You know, if you wanted to get some Gen Eds out of the way before transferring to a four-year school.” Harry kept his eyes on the road, but he was aware of his son turning to give him an inscrutable look.
Last night Harry had been unable to sleep, imagining Just receiving an endless stream of rejection letters, growing frustrated and angry at the whole Northeast, at his father. What if he didn’t return for another fifteen years? Harry had ended up insomniacly reading online message boards full of panicky teenagers posting their grades, test scores, desired schools, asking other anxious teens to estimate their odds of acceptance. All the subject lines read Chance me?
Chance me for Harvard? Chance me for MIT? I got a B+ once and I think I’m doomed.
This morning he’d followed Miriam into the bathroom, asking her to strategize where else Just could apply, how he might be lured back to Boston, where Harry could start to learn things like what his son liked to eat or drink, what he liked to study, what he wanted his life to be.
“Of course you can use our address for the in-state tuition,” Harry rattled on now. “I mean, more than that — you know you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you like.”
“Is Miriam okay with that?”
Miriam had not been asked about that. Harry imagined she wouldn’t be okay with it. Not for an entire semester or year. But she would understand why he’d had to offer. She would understand that this was Harry’s last, best chance. “Emerson is mostly an arts school,” Harry finally said.
“I know,” Just said and, after a long silence, added, “It costs, like, thirty-six thousand per year. That’s not even including room and board. That’s, like, another fifteen thousand.”
“Well, it’s in downtown Boston,” Harry said, as if he thought those numbers were reasonable, which he didn’t.
“If I used your address, I’d have to list your income,” Just said patiently. “For the financial-aid forms.”
Willow had been vehemently refusing Harry’s money for the past fifteen years. Harry hadn’t realized that the federal government wouldn’t care — he’d be automatically expected to contribute. “We’re keeping you out of the picture,” Just assured him. “If I apply to any of the really expensive ones, Mom and I are going to say my father’s unknown. Or that he died. You’ll be protected either way.”
“They’re going to declare me dead,” Harry told Miriam that night in bed, but he’d made the tactical mistake of mentioning the cost of every school’s tuition first, so she expressed more relief than shared indignation. “It’ll be like I never existed.”
“Just on a financial-aid form. Not in real life.”
“You still think he’s here to see me?”
Miriam had no response. She put her hand on his head in sympathy, but it felt awkward, like he was a little kid she was checking for fever. He reached up and pushed her hand onto the pillow.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
If he could do it again, he thought, surely it would all go better? Where was his second chance, to get this right?
“Any of this making you reconsider your no-children stance? You too could have a teenager planning to pretend you never existed.”
“Ha,” Miriam said. “No. Holding firm on that one.”
But as she spoke Harry felt something crumple inside of him, heard a small voice protest. If he could do it again, he thought, surely it would all go better? Where was his second chance to get this right?
He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, by the end. His parents had twice set up elaborate itineraries with paid-for taxis and plane tickets. The nearest scheduled bus service was thirty miles away. Twice he’d crouched at the edge of the Arcosanti parking lot in the predawn dark until he heard the cab crunching down the dirt road. Then he’d grabbed his backpack and run in the opposite direction, back to his and Willow’s room. His parents had called Arcosanti’s main office both times in a panic after he failed to get off the plane in Newark. They were sure he was being held against his will. No one had taken his ID, he told them, and no one was holding him prisoner. “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave them.” His parents sent cash then, paper-clipped to a phone number for a company in Phoenix that had agreed to send a car up, “for whenever you’re ready to leave.”
But when he finally left, he didn’t call the number or take the cash. He put it in an envelope on his pillow with a letter for Willow and a series of flip-book drawings for Just. Harry couldn’t really draw, but there was a big stick figure and a little stick figure and if you flipped through quickly enough, they hugged. He hadn’t wanted to sneak away in the dark, hadn’t wanted to feel like he was doing something that required sneaking, but he knew he’d never make it in daylight. He wouldn’t survive the goodbyes, would cave again, convince himself that maybe the next day, or the next, Willow would either agree to leave with him or let him take Just or, conceivably, his belief in arcology might reawaken strongly enough for him to make it through another year or five or ten. In the dark, though, he knew none of this would happen.
That night he pressed his cheek against Just’s and inhaled. His boy’s face was impossibly soft and smelled like the silt beds in the foundry. Harry left on foot, the road shining white under a full moon, and hiked out to Cordes Junction. The town wasn’t more than a truck stop huddled against I-17, but he found a trucker willing to take him south to Phoenix. He called his parents collect from the airport, and they arranged a ticket for a flight home. During takeoff he watched the desert drop away beneath him and felt no relief, just a gutting pain. They were at cruising altitude, Arizona gone already, when he had two thoughts: that he’d stayed so long because he’d wanted his son to at least remember him and that he hadn’t stayed long enough for that to be true.
At Harvard’s Agassiz House, Just didn’t even want him in the foyer and still refused to surrender the ugly backpack. Harry said he’d find a café to answer some e-mails and sift through new listings. He walked back toward Harvard Square, peering in all the independent cafés for an available table, and paused outside a Panera Bread on Mass. Ave. Panera; he imagined Willow shaking her head, his own younger self wincing. He kept walking. Maybe he could work under a tree. Or at a library, at least until a security guard chased him out. Could he pass for a graduate student? Probably not at Harvard, where he imagined they all finished their PhDs by twenty-seven.
