On a fishing trip to Yellowstone National Park some years back, I was thinking more about lures than the wilderness beyond the banks of the crowded streams. Nothing felt tamer than casting into the Yellowstone River while kids swam nearby and parents shouted out cautions and calls for lunch. But one morning, as I was reeling my line in, an enormous splash almost overtopped my waders. Annoyed, I turned to see which kid had cannonballed so close to me. Staring back at me was not a rambunctious child, but the cold, threatening eye of a massive bison, just the type that park rangers had warned us to stay well away from. This bison had dunked so close I could have patted the wooly fur around its muscular neck. All at once, I was plunged into a danger I should have expected but took me completely by surprise.
My close call with the bison—yes, he swam on past with that bottomless eye on me the whole time—helped inspire my main character Lea Johnson’s tumble into the wilds just outside her own front door. In my novel The Meaning of Fear, Lea, a behavioral researcher, relocates to rural Michigan in the wake of a violent attack on her husband. Despite being an expert in the fear response, Lea finds herself fearing the “wilds.” Sharpshooters take to the trees at night in her yard for an annual deer cull, while new friends and neighbors, and even her own husband, volunteer to help trim the herd. When a teenage trespasser on her property goes missing one night, even the local sheriff doesn’t seem concerned that the young man could be lost or mistaken for a deer. Are these folks’ values wildly different from hers, or is Lea out of step with a natural order she didn’t realize existed on the outskirts of her beloved town?
These nine novels tell the stories of women who find themselves battling their own wilds. Some women are thrust unexpectedly into a wilderness that calls for new survival skills and instincts. Some women are escaping from brutal captivity, preferring the possibility of death to servitude. Still others find the wilds in places that seem tame. These novels bring an unsparing eye to suffering, deprivation, and grief. But these stories also celebrate the land’s beauty, the joy of freedom even in the harshest places, and the revelatory sense of self that comes when a woman only has herself to depend on.
When the women of The Natural Way of Things awaken, drugged and locked in a remote compound, the squeals of kookaburras are the first tell that they have been snatched to the wilds of the Australian Outback. The ten women soon recognize each other as having made public accusations of sexual violence against prominent men. Despite deprivation and violence—their male jailers force them to labor in tunics and bonnets made from the bones of birds—Yolanda’s comrades cling to stubborn hopes of rescue, while she protects the women from hunger by learning to trap game. The bloody work takes its toll: “By the end she wore a ragged skirt of rabbit bodies and clinking steel traps . . . the flesh soon glued to the belt with blood . . . ” To survive the wilderness of men’s violence, Yolanda transforms from woman to feral animal guided by pure instinct to embrace nature’s refuge.
The Vaster Wilds pits woman against the wilds from its first lines. Set in 1609, young Lamentations flees from Virginia’s Jamestown colony into the “great and terrible wilderness” to escape starvation and a crime that deprivation drove her to commit. More Lot’s wife than Robinson Crusoe, the girl flees north through the dense forest without looking back. As she fights the cold, malnutrition, and the toll of past trauma, Lamentations chops fish from the ice and shelters in fallen logs. At first, survival means outrunning the men who pursue her. Later, as her health and stamina slip, true survival means learning when to flee and when to shelter in “one of the quiet good places of this new land.” Throughout the novel, Groff cuts to the nearby Powhatan gathering food and building communities as a reminder that this world is only wild to the woman not born to it.
In The Pesthouse, a woman’s refuge in the wilderness might turn out to be her only hope for a civilized life. After a contagion transforms America into an industrial wasteland populated by lawless bands of enslaving men, Margaret’s quarantine in a remote pesthouse in the hills is her first proof that survival can only be achieved in untouched places. She is a true woman of the wild, trapping birds, flinting fires, and fashioning peace from fear and loneliness. Her ease is reflected in nature’s easy reclaiming of the ruined land. Forests are overtaking farmlands and rivers tear at the roads “with the undramatic patience of water.” The closer Margaret draws to the seaside and passage to Europe that’s anything but safe, the more she questions whether her salvation lies in turning back to the wilderness, away from the wilds men have made of their tattered civilization.
Sometimes the wilds take over the office with the same inexorable creep as the latest policy directive flowing from the executive suite. Until she steps off the elevator onto a decidedly squishy carpet, Rose, a young sales associate in Edinburgh, never dreamed that when her boss said the firm was “going under” due to poor sales, she was being literal. As the water level rises by the day, productivity increases and pleas to leadership to stem the flood are met with policies preventing swimming. The staff jerry rig computer mice to function underwater while Rose wonders whether management, perfectly dry in their suites on the upper floors, will expect their employees to work fully submerged. At home, her clothes never quite shed the damp before she must plunge again into the aquarium of work. Amphibian forces Rose and her co-workers to absorb an absurd corporate culture and ever-changing sales quotas with their every breath without drowning.
Absolution takes place partly in 1963 Saigon, a city that has long tamed the wilds. At least that’s what Tricia and Charlene, who live in the grand villas reserved for their military advisor husbands, believe. Living a cloistered life with artillery fire just beyond the stucco walls, the ladies hold cocktail parties and perform charity work for Vietnamese children. When Charlene arranges a charity mission on the South Sea coast, Tricia is excited to swap her pedal pushers for fatigues. But when their army transport vehicle breaks down in a wilderness of jungle, rice paddies, and Vietcong raids, the women are thrust into the wilds for the first time. Being stranded reveals the foolishness of charity that bestows Barbies and licorice in a Vietnamese wilderness populated by the wounded in an already raging war.
The Underneath turns the woman in the wild narrative on its head. Here the wilderness is a place in need of rescue. When Kay Ward takes a break from her journalism career to mother her two young children, the hilly Northern Vermont forests that surround their rented farmhouse feel as safe as they are scenic. Kate soon finds herself lost in the wilderness of her children’s needs, oblivious to the ravaged wilderness just beyond the beauty she can see. The disturbing secrets the farmhouse reveals draw her to Ben Comeau, a heroin dealer whose logging scam is destroying the wilds just as the drug epidemic he feeds is threatening his town. The Underneath is a portrait of the American wilderness that, much like the human communities on its margins, is being razed to its roots.
In The Lowland, grief and loss bind three generations of women to one wild place and the family home that overlooks it. By the time Bijoli gives birth to two sons amidst the turbulent revolutionary movements of 1960s Calcutta, modern houses, including her own, ring the fetid lowland that was once an ancient seabed. Tragedy strikes one of her sons in the lowland’s flooded waters, causing the family to splinter and setting Bijoli loose into the grief-stricken wilds of her mind. Meanwhile Bijoli’s now adult granddaughter, Bela, roams freely across the American Midwest, working itinerant farming jobs while unknowingly re-enacting her grandmother’s fruitless care for the lowland. Late in life, Bijoli’s daughter-in-law, Gauri, will herself return to the lowland to confront her own secrets surrounding her husband’s death. This portrait of shared loss connected to a place that was never meant to be tamed reminds us that women can be cast into the wilderness just by stepping out their front doors.
First published in French in 1995, under the title The Mistress of Silence, I Who Have Never Known Men has of late attracted the literary spotlight. The story of a girl born in a cage holding thirty-nine other women, guarded by men who feed but never speak to them, resonates with its stark, eerily calm portrayal of systemic dehumanization. The women lack privacy for basic bodily functions and have no memory of how they came to be captured. When a catastrophe befalls the men, the women are freed into the jarring reality of a barren place. Here the wilds are vast, empty plains, with the occasional river. The girl herself, born ignorant, could be expected to be the novel’s wildest thing. But her restlessness, curiosity, and practicality ground her in this mysterious land as she wanders, forages, and eventually faces being alone in the unknown and the unknowable.
The God of the Woods opens with the epigraph, “How quickly . . . peril could be followed by beauty in the wilderness . . . ” It’s 1975 and teen Barbara Van Laar has disappeared from a summer camp her family owns in the Adirondack woods, exactly 14 years after the mysterious disappearance of her brother, Bear. From there, the narrative dips back in time to show Barbara’s mother, Alice, trapped in an oppressive marriage, drugged during childbirth, forbidden to nurse, and isolated from everything natural about raising her kids. In the present, the search for Barbara in wild places slowly reveals Van Laar family’s secrets that never quite disappeared. Upon arriving to Camp Emerson, girls are taught to “sit down and yell” should they find themselves lost in the forest. The mystery of what happened to Barbara may prove that staying in one place and crying for help is exactly what women determined to survive should never do.
I once had the pleasure and good fortune of interviewing self-proclaimed Afro-gothicist Leila Taylor about her book, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, a poignant text that is part memoir and part cultural critique. Our discussion was eye-opening for me because Taylor and I both grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and our talk centered on the ways that the gothic in America is viewed as a predominantly white space, when Blackness in America and all its forced socio-economic trappings are inherently gothic—blighted homes in the middle of a residential street, boarded up housing projects, rusted vehicles, overgrown grass, potholes, abandoned storefronts, dilapidated schools, unclean drinking water. Adding violence and horror to the mix, I’d say urban ghettos have cornered the market on the gothic, and yet.
In recent years, I’ve been returning to my conversation with Taylor because my debut novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, is a gothic horror set in a public housing project built in a fictional midwestern city with similarities to Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Like the abandoned homes in Detroit and the poisonous water in Flint, in Hester Gardens the trash is rarely collected, and residents must contend with mountains of garbage and a stench that permeates their lives and weaves itself into the fabric of their clothes.
So, Taylor was definitely onto something. With an eye towards the gothic as a literary genre, I’ve noticed recent growth in popularity and readership for gothic works written by Black authors, particularly of the Black Southern gothic in the vein of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which smashed 2025 box office records. I sense that this trend is here to stay.
I’ll always recommend classic Black gothic works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, but here are seven contemporary gothic novels written by African American authors that will shatter your heart and make you think.
Award-winning author Tananarive Due’s entire body of work is stellar, and you can’t go wrong picking up any one of her books, from her debut The Between, to The Good House, to her African Immortals series beginning with My Soul to Keep. Due has the distinction of being an author who can pen both acclaimed novels and short fiction, and I highly recommend her collections Ghost Summerand The Wishing Pool as well.
But I came here to talk about her celebrated gothic work.
The Reformatory is a master class in American literature that rightly won several awards and was lavished with critical praise. Set in 1950s Florida at the Gracetown School for Boys, which is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, where Due’s great uncle lost his life, the text follows 12-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens Jr., a Black boy who is sentenced to six months at the de facto children’s prison for protecting his sister Gloria from a white boy’s advances.
With the building’s ivy-adorned redbrick, sweltering heat, iron entry gates featuring barbed wire, and a landscape filled with revenants of murdered boys, Due builds a visceral gothic setting as she stares down the reformatory’s racist and brutal history.
This critically acclaimed book deftly tackles multiple taboo topics in a story both compelling and haunting. It tells the story of Jemma Barker, who leaves Chicago for a job at the Duchon residence in New Orleans, a white Antebellum home with pillars, black shutters, a wide porch, and oak trees. A house in need of repair that the locals warn her off of. An abode of neglect, with loose tiles on the roof, weeds, and, apparently, spirits.
Both the family and the home are hiding secrets, and soon Jemma learns the Duchons are locked in a curse that only she can break. With this powerful book full of unforgettable characters—I will never shake Honorine Duchon and her icy gaze—Sandeen takes on colorism, incest, passing, classism, sexism, slut-shaming, and passed-down generational curses.
adrienne maree brown channels Octavia E. Butler in this debut novella, the first in brown’s Detroit-set Black Dawn series. In Grievers, we have a city plagued by an illness with no cure that stops the sick in the middle of living, rendering them catatonic. Lyrically told, the story follows Dune, whose mother has the affliction, and, in fact, is patient zero. As Dune investigates the cause of the illness, she must navigate a hollowed out city of the dead and near-dead, filled with graveyards and dilapidated homes, in a text both gothic and suspenseful in its telling.
In Grievers, the gothic manor isn’t a home, rather an entire city (really country), where, even before the illness, the city rationed water due to greed, and the country was filled with fear, racism, poor education, corruption, and war. A “crumbling age” that readers might find eerily familiar.
Compton’s critically acclaimed debut takes the reader to Texas, with the titular house providing gothic angst and a look at trauma, grief, and the past that haunts. The text follows Eric Ross, a down-on-his-luck father of two who arrives in Degener after leaving his wife and life in Maryland. He becomes caretaker of Masson House, a spite house that once overlooked an orphanage, and is tasked with recording the four-story home’s suspected paranormal activity, events so sinister it drove the previous caretakers mad.
The story brings to mind Tananarive Due’s The Good House and Stephen King’s The Shining, and it speaks to Compton’s brilliance that even with those associations, this book feels fresh and singular.
In keeping with the gothic tradition, Masson House is a character itself, described in the opening sentence as akin to the “corpse of an old monster.” Throughout this powerful thriller, the sinister structure feels alive, with its rectangular windows, gaunt and gray facade, and the local lore that engenders fear in the town.
Like in Sandeen’s work, House of Hunger opens with a character embarking on a new job in a mysterious manor. In this case, Marion, who lives in a slum, pursues a job as a bloodmaid in a fictional north run by a waning nobility. And although the setting and location might not be an American city, Henderson’s text makes salient points about a failing empire in the north, where power has shifted away to the industrial south with its democratically elected parliament of factory owners, oil barons, and politicians. The House of Hunger is the first and grandest of 27 houses in the north, and it is only one of four still with any power.
