I don’t want to say human-animal relationship stories are to the book world what Christmas is to the Hallmark Channel, but there is a trap waiting for animal-loving writers where redundancy, sentimentality, and smarminess dwell. Perhaps I avoided that trap in We Should All Be Birds, a memoir I wrote about a wild pigeon named Two-Step, because I didn’t actually write it. (A health condition forced me to dictate parts of the story, and my coauthor helped me turn them into a book.) At their best, animal stories don’t just tug at the heart but shift how you see the world. My relationship with Two-Step did that for me, in ways both profound and hilarious.
Whether or not the writers on this list set out with the intention of saying something new or different about a person’s relationship with a wild animal, they did. (Like me, some of them may not even have planned to write a book, but the animals didn’t give them much choice.) As a result, each writer carved out their own niche—proving, as I found when illness contracted my world, that there is an infinite amount of space in even the smallest of circles.
They say you travel somewhere not to understand the place you are going to but to understand the place you came from. These stories show how our connection to wild creatures can help us understand animals, and perhaps more importantly, ourselves and, in the process, learn to live, thrive, and heal.
At the outset, it is important to note a couple of oddities. First, training hawks is called falconry. Second, I—a pigeon rescuer—am writing favorably about the pigeon’s enemy number one. (Tied for second are the raccoon and the cat.) MacDonald writes half for the head and half for the heart. A scholar and professor, she explores the biology, history, and mythology of predatory birds, especially the goshawk, one of which she adopts (and names Mabel). At the same time, she struggles to cope with the sudden death of her father, who also happened to be her childhood falconry buddy. Goshawks are extremely sensitive by nature, so MacDonald must observe her adopted bird with patience and a keen eye. Not only do readers get to see this beautiful creature in all its detail, but MacDonald also turns that same, trained eye inward, helping herself (and the reader) understand the complexities of loss.
People tend to think hares are the same as rabbits, though they are a very different species. Among their differences is that a wild hare is incredibly difficult to keep alive. On a walk one day, Chloe nearly steps on a newborn baby hare. What to do? Leave it so if its mother returns, she will find it easily? Move it into the grass where the mother might not find it? Or bring it home? In an act that will prove to be a gift to readers, she decides to take the young hare home.
From the start, Chloe’s goal is to NOT get close to the hare, literally. The biggest threat to a young hare is stress, and nothing causes a hare more stress than being handled and restrained. So Chloe holds a cloth in her hand before she picks up the hare to feed it from a syringe. She abandons early attempts at confining the hare and lets it have free rein in her home and garden.
Adding to the appeal of the book is Dalton’s understated crisis of her own. Previously an urban dweller consumed with her work in government, the pandemic forces her into a new life in the countryside. Though Dalton tries to maintain her old pace and lifestyle, she finds that the noise and activity are upsetting to the hare, so she begins living on the hare’s schedule and discovers a different pace of life. She doesn’t wear makeup, doesn’t watch the news, and doesn’t use lights in the garden at night. “It was excessive, it was absurd, it was beautiful,” she says. She realizes she has been waiting for life to go back to normal, but if this one hare can provide so much meaning and joy, what else might be awaiting her if she turns away from her old, hectic life?
In this exploration of the only eight-armed creature in the world, the reader will learn that the compellingly strange octopus has three hearts. The reader may need three for themselves, too, because Montgomery writes so beautifully about the mysterious cephalopod that a couple of theirs might just burst. With a background in journalism and having authored many books about other creatures (tigers, apes, dolphins, etc.), Montgomery is often referred to as a “popular naturalist,” and she has developed a writing style that is familiar and authoritative, funny and smart, and totally accessible. Over the course of the book, the popular naturalist gets to know several octopuses. (And, yes, octopuses is the plural of octopus, as is “octopodes,” which is also correct.) What stands out is Montgomery’s description of how these two creatures (human and octopus) have seemingly endless curiosity about each other. She becomes well acquainted with four different octopuses as the story progresses, and it turns out each one has its own personality. Using the term “personality,” though, is itself loaded, because animals, even the inquisitive and alluring octopus, are not people.
We learn from Montgomery that each arm of the octopus is essentially its own brain, capable of thought and emotion, and when she visits the aquarium and puts her arm in a tank, the resident octopus—whether it is Athena, Octavia, Kali, or Karma—will move its suckered arms across Montgomery’s un-suckered arm, sometimes blushing, sometimes retreating to a corner or tightening the embrace. And with each encounter, our estimation of this unique, marvelous creature grows, and we gain a greater sense of the depths of our compassion.
This is a memoir that crawls along at a deliberate pace—but it is far from slow. Pulling off that feat speaks to the writer’s craft and her scientific eye, since most of the book takes place with one character (the writer herself) confined to her bed, and the other (a forest snail) confined (mostly) to a terrarium that sits on a bedside table. The book is both reverie and revelation. (A single room? A snail? Really?)
The illness that incapacitates Bailey is so extreme that she can rarely leave her bed. Her visitors are few, but one brings a pot of violets, and serendipitously, this pot has a gastropodic stowaway. Grieving her busy former life—which included plenty of friends and plenty of time in the garden—Bailey turns her attention to the shell-covered, slow-moving creature who is living out its life beside her.
