She is the hairiest girl in North America. This is why he sold all his belongings, hitched five rides on five different vehicles with wheels, and arrived at her doorstep with a speech so polished she couldn’t think of a way to say no. She cleared out the corner of her closet that usually housed her striped scarf collection—a perfectly sized nook for the curled-up body of a full-grown man and his loom. He sleeps there, during the few hours of night when she is stillest, but mostly he stands beside her, his fingers poised for collection.
In the morning, she rolls out of bed like a tumbleweed. She crouches in front of her floor-length mirror. He crouches behind her. She sprays down all the hair on her body, then begins to lay it back into place. He opens the front pocket of his button-up coat, which he fills with the hairs that fall as she grooms herself. She uses a brush—the kind for horses—to perfect the aerodynamic look that she has been told “suits her figure well.” When she is done, he scrapes and bends the brush until a flat pancake of hair drops onto his lap. Excited, he adds it to his pocket.
At the coffee shop, he sucks the foam rosetta off the top of her latte. She doesn’t like the texture. He loves the art. She swallows one strand of hair. It curls around her tonsil. Before she can cough it up, he reaches two elegant fingers down her throat, extracts it, shakes off the wetness, and adds it to his pocket.
All day at work and on the bus and between being at work and being on the bus, she plays with her hair. She stretches and twirls the curls growing from her scalp. Scratches at the fuzz on her kneecaps. Twists the strands hanging from her armpit. All day at her work and on the bus and between her being at work and being on the bus, he catches and collects and then arranges the hairs in his pockets. Long hairs for the inseam, thick ones for the waistband, fine for the hem.
In the evening, after she showers, he slips his fingers down the drain to dislodge a clump of hair left behind. He has a tool to reach where his fingers cannot, and he operates it deftly, maneuvering it down the pipe, then activating its pincers. The drain belches then swallows the water formerly trapped by the clump. He meticulously rinses the soap from every strand, before sorting them into the piles next to his loom.
She brushes and blow-dries. He catches. She settles into bed. He collects the hairs that drift into the air as she tosses and turns. When her body finally gives into sleep, he retires to his nook, and takes inventory. Before he rests, he glances up at all the skirts hanging above him. A constellation of inspiration.
They continue like this for months.
Three weeks after he has left her and one day after Easter, she walks to CVS for discounted candy. As she is choosing between peanut butter bunnies and marshmallow eggs, she glances down and sees it. She smiles knowingly and repeats to herself the first words he ever spoke to her: “I am going to be the first man to wear a hair skirt on the cover of Vogue, and I need your help.”
Stem of Thorns
At fourteen, my body grew its disagreement from the inside out. When I had finally convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, a stem of thorns lurched from my belly, shivered when it felt the cool air settle around it, then curled its long arm down my leg and rooted there. My father shrieked and wailed and blamed himself and kicked me out of the house. It’s not because I don’t love you, it’s just that, well, you know, your younger siblings . . . he broke off and got real quiet. Then caved: Steve said it could be contagious. Steve was just a man. He was not an expert.
On Facebook, I found three others, and we all moved into an apartment together. The apartment had big windows that made the whole place smell like warmth. I got a job as a figure model for an artist who sold her drawings to people who were fascinated by my unique look. She made lots of money. I made just enough to pay rent. With the help of my roommates, I learned how to prune myself and photosynthesize and ignore my father’s phone calls. By spring, all of my limbs were in bloom.
On Sundays, when most of the world took the day off to pray or pretend to pray or watch their children play baseball, we gathered. In what we called The Garden, for obvious reasons, we picked and squished each other’s aphids and exchanged pollen and gossiped about our bosses.
Most often, we were left alone in The Garden. We had one place, and they had all the others.
But one week, as I was bending toward the sun, I heard footsteps, then silence, then the sound of air being sucked and compressed through a pair of nostrils. You smell so . . . floral. The torso of the woman behind me was hinged at a ninety-degree angle from the hips, her nose stationed at the entrance of one of my buds, inhibiting my epinasty.
She didn’t say hello.
I turned to face her, and the wind blew her hair toward me. She smelled like wet denim. I just love the look of it, like, see, she ran her hand down her arm’s smooth skin-casing, We’re so much less interesting. I half nodded, half shook my head, unsure how to respond or otherwise react. She took it as a sign to keep talking. Oh, my mother would just hate you. She opened her fists toward me and then scrunched them back shut, like one would do to make a baby giggle. I let out an uncomfortable grunt-laugh. She’s always going on about your smell and how much of an intrusion it is. She claims it gives her headaches, says that’s the first step to . . . catching it.
Certain her mother had never been close enough for a smell-induced headache, I made a face that said, That’s crazy, that must be really hard for you, which was the response she wanted.
She plucked a flower from my arm and tucked it into her hair.
The flower died by the time she got home, or fell on the way, but the story of her day of experimentation lasted her for years.
Look to your left. Now look to your right. I’m 100 percent confident that any one of those people in your eyeline—regardless of their reading taste—would love a book by Rachel Khong if you put it in their hands. Like many readers, I fell in love with Khong’s writing through her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. I recently finished listening to her latest novel, the New York Times best-selling Real Americans, on audiobook and found myself taking the long way just to keep listening a few minutes more. My Dear You, her new short story collection, completes the trinity—the literary treasure trove that is Khong’s body of work.
In My Dear You, Khong turns her attention to a wide-ranging cast of characters navigating scenarios that are at once surreal and deeply familiar: a government program that alters how people perceive race and gender, a cat that conjures the ghosts of past relationships, a vision of heaven where memory itself begins to slip. Oscillating between the absurd and the intimate, these stories explore identity, love, relationships, friendship, and the quiet, often overlooked ways we misunderstand one another. The result is a collection that is as funny as it is unsettling—one that asks what it means to love, to belong, and to be a person in a world that rarely makes as much sense as we’d like it to.
I sat down with Khong to talk about absurdity as a lens, identity and belonging, and the complicated, often contradictory ways we connect with one another.
Greg Mania:One thing I love about My Dear You is how the stories take these absurd or speculative situations and use them to look closely at very ordinary human feelings. What draws you to that space where the strange and the everyday collide?
Rachel Khong: I guess I don’t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things. To me, the everyday is strange, and vice versa. So many things that are happening now are so strange and unbelievable—whether it’s the Epstein files or anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth. At the same time, our internal lives are such rich territory. Obviously we’re still writing and painting and making music about human emotion. Even though we’ve been doing it for hundreds—thousands—of years, there is so much more to write and sing about and explore: The complexity of human emotion is endlessly deep and interesting and just weird. I feel that it’s my job to make art that comes from my particular experience, living through this very strange moment in time, metabolizing the events I’m living through on a national and global level, but also on a really private and personal level. I’m not sure why the stories get so weird, but if I were to articulate it—though articulating feels really antithetical to the way I work, which is more intuitive—I think it’s a reaction to our circumstances: When the powers that be want sameness, conformity, and fascism, I want to exist in the world of my own imagination.
GM:Why do you think the absurd can sometimes reveal truths about the real world more clearly than realism can?
I don’t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things.
RK: Absurdity is a way of exposing the faulty logic of systems we’ve grown used to. Realism reproduces the world as we recognize it, but I’m more interested in making the structure beneath our world visible. When something becomes ridiculous (like what happens in “The Freshening,” for example), we are more likely to question if our rules make sense to begin with. I recently read the stories of Leonora Carrington; her stories are so strange and absurd—our world isn’t always recognizable in them. But what she and other surrealists did was to suggest that the systems we take for granted as rational and logical really aren’t so—they’re actually terrible and inhumane. What’s absurd isn’t talking hyenas, it’s inequality and the fact of billionaires; it’s losing track of every person’s humanity. Absurdity can be such a powerful lens for looking at racism, misogyny, capitalism—it reveals the illogic embedded within systems that present themselves as rational.
GM:This is your first short story collection. What did writing short stories allow you to explore that felt different from writing a novel?
RK: Stories were how I found my way into writing fiction in the first place. I have been writing stories far longer than I’ve been writing novels. Often, I use stories as a way of exploring topics—writing my way into what I’m interested in. Goodbye, Vitamin grew from a short story about a character named Ruth. That novel expanded my interest in memory, and how we can love each other with our faulty memories. And though they are so tonally different, writing [the story] “My Dear You” led me to writing Real Americans, because it introduced me to my interest in choices: What do we choose for us, and what’s already chosen? How do we become who we become? Stories are a way to experiment, too: I’m much more wacky and playful in my stories because I think wackiness is much more manageable and palatable in small doses—it would get annoying (for both the reader and the writer) in a novel. And I love precision and brevity in writing; I love that stories can be distilled and potent.
GM:A lot of the stories seem interested in how we see one another—or fail to. I’m thinking in particular of the story where the government injects everyone with a drug that makes them see others as their own race and gender. What interested you about exploring identity and perception that way?
RK: I’ve been really interested in projection for a while now—what we think and assume about other people. I think it’s gotten even worse with social media and the internet. These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one. We assume so much about other people that really isn’t true; we forget the richness of every individual person, forget that everyone else’s lives are as complex as our own. What we assume about other people can be fatal, especially when it comes to Black men and boys dying at the hands of police. How did things get so inverted that the people who are supposed to be protecting us instead cause harm to an entire community? With “The Freshening” in particular, I wanted to try to answer that question: How could we stop this violence? How could we stop making these fatal, racist assumptions? Obviously the answer isn’t so straightforward.
GM:There’s also this recurring question across the collection about what it means to be an Asian woman in America. When you were writing these stories, what kind of questions about identity and belonging kept surfacing for you?
These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one.
RK: The main question was probably, “This again?” We’ve talked a lot about absurdity, and I do find racism more than a little absurd. I was interested in writing racism in the way that I experience it most often, which is in a quieter way, almost as an afterthought. It happens when doctors don’t take my complaints seriously, because I’m “probably” healthy. It happens when people confuse me for another Asian author, which happens more often than you’d think. The fact that my books get the most attention when it’s AANHPI month in May. A lot of literature covers racism that’s more overt, that’s really loud, but I was interested—especially in these stories—in presenting it in the more mundane way that I often experience it.
GM:The dating stories in the collection are often very funny but also a little painful in a recognizable way—awkwardness, misread signals, lingering ghosts from past relationships! What about love and intimacy at this stage of life felt especially rich or compelling for you to explore?
RK: It’s been a while since I went on a date, and I never experienced online dating, but I can recall the weirdness of dating so vividly—and can imagine the weirdness of it, especially now with apps and, like I said, so much projection about other people—that I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about desiring and being desired, about expectations and falling short, about how the way we love other people might not be exactly the way that they’d prefer to be loved. We bring a lot of assumptions into relationships—about the other person, about what relationships should even be—and at the same time, relationships can be so life-changing and essential and deeply loving. I’m sorry the fetishizing guy is named Greg, by the way. I promise he’s not named after you!
GM:I appreciate the clarification—I was getting a little nervous there! But I’m curious about what you said about people wanting to be loved in particular ways—why do you think that mismatch happens so often in relationships?
I’m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I’m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem.
RK: Well, every person’s perspective is so different—shaped by an entire life. I think the mismatch happens with books, too; I could give a book I love to a friend, but my friend might hate it. Who or what you connect with can be so subjective, which is why it feels kind of miraculous when you do meet someone or something you deeply connect with. With both books and relationships, I think it’s important to be humble and open. The assumptions we bring to relationships probably aren’t correct. Can we be open to how interesting the person or book might be, rather than jump to conclusions based on who or what we’d like them to be?
GM:Several of the stories brush up against the supernatural. There are ghosts, heaven, even the end of humanity! What do those possibilities open up for you when you think about what might exist beyond the boundaries of ordinary life?
RK: I’m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I’m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem. Our lives are both ordinary and not—that’s always on my mind as I write fiction. It’s pretty magical that the world we live in exists at all, and that we’re here for it. It’s magical that a tree grows from a seed, or that a baby forms in a womb. That our hearts just beat, until they don’t. We’re walking contradictions, in that we are all ordinary and mortal and limited, but we also have these amazing minds and imaginations that can take us practically anywhere. I write, in part, to remind myself of this contradiction: My life can feel so ordinary on a day-to-day basis, yet the fact that I’m here at all is pretty miraculous and odds-defying, and one day I’m going to die. What am I doing with that? Am I spending time with my closest friends, am I doing the most human things possible, am I caring as deeply as I can for the people I’m in relationships with, am I making things—am I creating—what I feel called to? Writing is how I remember what’s most important to me.
GM:What did writing this collection teach you about yourself?
RK: Honestly, putting all these stories together made me a little sick of myself. But as I grow as a writer, I’m learning to have compassion for myself, too. I did learn a lot from this collection, but it’s hard to separate growing older from the writing itself. For me, they’re intertwined and inextricable. I’m grateful to have writing, not to make sense of life—because a lot of it doesn’t make sense—but to accompany me in life.
A student recently asked, looking at the bookshelf in my office, “How did all these people get from here to there? From words on a screen to bound on the shelf?” I started to give her practical advice about staying in the chair and reading the right novels, but that is only a small part of how a piece of art grows up.