Marion arrives at the six-foot structure, “a fearsome thing,” to find windows glowing with candlelight, a dying garden, and gargoyles covered in moss. The nobles want Marion’s blood to survive, and Marion is desperate for the pay and the lifestyle, but quickly learns there are dangerous secrets in being a bloodmaid, and the truth of the hunger comes at a price.
LaValle’s award-winning novella always comes to mind when I think of contemporary gothic works for its use of setting to evoke dread in the reader. A must-read reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Horror at Red Hook,” LaValle’s The Ballad of BlackTom tells the story of Charles Thomas Tester, who lives in Harlem and one day delivers an occult tome to a sorceress in Queens, an event that opens a door to magic and mayhem Tester wishes he could close.
Set in 1924, the book offers social commentary on white supremacy, institutional anti-Black racism, and manages to also be a work of cosmic horror that both honors and critiques Lovecraft. The landscape Tester navigates drips with gothic horror. The New York streets, the subway, the perilous path from Black Harlem to the Flushing Queens of German and Irish immigrants, and the reclusive sorceress’s manor all work together to give the impression that something sinister is lurking within every person, building, and object.
In her Southern gothic, LaTanya McQueen takes down a controversial practice in the American South of turning former slave plantations into tourist spots. The book follows Mira, a Black woman who returns to her North Carolina hometown for a friend’s wedding on a renovated tobacco plantation that is rumored to be haunted by former enslaved people.
The gothic horror comes alive in the plantation setting, where Woodsman House sits three stories tall, with several Greek columns, and hundred-year-old maples. A glimpse at the disrepair the property falls into in Mira’s youth, with peeling paint, weeds, and columns that look like they’ll collapse, coupled with her arrival for the wedding, when the grounds have been turned into a luxury resort and wedding venue, featuring reenactments of the enslaved people picking tobacco, McQueen’s work offers strong social commentary and a reckoning with this country’s barbaric past.
This book, the first essay collection centering trans writers of color to be published by a major press, is a groundbreaking response to continuous attacks on the trans community. It’s been hailed as a “beacon of hope” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review), and widely praised for its authenticity, quality of writing, and broad range of stories. And now it’s receiving awards recognition.
We couldn’t be more proud that Both/And is Electric Lit’s first book. On Tuesday, we launched our spring fundraising campaign, nearly a year after walking away from our NEA funding, largely because of the Trump administration’s repugnant policies on gender identity and diversity. And yet, our work, and our community, continues to thrive. As EL looks to the future, we remain committed to elevating the stories of those most marginalized among us. Your support goes a long way towards protecting that vision.
A trans magazine can create a magnetic field, drawing people together into community. From Transvestia to TG/TS/TV Tapestry, Gendertrash from Hell to Original Plumbing, indie community publications have long allowed trans people to find each other, share resources, and build culture. Needless to say, much of that activity has since moved online, taking place in Reddit forums, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, blogs, OnlyFans pages, Discord servers, and countless other digital spaces. But trans print has experienced something of a renaissance recently: No fewer than five print-first trans literary magazines have launched their first issue (or two) since January 2025.
This roundtable is a conversation between some of the people behind those magazines. As the founder and managing editor of Chrysalis Magazine, which publishes art and writing by trans youth ages 0-18, I wanted to speak to other editors of trans periodicals about the joyful labor of starting and running a magazine, and the role of print publishing in trans culture and community. I spoke with Andrea Morgan and Luke Sutherland of the DC-based trans publishing collective Lilac Peril Press; Alma Avalle and Joyce Laurie of Picnic, New York’s finest trans literary magazine and culture rag; Ira Beare and Helena Lamb of EASEL, a trans photography magazine based in Chicago; and Aris Cumara of the ambitious and eclectic Trans Mag. Together, we reflected on the relationship between print culture and trans activism, the power of t4t publications, and the future of trans publishing.
Jacob Romm (Chrysalis): Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, each of us published the first issue of a trans magazine in roughly the last year. How did you come to start your respective magazines? What was the vision?
Andrea Morgan (Lilac Peril): Luke and I were having a lot of discussions around the time of some of the early Little Puss salons, because we had traveled up to New York to see what was going on, and really, really loved what we were seeing. We essentially came back to DC and were sitting around going, why doesn’t that exist in other places? And really could only respond to ourselves with: It doesn’t happen unless someone does it. And if no one’s doing it, then we have to.
Alma Avalle (Picnic): I think one of the things that got us excited about publishing Picnic, starting at the time we did, is that if you look at the media ecosystem from five, ten years ago, there wasn’t a massive appetite for trans writing in the cis mainstream press, but there was at least more of one. There are increasingly fewer places that are seeking our voices out or actively promoting trans writing. If we want places for our writing to exist, particularly writing that deals with trans people as people and trans characters as characters worth diving into and dissecting, we’re going to have to be the ones to make it, edit it, commission those stories, work with the writers.
Aris Cumara (Trans Mag): Just after the 2024 election cycle, I had read something about how a collection of trans journal entries or research articles was deleted. The research was just gone! I felt like something should be done for my community, and that’s where the magazine idea came from. There’re not a lot of spaces that are explicitly trans and looking for trans work. It needs to be printed and saved and put into archives, where it can’t just be deleted when ideologies change.
Helena Lamb (EASEL): It’s been a big couple years for trans photography. I feel like people have really been getting into it in a way that I’m happy to see. But there are just so few outlets for that kind of thing. This summer I was getting frustrated by the idea that the highest level a trans photographer can aspire to is getting a lot of likes on Instagram. I can also directly cite Picnic as inspiring me to start EASEL. When Picnic came out last spring, I was like, oh, you can just start a magazine! So we did.
JR:The idea for Chrysalis had been in the back of my mind for a couple years, but after the inauguration in January 2025 and the wave of executive orders attacking trans youth health care, I needed an outlet for my outrage and anxiety, some project that felt productive and connected to community. I started seeing all these videos of trans kids testifying in court, telling very carefully rehearsed and strategically crafted stories of what it means to be trans. But talking to real life trans kids, the way they describe their identities is actually so much more imaginative and interesting. I wanted Chrysalis to provide a space of imagination for less domesticated and respectable versions of trans childhood to be expressed.
Let’s talk a little bit about the editorial vision for these different magazines. What type of work does your magazine publish, and how did you decide that was what you wanted to prioritize? How do you curate the space of your magazine?
When something’s deeply immersed in community, it doesn’t need to explain itself.
Joyce Laurie (Picnic): For me and Alma, part of our editorial ethos is that we’re not doing this in a vacuum, and we’re not the first people to do this. We come after Nevada, after Detransition, Baby, there’s no shortage of trans people in popular culture, right? But it tends to be pretty one-sided. What we were interested in was not just talking about transness as an object, but trying to capture the kind of art that emerges from communities of transgender people. We talk to each other enough that there are some questions that are no longer profound or interesting to talk about, right? When something’s deeply immersed in community, it doesn’t need to explain itself.Our editorial priorities were to create work that’s meant to be read in the context of t4t community. Picnic is a t4t publication.
AM: The issues of Lilac Peril so far have been quite open, giving as little guidance as possible. Our last one was called “Taboo”—if trans people are taboo to society, what are the things that are still taboo to us? But that’s all the writers had to go off. We tried to prioritize people that were new to writing, because getting into it is so intimidating, and it’s hard to understand where to even start—especially for people who are writing about trans topics. We’ve seen some amazing writing, and we’ve also had the chance to work with people whose writing is flourishing in ways that are only possible if there’s an outlet for it. We’re really happy to play a part in that.
HL: The primary goal of EASEL from an editorial standpoint was to get artists to take themselves seriously—to cultivate a space where artists have an opportunity to see themselves as people who are producing real cultural artifacts, both photography and critical writing about photography.
Ira Beare (EASEL): If I can just add to that—I think because we all get this intense proliferation of images all the time, it’s easy for photographers to devalue the medium that they work in. We’re seeing an increased output without a reciprocal increase in the seriousness of people’s relationship to it. It’s nice to have a place to put it where it can land in a way that is slower than just scrolling past.
AC: I relate a lot to what y’all are saying, and it connects to the vision I had for Trans Mag, which is a little bit of everything. We wanted research, poetry, photography, visual art, craft, comics, and it became this combination of all my favorite magazines growing up. We do an open submission call for a lot of the work that we put in, and we want to feature people who live in much more conservative areas than Bushwick. And we do very specific themes per issue: Our last issue was about punk, mad-at-the-world transness. The next issue we’re doing is all clown-themed, and I want to do a theme on religion this coming year.
JR: I really appreciated what folks said about trying to edit in a way that encourages people to take their work seriously. Working with young folks, it was a priority that we had an editorial board of published trans writers, so that someone like Kyle Lukoff or Soleil Ho or Noa Fields is engaging with the work of these young writers, and offering forms of mentorship and possibility modeling.
So Joyce used this phrase “a t4t publication,” which feels connected to the next question I want to ask. How do you envision the audience for your magazine? Do you see it as being primarily for other trans people, or also focused outward?
Luke Sutherland (Lilac Peril): I don’t think we even considered the possibility of a cis audience. When we first started, our audience was hyper-local to trans writers in the DC area. And even though we’ve branched out over time, we still hold that really close to our chest. As a side note, we’ve noticed a funny trend when we table at events with a more general audience, like the Baltimore Book Festival last year. The number of completely random cis people who buy the magazine after we give them a 30-second pitch has been really funny and unexpected. I try not to psychoanalyze it too much, but I’m like, is this a guilt purchase? I don’t know.
AC: I love to hear this, because I had a similar experience when we did the first issue of Trans Mag. I saved up some money, bought a used car, put boxes of the magazine in my trunk, and went all over the US with it. I got in touch with little bars and bookstores and asked if I could pop in, tell them what I’m doing, and see who shows up. There were some places where it was all trans people, but then I went to Salt Lake City, Utah, and it was all cis, straight people, very stereotypical nuclear families. And when I gave them a little pitch, they were like, “Wow, let me get a copy. I’ll get a copy for my friend and we’ll look it over together.”
I don’t want our writers to ever think they have to explain what HRT is, or what t4t stands for.
AA: I think Picnic is very lucky to rely on an in-person fan base. The magazine grew out of what we observed with our friends at Little Puss and the Topside Press era, but also out of the scenes that Joyce and I exist in. So, when I’m thinking about who is going to read the work inside of Picnic, first and foremost it’s who is coming to the launch party, who is going to be at the bookstore in Ridgewood where we keep copies in stock. When I think about the idea of cis readership: The more exposure we can give our writers, the better. But when it comes to the type of submissions we’re looking for, I don’t want our writers to ever think they have to explain what HRT is, or what t4t stands for.That saves you a lot of space on the page, and lets you get to the interesting stuff a lot quicker.
IB: Based on the names of people who order from us online, we are selling primarily, if not exclusively, to transgender people. We spend a lot of time thinking about distribution, because it feels important to me that the magazine be encounterable if you don’t know who we are on the internet. And we found that sometimes a lefty used bookstore likes us way more than a gay bookstore. That was interesting in terms of thinking about where trans people actually are and what spaces they actually want to be in.
JR: For Chrysalis, there are some considerations specific to publishing youth writers and protecting their identities: We don’t publish the last names or any identifying information about our contributors. Sometimes they want us to list their social media handles, and we don’t do that because we don’t want to be responsible for whatever vitriol they might receive. So I’m often thinking about the possibility of hostile cis readers. And I’m aware that because Chrysalis publishes writing by trans kids, there’s a lot of feel-good value. I’ve tried to hold lightly the sense that it might be politically expedient in some way for people to encounter the writing of trans kids, and have a sense of their wholeness as people aside from what they’re seeing in the news. If that happens, great, but the readers I’m most wanting to care for are other trans young people, and in a way, the inner child of trans adults.
As I’m sure none of us need to be reminded, it’s a complicated time to be trans. What kind of relationship do you see between trans activism and community organizing work, and the cultural work of magazine publishing?
LS: I think hope can be kind of a cheesy word, but I’m thinking of the Mariam Kaba quote that “hope is a discipline.” When I think about that in terms of my personal writing and in terms of Lilac Peril, I think putting your energy into a long-term publication project like this is a practice of hope, because you have to believe there will be a future where this book exists, or this magazine exists. It’s investing in the belief that there is a tomorrow, there is a world after this.
AC: I agree entirely that it’s a discipline, it’s work. It’s showing up again and again to make something you believe in, and hope other people will believe in. And I think it’s a good way to tie into community. The other day I got an order from Boise, Idaho: I’ve never been to Boise, I don’t know what the trans community is like there, but something that I have put work into is going to exist in that community. The work is important, the communities are important, and they will always somehow find each other.
AA: One of the most exciting things about Picnic is the fact that it has a really strong ability to bring people together and have them as a captive audience for an hour or two. When I think about what Picnic’s utility can be going forward, if I’m organizing a reading where 100 people show up, maybe in the middle of the set of readings you have somebody come up and give the basics of ICE watching. Maybe at the end of the event you hand out whistles and know-your-rights cards as you’re selling the magazine, so people are leaving more attuned towards the issues that our neighborhoods are facing, and more equipped to help.
Hope is investing in the belief that there is a tomorrow, there is a world after this.
