Reckoning With the Desires of China’s One-Child Generation

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I first encountered M Lin’s writing during our second year of graduate school in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Her stories were, on my first reading, luminous and unpretentious, chronicling the often conflicting sexual, emotional, and political desires of women from China’s millennial One-Child Generation. Her debut collection, The Memory Museum, is a nostalgic but unflinching expansion of this vision, and a compelling examination of how China’s stratospheric growth has fractured the relationship between its theoretically collective past, uncertain present, and globalized future.

What I was most struck by, when reading these stories, is the way they engage with this fluidity of cultural identity through the shifting and unpredictable lens of female desire. In “Shangri-La,” for example, a young immigrant from a provincial Chinese city embarks on a reckless and passionate affair with her working-class Chinese masseur. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a woman whose marriage has been severely fractured by political differences during the pandemic goes on a “divorce honeymoon” to Morocco with her husband. And in the collection’s titular story, a young woman living in a futuristic society finds solace in accessing long-buried memories of her late parents’ political activism and tortured past. M’s willingness to discuss these changing perspectives in our interview is a testament to her talents as a writer and interpreter of her own work.

As I sat cross-legged in my apartment on a foggy morning in San Francisco, I called M, who is based in Manhattan, over Zoom. While our conversation was wide-ranging, M and I had spoken earlier about the need to discuss the female perspectives in the collection. The interview reflects our mutual interest in these protagonists’ efforts to forge their own cultural and artistic identities apart from those thrust on them in China and the U.S. 

Rebecca Bihn-Wallace: Despite taking place in vastly different settings and over different time periods, these stories feel thematically linked in the way that they center female desire, or lack of desire—whether sexual or creative or political. Can you talk about the role that these kinds of desires play in the collection?

M Lin: I think the way that the characters show up as desiring something comes from their feeling at odds with or unsatisfied by the present, by the lives that they have. In the first story of the collection, “Scenes from Childhood,” a woman is very old, and in her last years of her life, she is alone with no family and all these childhood memories. She has this desire to be surrounded by her loved ones again, and she’s able to reach that through the act of remembering. And in the second story, “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,”the woman obviously wants a divorce, even though she doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to do. It’s not that she doesn’t love her husband anymore, but for other reasons their life can’t go on together. 

I think these women’s desires come from their continued engagement with their own lives—which is a weird thing to say, because who is not engaged with their life? But right now, especially in China, there is one part of you that is based on what other people think you should do—your family, your parents, the culture—and the other part is that people in China are retreating from this, almost retreating from capitalism. I think the women [in my stories] are not choosing the path that was expected of them, and they aren’t choosing to give in and completely lose control of their lives. Despite the hostile environment around them, they’re still trying to fulfill themselves in some way. And that is not an easy thing to do in the age of declining mental health and world chaos.

Fiction has the power to ask the what-ifs.

RBW: Can you talk about the role of sexual desire in the stories? For example, “Shangri-La” is an inversion of the stereotypical dynamics between men and Asian women. How do these stories subvert that expectation, and disrupt the perception of what a relationship or a sexual connection between a man and a woman should look like?

ML: It was one of my intentions to write against the stereotypes of Asian women as being docile or submissive, which I think in a sexual context is one of the biggest stereotypes Asian women face. At the same time, Asian men are desexualized, so Asian men and women exist on two extremes of the spectrum. “Shangri-La” is also about the stereotype of richer men having affairs with women of a lesser financial background. I think [the story] is very aware of how its narrative subverts those sexual and power dynamics. But of course, I didn’t write “Shangri-La” in order to do that; the origin of the story is a phenomenon I’ve observed in New York, where often you see that the massage therapists in [Chinese massage parlors] are mostly men. And it’s also about class—I was thinking about how I’m a Chinese immigrant and the people who work there are as well, but in New York they’re rubbing my feet. This is what I think makes fiction so interesting, because it has the ability to imagine what can happen. Fiction has the power to ask the what-ifs.

RBW: Can we talk about conflicting creative and professional desires in the collection? In “Tough Egg,” there’s this conflict between the narrator’s desire to address fertility in her screenplay, and the reality of male-domination and censorship within the Chinese film industry. She knows that unless she gets a male name attached to her project, it won’t get off the ground. That conflict between the desire to be creative and the sacrifices that it demands interested me, especially when you’re working within a society that’s patriarchal, whether it’s Western or Chinese.

ML: Creativity is of course limited by our experiences and by reality, but it also has the ability to triumph, to go beyond those limits. I think people who call themselves artists engage with their life in a specific way. In the case of “Tough Egg,” the character is working with both the limits of the female body and having to consider motherhood, as every woman does. There are also the limits of censorship and the limits of the male-dominated industry. I think those limits are what makes her work really meaningful for her—she’s finding the space to create freedom for herself. It’s kind of what makes her effort worthwhile.

RBW: Another thing we see in these stories is that politics are really at the root of a lot of the relationship conflicts, particularly in terms of perspectives on the role of the Chinese government during the pandemic, or US-China relations. Can you talk about the role this plays in stories like “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” or even the political rebellions taking place in “No Prairie Fire Can Destroy All the Weeds”?

ML: The way the Chinese government functions is very much how a patriarch would function in a traditional Chinese family. So the state and the intimate relationships, such as a family or a romantic relationship, are very much intertwined. Even though I believe this is true everywhere in the world, the personal being political and the political being personal is especially true in China, because your life changes overnight if the government has a new policy. A lot of people are apolitical, because they know they can’t really do anything about that.

Creativity is limited by our experiences and by reality, but it also has the ability to go beyond those limits.

And to go back to your question, I think we just live in such polarizing times that even in the U.S., we see couples or families arguing or coming apart because of different political beliefs. I am exploring with these narratives the relationship between what you believe and what or who you love. Can you love a person even if you don’t agree with them? That is a question for individuals and on a much larger scale, for us as a country and as a planet—how we find ways to move into the future without agreeing on every little thing. You know, this is probably what politicians are figuring out on a daily basis. The emotional and intellectual parts of a person don’t always line up.

RBW: On that note, can you talk about the push-pull dynamics that a lot of the characters experience in terms of their relationship to the US and China and the porousness that we see in those national identities? For example, in the story “Yulan,” this passage was really striking to me: 

“In the American context, the theories and identity labels Yuchen constantly navigated tired and in many cases confused her. It was not that she doubted them; it was that she believed in them so firmly that she was unable to admit her own feelings, unable to stop performing for herself and others, unable to reconcile her own life with what she believed to be true.”

ML: I think this passage must be true to my own feelings. For anyone who goes between the US and China, or the US and Europe, the political context of the conversations that are happening are very different. The US is the only country that started from immigrants coming from different places; other countries have been around for much longer and are more homogeneous because of that. But in the US, race is a prominent, everyday aspect of life that you have to constantly navigate, especially as a person of color. In China, I never thought about race and people don’t talk about race because everyone is Chinese, even though there are nuances within one’s identity as a Chinese person, and there are a lot of different ethnic minorities. But in the US, sometimes the identity politics can feel exhausting. And being a feminist can feel exhausting because it’s always you against the world. You are trying to live by your beliefs, but the reality is always an uphill battle. And sometimes you fantasize about not having to fight every little fight.

For the character of Yuchen, she has her own career as an artist and photographer, when she could probably just as easily be a mother with a child. She’s trying to imagine if she could be happy being that, if she didn’t have her creative impulses and her feminist beliefs. The less you know, the more you might be okay with what you’re given. 

RBW: The role of family, particularly in the lives of your female characters, has a duality to it. It’s this source of memory and longing, but in another sense, it’s a source of tension and even a kind of oppression, where the generational differences between the One-Child Generation in China and their parents are stark. For example, in stories “Tough Egg” or in “Lucy,” the expectations that the parents have of the children are just not ones that they can really fulfill. I found the push and pull between asserting oneself as a human being and then functioning within a larger family unit very interesting.

ML: The tension between the individual and the family and the generational differences is something that I think about a lot, and I’m happy to hear that it came through in these stories. Because of how much China has developed over the past three or four decades, the generational difference—the leap from my parents’ generation to mine—is maybe equal to four or five generations in the West. And as I was saying, the parallel between the family structure and the structure of the country means that families have this supreme control over their children, and the government has control over the citizens. Even though this relationship might sound horrible at first glance, to the narrator in “Lucy,” it has its “upsides.” You can feel very taken care of.

RBW: My parents aren’t like this, but with a lot of American parents there’s more of the “sink or swim model” where, once you’re 18, it’s like, “Okay, figure it out.” [Laughs] And that’s just not something that the Chinese seem to do as much.

ML: You feel like you have backup, a safety net, but at the same time, because [your family] is providing you with that, they feel they have the right to comment on everything. 

The personal being political and the political being personal is especially true in China

Cutting ties with your parents is a sensational thing to do in China. In the West, if you do that, people might be like, “What horrible things did your parents do to you?” But in China it’s like, “What’s wrong with you? You are not a filial child.” No matter what happened to you or what you did, you’re not allowed to do that. And I think what’s interesting is that—this applies to my personal experience, and my core readership of Chinese people who live overseas—my characters, especially Lucy, are already defying tradition and the family structure by moving to a foreign country. As an only child, that is an even more severe thing to do. How will Chinese family culture and structures adapt to this much more globalized and mobilized world? That’s still an ongoing exploration, and I’m actually working on it in my novel.

RBW: That segues perfectly into my last question. I found “The Memory Museum” to be a very haunting, evocative, disturbing story in all the best ways. And I wondered if you could talk about the future world that you envision in the story, and what potentially inspired the speculative elements.

ML: There are two competing visions for the future in The Memory Museum as a collection. In the first story, “Scenes from Childhood,” in the future that the narrator is speaking from, the world is burning and there’s very little habitable land. China has become its own island, and with the narrator being overseas, she’s not able to contact her family. All of that is maybe closer to my vision [of the future] in real life. But the final, titular story, “The Memory Museum,” envisions a competing and completely different reality for China. It’s a utopian imagination of what China could become, and it came from a place of despair after I wrote the protest story, “No Prairie Fire Can Destroy All the Weeds,” where the last section specifically took the story to a dark place. If that logic were to continue, the path for China is very dark. But in fiction, we have so much more freedom and space; I can imagine not only how badly everything can go. So I just started thinking, what is my best vision of what China could be? So that’s where the speculative context and setting came from. I have been thinking about memory so much, and how memories are being erased by the current government. So I wanted [the setting of “The Memory Museum”] to be the perfect future I could imagine.

7 Books About Women Migrant Workers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

We are living in a moment when the presence of migrant workers is more visible than ever, yet their inner lives remain unevenly told. There are still not enough works of literary fiction centered on women as migrant workers—especially domestic workers. These stories do exist, but they are often older, or they appear only in fragments across texts—rather than being fully centered, these women tend to remain at the edges of someone else’s narrative. This absence is particularly striking to me because I grew up surrounded by such women. My mother. My aunties. The housekeepers and nannies in the homes of friends who had more than we did. It wasn’t something I had to learn about—it was simply the texture of everyday life. I watched how much these women carried, how much they gave, and how often that labor passed without anyone really stopping to see it for what it was.

I also remember how natural it all felt then. How unquestioned. The early mornings and the long days my mother kept. The way care was given so fully, and then quietly folded away. I didn’t think about it in any formal way, but I noticed things—how certain women held themselves, how they moved through other people’s homes, attentive to what was needed and careful not to take up too much space. Even then, there was a sense, difficult to name but impossible to ignore, that some lives were expected to unfold in the background.

In many ways, this is the space the stories in my own book, Layaway Child, come out of—a desire to stay with these lives, and to bring what is often held at the margins into clearer view. What I return to is the question of what it might mean to remain with her. To follow the woman who leaves for work long before the world rises and returns when it is asleep. The woman who moves through spaces that depend on her but do not fully see her. To sit within that experience, rather than simply gesture toward it.

The seven books gathered here move in that direction. They resist easy explanation and refuse to turn these lives into symbols. Instead, they attend closely to the daily realities of the work, while also making space for the interior lives that play out alongside it. Together, these works offer a way of seeing migrant labor that resists simplification. They remain with the quiet, often overlooked moments, and in doing so, reveal the full and complex lives unfolding within them.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

Lucy remains, for me, one of the clearest and most intimate expressions of the female migrant worker experience. A young woman arrives from the Caribbean to work as an au pair in the United States. What unfolds is not simply a story of employment, but of observation. Lucy watches everything: the family she works for, the culture she has entered, the expectations placed upon her. She understands, very quickly, that she is both essential and peripheral. By the end, what becomes clear is not just the shape of Lucy’s circumstances, but the clarity of her seeing—what it means to understand exactly where you stand, and to refuse to disappear within it.

Minaret by Leila Aboulela

Najwa, a Sudanese woman living in London, works as a domestic servant after her family’s political and economic fall. The novel follows her as she moves through the city—between households, between versions of herself—while gradually reorienting her sense of identity. Her work places her inside intimate spaces, caring for children, maintaining homes, and navigating the expectations of those who employ her. At the same time, she is reckoning with faith, memory, and loss, coming to understand that the life she once imagined for herself is no longer available to her, and that something else must take its place. What makes Minaret particularly striking is its attention to interiority. Najwa’s labor is constant but never sensationalized; instead, it becomes part of the texture of her daily life. The novel offers a clear, steady look at what it means to exist within someone else’s world while slowly reshaping one’s sense of purpose, dignity, and belonging.

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

This collection of short stories follows Laotian immigrants and refugees across North America as they navigate work, family, and language. Many of the characters are employed in forms of labor that often go unseen—nail salons, factories, service jobs—where repetition and precision shape their days. The stories are brief but exacting, capturing moments that reveal how deeply work can structure a life. Rather than focus on dramatic events, Thammavongsa attends to the small, telling detail: a conversation misunderstood, a task performed over and over, a body adapting to new demands. The result is a collection that shows how labor is carried not only in what people do, but in how they move, speak, and understand themselves within the world.

Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu

Willa Chen, a biracial woman in New York, takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy white family, entering a world that is both familiar and inaccessible. Her role requires her to care deeply for the child in her charge, while also maintaining a careful awareness of her position within the household. As Willa moves through her work, she becomes increasingly attuned to the subtle ways she is both included and excluded. The novel explores how domestic labor extends beyond physical tasks into emotional and social navigation, revealing the complexities of care work in spaces where belonging is never fully granted. Slowly, Willa’s proximity to wealth, to whiteness, to comfort shapes her understanding of herself. 