We are not ever just writers—we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to grab a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don’t have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and among and because of these moments. A scene is not only a moment on the page that takes place in space and time—the writing of that scene takes place in space and time too. I remember working on an especially dark section of my first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes pogroms by fleeing with her children into the Russian wilderness where she survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a swimming pool at a Southern California hotel where my father-in-law was staying while he visited us. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation. You can’t see that in the pages, but the energy of that good, easy day provided an opposite to the story from the past and its fictional counterpart. That strange pairing was part of how I powered the writing.
We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them. Writers make a choice to carve out significant time—some squeeze writing in while a baby sleeps on their chest or during the lunch hour. Some dictate a story while driving to work. The walls of stuck-ness are easily built. Time is always short; fear is a capable bricklayer; self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. While I love encouragement and good cheer (can you see me waving my pom-poms? I am!), those are not enough to free us. What I believe in, what has worked for me over and over, is a repertoire of small, playful, and unintimidating experiments. Lots of them. A small choice is huge. So often you need a little light, some air, and a handle turns in your hand, you peek through to the next thing, and you’re back, you’re in, you’re running.
My new book, Unstuck, contains all the skeleton keys to all the secret doors I know—I’m sharing a few of them with you here.
Doorway: Begin Anywhere
There Is No Better Time, No Right Answer
You have this idea for a novel. A young woman disappears in the woods, or a new planet is colonized, or two people fall in love. Ahead of you there are no fewer than one jillion decisions: Are we in 1876? Is the couple driven apart by their hateful fathers? Does the book take place over the course of twenty-four hours or a year? Is it told in first person? And that’s only the big stuff. Every page is a string of words picked by you. Every scene is populated, full of characters and places (real or imagined) where every tree, every vase full of dead flowers, every old, tired cat is placed there by you.
We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them.
You cannot, no matter how much you wish, know at the start how this will unfold. Like all the best parts of being alive, it requires you to enter without a map or a promise of success.
I was in such a place when my eldest child was in the fifth grade and it was time to go on tours of middle schools. I had spent the morning staring at a Word document on which I intended to begin a new novel. The document was a white, ominous nothingness. My job was much too big. Defeated, I closed the computer and picked up my kid at his sweet little elementary school, a place that had seen him through the pandemic, that had brought him from a tiny person to a big kid. We drove to a middle school and parked. Nervous eleven-year-olds and their more nervous parents hummed in small groups. Inside, the building felt huge. The echo of sneakers in the concrete stairwells, and halls leading to other halls. How were we here? How was my small person going to be okay in this wilderness? We came around the corner and there was a lit theater marquee at the end of the hall with these words: “BEGIN ANYWHERE.—John Cage.” I stood there for a long minute. My child tugged at me. He did not know how to be a middle schooler yet, as he would not know how to be a high schooler a few years later or all the steps to come after. I did not know what this new novel would contain, as I had not known how the three before it would work until I had written through the years and the many drafts. “I’m ready,” I said, and we began there, at the anywhere where we stood.
Key
You are here. You are anywhere. Start with a single scene, a single memory, a single question. Set a timer and keep writing for twenty minutes. Whatever you have done at the end of that time, your page is no longer blank, and you have, beautifully, gloriously, begun.
Doorway: Primordial Slush
The Matter from Which All Life Is Created
What I have come to understand is that you can’t start where you intend to end up (i.e., a book that feels like a book) because you have to start three billion years before that. I’m writing fast, following curiosity and questions, writing scenes even if I have no idea where they’re going, writing backstory for characters so I can figure out who everyone is, writing place and space. Eventually you want a book-shaped thing, but before that it takes the shape of a freshly bloomed tulip, the back half of a rhinoceros, a mountain stream, a bird’s nest. And before that it’s a beam of light or a ball of clay. I remember a friend asking how my second novel was going and I said, “It’s a swamp monster that oozes around on the floor waiting for me to feed it dead fishes? Is that an answer?”
This was not the creature I wanted. I wanted a unicorn or at least a sturdy, faithful dog. But here is what I now understand: You don’t get a dog right away, you have to evolve there. You have to start with a vat of primordial slush, the making of all life, and that slush is not pretty or decipherable. Then something crawls out and maybe it’s a tiny little swamp monster. You need that guy. Yes, that draft is super drooly and it’s awkward and lumpy and leaves mud all over the place. The swamp monster will grow arms and legs. When you come back to the second draft, he’ll be sitting up at a table and you can tie a little checked napkin around his neck and feed him crème brûlée. And when you loop back for a third draft, he’ll have grown a lovely coat of fur and now he’s looking more like a recognizable animal. A yak, maybe, or one of those Scottish Highland cows with the long red bangs. In draft four you have an apple tree that’s about to bloom and in draft six you have a crescent moon and in draft eight you have a wolf and in draft ten you can start to tuck all these eras carefully together between covers and hand it to someone and when they read it, by magic (and months or years of work), the story that you saw in your mind pops open in the mind of that reader and that’s when you get to start calling it a book, but by then I hope you trust that it’s also still a yak and still a moon, and that your old sloshy swamp guy is in there covered in primordial soup—the energy and possibility of the entire universe dripping from his slimy, squiggly body.
What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess. To trust the dust storms and the mud bogs and not rush on toward premature order. Order only matters if it contains something real. Sure, you can write a novel that follows a set of very clear rules and expectations, but you will have written a container, not contents. You will have a harness but no dog. Don’t skip the mess, because that’s where the magic lives.
It’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess.
Do you hear that this is not a quality assessment? Yes, a first draft can be shitty, but it’s hard to get very excited about sitting down to write a shitty first draft when quality control is already in the room.
There’s a dude in a white coat with a hairnet and a magnifying glass and he’s waiting for me to hurry up and take my failures and turn them into candy apples he can sell. If I’m trying to make candy apples, then a beehive is a failure. If I’m trying to write a novel, then a mud bog is a failure. And even if we are welcoming of failure, as we should be, as it is critical to be, I’m sorry but I’m kicking that white coat guy out the fire escape. There is no quality assessment in the primordial slush draft. The universe did not feel inadequate when all it had was an explosion in space from which all life would emerge.
Key
This is not a key you turn once. As you move through your first draft, you must keep going through this door-way over and over. Write the following on a sticky note and put it on your wall: It’s not supposed to make sense yet.
You might live in the slush for weeks or months or even years. When life begins to crawl out onto land it could happen quickly, a sudden understanding of your project and what it wants to become. Or it might happen slowly, one little toe out in the sunshine, then back underwater.
This is about the intentional, heartfelt creation of energetic, weird, unformed life. Every writer you’ve ever admired lives here too.
It’s not supposed to make sense yet. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I am discovering something still unknown on this earth. Create energy. Repeat.
Doorway: Writer Physics
Follow the Energy
A story or a poem or an essay has logic, but it’s also a living thing. Imagine that a cat walks softly across the black landscape of a burned neighborhood. One valid approach might be to follow the logic: How did this fire start? Who or what was lost? What will happen to the people who used to live here? Those are good questions and you may answer them, but sometimes logic can sideline us on a kind of frontage road next to the story that never seems to merge into the real stuff of it.
Writer physics, which happily does not require a familiarity with the theory of relativity, is the practice of noticing and following the energy in your pages. That cat moves over the ground, and the ground is radiating with everything that was burned. The ash is full of the energetic force of the house, which was full of the energetic force of the ten years (let’s say) a family lived inside that space. The baby who was born on the kitchen floor after a labor too quick to get to the hospital; the photo album of great-grandparents in Hungary; a hundred dinners eaten on a simple plate, a shard of which is under one of the cat’s paws.
What happens when the family pulls up in a car in front of this changed place? Follow the energy between the people and the plate shards, the memories, the cat. Maybe the cat, afraid and traumatized, jumps at one of the children and scratches her, and the cut gets infected by something in the ash. Maybe the father becomes obsessed with rebuilding a certain room in the house exactly as it was. Maybe the mother returns in secret alone at night and digs through the rubble herself, looking for remains of her old life. Maybe there’s a coyote, also scavenging. All of these ideas grow from pressing together two sources of energy: a character and an object, a feeling and another feeling, a character and a tiny moment, a tiny moment and an object. Energy makes energy. Pretty soon that mother is running after the coyote, which has the cat in its jaws. Pretty soon, she’s got a jagged piece of wood, once part of her living room wall. Where does the energy go next?
Key
Take a survey of the energetic forces moving through a scene, image, or moment. Close your eyes and try to feel them swirling around. Pick two and press them together, see what happens when the energy of one thing mixes with the energy of another. What changes? What new force is born?
Now you have the keys to some of these doors, but where you go will be a place entirely undiscovered, all your own. Send me a postcard when you get there.
As a child growing up in a very small town, interlibrary loan was a lifeline. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, ILL books came by mail, in heavy canvas envelopes with a thick zipper meant to withstand handling by the postal service. The return slip was tucked inside, and it was all very magical to me: putting in a request at the small, regional library (we were lucky to have one, I realize now), and then books appearing in the PO Box, with the checkout stamps spanning the state and sometimes the nation.
Then, I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling: the remoteness and separation from the larger world; the way that anyone who left and stayed away was otherized—as if wanting to get away from a county with a high teen pregnancy rate and a low per capita income was the fault of the leaver; the sense of tension that is often present in rural areas, in that the pastoral beauty is a scrim over a hard way of living. Books fulfilled a desire for connection with the larger world, and often helped articulate another tension: the push and pull between isolation and community.
My fifth book, The Last Supper, looks at these themes I’m perennially obsessed with—the impact of loneliness and seclusion, the human need for companionship, the necessity of finding people with whom we have commonality—and views them through the lens of my protagonist Amanda, a mother of two young children who is searching for more creative and economic agency in her life. It’s a novel for anyone who cares about how we build relationships and the ways that expectations around how family structures are “supposed” to work often impede our own happiness.
In the spirit of looking for and finding community, here are eight books that examine this idea from different perspectives. Whether that is tight-knit friend groups who weather changes in life or themes of reconciling with the dead, the books on this list illustrate the complexity of finding our place in the world, all while showing that it really is possible.
In this memoir, Loeb writes about growing up biracial, with Black family roots in Alabama and white Jewish family roots in Long Island. Growing up Black and Jewish in the predominantly white suburbs of New Jersey engenders a sense of outsiderness in Loeb. He has a complicated relationship to family and race. Yet, he also writes of finding one’s way through first loves, early jobs, and a network of collaborators—the experiences and people who shape our lives. Some memoirs tell. Others explain. Loeb is the latter, illuminated.
A penultimate chronicle of life, Silber’s Ideas of Heaven beautifully deploys hindsight, and each of these linked stories speaks to the power of connection. There’s a religious undercurrent in this book, written more as a way to link communities than to lionize any particular faith. Silber writes equally as well about fitting together as she does about being in opposition, because her stories center people, showing how far we will go for those we love.
This Indigenous horror novel follows Kari, who finds a connection to her mother’s ghost through an old family bracelet and is subsequently haunted by visions of people who have passed over, along with even more terrifying specters. At its heart, however, White Horse is about relationships, reconciling with family, the impact of chosen family, and the wide constellation of what community can mean: Sometimes it’s the drinking crew at a bar, sometimes it’s tribal aunties, but it’s always critical.
Centering on female friendships, These Impossible Things shows how deep bonds can be compromised, and how growing up and growing older can contextually change how we feel about the people we used to always reach out to first. It follows three Muslim women who met at school and are now living in London, figuring out their paths. Sometimes their choices strain the friendship, and there is constant tension between cultural expectations and being a 20-something in the city. This book addresses serious topics, but it also has a lightness to it, and it’s deeply relatable to anyone who has had decade-spanning friendships.
This is a book that could have just as easily been called a speculative memoir as a novel. Jen writes toward an understanding of a fraught relationship with the narrator’s mother, who speaks from beyond the grave; and the narrator begins to understand how her mother was trapped between cultures, carried deep trauma, and was often misunderstood. It’s intimate and compulsively readable. Jen takes a complex family dynamic, transforms it into an intergenerational saga, distills it back into a love letter, and in doing so, forges a new bond.
Set squarely at the intersection of middle-age regret and the American opioid crises, the setup alone of Hello Wife is poised to create tension. When Charlotte gets engaged to Jimbo, an unemployed addict she met at 7-Eleven, she’s 49 years old and ready for love. Charlotte’s family doesn’t agree that this is the way to do it. Yet, while it becomes quite clear and quite quickly that this is not a redemption story, the longing for companionship is palpable. Written with a delightful wryness.
Clutch (which I have written about before) follows a group of five tight-knit friends, all turning 40. In writing everything from fertility treatments, looming divorces, political ambitions, tech bros, and addiction, Nemens imbues the quintet with side-alliances and a certain kind of girl-drama. Yet, even when there is conflict, sisterhood always encircles the women. It’s a satisfying, juicy-plot read with an unbreakable bond at the core.
Partners living in Berlin after having fled the Soviet Union as children—one from Ukraine and one from Russia—are in their apartment, not speaking on a long night. In this narrative in verse, there’s a sense of rootlessness for both women. Between Nadezhda and her unnamed partner, history surfaces and hurt surfaces. Both women process what it means to have lost a homeland. The narrator tries to understand what it means to love Nadezhda. As a writer, Moskovich places that ache the most, and she does it without apology and with a present lyricism that often leads her characters to a place of agency.