HL: And that’s the virtue of being print-first. If you want the object to get into people’s hands, you have to collect people. I’ll also say that something that’s always on our minds as queer publishers is obscenity law. When we sent our inaugural issue to our first-choice printer, they refused to print it because they objected to the content. There was some sexually explicit content in EASEL 01—really good stuff. But that meant we had to find a second press last minute, and that was a shock.
JR: We made this sticker for Chrysalis that says “trans imagination is trans power,” and I really believe in that. For me, the very possibility of transition relies on a radical act of imagination. Personally, I really depend on trans literature to offer me spaces of imagination to encounter forms of transness that are not constrained by the doctor, the insurance company, the law. I think that work of imagination is crucial to trans political vision.
Jumping on what Hellie said about printing physical magazines, maybe we can talk a bit about the fact that we all publish in print either before or instead of sharing content digitally. Why was print so important for each of you?
JL: I’m inspired by the novel Nevada. In my experience, someone lends it to you and tells you to read it. It becomes this sort of ritual that I think is very transgender and has to do with the way that we share lives. I mean, we want to go to your house and see Picnic on your coffee table. I went to Chicago in December, and I did not see a single trans coffee table that did not have a copy of EASEL on it. That kind of presence feels more powerful than Instagram followers.
AA: I’ll add that print just made sense financially for us. We’re very proud of being able to pay all our writers, and there would be no way to monetize in the way we need to if we were doing this digitally. We wouldn’t have access to ad revenue in a way that would be able to move the needle. But it turns out that printing 200, 300 magazines and selling them at $12 a pop means that we can make back our initial investment and pay the contributors for the next issue.
LS: Print was also a no-brainer for us. Andrea and I have had explicit conversations about not feeding into the AI slop machine by having this work exist digitally. But even before all that, we’re paper perverts. The tactile reality of a book is very important to us. Joyce mentioned Nevada—for us, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutionshas been a northern star in a lot of ways. [Author Larry Mitchell] couldn’t find a publisher who would take it, so [he] ended up starting [his] own press, Calamus Books. There’s a reason that radical political movements and marginalized people have historically created small presses. We have to be the means of our own publication.
AM: Luke, you should mention Lilac Peril’s version of “On Every Coffee Table.”
LS: I heard an anecdote from a good friend of mine who has a human-sized puppy cage in her home, as one does. And she let me know that for several months, our last collection, Taboo, was the only reading material in reach of that cage. We’re proud to say that our book is the number-one most-read book in human-size puppy crates, as far as we know.
AA: Picnic 2 is coming for that record.
HL: A print magazine is a good way to make sure the images you’re publishing are good. It’s easier to demand excellence when you’re going to spend time and money putting a physical thing into the world. An image is so much more effective, useful, interesting, and powerful when you are holding it in your hands, and a group of people are crowded around the magazine experiencing that image together. As we all know, looking at a picture on your phone, whether it’s really good or really bad, is useless. I had no intention of putting more images onto screens if I could help it. There is a digital version of EASEL, but I couldn’t care less about it.
AC: Something that we’re trying to do this upcoming year is to double and triple our print capacity in order to get them into local bookstores around the country. We do as cheap wholesale as we can to bookstores in the middle of nowhere, where somebody can walk in and see a magazine that’s bright and colorful and cool-looking, and has the word “trans” in big letters right across the front.
JR: Yeah, strong second to all of that. And also for me, print came from being such an archives nerd myself. Print lasts, and in many cases lasts longer than the file formats of digital media. The editor’s note of Picnic mentions this too: Save your magazines in a box in your basement. I’ve started my own cardboard box of trans zines, saving print ephemera from this time as an act of faith in the future of trans life. Other nerdy trans researchers in 50, 100, 200 years, will want to be pouring over the things that we’ve made.
I want to close by asking: Putting aside questions of feasibility, finances, time, and capacity, what do you hope the future of your magazine looks like? What’s the big dream?
HL: Ira and I have had a couple of conversations about what it would look like for EASEL to be a success. And honestly, I feel like we made it. So many publications like ours put out three, four, five issues, and then just drop off the map forever. So the fact that we turned out two in a year feels amazing, and I’m going to keep doing it for as long as it feels good. That being said, in a perfect world, the dream I have for this magazine is to be able to pay contributors more. My dream for EASEL is just more money for everyone.
AC: Something that I would love to do is to build a full industry-level trans media production company that works on artistic endeavors across the board: magazine publication, book publication, comics, CDs, animation, and film. Something that’s built sustainably and pays artists, does things ethically, and at the quality that we want. Instead of waiting for money from these other big companies that have been doing it for years, what if we built something that could be just as big and produce just as much work, but we get to run it? That’s the big, big goal.
LS: A concrete goal of Lilac Peril is that we’re very interested in publishing novels, and we already have one in the pipeline, which will ideally come out in 2027. When I think about my dream for this project, it’s basically what it sounds like Picnic has already achieved with EASEL, which is to say, I would be over the moon to hear from someone else who started a publication because of what we do.
JL: I was going to say exactly what Luke said, which was in the editor’s note of Picnic 1, and in the end note. When you start, when you end, before you go, please start a magazine. You can do it. All you have to do is believe in yourself. Obviously you’re transgender, so you might not, but you should—because what you have is worth hearing.
White partners in interracial relationships—especially white boyfriends and husbands—are a huge fixture in TV shows and movies. However, their race is often ignored or glossed over. They just happen to be white, unlike their racialized counterparts. When whiteness does get airtime, it’s usually in the context of more distant relationships, like between strangers or neighbors, teachers/students, coworkers, or even friends, rather than significant others. For these and other reasons, I love books that look directly at whiteness in romantic partnerships.
In part of my poetry collection, Replica, I write about being in a white male–Asian female relationship, a common interracial pairing that comes with its own stereotypes, acronym (WMAF), and memes. Besides being interested in the power dynamics—which of course vary in individual relationships—I initially wrote out of defensiveness: I too am with a white guy but am still my own person. I thought writing about my relationship could be a protective measure against being stereotyped—a strategy I still embrace. But the more I wrote about it, the more I saw how it matched the larger project of my book, especially the idea that poetry is an imperfect form for representing yourself.
Representation is a tricky endeavor. It helped me to read other writers who were also exploring whiteness in intimate relationships, even if representation wasn’t their main goal—or goal at all. In these genre-spanning books, power imbalances play out on small and large scales: at home, on social media, in pop culture, in the workplace. There are fantasies of ideal white partners, dating horror stories, an incel, and woke white boyfriends with questionable pasts. There are moments to look away from, and moments that make me look deeper within. These seven books zoom in on whiteness, as close as we can get to it.
A sentient blob found in an alleyway becomes 20-something-year-old Vi Liu’s pet experiment. As soon as she realizes Bob the blob can grow a human body, she prints out screenshots of movie stars for him to aspire to: “I don’t notice that all the pictures are white dudes until I’m done. But Bob’s hand is already white, and who am I to tell him he can’t be a white man?” Not only does he grow washboard abs, he also develops human desires. We watch him learn how to play frisbee, befriend frat bros, be what he wants to be. Bob as a brand-new, picture-perfect white boyfriend clashes with Vi as she reels from a breakup and reckons with the hotel job she hates, growing up half-Taiwanese, and the ideas of love and self-love.
In a category-defying hybrid poetry book, Sebree redefines field research in the aftermath of her relationship with a white man. The field in question is herself, with “maps made of men, of finger pads, of scrotal sacs.” Her study references everything from bell hooks to conversations with other black women to movies like The Avengers and Inception. Short sections, usually only a few sentences long, create a kaleidoscopic whole, asking us to look closer: “I can’t figure out the line between love and want, need and desire. // But it’s fishing-line thin, made of polyethylene fiber.”
We meet the main characters, a young Black gay man named Davis and his white boyfriend, Everett, twenty-four hours before their wedding day in the rapture and safety of sex. In their bubble, the two are “wildly, indescribably, incandescently in love.” Things take a turn when family members do (Everett’s) and don’t (Davis’s) arrive at Everett’s family’s Hamptons beach house for the wedding, and later, when news reaches them that Davis’s estranged father has been in a horrible car accident. Their newly minted marriage is tested by internal and external forces—Davis’s unprocessed childhood trauma, their families’ ideas on race, gender, and sexuality—that bubble up in the wake of the bad news.
Jacob’s graphic memoir opens with her six-year-old son’s obsession with Michael Jackson, a fixation that generates endless questions about race and identity—both the pop star’s and his own. Conversations with Z, who is half-Jewish and half-Indian, ramp up as the 2016 election approaches, prompting Jacob to self-reflect. Colorism in Indian culture, her childhood, her parents’ arranged marriage, even her own love life gets reconsidered. We encounter weird white guys, women across races, her first real boyfriend, who is Black, and Jed, a white classmate from childhood who becomes her husband and Z’s dad. Jacob’s relationship with Jed is only one of the threads followed, but their conversations on mixed-race parenting and Trump-supporting family members are some of the most salient and complicated in the book.
Rankine challenges herself to ask white men what they think of their privilege early on in Just Us, a hybrid text containing essays, poems, images, and research, in the lineage of her 2014 collection Citizen. Several airport/airplane interactions later, Rankine recounts her findings to her white husband, who “believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition.” This white husband is a minor character in a book that advocates for messiness, that probes the intimacy of conversations on whiteness with strangers and friends alike. But “lemonade,” a small section on their relationship and a session with a marriage counselor, deepens previous and subsequent conversations in the book and adds meaning to the title “just us.”
Emira Tucker is at a fancy grocery store with two-year-old Briar Chamberlain, whom she regularly babysits, when she is accosted for being Black while babysitting and accused of kidnapping Briar. Not only is this when Emira meets Kelley Copeland, a bystander who records the whole thing and later becomes her boyfriend, the incident also sparks complicated feelings in Emira’s boss (and Briar’s mom), Alix, whose white feminism turns into an infatuation with Emira as a younger Black woman. On the other hand, Kelley is charming, professionally stable, and fits the woke white boyfriend prototype, complete with his own crew of Black friends. Emira and Kelley are a fascinating case study of an interracial relationship and what it means to fetishize Blackness, but it becomes even more interesting as Kelley and Alix become foils for each other.
Across seven stories, Tulathimutte explores rejection—romantic, sexual, racial, societal—in its most intimate forms, as it intersects with whiteness, identity, and our online selves. In “The Feminist,” the first short story in Rejection, an unnamed white protagonist evolves from the eponymous “feminist” to an incel by the story’s end. A self-identified “narrow-shouldered man,” he gets friendzoned time and time again while preaching—and overperforming—feminism. He starts to believe, like the forums he frequents, “that narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group . . . a marginalization far worse than those based in race or gender, which were mere constructs, as opposed to the material fact of narrow shoulders.” In “Pics,” Alison struggles to get over a one night stand with her best friend, Neil. The story is about many other things, but we get a slice of Alison’s perspective on a WMAF relationship: “I can’t get over the absolute GALL of [Neil] trotting out his new hairless Asian child bride in front of me,” she texts her group chat.
Somehow, in the crowded party, Catherine and Andros were alone together in the living room. Catherine wasn’t sure how the room had emptied out, leaving just the two of them there, angled toward each other, him in an armchair and her on the couch, her legs crossed and a glass of mulled wine in her hand. She wore a crushed velvet cocktail dress and he wore a woolen button-up the color of slate. His hair was white and thick and his face was clean-shaven; his eyes were a light blue, light even in the darkly-lit room.
Catherine knew exactly who he was—she’d recognized him instantly—and he didn’t know her at all.
“You’re not a fan of Stein, then,” Andros said. “Tell me why. I’m very interested.”
“I haven’t read everything,” said Catherine. “I’ve read very little, in fact.”
Catherine couldn’t remember what she’d read exactly, but she knew she’d felt confused by whatever it was, and irritated by what seemed like a willful opacity.
“She’s one of my favorite female writers,” he said. “She changed literature forever. She changed language itself forever. We are all in her debt.” He shifted his weight in the chair, wooden and uncomfortable looking. Andros was old enough to make Catherine wonder if she’d been wrong not to offer him the couch, soft and sinking as it was. “I bet she’d be thrilled that you don’t like her, in fact. What is the opposite of turning over in one’s grave?”
“Giving a thumb’s up?” she tried, then instantly regretted it.
He laughed, and it didn’t seem like the laugh was just to make her feel better about having said something so incredibly stupid.
Catherine smiled and took a drink of her wine. Some of the others had gone out to the balcony to smoke weed and cigarettes, though it was cold and a soft snow was falling over the city. Another small group had gathered in the kitchen to assemble cookies and cake. Andros didn’t appear to smoke. He didn’t appear to drink alcohol, either; he was holding a can of Coke and wasn’t even drinking that. The party was the annual end-of-semester celebration hosted by Lawrence, the director of the NYU MFA program, held at his Park Slope apartment. Catherine had graduated back in the spring and she felt between groups: not student, not faculty, not friend, and certainly not a writer-writer. Lawrence seemed to know every writer in the city, even actually famous ones, though Andros was certainly the most well-known name in attendance that night. The only other person there from Catherine’s cohort was a boy on the balcony she’d never considered more than an acquaintance, despite two years of close proximity. If she’d ever talked to him one on one, she didn’t remember it.
Lawrence had introduced Catherine and Andros soon after Andros arrived. Lawrence told Andros in front of Catherine that she was something special, a compliment so nondescript it couldn’t help but be true. He was a little drunk already. A young Gertrude Stein, he’d said. Catherine had made a face, and Andros noticed.