Such is Bailey’s curiosity (and what turns out to be the fascinating lives of snails) that it is easy to forget how extreme her illness is and how much suffering it brings. She launches into an investigation of all things snail, including a twelve-volume book by early naturalists, and along the way we learn things like how many teeth a snail can have (thousands) and how utterly complex snail slime is. This is not the voice of a person removed from the world but rather the voice of a person who has a new, strange world brought to her.
Yes, this is a YA book, and yes, this book can help a child fall in love with reading (as it did for me when I was around ten years old). While not a memoir, it is the true (or true-ish) story of a young whaler in the 18th century who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Survival in the Arctic seems unlikely, but Allan Gordon gets lucky when the sunken ship, now turned belly-up, becomes frozen in the ice. This bit of fortune provides Allan with shelter, warmth, food, and…rum. Lots of rum. The isolation and freezing temperatures are not enough to numb the existential pain, and his turn to self-medication shows young readers that seemingly black-and-white issues are often filled with shades of gray.
Allan’s second break comes when he befriends an orphaned baby polar bear. He names the bear Nancy after his beloved, whom he left behind and yearns to return to. This creature, who he had been taught to fear, becomes a companion and the answer to his existential distress.
Allan and Nancy have numerous adventures, including encounters with creatures that want to kill him, and creatures he has to kill, and a fortunate run-in with Eskimo people he has to decide whether to trust or not. What struck me at the time and sticks with me all these years later is how much companionship a creature that we may not have thought much of before (or would have feared in an encounter) can provide. Though Allan longs to return to his home, nature finds a way to impart a valuable, lifelong lesson: if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. (Even if it is a polar bear.)
Reading is a migraine trigger for me, and as a result, I have only read two books in the past half dozen years, and this is one of them. I have no regrets about my choice. Darlington is a poet, and she has to be in order to describe owls in the way they deserve. Owls are shy, often invisible when they are right in front of you, and silent as they glide over a field where poor, scurrying creatures live. As Darlington canvasses the UK countryside and beyond in pursuit of owls and owl lore, she has to reckon with the health struggles her fellow explorer and helper is dealing with. That helper, Benji, is also her son, and the mysteries of his illness seem to mirror the mystery of the owl. Darlington not only writes gorgeous, rhythmic sentences, but her mastery of rhythm may be what helps her tune into the rhythms of the natural world (and in particular the habits and habitats of owls).
In Alfie and Me, behavioral ecologist Carl Safina recounts a transformative year spent caring for a rescued baby owl during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though Safina has spent a lifetime working with wildlife, this tiny, downy creature—Alfie, a “ginger” Eastern screech owl who at one point is the length and color of a sweet potato—touches something deeper in him.
As Safina tells the story of Alfie’s rehabilitation, he seamlessly weaves a fascinating tapestry of science, history, philosophy, and personal experience. He also conveys his abundant (and infectious) love for Alfie without a drop of sentimentality. As he prepares (and delays) Alfie’s soft release into a perilous freedom, Safina considers the bond they’ve formed and the difficulty of letting her go, asking himself: Should I open the door? Saying goodbye is complicated, but of course he does.
We won’t spoil the outcome, but Alfie’s part in it is uplifting. The human part is less so. Despite the charming relationship between these two gentle souls and their vibrant connection with the many beings in and around their Long Island backyard, the author makes sure we remain aware of greater threats to all life. As this clear-eyed scientist, guided by deep compassion, has said: “Technology won’t save the world, but our hearts may. And our hearts must.”
It appears that Raven, who has the fortune of having a bird for a last name, has made a deliberate choice to live a solitary life. As she says, she is alone but not lonely. She is “uncomfortable with dialog” and opts for “disappearing into the woods” to avoid answering questions that cause her anxiety, especially those related to her parents and her alone-ness. She is a biologist and a teacher of naturalist history, and she is well-trained in the close examination of the living things she encounters. She has a fondness and curiosity for all of them, not just the fox who routinely visits near her cabin but also the trees, weeds, flowers, magpies, voles, and even a black widow spider.
Early in her “relationship” (her chosen word) with fox, Raven is warned by a colleague that her non-interactions are okay “as long as you’re not anthropomorphizing.” Apparently, attributing human characteristics to an animal is THE cardinal sin in natural biology. But even in a moment when her training says she should not allow an animal into her “social circle,” she wonders if she is “imagining fox’s personality.” The reader feels a tension here, one that reveals Raven may not be as completely at peace with being alone as she claims.
“It is not mine to hold that you’re afraid of me and you think I am wrong because I exist. I have a right, me and my family, my chosen family, my friends, we have a right to live happy lives.”
-Tina Valentín Aguirre
“You think the queers are gonna go back into the closet? No child. Queers are gonna say fuck you, get off my dress.”
-Adela Vázquez
So Many Stars, collected and edited by Caro De Robertis, is the cosmology of trans lineage of color we desperately need right now. Trans history does not come easily accessible in our world. As trans people, we are deprived of our history. We don’t learn it in school, we don’t learn it at home (unless you’re lucky enough to grow up with parents who teach you about Martha and Sylvia). Trans lineage and history is mostly still existing tucked away in living rooms, at the kitchen table, in bathrooms, at the gay bar, on the streets. It lives inside our elders and in the oral histories we pass to each other whenever we kiki, en cualquier breteo.