I met Nora Lange in the dream space of the Brown Creative Writing MFA Program where I was teaching and she was a graduate student. As a student, she seemed all possibility, all wonder, and I, the witness to that nascent, vulnerable state of becoming. There was an openness, a tenderness and hope, an optimism, an irreverence, a crazy faith. I loved her quiet audacity, her willingness to fail when need be, her tolerance for the unknown, her acute take on all that surrounded her. Nora had a great spirit and an enormous verve—the quality that is immediately recognizable in those students who are up for anything.
The anything in those days was weekly or bi-monthly writing assignments conducted in the experimental narrative laboratory being run under the guise of a writing workshop. Nora recently reminded me of one of the things her cohort was up to at the time: They had been asked to create a Cornell box in which the page itself would serve as the box or the container and the task would be to place within this box disparate, trembling, precious images and narratives that might speak to each other and resonate in mysterious ways. The anything might be to create in language a vestibule that would then open onto an enormous concert hall; the anything might be to conjure a “Tristan chord” filled with longing and dissonance that, over pages, might move toward a kind of resolution. Or to create a truly bifurcated piece, or an oracular piece, or à la Georges Perec, attempt to exhaust a space in Providence . . .
Years pass of course. Students come and go, the so-called real world imposes its directives and preferences, and somewhere along the way too often a tacit agreement is entered, understandably so perhaps, an acquiesce, a surrender where essentially the same literary formulas, dressed albeit in cool clothing, are reinforced and prevail.
Nora does not succumb to the borrowed, the inherited, the familiar tropes, the conventionally legible expectations. More and more she grows incandescent, fierce, her work unique, the stories a series of intensities before us. Unapologetically, she steps into her talent. Her new collection of stories, Day Care, is an extraordinary record of our moment—of what it is like right here, right now. She asks of the page what far too few writers ask, and she ventures far—passionate, restless, full of wonder, not already decided, alive.
Recently after many years Nora and I found one another again and wrote back and forth for a few weeks before conducting this interview online from our far flung perches in the country. Oddly, though it had been more than a while, and much had transpired for both of us, it felt as if no time had passed at all.
Carole Maso: These stories are astonishing in many ways—they are what I admire most in writing, an event and not just the record of an event; they are a genuine experience on the page. What informs your work? What are your influences?
Nora Lange: I’m influenced by curiosity. I am influenced constantly. I can barely read or see anything without wanting to make notes. I have piles of magazines, cutouts, emails, saved drafts, notebooks, passages underlined. My dreamworld consists of a ceiling made of glass, definitely impractical (this is a dream world!), sleeping surrounded by books, and absorbing what I do not have the time to absorb under ordinary circumstances through osmosis. I work for my family at times—working harvest, or selling wine. For instance, mid-book tour, I’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina working an event called “Pinot in the City.” Often I’m asked at these events, red or white? To which I dutifully answer: Both.
My influences are vast. You, Carole, for one. Anne Carson until I return to water. Muriel Spark. Lucia Berlin. Lydia Davis. Claudia Rankine. Maggie Nelson. Adrienne Rich. I realize it might be annoying to say, but I am grateful and loving for so many writers and their work. And I write beside them. I live beside them.
CM: I very much like your stories because they reside in a slightly more abstract and heightened space and are not prone to the usual and often far more facile psychological assignment and expectation novels seem susceptible to. Can you talk about the different forms for you? What draws you to each? What do you hope/want from them formally? What do you think a story might do or might be?
A story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and try to put together, though you’re surely missing pieces.
NL: Someone for Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Lange’s well-honed stories build to stinging epiphanies,” and, not to be so intellectually vanquished as to lean on the review, but that sounds about right. The hope is to build to some kind of release.
For me, a story feels closer to my life. Active psychosis meets regular therapy, a luxury I do not have, so I write with language to discover. Sometimes I just get brushed with a line. I have many emails to myself with one liners and reminders to build on these or consult later. For instance, one recent Saturday while walking on the treadmill at my daughter’s daycare, I wrote an entire story on my cell phone inspired by a woman—sassing to an alarm—next to me on the stair master. It was a challenge to type as fast as my mind was bending. This is not to say the story is complete. No way. But some part of that experience, and of the text that was written that day, will be folded into a story that I’d like to orchestrate around a kind of alternative self-help group.
Sometimes (often, I should admit) a story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and to try to put together (though you’re surely missing pieces!). I have no interest in solving anything. Stories feel alive in a different way than a novel. They have a different pulse. They are bursts and composites and have some constraints (like word count). They are contained in a different way than a novel, which has a different, roomier, perhaps more flexible architecture where, even as the writer, I am allowed to get lost.
I feel the need for a story to be perfect. That’s why, for me, they are incredibly time consuming. It’s like a carving. Or maybe it’s the way a photograph needs to come into focus—this is your shot. Which isn’t to suggest, not at all, that the entire image needs to be in focus. It could just be the daffodil teetering on a windowsill that is sharp while everything which surrounds it is not.
I can say that with each story I am setting out to explore something in particular. For example, in “Owls Yawn Too,” the mother is absolutely in love with her owl, a kind of rapturous love. Very romantic. Or in “Dog Star,” I wanted to write a story that took place inside a snow globe—how would that work? Which I guess could sound “surreal,” as some pieces in the collection have been dubbed, but living inside a snow globe doesn’t really feel off the mark: People and industries interfere, or intrude upon the ways of life of others all the time. “World building,” such as a lifestyle or data collection center—these have interiors and exteriors in sometimes abstract, “sophisticated” ways, like governmental policy or mining. Or direct, smaller ways like the leaf-blower next door. Now, looking at that language above, I ask myself: How do I say this? How do I say what I want to say? I shall try again, but if this were a story, I would have deleted the former. Whereas here, I’ll leave it be, an experiment. What I mean to write is there are effects of industry and policy that we do not see, which isn’t to say we do not experience them. We do, absolutely. But they are an altogether different kind of imposition, one where most individuals wield little to zero power. As opposed to a smaller, more direct “intrusion,” or interruption (less severe) like a Jehovah’s Witness ringing your bell.
CM: In this collection there’s an exploration of sentiments, sciences, human dynamics, which is to say animal dynamics. How does language reside in you?
NL: I just found at the back of my desk, as I sat down to write to you, a slim slip of paper about the size of my ring finger with the handwritten words:
Patterns of behavior
Alimental, gametic, climactic
And off to the left, written in a pyramid shape: Causes of migration.
When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death.
This is my handwriting. This snippet of paper, with this text, came from my time living in Chicago for years in the ‘00s. I had done a play (written and directed) called Aviary based on the migrational patterns of birds and captivity and other undergraduate musings! The point is, I have carried this snippet of text with me for all these years—and I have moved a lot. I mention this, not only because of the serenity of finding it as I was sitting down to write to you, but because these are the themes that I find myself returning to: a longing for air, preferably fresh, and survival of any sort.
CM: I feel a hedge against death, a fending off, honoring and bringing up close the chaotic and the dread, perhaps to disarm death in some way. Can you talk about death (in any way you like)?
NL: Odd you ask, as I’ve just completed an ongoing interview with palliative care neurologist and writer Anna DeForest for a column she’s doing in The Believer on this subject.
I could spend my whole life talking about death, I came to realize in corresponding with Anna. I am realizing now that perhaps I have been doing this from the start without knowing. When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death. For many, these are the counterpoints which make up life. That is, living it. I am not talking about dying in old age—or surviving elderly existence—but of migration, even the day to day, for many. My mother lived from paycheck to paycheck, and survival was about having just enough. She “held it together” until she didn’t. The force, the weight of getting by, for so many is often alarming. A detail about my childhood, and my life with my mother and brother—which I absolutely understand, though I wish had been different for her—was that soon after divorcing, she remarried. Maybe it was for love. I’d wager it also had something to do with finding support. Working full-time and raising two very young children alone, in a new city, family dead, or far away, can be daunting. I highlight this as a way to illustrate the complexity of a woman’s choice.
CM: I’m left with the feeling of a world as it vanishes, and so all is heightened and precious in a way not often felt in fiction. Sometimes, as I mentioned, it feels as if it vanishes as we read. The cherished but lost world, or about to be lost, or, if in a precarious present, there’s a tenacity, a holding on as all blurs and dissolves. On this note, the book feels very much a picture of cherished things. As it all disappears, goes to smoke now, what did you think was beautiful there?
NL: I think to be touched by things is beautiful. Sometimes we—myself and Sylvia (my daughter who is three and a half)—just pull up the heavy black blinds in our rental to watch and discuss the squirrels scurrying along the electrical wires. She will call out to me from the living room to come to see the moon, which after the daylight savings time change is a night-like moon at seven a.m.
Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical. I hope that these stories cause people to stop to marvel for a minute, or to meditate on cherished things. But the book will not disappear. Unless of course there’s a flood, or an earthquake, which might prompt any number of things. Perhaps even a divorce in which one partner gets it in the settlement.
CM: Also conveyed is the mystery of existence, the baffling project of being alive. You create subterranean, complicated responses in the reader that only literature can do. Can you talk about how you move through the world? What is your day-to-day like? What makes its mark on you?
NL: Interacting makes marks for me. That can happen in reading. I interact while reading, do you? It could be that I stop to look a word up, or write a note or something in the margins, or “JUST THINK.”
My day-to-day is extraordinarily unglamorous. It involves a lot of discussions with a toddler, who calls herself “kitty cat” and “buttercuppy” and “Jew.” She might be all these things. I have a limited concept of my origins. Recently, under the guise of research for a character that I’m writing, I did the Ancestry thing—spat in a vial and sent it off for DNA testing, which hasn’t shed any light on anything.
Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical.
The other evening we passed out fliers around our neighborhood. Posters is probably more accurate. I had written on them: Dear Neighbors! And I was pointing out to Sylvia that the neigh in the word was the sound that a horse supposedly makes. It’s also a word, neighbors, that I notoriously misspell. That evening, even when I’d felt confident I’d spelled it correctly, after the third or so poster spelling it out, I still had to confirm. Self-doubt is all consuming. I work really hard to reject it, if I can. If I’m able. I really do believe that those who want more power, those who have all the power and want more power, want to erode our memory, our sense of self. Therefore, I feel a constant need to legitimize my understanding—even researched—and my intuition—less researched though often accurate. Like when I was in labor but nobody believed me until the baby was nearly on the floor. Or when my water broke and I was asked if I had simply peed my pants when I’d said so. If a person is exposed to enough of that questioning, to that implicit or explicit doubt directed by others, how is one supposed to touch base with themselves?
CM: Mother runs through many of your stories. Or a mother force field, a mother-feeling insinuates itself often into the prose, even when it remains outside the story’s parameters. What is your experience of motherhood? What windows has the experience of being a mother opened or closed?
NL: Chimera—as the word relates to Greek mythology—generally speaking, a female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Can birth be so wild an animal that it’s transhuman?
More calmly, motherhood is time travel. That is how I see it, in all seriousness. On a cellular level and more. I feel very much a part of the circular atmosphere, more now than ever before. On motherhood time travel: I am to write about this very topic soon. Stay-tuned.
CM: Perhaps a simple question to end on, but Nora—what brings you to the page?
NL: A deep longing to be there, wherever “there” is at any given moment in time: seated on an airplane; reminding Sylvia to (please) not throw sand in a playground’s sandbox; in a grocery store checkout line; horizontal at rest listening to her breathing beside me.
An obsession. Raging curiosity. A resolve to participate no matter what angles or forces wish to take me away. Writing is an act of engagement, and I would not know how or what to be without it.
Everybody on my father’s side had assimilated in what I’d call the cultural sense: they’d stopped talking Jewish. My father and his progenitors, they put away their deep borough accents, buried their surety of doom, their wryness and their rye. It wasn’t a rejection of god or the Torah, neither of which held any sway, but about not sounding like the kind of person certain other people don’t like. Only the prepubescent Hasids knew to stop me with their lulav and etrog. I could’ve rebuked them, could’ve told them my face in fact belonged mostly to my Protestant mother. But I secretly loved their knowing.
My daughter did too. Unlike me, though, it wasn’t a secret.
Bunny, at seven, dressed every day like she was auditioning for Fiddler on the Roof, mixing orange plaid dresses with woolen tights the color of lichen and the ancient pilling cardigans of a babushka. Bunny sometimes wrapped her hair in one of the old silk scarves I’d inherited from my grandmother, Bunny’s thick dark bangs and both ears sticking out the sides, making her look bedraggled and forlorn, one that was both feral and matronly, a suffering sort of girl from another time. When the boys with their payot asked us if we were Jewish, she didn’t lie the way I did; she said, louder than seemed wise, “Yes!”
On a Thursday, in the small kitchen of our Park Slope apartment, she produced a first-grade worksheet from the bottom of her backpack.
“Bunny, I can’t read this.” Bunny drew on everything, including her own skin, the tops of her hands, and her homework. She’d obscured the directive and questions with a long potato face, arched eyebrows, flat black line of a mouth, and swirling hypnotized eyes. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the artistry was unremarkable; it didn’t seem to be about that.
“I’m the one who has to read it,” she said, snatching the paper from me and squinting at it. “Interview an elder relative. There are eight questions. Who can I talk to?”
“Grandma Shelly is an elder relative.”
Bunny shook her head. “She’s not old.”
Point taken. Nat’s mother dyed her long hair red and got up and down from the floor faster than I did.
“There has to be someone better.”
Like a whorl of reflux from a forgotten meal, up rose my great aunt Lillian, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Unassimilated, openly judgmental, Socialist, divorced. As bold in her unpleasantness as my own child was about wanting to have been born in another time.