The Son of the House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia

When Nwabulu and Julie, two women from different classes of Nigerian society, are kidnapped and held together, they begin telling each other the stories of their lives. Nwabulu has worked as a housemaid since she was a child, sent from home with promises that are never fulfilled. Julie, by contrast, comes from a wealthy, educated background, but finds her life increasingly shaped by the expectations placed on her as a wife and mother. he novel moves between their lives as their stories unfold, revealing how class, gender, and power influence the possibilities available to each of them. Domestic labor sits at the center of Nwabulu’s experience, shaping both her vulnerability and her sense of self, while Julie’s story exposes a different kind of constraint—one that operates within privilege rather than outside it. Held together, their narratives offer a layered account of how women’s lives are shaped in unequal but deeply connected ways.

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

Set in Cyprus, Songbirds centres on Nisha, a Sri Lankan domestic worker who has left her young daughter in order to support her family from abroad. She works as a nanny and housekeeper, caring for Petra’s daughter and maintaining the rhythms of a household that is not her own. When Nisha suddenly disappears, the novel shifts to Petra as she searches for Nisha and, in doing so, confronts how little she truly understood about Nisha’s life. What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose presence has been essential yet largely unseen. Nisha’s story—revealed in fragments through others—captures the realities of migrant domestic work: the distance from one’s own child, the constant negotiation of belonging, and the quiet sacrifices that sustain lives across borders. 

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Clean unfolds through the voice of Estela García, a domestic worker who has spent years working for a wealthy family in Santiago. Speaking from an interrogation room after the death of the family’s young daughter, Estela recounts her time in the household. Over the years, she has become deeply embedded in the family’s daily life, responsible for the child, the home, and the small, repetitive tasks that structure each day. Hers is a portrait of a life lived in close proximity and near invisibility. Estela is present for everything—meals, arguments, private moments—yet is often treated as if she were not there at all. The novel lingers in that tension, where intimacy does not lead to recognition, and where being indispensable does not mean being seen. In giving Estela the space to speak, Clean turns that invisibility inside out, revealing a voice that is observant, controlled, and no longer willing to remain in the background.

A Campus Novel For a Post-Ironic World

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason is a deeply internal debut, charting the bounds of a violent, unpredictable world through its truth-seeking (and perpetually dishonest) narrator. The novel follows an unnamed woman during her year as an instructor at a remote all girls school, where she’s filling in for an older male teacher on leave for an unspecified reason. 

Through her interactions with administrators and students, the narrator’s idiosyncratic worldview comes into relief. She fixates on the victimization of students—those manipulated and adultified by the very authority figures who are meant to guide them—and recalls the “multiple pedophiles and ephebophiles” (adults with sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents) who ran unchecked at her own high school. At the same time, she nurtures an idyllic admiration for Joseph Stalin, focusing on his difficult upbringing and childhood mistreatment rather than his autocratic reign. Her family relationships are similarly warped; through her contentious (albeit humorous) relationships with her mother, sister, and father, we come to understand how the narrator has been shaped by both personal and intergenerational traumas.

Offseason is a character study, but it’s also a love letter to literature. The narrator teaches Charles Dickens with unbridled (and occasionally inappropriate) excitement. She projects onto a younger female student, and recommends literature as the antidote to her imagined turmoil. She throws herself into books, turning away from the pain and violence in the world, but Offseason still manages to bring it to the surface. In reading, we’re reminded that this contrast—the potential to harm and heal in turn—is the very thing that makes us alive.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with Avigayl Sharp in person at Stories and Books Cafe in LA’s Echo Park. We discussed literature, sincerity, and trauma-plotting infamous historical figures over the din of a bustling cafe.

Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas: Like Offseason, your short story “Animals in the Dark” is set at an all girls school. What drew you to this setting? What were you thinking about when you were trying to render it?

Avigayl Sharp: After my MFA, I was working at a girls’ school. I never taught, but I worked as an administrative assistant. There are weird things that obsess you as a writer and that emerge out of necessity. A character needs to have a life, a job, and a material world that they operate within. So in a way I was searching for something that could serve a purpose, and it felt like a very functional decision. At the same time there’s something about the way that large groups of girls operate with one another and with older authority figures that began to really preoccupy me. I was interested in reversals of authority. I also love campus novels, especially weird campus novels. I love The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I love Lucky Jim, you know, all these novels where there are teachers behaving in insane and erratic ways.

LRT: It was very interesting to see the books that came up throughout. At one point the narrator recommends Lolita to a student she suspects of being groomed by a male teacher. I was thinking about this canon of literature while reading—Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Disgrace, among others. Were there other books from that canon that you were thinking about while writing?

To know someone is sort of to unknow them.

AS: Nabokov was big for me. Lolita and Pale Fire, and Pnin was another that I didn’t put in the book because I decided not to directly reference super campus-y novels. 

I’m interested in characters who put on a voice and narrativize their own lives to themselves and to the readers. Then, it’s through the cracks and slippages in their story that you come to understand reality. So Nabokov was a huge influence in that way. Muriel Spark was also really important for me and important for the book. She’s both extremely comic and also cold and serious and fierce at the same time. 

LRT: I was intrigued by how you handled the older male teacher, Thomas. When the reader learns that he’s taken a leave from the school we’re guided to assume one thing, but he ends up being a different kind of character than we might have initially suspected. In thinking about relationships where abuses of power can happen, was there something you felt was missing from the existing canon that you wanted to show in more complexity?

AS: I mean, it’s an interesting question. One thing that I was thinking about was projection. I’m interested in the way that we can experience harm by seeing harm everywhere. We do live in an extraordinarily violent world.

What was important to me with the Thomas character is setting up this idea that there’s a mystery that you can get to the bottom of. The narrator has this preoccupation with getting to the bottom of things. She also has this conviction that she knows more about the world around her than anyone else, and this fear of the mysteriousness of other people. I wanted to write a book in which one thing that hopefully happens by the end is that the narrator and also the reader know certain characters less well than they do at the beginning—their mystery increases. 

LRT: It feels true to life that someone would become more opaque over time, rather than more legible.

AS: I think people can appear transparent to us before we know them, and that to know someone is sort of to unknow them. In a way the book is a classic bildungsroman because the narrator receives a moral education and gains a moral sight, I hope. She has an extreme anxiety and ambivalence around questions of victimhood—who is a victim and who is an aggressor—and a longing to remain on one side of the line. I was also interested in the association of victimhood with moral purity, and as a result, her belief that she can be cleansed by never growing up.

LRT: Instead of teaching multiple books to her students, the narrator spends the whole year teaching Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Both that book and the topics of her class discussions relate to the city, but Offseason takes place in a small beach town that empties out for half the year. Why Bleak House? 

AS: Some things are just the timing. I read Bleak House shortly before I started the novel. I hadn’t read a lot of Dickens, and I ended up having a transformative experience with this book. It was just a book that contained every kind of novel within it. It’s so ambitious. So funny and bizarre. It’s a mystery. It really is every kind of book. And I was thinking about the novel as a form, and I thought that this kind of obsessive commitment to literature at its most excessive would be a funny fixation for the narrator to have. [Bleak House is] a book that’s ironic about a lot of the things that it’s also serious about. 

LRT: I have to ask about a figure that looms over this book: Stalin. The narrator’s fixation with him is revealing. I saw connections to her relationship with family and also her volatile one with truth. What were you thinking about by including this fixation and how did it connect to the narrator’s other relationships?

I wanted to write a book about the past that only looked at the present.

AS: [Stalin and the narrator’s mother] are tied inextricably because her mother was born in the Soviet Union. There is an identification with the aggressor, and a fantasy around a type of power that could really bend the world to its will. But of course, she’s also trauma-plotting Stalin all the time. She has a longing to create a story around Stalin that can fit into a narrative arc of victimhood. In addition to the familial history aspect, I think it comes from an inability to confront the failures of the left. The book is interested in communism and utopian socialism, but the narrator also can’t look at failure and loss. She can’t accept Stalin as a figure of extraordinary violence. There are times when she turns toward it and then she looks away because she longs to maintain a fantasy in which the Soviet Union worked. I think she has a desire to map the world in a very rigid way and to maintain her status as a victim in a victim lineage, but one who can forgive. She can be at the bottom, but she also really sympathizes with these figures that she imagines as aggressors. She sympathizes with the pain they feel over the powers and the violence that their families have enacted. When she has to face the complexity of the world, it’s extraordinarily painful for her. She has to reconfigure the story that she’s been telling herself, and she does not want to do that.

LRT: The novel is structured around each semester, but there’s an interlude where the narrator visits home and we see more of her relationships with family and a traumatic experience from her teenage years. How did you write this interlude section and how did you want it to function?

AS: I was very interested in writing about trauma—the experience of trauma, the lingering effects of trauma—without ever giving the readers information about what this traumatic experience is. I wanted to create the sensation of reading to find out what happened, because I think we have a cultural obsession with understanding what exactly happened to someone, how bad was it, what did it mean, etc. I’m interested in psychoanalysis, and in understanding an experience through the symptoms that emerge around it. There’s a way that the preoccupation with what exactly happened can allow us to move away from what is actually traumatic about an experience. There’s also a question of privacy in the book. There are themes that the narrator is too open about, but there are also things that remain hidden. 

LRT: Yes, exactly. She doesn’t give us the satisfaction of being able to slot her experience into a hierarchy of pain.

AS: As a reader you only know what she is now. That was really important to me. I knew I wanted to write a book about the past that only looked at the present.

LRT: This is more of a structural question. How did your experience of novel writing differ from writing short fiction? What was the process of crafting this novel specifically?

It’s a book that has a very sincere belief in the transformative power of literature.

AS: It was so different. I spent a long time not knowing if I would ever write a novel because I love short fiction. I think it doesn’t get enough love. As a writer in institutional settings, there’s a lot of you gotta write a novel. I was like, I won’t do what anyone tells me to. The problem is that I actually love the novel as a form so much. When I started to write the novel, I realized how you have to reinvent the form. There’s no container; you have to create the container that your book needs to become itself. There are three sections, the first section and the third section are mirror images of each other, and there’s a hinge in the middle. As I was writing the first section of the book, there came a point where I realized that the narrator had too much control. Certain ways that I figured to structure the book were attempts to throw things in her path so that she was unable to exert this narrative control as strongly. I wanted it to feel like you think you understand the type of book you’re reading, and then it becomes a different type of book, and then becomes a type of different book again. 

LRT: It’s funny, at the end I was trying to figure out if the book is hopeful or not. And I think it might be more accurate to say it’s a book that feels open to possibility.

AS: Yes, yes. Maybe open is a better word. It’s definitely a book that’s about the novel, but not just the novel. I think it’s a book that has a very sincere belief in the transformative power of literature.

LRT: There’s a certain amount of repetition in the prose—which is so funny and sharp and pointed, with so much dishonesty and slips of truth—but was that decision to repeat certain images or ideas coming from any particular place?

AS: Yeah, it was. I do think that the book is constructed musically with leitmotifs. I am drawn to that kind of patterning, but I’m also interested in repetition, compulsion, the sense that we are acting out the same things over and over again and that this can be terrifying and that it can also be beautiful and that the way we change happens through repetitions that vary slightly. We repeat stories about our lives, and we repeat certain lexical ways of speaking. In the second section, there’s a lot of repetition with the family. My hope is that it modulates between being horrible at certain points and also, at other moments, there’s a beauty in that cycle.

LRT: What do you think readers will be most surprised by in terms of what’s on the page vs. the description of the book?

AS: I think it’s both more funny and more dark. But I also think it’s a very sincere book. It’s a comic book, but not ironic. 

I Wasn’t Excited for My Top Surgery. That Doesn’t Negate My Desire for It

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Minor Meats by Billy Lezra

The right one weighs 568 grams, the left one, 547, over two pounds off my chest. For five days, two tubes drain the incisions. Ruby, then amber, fluids pool into translucent bulbs pinned to my white compression vest.

It’s Christmas. 

I am the tree; the blood bulbs, ornaments. 

Inside the bulbs my red blood cells are shaped like marbles, tiny spheres. The name of this condition is hereditary spherocytosis, which means I got these marbles from my mother, a hematological heirloom. Behind our upper left ribcage, our spleens destroyed these marbles and made us anemic, jaundiced, low iron, high platelet. My mother’s spleen was six years old when it was removed; mine was 13. 

The night before my splenectomy, she ran me a hot bath and massaged my legs with lavender lotion. When you wake up you won’t be able to see or move for about 30 minutes, she said. But you will be able to hear. The surgery lasted four hours. I didn’t read or talk to anyone while you were under, she said. I just imagined your body inch by inch.

Once my destruction site was excised, the spheres passed through my blood undetonated. Spleenless me did new things: hike, run, make plans, keep plans, get good grades. The words on my report cards changed. The green insuficientes became suficientes, bienes, notables, sobresalientes. 

Sobre, above.

Saliente, salient.

Spleenless me rose above.

“Rigor” appeared everywhere, underlined. 

20 years after my splenectomy, three weeks before top surgery, my surgeon calls to discuss how my blood might behave. 

Spleenless people with spherocytosis have high platelets. 

Platelets make the blood clot. 

When it comes to surgery, you want to clot, not a clot. 

Normal platelet levels range between 150,000 to 450,000.

What I want is to become my own occupant.

Mine are between 600,000 and 750,000. 

Because I’m a spleenless person made of marbles, my surgeon says my chance of developing a post-surgical clot that could move somewhere “tricky” is something to “consider.” By “tricky” I assume she means lung, heart, brain. 

“Do you feel comfortable doing the surgery?” I ask.

“Absolutely. It’s important to you, and you’ll be so happy when it’s done.”

I open my brown Moleskin and write down the words “happy” and “important.” I remind myself: I trust this surgeon. She’s thorough, serious, kind, a total genius; I love her results. 

Toward the end of our conversation she asks if I’m “excited.” 

The word surfaces in my clinical notes. 

I’m officially medically excited. 

I’m not excited to have surgery.

I do not feel certain about this choice.

Uncertainty does not negate desire.

Some people modify their bodies to experience self-alignment, but I don’t have a coalesced self I feel misaligned from.

I sense my lack of coalescence is my misalignment. 

“Dysphoria,” writes Max Delsohn, “[feels] like being a tourist in my own body.”

Right: tourist, interloper, spectator, seditionist, assailant. I watch myself from below and above. What I want is to become my own occupant.

“It sounds like this surgery is gender-expansive,” says my friend Moa. 