So Many Stars gave me life in ways that I didn’t know I needed. This collection of oral histories by trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two spirit people of color, this fabulous archive of incredible ways of existing and inhabiting the world beyond what we’ve been taught is possible, is a reclamation of our history. Our collective knowing. Traversing gender expansive childhoods, epic drag nights in forbidden mansions, AIDS, cross-dressing when it’s illegal, chosen family, exile, hormones through the black market. More importantly, it shows us how deeply trans people of color have loved—themselves and each other. This is a piece of us. Que nadie nos diga que no tenemos historia, que no venimos de ningún lado.
Full of humor and urgency and a complete mastery for storytelling, three pillars of transness—So Many Stars confirms we are fierce, gorgeous and endlessly resilient.
Julián Delgado Lopera: This book touches on so many elements dear to both of us. Everything about this project felt so close to my heart. Some of the people in it are part of my trans family. It’s also very Bay Area based. You and I have also known each other for a while, so I’d like for this to be more of a conversation. How was this project born?
Caro De Robertis: The project was born out of a fellowship I received from Baldwin for the Arts, founded by Jacqueline Woodson in collaboration with the Emerson Collective and Columbia University Center for Oral History. Jacqueline invited me to participate and create a collection of queer and trans BIPOC voices of the West Coast. Once it was under way, I was going into people’s kitchens and offices and living rooms, putting up my microphone, and listening to folks’ memories and insights. I was absolutely blown away not only by the power and beauty and dignity of people’s stories but also by the depth and richness of what they had to offer: an essential part of what should be our collective archive, and yet it’s missing. The original project was to create an audio archive that is now available online. But I am a novelist, and as I was seated in front of people, stunned by what I was hearing, I couldn’t help but start to imagine a book and really want to hear these voices on the page.
In this book, there are 20 narrators, and they are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian. There’s transfeminine people, transmasculine people, trans men and women, people who identify as genderqueer, nonbinary, butch, genderfluid. That is a lot of different ways of knowing and being and existing. Even a wealth of 20 voices is not fully representative of trans BIPOC people, 20 is not enough, but it does open up the possibility of creating some range, and recognizing and celebrating how many different ways there are to be trans, to be gender noncomforming, to know yourself as a person of color, to walk the world with your whole authentic truth.
JDL: Structure plays an important role in this book. Why did you decide to divide the chapters by theme? Why those themes specifically?
Connecting with trans elders is enormously important.
CDR: At first, I thought I would create a chapter for each person as a sort of mini biography. Then I started reading more widely and took a very nerdy deep dive on the work of Svetlana Alexievich, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral histories. She really opened for me the possibility of building a broader narrative arc out of a collectivity of voices so the community is the protagonist. I then set out to do that, partly because I wanted there to be a broader narrative arc that people would be immersed in, that would be a satisfying, fulfilling read. Another reason is because I really would love for this book to be utilitarian. I want it to be useful to people. We have such a tremendous need to make transness visible in our own terms, to hear trans and gender nonconforming voices of color around themes of trans and gender liberation. This structure means that one person can look at it and say, oh there’s a whole chapter on activism and a whole chapter on how people respond to the AIDS crisis. Or I am a cis parent and I would like to know what it is like for kids to experience their gender in childhood, how they might navigate family, and how I might see my own possibilities as a parent trying to be supportive but not understanding everything. Or I am a young trans nonbinary person, here’s a chapter called “Thoughts for Younger Generations.”
JDL: I was thinking of the importance of trans lineage because most of the folks in the book are over 50. Trans lineage is something that I am constantly articulating for myself in a lot of the work that I do and something that is very relevant to this book.
CDR: Connecting with trans elders is enormously important. We live in a society in which there is a mainstream notion that transness and gender noncomforming are inventions of the young, and if it’s something that they just came up with, if it’s a fad, [then]it is easily dismissed. This hurts young people and erases the fact that trans people have always existed in every era of history, every culture and place in the world. The systemic silence of the archive has not allowed that to be visible. Our own lineage has become invisible to ourselves. In mainstream media, much representation of trans and nonbinary people is disproportionally white, and so for people of color, having that visibility of transness within our own racial and cultural and linguistic cosmologies and understandings is incredibly valuable and important.
Many trans people are not raised in trans households. We don’t automatically receive our cultural inheritance in our home and upbringing. Which is different from other cultural inheritances. I learned Uruguayan in my home growing up, but as a queer person with straight homophobic parents, I didn’t receive my queer culture as part of the way I was raised. I had to go out and find it.
JDL: I love what you’re saying. I always think about the spiritual connection in feeling a trans lineage, the big need to call on an ancestry. That has come very into focus with the passing of my trans mother, Adela Vázquez. We too have ancestors. We have a culture. A language. There’s something for me deeply spiritual to knowing there’s something so much larger than us holding us, especially during brutal times like this.
I’m amazed of the ways in which for so many trans people, the world shuts our light—institutionally, structurally, familialy—and how remarkable it is that we’re still here and we’re still trans. There’s that instinct of self-preservation and survival, that deep fierceness. Nelson D’Alerta, for instance, who’s my tía, creating drag shows in the middle of a homophobic dictatorship in Cuba, getting arrested and tortured for this. Adela Vázquez, also, coming from Cuba on a boat into a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere Arkansas and still managing to transition, be a San Francisco underground star, survive every single day walking down the street as a trans woman, and still be fierce and fabulous. I don’t want to romanticize it too much, because it is also problematic. But there’s something there.