“How old is she?” Bunny demanded.
I calculated. “Over ninety.”
Bunny stood reverently still. “Have I ever met her?”
I shook my head. In fact, I hadn’t really talked to Lillian in two decades. As family lore demanded, I remembered Aunt Lillian as monstrous. Until I brought her up to Bunny, I’d forgotten that I also remembered her fondly—during my childhood visits, she always seemed pleased to see me, interested in whatever words I could eke out, and remarked on certain promising things about me (“Sadie, you have the posture of Philippe Petit”)—at which point the Lillian in my mind began to sway between an unfiltered pariah and a wry, intelligent old lady who could see right through me. This amorphous hovering, like one of those haunted Halloween portraits that turn the living into skeletons or zombies when seen from certain angles, was perhaps even more frightening. I suddenly regretted suggesting a visit to someone who probably had every right to loathe me as much as my family did her.
“Was she in the Holocaust?”
Bunny had recently become intrigued by the Holocaust, had just last week asked a stooped old man in line at the grocery store if he’d been in it.
I shook my head. “You know what, though? I think she could be losing it, mentally. Who knows if she could even answer any of your questions?”
Bunny ignored me. “Is she nice?”
“No,” I said, scooping crumbs and an apple core from the bowels of Bunny’s backpack and dropping them into the compost. “She’s pretty mean.”
“That’s OK,” Bunny said quickly. “I can handle it.”
Already, our hypothetical visit had turned into a dare.
“Don’t we have a birthday party this weekend?”
“We have to go see her, Mom.
I should’ve just said no. I wanted to. But arguing with Bunny always depleted me, which was why I mostly did what my husband did, and avoided it.
Those dark discerning eyes blinked curtly up at me, waiting for my acquiescence. If we were really going to do this, however, to see this woman my parents wouldn’t see, this woman who didn’t really like my parents either, we would need to bring some buffers.
“And Milt can’t come,” Bunny declared.
I closed my eyes. “Your brother is three. Where’s he going to go?”
“Just leave him with Daddy,” she pressed.
Daddy. Everyone liked Nat; he was warm and relaxed and deeply tolerant, for practical reasons (he worked in real estate). My mother would joke that I must’ve had a perfect childhood because I’d married someone so much like my own father. And I would joke that she was right. (In reality, Nat was much harder for me to talk to than my dad, and, yet, much softer with the children, quicker to solve their problems, to break a rule if it meant they’d be happy, a practice that had become the family way.)
Aunt Lillian might not have censored herself in front of me beginning back when I was Bunny’s age, but she was unlikely to do her worst in front of easy, charming Nat.
“If we go, Daddy’s coming. And so’s Milt,” I said as I washed my crumby fingers. “But you should know Aunt Lillian isn’t, she isn’t like your grandparents. At all.”
“OK. How?”
“Well. She’s not a fan of what Israel is…is doing.”
Bunny looked at me. “Neither are you.”
“Right. But I don’t yell about it.”
“Grandma doesn’t yell about it.”
“Well, Grandma sent money to the Israeli army. Aunt Lillian would yell at her for that, if Grandma was on my side of the family.”
I waited for Bunny to say something. “I’m not saying she’s wrong to yell. Maybe I should yell more.”
Bunny looked absently past me.
“Mommy,” she said quietly, her soft palm on my arm, “will she like me?”
I covered her hand with mine. We were on different pages. As usual. “I don’t know.”
Bunny nodded, her upper lip rising gravely. “I’m a lot.”
I was the one who’d told her she could be a lot. But I’d done it less in horror than in wonder. Last year, in kindergarten, Bunny insisted on carrying two large tote bags filled with dress-up clothes and her favorite books to school every day. She said she needed them. Her teacher told me she’d rarely open the bags, but if another student so much as peeked at them, Bunny would instantly panic, sobbing quietly but unabatedly. This teacher was the gentle kind and always shuttled Bunny to the quiet corner, along with the bags, to recover from the affront.
This year, the totes and the meltdowns had been replaced by three separate reports of Bunny calling the same two girls sheep for copying all of each other’s classwork and, at the conclusion of her rants, spitting on the ground next to their shoes.
“They lie for each other, Mommy! They lie.”
Her conviction exasperated me, but I made a point of telling her the opposite. And I wasn’t lying. Exasperated or not, I really was in awe of her.
“So is she,” I admitted. “Which is maybe why we should just call her instead of visiting—”
“Actually, I don’t care if she likes me,” she announced. “Please let’s go. Before she dies. We have to go before she’s dead!”
On the drive down the Belt, I explained to everyone about my great aunt Lillian’s estrangement from our family.
Lillian had delivered an impromptu speech at the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, my cousin Weston, twenty years back, in a sun-drenched Humanistic Northern California synagogue with more windows than walls. In what had sounded to me at the time like jest, she’d called her ex-husband, my Great Uncle Julius—a former union organizer turned highly paid public speaker and consultant—a sellout, a capitalist, a traitor. He’d traded the ethos of her kind of socialism, the kind that required unending struggle, for what she considered an excess of comfort and security. This was how my parents put it to me anyway. She’d called Julius as much before, of course, but never in front of so many non-Jews (Weston’s father was Chinese and an atheist).
In the ensuing years, I learned from my parents that Lillian’s daughter—my father’s first cousin—had blamed her mother for her father’s headaches, for his ulcerous guilt, but also for the incessant unstitching of her own self-worth. Lillian made her question herself and now she couldn’t stop. After the party that evening, Lillian’s daughter followed in the example of her long-suffering father and went on strike. They stopped speaking to her. My father and the rest of the cousins, company men all, did the same.
At the Bar Mitzvah, I remember the wobbly buzz—nauseating and electric—that I got in my stomach at Lillian’s performance, her exacting tone, and the way my whole extended family went immediately on edge, some stiff, some stiffly smiling, and others, like sweet, pubescent Weston, dopey next to her in his baggy suit, opening his mouth wide and then quickly covering it in an attempt not to laugh.
Great Aunt Lillian was so angry.
But she was also not speaking nonsense.
I remember her saying, in front of everyone, that she could not abide her own kin taking so much more than their fair share. I remember her looking right at her ex-husband and saying, “What happened to you, honey? What happened?”
Occasionally, I’d wonder if it would be me who’d bridge the gap, call her up, make a visit, make amends.
It wasn’t. Well, it hadn’t been.
Lillian lived in a limestone apartment building in Gravesend. She’d been kind but terse over the phone, suggesting we come any day that suited us, that she had nothing on the calendar anymore.
“Does she look like Grandma?” Bunny asked.
“Kind of,” I told her. “She’s little. Always wears red lipstick. Oh my god, why are we doing this?”
Bunny groaned and Milt shouted, “I don’t know!”
I felt Nat’s calloused fingers on my earlobe. I bristled at the contact, shaken from my anxious clench, and then relished it. Nat glanced at the speedometer as I barreled past Staten Island’s humble skyline across the water because going faster might make this all be over sooner.
“You think she’s renovated since you last visited?” mused Nat. “These longtime owners, they die and then they sell for less than they could because nobody’s touched it for forty years. It’s a shame.”
“She rents, Nat.”
He looked at me aghast. “A renter? OK. Got it. Forty years renting.” He whistled, seemed to consider the dark flat New York Bay outside his window as he did the math before looking down at his phone.
“What are you going to ask her, Bun?” I asked. How my aunt could not be even a little charmed by this odd child, I couldn’t imagine. Through the rearview mirror, I watched Bunny’s eyelids drop to keep me out of whatever she was planning.
“You’ll see.”
I imagined my own questions: Were you ever in a bread line? Did you go by yourself to the March on Washington and what kind of shoes did you wear? What did you mean when you asked Uncle Julius what happened to him? Do you ever wonder what happened to me?
There were so many parking spots outside her building, I worried we’d missed a city evacuation.
“Here we are!” I called out brightly.
We rode the birdcage elevator up and turned down a dim hallway at whose eerie end stood the object of our visit.
“And here I am! Ta-da!” Lillian leaned against the doorjamb in a red silk shirt and black slacks.
I’d last seen her, from afar, at my grandmother’s funeral, fifteen years ago. Her skin had been olive then, her bob bottle-dye black, smudged at the hairline. It was a shock to see her now, hair completely white and jaggedly orbiting a face once severe, now mottled as a gratin, her small body bent across the shoulders in a resolute way. She smelled like bottled lily and orange juice.
I nudged my resistant brood forward.
“Hello,” I sang, but Milt seemed to recognize something in my tremolo. At three, he was as tiny as Bunny was tall, as silly as she was defiant and stern. Not so silly then, though, as he wrapped himself around my thigh, which itself was wrapped in black tights, his untended fingernails digging in. I felt my pantyhose rip just below my butt.
Only pausing for a second, I continued on, my flannel dress, tight on top, swung loose over my hips, keeping the tear hidden.
Her eyes were like lights flashing as she blinked up at me. It was impossible to tell, because she’d not yet spoken, not yet smiled, how she felt about us, whether she was pleased we’d at last arrived or dismayed we’d gone through with it.
“Hello, my darling,” she purred at last, that nasal, wizened cat voice tossing itself over me like a fur coat. Three of her teeth were missing, one near the front, the other two, in back, creating airless open tunnels. She reached out to hug me, one of her fat gold earrings cold against my neck. “Sadie.”
It was impossible to tell whether she was pleased we’d at last arrived or dismayed we’d gone through with it.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes going blurry.
“Take your shoes off, doll,” she said, letting go of me roughly, as though it was I who was holding on too tight.
The children hurried in behind her, Nat guiding them with a hand on each shoulder.
“And you must be Nat,” she said to him.
Nat looked behind him and then at her. “I guess I must. Wonderful to meet you, Lillian. You’re a legend. According to Sadie.”
Lillian seemed pleased to hear it, her mouth twitching.
“Well, look at this bootlicker you got here, Sadie.”
Nat chuckled.
Lillian took our bland bouquet of coats and carried them down a hallway and out of sight.
Her place was just as I remembered: the bulky gold and brown brocade sofa flanking the wall beside us where I’d been photographed asleep against my mother’s arm, and above it, a window just as wide, its beige doctor’s office blinds half open. On the smooth white horseshoe coffee table were cut glass bowls filled with the peanut M&Ms, pistachios in their shells, and plastic-wrapped sesame candy that’d drawn a molar out of my mouth when I was in fifth grade. Opposite the sofa, to our right, sat the low black lacquered credenza my cousins and I got screamed at for smudging, a bulky television on top, its screen wiped clean.
A matching black China cabinet swathed the entire far wall, inside of which were all of Lillian’s Hummels. My grandmother had had them too, and though I’d never once touched them, I’d badly wanted to. They weren’t quite dolls to me, but tiny emotive creatures contained in porcelain. Lillian had maidens, mostly, in various states of reverie, and a bespectacled pharmacist, a gaunt rosy-cheeked rabbi, a blonde boy holding a blob of balloons in primary colors. It was the rabbi I’d coveted, so tired had I grown of my blithe yellow-haired dolls with their shiny dresses and empty eyes. Mightn’t he change our games in some deep, unknowable way, say vaguely important things like my great uncle, maybe, or snipe cleverly like Lillian herself, but I didn’t have the guts to ask to hold him in my own hands, was afraid I’d seem weird. This? She’d have wrinkled her nose at me. Him you want?
On the highest shelf, a shelf I’d never been tall enough to see before, was a black and white photograph, the only photo in the cabinet. It was Lillian at Bunny’s age, sitting primly between her father, a narrow-faced bald man, and mother, a somber woman with dark hair piled on the top of her head, a woman who was probably the age I was now.
When Lillian returned, Bunny pushed her brother aside.
“Hi, Aunt Lillian. I’m Bunny. Your great-great niece.”
“Me too!” sang Milt.
“Oh my god, Sadie.” Lillian let her mouth hang open as she stared at Milt.
“The eyelashes! That chin, oh my god. Do you see it? Is it just me? This child is gorgeous. He’s Julius. He’s a tiny Julius.”
I summoned Julius’s gleaming hairless head, the black hairs wafting out of his ears, the curl of his upper lip. “Oh. Yeah.”
Lillian looked at me, aghast. “No one’s ever told you that?”
I stroked the orange paisley scarf wrapped around Bunny’s dark hair. “No,” I said, stupidly. For a moment, we all waited for her to say who Bunny looked like.
Lillian bent at the waist and leaned close to my expectant daughter. “My darling. You know, looks aren’t everything.”
I gasped. I closed my eyes a second; I didn’t want to look down to see what this had done to Bunny and for good reason; when I opened them, I saw her little chin flat against her chest, eyes on the floor. She was trying very hard not to cry.
There was a sob. Bunny was crying into her hands.
“Oh look what I did!” Lillian smacked her lips and shook her head. “Listen, as I’ve always said,” Lillian continued, waving one bony blue-veined finger at me, “never trust anyone with a simple nose.”
She had always said that. And I’d listened. I’d lived it, unable to take seriously every milquetoast idiot with a nose of no consequence. The aphorism had sounded profound to me as a child, as though it were truthful enough to root out the bad from the good, but now that she’d just called Bunny plain to her face, I felt only angry and embarrassed, embarrassed I’d crossed the threshold at all.
Bunny, recovered but splotchy-cheeked, dropped to her knees beside the coffee table and began pecking at the sweets.