Her language piques me, a progression: gender confirmation to affirmation to expansion. We confirm dates and times; an external action concretizes the event. We affirm, state, declare; to affirm implies an awareness of the thing being affirmed. It makes sense to feel excitement or certainty if body modification stems from what is known. But expansion doesn’t have to be sure or aware of itself. Dough expands, and moss, and mycelium, and water. Expansion doesn’t require certainty, just curiosity; curiosity is enough. 

“And expansion can become affirmation,” says Moa. 

After wildfires tear through forests, dormant seeds germinate—slowly, then all at once. 

But I am terrified of my marbles, of my blood.

In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I spend hours trying to make appointments with hematologists who can’t see me in time because I’m new to the area and the waiting lists are long. I find an online hematology service and meet with a practitioner who looks at my labs and assures me I’ll be fine. I ask my primary doctor whether this conclusion is enough to clear me for surgery and she says yes. I ask my surgeon the same question and she says yes. But my fear gets the better of me, so I seek a fourth opinion. I book a flight out of state to see my old doctor who specializes in spherocytosis.

Then I cancel the trip. 

It’s too expensive, another risk.

I’m more likely to get sick from a trip than from a clot. 

Spleenless people are prone to infections. Certain bacterias—streptococcus or neisseria—sneak around our immune systems cloaked in capsules made of polysaccharides. These capsules protect pathogens from the body’s attacks; spleenless people have less ammunition. If I catch a bad cold, they’ll cancel the surgery. And if they cancel the surgery, it may not be rescheduled because look at the United States.

When I think about not going through with it, I feel crestfallen. 

And yet it would be so much easier to absorb risk for something I’m excited about.

“No one said this would be easy,” says Liam, my partner of 11 years. 

“I haven’t had a plan, or an ulterior motive, or a rhyme or a reason [for] what I’ve done,” says Dr. Susan Stryker. “I was just doing my thing to unfold the mystery of my transness to myself.” 

Unfold as in germinate as in expand. 

Years ago I went on social media and shared the name and pronouns that make me feel like a person rather than an assumption. Once the language around me changed, my curiosity teethed. Might I feel closer to myself if I shapeshift? “Sometimes the feelings are certain and come first, and the action follows,” writes Krys Malcolm Belc. “But other times, the action has to lead the feeling.” And sometimes clarity comes after action, after feeling. 

It’s an incredibly bureaucratic process, to become. I consulted, scheduled, perused pictures of stunning chests, found a few I loved, and set the date for my deconstruction. Then I graduated and moved down the coast, twice. Now I’m supposed to go under in two weeks, and I’m bone tired. Liam, who went through this surgery a few months ago, asks me if it would be better to wait.

“It’s not an option,” I say. 

My stubbornness surprises me.

I am unyielding—not excited. Rigorous—not certain. 

I read essay after essay after essay.

From Naomi Gordon-Loebl, I learn the Latin roots of the word “decide.”

De, off.

Caedere, to cut. 

I read medical studies about clots and spherocytosis.

I check my blood, once, thrice.

My platelets climb.

662,000, 681,000, 738,000. 

The day my surgery date was confirmed, I was with my friend Heather in the Nashville International Airport. This was before my surgeon cautioned me about my marbles and platelets. I was in the luxurious space between opportunity and execution; this was my specter of “excitement.” 

I’d met Heather in graduate school, where she was earning her Ph.D in fiction. I was drawn to her incisive humor and to the way she noticed subtle patterns in the novels we studied. We’d just spent 10 days in a writing conference on a campus with gothic chapels; at night we slept in a dorm that faced a cemetery. With hours to kill before our flights home, we drank iced coffee and I told her my news. 

“Congratulations,” she said, with a smile that seeped through me.

A few months later, Heather showed up to my graduating thesis defense with roses, carnations, and lilies in a round glass jar. For two hours she listened to me answer questions about my work; she observed a pattern, an undertone; she wrote it down. 

Later, over chicken yakisoba noodles, she air-dropped me this note:

“Billy uses information & research to feel in control but it also feeds their anxiety—can we sit in knowledge and use it to process & understand while accepting lack of control?” 

I do not accept lack of control.

I will control my body. 

I will carve it into what I imagine.

I can’t control the way my blood clots.

But I can control the information I have about the way my blood clots. 

I can read the right studies and ask the right questions and ask for the right tests and the right medication. And by that I mean: I can control the way my blood clots. No?

Once my imagination seizes danger, I gallop toward a solution. 

In my house I have a metal door jammer, a panic button, a radon detector, a propane detector, an alarm system. I can’t control whether an attacker or toxin infiltrates my house/body, but I can control how guilty I feel if something goes wrong. If I lock and jam my door and set the alarm and plug in the radon detector and something bad happens, I can forgive myself. If I read medical studies and get blood tests and talk to nurses and doctors and something bad happens, I can forgive myself. The problem with this logic is its perversion.

The system that tries to protect me assails me. 

I’m afraid I’ll die if I have this surgery.

I’m afraid I’ll die if I don’t have this surgery.

I don’t have a panic button for the panic I create. 

The system that tries to protect me assails me.

I am the hydra: I cut down one head, turn around, and there I am.

Three days before the surgery, I walk along cliffs. 

The sea is choppy.

Clouds coagulate; within days an atmospheric river will run through the coast. 

These currents of air can be over 1,000 miles long, 400 miles wide, more than two miles deep. 

My phone buzzes with flood, wind, and landslide alerts. 

My father calls.

“I want your right breast in a jar,” he says.

“Should I get it preserved in formaldehyde?” 

“Absolutely not. I don’t want the tissue to shrivel. I want it to grow arms.” 

“And where will you put my breast? Next to Tomás?”

Tomás is his human skull, a found relic from his childhood.

We laugh.

We talk about the river, my missing organs, my weird blood.

Along with my spleen went my gallbladder; several years before that, my appendix, minor meats. My appendix almost burst after the first time I visited my father, Michael, in the United States. 

Cambridge, 2001, Christmas. Rain, slush, snow, Moulin Rouge. I’d just turned nine. Before this, Michael and I had only spent time in Madrid or in the south of Spain, once or twice a year. His girlfriend, Hilary, paid for many of his flights to see me, even though she’d never met me in person.

I liked her immediately. We walked around Central Square, baked salted chocolate chip cookies, and chatted. She was writing her first book, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I also loved the precise way she and Michael assembled dinner every night, a choreography they’d learned together in culinary school. This was the first time I stepped into my father’s life. He introduced me to his rituals, Iron Chef, Terminator, good knives, duck fat, pickled beets, and salmon grilled on charcoal. After nine days I returned to Madrid; two days later a surgeon rolled me into the operating room. 

“Apendicitis aguda gangrenosa,” she said, after. 

Aguda, acute, sharp. 

Madrid, 2005, Christmas, again. 

Four years after my appendectomy, Michael flew to Spain for my splenectomy; my mother left our apartment so he could stay with me the week before. On sunny days we wandered through outdoor markets that sold items for nativity tableaus: tiny angels, goats, sheep, barrels of hay, myrrh. On rainy days we watched movies. 

On our fifth night I wanted a burger from a place called Foster’s Hollywood.

Michael said no. 

Anger prickled me. 

“I’m about to be cut open. Just give me what I want.”

He said no. 

Later, he knocked on my door. In his hand was a blue ceramic plate with a burger. He’d bought the bun from a bakery, mixed and spiced the organic meat, frosted it with thick flecks of sea salt, and caramelized the onions.

“I barely used any oil,” he said, “so this shouldn’t hurt you at all.” 

I devoured it.

The thing about only seeing each other once or twice a year was that our time together was all text, no subtext. We talked about concrete objects: movies, books, food; we didn’t have nonverbal shorthand accumulated in shared space. I don’t remember talking about how sick I felt. I imagine my mother may have told him that greasy food, from Foster’s Hollywood in particular, made me curl up in bathtubs, knees to chest in hot water, and pant with pain. 

By the time it was clear my spleen had to come out, I’d lost count of how many times my mother had to drive me to the emergency room after I ate something oily. For years I’d tried to control my diet to control the pain. I subsisted on bland things until I caved and reached for chips or cheeses or burgers that hurt with ferocity. My doctors couldn’t figure out the problem; they accused my mother of having Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. I’m not sure what was more disorienting: the pain, or watching medical professionals mistreat the person who brought me peppermint tea and lavender bath balls and demanded they take me seriously.

Eventually, as a result of my mother’s rigor, the right doctor ordered the right test and confirmed my gallbladder was atrophied. Up until I started writing this, I thought my awful stomachaches were unrelated to my weird blood. But a quick Google search reveals that people with spherocytosis often have gallstones. The chronic destruction of red blood cells releases too much bilirubin, which then crystallizes into sediments. I’m not sure why it took my doctors seven years to solve something the internet told me in seconds. But right after I turned 13, they decided to excise my troubles. Once I was two organs lighter, I’d be able to run, swim, dance, study, eat oil. 

“Te vas a re-encontrar,” the surgeon said. 

You’re going to find yourself again.

As if there was an authentic self I’d lost.

On the day of the surgery, while my mother imagined my body, Michael helped my grandmother with her Hebrew. My mother didn’t understand how my father could distract himself at a time like this; my father didn’t understand how my mother could not. As I came to, the wind whined and my parents shouted. I dipped in and out of consciousness, and by the time I could see again, they were gone. When I ask Michael why they put me in the intensive care unit, he says he doesn’t remember. 

What I remember most from the ICU is a little boy who I believe died in the bed next to mine. The sound of his anguish was desbocado, des-boca, un-mouthed. To be a body in pain so close to a body in so much more pain left me between shock and high octane fear.

At some point, a nurse brought me a TV that played Monster in Law.

To make oneself visible is not neutral: Visibility begets violence; spectacle begets spectatorship.

With white curtains she sectioned off the little boy’s bed.

His cries turned to rasps turned to quiet.

In the morning the bed was empty.

The nurse told me the boy left, but the underwater tone of her voice made me wonder where “leaving” was. She didn’t say, “Se fue a casa,” or, “Se fue con sus padres,” which would have meant he went home, or with his parents. 

She said, “Se fue con los suyos.”

He went with the people who belong to him, who he belongs to. 

Pain is relative, a relative.

“Rate your pain one to ten,” says the nurse.

It is over, it is done, over two pounds off my chest.

“One.”

“That’s unlikely.”

“Overwhelmingly, patients tend to rate their pain as a five, unless they are in excruciating pain,” writes Eula Biss in The Pain Scale. “At best, this renders the scale far less sensitive to gradations in pain. At worst, it renders the scale useless.”

“Two,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

Later, Liam will tell me I gripped his hand so hard his thumb changed color. Hours before the surgery, I’d convinced myself that an earthquake would shatter the tectonic plates under the hospital, that I’d be the reason Liam ended up dead. I was also certain a shooter would come murder the people providing affirming care. 30 minutes before I went under, I Googled fault lines and blueprints and police records and clocked all the hospital’s exits and tried to figure out which waiting room would be safest for Liam. I am the hydra with hijacked heads. My terror must have glistened through the drugs, because as I woke up the nurse said: “You are completely safe here, and I would die for you.” 

Little presents arrive: two blankets and a pot of lavender honey, from my mother. 

A plant cutting with white roots in a glass jar, from Moa.

A mastectomy pillow, from Hilary. 

A coloring book, from Michael, titled: Well that’s a weight off your chest! 

A t-shirt, from Heather: “New tits, who dis?” 

For a fortnight Liam injects me with anti-coagulant delivered through a needle to my stomach. It lowers the risk of clotting but raises the risk of bleeding. 

The atmospheric river comes and goes; the clouds thin. 

My phone reminds me to move once an hour. 

I walk up and down the hall and will my platelets to loosen but not too much. 

Every day I measure the ruby I leak. 

At night, I re-read Jane Eyre.

In graduate school I became obsessed with Charlotte Brontë’s body. 

I learned she had a toothache the day she started writing Jane Eyre. 

I imagine the throb that travels from her molars to her jaw to her neck to her head as she writes the first sentence: “There was no possibility of a walk that day.” Then she describes the weather: “Since dinner the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.” 

In the medical manual used in Brontë’s household, Modern Domestic Medicine, Thomas John Graham recommends walking to soothe toothaches and headaches. As her mouth radiates, Brontë writes that Jane can’t walk that day. The weather that confines the character mirrors the pain that encloses the author. Jane can’t leave the house; Brontë can’t leave her body.

In Brontë’s extant letters she connects weather to pain. “Today the weather is gloomy and I am stupefied with a bad cold and a headache,” she writes to a friend. She implicates the weather, observes scholar A.J Larner, “including the east wind or cold wind, autumn, fog.” 

When I send Heather this essay, she texts: did you know a walk killed Branwell Brontë? Charlotte’s brother, found in a ditch. I read about him. I read about the sequence of deaths Charlotte endured: her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, then Branwell, then Emily two months later, then Anne, five months after that. Many of her siblings died from tubercular complications catalyzed by bad weather. 

With this context I see Brontë’s pain on almost every page. 

In Jane Eyre, the fog itself breeds “pestilence.” 

The word “rain” appears 34 times; “cold” 65 times, “clouds” 34 times; “wind” 42 times.

I think about the atmosphere, about the writer’s grief, teeth, skull.

Books come from cells, fingers, bones. The way I read a text transforms when I learn about the pain that spread through the body that made it; texts ache, pain patterns and leaves marks. One of the problems with my writing, my teachers say, is that my body is nowhere to be found. You never describe your hands or hair or clothes or tattoos, they point out in college, in grad school, in workshops. To describe my body feels akin to describing a city I’ve flown through, a fool’s errand. My absence is the illustration: Nothing to see here, do not imagine me.

To make oneself visible is not neutral: Visibility begets violence; spectacle begets spectatorship. I want to erase myself as much as I want to be seen. Writing shears my mind from body. I have no canvases to fill, no stages to cross. I make no noise, no music. For years I wrote tucked in the back of a closet. I’ve backspaced that detail at least twice because everyone makes fun of me for it, so on the nose it’s embarrassing. My point is that I’ve been told my body is hiding, missing.

As I write this, I wear a purple robe.

A white bandage wraps around my chest.

The drains are out, so are my blood bulbs. 

My incisions don’t hurt. 

My bones hurt. 

My mind hurts.

The pain in my mind amplifies the pain in my body.

“Don’t forget,” says my therapist, “most people feel like shit after their surgeries. It’s normal to feel like you made a mistake.”