Anton was his first name—not Andros—but nobody ever referred to him as Anton, or even as Anton Andros. He was just Andros.
“So what do you plan on doing with it?” Andros asked her now. “Your writing?”
“Publishing it, hopefully,” she answered. She wanted what every twenty-seven-year-old with a fresh MFA wanted: a book, then another, then another, a career half as successful as Andros’s—more than half, in Catherine’s case. Everyone around her was talented. She wanted her talent, however much she had, to not exist only as potential.
Soliloquy, Andros’s debut, was the one that made his name. She’d read the first third of it; she could tell it was very good, surely brilliant, about a young man tending to his mentally ill mother in Astoria. She put it down one day and never picked it up again.
What was that like, for your debut to be better than anything else you’d ever write? It was a problem she’d like to have.
“It’s on submission?” Andros asked.
She shook her head. She’d been trying not to look at him like all young writers must look at him, but she knew she was failing. A smile kept escaping her when it didn’t make sense to smile. He smiled back.
“I haven’t finished it yet,” she said.
“Stories?”
“Novel.”
“Ah.”
“It’s nearly done,” she said, crossing her legs, itchy in tights. The dress was a little short, now that she was sitting. She didn’t usually wear dresses. “I’m hoping to have a draft by the spring.”
The novel wasn’t anywhere near done. It had been tormenting her for five years and way too many workshops, and the shape of the story only seemed to be getting further away. The writing was strong, even great in some passages, everyone said so, but the story was missing some essential element that nobody could quite name. It was about her grandmother, Nana, and her long, terrible life—a great story, but the novel wasn’t working. Catherine knew it better than anyone.
“And do you have representation?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
One writer in her cohort had an agent already, Maggie. Catherine had thought she maybe had a crush on Maggie for the first year before realizing that Maggie was both incredibly straight and incredibly self-absorbed. Maggie was also talented, of course, but her stories always felt edgy in a forced way; some of them were audaciously close to episodes from Girls, but never as good. It was no surprise she had an agent before graduation, and she’d probably be quite successful. Catherine wasn’t bothered by that. It had nothing to do with her.
“So, Catherine Meyer, what do you do,” Andros asked musingly, “when you’re not writing?”
Her name sounded strange when he said it, like he didn’t believe it was her real name. If she was going to use a fake name, she’d choose better than Catherine Meyer. Still, she liked to hear him say it. It made her smile again, and he smiled back.
“I’m a nanny.”
“You like that work?”
“No,” she laughed, feeling the wine. For thirty hours a week she watched two sisters, three and six years old. They were exhausting, but at least they got along mostly and they were allowed to watch some TV on their tablets. “The money isn’t bad, not for now. I won’t do it for long.”
“Soon you’ll sell your book.”
“That’s right,” she said, unsure if he was making fun. Truthfully, shamefully, she had thought that the moment she was out of school, done with workshop deadlines and reading her peers’ work and teaching undergrads about the rhetorical situation and all the reading for her other courses, the novel would practically finish itself. Yet in the last six months she’d hardly written at all. The new time seemed to mock her more than free her—but the ambition persisted, inspiring an agita like unfulfilled lust.
She didn’t tell Andros that when she wasn’t writing or working, she was browsing social media and dating apps, dispassionately yet persistently. She sometimes went to drinks with those from her cohort who still lived in the city, but they left her in a seeking mood, so she’d go out to a bar or a club on her own after, looking for girls, and there they were, as if waiting for her, so she took them, hungry to get them into her bed. When morning came, she wanted to wake up alone. She’d had a girlfriend in college, but she’d never had any interest in a girlfriend since—she hardly had any interest then. The crush on Maggie was unusual, short-lived, and probably not real to begin with. If Maggie were here tonight and not skiing in Vermont, surely that’s who Andros would be talking to.
What are you looking for? her college girlfriend had asked her when they were breaking up but didn’t know it yet. The girls on the app asked her too. The app itself asked her. What are you looking for?
I’ll know it when I see it. That was the only true answer and the answer nobody wanted.
Now all Catherine wanted was to be right here, drinking this wine, with Andros’s full attention. Maybe he wouldn’t be talking to Maggie, actually. Maybe he would be talking to her no matter who else was here.
“One of my daughters is a writer, you know,” said Andros. “Iris.”
“Novels?”
“Screenplays. She’s in L.A. now, and she’s going to do well there. She’s meeting the right people, and she’s a very bright girl.”
The pride he felt, how it softened his whole face, made her jealous—a ridiculous response, but still, there it was. It wasn’t like Catherine didn’t have a father who surely bragged about her to strangers at parties. Outside, on the balcony, came a surge of laughter.
One of my daughters, he’d said. How many did he have?
“Will she adapt one of your books?” Catherine asked.
He shook his head. “Oh, absolutely not. She has more sense than that. She’s practical, savvy—more like her mother in that way.”
A wedding band was on his finger. Catherine fought the urge to pull out her phone right there and see what she could find out about his daughters and wife online. Andros wasn’t handsome, exactly, more stately and dignified than pretty, but the women in his life were surely stunning.
“So, Catherine Meyer,” he said. “When can I read your book?”
Before he left that night, Andros wrote his address on a piece of paper and folded it into her hand.
“Don’t wait until it’s done,” he said. “Send me the first chapter. By post, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand to read on a screen. All writing has more dignity on paper.”
She couldn’t believe he was really serious, but his eyes were unwavering.
“I will,” she said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Catherine left the party soon after he did, seeing no reason to linger. That night she stayed up, retyping the first chapter, trying to make it sharper and fresher. Just imagining Andros reading it made it more smooth and alive. As she wrote, she took breaks to look him up online.
Soliloquy and a few of his other books were on several lists and referenced in many articles, but on Andros himself, there was very little. She kept encountering the same three photos of him, all taken decades ago. The Question of Joseph had also been popular, apparently. From what she could tell, it was a love story between two neighbors, again in Astoria. He didn’t seem to give many interviews, at least none in online magazines, and the sparse Wikipedia page didn’t tell her much she didn’t already know. He’d written eight novels, all told, and he was born in 1952 to Greek parents in New York. He’d won both the National Book Award and the Book Critics Circle Award, but not the Pulitzer.
Nothing on his wife or children, not even one name.
The pages had to be done in one week, at the most, she told herself. This was an offer with an expiration date, even if he didn’t say so explicitly. By the week’s end, she could hardly understand her own words. She knew it was strong—at least much stronger than it had been—and she aged the voice of the prose, making it more formal and even a little ornate, less simple and spare. She printed it out at the public library, adding her phone number and email address on the front page, and then she bought a long tan envelope with a clasp at CVS. On her way to nanny the next morning, she deposited it at the post office.
When Catherine arrived at the cafe, Andros was already there, sitting by the window. He wore the same shirt he’d worn to the party, or an identical woolen button-up, and a cashmere scarf, gray on gray. Catherine dressed more girly than usual, wearing a silk blouse from the back of her closet and her mother’s small gold earrings, a tinted lip balm. She’d entertained the idea of mascara but decided against it in the end, feeling enough like a doll already. The cocktail dress at the party she’d worn almost ironically, but he wouldn’t know that.
He didn’t see her right away; he was staring out the window, his expression somewhat vacant.
When she approached him and said his name, his face lit up.
“Catherine Meyer,” he said, smiling. “I took the liberty of ordering you a coffee. You like coffee?”
“Yes,” she said, though she’d already had too much that day. “Thank you.”
She fitted her coat over the back of the seat and set her bag on her lap; the floor was dirty with grime from all the boots before her. She’d never been to this cafe before—he’d emailed her and told her to meet him here, without a hint of how he felt about her chapter—and it was nicer than the places she usually went, with its high ceilings and white walls covered in framed paintings, all originals.
On the table was a thin book with a woman’s face on the cover. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
“How’s your book?” Catherine asked, gesturing to it.
“Oh, it’s brilliant,” he said. “You haven’t read it?”
Catherine shook her head, thinking already of a lie about what she’d been reading in case he asked. She’d found The Hunger Games on the bookshelf while nannying and had started reading it while the girls watched TV. She loved it.
“I’ve heard of it, though,” she said. She poured some cream into the coffee and took a sip; it was already a little cool. Truthfully, she’d been assigned to read Didion in college and didn’t even print the excerpt. One single reading reflection was such a small portion of her grade, she’d done most of the others, and she’d probably had some consequential paper due that week that took precedence.
“It’s a gift for you, then,” he said, pushing it toward her. Catherine took it in her hands; the cover was soft and the spine broken.
“Oh, I can’t take it—”
“Please,” he said. “I brought it with you in mind.”
“I’ll bring it back.”
“Don’t, please. I’m sure I have more than one copy.”
He looked at her the way he did at the party. It was a look she didn’t quite understand—paternal, maybe, avuncular, though not quite; something more mischievous than flirtatious, like they were both in on a joke. He wasn’t looking at her like he wanted to fuck her; she was pretty sure she knew that look at least. Most people seemed to assume she was gay, or at least queer—they picked up on what she was signaling both intentionally and subconsciously —but he might not, especially today, with her little earrings. He was surely an astute study of character, but he was also old. She was all right with him not knowing this about her.
“I loved your book,” she said, because she’d forgotten to say it at the party. “I’m sure people tell you that all the time. Soliloquy is the one I read.”
“Thank you for saying so,” he said. “I can’t say I feel the same.”
He took a sip of his tea and held the mug. An empty plate was next to him with pastry crumbs. How long had he been here before she arrived?
“I’ve written one good book,” he said. “Do you know which one it is?”
She didn’t dare answer.
“It’s a trick question. It hasn’t been published. I’ve given Iris instructions to publish it as soon as I die. They’ll take it then, I’m sure. That’s probably what they’re waiting for. It’ll sell much more once I’m dead.”
“What’s it about?”
“Myself,” he said. “What else?”
She smiled.
“So,” he said, leaning forward a little. “I read this story of yours.”
Catherine waited, reminding herself not to look too eager.
“It’s very strong,” he said. “Very strong, for such a young woman. This character, this Ada—I love her. I love the way she talks.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I rewrote it, the whole thing.”
He nodded, as if he could tell. Ada was based on Nana. Catherine had taken the true story and twisted it beyond recognition, knowing, too, that the stories Nana told weren’t entirely true either. The first chapter began with a young Ada leaving Ireland, traveling across the Atlantic by freight with her pregnant mother.
“You do still have some tells of a young writer, however,” said Andros.
He looked outside, gathering his thoughts. The sky was low and gray; there was a storm coming. It was supposed to start in the morning, but there was still no snow.
“You explain what doesn’t need explaining,” he said, his eyes back on her. “You don’t trust your reader, not completely. Your reader is every bit as smart as you are. You must treat him like it.”
This was something she’d heard before. She thought she’d done that, she did trust her reader—especially when Anton Andros was her reader. His book may not have been her favorite, but still, he had all the respect she had to give.
His book may not have been her favorite, but still, he had all the respect she had to give.
“Yes,” she said, reaching for her notebook in her bag, fishing for a pen. Usually she just wrote emails to herself, but she sensed he wouldn’t like it if she took out her phone as he was talking. Carrying a small notebook around made her feel like a writer and also like Harriet the Spy.
“There are some beautiful sentences in there,” he went on. “Smart sentences. But they were too beautiful; too smart. Do you understand what I mean? A sentence like that, you can tell the writer is proud of it. You can see him sitting back and saying, look at that! There’s ego in it, is what I mean. It points to the writer, away from the story. It’s an interruption—a lovely interruption, sure—but an interruption nonetheless. Didion will help you with that. Listen to her.”
He spoke as though he’d said this before, many times. Surely he had. He used to teach at NYU, a long time ago, and it was easy to imagine him saying all this to a group of adoring undergraduates. Lawrence had been his student. Andros seemed like the type who would have slept with a female student every so often, but only the really exceptional ones, and only in the time when that was still practically expected, even if not exactly respectable.
“I think I know what you’re referring to,” she said, wishing she had the pages in front of her. She’d found a pen, but she was afraid to write and break his gaze. “The passage when they’re boarding the boat, when Ada’s mother—”
“Write something new for me,” he said, lifting his hand to stop her. “Put this story in a drawer somewhere. This story very well might have a future, but you have to grow a bit more first. It’s been workshopped to death, I imagine?” She confirmed with a nod that it had. “I want to see what else you can do.”
His eyes, with a moment of sunlight coming in through the window, became a glacial blue. They were staring into hers.
It isn’t a story, she wanted to say. It’s a chapter.
“I know how to make it better,” she said. “I was just thinking this morning about—”
“Do you have a drawer?”
He was smiling, so she smiled, too.
“Yes, I have a drawer.”
“Put it in that drawer.”
“Okay.”
“Something new.”
“Okay,” she said. “Something new.”
She wrote down trust, drawer, new.
“Let me tell you why,” he said, leaning in, his elbows on the table. “I am not interested in that story, what you can do with it, how much better you can make it. I’m interested in you. You as an instrument.”
It was hard to look at him as he said this. Suddenly, she remembered who was talking to her: Andros. It’d been a long time since she took a breath.
“Thank you,” she said, unsure if it was the right thing to say.