CDR: One of the things that really struck me with these stories was the way the trauma often went alongside the joy. The transjoy, the incredible rocket fuel of gender euphoria and happiness that came from embracing one’s true gender, often came meshed with experiences of pain. Nelson being a perfect example. Putting on these shows to these packed houses of people hungry for these drag shows. You can see her descending from the staircase in these mansions at this Cuban beach, 17 years old, all glamorous, surrounded by her friends. And then she’s also getting arrested and tortured by the Cuban government because the drag shows are illegal at that time. The pain of that oppression is very clear. She described that vividly. And she equally described the beauty and power of those shows and how she wouldn’t trade those experiences for a second, even knowing the cost. It speaks for a really remarkable spirit.
These stories hopefully are for people who care about what it means to be fully human and alive, but they also have really great insights on what it means to live authentically, even when that means going against the status quo. The way the world is going, it’s something that everybody needs, and trans and gender queer people of color are experts at. We have a lot to offer there. These stories illustrate how our current lives are made possible by past acts of everyday blatant courage, and that means we can commit acts of everyday courage and thereby have a hand in shaping the future.
JDL: A lot of what folks are narrating are not only experiences relevant to trans people. The experience of having to deal with your body, of having imposed notions of what your body should look like, wanting to belong, wanting to be loved, wanting to be seen for who you are—we all people experience this. A lot of the stories are universal, they’re just being told through a trans experience.
CDR: That’s absolutely right. In the chapter “What Is Gender?” C. NJoube Dugas speaks to this when they say, “We’re living in an nonbinary world.” The world itself defies reductive categories of gender. If we look at the possibilities of liberation that gender expansive thinking offers, it offers a great deal for trans people and those who may not identify as trans, but who have felt their identity reduced. I’m constantly hearing from cis women and girls in my life and strangers at book events about how reductive and diminishing it can be to be treated like a woman/girl in society. And those of us assigned female at birth are no strangers to some of this. Gender liberation for trans people does catalyze gender liberation for everyone.
Gender liberation for trans people does catalyze gender liberation for everyone.
JDL: In plenty of conversations I’ve had as a queer historian, I’ve been asked about the need to have more transmasculine representation in the conversation around transness and trans history. I have had less access and knowledge of transmasculine elders—my direct ancestral lineage is mostly trans women—so it was such a joy for me to read so many transmasculine stories, to see myself in some of it, and not myself in some of it.
CDR: I really wanted to have a balanced representation. Transmasculinity has been less visible, and we have such a tremendous need to see ourselves. In terms of masculinity, it was so beautiful to hear people compare notes. In the chapter “Transitions”, I really appreciated how people’s understanding of masculinity built on each other and contradicted each other. There were a few transmasculine folks that shared very generously about their relationship to testosterone and to top surgery, as well as folks like C. NJoube Dugas, who shared about their decision not to do any medical transition, and another trans guy who is living completely as a man and chose not to use testosterone.
There’s also a discussion among the black transmasculine folks about transition. One of them says that a white trans guy who started passing came up to him and said, “Isn’t the privilege amazing?” And the narrator said, “If by privilege you mean being more likely to be shot on the street as a black man, then no, we’re having very different experiences.” There are very nuanced conversations between black transmasculine people of how they each experienced race in the process of transition. And there’s someone like Andres Ozuna, an immigrant trans guy, talking about how it took him time to figure out what kind of man he wanted to be. It was a hesitation for him because he didn’t want to repeat some of the behaviors that he sees in men that seem unkind. He’s like, I can create my own masculinity in alignment with myself. As we create those masculinities, those of us that identify as transmasculine make a contribution to cultural possibility for all masculine people, including cis men.
JDL: Exactly. I think trans guys and transmasculine people do a lot of work for cis men.
Something else that’s coming up is the role of chosen family. A lot of folks in the book had to leave their birth families or are estranged from them, which is a very common experience among trans people, including you and me. There’s extreme importance in this trans network created for many generations now, this chosen family that is very much part of trans culture of color. For instance, I had a trans mother, and I have trans tías and siblings and an entire house structure. We know that it is something we do for each other. We know we’re going to have to care for each other, even as unhealthy as they get, because they can also be very dysfunctional families.
CDR: Chosen families are real families with genuine bonding and depth and everything. Real families can have dysfunction and conflict and need for repair. Chosen families are one of the great innovations that queer and trans communities have given to the world. Born often out of a kind of brutality, whether a person is thrown out or disregarded or simply not seen by the people who are the original family, who should be the people loving and cherishing a person in their life.
Chosen families are real families with genuine bonding and depth and everything.
There is a whole chapter in this book called “Chosen Family.” The choice of chapters is born partly out of my own want to create a narrative arc but also partly out of what showed up in the interviews. For example, I thought AIDS activism would go in the chapter along all other forms of activism, but there was so much that this generation had done during the AIDS crisis that it insisted on becoming its own chapter. The same goes for art. I was going to put drag in the same chapter as all kinds of artistic expression, but there was so much richness about the art and power of drag that it insisted on becoming its own chapter. Chosen family also insisted on being a chapter, because there’s so much richness and beauty that people expressed. Whether it was being a trans mother or creating siblinghoods or ride or die friendships that carried people through. The story of Chino Scott-Chung being part of the sticky rice gang which looked at the first top surgery scars in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant together. Chino Scott-Chung had a best friend, Christopher Lee, who was the first person within lesbian community that asked Chino Scott-Chung to call him “he.” Christopher Lee transitioned and took his own life, and Chino Scott-Chung was his power of attorney. When he saw that California had insisted on putting an “F” on Christopher Lee’s death certificate even though he had changed all his paperwork, Chino Scott-Chung ended up fighting to change California State law. There’s such a range of ways that people have forged bonds in defiance of what society assumes is possible for us as trans people. We are overflowing with love because we know how important it is in our collective well being.