I don’t feel like I made a mistake.

The feeling is akin to infection.

Encapsulated bacteria sneak around my psychic immune system.

I have nothing left to fight anything off.

Every few days a nurse calls and asks me to rate my pain. I say one or two.

“The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration,” writes Biss. “This may be its greatest flaw.” 

Before they took my spleen, I was listless; before they took my appendix, I was gangrenous; before they took my gallbladder, I had stomachaches so piercing I asked my mother to find a doctor who would kill me. But not all pain is legible in a blood test or in an ultrasound. I don’t know how to measure the pain I put my body through to escape the dysphoric pain it was in: the alcoholism, the anorexia, the pulse behind my panic buttons and alarms for catastrophes lived and imagined. Right now, right now, I am “in” pain, not above or below it. It swallows, like fog.

Euphoria can be as quiet as collagen fibers, synthesizing.

I receive my post-operative report on Christmas Eve.

I highlight the weight of each breast, record the grams in my brown Moleskine, next to “happy” and “important.” 

I turn the page and start writing this. 

I give myself a constraint: This essay will end as soon as the pain passes. I’ve written through discomfort before, but this particular ache shortens my sentences, takes me to Brontë’s mouth, and mixes my parents and my organs into the same text. I send drafts to Liam, Moa, Heather, Michael, Hilary, to my best friend, my writing group, my writing partner, my editor. I absorb notes and questions and line-edits and corrections; I have a fantasy: There is a right way to tell this story. I’ll sandpaper one word after another until I become legible to you and real to myself. “It is the narrative constructed in retrospect—perhaps even more than the body—that makes the self recognizable, even cognizable,” writes Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. “But narrative requires language.” 

And language confirms, affirms, expands, harms, regulates, warps, blesses, sanctions; like the body, language is wielded, not controlled. The pain passes and I don’t stop writing. If I revise, research, get more feedback, read another book, maybe I’ll get it right: sobresaliente. I just don’t know what “right” means. Or rather, the definition keeps shifting. To reverse-engineer a narrative around an experience that lives at the end of language feels like catching mist; I am tattered and embryonic at once. 

Winter ends.

Now, I’m 99 days out.

It’s spring. 

I look up the symbolism of 99. 

Google tells me I’ve completed one cycle and begun anew.

I should “trust” myself and “embrace a major life transition.”

I look up the symbolism of my missing parts. 

Appendix: uselessness, resilience. 

Gallbladder: courage, judgment. 

Spleen: melancholy, fear. 

Breasts: nourishment. 

 “Something I’ve noticed,” says Liam: “when we hug our hearts feel closer.”

I had an idea of euphoria, loud, bang, ecstatic.

But when I read about the word’s origin, I learn it comes from Greek: Euphoros.

Eu: well or easily.

Pherein: to bear.

To bear well. 

Around the eighteenth century, “euphoria” surfaces in medical contexts. A patient may experience euphoria after acute periods of illness, treatment, suffering. This euphoria exists not outside pain, but within its endurance. A sentence from my post-op report: “The patient tolerated the procedure well.” Meaning: Even unconscious I was euphoric; my body metabolized its expansion. Euphoria can be as quiet as collagen fibers, synthesizing. 

“I said to the sun

“Tell me about the big bang,” writes Andrea Gibson.

“The sun said

it hurts to become.”

Today feels like the first hot day in forever.

I walk 15,000 steps down the coast past the harbor, boats, and seals.

I sit in the shade.

I open Instagram.

I assemble a carousel of images: wet dough dotted with pools of oil; leaves of mint crystallized in ice cubes; Liam carving our initials in the sand; me, shirtless, stunning chest turned toward ocean. Days ago I put my silhouette on my close friends’ stories but now it will live on my grid. The caption: winter decadence. I’m not sure who I’m posting this for.

The performance of self is as strange as the performance of certainty, but sometimes spectacle makes the self concrete. By that I mean: I become aware of how much I love this body as I watch myself want to put it on the internet, like a painting: Look at me. But I feel pressure to resist the arc in which I finally get the surgery and look in the mirror and think: There I am. This may be true, but I’m also as unknown to myself as ever and have zero interest in arrival. I don’t think my authentic self awaits; I don’t think such a self exists. It’s mutable if it does: mycelium, water.

I post my carousel and think about the month ahead: By the time Christmas lights climb the streetlamps, I’ll be long gone from this slice of coast that teems with rain and fog and seals. I’m moving once again and so many tasks await: sorting, bubble-wrapping, packing; all the minutia of taking a life apart. I think about a lecture I went to once, about ruins, how a site’s destruction teaches us as much about its history as its construction. What I abandon—apartments, clothes, books, organs, oceans, concepts, tissue, names—matters as much as what I generate. There is no right way to expand, and I anticipate more destruction. But right now there’s not a cloud in sight.

8 Thought-Provoking Books About Reality TV

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Reality TV has always prompted discourse. From its earliest days, critics have decried it as the downfall of civilization even as viewers tuned in in droves for the interpersonal drama, the competitions, and the bizarrely artificial setups. Decades into the genre’s formation, critics and fans still abound, and we’re still asking the ever-titillating question: How much of what we see is actually real? 

It’s a question that has, in a sense, escaped containment in recent years, where entire media ecosystems may be based on outright lies and propaganda, where mis- and disinformation are spread online both deliberately and not, and where the boundaries between reality TV and social media stardom seem to be eroding. How did we get here? And why are so many of us still lapping it up? 

We—Stevie and Ilana—cemented our friendship in grad school by watching The Bachelor franchise every week, and we began asking each other these and many other questions. For example: Why does the franchise keep casting leads who used to play professional football and have really thick necks? And why oh why don’t these people ask each other basic questions about each other’s political views before deciding to get engaged? What started as a way to turn off our brains for a couple hours increasingly became another place to use our critical thinking skills. We couldn’t help it; there was so much there to dissect. 

Our joint anthology, Here For All the Reasons: Why We Watch The Bachelor, was born out of our conversations surrounding the franchise, as well as the question we kept asking each other—and that we knew other fans, friends and online strangers alike, asked themselves too: “Why are we still watching this?” The result is a polyvocal collection of personal essays sharing the thoughts, opinions, images, theories, and critiques of nearly 30 contributors with the world. It’s the first anthology of its kind—dedicated specifically to a reality TV product’s fandom—and we’re eager for readers to join the conversation. 

The eight books below also engage with reality TV in unique and interesting ways. These authors showed us we’re not alone in thinking reality TV is a genre full of legitimately rich texts that reflect back to us so much of what is wrong with our contemporary social and economic structure, while at the same time giving us glimmers of true human compassion and hope, albeit via extremely imperfect vehicles. Each of these books is thought-provoking and engaging—and proves that whether you love it, hate it, or love to hate it, reality TV is a genre with enough cultural cachet and sticking power to be taken seriously. 

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

In this thorough history of the reality TV genre, New Yorker staff writer Nussbaum begins by contextualizing it with what came before: audience participation shows on the radio like Queen For a Day, which started in 1945 and involved women talking about their financial and emotional hardships in the hopes of winning financial help and whatever items sponsors donated to the show. (Audiences in the US, Nussbaum shows, have long enjoyed schadenfreude-tinged entertainment.) The book also introduces readers to what many consider to be the forerunner of our contemporary understanding of reality TV: An American Family, a 1973 cinéma-vérité project that followed the Louds, a typical middle-class white family, as they went about their seemingly ordinary lives. Except it turned out that audiences found nothing mundane about getting to pruriently peer into another family’s dysfunction. Nussbaum doesn’t stop there, of course—she brings readers all the way up to the present with the making of an American reality TV star president. 

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

GLAAD-award winning journalist—and Here for All the Right Reasons contributor!—Allen’s debut novel (after her first nonfiction book, Real Queer America) is a hell of a hoot. Patricia Wants to Cuddle follows contestants in a Bachelor-like reality TV dating show who are all vying—with varying degrees of sincerity—for the heart of the dull entrepreneur Jeremy Blackstone. Each of the final four contestants will feel familiar to reality TV aficionados. There’s Lilah-May, a Christian influencer; Amanda, a fashion vlogger; Vanessa, a model; and Renee, an HR rep. For the last two weeks of filming, the cast and crew arrive on a small, isolated island in the Pacific Northwest that has a dark history of women hikers disappearing there. As tensions rise among the contestants, and between them and the cutthroat producers, rumblings in the woods begin to threaten not only the show itself but the very lives of its participants. But what if whatever—or whoever—is out there just wants to be loved too? 

Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto by MJ Corey

Even if you’ve never seen a single second of Keeping Up with the Kardashians or their Hulu revival, The Kardashians, you’ve heard of the Kardashian-Jenner family. Whether you’re fascinated or disgusted by them, the fact is that the clan has managed to make themselves relevant and stay that way despite not having any particular talent other than the accrual of fame and money. Then again, in the US, the accrual of fame and money is itself a highly valued kind of talent. MJ Corey, the voice behind the popular @kardashian_kolloquium Instagram account, has written a fascinating deep dive into the Kar-Jenner dynasty, examining how Kim in particular has used the contemporary media landscape to self-mythologize and cement herself as an icon. Kim, Corey argues, has made herself the medium, and her various transformations—through costuming, contouring, and plastic surgery alike—connect her to icons of yore, informing us that she’s as important to the culture as they are. Whether we like it or not, Corey argues, she’s right. 

Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley

In Dream Facades, Morley, managing editor at Dwell, argues that the houses so many reality TV shows take place in and around are crucial to understanding the genre, our relationship to it, and how thoroughly it reflects the woes of the ongoing colonial mindset of US culture. In Selling Sunset, for instance, they point to how so many of the houses being sold have panoramic views of the sprawling and expensive city of Los Angeles, and how this showcases the eventual owners’ positionality—they are literally above the smog, the dirt, the plebs. As for The Bachelor mansion—of particular interest to us, of course—Morley shows us how its Mediterranean Revival style is actually local to nowhere and barely Mediterranean, really; it’s instead a kind of colonial fantasia. We’ve gotta be honest here—we’ve spent years considering reality TV from what we thought was every possible angle . . . but Morley’s book showed us how much we were missing by not taking a deep look at the spaces in which the genre is set.

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

The reality show in Aisling Rawle’s debut novel is like a supercharged version of Big Brother: Amid a vaguely dystopian background, contestants occupy an extremely isolated compound where they have to complete challenges to get even their most basic needs met. Lily, the narrator, wakes up on the compound. She and the other women await the arrival of the men, who are forced to trek across the surrounding desert to arrive at the house and its grounds. Once they arrive, things begin to heat up quickly as they complete group and individual challenges for rewards like a front door, coffee, food, and water. Meanwhile, Lily makes it clear that getting on the show can be a literal lifesaver, a way to achieve status and financial options in the outside world. It’s bleak, but then again, how many people get into reality TV these days for the same reason?

Here for the Wrong Reasons by Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang

In Paulsen and Wang’s debut rom-com, Here for the Wrong Reasons, seemingly straight competitive rodeo rider Krystin signs up for the dating show Hopelessly Devoted with the hopes of, well, becoming hopelessly devoted to its leading man. Lauren, meanwhile, is gay as a three-dollar bill, but she’s closeted to enough people in her life that she’s able to secure a spot on the show, and she plans to get as far as she can in order to grow her influencer brand. Once she gets big enough, she figures, she’ll be able to come out to her audience. When the two women begin to have feelings for each other, they have to reckon with their individual goals outside of the show, and what it might mean to change everything for a chance at a true happily ever after.

True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us by Danielle J. Lindemann

Lindemann (who blurbed our anthology) is a professor of sociology at Lehigh University—and this year a visiting professor at Princeton—and argues that reality TV is worth interrogating because of how it affects us, the viewers. (We heartily agree, obviously!) In her deeply researched book, Lindemann sidesteps the question of how real reality TV is—because, as she points out, it doesn’t really matter when it can teach us how much our own reality is socially constructed—and instead examines the ways reality TV portrays the many intersecting identities of those who appear in them and how those portrayals largely uphold the status quo of contemporary power dynamics. She also explores how concepts like coupledom and family are constructed on reality TV, and shows how conservative ideals are nearly always the foundation for whatever seemingly liberal shenanigans we might witness onscreen. Lay readers, have no fear—while Lindemann may be an academic, this delightful book is geared toward a general audience, not the ivory tower. 

Real Love by Rachel Lindsay

Rachel Lindsay is Bachelor Nation royalty. The first Black Bachelorette, Lindsay is beloved by many in Bachelor Nation for being openly critical of the franchise and its treatment of contestants and leads of color. In her debut novel, Real Love, written with author Alexa Martin, Lindsay explores what might have happened if someone a little bit like her had said no to being on a Bachelor-like dating show. When Maya Johnson turns down the opportunity to go on Real Love and recommends her best friend Delilah instead, she feels good about it. After all, her life is going according to plan. But when Delilah becomes the show’s lead, Maya begins to wonder: Did she make a mistake? Delilah seems so happy and in love, her life entirely transformed. And while Maya might have a great career, she’s beginning to think that her grand plans for a stable, predictable future might not be fulfilling her as she’d always imagined. When her sister comes for a visit, along with a good-looking fellow traveler, Maya discovers that there might yet be some surprises and swoons in store for her too. 

The Delicious Hell of a New Jersey Sex Dungeon

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

Dark Horse Portal

for Deb

Portal is a video game
where you wield a gun that shoots 
holes. One you go into, one you come
out of, each end delicately placed on the wall,
facing one another in Escherian drama.
In this portal, Mommy is a robot,
and the robot puts you through hell. But let's
not talk tech. In life, disparate points
may also be connected. See: leading group fitness
classes back when my body could
hold my bottomless desire for pain; and ten
years later, seated on the floor of a “dungeon”
in a nondescript New Jersey Holiday Inn,
wrapped in the arms of the woman who’s
just lavished bruises upon my ass and thighs.
But Nat, you're burying the lede.
This poem is really about “Dark Horse,” Katy
Perry’s 2013 “witchy and dark” pop hit, the video
where she, uh . . . pretends to be Egyptian?
Yeah, that song. The one to which I pushed eager
bodies into cardio panic long ago.
It was an up-tempo remix, to be clear on this.
When I taught that track, I thought I would die. 
Not dying was my fantasy of resistance: in
discipline, I'd avoid coming to harm.
And yet—long since harmed—it’s 2025 and I hear 
“Dark Horse” in the dungeon, where someone's getting 
fucked near a portable speaker. It's the 
slower radio version, but the song is the same: 
near-blackout gasping, ankles shot, shorts damp 
with piss from tuck jumps, alive in the hell
I once gave myself. And now I’m living in delicious
hell gifted to me by someone else. 
This is not a game: I want
you to hurt me. Tell me I'm good, yes, 
a good little boy—no robot. Let me be abased by
longing. And when “Dark Horse” plays again, take me
back through the hole. Be the one 
who makes me feel it.