“Some people have a light,” he said. “I can see it right away; it’s right there, right in their eyes. You have that. Your light isn’t hard to see, though, so I can’t give myself too much credit for spotting it. It’s your talent, your intelligence—and something inexplicable, undefinable. Lawrence saw it, too, you know. He told me you blew him away. Simply blew him away.”
She said thank you again, though she’d said thank you already too many times. She knew what light he was talking about; she knew she had it; she always had. She wouldn’t even attempt to write otherwise. But Lawrence had never said anything like that to her—and he always had plenty of critiques to offer her in workshop. Though when he said she was something special at the party, maybe that was a deeper compliment than she understood at the time. She chose now to believe it.
“It’s just the truth,” Andros said.
The cafe had filled up since she’d arrived, and the music was too loud—that’s what was wrong—someone must have turned it up all of a sudden, something indie she almost recognized. Still, no snow was falling.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” she said, though that was precisely what she wanted: all his time, all his attention. She could hardly feel her body. Just being this close to him, her brain was becoming smarter, stronger, sharper.
“My time is yours,” he said.
“There must be a lot of writers who send you their work,” she said.
“There really aren’t.”
She smiled, unsure if she should believe him.
“Besides,” he said. “I have a lot more time on my hands than you might think. What does a writer do who can’t write?”
“Read?”
He laughed.
“I have a syllabus for you,” he said. “Books that will show you how it’s done. Write this down.”
Catherine had heard of some of the writers on the list, but not all. For those she recognized, the book titles were not their best-known works, and this gave a sense of the great depth of all she didn’t know. She was going to get more of an education from Andros in one hour than two years of her program, and it was making her giddy. On the way back from the cafe she went to the used bookstore nearby, just a little out of the way, and browsed the aisles for a long time, collecting all that she could find on the list.
That night, her roommate, a soft-spoken social worker, was making something elaborate and smoky in the kitchen, so Catherine closed herself up in her room and read Didion in her bed. Maggie texted a group chain about drinks somewhere but Catherine ignored it. Didion’s writing cut right into her; she’d never read anything quite like it. Catherine was right there with her in California, 1960’s, seeing everything, missing nothing. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume. . . Catherine eagerly turned the pages, then turned them back, to make sure she got every word.
How had she not read Didion before? How had no teacher ever put this book in her hands and said, you must read this immediately, nothing else before this, instead of burying it in a crowded syllabus? It was satisfying to think Andros had given it to her because he saw some likeness between them—could Catherine really be half as brilliant as this? Yes, she thought, she was. She could be.
But even as she loved the writing, she felt uneasy; she was missing Andros’s point in giving it to her. Catherine didn’t have any interest in writing essays, and some of Didon’s sentences seemed smart in the way Andros told her not to be, like I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. Catherine didn’t know exactly what kind of writer she wanted to be, besides a successful one. It definitely wasn’t Stein, but it wasn’t quite Didion, either.
Catherine put Didion down and read a little bit of The Hunger Games instead—she’d taken it home with her, just to borrow—then she gave up on that, too, in favor of her phone. She was soon searching for Iris Andros and found a private Instagram account with the profile photo of a beach and a few results from indoor track from many years ago. She was about ten years older than Catherine, then, probably, judging by the year of the results, which would still make Andros an old father. Second marriage, perhaps, or third. Iris had run for Horace Mann and hadn’t been very fast, which gave Catherine some pleasure, though she wasn’t much of an athlete either.
Andros still hadn’t mentioned another daughter since Lawrence’s party. Maybe the other daughter was a source of shame—an addict, a criminal—or, perhaps worst of all, a painfully ordinary girl of average intelligence and mild ambition. Catherine felt embarrassed for her, though she felt sympathetic towards her, too. It wouldn’t be easy to have Andros as a father, Iris as a sister.
Andros must talk to Iris on the phone, pressing his ear to the receiver, wanting to know how she is, how she fills her days.
I love you, baby, he’d say to her. I miss you so terribly.
I miss you too, Daddy.
When can you come visit your old man?
I don’t know, Daddy. I’m really busy. I’ll try to come home soon.
You know I’m so proud of you, baby.
I know, Daddy.
On the train to nanny the next day, a new story idea came to her, a story of young love. It seemed like the kind of story Andros might have a soft spot for—a little nostalgic, a little sexy. The thought occurred to her to make it two girls, maybe lightly based on her and her college girlfriend only with more passion between them—but she didn’t know what he’d say to that. Maybe she’d make it a queer relationship after he read it. When it was finished, she mailed it to him. A few days later, he emailed her to meet her at the same cafe. He was early again, sitting in the same seat. This time he’d ordered her an almond croissant.
“You’re trusting the reader,” he said. “I can see that. That’s good, very good. But there’s something missing. Can you tell me what it is?”
She’d just taken a big bite of the croissant, which was perfect. Flakes fell on her lips as she shook her head.
“I can’t find you anywhere,” he said. “I’m looking for you, and I can’t find you. Ned and Sara are adorable, I’m rooting for them, but you—what you care about—it’s not in this story.”
Ned and Sara weren’t adorable; that’s not what she’d intended. The character of Sara had become, kind of and kind of not, her older sister Rose, much more than her college girlfriend. Ned was based on Rose’s ex-boyfriend, a musician who had left Rose heartbroken and short-tempered for weeks. It was a strange surprise how Catherine found herself identifying more with Ned, the artist, the one who wanted nothing to do with anything or anyone but his art, art that didn’t even exist yet.
She was writing herself, she wanted to say. She was Ned.
“Write closer,” said Andros.
She wrote another; he asked for more. She wrote another. They met every few weeks at the same cafe all throughout the winter. He was always there first and stayed after she left, always with the same gray scarf and a different treat waiting for her. He never handed her back any pages. She started to wonder if he had a stack of them at home, or if he used them for kindling. Secretly, shamefully, she harbored the hope he was sending them to his agent or editor, and one day she’d meet him and he’d say, Congratulations, Miss Meyer! You have yourself a book deal.
She bought a new lip tint, this one with a little shine, a navy cardigan and a fair isle sweater at a thrift store. She began to think of certain items as part of her Andros costume.
One story was about her father, only he wasn’t her father; the father in the story was ill from some horrible but vague degenerative disease, not just living in Atlanta for work and still technically married to her mother in Fort Collins. The daughter in the story loved her strong, kind father, but she was hoping, secretly, that he would die faster, to get it all over with. Catherine found herself writing a scene in which the girl spoke directly to the father’s illness—and the illness spoke back—but it was too weird and didn’t work at all. Andros would think it was ridiculous.
The story was Andros’s favorite so far. She only wrote stories now, not chapters. The Nana novel was dead, and it felt amazing to give up all her efforts at reviving it. It was dead and had never been alive to begin with.
“There you are,” he said of the father story. “I’m finally starting to see you.”
Before they parted that day, he said, “I’ve read some of your work to Mary Beth, you know. She wanted me to tell you she loves it.”
“Mary Beth?”
“My wife.”
Catherine tried to hide her surprise that Andros would share her work with anyone. He’d say to his wife, Want to hear something from this young woman? She blew me away; simply blew me away. She’s something special. She has this light.
“Does she write?” Catherine asked.
“No,” he said. “She could, if she wanted, I’m sure of that. But no. Mary Beth was a singer, for a time. Her voice was—oh, it was like nothing you’ve ever heard.”
Catherine nodded, unsure what to say. He spoke of his wife like she was dead.
“She said, this is right up Bill’s alley, don’t you think? I told her I agree.”
Catherine tried not to look too delighted, and she had no idea who Bill was, but Andros’s eyes were shining; he knew this would make her happy. Bill sounded like someone big enough to need no last name.
Andros wasn’t offering anything, she knew that, but still, Bill had been mentioned, and Andros was smiling.
Before she left, Andros told her he’d be traveling for the next couple weeks.
“I’ll be in LA,” he said. “Visiting Iris. Would you mail me a story anyway? Mary Beth will be there. I’m sure she’d love to have some reading while I’m gone. I’ll get to it as soon as I get back.”
Catherine enjoyed the assignment, writing a story for his wife, this singer she’d never met. It opened up a new part of her mind, this strange audience. She thought Mary Beth might like a mother story, so she wrote about watching her mother apply makeup in the bathroom with red wallpaper that matched her red lipstick before she went out with a friend—male suitors, Catherine long suspected—and how the girl in the story waited up with her grandmother, playing Scrabble, never winning. When she read it over, she knew it was good.
Bill was Andros’s agent, it wasn’t hard to find. Bill McAndrew. He represented a few famous authors, and many she’d never heard of, but they all seemed to have plenty of big books. She was right up his alley.
It opened up a new part of her mind, this strange audience.
Spring came in a rush after that. In the afternoons, Catherine took the girls outside to the park across the street and they became sweaty in their long pants and jackets. The day she finished the story about her mother, she walked to Andros’s apartment to drop off the pages in his mailbox herself. It was a good day for a long walk, she had the whole day off, and she feared the mail would lose the pages, the best pages, the pages for his wife—maybe even for Bill.
When she approached the building, she checked the address against the directions on her phone to make sure it was the correct one: a modest but dignified building on W 75th and Columbus. There was his name, Andros, on the door. She wasn’t going to buzz; Catherine wasn’t ready to actually meet Mary Beth yet, not with how she was looking today, scrubby and normal, wearing not even one Andros costume item.
The front door was locked, of course it was, but she tried it anyway. There was a stand inside for a doorman but nobody was there. It didn’t feel right to drop the folder in the mail slot and leave it there on the floor.
For a minute she stood there, unsure what to do.
Then, the door opened, and a young woman about Catherine’s age came out. Their eyes met; there was something familiar about her, but what? She wore a blue bandana on her head, an oversized argyle sweater, and dirty sneakers. A tote bag was slung over her shoulder. She was a little older than Catherine, actually, it was clear with a closer look, just dressed like a college student.
“You’re looking for Anton Andros?” she asked. His name was right there on the folder.
“You know him?”
The girl smiled like she’d just heard a bad joke, but Catherine didn’t get it.
“You can’t leave the mail out here,” said the girl. “Give it to me. I’ll bring it in.”
The girl opened the door with a fob, allowing Catherine to follow her inside. She shifted her giant tote from one arm to the other; it seemed full of clothes. The doorman, an older white man with a navy suit and very pale skin, emerged then from around the corner. He smiled at the young woman in apology.
“Richard, hon, can you take care of this?” she asked.
“Yes, Miss,” he said, sliding it under the counter. He looked at Catherine, without suspicion, but he was looking at her. “Of course, Miss.”
Catherine followed the woman outside and waited until they were on the steps to thank her.
“It’s nothing,” she said, and descended the stairs, on her way out, done with Catherine.
“You’re his daughter,” Catherine called after her. It suddenly became clear. “I’m Catherine Meyer.”
She paused and turned back to eye Catherine. “Jules.”
Jules didn’t look like she’d ever heard the name Catherine Meyer before.
“You’re visiting?” Catherine asked.
“No, not visiting.”
The girl didn’t want to talk to her, but she wasn’t leaving yet, either. The resemblance to her father was striking, now that Catherine knew to look for it: the wide face, light blue eyes, though her coloring was paler. She wore no makeup; her dirty shoes were old Chuck Taylors.
“I didn’t know he had a new one,” said Jules flatly.
Catherine stood straight, not quite understanding; then she did understand.
“There’s nothing like that,” Catherine said, hating the insinuation. It revolted her, and it was an insult to her and Andros both. He never touched her, not even a hand on her shoulder; she reminded herself of that. He didn’t even give her that look. “Between your father and me—nothing like that at all.”
“He reads your work,” said Jules. “Is that it? He gives you advice, he introduces you to the people he knows?”
He hadn’t introduced her to anyone. The closest he’d ever done was mentioning Bill’s name one time, and that was nothing. Less than nothing.
“I know I don’t know you at all,” said Jules. “I don’t know one thing about you. But I know my father. When he has attention like this—it’s like a drug for him. He’s always looking for a fix.”
Jules stared at her, waiting for Catherine to speak, to offer a defense, but she had none.
“He’s reading my work,” Catherine said instead. “We have coffee, that’s all.”
Jules nodded, not disbelieving her, but she was done talking. She was on her way somewhere, and she’d already been delayed enough.
“I’m sure you’re very talented,” Jules said, as she began to walk away. “You always are.”
For days afterward, Catherine couldn’t stop thinking about Jules. Every time she tried to remember the woman’s face, what she said, how she said it—the image evaded her. Then, when she was finally thinking of something else, it would come to her, clear as anything, the whole interaction—when she tried to pause it, rewind, slow down, Jules’s face again turned to mist.
Jules didn’t exist online, not at all. Catherine searched and searched, digging deeper, from all angles she could think of—Julia, Julianna, Julie, Juliette. Nothing.
Catherine didn’t know if she should be grateful for Jules, or resent her, or discredit her—or if she should have any feelings about it whatsoever. Andros might have a good reason for keeping her secret—not secret, really, but quiet, or maybe just not worth his time and attention—though Catherine couldn’t imagine what a good reason might be.
Had Jules really told her something Catherine didn’t know already? Andros had read the work of other young writers before. Of course he had. Of course she was special and also not special. None of this was news, yet it felt like a revelation, and it made her stomach sour.
She wondered if any of this would have happened if she hadn’t worn that stupid cocktail dress at Lawrence’s party.
A few days later, Andros emailed to say he was back in town and he’d love to talk about her story, if she was free. They chose a date and time. The messages were short, as they always were, and she sounded normal, and so did he.