JDL: I feel chosen family are angels sent to us. We have this deep need for love and guidance. A lot of the times it’s chosen family, the gay bar, and nightlife—which also has its own chapter—where we learn our inheritance, our lineage, and how to be in the world as trans people. It is guidance on how to live in this body, how to survive and how to exist.
CDR: Yes, guidance. It is not just the validation and the love. Some people are lucky, their birth families might support them but not understand. You also need guidance from trans and queer culture. It’s about hearing possibilities through the example of how people have done it before. Throughout the book, I really feel these narrators are saying “Here’s some love, here’s some guidance. I’ll be part of your chosen family.” Some of them say it directly. Donna Personna says, “I’m everybody’s mother. I’ll be your mother too.”
JDL: That’s a great place to end, but I’m going to ask you one more question. Is there something else you learned listening to everybody that could be applicable today with the rise of fascism we’re experiencing?
CDR: Everything. I learned a tremendous amount creating this book, including parts of our collective history that I didn’t know. For example, I was amazed that I had lived my whole life as an open queer person and still didn’t know the extent to which trans women, especially trans women of color, were pressured to detransition during the AIDS crisis in order to access services, because in the 80s a lot of AIDS and HIV services were created for gay men and so a lot of trans women were told, “Come in as a gay man and we’ll get you this life saving treatment.” Sharyn Grayson and Adela Vázquez speak to what it was like to witness this horrifying and demeaning reality and then to spearhead services for their sisters, realizing, oh, no one is going to come rescue us except us. That’s an example of learning a piece of history.
On a deeper existential level, listening to these folks helped make me more possible inside of my own soul. And now that we are living in these brutal times, I’ve gone back to the last chapter of this book, “Visions for the Future”, when I’ve needed sustenance and a beacon to follow, when I have felt terrified and afraid and embattled by the volatility of our current reality.
One of the pieces I keep coming back to is Joan Benoit saying, “The right wing, this is their last hurrah, this is backlash. They know they are a dying breed, which is why they’re being as violent as they are.” And Adela Vázquez saying, “You think the queers are gonna go back into the closet? No child. Queers are gonna say fuck you, get off my dress.”
Admittedly, you have not watched this movie. But it is Alex’s family’s favorite movie and you love Alex and her family, and sometimes when you’re at their house it’s playing and you catch scenes. Like when Bilbo Baggins sees the magic ring and for a second his face looks crazy. That part was too scary for you.
You are in kindergarten and Alex is in third grade, which makes her the coolest person in your world. She lives on the cul-de-sac down the street from where you live with your family and also where Rachel lives with hers. Rachel is your best friend. Alex is your friend, too, but it’s also sort of like she’s the lead singer of a band and you’re her backup singers. You’re not actually in a band together, but sometimes you make up choreography to the songs Alex loves and perform them for your parents and other neighbors. Well, Alex makes up the choreography, and you follow along.
Alex is the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen. When she gives you a copy of her school picture, you cut a heart around her face with safety scissors and put it in your treasure drawer. You’d probably do anything Alex asked you to do, but isn’t that what friendship is? Your dad once said that Alex is “bossy” and “not very nice sometimes,” but he doesn’t know her like you do.
What Alex loves most aboutthe Lord of the Rings moviesis Merry and Pippin, who are hobbits and, you’re pretty sure, brothers. When you play make-believe together, Alex is Pippin and you are Merry. Alex says that if there was a machine she could walk through to transform magically into a boy, she’d walk through it right away. Me too, you say, giggling.
Titanic
(Age 8)
You first watch this after school at Rachel’s house, on one of the many days it’s playing on TV. It’s about rich people and Irish people (Rachel is Irish, too) and a shipwreck that happened in real life. On the ship are two people (not Irish, you don’t think) who aren’t supposed to be together because Rose is rich and Jack is poor but they fall in love! They kiss a lot in an old car, and when they take off their clothes you see Rose’s boobs. You think that maybe you see Rose’s boobs a little too much, because you also see them when Jack draws her naked on the sofa with the necklace. Jack is an artist, and when he dies at the end it’s so sad that Rachel can’t stop crying, even though she’s seen the movie before. For weeks afterwards, whenever you and Rachel play together—Alex rarely plays with you anymore—you make-believe that one of you is Jack and one is Rose. You prefer being Jack, who you love with your whole heart. He’s so pretty he almost looks like a girl.
The Notebook
(Age 12)
After seeing this in your mother’s DVD collection for years, you finally watch it at a sleepover with your orchestra friends (you’ve been learning the cello). And guess what? YOU LOVE IT! You don’t like the old people scenes because you don’t think they act like the younger characters at all, and when they die at the end everyone at the sleepover cries except you. But you think young Allie is perfect in every way: she’s so smart, and so strong and sure of herself, and she wears the prettiest dresses. She’s played by an actress named Rachel McAdams, whose last name is very similar to your friend Rachel’s, and when she smiles she has the most amazing dimples. Noah is cute. Unlike in Titanic, you do not see any boobs, but you do see Noah touch Allie’s over her dress.