The Ninety-Two Dollar Snail

for Brigitte

Standing in a gift shop you tell me the cost
of the snail in U.S. dollars instead 
of Canadian, arguing it’s less than initially supposed.
The purchase may be worth it—and yet
this all feels like too much
desire. When I say that, what do you see?
Maybe the Nova Scotian 
cafe we dined in days before, where I did agree 
to buy a grab bag of “treasure” and unpack 
its broken contents. The reveal: a chipped mug 
holding rainwater bracing 
as the maritime air 
       I thought at first too cold
too cold to feel is how I’ve felt for so long, after all
I thought I’d forever be an icy geometry 
who releases light refracted ’til it hides its hungry
source in clever ways.
Yet on this northern soil, studied designs
demand we cut up the rules of previous prototypes,
collage out something else: sunrise over
Prince Edward Island, puddles following
       a brief storm. And muses:
one who wears the perfect feather earrings. Another 
bearing throttled passion whose tunes I recognize. 
If I had to describe it, I’d say my life’s been
a solo journaling game where I struggle to record
hurt before its bittersweet splendor is sacrificed 
on the altar of new distractions—
in this case, a felted snail who undermines all rationality
by being too sweet, too 
soft, and though I’ve desired 
such transport before, this is the first time you
have stood by my side in view of the object in question
saying yes
there is a cost and I appreciate that it’s high
but also I understand why 
you want this and I think
              		   you can have it. You 
   		      		         can have it.

Writing Is a Way to Have Futurity

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Being a student of Monica Ferrell’s was a singularly influential time in my life. Immediately upon meeting her, I wanted to be like her: to enter a room with the same serious allure, the same unassuming self-possession. And when I first read her poems—fierce, sophisticated, sensual in every sense of the word—I didn’t want to write poems like them; I wanted to have written them myself. 

Now, instead of envy, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for her new book, The Future, which continues to teach me how we can maintain an urbane, old-soul sensibility in the mundane horror of the new world order. The poems strike the most inevitable and surprising balance among the myths and archetypes from the past, the technological artifacts of the present, and the signs of mortality and rebirth always on the horizon.

Monica and I met to talk about The Future: its influences, its anxieties, and ultimately, its optimism.

Zachary Pace: Both You Darling Thing, your second book of poems, and The Future contain so much of the modern world, where your first book of poems, Beasts for the Chase, takes me back to less technological times. For example, the computer appears in a few poems of The Future. Has your writing process changed at all now that computers are such a central part of daily life?

Monica Ferrell: I wrote a lot of the first book by hand, in notebooks, and would transfer poems over to the computer, but by the time of writing the last poems in that book, I was typing directly into the computer. The second book was definitely written into the computer, but if I had writer’s block, I’d try experiments like writing on a typewriter. The Future was also written at the computer, and I felt a one-to-one relationship with the screen as opposed to the pen or notebook.

I’m also writing fiction, and in the last two years, I’ve gone completely longhand. For one thing, it’s too easy to move text around on the computer; I feel like I’m just rearranging chairs most of the time. When I’m writing a piece of fiction longhand, I feel like I have a single thread that I’m spinning through the pages. I feel continuity and forward motion.

When I open the computer now, as opposed to when I was a student, my main associations are bad news, work emails, or internet shopping. These things take me so far away from the sacred space of writing, that’s also why I’ve turned to writing fiction by hand. But the poems are still written on the computer, mainly because it’s so easy to move around the line breaks that way, and to change the stanza shape. Formal plasticity. Formal changes can be made instantly.

A lot of poets say that a first book is the invention of the self—inventing the myth of the self. My first book was made out of everything that I read as a child—stories that spun the thread of who I was making myself to be, those cultural artifacts that we cleave to as young people and derive a self out of. Some of the poems were inspired by travel. I was living in Brooklyn, but I don’t think much of Brooklyn is in there. My second book was more real-worldly, but the scenes are centered in romance, with some recognizable places: St. Petersburg in Russia, for example. I think of the second book in an urban setting. People are meeting each other in places of contemporary reality.

ZP: This new book is rooted firmly in a rural setting. How did moving to a new place change your writing?

A lot of poets say that a first book is the invention of the self—inventing the myth of the self.

MF: The Future contains so much Vermont. It’s on the first page: “Monica, you live in Vermont: / There are no volcanoes.” The pandemic was one reason for that. We were stuck at home for three good years there. The most exciting thing was planning dinner or having a package delivered, instead of the primary experiential quality of our lives being relational with others in a broad scope. During the pandemic, we also moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. I’m thinking of a line in a novel by a friend of mine: “In New York City, it’s easy to mistake the city’s bustle as your own.” It’s easy to get swept up in the great flows of financial capital and feel like you’re a part of it. In Vermont, that flow feels far away. The house you’re living in doesn’t touch other people’s houses. The silence is different. The month of March is different. A few of the poems are set in March. You hardly notice March in the city because of all the lights. In Vermont, there’s not a lot of bustle. The drama and the movement have to come from you.

The Future also has a lot to do with having kids, and being responsible for their reality. Nothing gets made unless I make it. These constitutive elements of their reality, which probably seem so firm to them—a toy chest, for example—only got there because somebody chose it. Having to provide a built environment for people who rely upon it is a big part of The Future.

ZP: “The future” itself is most tangible in the experience of having a child, in creating a life that extends beyond your lifetime. I was so moved by “The Life of Mary,” in how it imagines not only Mary, mother of Christ, but the mother of Mary, Saint Anne, who created a future that created the future that is the bedrock of our history.

MF: I applied for a grant to go to Munich because I wanted to see where Rilke was when he wrote his collection Life of the Virgin Mary, or Das Marien-Leben. While I was in Munich, I went to the Alte Pinakothek and found a room devoted to the Meister des Marienlebens, “Master of the Life of Mary,” where I saw a cycle of paintings with the same title as the Rilke cycle. It’s very clear to me that he was inspired by these paintings. But he hid his traces, because he never mentions this painting cycle. Actually, many years later, in his letters, he said he was thinking about Titian. I think he was trying to obfuscate the fact that he was heavily indebted to these paintings that had the exact same title. For my “Life of Mary,” I decided to go back to the source text, the paintings in Munich, and write one-to-one ekphrastic poems from those canvases.

The poem wound up thinking about my own experience of giving birth. I got out some of my resentments about how the mother and even the father are left behind in the sacralization of and wonderment around the baby. Over the course of the sections, the poem moves away from Jesus to see that every birth is a miracle. It’s really so crazy how we come from other people. Leaving aside Jesus, I was also thinking about the mother of John the Baptist—what it is to raise a child who will have his head cut off. All the children we raise . . . many of them will die horrifically, or struggle with schizophrenia, or perpetuate violence against somebody else. They’ve left your hands. Still, we keep spinning on into the future, with no idea how they’ll braid into the tapestry we weave together.

ZP: One of my “subway takes” is that misogyny has everything to do with the paranoid, phobic, and even envious response that male-bodied people have to the life-giving power of a woman’s body.

MF: I 100 percent agree. So many of the mythologies around the world are trying to wrest this power and accomplishment from women in order to reframe it as negative. I’ve always been so interested in prehistoric people, and they are a big focus of this book. Prehistoric art is overwhelmingly preoccupied by fertility and its crazy power.

ZP: In a few poems, when the speaker imagines the future, I sense a wistfulness around the language that the children will have to invent for things we don’t even know about yet.

I hate supermarkets. They super-depress me.

MF: In my “Duino Elegies,” I’m thinking about everything invented in the past—guns, woodwinds, all the random crap in the world—and how the child starts out with no language but will go on to invent names for all the things that will be invented in the future. And at the end of the poem “Subclinical”—“To greet this revelation of a future / With those new names it will need”—I’m thinking of a dystopian future, and how the child will have to invent new words for the horrors of climate catastrophe; these will be part of the child’s lingo, but we don’t know what they are yet. In the “Cosmos” poem, I give language to my children: “By filling their mouths with the whole jar of marbles: / English words in mincing syntax.” 

To see a child start out with no language, and to explain every idiom or cultural artifact—even answering a question like, “What is an advertisement?” Well, an advertisement is used to sell someone something they don’t need. “Why would anyone do that?” Because people are greedy—to explain every word, you’re unveiling part of the cultural complex. It’s not as simple as giving a dictionary definition. I also don’t want to be too over-determining. I want to give the space for my children to reach their own conclusions. 

You asked about wistfulness. That comes from an awareness of my mortality. I just turned 50. Like many young people, I once thought death was glamorous, reading Sylvia Plath and Thomas James. Now, among my peers and friends, we keep seeing people of our generation with their lives cut short. My dear friend Paul La Farge died of brain cancer at age 52. So, I’ve been grappling with this topic. 

ZP: The speaker is put in touch with mortality in a profound way in the two poems that take place in a supermarket: “At the Stop & Shop” and “At the Price Chopper.”

MF: I hate supermarkets. They super-depress me. As a single person in New York, I could get by for a long time on very little in the way of food. But now . . . when we moved to Vermont during the pandemic, we’d go on one stock-up trip for the whole week. It was a horrible enterprise. 

But in a rural place, especially in winter, it’s one of the only places you see anyone. It’s like the town square. It’s where you get to know who you’re living with. And in those poems, I’m thinking about where we are in relation to our ancient ancestors. Going to the supermarket to buy a jar of hot honey is so absurd compared to the life-and-death, communal quality of having to hunt the mammoth together and break down its body into parts. The animals that they were hunting became totems in their religious culture, so it was meaningful to their spiritual life, how they were feeding themselves. Now . . . there’s just so much plastic. You can’t go to the market without encountering plastic. The poems are a way for me to think about how I’m poisoning myself and everyone around me, even as I’m trying to nourish them. In the same way, the grocery store is a very intimate space, you’re standing at the conveyor belt watching a stranger’s Styrofoam tray go by with its cold chicken breast—that’s going to be part of his body pretty soon.

ZP: On the flip side of this communal feeling, I’m remembering the encounter in “You Can Fold Me,” when the speaker is belittled at a voting booth while the children are having a tantrum and responds: “Fuck you // I invented the future / What the hell is it // You do you think / You’re so big?”

MF: That really did happen, at a voting booth; a man cut in front of me in a queue of voters and said that I seemed to be too occupied. And it was already such a challenge for me to be standing there with my baby carriage and squirming little kid. I didn’t actually say “fuck you.” But the idea of having invented the future came out of feeling like to him my vote didn’t count or that I had less of a say because I had my two kids there, when in fact, I should probably have three votes. 

We nourish ourselves on the words of others. Their writing enters your bloodstream.

Part of why I didn’t originally think I would have kids is because I wanted to give more of myself to writing. This is often a question for a female writer. And historically, there’s been a cultural bias against “domestic” subjects. Poets wouldn’t write a single word about cleaning the floors or tidying the house. It meant that you weren’t a serious writer, that your mind had been corrupted by the mundane. That’s why I laugh to myself about a poem like “At the Price Chopper”—why not put Alexander the Great alongside an Alas-poor-Yorick moment about my late father, all while the speaker is out looking at some Granny Smiths in the grocery store.

ZP: I think that has to do with how, historically, many writers were wealthy and had staff or spouses to do that work. I think it’s beautiful how the diurnal stuff comes into poems because we have to do it ourselves.

MF: Agreed, class is such a big part of it too: people thinking, “This is beneath me; let some other class of person handle it.” That need to categorize—this type of work is for women, this is work for lower-class citizens, this is work for people of color—that kind of societal hierarchical thinking is absolutely reflected in what shows up in the literature. And then if the domestic sphere becomes subject matter only for women, the working class, and people of color, that’s part of the machinery of how these groups of people can get dismissed as writers. 

ZP: Literature is another one of the most tangible forms of the future, in this book and in your work at large. But in your “Duino Elegies,” the speaker says, “Every word of writing is a form of goodbye.” What do you think of that paradox?

MF: Writing is one way to have futurity. We nourish ourselves on the words of others. Their writing enters your bloodstream. And when I finished writing my first book, I thought, I can die now, because part of me is going into the future. My words will be part of the circulation, the discourse, and these words will keep getting inflected with other people’s associations. We become part of an inheritance—the cultural legacy. I’m thinking of something a professor once said: Even if you’ve never read Dante’s Inferno, you know Dante’s Inferno because it’s a part of cities; it’s a part of how we think about organizations of space. The interpenetration of literature and nonliterary realms is so intense.

I’m also interested in chemical traces and what happens to our bodies after we die. If I can somehow manage being left outside as a corpse, I will do it, because I want to put the magnesium and other elements back into the earth and have them reform into other things. The words we create are like that. And it’s not just literature, it’s being part of each other’s dreams. I’m going to go on remembering my dead friends. They are a constituent part of my present experience that goes into what I pass on as well. And that’s pretty joyful. As much as the book has to do with mortality, it has a joyful element: looking around and saying, hey, if I die, it’s okay, because others are carrying on—yes, the children, but so many other things I’ve entered into, just as I have been entered into too.

7 Novels About Dysfunctional (But Charming) Families

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Families, whether given or chosen, are chimeric creatures. They’re difficult to describe in full, laden with temperaments, textures, and histories. I can’t recall the last time I spoke to someone who described their family as anything other than dysfunctional. 

Of course, perspective matters. The story of a family is dictated by whomever undertakes the task of explaining why their family is like that. Depending on who’s asked among my own relatives, my Great-Aunt Cindy is either a heretic or a saint (though we all agree she should stop picking fights online). Even when the Great-Aunt Cindys of our worlds are on their best behavior, other characters emerge with their own brand of trouble, which we—often to our chagrin, sometimes to our delight—must help sort out. 

For me, the best family portraits in fiction strike this balance: chaos outpaced by deep-rooted love. Love so big that words must stretch to contain all its particularities. There is sadness and grief because there are always those things, but it’s the love in these novels I remember, and that I hope other readers go looking for.

Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

You are Candelaria, an 86-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living in Boston. You are making tortillas on Christmas Eve when your daughter Lucia calls: Candy, the youngest of your three granddaughters, is in trouble again. But she is not the only one. Your boyfriend Mauricio soon returns home smelling of nothing, a harbinger of the apocalypse to come. You stab him in the gut with your kitchen knife, and the earth begins to tremble. This is the opening scene that launches a romp of a novel, one that follows three generations of women—Candelaria, Lucia, and her daughters, Paola, Bianca, and Candy. Narrated in alternating second-person (Candelaria) and third-person (the granddaughters) perspectives, they grapple with a multitude of crises. Addiction and intergenerational trauma and Latinidad, but also, zombies, a fertility cult, cannibals, and the most persistent of horrors: men. Together, these women endure it all, laughing maniacally along the way. 

Worry by Alexandra Tanner

After surviving a suicide attempt, Poppy moves in with her older sister and Worry’s narrator, Jules, a post-MFA writer surviving in Brooklyn through a patchwork of unfulfilling remote jobs. The arrangement is meant to be temporary while Poppy finds her footing in New York and works through her severe anxiety. Instead, Poppy stays. She adopts a three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar who destroys most everything. Meanwhile Jules loses her job, her humdrum relationship, and all sense of privacy. For comfort, she nosedives into the anti-vaxx vortex of Mormon mommy bloggers, a move paralleled by their toxic mother’s flirtation with pyramid schemes and Jews for Jesus. As the year progresses, Jules and Poppy navigate their claustrophia—physical, emotional—and an ever-growing capitalist hellscape. It’s a wry, funny tailspin that captures the madness specific to sisters. 

Leave Your Mess At Home by Tolani Akinola

This debut novel follows four Nigerian-American siblings living in Chicago: Sola, Anjola, Ola, and Karen Longe. Their family relationship is strained due, in large part, to their mother, Latifat, and the pressures and/or leniencies she places on each of them (though their father’s passive tendencies don’t help). The resulting dynamic is—to invoke another popular diagnosis for families—messy. So messy, so heartwrenching, and so funny. Combined, these elements make their siblinghood incredibly vivid. As the novel rotates between the siblings’ perspectives, Akinola reveals layered histories and suppressed secrets that build to an explosive climax at Thanksgiving. The unfolding crisis forces the family into reflection. Some go willingly, while others resist accountability altogether. In the end, the siblings must decide for themselves which relationships are worth fighting for and which are better let go. 

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

From his front porch across the Penobscot river, Charles Lamosway has watched his daughter, Elisabeth, grow up. She is oblivious to their connection. As far as she knows, her father is Roger, the man who raised her. This arrangement was predicated by Charles and Elisabeth’s mother, Mary, to ensure Elisabeth would be raised as a citizen of the Penobscot Nation. If her true parentage were known, she would not meet the tribe’s blood quantum requirement. Charles understands the gravity of this choice, having been raised on the Penobscot reservation for most of his young life by his mother and late stepfather, Frederick. When Charles became a legal adult, he was forced to move across the river, yet his connection to the Penobscot Nation endured. After Frederick’s passing, this connection frayed; when he discovers Elisabeth may have disappeared, it threatens to snap entirely. The fear of losing her spurs him into action, kicking up stones that might be better left unturned. The novel asks us to consider if there is more to belonging than blood, and seems to give its own answer: yes. 

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Another tender novel featuring stepfamilies. Zambra is heralded as a writers’ writer; he is interested in writers and writing as subjects of narrative exploration. Chilean Poet fits this paradigm. Set in Santiago, a city of poets, the novel opens with Gonzalo and Carla, the former a fledgling poet, as randy teenaged lovers. They part ways, as teenagers are wont to do, and meet again at a gay bar nine years later. Clothes come off, and Gonzalo notices that Carla bears a curious new scar. Since they last met, she’s had a son, Vicente, now six years old. Slowly, they become a family. Seeing the bond between Vicente and Gonzalo grow—negotiating their new roles as surrogate parent and child, Gonzalo imparting his love of poetry to Vicente—is my favorite part of this novel. Their dynamic is kaleidoscopic: warmhearted, awkward, funny, full of care. 

Then, there is a turn. This is Zambra, after all, who delights in chicanery, and poetry is the backdrop. Naturally, a volta is required: Betrayal upends the new family’s happiness, breaking them apart. Readers are left wondering how and if Vicente and Gonzalo will find their way back to one another. Luckily, it’s a joy to find out. 

Three Parties by Ziyad Saadi

Firas Dareer is turning twenty-three. The stakes for this particular birthday have been upped: in addition to throwing a blowout bash, Firas will use this day to come out to his entire social circle, including his conservative Muslim parents. The Dareers are Palestinian refugees; they fled Gaza for Detroit after Firas’s grandmother was shot by an Israeli occupation soldier during the Second Intifada. Coming out means risking his family and his only tether to home. Despite a painstaking itinerary, disruptions abound that threaten to implode his special day: his cantankerous Jido, escaped from the nursing home; Maysa, the Dareers’ housekeeper, who constantly meddles with his decor and once caught him blowing another boy at a party; a brigade of neighbors, friends, and secret lovers; his evasive sister, Suhad, and his youngest brother, Mazen, who preoccupies the family’s collective imagination, having recently survived a suicide attempt. As the day unravels, Firas’s party snowballs into much more than a tragicomic birthday celebration; it becomes—without spoiling too much—a sort of homecoming. 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

For some friends, I am the only writer they know, which generally means I am also the only reader they know. That means I’m called upon as Book Recommender often, and Girl, Woman, Other is one of my staple suggestions. It’s an immersive book with equal parts seriousness and levity. There is something for everyone here. A novel-in-stories, it offers a window into the lives of 12 Black British women, ages spanning from their teens to well into their nineties. Though not all of the main cast meet on the page, they are almost all interconnected in some way—as mothers, daughters, aunts, mentors, friends, lovers. (For the curious, search engine results will reveal maps hand-drawn by readers who’ve gone through the trouble of sorting all the links.) The novel tackles several thorny topics through an intersectional lens: feminism, immigration, racism, sexuality, class, and gender identity, though these hardly scratch the surface. But the characters are not always victims. In an interview about the novel, Evaristo explained that the inclusion of “Other” in the title refers, yes, to how they’re othered by society, but also sometimes by one another. For me, this book encapsulates the full meaning of family, because it includes community as part of its working definition.

A Novel That Refuses the Korean War’s Erasure

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Eve J. Chung’s sophomore novel, The Young Will Remember, turns its gaze to a lesser-known corner of twentieth-century history—the Korean War and its aftershocks. At its center is Ellie, an American journalist whose plane crashes in enemy territory. She’s rescued by Emma, a North Korean woman searching for her daughter who was taken years earlier by the Japanese occupation forces to serve in “comfort stations.” From this meeting unfolds a story of two women bound by survival, silence, and the stories that war leaves untold.

Readers expecting a conventional World War II narrative will find something more searching here. Chung’s novel is about the “Forgotten War” and threads together the personal and political—the human cost of conflict, the burden of inherited history, and the question of who pays the true price of war. Her writing dwells on the mothers and daughters whose lives have been shaped, and sometimes erased, by forces larger than themselves.

Chung’s debut, Daughters of Shandong, was intimate and propulsive, and The Young Will Remember expands her canvas, offering history as backdrop while inviting immersion into what it must have been like.

When I spoke with Chung over e-mail, we discussed what it means to write about the atrocities of war without replicating their violence on the page, the challenge of portraying ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure, and the responsibility artists carry when turning collective trauma into narrative.

Cherry Lou Sy: As I read the novel, I was constantly aware of Ellie’s racial and ethnic background as a Taiwanese American woman moving through spaces we don’t often imagine Asian Americans occupying—particularly war reporting in that era. I found myself checking my own assumptions about visibility and belonging. Did questions of plausibility or historical erasure shape how you imagined Ellie’s movement through the world? Were there moments where you felt you were writing against the archive?

Eve J. Chung: It was important for me to write an American war story with a main character who is a woman, and specifically, an Asian American woman. As someone who studies war and history, I’ve generally found it difficult to find media about the 1940s and 1950s that address how BIPOC Americans might have experienced WWII, and the Cold War after that. Ellie’s Taiwanese American heritage is crucial to this story, because she is able to blend in somewhat in North Korea, and speak both Japanese and Chinese as a result of Taiwan’s colonial history. Thus, Ellie can communicate with some Koreans and some of the Chinese soldiers. 

In order to write Ellie, I had to combine research, because Ellie, as a BIPOC woman, faces at least two different forms of discrimination. For this, I relied on Maggie Higgins’s books, which detailed the difficulties she faced as a woman journalist during the Korean War, and also biographies of Hazel Ying Lee, which described how “orientals” were banned from many establishments. Segregation was still legal during the Korean War, but the Korean War was the first war with integrated troops. However, integration in the military was difficult to enforce—despite the presidential order, commanders in the field still insisted on segregating their troops. This background would be important for someone like Ellie, who is fully aware that different types of Americans receive different treatment from their government. Most notably, the Korean War takes place only four years after the Japanese internment camps closed, so this is a major fear for Ellie. Today, even though it has been 80 years since those specific camps closed, I still worry about being put in one—and indeed, these camps are already operating right now, for immigrants who are allegedly undocumented, many of whom were taken without due process, so even their status as being undocumented is questionable. It is the present that makes me care so much about learning from the past, and much of my motivation for telling these stories is to fight against the erasure of history.

CS: Alexander Chee has written about the ethical questions writers should ask themselves when writing beyond their own direct experience. What questions did you return to while writing this novel—especially as it moves across cultures, languages, and borders?

My motivation for telling these stories is to fight against the erasure of history.

EJC: Interestingly, my husband, who is half-Korean, read the first draft of my novel, and commented that things would be logistically easier if I made my character a Korean American who could speak Korean. I did not want to write as a Korean American [main character], because a Korean American would have a significantly different inner thought process during this war than a Chinese American. In the US, there is a tendency to lump East Asians together, and while there are certainly overarching cultural similarities, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese people have important distinctions, especially when it comes to geopolitics. Perhaps because I myself am of Chinese descent, I was particularly interested in the interactions between the US and the Chinese soldiers and the rising rivalry between the countries that continues to this day. For background, I was an international relations major, with a masters in international criminal law, and I currently work in international human rights. The perspective that I wanted to write from, and what I had more to say about, was that of someone who is ethnic Chinese, in an era in which American and Chinese relations were so bad that they were physically in combat, and General MacArthur was pushing to drop nuclear bombs on Manchuria. Like Ellie, I have at times found myself torn between being proud of my American identity and my Chinese heritage, but also able to see some of our global conflicts through a different lens because of that duality—and sometimes, I am deeply ashamed of the violence that my government is perpetuating abroad. 

Writing as Ellie felt natural to me, but there were other challenges. Though Ellie herself is not Korean, the setting was in Korea, and I had many Korean characters, so I wanted to be able to portray them accurately. I do have many Korean friends and extended family members (though most of them are either Korean Americans, or Koreans who immigrated to the US decades ago), so I interviewed my mother-in-law about her childhood in Seoul, and also asked other friends about their parents’ experiences during the war, and did additional research about refugees and survivors, not just from the Korean War but also from World War II and the Japanese Colonial period. I had Korean friends, including fellow authors, who were kind enough to beta read my drafts, and I also had a Korean linguist, who I found via my mother-in-law, check as well. Despite having tried my best, I am sure that there will be things that I got wrong—but I hope that they are minor, and that readers will know that it certainly wasn’t from lack of care or effort! 

There is the added complication of time, since culture in the 1950s is also different from what it is now—though I didn’t feel obligated to make my characters conform to gender or social norms, because they, like most women’s human rights defenders, purposefully defied the standards around them. Still, I asked myself how each woman might consider her juxtaposition with the rest of society. I wanted to ensure there were references to how difficult it was for them to break the conventions that they did, and how irritating or daunting it might have been for them to constantly defend their decisions. 

CS: I was struck by how multilingualism functions almost as a form of mobility in the book—Ellie’s ability to move, blend, and survive is tied to language. How did your understanding of the formation of the 38th Parallel and the emergence of modern nation-states shape the way characters encounter one another across linguistic and cultural lines?

EJC: I love languages—I’ve loved learning them, and have noticed how being able to speak certain languages has opened opportunities and friendships for me. For context, I am conversationally fluent in Spanish, French, and Mandarin, but also studied Japanese and Korean. Just as Ellie manages to get her posting as a foreign correspondent because she is trilingual, I’ve also been hired for certain jobs because of my language skills. In the human rights field, as with the journalism field, gathering information depends on being able to converse with the right people, whether those are witnesses, government officials, or partners. Speaking through an interpreter works, but it is different when you are able to connect with a person directly. Through her language skills though, Ellie is able to connect with some Koreans, and some Chinese soldiers. 

However, just as language connects us, we also see, from various colonies around the world, how language is also a tool for dominance and erasure. I was conscious of this while writing this story. From interviews, I understood that older Koreans who grew up under colonial rule hated having to speak Japanese—so Ellie also couldn’t randomly strike up conversations in Japanese either with the average Korean at the time. Pastor Pak ends up being someone she can speak to safely because he too has such a varied linguistic background. Through Pastor Pak and Ellie, I also hoped to show how learning another language does also open one’s mind to other people, and other ways of thinking. 

I consider divisions such as nationality and religion to be arbitrary.

CS: Imo’s character stayed with me, particularly as the novel reveals the moral cost behind her comfort and stability. Reading her made me think about how nationalism can both protect and obscure—especially when viewed from our current, globalized moment. How did you think about patriotism and complicity while writing her? Did your understanding of “our country” shift as the book took shape?

EJC: I think I wrote this story as a response to my understanding of “our country.” There are several conversations in this book that are meant for the diaspora reader. For example, Ellie’s conversations with Pastor Pak about those who stay to fight, versus those who run from war. I am the granddaughter of refugees, so my family fled war. There is, in many contexts, a tension resulting from that decision, and resulting loyalties and affiliations are also personal to the individual. 