“Explain this bigotry?” called large-nosed Nat as he stacked the bagels and lox we’d brought onto the dining table. Nat’s parents, like mine, were mixed, but his paternal side was Protestant, and it was his Scottish father’s face he’d inherited. By the time I learned his last name, the day after we met at our mutual friend’s wedding, I’d already made assumptions about his schnoz and how much character it had afforded him.
“Oh, it’s a joke!” Lillian laughed. “Can you not take one?”
I ought to have ignored her and announced to the room how beautiful Bunny was. But I waited a moment too long.
“You can’t trust people who’ve not had to suffer. I’m complimenting you, Nat!”
Bunny was, of course, listening, her eyes darting between us, her head perfectly still, mouth closed as she whittled a peanut M&M down for parts.
Lillian stood up, as fast as my mother-in-law. “Well, what’ve you brought me?” Peering at the table, she turned back. “Egg?”
“Bunny loves an egg bagel,” I said.
“Sadie, she got your mother’s goyim genes.”
I got red and deflected. “You know my mother would never touch a carb.”
When I was around ten and at my urging, my Presbyterian mother told me what we would do if it was ever too dangerous to be Jewish again. She lay beside me in my twin bed and made a list. Though I hadn’t the chutzpah to argue with her, I didn’t want what she was offering: her old last name, a bedroom at my uncle’s house in New Hampshire, church every Sunday. I imagined instead that I’d remain myself, outwitting everybody and surviving.
Last month, Bunny asked me what we were supposed to do now about the people who were being taken from their homes, the immigrants, the new Jews, as she’d heard me call them once at home. I told her I had no idea, save for phone calls and protests. We had no spare room. I had no brother in New Hampshire. And anyway, they couldn’t hide in plain sight like I could’ve. Like I still can.
Bunny marched toward the table with her folder. “Can I start?”
“Just a second, doll,” Lillian said, on her heel. She slid into a seat, her narrow wisp of a body poking out from her chair like a tulip on the verge of a droop.
Lillian’s round table was set with gold-rimmed melamine plates, pink and green patterned china cups and saucers, and white paper napkins folded into triangles. She’d folded them neatly, in preparation for us. In addition to our goyim bagels, we’d brought cream cheese and whitefish salad and nearly a pound of lox. From her own refrigerator, Lillian had set out three cans of Diet Cel-Ray, a tub of whipped butter, a jar of capers, and a plum tomato.
Nat had one knee bent into the couch, surveying the street. “It’s interesting, Lillian,” he called to her without turning around. “You’re at the end of the hallway here but you don’t get a corner view. Does anybody? Some people must’ve combined two units, no?”
She shook her head as she plucked a halved bagel from the bunch and dropped it with a smack on her plate. “Not allowed here. Every unit is the same.”
I smiled. “That’s wonderful.”
“Is it?” Lillian cocked her head at me. “I wouldn’t mind a corner view. Nat, maybe you can convince the authorities? Tell them you’re a professional!”
He seemed to be considering this, even though it was clearly a joke. “You should live as well as you can for as long as you can.”
This, Lillian ignored, reaching for the cream cheese.
“Come eat,” I told Nat.
Milt dropped a handful of M&Ms on his plate.
“Not before dinner,” I said.
My son reached to gather the collar of my dress in both hands, one button popping off its thread and plunking against the table with a sound only I heard. “Yes,” he whispered. I smiled, in thrall to his defiance. How could I not?
“Let’s start with a bagel,” Nat said, sitting down beside him.
Milt screamed.
“Quiet!” Bunny commanded. “I’m about to start my interview!”
Lillian spread her cream cheese slowly, forking the glistening lox and setting it on her bagel like a toupee, and on that, a tomato cap festooned with capers.
“Can she…” I looked at my Aunt Lillian, who nodded as she chewed.
“What’s your full name?” Bunny held her folder open with one wavering hand.
“Lillian Hanna Faust.” She pronounced her middle name, a name I’d never known was hers, the Yiddish way: HAH-nuh.
“What year were you born?”
“1931.”
This whole thing could’ve been done over the phone. Why had I bent to Bunny? Why hadn’t we just sent Lillian these questions in a letter? I was sweating. When Bunny got to the last of her questions, we’d still be on the first halves of our bagels and then what would we talk about?
“Where were you born?”
“The Brownsville and East New York Hospital.”
Bunny’s pen stopped moving part of the way through the word brown.
“And that’s gone now, right?” I was stalling, giving her time to catch up.
“Do you want me to write it?” Lillian offered Bunny with surprising tenderness, ignoring me.
“She has to write it,” I said.
Lillian made a face like I’d slapped her. “It’s not her fault I gave her half the alphabet.”
“What did Bunny get?” Milt asked.
“A joke,” Lillian said.
“I want a joke!”
“He can’t have a joke. It’s my interview!” Bunny cried. “I’m writing as fast as I can! They say I have to write it so, so, I’m writing it!”
I watched as she mangled the letters, pressing down so hard, her pencil tip broke.
“I didn’t bring a sharpener,” she mumbled, her chest rising higher and the plates in her face looking like they might unbind themselves.
I found a pen in my purse and handed it to her. She pushed it away.
“Have you eaten your bagel yet, Bun?” I asked, though I knew she hadn’t.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Lillian breathed into Bunny’s ear. “These bagels are absurd.”
“She’s an absurd girl,” I said, though it didn’t come out in the silly way I wanted; it sounded dismissive. Cruel, even. To make up for my mistake, I placed my hand on Bunny’s and a seam tore below my left arm.
“I never asked for these bagels,” Bunny said quietly. “You just think I like them because I ate them once.”
This wasn’t true but I didn’t want to embarrass her (or myself) any more than I already had.
“When you’re distracted,” I reminded Bunny, “you sometimes forget to eat. And when you don’t eat, you get upset.”
“When I get a lecture, I get upset,” Lillian said out the side of her mouth.
“And when you get upset,” I continued, ignoring Lillian, although, in a way, I was speaking to her too, “it’s hard to know…what to do to help.”
Lillian sized me up from across the table.
“Not to get off topic here,” Nat said, “but can I ask how well you get along with your neighbors?”
“You may and we get along fine. I don’t speak to them and they don’t speak to me,” Lillian said. She gestured toward Bunny. “Does she know Jewish?”
Yiddish, she meant. She meant also for me to perhaps not know what she meant, to have to ask, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to, that I did know, that she couldn’t take me for a fool, or for someone like my mother.
I finished my glass of water and poured myself a Cel-ray. “Who would teach her?”
Bunny raised her writing hand, pen tip pointing at the ceiling fan. Her bagel had a bite out of now. I hadn’t even seen her take it. “How am I related to you?” Bunny asked.
Lillian stood up and shuffled away from us. She hauled a folding stepladder from the front closet, tucking the whole of it inside, and climbing on. Nat ran over and put his hands out lest she topple. Her slacks made meditative shushing sounds I could hear from the table.
“Can I do that for you, Lillian?”
“You cannot!” she said, all but her stockinged calves out of view.
Bunny waited silently, refusing to look at me, while Milt ducked away, for, I knew, more M&Ms, as Lillian reemerged with a thick red leather-bound album.
She pushed her plate aside and opened to the first page. “I was married to him.”
There was young Julius, his sharp chin, full cheeks, those mournful eyes.
Bunny eyed her brother. “He does look like Milt.”
Milt beamed and scrambled over to Lillian, who, without so much as a groan, lifted him into her lap.
“Nice looking guy,” Nat said, peering at the photo from across the table.
“He was!” Lillian snapped. “Nice, polite. He looked how he was.”
“Nice people aren’t necessarily easy to be married to,” I said.
“We’re not?” Nat opened his mouth in mock alarm.
I rolled my eyes, smiled for my great aunt. “Aren’t I the nice one?” It was a joke and an aspiration.
Nat patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for his phone, on which I could see a call from a colleague, silenced after some consideration. I felt my face get hot very fast. It wasn’t the tenderness I was responding to but the condescension. We both knew how much everybody liked him and we both knew how hard I worked to be liked. Just yesterday morning, at the park where I’d brought the kids early, Nat showed up a half hour later to cheers from three or four other fathers, and mothers, too, hovering around the play structure. I’d brought donuts, but it was Nat they were most pleased to see.
Nat noticed all the effort I made to be liked: the times I brought cookies or pizza (or laughed loudly at somebody’s not-so-funny joke), and the times I was easygoing with the kids, letting them stay up late, resolving their arguments without yelling at either one. Nat noticed and he loved it; he told me so. But sometimes I wondered what he would tell me if I didn’t try so hard. Sometimes it was all I thought about.
We both knew how much everybody liked him and we both knew how hard I worked to be liked.
Lillian’s eyes flicked from me to Nat for a second, unreadable, then she seemed to drop away, inside herself again.
“Julius was a doll,” Lillian said. “A hypocrite, but he was easy to come home to, he was an easy man.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “Nobody got divorced back then, right?”
“Not nobody! I drove him out of his mind. I questioned him, I doubted him, I told him he wasn’t interesting enough for me and so he said adieu!”
No one could insult her worse than she could insult herself.
“Adieu?” Milt peered up at her. “Is that a bad word?”
“It means goodbye,” muttered Bunny as she wrote.
Lillian afforded Bunny no extra points for her knowledge, instead smoothing Milt’s hair with her manicured fingers, a stillness on her face I couldn’t read.
None of us spoke.
Our master of ceremonies continued transcribing Lillian’s words, penmanship jagged but clear. Milt had slid off Lillian’s lap and gone under the table. Also under the table were Nat’s hands tapping a message into his phone, too busy with weekend work for another attempt at enticing my aunt to do an impossible apartment upgrade. Milt drifted into the living room, unburdening us.
“He wanted to take care of me,” Lillian explained in a softer voice. “He wanted to give me things.”
I nodded.
“He said when I first met him that I was the smartest girl he’d ever known. Which wasn’t true, no student was I, but I loved hearing it. We’d gone to see The Valley of Decision with Gregory Peck and I think Julius thought of me like the maid, the sweet girl, the loyal girl, the good listener, you understand? I liked that version of me too except she didn’t exist. He wanted me to say it was alright the way he wanted more for himself than the fellows he was negotiating for and I didn’t think it was. He didn’t want to talk about big ideas with me, he wanted to talk logistics, all the time, the plans, the deals, the numbers. He wanted me to be here,” Lillian said, extending a flattened palm out in the air half a foot lower than her shoulder, “his little soldier. Am I making it plain? Every time I opened my mouth, he’d brace himself. At dinner, at breakfast, in bed. He’d flinch! At his own wife! Do you flinch at her, Nat?”
Nat stuck his phone into his pocket after a moment. He had not heard her, didn’t know if he ought to say yes or no.
“Sorry,” he mouthed to me. “Closing got delayed and the seller is pissed.”
Lillian tried again. “Do you mind when she argues with you, Nat?”
I took a slow breath, and then another, waiting for him to answer. “She doesn’t argue with me. We don’t argue with each other.”
Nat rubbed his thumb along the webbing between my fingers. With his thumb, he was telling me that we were not like Lillian and Julius. And we weren’t. I didn’t argue with him, not out loud.
When Milt was six weeks old, I slipped into a frayed, weepy pocket during which it was hard to wash my hair, hard to wear anything but soft pants and a very old pair of dirty sneakers. Nat, without telling me, hired a woman, a night nurse, to stay at our apartment every night for two weeks and get Milt to sleep. It was very generous of him and, I conceded, a relief to put Bunny to bed without Milt in my arms, but it cost more money than we had and it wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want it at all. So, every night, I’d agree with Nat about what a boon Teresa the nurse was, and then I’d roll over and cry quietly until I passed out, waking to a wet nightgown, that violent reminder to pump. Things were better now. Nat thought he’d made them better. And I took medicine for the crying.
“That’s a shame,” Lillian murmured.
The air here felt slippery and dangerous, like if we inhaled deeply enough, maybe someone might start arguing. Maybe even me.
“Tell me about your family growing up,” Bunny read from her paper.
“I had two little brothers who I loved, the baby especially. My mother was very bright and quiet and then she got sick.” Lillian pointed to her head. “In her brain. My father was not so bright and always angry. He worked for a tailor. My mother should have gone to college, I think. She read the newspaper every day. Start to finish.”
Bunny wrote all of this down, carefully. Lillian let her and began to eat, relishing one bite, then another, as we sat in silence until I saw Milt dancing in the corner of my eye.
I nudged Nat with my elbow and he looked up from his phone. “Can you…take him?”
“Where’s the bathroom?” Nat asked brightly.
Lillian dropped her bagel and stood up very quickly. “Of course. Let me show you.” Like a cat, she slipped into the hallway, which fed into, ostensibly, the bedrooms and bathroom. “Come, Milt! Come, Nat! I’m going to show you the bathroom!” she sang loudly.
I patted the parts of my dress that had undone themselves. It was an old dress, one I’d worn before kids, before breastfeeding, before Nat, even. I’d gotten it second-hand and worn it to a holiday party where someone had told me I looked like a character in Mad Men. The dress was finished now. Why I’d worn it today, I wasn’t sure.
Lillian returned but did not sit. She hovered with two hands on the table and flicked her chin toward her grand-niece. She must’ve felt that her lipstick had been lost on the lox because she pressed her mouth together in an effort to remake it. “Next!”
“Can you tell me something about our family that I might not know?” Bunny asked.