He crossed the street and went back through the brick and iron gates. The campus was shamelessly beautiful, a stately parody of itself. He wondered if Just was falling in love right this moment with something he was never going to have.
Harry’s last year in Arizona, he’d thought a lot about college. Not just the parties — late-night pizza and red plastic cups — but those darkened rooms full of ideas. Every idea Arcosanti ever contained felt bleached and flattened by the desert sun. Harry had been in his early twenties. He could sit in a classroom and look just like everybody else. No one would ever know he had a son. They would never even know he’d left college. He’d wanted to believe that Arcosanti was like Narnia, that you could step out of the wardrobe and back into the very afternoon you’d found it. But of course you couldn’t.
Students started to stream out of the buildings, changing classes. They wore nice sweaters and had clean backpacks. Harry tried to picture Just among them. He couldn’t. Until he could, because there was Just, walking straight by him, holding a video camera in front of his face. He was walking alone, without a tour guide or admissions host. He hadn’t made it twenty feet past Harry before a campus security guard stopped him. They were close enough for Harry to hear when the security guard said, “No filming.” Just was trying and failing to convince the guard he had a video permit from Public Affairs when Harry walked up behind them.
“I’m sorry, Officer,” he said. “My son’s a prospective student. He didn’t know about the filming rules.” My son. Harry could taste the words in his mouth long after he’d said them.
“Can I see some ID?”
“I don’t have one,” Just said too quickly, and the guard bristled.
There was so much, Harry thought, that his son needed to learn about the world. “Here’s mine,” he said, pulling out his wallet, and he watched the guard write down the name.
After being escorted to the nearest campus entrance, they were left courteously enough on the sidewalk outside.
“Different last names,” Harry said. “This won’t hurt you if you decide to apply.” Just was raising the video camera to film the guard’s retreating back. Harry swatted it down. “What are you doing? What were you doing?”
“We’re on city property,” Just said. “They can’t stop you filming from here.”
“You researched this?”
“Sure. But someone from Tufts had tipped Harvard off. They asked me to leave admissions before I got much of anything.”
“What did you do at Tufts?”
“It’s for a documentary. I’m not just screwing around. Mom’s been dating this Italian video artist. He gave me this,” Just said, holding up the camera. “I’ve been recording audio from the info sessions on my phone, but he said I should try for some quality footage too. He’s going to help me edit everything together. You know college in Italy is, like, completely free? Harvard costs sixty thousand a year. It’s so fucked up.”
“You’re making some kind of exposé?”
“Mom said not to tell you. She said she wasn’t sure you’d be cool with it.”
“What else did your mom say about me?” It was a huge question, ridiculous, too big for the rest of their lives, let alone for a sidewalk outside of Harvard Yard with students pushing past them.
Harry led them across the street to the nearest café’s outdoor tables. They sat, and Just returned the camera to the backpack, wrapping it carefully in the red polo shirt. It took him a long time to answer.
“Honestly?” he said. “Not a ton. You two were on a summer workshop together, and then you went back to school.”
“Four years. I was there four years.” Harry tried to meet Just’s eyes, but his son was staring at the perforated black metal tabletop. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
He just hadn’t seen how they could love the boy as much as they did and still raise him in Arcosanti. Willow hadn’t seen how he could love the boy as much as he said he did and still threaten to leave. There’d been no possible compromise, not one Harry had been able to see then and not one he was able to see even now. Which meant that in the great forking of his youth, he had ended up with nothing but bad choices. The painless road must have split off earlier, before he’d fallen in love with Willow, before he’d fallen in love with arcology. But that meant Just would never have existed.
“If you finish the movie — what do you do with a film like this? Submit it to festivals?”
“Put it on YouTube, probably. Higher education in this country is out of control.”
It sounded so rehearsed that Harry wondered who Just was imitating. Willow? The Italian filmmaker? Or maybe the words were really Just’s. Maybe this was what his son sounded like. At sixty thousand a year for tuition, he wasn’t wrong. Harry wondered what he’d sounded like as a teenager, parroting Paolo Soleri. Soleri had died last year, ninety-three years old. There’d been a memorial celebration at Arcosanti, a reunion of past residents and workshoppers. Harry hadn’t attended, but he’d been invited. He still got all the mailings, the pleas for donations. He still read them before he put them in the recycling bin.
“You should have told me,” Harry said. “What you were doing.”
“Mom said — ”
“Whatever she said. You were lying to me, and you were using me and Miriam. That wasn’t fair.”
Just took a moment to think about it, and when he said, “I’m sorry,” even though he said it to the sidewalk, it sounded sincere.
“Do you still want to visit Boston College this afternoon?”
Just’s head jerked up, his expression hopeful but suspicious.
“For footage,” Harry said. “I’m assuming you don’t actually plan to apply.”
“You’d do that?”
Was this a desperate ploy for his son’s affection? And did he believe this documentary would ever get made or that if it did, it would say anything that hadn’t already been said better by somebody else? Probably not. But maybe. This was his son, would always be his son. Didn’t you have to hope, totally and shamelessly, for “maybe”?
“I would. Although, for the record, I really liked college. I learned a lot. You should go. It doesn’t have to cost sixty thousand dollars.” Harry thought of himself scribbling notes in a dark room, desperate for someone to show him a picture of the future. That there wasn’t one was perhaps the best fatherly advice he had. Every possible arcology, they were all shipwrecked and insufficient. There was no city of the future, only the lecture slide before it, blank except for a question mark. But uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from a certain angle.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Mondays, strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