I consider divisions such as nationality and religion to be arbitrary. Often, we choose a particular religion because it is what we grew up with, and yet, so many wars are fought along national and/or religious divides. Imo is a character who is willing to reject her own privilege when she understands that it comes with a tremendous cost to others around her—a decision that arises from seeing the common humanity between people, versus whatever categories that we choose to divide ourselves with. This is a quality that is not necessarily uncommon, but unusual enough that her actions stand out. In many countries, criticizing one’s government for human rights issues is considered unpatriotic. I try to emphasize that true patriotism is holding your country to standards, and trying to make life better for everyone in the country. This being said, my concept of “country” and citizenship are very fluid, because my grandparents, parents, and I were all born in different countries, and the same for my husband, so our children are a mix of ethnicities. I don’t know if I would have a different understanding of nationalism had I been born in China, for example. In the book, Ellie too wonders the same thing—how her life might be if her parents hadn’t come to the United States—but then she also later acknowledges that maybe the world would be a better place, with less war, if more people were between worlds, and knew that it is natural to love across those boundaries. 

CS: The novel carries a great deal of historical research, and I know parts of the story are connected to your husband’s family history. Why did this story need to be a novel rather than nonfiction or memoir? What could fiction hold that those forms couldn’t?

EJC: One of the main reasons I wanted to write about the Korean War is because it is a nexus between American, Chinese, and Korean history, which are the cultural influences of my family, and also offered points for me to tie in human rights issues that are important to Taiwanese people as well, namely justice for survivors of WWII military sexual slavery. My husband’s grandfather was a pastor from Pyongyang, and I based many aspects of Pastor Pak’s character on him, but otherwise the stories do not overlap much. My grandfather-in-law fled North Korea because he was concerned about being persecuted for his religion, and was already in the South when the Korean War began. He ended up meeting his wife in a refugee camp, and together they came to the United States. I did end up using snippets of what he told my husband and my mother-in-law, but more for research about how life had been during the war than for the storyline itself. This being said, I know that my husband’s grandfather had been working on a memoir for himself, but nothing ever came of it. Perhaps that will be something that one of his grandchildren (or maybe great-grandchildren) will do!

CS: One of the most powerful moments for me is Ellie’s encounter with Song Yun-Hee while she is living as Lin Yan-Xi—it felt like a kind of haunting, as though identity itself had become spectral. Do you see this kind of transformation and silence as specific to war, or as something shared by many survivors of trauma? Did you always know this would be how their paths crossed?

I hope that people who finish this book might become more committed to opposing war.

EJC: When the idea for this book first formed, I had thought about calling it The Changeling, because of Emma substituting Ellie for her daughter. The message that I wanted to get across can perhaps be best summed up by one of James Baldwin’s famous quotes: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” It ties into the atrocity of mass bombing, which makes it impossible to distinguish between military targets and civilians—and notably, from the US military record, there seemed to be cases in which there wasn’t any effort to do so. Emma, as a name, is a play on “Emma,” and she is indeed meant to be “mother” because I intended for her character to represent motherhood in war. All mothers suffer in war, whether directly from violence, or from the loss of their children. I believe that what some of the leaders of this world have done to mothers is unforgiveable, and this book is the result of my anger at the willingness of men—often old men—to sacrifice young lives for their own legacies, or even just to keep themselves from losing power. I always imagined Ellie and Yun-Hee meeting, and saw the ending of the book early on. Professionally, I have previously worked on the issue of enforced disappearances as a form of torture. This was a type of violation that I wanted to make clear with Emma, and show that not knowing what has happened to a loved one who was taken by the State is indeed a pain amounting to torture. 

CS: What did you learn while writing this novel? And what do you hope readers carry with them after finishing it?

I learned a lot of military history! Before deciding to write this book, I only knew the basics about the Korean war but was ignorant of the scale of damage. Though I had known that Chinese soldiers had fought in Korea, I did not know about the Battle of Chosin—I did not know that at one point, there were more Chinese soldiers than North Korean soldiers in North Korea, or that Mao had been poised to send a million more men across the Yalu River. From a Taiwanese perspective, I had known that the Korean War was essentially what saved Taiwan from invasion. At that point, Mao’s soldiers had been preparing for amphibious assault, but the US crossing the 38th parallel led him to divert those soldiers to the North, where they eventually clashed with UN troops in North Korea. I hope that readers will leave this story with more knowledge about this history, which is relatively forgotten in the US.

I also intended for this book to call attention to the lack of justice for survivors of sexual violence, then and now. Sexual violence remains the most difficult crime to prosecute because it is so normalized in this society—this idea that men will be men, and that certain powerful men never have to apologize. No one should be above the law, and the horror of sexual violence should never be minimized for the convenience of those in charge. 

Lastly, I hope that people who finish this book might become more committed to opposing war. Lately, I find there are leaders who are willing to risk escalation, largely because they and their loved ones will not be at the front lines, and also to use war itself as a justification for holding onto power or saving themselves from prosecution for other crimes. It is always ordinary people who suffer more during armed conflict. In this sense, protecting our democracy is intimately tied with the prevention of war, because we must be able to hold our leaders accountable when they fail us.

A New Mother Hungry for the World on Her Plate

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“Oh No” by Adrienne Celt

Longtime readers of this column will be unsurprised to hear that the first quality I look for in a restaurant is not that restaurant’s willingness to accommodate an infant in arms. Such an attribute is not, after all, the marker of elegance, excellence, taste, or invention, all of which my devoted readers will recognize as my areas of primary interest. I believe that food and eating can be artful—indeed, can be art—and it is with this belief in mind that I approach each of my reviews. Families of course deserve helpful criticism of child-friendly establishments, but such readers more fruitfully seek guidance elsewhere. So has it always been.

But my friends, sometimes life finds a critic with no babysitter and a looming deadline, and in such cases the critic is grateful to be able to keep her reservation.

I entered Au Naturel on a night of constant drizzle, ducking in from the wet street to a womb-like space lit only with vintage lamps on an eclectic series of tables. Au Naturel—or Oh No as many have come to call it—uses their scant square footage to maximum advantage, with a variety of seating areas, including an archipelago of two-tops skidding off the bar and a single long table running riverine down the hallway. The atmosphere is meant to be cheeky and fluid, but still I was uncertain whether the other diners would appreciate my unannounced guest: a three-month old baby asleep in his car seat. This being my first assignment since his birth, I was not intending to bring him along, but circumstances conspired to find my husband out of town and my sitter canceling at the last minute, leaving me with no alternative than to pack up my small, slumbering companion. Incidentally, I appreciate the well-wishes we have received and am happy to say we are all in great health.

The host approached the baby’s makeshift cradle with a look of trepidation, and like any new parent, I held back a wince. There was a pause, in which the host regarded Nigel with curiosity and incomprehension, a failure of categorization and context I too well understood. But then he smiled. 

While certain diners will not take it as a positive sign that the restaurant moved so quickly to make space for Nigel, perhaps they’ll rest easier knowing that I was seated at a booth in the very back corner, in a small enclave near the kitchen door. The table afforded me privacy for nursing or distracting the baby, and kept any noise away from the other patrons. Neither the host nor my waiter raised so much as an eyebrow in complaint. Although I never make reservations under my own name, I can’t rule out the idea that they recognized me and acted generously as a result of my position, but no matter the reason, the swift decency with which my needs as a mother were met frankly brought tears to my eyes. It had been a cold, anxious cab ride to the restaurant, and I will not soon forget the warmth that swept me to my high-backed booth. 

Nonetheless, I endeavored not to let this color my views of the food.

Oh No, a joint venture of chef John Scott and the naturalist Laura Ashbury, is an evolving concept. The menu rarely repeats an item from one night to the next, though certain famous dishes appear just frequently enough for eager diners to seek out multiple bookings in pursuit of a specific experience. Both the fluctuation and the repetition are by design. As I scarcely need tell you, my devoted readers, Oh No seeks to replicate, through its food, the experience of existing in the natural world. That doesn’t mean anything so mundane as farm-to-table feasts: for a large stuck pig with an apple in its maw, please look to the numerous quotidian establishments still chugging away in the fashion of the early twenty-tens. 

Here, the natural world has seasons. The natural world has wind whistling across the surface of a pond. The natural world contains predators and prey in balance with one another. All these must be felt when dining at Au Naturel. This is not me being poetic: the preceding sentences are printed on the restaurant’s nightly menus. 

I was prepared for two possibilities. First, that the food would be high-concept esoteric drivel. A John Cage tone poem squeezed into edible drag. 

Second, that the thinking would be sound, but too physical for my tastes. All flavor and no presentation. Brute force cuts of meat. 

The décor did not do much to set my mind at ease in this regard, because though pleasing, there was little subtlety to its warm wood and fireplace, the low lighting that seemed to hint of your grandmother next door in a rocking chair. Whispering hush. But once I pushed Nigel’s car seat up against the wall and burrowed into my booth, there was no chance I would be leaving before eating every dish placed in front of me. The value of heavy sleep is not to be disregarded by any new parent. Nor is the possibility of looking at that tender place where one’s identity used to sit, and watching with held breath to see whether it might be growing back. 

I never thought I would have a child, to be quite honest. I believed I would pursue the passions of my intellect and creativity, define the tastes of a generation and achieve a greater understanding of flavor’s architecture. I thought I would write columns, win awards, garner power. Insofar as my work involved food, my life involved the human body, but it was never food meant to nourish the body alone that held my interest. 

I thought for many years that to have a child would mean to diminish myself, to debase my own existence beneath the necessity of caring for another person. Not that I thought such care was an unworthy pursuit, it just wasn’t mine. 

But I have been surprised by the level of delight I feel in my son. That his needs in fact overwrite my own at times—the lack of sleep necessitated by his nocturnal infancy, the backaches that I don’t even realize are developing when I cradle him against my chest, the agonizingly precise way he holds my attention for hours on end—does not cheapen my wonder at realizing such a complete specimen was born from my own body. I touch his ribcage beneath his soft chest and think, You are whole. You are mine. Readers, yes: I eat for two. And with every mouthful I am newly aware of why we engage our physical senses. 

Enter Oh No. The buzz around this restaurant built during the months of my pregnancy, and for some time I let it slide beneath my attention, because I knew that to do the place justice I would need to eat without restriction. The menus at Oh No are not printed or released in advance, and a pregnant woman can’t risk being served sea urchin, fresh-cut tuna, or frankly the appropriate amount of wine. A restaurant vaunted for its re-creation of untouched landscapes may realistically be assumed to offer raw foods, including meat. And so I continually implied that Oh No had not yet reached the level of acclaim to merit my regard, while also ensuring that my editors didn’t give the assignment to anyone else. This became trickier once Scott and Ashbury won a James Beard award in my eighth month, but I persevered.  

Now, however, I was prepared. Now was my time. The transition of food into breastmilk may be miraculously direct, but there are still more stopgaps between Point A and Point B than when the child is a part of your body. Furthermore I was hungry for what they were serving: the world on a plate. Hungrier, perhaps, than I had ever been.  

I had booked a late seating by design, as the plan was always that my baby would be asleep during the meal, although he was supposed to be home in his crib, where we had lately transitioned him out of the bassinet. I was ready and eager, excited to return to my work and exercise the loose muscle of my mind. In the three months since Nigel was born, I have read the occasional book, and spent enough time on social media that my colleagues still view me as being “in touch.” But I have not given sustained attention to any project of my own. That my son’s birth has increased the power and poignancy of the ideas I want to communicate does not, unfortunately, contradict the fact that I have less time in which to communicate them.  

Thoughts come to me now, and if I don’t jot them down immediately they dissipate. There is difficulty in holding the thread of a complex and evolving idea—the beginning might be gone before I reach the end. There is a way in which this feels like death, when I compare it to my old life. Of course it’s not: it’s just exhaustion and distraction, both of which can be overcome with time, effort, and a judicious helping hand. But still, I feel it. I had no idea how undistracted I used to be. Even pregnant, in a constant hormonal haze, my mind was relatively clear and focused, and time unfurled in a steady fashion, like ribbon unspooling from a roll. Never before had I experienced entire days vanishing with no trace, no content. When we first got home from the hospital I would lie down in the bed and start to shiver uncontrollably as my body chemistry evened erratically out, breasts throbbing from phantom nursing even when the baby was elsewhere. 

For the first time in my life, food was a necessity, and not a pleasure. We ate peanut butter crackers. Take-out burritos. Meals selected less for their flavor profile than for their ability to be hefted in one hand. My greatest culinary joy was the Baby-Eat-Mommy, Mommy-Eat-Baby game, in which I would nibble on Nigel’s face with the softest of lips and he in turn would bite my cheeks, bite my nose, bite my chin, as hard as he could with his pink wet gums. His mouth ever-abundant and perfectly satisfactory.

Or almost perfect. There was, it turned out, still a part of my brain that remembered other kinds of eating. A yearning, gnawing recollection that I had not always been the one on the plate. 

So I pitched a review. This review, in fact. A visit to the natural world, the expansive world beyond my doorstep. My editor asked if I was really ready to go back to work, and I assured him that I was. 

We are here on Earth to celebrate the experience of being here on Earth: a tautology. But also true. When we dance, when we eat, when we crack open an egg or stir cream into coffee, we are alive with our own vitality, our very being-ness. The energy which tells us how to get up in the morning, and why in god’s name we might reproduce. Because it tastes good. Because it feels good. Because it’s fun.

But being reminded that we are alive necessarily means being reminded of the alternative: death, and more than that, whatever comes after death, in our absence. The lack of self, the lack of everything. The fact you can’t uncrack an egg.

A laudable idea, but in a restaurant, it has to work on the plate.

Oh No was founded in part because John Scott and Laura Ashbury felt the urgency of this emptiness not only on a personal level but also as a kind of global project. It is their aim to use food to remind us of the rich and varied life on the planet—indeed to let us experience the breadth of that life—even as biodiversity is in a freefall of decay. To bring the death drive and the need for survival together into precarious balance. A laudable idea, but in a restaurant, it has to work on the plate. 

On the night of my visit to Oh No, I ordered the tasting menu, which was organized by location—the first few dishes being oceanic, as befits the cradle of all life. You likely know that I am suspicious of style, and how it so often comes at the expense of substance, but a first course is always a doorway, which must be stepped through before judging the room. So, the ocean. I received a glass sphere in which a jellyfish, pureed and reconstituted, was suspended in a foam of seawater. The presentation could be viewed from any angle so you might approach it with the boundless geometry of a fellow sea creature; the foam and the jelly were then to be swallowed in one mouthful which revealed an undertone of brine shrimp, giving one the sensation of being a baleen whale. Giving the impression of the sea, seething around one’s body, rushing through one’s teeth. I found the flavor refreshing, the textures layered, the surprise of the shrimp just enough to make me wonder what else was rushing towards me in the dark. 