From the bathroom came Milt’s screams, Nat’s resonant murmuring. I didn’t want to abandon Nat to the meltdown, but I wanted to know what Lillian was going to say. My longing felt at that moment like a day’s worth of unmet hunger, like that Yom Kippur fast I’d only once done as a teenager to test my devotion, my Jewishness, just in case I might one day need to up the ante, though I was yet to be asked, not by Nat, not by anyone. I stayed in my dining chair, my eyes darting toward the hallway, hovering meekly between my progeny.
Lillian took a sip of her cold coffee. “Well, did you know that my children won’t speak to me?”
Bunny shook her head. “Why?”
“They think I’m a monster.”
Bunny looked up at me then back at her. “You’re not a monster,” she said firmly.
“I might be,” Lillian snapped. “I was a difficult wife, a difficult mother. I’m a difficult person. I wanted everybody in my family to understand things as I did. And they didn’t. They don’t.” Her lips like worms had begun to wriggle across her face with something she seemed to want to contain.
Her bitterness was not a shock, but the emotion under it was.
“It’s not so much fun being the bitch,” Aunt Lillian said. We didn’t curse in our house, and I could see Bunny’s eyes widen at the word.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry they shut you out. That we did.”
Aunt Lillian raised her eyebrows.
Bunny interrupted again, heroically, speaking over some detritus in her throat.
“What’s your favorite snack?” she asked.
Good god. We’d dropped into the miscellaneous portion now.
Lillian held her hands up and scoffed. “Nuts?”
Bunny wrote the word slowly, slower than any answer so far.
“OK. Nuts. Now last question. What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?”
“That’s your own question too, right?” I asked her. I was impressed, and I wanted them both to know.
Bunny nodded. “The original was do you have a pet.”
Lillian snorted.
“What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?” I asked Bunny.
I knew the answer. She was going to say Milt, her brother Milt, whose screams had at last abated. If I listened through the silence, I could hear water running. It was having a brother, a brother I’d foisted on her, that was hard but that she didn’t really mind. She wished he’d never been born but she couldn’t help loving him a little bit too.
Bunny lowered her head and spoke to the table.
“You,” she said.
I stared at her. What remained of my dress’s seams pressed into my hot skin. I looked down at my hands.
“Me?” I chirped. “I’m the hard thing about your life?”
“She doesn’t mind!” Lillian shouted. “That’s good news!”
I kept my face as unmoving as I could so my cheeks wouldn’t get wet. “Why am I the hard thing?”
The enveloping softness of the carpet under my feet was not a comfort then, so I pressed harder against it.
In a small voice, she said, “You’re not brave. But it’s OK.”
I was woozy, blood gathering across my collarbone, I could feel it tingling, my tongue solidifying, stomach humming and hollowed out. I kept my eyes open even though I didn’t want to.
“What exactly are you talking about?”
Bunny would not look at me. She shrugged. “You pretend. Like now, you’re acting like you’re not that mad. But you are.”
I saw my aunt’s mouth contort. She was pretending, too.
“So, being brave is, is getting mad?”
“For you, it is,” Lillian spat quietly.
“Hell of a bathroom you got there! Did that clawfoot tub come with the place?” Milton and Nat returned together in lockstep.
“I pooped,” Milton declared with grim pride.
“Not in the tub!” Nat clarified.
“Shut up!” Bunny bellowed at both of them.
“You shut up!” I shouted, as angry as I felt, pretending nothing, the outside of me reflecting my insides so exactly, I felt like my skin had fallen off.
“Sadie,” said Nat.
“Don’t yell just to prove yourself to her,” Aunt Lillian muttered, peering up at me, her brown eyes catching the light and shining. “Or to me.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m really sorry,” Bunny mumbled, shaking her head wildly. She’d dropped deep down into her throne of a dining seat, her nubby blue smock dress folding in on itself and over her.
I shook my head, crying breathlessly and stupidly in front of them all. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to say was and to whom. What I usually said, what I usually did, was what neither my aunt nor my daughter wanted from me, so I said what I’d have rather kept to myself. “Yeah. I do pretend. So I don’t hurt people’s feelings. Like…” I gestured at Lillian.
At this, Lillian made a grunt as loud as a clap, chastening whatever courage I’d just mustered.
I wiped my nose with my ruined dress. “Thank you so much for having us.”
Nat had begun clearing the table. “The coffee was wonderful.”
“It wasn’t.” Lillian gazed at him and then at me. “You’re running away from the fight. Tell her she’s wrong. She’s a kid. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
But Bunny did know. She knew more than most kids her age ought to know. Bunny was right.
I shook my head at my great aunt, watching Nat gather three wobbly Cel-Rays. “You told me not to impress you. Now you tell me to fight. What do you want?”
“Honey, you don’t need to be embarrassed,” said Lillian, without a thread of the tenderness she had used to speak to Bunny.
I stacked the plates, my sleeve catching in the cream cheese. “Bunny talks like that when she’s tired.”
“I’m not tired,” Bunny said, her earlier penitence undone.
“Should we leave the bagels?” Nat asked Lillian.
“Please don’t.”
Lillian reached across the table to me and encircled my arm with her cool hand. “You’ll never be like me, Sadie. No matter what you do.” Her consonants were crisp, brutal. She was holding onto me tightly. “You follow the rules. You’re nice. Just like your uncle.”
Tumescent with shame, I nodded dumbly. Lillian’s eyebrows were arched. She did not look like my grandmother. She looked like Bunny’s drawing. And also, maybe, Bunny.
“Take it as a compliment,” Aunt Lillian demanded.
I tucked my hair behind my ear, the busted stitching of my dress exposing my soaked armpits like strings stretched over a guitar’s sound hole, and told Lillian goodnight.
In the car, Milt had fallen asleep, the porcelain of his stolen Hummel (the rabbi, my rabbi!) like a watchful glowing moon in his arms.
Bunny remained alert. She’d held my hand all the way to our parking spot and when I wordlessly buckled her into her car seat, she’d said, over and over, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad,” to which I’d shaken my head furiously as Nat thundered, uncharacteristically, “Nobody thinks that, Bunny!”
Now, in the back, Bunny seemed to have forgiven herself and me as she gazed ahead.
“Aunt Lillian never answered your last question.” I was picking at a wound that hadn’t even scabbed.
Red and white orbs of tail lights and highway lights guided us north toward home. Beside Nat shone the blackness of Gravesend Bay and just beyond, the Verrazano, regal in its nighttime banner of electrics.
“I hate it about me too,” I told Bunny without turning around. “That I’m not brave.”
“I don’t,” Nat murmured.
“I know you don’t,” I said sharply.
“Isn’t it brave to be sorry? You’re always sorry.” He turned his head sideways and smiled at me with no teeth. “She’s not.”
I didn’t know if he meant Lillian or Bunny, Bunny who listened quietly to us as she gripped her car seat’s armrests, her defiant heart pinned in with five straps to prevent disaster. He meant it as a compliment. But he didn’t know I wasn’t sorry half the times I claimed to be.
“Maybe,” I said because Bunny was right: I didn’t want to fight.
“The hard thing in Lillian’s life that she doesn’t really mind is herself,” said Nat. “Your great great-aunt is the hard thing. Write that, Bunny.”
He sounded so proud of himself.
How could I tell him he was wrong? I didn’t know what the hard thing was that Lillian didn’t mind, but I knew she could hardly bear herself. I could hardly bear myself sometimes. That was what made us both brave.
Bunny stared at me in the rearview mirror, as still and silent as the bridge outside our window.
“I think she’s asleep with her eyes open,” Nat whispered.
I nodded and stared at the road ahead. She was asleep with her eyes open. She had been for a while.
It was too hot now and, as Nat drove, I tried to shuck my coat off from below my seatbelt but it was too bulky. I had to unbuckle. As the car’s alarm rang, I shrugged my arms free. Ignoring Nat’s concerned glances, I slipped my fingers under the torn armpit of my tattered dress and wrenched the sleeve clean off.
“Sadie. You have to buckle.”
I leaned my bare shoulder against the window. “I know,” I said as the alarm dinged and dinged. “I will.”
This list won’t be a screed against the MFA. Other than this one sentence, I won’t write “MFA industrial complex.” Almost a century old, a master’s degree in creative writing now seems inescapable—to be a writer, you need one. While I don’t find that logic persuasive, most modern writers emerge from or eventually become entangled with the fine arts degree. But what happens when writers create without these institutional pressures?
In the world of prose, I think of Fran Ross’s Oreo, so original, hilarious, and ecstatic—a formally ingenious book. And what about Annie Dillard’s wild inventions in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm? She ended up with a university teaching post, but I can’t imagine either of these works emerging as a master’s thesis. Outside the United States, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrinecomes to mind, too, evoking a totalizing fascination with falcons in diaristic prose that is unbearably beautiful. Each of these books is sui generis, authored by singular minds transfiguring literary and cultural history without heeding predominant tastes or trends.
In the world of poetry, I’ve especially struggled to locate writers without MFAs, with a few exceptions like Louise Glück and Danez Smith, different generations but both luminaries to me. It’s taken years—some posting on social media and scouring author bios—but I’ve found a few MFA-less contemporary poets whose expansive imaginations have produced exciting, inventive books. While each writer is distinct, their taste, sensibility, and allegiances are manifold. No one advises them where to go, so they go everywhere.
This book has a theatrical sweep, its poems reading like monologues and dialogues that think and revise and name and trouble naming itself. Toscano talks through economy, empire, and the multifarious registers of language, laboring—this being a special focus of his—to include and undermine theoretical jargon that can ally and alienate. Toscano’s mind is exciting and expansive. But where his poetry most impresses and surprises is at the hyper-local level of words, specifically the interjections like um, yeah, ugh, oh, etc. that juxtapose the book’s philosophical rigor, creating funny, insightful, and tonally rich poems.
Some of Cheung’s most compelling poems are ghazals, and the collection itself begins to resemble a radif, a word repeating at the end of lines. “Exile” is one such word, accruing conflicting meanings. Exile is place, body, history. Nothing is one thing. The poet herself is physician, dreamer, historian, mother, wife. The self, like the radif, repeats—altered slightly each time. Common Disaster is the perfect title then. Disaster may be common—in more than one sense of the word—but as the collection demonstrates, it is not endured equally. Cheung is a musician: often brutal subjects cast in lucid lines, beauty rendered without consolation. The pandemic, hospital rooms, the Silk Road—each becomes a site where history and intimacy converge. If a person is a crossing of multiple histories, few poets trace that crossing with such immediacy and tenderness.
I don’t think you’ll find a more provocative cover. Bring it with you to your local coffee shop, DMV, or even to church. Really, it will provoke. Her poems traverse so many subjects, histories, obsessions, questions, antecedents, epigraphs, forms, and more—we have cameos from Homer to László Földényi to Maximus the Confessor. These poems are like a strange heretical religion: They don’t just focus on the unattended moment, which poetry can be so good at, but they also create assemblages that mystify. I love these poems. You are dreaming with a poet who seems limitless in her imagination.
Lassell builds an architecture wherein poems work individually and astonish as a collection. The poet works and reworks what a frame can signify. Sometimes, frames include and exclude the past, and a subject in one poem will be transfigured in another, a frame inside a frame. Lassell thinks through so many spatial possibilities in a world disordered and overwhelmed by information and content. However, the poet doesn’t sentimentalize unity. The synecdochal texts question wholeness and stability, especially through a series of erasure poems, “The Temple of Salt,” that reimagine linguistic and theological possibilities in Genesis. These erasures are some of the finest poems I’ve read this year.
Sometimes, as they say, art does aspire to the condition of music. Here is such a book. These poems are marvels of the everyday in the Ozarks. The project is living, attending to the vicissitudes of motherhood and the fraught pleasures of desire. A careful, devoted observer, Nichols writes poems filled with unruly questions that forego tempting and easy resolutions. For her child, whose father is no longer around, she offers to “be your trellis, at best.” These are poems about wildness—the feral exterior and volatile interior.
No exhibit is a neutral representation of knowledge. In natural history museums, for instance, dioramas can occlude the vexed entanglement between science and empire. Kilbourne, a longtime research biologist, complicates the historical production and transfer of knowledge—history isn’t partitioned with great and noble scientific inquiry on one side and racist colonial plundering on the other. Natural History makes clear that what we know cannot be divested from how we have come to know. Intricate in design and sonorous, the poems startle both in erudition and cadence. Whether he writes about himself or a recipe, Kilbourne situates the subject—the poems often open with periodic sentences so that the subject doesn’t appear neutral or unburdened by history. The effect Kilbourne achieves could only arise through this unexpected but necessary reciprocity of science and poetry.
Some say if you write long enough, you keep writing and rewriting the same poem. Nature poets, in particular, can vanish into the landscape, protected by flora and fauna nomenclature. However, Baker writes inimitably beautiful poems about the natural world that make me rethink what the “natural world” even is. What fascinates me is how he thinks through subjects, with heterogeneous methodologies and vocabularies and histories. In one poem, “Oikos,” the poet ruminates his way through vexed conceptions of home and hospitality, of ethics, the form of the poem restive: spacious in some sections, controlled and hymnal in others. The language is conversational, full of puns, but also learned, melodic—the poet attempts to make a dwelling for his beloveds while remaining aware of the terrors inextricable to that process.