So Jules hadn’t told him they’d met, she thought, though perhaps she had. Maybe he would’ve emailed her anyway, as usual, and it didn’t change anything at all.
Andros had never lied to her.
Catherine dressed to see him, this time wearing a cropped shirt and old jeans; the day was barely warm enough. As she walked, she thought of what she might say to him about Jules—nothing, she wouldn’t say anything to him—she’d listen to his thoughts on her story, perhaps Mary Beth had passed some along as well, if she’d even read it. Catherine would take whatever she could from him; this was a transaction, after all, it always had been.
She walked. The day was overcast with a mild wind, the sidewalks eerily quiet, and as she walked she began to head in a different direction.
An idea occurred to her. Andros wouldn’t be home now. He’d be going to meet her at the coffee shop; he was always early. He would’ve left by now.
Catherine walked to his apartment. She stood outside for just a moment, afraid to lose her nerve. She wanted to see Jules.
She buzzed Andros’s number but nobody answered. This time the doorman was at his stand. She knocked and smiled at him. He gave her an inquisitive, not quite suspicious look, and opened the door slightly.
“Richard, is it?” Catherine asked. His face searched her, perhaps he did vaguely remember her. “I’m here to see Jules Andros, I was with her the other day. Is she in?”
“Who should I say is calling, Miss?”
“Catherine. Meyer.”
He took a few steps inside as Catherine moved out of the doorway. He lifted a phone, pressed three buttons and held it to his ear. It seemed to take a very long time. “Catherine Meyer is here to see you,” he said. Catherine could hear another voice on the line, just barely, not enough to make out any words, but it did sound like a woman’s voice.
“Yes, Miss,” he said. “Of course.” He hung up and looked at Catherine. “Miss Andros says you’re welcome to come up. 303F. Elevators are right this way.”
“Thank you.”
Catherine felt nervous, as nervous as she could ever remember. She felt like she was doing something illegal, though of course she wasn’t. There were no laws for things like this.
The building’s interior became a little shabbier in the elevator and down the hall—thin crimson carpets, fluorescent lights, a slight smell of cigarette smoke. She found 303F and stood in front of it, feeling absurd. Jules opened the door before Catherine could knock. She looked as if she just woken up from a nap; her eyes were tired, her hair unkept, her fingers stained blue and black from some kind of ink. She wore black leggings and an oversized tan t-shirt, no bra. Her breasts were large and a little uneven.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” said Jules.
“I didn’t either.”
“My father isn’t here. But I think you already know that.”
“He’s probably at the cafe right now. Waiting for me.”
Jules leaned against the doorframe, studying Catherine with a new interest. She had the same gaze as her father, intense and penetrating and a little amused. It was hard to stop looking at her.
“If you’re here to tell me that you never slept with my father, don’t worry about it,” said Jules. “I know you didn’t. And I don’t even care if you did. It’s not my business.”
“I’m not—no,” said Catherine, though she was relieved to hear this. “I just wanted to see you, if that’s okay. Just for a minute.”
Jules smiled a little, changing her whole face, as if she’d won a bet with herself. She had an unexpectedly lovely smile. She moved away from the door.
“Come in.”
Catherine followed her inside, and Jules shut the door slowly, taking care to lock it without making much sound. Behind Jules was a small kitchen; the counter was clear but the sink full of dishes, and a sprawling pothos was on the windowsill. It smelled like burnt eggs. The place was silent in a way that made her certain they were alone.
“Why do you want to see me?” Jules asked her.
Catherine didn’t have a good answer, she knew that. She hadn’t been honest with herself. She knew was never going to meet Andros today.
“Why did you let me up?” Catherine asked in return.
Jules shook her head with a smirk, as if still deciding whether or not she wanted Catherine here.
“We can sit in my room,” said Jules.
Jules led her down the small hallway, past a modest living room overrun with books, then two closed doors, one of which was surely Andros’s office, where he read her work. The bathroom door was open, showing a mess; the shelf next to the sink was full of products without lids and a purple towel lay on the floor.
Jules’s room was painted dark green, and it had one large window and several small lamps, Christmas lights and tapestries that gave it a collegiate feel. There were a few piles of books here, too—mostly graphic novels, by the looks of them, and art books. Catherine noted the bright colors of the spines, the funny fonts of the titles. One on the desk looked like a novel about a robot, maybe even Young Adult. Catherine had never even thought to write something like that. It had truly never entered her mind.
The walls were nearly completely covered with unframed art: drawings, sketches, paintings, all tacked up. The wall must be wrecked with holes. Catherine’s mother would have a fit if she did that.
“You made these?” Catherine asked, standing in front of a portrait. It was charcoal, of an old woman. She had dark bags under her eyes and folds in her skin, a sour expression, her features seemed intentionally exaggerated.
“From a long time ago, mostly,” said Jules, sitting crosslegged on her unmade bed.
“You’re so talented.”
“Who isn’t?” Jules asked, with a shrug. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Suddenly, Catherine felt the exact same way. All her talent, whatever amount she possessed, hadn’t gotten her anywhere but here in this room, with a dead novel and mediocre stories written for an old man and some wife.
Catherine looked over the other portraits on the wall, some smaller than her hand. The ones with color were bright, green skin with blue lips, long chins and crooked noses. Catherine wondered if any of these portraits were of her sister Iris, but she didn’t want to ask.
“I did give him your story, if you were wondering,” said Jules. “I didn’t destroy it or anything.”
Catherine hadn’t even thought about Jules not delivering it like she said she would.
“Did your mother read it?” Catherine asked. “He told me it was for her.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think she did.”
“Oh,” said Catherine, feeling ridiculous in her disappointment.
“I read it, though,” said Jules. “He just leaves them on the table. I can’t help myself.”
Her stomach dropped. Catherine swallowed.
“Have you read all of mine?” she asked.
Jules smiled. “I read whatever he leaves around. His other students’ stuff, I’ve read some, but they bore me, I don’t usually get past the first page. Yours didn’t bore me.”
Catherine took it in, imagining her pages here, in this apartment as it was, with the purple towel on the floor and the burnt egg smell. She imagined Jules reading the first page while standing in the kitchen, a slice of cheese in her hand, maybe, turning the page, then bringing it into this room, taking it into her bed. Catherine hadn’t written the stories for someone like Jules. She wanted to ask more about what she thought of them, what she thought was missing—Jules might be the person who could finally tell her—but she didn’t want to think about her writing now.
She would write again, she knew that. Andros didn’t get to have the power to make her stop. Nobody did. But she might need to not think about her writing for a long time.
Catherine felt strange still standing. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“What do you do? Are you in school?” Catherine wanted to know everything Jules would tell her.
“I got laid off last year,” said Jules, though she didn’t say from where. They sat in silence for a moment, and Catherine tried to sense what kind of silence it was. Jules was still looking at her. Catherine didn’t want to leave her bed.
“Nobody’s ever drawn a portrait of me before,” said Catherine.
“Are you asking for one?”
Catherine realized that she was. It had never once occurred to her that no portrait of her existed anywhere in the world, and it suddenly seemed like a very sad thing. She discovered she wanted one desperately.
“You have a good face,” said Jules. “I haven’t tried a face like yours. With how your eyes are like that, down at the edges.”
She said it so matter of factly, not a compliment or an insult. Catherine wasn’t sure whether or not she should say thank you, but she liked knowing Jules thought her face was good. Catherine never thought too much about her face; she wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t ugly, it didn’t serve her or hurt her. Catherine closed her eyes. Jules moved closer and touched her hair, angled her chin down. It was more the touch of a mother than a lover, a correcting touch.
Jules reached for a black pencil, a piece of paper and secured it to a clip board. She leaned against the bed and held it in her lap, a posture she’d clearly assumed many times before. Catherine wasn’t sure what to do with herself, with her hands or her gaze.
“Can you look toward the window a little?” Jules asked. Catherine obeyed.
“Now look back at me,” said Jules. Catherine turned but kept her eyes downcast.
Pencil touched the paper; the sound sent a shiver through Catherine.
“He might be home soon,” said Jules.
Catherine nodded once. She had no idea what she would say to him and what he would say to her, but she did want to see the look on his face when he saw her here. She wanted to see the revision of who he thought she was play out over his eyes. He hadn’t seen her at all, of course he hadn’t: she’d shown him someone else. She wanted to watch him realize that.
But that wasn’t why she was here; she wasn’t here to spite him. She didn’t care about him right now. He didn’t exist.
“This might not look the way you want it to look,” said Jules.
“I don’t know how I want it to look.”
“Shh,” said Jules. “I’m going to do your mouth first.”
Catherine stayed very, very still, and listened to the pencil on the paper.
When Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Will and Testamentwas published in Norway in 2016, scandal erupted in its wake. In that novel, a character who resembles Hjorth recounts her struggles to communicate with her family after she tells them that her father sexually abused her as a child. In real life, Hjorth’s family protested that her allegations weren’t true, while Hjorth pointed out that the novel was, by definition, fictional. In 2017, her younger sister Helga wrote a novel of her own, Free Will, that told the story from her perspective, casting the older sister as a psychopathic liar. In 2018, her mother sued a Norwegian theater that produced an adaptation of Will and Testament. All of this controversy was good press: Will and Testament has sold upwards of 170,000 copies in Norway and received multiple literary prizes there, as well a place on the longlist for the National Book Award.
In her new novel, Repetition(first published in Norway in 2023), Hjorth delves into the experiences of a teenage girl whose burgeoning sexuality creates conflict with an abusive father and paranoid mother. “It’s not a secret that this book is autobiographical,” she told me frankly of Repetition, while also emphasizing that it is a work of fiction. At age 66, delving into memories of her experiences as a teenager is by necessity an act of imagination. Regardless of how fictional Repetition is, it provides a devastating window into how families live in the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. Though the narrator’s father committed the crime, it is the mother who surveils and harasses her, terrified of any hint of sexual behavior. Later, when her mother discovers the narrator’s diary, in which she has written a vivid sexual fantasy, her parents act as though she has somehow violated them, instead of the other way around.
Perhaps losing her family in the wake of Will and Testament has allowed Hjorth both to speak more freely about her creative project, and lowered the stakes in writing about the brutal family dynamics she describes in both these novels. In Will and Testament, protagonist Bergljot maintains some form of hope that her family will be able to hear her. The novel’s pages are filled with her anxiety about interacting with her family members and the anger and devastation that comes every time these hopes are dashed. Repetition is as morally uncompromising as Will and Testament, but it is also a calmer novel, focused on analyzing the past. “If your family cuts you out and you accept that, you understand there is no way back. They don’t want to have contact with me,” Hjorth says. “Even though it’s a big, big sorrow and it’s hurt you, and maybe you are hurt in a way that never can [heal], you are also set free. It’s a kind of earthquake.”
In a conversation conducted over Zoom, we discussed the complicated position of women in her mother’s generation, the tendrils of sexual abuse, the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, and more.
Morgan Leigh Davies: In Repetition, you explore how child abuse affects other relationships within a family, not just the primary abusive relationship that we might focus on.
Vigdis Hjorth: That’s how family problems can be. Things happen, and maybe you can talk about what happened. Maybe you cannot. When grown-up siblings are talking about, What kind of family did we grow up in? they will have very different views. They will tell different stories about what they have experienced. When Will and Testament was read so widely, it must not have been because that many daughters or sons have experienced sexual abuse, but because a lot of them have experienced violence in a physical or psychological way.
You have the feeling you cannot talk about it, and if you try to talk about it, your siblings, or your mother, or the rest of the family, don’t want or aren’t able to believe you. It’s a pattern that must be more common than I knew when I was writing the book.
MLD: I found the depiction of the mother in this book really interesting. You make an effort to imagine the thought process she is going through—even though she’s failed in her responsibility to her daughter, she’s also in an incredibly difficult position. What was the process of trying to enter that consciousness?
VH: When you try, as a grown-up child, to understand your childhood, you very much want to excuse your parents. You try to explain how they could react as they did, because the worst thing is to conclude that, Oh, they didn’t care about me. They didn’t love me. They do not love me. You try to explain it: She had to do it, she had no other choice. But I also think that this is a question about generations. Most women were economically [dependent] on their husbands, that’s why they couldn’t divorce. They had no power: not in society, not in their marriage. Their only power was to have children that behaved, and a clean house. Their status depended on that. That explains how many of these mothers maybe had the feeling that something was not right, something must have happened, but they didn’t really want to find out because then they would have a dilemma that would be impossible to solve.
Maybe these mothers can’t imagine how important they are in their child’s life.
I let the mother character have a lot of space: Will and Testament and Repetition talk a lot about the daughter’s relationship to her mother. It’s just me guessing. And then this little girl that happened to be an author is looking at her thinking: Where is Mother? What is Mother thinking? What does Mother understand? And maybe these mothers can’t imagine how important they are in their child’s life.
MLD: Especially in that era where there wasn’t as much discussion about the psychology of children.
VH: Yes, yes, yes. For that generation of women, not in bourgeois but in middle class life, the main concern was, Do my children behave? And that was everything.
MLD: I would imagine especially for girls, right? In Repetition, that idea is so tied to sexuality, which is the worst kind of misbehavior possible. This mother knows on some unconscious level that this has happened to the narrator. Her intrusions into her daughter’s sexual life are not the same as sexually abusing a child, but it is a weird continuation or contribution to that abusive environment.