The Outsiders
(Age 13)
You don’t like this story’s violence, but you do like how nice the Greasers are to each other. You think, what if Johnny and Ponyboy kissed? Then you think: just kidding.
The Family Stone
(Age 16)
Rachel McAdams is in this, and once again her character is full of life and wit and beauty. This is the second role you’ve seen her in after The Notebook, which you and your friends still watch sometimes but ironically, having decided that neither of Allie’s love interests deserve her. In The Family Stone, Rachel McAdams has a gay sibling, like you and your sister do, and it’s the first movie you’ve seen where a gay character’s parents love and accept them without melodrama. Rachel McAdams wears pajamas in most scenes but still looks like an angel. Not much else to report about this.
Blue is the Warmest Color
(Age 18)
Pass.
Blue is the Warmest Color, Revisited
(Age 19)
After first watching this alone in your freshman dorm, you do a lot of research about it. You learn that the actresses (straight, female) who played the lesbians were actually treated very poorly on the set. Older feminists on the internet analyze the sex scenes, describing them as unrealistic and oversexualized, the male gaze embodied. The latter claim has to do with the amount of shots its director (straight, male) included of the actresses’ asses. This is patriarchal, the internet feminists say, because it gives men exactly what they want to see.
You prefer being Jack, who you love with your whole heart. He’s so pretty he almost looks like a girl.
You try not to think about whatwatching such scenes made you want to see. Instead, you nod along righteously to the criticism, relieved to have evidence that it’s not a good movie at all and definitely not worth dwelling on any longer. When a friend in your French class asks if you’ve seen it, you send her links to the feminists’ critiques.
Y tu mamá también
(Age 20)
You watch this on your own in a strange city. Throughout the movie, a thrum races the length of your body each time the adolescent protagonists—two boys—touch; you want so badly for them to make out that, when they do, you’re so excited you pause the movie to make yourself calm down. You tell yourself that this is a signifier of how much you love boys/men, of your desire for them to buck archaic codes of behavior and embrace tenderness however it finds them. In other words, your startling bodily reaction to this movie is because you are a worldly sort of girl/woman, straight and cisgender but keeping up with the times. After loving this movie so much, you work your way through a list of queer international films, through which you prove to yourself how very free-thinking you are. Such a passionate ally to the LGBTQ+ community.
Brokeback Mountain
(Age 21)
It just so happens that you see a clip from this movie one night and it stops you in your tracks. This occurs partway through your year studying in England, which is where you first meet self-described Marxists and also where two of your queer women classmates buy you drinks one night at a pub and ask you are you sure you’re not bisexual? America has just elected its very own fascist, and you tell yourself that the intensity of the Brokeback clip’s hold on you probably has to do with how melancholic and homesick you feel. These are cowboys, after all, and they can be so rough but also so, so sweet. Not at all unlike your childhood in the American Midwest, playing tackle football in backyards with neighbor boys and kissing Rachel, just once, on a trampoline.
After this night, there are many others that end with you looking up more of this movie’s clips using searches like “tent scene (full)” and “heath ledger spits in hand.” Thus far in your life you’ve been too chicken to seek out anything more pornographic than GIFs on Tumblr of people kissing, so these are the first depictions you’ve consumed of sex between men; in an attempt to understand the mechanics, you rewind the clips again and again.
It would be a lie to say that you don’t sometimes interpolate these with clips from Blue Is the Warmest Colour, but you do so only for research purposes.
Call Me By Your Name
(Age 22)
You see this in an old theater near the apartment you rent your senior year of college. Embarrassing as it is to admit later, it dissolves you. Devastates you. You see it in theaters again in full disregard of your financial situation, on the cusp of graduation with student loans coming due. It isn’t that sexually explicit of a movie, but when the Sufjan song hits, you think: I want to be like these characters. Then you think: I am like them, even though it’s a romance between two boys. After seeing it the second time, you say to your roommate something you’ve told her before—that you’re just really obsessed with queer coming-of-age films right now. “Imagine how much more you’d love them if you were queer,” your roommate says. This stirs something in you you have not planned for, something you’ve never admitted, not even to your diary. “I have to tell you something,” you tell her.
Teeth
(Age 25)
This is about a girl who has teeth in her vagina, teeth so powerful they can—and do—bite men’s appendages clean off. You don’t track anything else about the plot, though, because it’s shown to you by the first girl you ever have sex with, right before you have sex.
The girl—woman, really—is smaller than you, with tiny features and sharp clavicles, all of which she carries in an unmistakably sapphic fashion. While the movie plays she reclines Hellenically on her bed and wraps her arm around you. You nuzzle your head against her chest (!) and struggle to focus on anything besides the smell of her perfume/cologne. You never ask what it is, but it must be a common one, because afterwards you’ll frequently smell it on passersby. It’s sweet and heady and makes your knees go weak, even years later, even now.
In other words, your startling bodily reaction to this movie is because you are a worldly sort of girl/woman, straight and cisgender but keeping up with the times.
This woman has been practicing lesbianism for many years, and this is intimidating because she’s only a year older than you, and you already feel far too old to have no idea what you’re doing. But she is patient, a natural teacher. You take things slow then very fast. Unlike with the men—boys, really—you’ve been with, there is no expectation for either of you to orgasm, so when she does it feels like a revelation. Her back against your chest, your hand between her legs—oh, you think, it’s just like playing cello. You expected this all to be impossibly difficult, but you’ve been practicing for it for a long time.