I spent two years trying to sell TV shows in Los Angeles. Before my first pitch, I asked my agent if I should dress casually or formally. She told me to dress “NYC cool,” which was absolutely not one of the options. I can’t say my memories of my time in Hollywood were “good,” necessarily; I never quite felt like I fit in.
After I left LA, I wasn’t keen to re-enter that world: the world of pitching ideas you never thought would reach viewers, of waiting in “development hell” for months, of never getting an official rejection, but instead just watching the industry slowly ghost you. Because of the sour taste Hollywood left in my mouth, I was particularly struck by how much I enjoyed Hallie Cantor’s Like This, But Funnier, the perfect satire of the TV writing industry. Her protagonist, Caroline, captures exactly what it means to spend your days pitching a nebulous idea for a TV show while wondering if your life is ever going to start moving. Cantor deftly describes the negative space that fills your world when the industry demands you have a close personal connection to your story, but your days are spent in your PJs in front of a laptop, so you don’t think that story is quite that compelling. She skewers how attached execs can be to small, unimportant details of a pitch that become impossible to build a world around. She roasts the industry’s obsession with authenticity while making the same type of show over and over again. All while capturing a complex female protagonist struggling to manage her relationship, her career, and her uncertainty about starting a family.
Cantor and I met over Zoom to discuss the screenwriting industry, letting our characters live in uncertainty, and envying the nine-to-five.
Ginny Hogan: How did the character of Caroline change during the drafting process of Like This, But Funnier?
Hallie Cantor: In my first draft, she was oddly very grumpy and annoyed all the time. And I think that was partly because I was grumpy and annoyed about having to write a first draft. And that came out in the character. It’s also an easy place to find humor: this self-defensive, cynical crouch of like, this is stupid, that’s stupid. But that gets grating over 300 pages. In later drafts, I really pushed myself to find places where she’s more terrified or elated or any other emotion. So she’s not just constantly annoyed.
GH: I imagine that this was very much inspired by experiences that you had as a writer. Did you consider writing a memoir?
HC: I never thought about writing a memoir. I didn’t even think that I was going to be writing about my own experiences at all. I set out looking for an idea for a funny fictional novel. Then, I had this idea about a writer married to a therapist, which I am in real life. Gradually, in my subconscious, I started feeding pieces of my own experiences into Caroline’s, and the story became what it is. But often, when I’m writing, I take a real feeling and hang it on a scaffolding of a bigger premise. That’s not only more fun for the writer, but it’s more fun for the reader to read about somebody who’s lying and stalking, caught in a web of their own deception, instead of a plot that’s more like “she felt bad about herself for a couple years.”
GH: One of the things I loved in the book was Caroline’s TV show pitches. The pitches get worse and worse, but the studio gets more and more excited about them. She gets caught in this web of lies; she’s not sure that it’s ethical for her to pitch the show because the character is inspired by her husband’s patient. And on top of that, she knows the pitches are bad. And I found it very real – it can feel like the industry’s taste is not aligned with your own. But I’m wondering, for a person who is outside of Hollywood, was there anything you wanted to explore that felt too far-fetched? Anything you had to rein in to make it more believable?
I think her journey is about having the self-compassion to not be afraid of her own ambivalence.
HC: Not really. There’s a section that’s just emails from her agents and executives giving her notes on the script. An early reader said, “This section feels like a different tone from the rest of the book. This is a little too heightened.” And I was surprised because a lot of that was taken verbatim. There’s definitely a bit of satirizing, but I didn’t think of the book as a Hollywood satire because the reality of Hollywood is so silly and ridiculous. I just wanted to present that on a plate to people outside of it.
GH: That really comes through. Did you know when you started writing how you wanted Caroline’s story to end?
HC: Not specifics. I had a sense that I wanted her to have a changed relationship by the end, both with herself and with her work. For so much of the book, her fatal flaw is that she feels like to be worthy, she has to be exceptional. She thinks she has to be the most talented, that she has to rise above everybody else in Hollywood. And by the end, she’s open to the idea that her creativity can connect her to other people instead of setting her apart from them. I did note that I didn’t want her to decide one way or the other about the question of whether or not to become a parent, which is also a big thread in the book. I didn’t want the takeaway to be, “yeah, you should have kids,” or, “no, it’s okay not to have kids.” I wanted to honor her ambivalence. And honestly, she’s not even ready to make that decision. I think her journey is about having the self-compassion to not be afraid of her own ambivalence.
GH: That’s so interesting. I know it’s becoming a bigger thing to depict child-free women in books and on TV, which is so cool because that’s definitely been missing. At the same time, I also think it’s so cool to depict a woman who just stays in uncertainty. That is definitely missing from the conversation.
HC: So many articles are like, “I wasn’t sure, but now I have my two-year-old.” Well, okay, you figured it out, but what about the rest of the world?
GH: There are parts of the book that felt so close to home in terms of how people talk in Hollywood, especially with Caroline’s agent. Was there anything that felt almost cringy to write?
With those experiences, you’re carrying the shame, internalizing it, wondering if you were asking for it.
HC: There’s one scene about a Secret Santa gift exchange in a writer’s room. And it’s not even really necessary for the plot, but I always knew that I wanted to include a moment like it. I’ve had these experiences in the TV writing industry, as people do in a lot of creative industries, where somebody makes a joke or says something that’s a bit off, and you don’t realize until later that it upset you. But at the same time, you don’t wanna say anything because getting along with the other writers is such a big part of the job—you want to be part of a cohesive social unit. But with those experiences, you’re carrying the shame, internalizing it, wondering if you were asking for it. And I wanted to show that. Specifically, how the accumulation of those kinds of experiences could affect Caroline. And could affect the way that she feels about herself and her career. But it was difficult to write. I found myself experiencing this self-doubt of like, is this even anything? Should I not even include this? Is she being a whiner?
GH:Creative careers are so idealized, and Caroline is a woman who’s had a lot of conventional success and is still dissatisfied. So I love that scene because it really shows that she has not had a super smooth ride, and yet, she herself still idealizes this career path and can’t imagine doing anything else.
HC: That’s a big part of it. You do idealize the career, and you don’t want to seem ungrateful because you do love what you’re doing. But then, there are these parts of it that you’re like, this didn’t feel so good.
GH: Is there anyone in Hollywood you were worried would be upset by the book?
HC: There are maybe some people who could see themselves in it, but the honest truth is, I don’t think that they read books. And even for people who have read it, it’s easier to recognize a behavior in others than in yourself. In the meetings I’ve had about the book, people have been like, “Oh, it’s so accurate, everybody I know is like that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and you.”
GH: Did the process of writing the book change how you view your screenwriting career? Or screenwriting as a field?
HC: If anything, it underscored for me how much free work we’re expected to do as screenwriters. It sounds counterintuitive because, obviously, writing a novel is the ultimate piece of free work. But it felt different; I knew that even if I didn’t sell the novel, it could exist as a piece of art in the world. And that was very satisfying. It also made me reflect on the years I had spent working on pitches and scripts that are basically blueprints for something else. And you have a small chance of getting paid and a very slim chance of the work getting produced. It can be very hard to feel that your work is valued in those circumstances.
GH: Was it easier to get motivated for something that you knew you could make on your own?
HC: Definitely. I had gotten to a point where I was pretty jaded about working on pitches because after enough failures, I was like, well, this is not gonna be anything.I’m just doing this on the off chance that I get paid, but no one’s ever going to read it or enjoy it in the way that an audience is meant to enjoy something. So it was very exciting to work on a novel and think that even if I ended up publishing it on a blog, people could still read it.
GH: Do you want the book to change readers’ perceptions of the TV writing industry?
I don’t think I’m the first person to say that the entertainment industry is tough.
HC: It’s an interesting question. I certainly didn’t set out with that intention. And I don’t think I’m the first person to say that the entertainment industry is tough. In the years since writing the first draft of the book, we had the writer’s strike, which showed people the bigger structural issues facing TV writers. So if anything, the book can function as a magnifying glass. It lets the reader zoom in on what it feels like to work within a system that is constantly demanding that you bang on the door to prove yourself over and over and over. And how easy it is to adopt a worldview about your worth, and value of your labor, and your relationships to other people, and how much you can trust what other people say, and how authentic you can be with other people, and all these things that have a massive impact on us as humans.
GH: The relationship aspect comes through so well in the book. Caroline is married to a therapist. And I know from my own experience that there’s this dynamic between being in a creative career and being married to someone who has a stable job. I’m curious what your thoughts are on it. Does it ever make you envy a nine-to-five?
HC: All the time. And my husband not only has a stable job, but it’s a job that concretely helps people. So it’s very easy to be like, What have I done with my life? But yeah, I’m doing it. I’m telling myself that laughter helps people in its own way.
GH: It does! And I tell myself that all the time too.
HC: And the flip side is that you do get to see the downsides of a nine-to-five, where this person has to go to work every day, even when they feel crappy and wanna take a nap. And as creatives, we do have the freedom to make our own schedule and all those other things that we can appreciate.
Recently, I was texting with the editor of my most recent book about how there seem to be cycles in in literature, some kind of zeitgeist or collective unconscious, like how for a minute there were so many retellings of Frankenstein (like this, and this, and this, and this).
Speculative fiction has been having a moment for a while, and in many works—including the ones on this list—there is also a deep current of loss and isolation. And ghosts. What’s interesting to me, just as how the Frankenstein retellings came from really different writers, is the way the through lines in books from this season cross generations, genres, and perspectives. The story collections from Patricia Henley and Tayyba Kanwal, whose debuts have nearly three decades of distance between them, have a lot more in common than the jacket copy would suggest. Similarly, ire’ne lara silva and Wesley Brown capture a kind of familial longing, though Brown’s realism is literary (in the genre sense) and silva’s is magical.
My editor said he’s starting to see a lot of Icarus metaphors, but what I’m seeing is writers using narrative to try and articulate our contemporary moment, even if their work is set in the 14th Century, like Lauren C. Johnson. None of these books fly too close to the sun, but all take that same soaring ambition.
A group of five college friends take a trip to Palm Springs, the first time they’ve all been together in years. Careers, children, marriages, and aging parents make connecting in person difficult, even though they always keep up with each other in the group chat. Yet, as elder millennials, the fourth decade of their lives is about to become a flash point: Changes are coming for each of the women. Their renewed closeness creates a scaffolding they all hold on to, but it also reminds them of the times they were less supportive, wrapped up in their own concerns. Clutch is a novel that explores the complexity and nuance of long female friendships, and Nemens writes this dynamic with perfect pitch. The only reason to put this engrossing novel down is to text your bestie.
After being entwined in a decade-and-a-half long relationship, the nameless woman in Schikora’s novel and Dutch, the charismatic leading man in her idea of a love story, ultimately part. Though they were never fully honest with each other as a couple, hiding the pieces of their past lives dealing with substance abuse and disordered eating, the protagonist of the novel cannot let Dutch go. Even when he marries, she pines for him and what they could have been, to the point that she considers Dutch’s wife the “other woman.” The protagonist tracks her relationship with Dutch along with another love story, that of June Carter and Johnny Cash. A Woman in Pink chronicles the relatable if heartbreaking reality that love is not always enough to make a partnership work, and takes a hard look at what healing actually means.
Cornerstone Press: Apple & Palm by Patricia Henley
In the town of Whistle Pig, people are living their lives. Characters recur in Patricia Henley’s latest. For example, Jill Zebrak, who in one story regularly retrieves her elderly father from the local casino and mildly tolerates his lover who is closer in age to her than him, appears in another story where she takes in two young girls after their parents die in a murder-suicide. Yet Henley’s collection is not bleak: There is a vibrant artist colony in Whistle Pig, amorous octogenarians, and a true sense of community. What Henley does best is describe how small-town life has both a frustrating insularity and inescapable points of connection. Apple & Palm looks at the ways we live and the choices we make not only for our own survival, but also for the survival of the people who surround us.
A domestic worker trapped in a Dubai household of extraordinary wealth schemes for her and the other workers to get out; a Houston family’s babysitter lands a spot on a reality show about nannies, and they attempt to use this to catapult their own children to fame; in Lahore, a privileged woman seeks her own economic agency, only to be rebuked by her husband, all while a gifted bracelet from her son—meant to convey his prosperity—circles her wrist like a handcuff. In Pakistan, and in the Pakistani diaspora, Kanwal’s characters are pushing against customs and expectations, or angling for power and dominance. The stories are written with attention to an emotional center. It’s not always clear who the villain is, and that’s the point in these heartfelt and beautifully textured stories.
In this multi-generational novel, the higher price that women pay, from action to silence, is cracked open. Sali, the only child of an evangelical family, stands trial for the murder of her husband. Fourteen years earlier, she was living in her family’s home and was pregnant by a married man. After his accidental death, she is wedded to a local police officer who swears to raise the child as his own. Yet, while Sali and her husband go on to have two more children, they struggle with money and marital fidelity. The murder trial makes the Zambian national headlines, and Sali’s 15-year-old daughter Ntashé has to reconcile what the newspapers print and what she hears in the courts against what she knows of her mother. Sali’s own mother must do the same. Gripping.
In this hybrid work, photographs of Joshua trees, Ferris wheels, and old motels are companions to the story of Dawn and Johnny, who are on a road trip across the American West. Dawn, a photographer, has cancer. Johnny, the driver, navigates highways and red dirt roads, and drives onto a golf course to flip a donut. The effect is that of chronology by postcard, narrative through mile-markers. The book captures the desolate beauty of both the desert plains and mountains, punctuated by tiny, dying towns. something out there in the distance is a slim volume containing a deep emotional weight.