VH: I think that the mother in the novel, unconsciously or not, knows something has happened. She is suspicious, but she cannot ask the question. It’s an impossible question to ask. She knows that if she asks, the answer will be no, and she also knows that she will never be able to find the right words to ask. How do you ask a four- or five-year-old girl about that?
So what shall she do when she can’t ask? She observes the daughter’s behavior. Her nightmare is that this girl, at 15, 16 years old, will be promiscuous, because even at that time, everybody knew girls that behaved like that often had abuse stories. It sends a signal to the society that something is not right.
MLD: That comes to a head with her parents reading her journal, in which she describes her sexual fantasies. It’s very upsetting to imagine being violated in that way, especially by your parents. The narrator then says that this experience stopped her from writing for many years after. You’ve said before that writing isn’t therapeutic. But it obviously does serve some function or we wouldn’t do it, and suddenly this character no longer has that.
VH: Writing about your problems doesn’t solve them, but you can find something out. Sometimes I say, I don’t know what I mean before I see what I write. My writing is more intelligent and wise than myself. Maybe that’s because we have to talk to so many people during a day, and do a lot of unnecessary talk, but when we write, we can come closer to what is important.
I wrote a lot when I was a child. Not interesting things. But I must have found that writing, or drawing, was a way to calm down, to concentrate. When I was 14, 15, I started to write a diary. That was even more calming. I think I say in the novel, “Why do I write her or she when I mean me?” So it’s not a secret that this book is autobiographical, but I’m also afraid to use that term because what you write in 100 or 200 pages cannot capture what really happened.
What you write in 100 or 200 pages cannot capture what really happened.
When the girl in the novel—me in reality—makes up what happened with this boy she had fantasized about, inspired by porn magazines the boys had, that is a kind of fiction: her first fiction. That was a very special experience. I had this feeling of what literary inspiration was. I was really making it up. That had a much [stronger] impact than anything else I had said or written before. It was an insight into the power of fiction. It was impossible to say to my parents, It’s not true. It’s fiction. I made it up. I dreamed it. So in that first fiction experience, I saw the impact it could have. It was very traumatic in one way, but I also found out that it was a very powerful tool.
MLD: It’s so significant that it’s a sexual fantasy, that you’re able to create something that’s so different from the abuse. It’s no wonder you’re writing so fast and feeling so connected. The whiplash of that immediately being seen by your parents must have been extreme.
VH: Yes, it was. That’s why I can never forget it. When I say that I dreamed it, I didn’t dream it as a porn film. I wasn’t sitting there getting horny. It was not like that. It was as if I had been drinking or taken something. That was also the first time I felt free and lifted up by writing. The sentences were flowing, the words were coming. There was this feeling of everything going and going; the pen was flying over the paper. The most fabulous feeling as a writer. It has nothing to do with sexuality, but what she’s writing about are these phrases from porn and from romantic films. It’s a language every young girl that had seen films, especially American ones, at that time had inside them. It transformed my, her, body into language: all these longings, one scene after the other. It was the first time I ever experienced being taken away by an activity, forgetting everything else, just being in it. It was a lovely feeling.
She never read that again, of course. I never read it afterward because I threw everything away. But it would be very interesting to see what quality was in that piece of writing. I think it must have been a kind of singing, a kind of song. The Sámi people in Northern Norway that I met in my youth sang to each other, they sang their experiences. To me, it was the first song I made.
MLD: How did you get back to that process after so many years of not doing it?
VH: I used to tell this as a funny story. Often, when women are together, we talk about: How was your first time? Tell me about your first time. I told this story to make everybody laugh because nothing happens. It’s so stupid. Everybody laughed when I said that this boy was putting his arm around her shoulder and saying, “Now, you have become a woman.” I made it a funny story, and it is a funny story. But a month before I started to write this novel, I told it at a literary festival, everybody laughed, and when I went home, I felt so stupid and so guilty because I hadn’t taken myself as a 15-year-old girl seriously. So I tried really hard to find out, How did she really feel? In fact, it was a big trauma for her because she couldn’t say to her parents that her writing was a fantasy. She was left alone with this and couldn’t tell anybody because it was so shameful. I had forgotten that loneliness and shame, or I didn’t want to see it. I felt sorry for the girl I was. So I decided to find out about her, and the way I find out is to write about things.
It’s difficult to say what the literary aspect of the sentences is and what the so-called truth is, because the truth is always ‘so-called.’
MLD: It’s interesting to hear you say, Of course, this is me. The story of Repetition appears briefly in Will and Testament. For very understandable reasons, in interviews from five to 10 years ago, you really emphasized that your work was fictional. How much are you thinking about these books as part of a wider project? Are you thinking about people reading them together, or do you not think about reception at all?
VH: I’m not thinking about reception when I’m writing. But I would never have written a novel about my own difficulties if I didn’t think I shared this trauma with a lot of other people. I tried as much as I could to make the quarrel in Will and Testament—in-between the siblings, about the mother and the father—very common. I didn’t want it to be about my mother, my father, because then other people would have difficulty identifying with them.
It was stormy when it was published. Now I have nothing left to lose in my relationship with my family. They are lost to me because of Will and Testament. But I wouldn’t write a story to hurt them. Why should I? I write what I feel is necessary. And I think that what I write in Repetition is a phenomenon more common than we believe. Something has happened, it’s not possible to talk about it, but it has a lot of consequences. I use this true story because it is a good story. In one way, it is a funny story and it’s easy to identify with. In one way, you can say that this is one of the most autobiographical novels I’ve written. Still, it was written so long after I was 15. Was it like that? Or is this better fiction? It’s difficult to say what the literary aspect of the sentences is and what the so-called truth is, because the truth is always “so-called.”
MLD: I always like to ask people at the end if they’ve read anything recently that they really loved and would recommend.
VH: I read a lot and I love a lot, of course. This Sunday, I’m going to talk about Tove Ditlevsen, the Danish writer. My grandparents were Danish. All Danish people had Tove Ditlevsen. She was not translated, but they were living nearby. So that was the very first novel I ever read. Especially the third part of the Trilogy, Dependency. The first part is about growing up in the working classes, but you have read about that before. In Dependency, she’s writing about this milieu in Copenhagen where everybody slept with everybody, and she mentions every man she slept with and had children with by name. She writes about their children and abortion and everything. It was a big, big scandal. She was sued, of course. She was writing [in a sing-song voice]: He committed suicide, it was very sad, and I was taking this drug, and it was sad, and then I married this guy, and then the other one, and he had had children before, and that was way too busy for me, and then I was using this drug, and then I found another man.
She’s totally honest about everything, especially about abortion. When I’m talking about it, I’m not literary, but she’s literary. And so brave. She committed suicide. She had tried to commit suicide many times, writing about her attempts: she wrote about everything. Then more than 6,000 working-class women came to the funeral because she was the only one who wrote about their daily lives.
I’ll say one more thing. When she was in her sixties, this young journalist visited her in her home. You can see this on film. And he asked, What would you say if a former lover came to you and said that you’re not that good in bed? And she said, I am, I’m really good. Where’s the bedroom?
She’s a hero: very inspiring. [whispers] But I’m not as good in bed as she is.
“I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel,” Lou Reed croons at the end of the title track to his 1975 album Coney Island Baby. At the time, Reed was head over heels with Rachel Humphries, a Mexican-American trans woman who appeared alongside him on album covers, on stage, and through his lyrics during their five year relationship. No ‘70s rock star was complete without a controversial affair with a trans woman, it seems, yet these women have been swept into the footnotes by later biographers. Lauren J. Joseph’s second novel, Lean Cat, Savage Cat, spins this idea of the trans rock muse into an erotic phantasmagoria set in Berlin’s churching queer party world.
Charli is a trans art student doing everything in her power to avoid her PhD when she meets Alexander Geist, a glamorous and slightly menacing stranger who invites her to come with him to Berlin. Soon she is absorbed into the work of transforming Geist into the next David Bowie — a project fueled by drugs, sex, and the seductive allure of self-creation that quickly turns volatile. Joseph’s writing, at turns lacerating and hysterical, keeps us on our toes questioning not only these characters’ intentions but whether or not they even exist.
Over slices of bara brith, Lauren and I sat down on the sofa in her London flat, flanked by a Beryl Cook throw pillow on one side and a larger-than-life plush Garfield on the other, to discuss the novel, what it means to be haunted by your past personae, and the romance between David Bowie and Romy Haag that inspired it all.
Morgan M Page: Lean Cat, Savage Cat is set in the underground queer milieu of Berlin. You lived there yourself for a time. What is it about Berlin, and especially that strata of Berlin, that holds your interest?
Lauren J. Joseph: I think because it really felt like the Wild West to live there. In my mind, Berlin has the same function as Italy does for Shakespeare. You know, in Shakespeare’s time everything was happening in Italy, all these poisonous plots and backstabbings and great works of art. There’s a lawlessness to it. And the feeling that no matter how unhinged something is, it’s believable if it happens in Berlin. You have a lot of room to write in Berlin.
MMP: And do you feel like the history that pulses through that city also has an effect?
LJJ: Oh very much, yes. One of the anchors is this department store called Karstadt, where the characters are often going shopping or it’s used as a reference point—a club is close to Karstadt, or someone has an apartment close to Karstadt. And I think that’s a really good signifier of the 20th century history of Berlin. It was the largest department store in Europe in the ‘20s, and it was obviously destroyed during the war. It was rebuilt, bought and sold by private equity companies as the neighbourhood around Karstadt gentrified. It keeps shifting position as the thing that was the height of luxury and then the bottom of the market, and now has a sort of a cult position in Berlin’s history and topography.
MMP: This is a novel, in part, about the construction of persona. And interestingly, one of the main characters, Alexander Geist, has a curious history for you. Who is Alexander Geist? And what is this process of working one of your own personae into a novel?
LJJ: I was very inspired by people like Sophie Calle and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Calle did those famous pieces—Suite Vénitienne—where she met a man and then followed him to Venice and around the city taking pictures of him, he didn’t know. Or she did that piece where she became a chambermaid and took pictures of people’s belongings in their rooms (The Hotel). Hershman Leeson had a long term piece called Roberta Breitmore, where she became a character, rented an apartment, went to therapy, went to Weight Watchers, had a whole wardrobe and makeup look—and made this body of work about being this person she wasn’t and then handed off this person to other people. So both of these bodies of work were so interesting to me, and I wanted to create this figure of Alexander Geist maybe around 2010. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if I made an alter-ego who is a fully functioning alter-ego but I put him in the public sphere as opposed to both of those artists’ work being very private and almost in the world of domestic espionage. I created a body of work—music and music videos—and later shipped him into the novel, basically. I had a whole bunch of other personas. I had one, Anna Mosity.
No matter how unhinged something is, it’s believable if it happens in Berlin.
MMP: [Laughs] Is that two words—Anna Mosity?
LJJ: Yes! And she was like a French couture model turned punk star. I was in a witchhouse band in which she was the lead singer. So there were a bunch of personae that hadn’t functioned for years. Alexander Geist was popular and I always thought there was more to him. Because he’d been relatively successful, he haunted my own life. I couldn’t quite get away from him for a while. Geist meaning ghost or spirit. He sort of haunts the text and becomes a figure of obsession for Charli, the narrator. I like shipping characters between works. I think it’s interesting to build a body of work like that. And my novels all share characters—usually a minor figure in one becomes a more central figure in another.
MMP: The protagonist, Charli, is a young trans art student at loose ends. One of her guiding obsessions is the ‘70s romance between David Bowie and trans nightclub owner Romy Haag. Tell me more about their story. And what is it doing in the novel?
LJJ: Well, the story as Romy tells it is that Bowie came to Berlin and because her nightclub was so popular, people were always begging her to come to concerts and so she said, “Ok, why not.” She went along to the concert and they saw each other and fell madly in love. He went home with her and they’re playing records and he said, “Why don’t you have any of mine?” And she said, “I’ve never heard of you.” [Laughs] The next day he had his record company send all his back catalogue over. From that point, they were inseparable. They lived together for a time. In his “Boys Keep Swinging” video, he’s dressed as her. They had this long relationship that covered the span of his three Berlin records—Lodger, Heroes, and Low. And apparently, they were quietly friends until he died, he still sent her Christmas cards. So she had a very profound impact on him and his work, but I’ve read so many biographies and watched documentaries about Bowie in Berlin, and they’ll always say something like, “Whilst Bowie was experimenting in Berlin, he often spent time with drug addicts and transvestites such as Romy Haag.” She’s always treated with such contempt and disrespect, swept into the corner. When really she’s still a celebrity in Berlin now, but she had this incredibly popular nightclub which everybody had to be at. The hottest spot in Europe. She also sold tons of records [as a disco diva] and had her own TV chat show into the ‘90s. So I sort of wanted to introduce her to people who weren’t familiar with her outside of German pop fans and Bowie obsessives. To make her the obsession for Charli, rather than Bowie. Bowie is kind of Alexander’s obsession. I wanted to use their story to underline the fact that this is a very old and common tale—Amanda Lear as trans muse for Dalí, Rachel the muse for Lou Reed. In rock and roll history, these women were always isolated or disrespected or pushed to the side.
MMP: And is that paralleled in Charli’s character in the same way that Geist has parallels with Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona?