She ghosts you a week later, teaching you what it feels like to have your heart broken by a femme.
Disobedience
(Age 23—26)
The one in which Rachel McAdams’s character asks another woman—played by another Rachel, no less—to spit into her mouth. You watch it while playing it very, very cool with a gay friend you have a crush on, who knows you’ve recently come out as bi but hasn’t made a move on you. You met her at a party with a boy you’d been on some dates with, who was her neighbor; halfway through the party, you confessed to her that you didn’t like the boy that much after all, and the two of you exchanged numbers so you could keep in touch after you broke things off with him. You keep in touch. You watch movies together, sleep over in each other’s beds; she joins your picket line when your union goes on strike, and you babysit her little dog when she goes out of town. Neither of you ever make a move. A year later, she moves to Dublin, where she soon finds herself an adorable (Irish) girlfriend, who looks and dresses like she time-traveled from the late Medieval peasantry. You’re happy for her.
As time keeps passing, the Rachel/Rachel spitting scene weaves itself irretrievably into your conception of your sexuality. The first person to act it out with you in real life is a trans person named—fittingly—Ray. They’re also among the first of your friends to call you by new pronouns, by a new name. A new type of life unfurls itself for you then, though it isn’t without its own set of insecurities, some of which are fairly idiosyncratic. You become hyperaware of power differentials, and for several years you tend to choose lovers who’d be your equal in the wildly unlikely event of a physical fight, who are more or less your height. You avoid close entanglements with cis boys, which feels like a necessary correction, at the time.
Miscellaneous
(Age 26—28)
Her back against your chest, your hand between her legs—oh, you think, it’s just like playing cello.
This is a period of your life in which watching movies doesn’t rank highly on your priorities list. When you do watch them, you watch for gender, for models. Diego Luna—then-teenaged star of Y tu mamá también, now comfortably in his forties and playing an intergalactic space communist—resurfaces powerfully in your psyche as a softly masculine archetype, slight of frame, a little facial hair but not much. A little anxiously, you begin to experiment with ways of cultivating a similar masculinity in yourself, like shaving your head, and taking a hormone that gently beckons changes. Gender seems to you at this time to be something foundational, bread and butter, but after a few years it strikes you more as a collection of grace notes. Your gender becomes impressionistic. You stop the hormone but keep the facial hair it gave you, not much but enough. You keep your tits, too, and start collecting the types of shirts they feel best swimming in. The gender anxiety is still there sometimes, but it’s no longer so loud that you can’t hear the other stories your body is trying to tell.
Conclave
(Age 29)
The pope dies, and this is as useful a pretext as any to reach out to the transfeminine person you recently started seeing, who is so gorgeous you sometimes have to look away. No pressure, you tell them, but if they happen to be free tonight, would they like to watch the movie about choosing a new pope with you? You just saw her two days ago, which makes the text somewhat risky, but she responds right away. Yes.
You expected this movie to have scandals and betrayals, cardinals in coordinated outfits. You also expected it to be at least a little gay, but you did not accurately anticipate how. Hold up, you say at one point, you don’t think that priest is…? By the climax, you’re both giddy, screaming at the screen. Yes, yes. Within minutes, you are repeating these words to each other in your bed. Yes, yes, yes.
For the record, you’ve come by now to believe that it’s not Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s ass shots that make it unfeminist. Instead, its fatal flaw lies in how it represents queer life as inevitably frigid (contrary to its title) and full of secret shames. You understand that this is true to some people’s experiences but it’s not true to yours. Throughout all of Blue’s famously lengthysex scenes, the characters only smile at each other once. That, you think as this beautiful queer beams radiance at you, is what’s truly unrealistic about it.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Movie
(Age 29 ½)
Within minutes, you are repeating these words to each other in your bed. Yes, yes, yes.
Several pretty girls tell you to watch Buffy the TV series, and so you do—what are you to rocks and pretty girls? You watch several episodes with these women (your friends), but when you decide to watch the show’s precursor—the 1992 camp classic film—you ask a different friend to watch it with you, one with whom you’ve been flirting very, very carefully. This friend doesn’t describe themself as a pretty girl, though they are very pretty. You have similar haircuts, and you crop your shirts in similar ways, and they are much, much taller than you, though you’ve decided not to hold this against them. You’re nervous. You sit beside them on the sofa of the two-story house they share with many housemates; when Buffy slays her first vampire, they take your hand. By the movie’s credits, you are completely enfolded inside their long limbs. Your friend is a soft sort of nonconformist, who years ago described having “a non-binary twinge in the neck”; in the time since then, your respective gender arcs have brought you to meet in the middle of some borderless, anarchic land. You ask to kiss them, and the way they kiss you back feels familiar, feels dykey, but this is only peripheral to your attraction to them. Which is to say: unimpeachable dykeyness is no longer a standard by which you assess every cycle and turn of your intimate life. You’ve been friends for a long time and comrades for even longer—what else, you wonder now, matters? Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Saturn has recently returned to where it was in the skies when you were a newborn baby and knew nothing of gender. Or perhaps not. But some planet or other has brought you to a juncture in which your queerness is to you what Paris was to Hemingway: moveable, and evergreen. Queerness, you’re told, also occupies this role for the Buffy community, or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it even served that role for Hemingway, too, if he was half as lucky as you are now, kissing your genderbent friend on the sofa, climbing up their house’s creaking stairs.