After a brush with death, Antonio encounters his first love, a man who has passed over and is caring in the afterlife for Antonio’s child who did not survive to infancy; Emma Elisa grows marigolds all season to host an elaborate Día de los Muertos party, where her community builds altars and considers the past; a spirit of death inhabits a tattooed body, falls in love with a hospice nurse, and runs a taco truck with vegan options. In these loosely linked stories, the veil between the dead and the living is a mere shimmer. The collection speaks to erotic desire, brings myth into reality, confronts generational trauma, and addresses colonialism all in stunning, gorgeous prose. The beauty in how silva writes speaks to our complicated histories and yearning bodies.
Betty is a young woman with a famous feminist mother best known for executing a re-imagining of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and that shadow hangs over Betty just as an elaborate fresco. As Betty experiences the messy part of early adulthood when friendships and relationships change, her childhood begins to feel more distant. In conversation with a server at Lonesome Ballroom, at happy hours with her grandmother, or wading through the discourse of her marriage, Betty cannot quite find her footing. She’s smart, she’s educated, but she also doesn’t have a clear sense of herself. McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom expertly wrestles with questions of third-wave feminism and familial inheritance, all while perfectly capturing the anxieties of the turn of the 21st century. A wild—and for women of a particular generation, highly relatable—ride.
The Watergate scandal of 1972 is embedded in the American consciousness, but less remembered is Frank Wills, then a young man who had worked his way up to a security guard at the Watergate complex. On June 17th, he noticed that locks to one of the office suites had been tampered with and called the police, ultimately bringing down the Nixon presidency. In this short novel, Wesley Brown blends the true story of Wills with the fictionalized account of Wayne Beasley, a Black Korean war vet who runs a family barbershop in Savannah and recounts his memories of Wills as a child, a young adult, and then a man at the center of major historical event. The novel emerges as a conversation between generations that asks questions about race, politics, war, and family. Looking for Frank Wills is a powerful retelling of Wills’s story.
Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, Eric is out of place at school in Hong Kong and called a “ghost” for his light-complexioned face. Eric is caught between different realities: should he speak English or Cantonese? How does he negotiate his separated parents’ different perspectives against his own experiences? How does he figure out who is against who he wants to be? Wong Foreman takes all of these questions and alchemizes them into an exploratory narrative that centers Eric and excavates family dynamics. There’s an epistolary element that brings the voices in closer, but the center is Eric and his struggles. A novel that’s as broad as it is heartfelt.
In the aftermath of a romantic breakup, a writer and journalist departs the apartment he shared with his partner, making all of the arrangements within ten days. On a train to Berlin, the narrator of Sajko’s novel reflects on his (and her) culpability for their parting while also ruminating on memories of his family, like his alcoholic father who died alone and his mother who made a harrowing escape from his father’s violence. A compressed book, every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist’s regret. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling.
It’s 1348 in Paris, on the west façade of Notre Dame, and the statue of Sainte Geneviève has been gifted an orange by a woman who climbs the wall to reach her. Though the forms that adorn and guard the cathedral look still to passerby, they’re conscious beings who can loose themselves from their niches for one night each moon cycle and explore the city, its people, and its pleasures. Geneviève wants more than one night monthly, and despite the cautioning she is given, isn’t so interested in the rules after she’s tasted the orange. The West Façade draws on everything from Eve’s eating of the apple to Cinderella needing to return before midnight to questions about what consciousness and sentience means—all the more a salient line of inquiry in the age of AI. Johnson takes the art of another era and contemporizes it to a compelling, original effect.
In this linked collection of speculative fiction, an accountant who is learning to swim is interrogated by her humanoid companion; a woman is unanchored in time and cannot remember giving birth to her daughter or even who she is; and in the title story, a couple argues incessantly and from such deep unhappiness the woman dreams hopefully of contracting a fatal tumor. Gadsby’s stories have simmering resentment, the cruelty of children, and the terror of never belonging as characters right alongside her unhappy people, threaded together with recurring themes. The effect is a glittering collection with high emotional tension.
The adulthood experience of purchasing a first home becomes something much more pronounced for Eleanor Fan. As she grew up, her mother, Lele, helped her with everything—even into adulthood—but after Lele’s death, Eleanor is left without her guidance and ultimately buys a property that’s less of a home and more of a sodden cage. As the Pacific Northwest rain continues to fall, Eleanor must reckon with both the absence of her mother’s strong force in her life, and the appearance of a new force: ghosts who speak to her. Fu’s novel shows the impact of isolation on a young woman consumed by grief, as the story unfolds with increasing intensity. A literary page-turner.
The perspective in The Unravelling of Ou belies the seriousness of the book: The narrative is told from the viewpoint of a sock-puppet named Ecology Paul. Of course, Ecology Paul must be puppeted by someone, and that’s Minoo, who is struggling with feelings of isolation. The sock-puppet speaks less to whimsy and more to how desperately people need to be seen and listened to, and how deeply feelings of shame are buried. Yet while the sock puppet is a source of comfort to Minoo, her adult daughter is not having it, and Minoo must work through her own feelings in order to save the relationship. Ghadery takes a silly premise and transforms it into a captivating, layered story. A feat of imagination and execution.
It’s the kind of hot summer day in rural Alberta where my limbs hang so heavy that I wobble as I walk, almost drunkenly, and bump against Caroline and Kim beside me. “Sorry,” I mutter, and they push me away half-heartedly while Chris weaves back and forth on his yellow BMX bike. We’ve been kicked out of the house and told to go play. We already rambled through the ditches, took turns targeting trees with rocks, moseyed our skinny legs past the few houses around us, past a farmer’s field with cows, a small creek, past the frog pond where we catch tadpoles in the spring and pour them into glass jars that we set inside the house so we can watch them grow and lose their tails and sprout their funny legs.
I learned about metamorphosis in school last year, and it makes my stomach and fingers and feet and head fill with happiness to think about it. The magic of it. Right there in this pond. Like some witch is waving her wand and zapping creatures into other creatures, except the witch is Mother Nature.
I don’t understand it exactly, but metamorphosis seems a lot like evolution. And evolution means that some people think we used to be monkeys. I look at Caroline while we walk and imagine her covered in hair, imagine her teeth and mouth turned enormous, her picking bugs off my head and eating them like the sister monkeys do on nature shows, swinging from a tree with one arm. That I can imagine; we’re both excellent at hanging from the monkey bars on the playground at recess.
But she’s too old to actually do that now. The girls in her grade just stand around in groups and talk, yell at the boys, sometimes walk around the yard, but I can still do the highest baby-drop of anyone in my class.
I don’t think our family believes in evolution though. At least, I don’t think our church does, but I’m not sure. Maybe people at church who don’t believe in evolution haven’t thought much about tadpoles, because it’s scary to see how weird they look when they’re caught between half tadpole and half frog, but it’s also super cool. And that makes me wonder if maybe I’m a half something too.
The tadpoles in our pond have all turned to frogs by now, so we keep walking, aimless, talking, sometimes laughing, nudging one another along in the heat, meandering back home with no real purpose but that we want to return. Maybe this time we’ll be allowed to stay inside and watch something on TV in the cool dark of the family room, though we already know there’ll only be soaps on midafternoon. We aren’t allowed to watch soaps.
It’s a white van. No windows on the side. But instead of driving by, it reaches us and stops.
The roads are deserted. Heatwaves simmer ghostly above the asphalt while the power lines hum over our heads and a chickadee dee-dees to some bird-love in the forest. We have the place to ourselves, it seems. The world.
But then, there’s the sound of a vehicle turning onto our gravel subdivision road, coming behind us slowly. We turn to watch it, move to the side to let it pass as we’ve been taught. There’s plenty of room; the road is wide. It’s a white van. No windows on the side. But instead of driving by, it reaches us and stops. A man with curly hair smiles and asks us for directions to a place nearby. We all know where it is, but Caroline, the oldest and best at talking to strangers, steps forward and walks around to his window to answer him. She’s smiling and confident as always, easy with strangers. I watch her and envy that ease, wonder if I’ll ever learn to talk to people the way she does because I’m the shy one. I will also be “the tall one,” my aunt has predicted, because Caroline will be “the pretty one.” We follow her lead to the front of the van.
He doesn’t seem to understand what she’s saying, which is strange because the directions are simple, but how fun to know more than a grown-up. The man opens the door to hear Caroline better, I think, and the door comes between us, separates us from her while we wait. He’s still confused, and she repeats herself again, but she looks nervous and shy now, uncertain, which is strange. Finally, the door closes and the stranger drives away.
The air hums. None of us move. We, four children, stand on the gravel road, the sun hot on our dark heads. We look at the wet, white puddle on the ground in front of us until Chris asks what it is.
“Pee,” says Caroline. “He peed in front of me.” But it looks nothing like pee.
We look at one another, at the puddle, at our shoes. We wonder if something just happened to us. Some change planted deep and about to sprout. We feel it, but don’t know if it matters. Should we tell someone? Mom is at work, so it would have to be Dad. Dad is risky—he could get mad.
My stomach fills with something like fear, but I don’t understand it. We decide to tell. We turn toward the cool walls of the shop in the backyard, where Dad is at work on somebody’s car.
He’s furious when Caroline tells him that some man just peed in front of her, and he understands something about it that I don’t, something related to my fear. He calls the police and then jumps into his old green pickup with the other mechanic he’s hired for help and leaves us alone while he drives around looking for the curly-haired man in the white van.
I don’t understand: his anger, his driving around, his calling the police. But the something sick and scared is bigger now. We go inside the house. No one is around to tell us not to. We gather in the bedroom that I share with Caroline, the four of us on our two beds, and we wait.
There’s a very tall, very large police officer at our door later that night, and Dad greets him like a friend showing up to a party. Something has shifted in him now, and his anger is gone, replaced by an emotion that seems more like excitement. He guides the policeman through our house and sits him at our kitchen table, in Caroline’s chair. We stand beside him, two at each elbow, gathered like a family photograph. He looks at each of us children, asks us our names, smiles, puts a business card in each of our small hands. It has a silhouette picture of a man behind bars and black and red letters that say Crime Stoppers. His name is DET. G. F. (Gary) Jones, it says, but we don’t use his name. We hardly say anything. He asks us questions about the van, what the man said, what he looked like, what we said back to him. He writes down notes. It’s very quiet as the pen scratches along the paper. And then he pulls out a photo album as thick as my palm is wide.
“These,” he says, opening up to the very first page, “are all men who’ve done similar things to kids around here.”
Around here? I wonder. To other kids? Maybe kids I know?
There are pages and pages of men in the album, and I wonder why so many of them are going around peeing, why they would do it in front of kids. The men look sad and tired; some of them look scary; none of them look like the curly-haired man from the white van.
The policeman stays for a long time taking notes, and he tells us that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will search the area for the next few weeks. When he’s done, he looks up and around at our house, says that it’s very nice. Most visitors say this, and my dad smiles, pleased, and we all know what’s coming next.
“Would you like a tour?” he asks the policeman. And the policeman says yes.
Like a travel guide, my dad shows him our dining room off the kitchen and the table loaded with papers to be filed; he shows him the office packed with boxes from our childhood to be sorted through, the room with the empty hot tub that rarely works, the bathrooms, our messy bedrooms. He opens our door and shows him our pink canopied bedroom filled with clothes and toys, dolls and books, our life spread out before him.
The policeman smiles. I can tell he wants to leave now, had maybe only ever been politely interested, though my dad doesn’t seem to notice it. Dad continues to tell him about the double thickness of the walls, the fire-retardant insulation, how he designed the house himself, had the blueprints done up from his own drawings, and then finally, he’s finished. They’re at the door shaking hands. The policeman leaves. Dad returns to his shop out back; Chris and Kim go to their separate bedrooms; Caroline and I go to ours.
Years later, when I’m a teenager and old enough to understand but somehow still don’t, I say something to Caroline late one night, lying in the dark while we talk, about the time that man peed in front of us. “Peed in front of us” has become our code for the thing we don’t know how to discuss and the title we give to that moment that changed us without our understanding why. But Caroline’s old enough now, too, and tonight she’s had enough of the code.
“It wasn’t pee,” she spits, angry and hurt at my little-sister stupidity.
Caroline had once told me that she’d stopped wearing pretty earrings after that day.
“Oh,” I say dully. And I remember again the man’s face, my dad’s anger, the police visit and the photo album. I remember, remember, remember how the van door had opened and cut me off from Caroline, and that something had happened to all of us, but in different ways. How no one talked to us about it. How Caroline had once told me that she’d stopped wearing pretty earrings after that day, said she’d thought that maybe he’d done it because she’d worn those earrings. Wanted to look pretty.
And I think of how it had ended with the policeman’s visit and a guided tour through our house, all our private spaces on display with us kids clinging at the edges. I think of the tadpoles we used to catch in the spring, the way their arms ripped through their chests one day when it was time. And I wonder if it hurt. If they knew what it meant. We carried them back to the pond when it happened so they wouldn’t die in our jars. They clung to the edges as we poured, their hearts beating hard beneath pale skin, little bodies of uncertainty shaken loose from their homes into unknown territory. They grabbed for one another as they fell, arms outstretched, like sisters in the dark, like fire reaches for fire, the warmth of another flame.
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