The next dish refined the locational specificity of the ocean, with a penguin liver served on a slab of Antarctic ice. Rare and bloody in appearance, the liver had been marinated in something light and citrus-adjacent: ordinarily I would have guessed yuzu, but no such fruit is to be found on the last continent, and I was informed that the flavor comes from a combination of seaweed and lichen, crushed into a red wine reduction. The thickened wine was also poured over the liver as a sauce, spreading across the ice like a murder victim’s blood in a police procedural. All this was served with chilled Aquavit, taken as a shot before swallowing the liver in order to lower one’s body temperature from within. Does this really give one the feeling of being a dismembered penguin? Or perhaps of being the leopard seal who tore the penguin’s liver free? It certainly gave me a chill, so perhaps the true goal is to share the experience of the ice on which the penguin’s blood will freeze, as it floats above the great aquamarine undersea. Perhaps.

At this point I was amused but unconvinced, a posture so familiar I almost wanted to wrap it around me and run out the door. Finishing off the last of the liver, I began composing a review in my head that was pleasant, encouraging, lukewarm. One that asked what I felt were the important questions—namely whether the food at Oh No was actually expressing a complex understanding of various ecosystems, or if it was just a very clever camouflage, a pretty but meaningless onomatopoeia of the tongue. Perhaps before my baby was born, I would have filed that review, in fact, slapping the restaurant on the wrist for stunt cooking, and then moving on with my life. But despite my best intentions of impartiality, I couldn’t stop thinking about the host. How he leaned so kindly over my child, and with a nod of the head, welcomed him into their version of the world. So I stayed.

And since I did, I should mention that the jellyfish was served with a crisp New Zealand white, which, while a bit insipid, dried the palate sufficiently to bring forth the oceanic purity of the dish.

When Nigel was born, I understood for the first time why fairy tales all claim that magic comes at a cost. In pregnancy and childbirth, the cost is visceral, as is the benefit. You definitely get something, and you definitely trade something. 

In the first few weeks of my son’s life I sat in the same position on the couch for hours out of every day, with my feet propped up on a table laden with blankets: our ersatz ottoman. I had never before considered that we ought to have an ottoman at all, that the angle of my knees would ever be static for long enough that it might matter. I used to sit at my desk, twitching around as I wrote; I used to stand at the kitchen counter mincing garlic and wiping it with one finger off the knife. When I lay on the couch, I would spread across it lengthwise, or perch at the edge for conversation, or—forgive me—nestle inwards far enough to create the possibility of sex. I would watch movies. During which I would get up and go to the bathroom, or pour myself a finger of scotch. Never was I so still as I now needed to be with little, wrinkled Nigel, just seven and a half pounds with eyebrow hair so light that it was invisible. He was in all ways so small he seemed on the edge of disappearing. And yet so forceful, so needful. He could not be ignored. I did not sleep more than four hours a night. I felt milk come into my breasts so they ached at the armpit and tingled behind the areola like needles were being pushed out from within. My knees got sore.

Is this the trade? It isn’t. The pain, the exhaustion, is not the thing. You see, in those early weeks I spent hours scrolling through my phone, looking at and liking pictures of my friends on vacation all over the globe. Eating ceviche in Madrid. Lolling on blankets in front of a fireplace in a Vermont cabin. Popping their heads out of the water at an Australian beach, and dredging themselves onto shore for a cold beer and a bag of exotic chips. Each of them somehow managing to be in a place I’d often wanted to go: Japan, walking through a series of red gates by a temple. The Outer Hebrides of Scotland, wrapped in wool. Standing beneath a blue and orange wall in Mexico City, sipping a raspado thick with mango and cream. I thumbed through these photographs with a pathological furor, but the fact is that I did not want to be where they were. I wanted to be exactly where I was, and to know the wide world was still out there.

Meanwhile Nigel slept with his face pressed against my neck, his cheeks fattening in direct conjunction with the growing adroitness of his mouth on my breast. What I had lost was the desire, so potent at every previous point, that my body should be for my use only. I shed the part of me that only cared about my own forward momentum. Though in fact my life’s trajectory felt clearer than ever. He knew how to eat and I knew how to give. I was happy to be still, for a time, because ahead of me lay every day of my and Nigel’s life together, multiple and various and impossible to predict.

I still looked at the photographs, but in the way we peruse our memories of the dead. With a fondness that almost rises to the level of yearning, but must, by its very nature, be released like a puff of smoke.

After water came air.

This being my first step forward back into my existence as a thinking creature, a living mind, I was easily charmed by the simplicity of the menu’s layout. Water. Air. My brain, so recently scooped out, clung to the clarity of shared concepts, as if I might be served a triangle and a circle, floating in the sky, and then be asked to name them. The delight consisting in the fact that I could. 

Naturally Oh No’s food was more complicated than that, but in another way, it wasn’t. I can easily tell you what I ate. The question is, can I tell you why?

The next course began with tiny grasshoppers flash fried and coated in crushed salt and herbs: sage, parsley, chamomile. These were brought to the table and then tossed in a hot metal bowl to pop like corn, and the effect was one of brushing insects away from one’s face in a grassy field in late summer, stepping on small plants with a careless shoe. Or of being that cloud of insects, one among a throng, pinging off one another’s reckless limbs. I watched Nigel twitch in his sleep while I ate; I licked the salt concoction off my fingers, as the atmosphere at Oh No is not especially decorous, and it fit with the overall picnicking sensation of the dish. Stretching on a blanket. Yawning. The pleasures of the flesh.

Following the grasshoppers was perhaps the silliest dish of the night, a light lemon soup evaporated into the form of a cloud and brought to the table in a glass tube to be huffed through a straw. Besides the obvious unintentional nod to smoking cheap dorm room marijuana, this worked better than it had any right to, hitting my tongue like a droplet of water warmed by a yellow sun. I would have preferred to simply eat the soup, if only to see how the chef might have garnished it, but as molecular gastronomy goes, the cloud was quite effective. And they do mean to have an effect.

There are many ways to prepare a meal with natural ingredients, but that isn’t the project of Au Naturel. They don’t care to teach the uninitiated that nopales are made from prickly pear cactuses, or that a flower can be used in a salad for a pop of color and a bit of surprise. They are looking to convey, through food, the way it feels to exist in certain places, certain forms. Each course and plate is transportive in the manner of art, because it appeals not just to the body or mind but to the spirit, in a kind of synthesis or synesthesia. 

They are looking to convey, through food, the way it feels to exist in certain places, certain forms.

Parenthood is this way too. A project of transformation, ready or not. From the moment you become aware of the child in your body, you are imagining their future life, trying to picture the arrangement of their face and who they’ll take after; what they’ll look and smell like, how they’ll sound. It’s all theoretical, but you make choices—endless choices—trying to produce a happier theory. And in the process, a change occurs, not to the child, but to you. 

My question as I ate was this: can a restaurant truly achieve this trembling precipice, simply by complicating the form of a soup? Wherein freedom is achieved through freedom discarded? Individuality junked in favor of collectivity? Self lost to the other? Ashbury and Scott claim that the premise of Oh No is that self is not lost in the other, but widened. And well. This is not a terrible premise. I’m just not sure that it’s theirs.

At this point you might be hoping I’ll get to the point: is Oh No worth the price of admission, or not? So let’s get this out of the way: for a tasting menu with wine pairings you can anticipate paying at least five hundred dollars per person, though the restaurant does not adhere to a specific price point, given the variability of their food. Expect to pay market price, though I have not heard of a single diner’s bill exceeding six hundred and fifty dollars, which included after-dinner cocktails and a small encore plate. 

I didn’t stay that long. 

By the time we wound to the end of Air, the clock had struck twelve and I was beginning to turn into a pumpkin, which is an idiom almost stupidly suited to Oh No’s concept—food, bodies, transmutation—but never mind. In the time honored tradition of the sleep deprived, I was desperate to stay up later, and also determined to finish my review with the greatest possible command of the establishment. I asked the waiter to bring me a cognac to help settle my stomach before the next plate, and he said that in fact it was strange I should request this, since the next dish was brandied. It was, he said, the coup de grâce of the evening, and in fact one of the staff favorite dishes among those who had been lucky enough to try it. He promised to bring me a cognac of his personal recommendation to accompany the food, and then he disappeared behind the bar.

Are you wondering, as I did at this moment—sitting back in my quiet booth and feeling the beginnings of a comfortably full stomach—how a restaurant like Au Naturel acquired a moniker as dour as Oh No? 

There are multiple theories about this. Some people say it’s because the food is skirting the edge of conservation and exploitation: that to acquire a night’s worth of ice from Antarctica specifically to watch it melt is not the same as mourning the loss of the ice shelf or the attendant rise in sea level. Some say it’s due to an early reviewer’s assertion that there’s nothing naturel about the cooking, and others suggest that when John Scott and Laura Ashbury realized they’d talked themselves into opening a restaurant, Oh no is naturally what they exclaimed. 

Any of these stories might contain the truth, and we can never be sure, but this at least was my experience. The waiter brought my snifter of cognac, a very nice ten-year Planat, and then returned with a tray covered with a linen napkin, which he brandished at me until I took it. Beneath the cloth was a dish which contained a thin layer of liquid and a creature I understood, after some scrutinizing, to be a hummingbird prepared in the manner of an ortolan. 

The waiter indicated with one hand at my head. “The cloth,” he said.

If you aren’t familiar, an ortolan is a songbird that is force-fed with savory grain, and then consumed in its entirety after being drowned in Armagnac. Ah, what a way to go, some diners have been known to say, though those who eat these birds also cover their faces with veils—either to treat their sinuses to an infusion of hot liquored steam, or else to hide their shame from God, depending on your interpretation. 

The hummingbird, my waiter explained, had been fed exclusively from honeysuckle and bleeding heart flowers, and kept for the maximum possible time from flying, as the bird’s rapid wingbeats generally expend its caloric intake almost faster than the bird can consume. The bird is given a final meal of sugar water before being plunged in Armagnac, and then boiled alive. It was served to me, at Oh No, as dessert. 

Can you imagine what I whispered next?

I am not an unadventurous eater. If I was, I would fail at my profession. In fact, I would never have sought this profession at all. It is my pleasure to eat whatever is served to me and judge the meal on its aims and merits, outside any Western ethical system which forbids, for example, the consumption of horse or dog or any other such pet. I have eaten and enjoyed shark’s fin soup, and a thousand year egg, and a slice of my own sauteed placenta, which was served to me by my midwife and was nicely seasoned but too tough and gamey for my personal taste. 

The hummingbird was elegant, minuscule; the notion was that I would pick it up with a spoon. And without hesitation, I did. I draped the cloth over my head and hunched over the bowl, and I put that marvelous small thing in my mouth and I bit through its bones to the sweet pocket of liquid within, which exploded on my tongue the way a berry bursts its skin. 

The steam was heady; it cleared my sinuses and replaced my doubts and fears and regrets with a brief sugary high, and the desire for more. 

If I were to eat this every day, I imagined, I would understand what it felt like to hover in the air suspended on currents of warmth and navigate by the vicissitudes of gravitational waves. All at once the entire evening’s menu washed back over me, with similar effect. If only I were to eat the sea, the ice, the summer, the sky, every hour then I would never lose anything I wanted, and the world would never die. Not as long as I lived. 

I wanted to tell the waiter about my revelation—I wanted to tell everyone. For instance, you. But I pulled back the veil across my face, and immediately saw, not God, but Nigel, who had woken quietly and was sitting in his car seat, chewing on his hands. He smiled at me. An enormous smile of welcome and bliss, with which he now greets me every morning because—or so I tell myself, and assume—he has missed me in the night, almost as much as I miss him. And I realized that in my moment of perfect completion, I had forgotten him. I had left him alone.

Magic, I will remind you, comes at a cost. It always does.

After paying my bill I ordered a car and I took Nigel home. The lights were out, and I only turned on the smallest, lowest lamps as I brought my son to his bedroom and settled in to feed him. There was a bottle in the fridge that I had pumped earlier in the day, knowing I would be drinking too much alcohol to nurse him after I ate, but instead of preparing it I lifted my shirt and brought him to my breast, as we both prefer. His eyes briefly opened and considered me, as his mouth pursed around my areola in a perfect embouchure of hunger.

I gave birth to Nigel via caesarean section, my body splayed out on a table and paralyzed below the breasts. The room, cold. My legs immobile, my arms restrained on either side. A knife moving into my flesh and subcutaneous fat; no pain, but a sensation of rocking, pushing, squelch—for which the surgeons used the catchall term “pressure”—as my uterus was pulled out of my torso so the baby could be removed. Then the organ was shoved back in. In any other place or time, all of this—my bright white awareness, my frigid alarm—would have constituted horror. When in fact, it was one of the most beautiful rooms of my life. One of the great moments.

I remember shaking, laughing with the anesthesiologist who was perched at my shoulder. And I remember a hard crash. The anesthesiologist’s look of shock as the blood drained from my head—to somewhere. The bright room getting brighter, like iridescent milk, all the machine sounds suddenly stopping as I felt a heft and a lift. Something leaving my body, but not the baby; something leaving my body and that thing was me. Hovering up and above for just long enough to see the surgeon peel the uterine scrim away from Nigel’s face before I dropped back in with an intake of breath, to the anesthesiologist’s relieved expression. I came back, but I was different. I will never be who I was before. 

Here is my final thought about Au Naturel, which offers excellent value for the money, and has created an atmosphere of comfort and intimacy that is truly conducive to the culinary exploration offered by its kitchen each night. Five stars for cuisine, and ambience, and service; indeed if I could offer more than five stars for service, I would. I remain grateful to the staff who helped me rest my son quietly in the corner, recognizing perhaps that he too is part of this life and this world, and a worthy guest of their establishment. Or perhaps just being kind.

But having experienced at least one small sliver of Oh No’s menu and their thinking, I cannot help but feel the two are irrevocably at odds. The work of a naturalist like Laura Ashbury is to study the various forms of life outside our own and to believe they can be, through our intervention, understood and sustained; while the work of a chef is to make something to eat. Of course there is nothing ignoble about eating: it nurtures body and mind, and has been my life’s work. But thinking and living, thinking and dying, none of these are quite the same.

I listened to Nigel suck and swallow, listened to his satisfied sounds, and occasionally wiped a bubble of milk off his lower lip when the stream came too fast for him to handle. The milk he consumed was mine, was me: to make it, my body liquifies the calcium from my very bones. Given that he eats such a meal every few hours, there is an argument to be made that I too will never die, as the idea of me will live in him, and we will both be thus sustained. 

The evidence does not support it. But what would?