LJJ: I would say so. A lot of Romy’s influence on Bowie was invisibilized, like Angie Bowie’s work or Albert Einstein’s wife or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the woman who did all the readymade’s before Duchamp. Women whose lovers become much more well-known, basically getting all the credit. And that does happen to Charli, too. She’s the one who’s ironing the shirts, organizing the interviews, giving him his salami and his orange juice. And she gets no thanks, and there’s a strange kind of masochism in that. But it also becomes a resentment for her, where she’s trying to deny the obvious, that he’s not abusing her horribly when he blatantly is.
MMP: The book lends itself to multiple readings. Is there an angle it should be understood from—or is the ambiguity the point?
I’m not in my US era right now—with the obvious exception of Bad Bunny.
LJJ: The ambiguity is definitely the point. There’s probably three theories of what is actually going on in this book, and I wrote them into the book, and then in the edit tried to make sure that each of them holds water. I don’t want this to be a book that has a definitive reading. I don’t think books ever really do. Maybe narratively, if you’re writing Agatha Christie you have to know who did it. But in this book, you definitely don’t. I don’t think a lot of the characters even know what has happened to them. Agatha Christie is sort of a reference point throughout this book, she comes up a couple of times as being the antithesis to this kind of story, to say there will be no clear resolution here. But I like that, it’s one of the things that has brought me back to reading The Turn of the Screw, American Psycho, and Pale Fire. In all of those books, you return to them and they only get richer, and you still don’t know. Is Miss Jessel really seeing ghosts? Do the children see the ghosts? I’ve read the book five times now, and I still don’t know, and that’s why I love it.
MMP: Part of this novel is about the creation of a rock star, a world you’ve dipped your own toes in before. How did you find writing about music? Were you “dancing about architecture,” as it were? And is music an important part of your writing process?
LJJ: Music is a part of my writing process, actually. I find if I get a bit sluggish, then I will stop and have a little boogie. But also a certain piece of music will definitely set the tone for something, and then I find myself listening to the same handful of songs over and over. With this I was listening to [Bowie’s] “I’m Deranged” a lot. And I was also listening to an old Bob Fosse/Gwen Verdon track called “Who’s Got the Pain When They Do the Mambo.” [Laughs] Quite off-kilter little songs but a piece of music can really set the tone. And for a book about music there is relatively little description of music. A lot of song titles come up, people are often listening to music or talking about bands, but the music itself isn’t ever greatly described. There’s one or two times when Alex is singing and the track is described, but for a book that is so much about music, there’s very little writing about music.
MMP: Your book is coming out simultaneously in the UK [with] Bloomsbury and the US [with] Catapult. Neither of these countries are particularly comfortable places to be transsexual in 2026. I have two questions for you about this. The first is about the novel itself. This is a literary novel dealing with psychological thriller elements. It’s got a touch of the Black Swan to it. Breakdowns, doppelgangers, addiction, maybe psychosis—who can say? It’s up to the reader to decide. And it’s entering a real world in which governments on both sides of the Atlantic are stripping us of our rights by labeling trans people as mentally unfit and unstable. Is there a tension here between writing the stories that speak to you and considering the ways they might be received?
LJJ: I think you always have to ignore the way they will be received, otherwise you end up writing for a voice that isn’t yours. I took a class with Shelia Heti once and asked a similar question to her, and she said you don’t have any control over how your work is received. When you’re writing a novel, you don’t even know if it will get published. And if it does get published, how do you know anyone will read it? Your first responsibility is to yourself, and you really have to resist it, otherwise you end up writing the “trans women are women” type of books—
MMP: Right.
LJJ: —where that’s the point of the book and people say that at least once a chapter. And that isn’t what I want to do. Sarah Waters said you can only write the book that calls to you, and this was very much the book that called to me. And I think it’s good to bear in mind that this moment is not the eternal moment. Things will change and this book will be read very differently in five years and in ten years, and beyond that.
MMP: My second trans-Atlantic question is actually a logistical one. Normally, you might travel to America to promote the book. But for many trans people this is an unappealing prospect at the moment. How has this made trying to market the book in the US different? Is it tricky?
LJJ: With my previous book, At Certain Points We Touch, I couldn’t travel because of the pandemic and then this time, my publisher was as generous as to offer to facilitate me financially—or as they say “pay for,” I believe in standard English [laughs]—but I’m not going. I thought that would be a big headache but it’s been picked up by tons and tons of Books You Must Read and these kinds of preview lists already, and I’ve been doing interviews, so it seems as healthy a reception as last time for sure, without having to go there. I’m honestly not desperately interested in American culture right now. There was a long time in my life where I was very much a student of Americana—I think definitely in At Certain Points We Touch, and in Everything Must Go, my novella, they really exist in a space of Americana. A bit like those PJ Harvey albums in the mid-90s that are by somebody British but someone in love with the Southern Gothic. I’m not in my US era right now—with the obvious exception of Bad Bunny.
MMP: USA is no longer A-OK!Changing tracks one last time, something I’m interested in is this idea we have in culture that writing is this lonely, solitary thing. Something you do on your own, you lock yourself in a room, and famously writers are introverts. But conversely, many of us have communities of writers and these communities have a surprising amount of influence on the work itself. What role does having a community of writers play in your process?
LJJ: I think it definitely keeps me updated on what’s happening. If I weren’t talking to other writers, I would have less of an understanding of what’s happening, what people are working on, and on their processes. I think it’s also good to have a community of writers to talk about the logistics and pragmatics of writing. And also because when you are friends with a lot of writers, you do get to share stuff with people, and often you get to see it a long time before anyone else does, which is a real amazing privilege. That influences me, for sure. I think the biggest influence is knowing that somebody will read it. Ultimately, I do know that somebody will read it, but there’s always that moment of thinking what if I write this for myself and it doesn’t go anywhere, my agent says it’s terrible and my publisher doesn’t want it, but you know that you’ll be able to share it with other writers. And those other writers are not really invested in any other way besides as early readers—they don’t get a cut, there’s nothing in it for them but to read it. That’s one of the most exciting things about writing, the moment when you can share it with other writers. They’re your peers, you know? I’m not a very competitive kind of writer, or a jealous kind of writer either, but there’s something of a Renaissance sculptor or painter to it. You do get a feeling that people are excited to say ,“Ta-da! Look what I just created.” Which is a nice feeling, really.
The mother-daughter bond, whether tender or fraught, is a formative one. Establishing a safe and secure connection early in life helps develop self-esteem, emotional well-being, and acts as a blueprint for future relationships. Although losing a mother impacts a woman’s life no matter her age, the loss of a mother in childhood is a grief that shapes a daughter’s sense of self for years to come. Daughters who lose their mother before adulthood tend to take on family roles too soon, becoming hyper-independent and isolated. As they age, grief can resurface at milestone moments like graduations and weddings. Motherhood itself can bring waves of anxiety and fear.
When I was eight, my mother was diagnosed with aggressive and widespread cancer, leaving little time to wrap my young mind around the gravity of her imminent passing. Afterward, part of me held onto a fantasy that she was not really gone. I imagined her showing up at school in her green convertible. The finality of death was impossible for me to comprehend, prolonging and delaying my grief for years. Layered over my sadness was shame about my new identity as the girl whose mother died. As a way to process my grief, I sought out books about loss. I devoured Lurlene McDaniel’s YA novels for their dependable terminal-illness narratives. Grieving for fictional characters was a cathartic release for my own unresolved sadness. As I got older, I turned toward memoirs written by actual women who knew the pain of mother loss. But many of these books featured protagonists who had lost their mother in late adolescence or early adulthood. I yearned for stories from daughters like me—who’d spent years sifting through memories trying to piece together a woman they hardly knew.
When I began writing Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home, my memoir about building a hard-won family life after childhood loss, I once again looked for stories that reflected my experience. This time, a new crop of memoirs appeared that delved into the complexities of losing a mother in childhood. Through poignant prose, excavation of fragmented early memories, and sometimes humor, these memoirs explore the ripple effects of early mother loss on womanhood, motherhood, identity, and belonging. A loss that shapes daughters for a lifetime.
When Genevieve Kingston’s mother died, she left her a legacy that would tether them together for years to come—a trunk packed with handwritten letters and carefully chosen gifts to be opened on the birthdays and milestones in her daughter’s life that she wouldn’t be there to witness. The book opens as Kingston, a woman in her thirties, has just three gifts left—for her engagement, wedding day, and the birth of her first child. From there, the author traces her way back in time to reflect on the complex emotions of living with her mother’s illness in childhood. She examines how she worked through her grief as her family endured more painful losses and dislocations in the years that followed. Kingston explores how the loss of her mother shaped, and continues to shape, her experiences with love and womanhood. Her mother’s gifts serve not only as a connective thread but also as a window into the woman whose final wish was to remain a talisman for her daughter’s pivotal life moments.
Tiffany Graham Charkosky’s girlhood unfolded against the backdrop of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and declining health. Eighteen years later, as a woman finding her footing in marriage and motherhood, Charkosky’s grief and fear resurface when she discovers her mother’s illness was a result of a specific and rare genetic mutation. What follows is a familial excavation, genetic reckoning, and heartrending reminiscence of what is lost when a mother dies, leaving her young children with unanswerable questions that cannot be quieted, no matter the years that pass. Charkosky faces genetic testing and uncertainty as she unravels the mystery of her family’s legacy through her own DNA. Living Proof is a profound story of what we inherit through genetics, memory, and time.
The daughter of an Armenian mother and Ghanaian, United Nations official father, Nadia Owusu spent her childhood in perpetual motion. The first quake of disruption hits when, as a toddler, Owusu’s mother abruptly abandons her. Owusu spends her childhood moving with her father all over Europe and Africa. Her mother floats in and out of her life, disappearing for years before resurfacing in an intermittent cycle of rejection—aftershocks of her first departure. At thirteen, the author’s father dies after a prolonged illness, a tremor that crumbles any remaining stability. An orphaned Owusu is left to navigate her adolescence with a stepmother who is resentful of her new role as primary parent to a daughter she did not bear. Living in New York in her twenties, the author is directionless and unsure of her place in a world that holds no parents or home for her. Aftershocks illustrates how the complicated grief of abandonment—a mother who is both here and gone—is a uniquely painful loss.
What if your mother died because of a choice you could not understand? How would you remember her or make peace with the loss? This is the journey of Susan Lieu, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee mother who built a successful business and raised a family in California, only to die young after a botched cosmetic surgery. In her debut memoir, Lieu seeks not only to write her mother into a fully formed and vital woman—which she does—but to reckon with the circumstances of her death. As the author unspools the cultural and societal beauty standards that shaped her mother’s decision, the reader is invited to be part of Lieu’s family dynamics, cultural traditions, and the intimate banter that floats between manicure stations in her mother’s beloved nail shop. The Manicurist’s Daughter is an unflinchingly honest account of a daughter’s quest to understand the mother she lost too soon.
The cover of The Full Catastrophe hints at the memoir’s impending upheaval. The title itself warns the reader. In the first pages, the author receives the unimaginable news that her son has died in an accident. What follows is a retracing of the tumultuous years that led her to that moment. By twelve, Walsh lost both of her parents within a year of each other. That early loss sets in motion an unwavering desire to recreate a maternal bond as a mother one day. Before graduating from college, Walsh marries and has three children, hopeful that a family of her own will repair her broken foundation. But when her marriage crumbles, she realizes she will have to become the safe haven she’s been seeking. Then, the foreshadowed catastrophe arrives—the death of her oldest son. Walsh, along with readers of her memoir, wonders how much loss one person can endure. The Full Catastrophe is a heartbreaking yet hopeful journey toward belonging.
Kat Chow, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grows up in suburban Connecticut and loses her mother at thirteen. In the years that follow, she writes, “The way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether.” In Seeing Ghosts, Chow bridges her way back to her mother by excavating her family history and gaining a clearer understanding of her lineage. Through the lens of her mother’s death, Chow explores losses her mother endured: the country she left behind, her own mother’s death when she was a girl, and Chow’s stillborn brother. Despite cultural beliefs that speaking of the dead is unlucky, Chow invites these “ghosts” into her life—and the pages of her memoir. In turn, her lost family helps her shape an identity and preserve her mother’s story.
Actress and comedian Molly Shannon is best known for her energetic, over-the-top characters on Saturday Night Live. But behind the humor that brought her fame is a story of tremendous loss. When Molly was four, she survived a terrible car crash that killed her baby sister, cousin, and mother. Shannon’s memories of her mother are of a loving and joyful woman, but they are fragmented and coated with the trauma of her sudden passing. The loss only becomes more complicated as her father’s alcoholism shapes her childhood. In her memoir, Shannon explores how the pain of her experience fueled her drive to perform, describing comedy as both a calling and a coping mechanism. While her path to fame is a central theme, Shannon’s capacity to find forgiveness and create joy in the face of profound loss is the true heart of Hello, Molly!
When Conway loses her mother at seven, she assumes the identity of the “responsible girl”—parentified and agreeable, never causing disruption in her family or allowing herself space to mourn. Her father struggles in his new role as single parent. Instead of asking how Peg is coping, he asks her to pack lunches and start dinner for her two siblings. When he remarries a few years later, Conway finds herself in a new home with a new school, new furniture, and even a new birth certificate that erases her mother and replaces her with a stepmom. It isn’t until adulthood, when an accident awakens reverberations of early mother loss, that Conway realizes she must reassemble her identity to include the unresolved grief of being a motherless daughter if she truly wishes to heal.
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