The world is not kind to survivors. Kelly Sundberg has experienced the erasure, victim-blaming, and lack of justice that too many endure when speaking up about abuse. Following her debut memoir, Goodbye, Sweet Girl, about escaping an abusive marriage, Sundberg’s latest book, The Answer Is in the Wound, recounts the aftermath of this relationship as she battles post-traumatic stress disorder and fights to carve space for herself in a world that wants to silence her.
Though she was physically battered and emotionally wounded, Sundberg was not defeated by her marriage. She went on to publish her first book, earn a PhD, and raise a child as a single parent. The interconnected essays in The Answer Is in the Wound cover over a decade of healing, capturing the intense effort it took to survive. Sundberg shows readers what it looks like to rebuild a life, how trauma influences new relationships, and how troubling news stories appear all too familiar.
With a focus on lyrical forms, symbols, and repetition, the book is gut-wrenching, meditative, and vital. At times, the essays engage with prominent researchers in trauma psychology, weaving potent insights alongside Sundberg’s own experiences. Magic is a common theme of the book as Sundberg turns to crystals, tarot, and a psychic therapist with the desperate hope to alchemize her suffering. Similarly, this book is a form of magic. Despite suffering, it dares to offer hope.
I had the pleasure of speaking with the author about what is lost after trauma, the problem with being called “strong,” and what creativity looks like for her now.
Lizzie Lawson: Near the beginning of the book, you include an erasure poem composed of apology letters from your abusive ex-husband. For me, this opened a tension between the apology’s attempt to erase harm and the truth that comes through when parts of the apology are erased. Why did this feel like the right way to begin the book?
Kelly Sundberg: That’s a good way to describe it. When doing an erasure and thinking about publication, you have to transform the original material until it’s indecipherable. Publishing my ex-husband’s apologies in their full form would be illegal, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do that anyway. In the process of making the erasure, which I started as an intellectual experiment, I found that, although the language had been transformed, the essence of the apologies is the same. There was so much filler language within the apologies. When people are apologizing, particularly abusive people, they tend to go overboard and lavish praise on their victims. He would say things like, “you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” which is such a cliché, but I’m human and susceptible to that.
The erasures kept the essence of the apologies but also made them more honest. The final line in the poem is “thank you for giving me you.” That wasn’t the line in the original letter, but that was what happened over the course of the relationship. I had been slowly erased. People could still look at me and know who I was, but I wasn’t the same. I never will be the same. That’s why parts of the erasure continue to show up throughout the collection. It shows that things in me were erased. They are gone. I’d like to say something more hopeful, like “you can capture these parts of yourself back,” but you can’t. Once some parts of yourself are gone, they’re just gone.
LL: The book returns to your hometown in rural Idaho and the time you spent in the wilderness as a young adult, revealing the origins of male violence in your life. One thing you attribute your healing to is getting out of your hometown. Was it always the plan for the book to return to Idaho?
KS: I can’t tell my story in any meaningful way without returning to Idaho. I love Idaho, but Idaho is a tough place. It was founded by people who went to the mountains because they wanted to be lawless, and that tradition has continued. When you see Idaho in the news, it’s oftentimes about white supremacy or the recent story about Teresa Borrenpohl, who was dragged out of a town hall meeting in Coeur d’Alene. A few years ago, I gave a keynote address at a domestic violence agency, and I was seated with the same sheriff who had her removed. He was aggressive with me because I talked about the response of the police when my ex-husband was arrested and he felt I was too critical of the police.
That’s a roundabout way of saying Idaho shaped who I was. Idaho has violence simmering under the surface. Male violence especially is excused, if not normalized. When I was in my twenties and going to bars with friends, it was not uncommon to see fist fights. As a woman, when you’re in a patriarchal place, the way you survive is by either making yourself invisible or hitching your wagon to patriarchy. I made myself invisible. When I talked about feeling erased in my marriage, it wasn’t unusual for me to feel that way because my childhood in Idaho was a system of self-erasure. If I was too assertive or too powerful, I’d invite aggression I didn’t want.
Idaho is one of the most beautiful places in the world geographically, but like a lot of beautiful places, it has a long history of exploitation, of the land and the people. I always thought I’d move back until recent years when our political climate became too much. I want to be clear though, there are also wonderful people in Idaho. The good people who last in Idaho are some of the best people you’ll meet.
LL: The book gently pushes back against people describing you as “strong” for surviving abuse. Could you talk more about that?
KS: People call me strong a lot. I get messages from people, and they call me strong. The reason I push back is because I don’t feel strong. I’m not sitting around in my daily life thinking I’m a strong person. I’m a vulnerable person. I’m tender. I’m prickly. I’m sensitive.
My childhood in Idaho was a system of self-erasure.
I survived my marriage not because I was strong, but because I had to. I didn’t have a choice. I wouldn’t call it strength as much as endurance. I kept going, and luckily there was light at the end of a very, very dark tunnel. It wasn’t strength that got me through it. It was a desire to stay alive.
When people tell me, “You’re so strong,” it feels like a lot to carry because they’re not seeing me for who I am. I want to be recognized as my real self, which is someone who’s vulnerable. I’m not weak, but in a lot of ways, I’m like an exposed nerve.
LL: Society has this idea of a perfect victim, one who doesn’t have flaws, doesn’t fight back, and doesn’t speak up. You wrote about this in relation to the media cycle around Amber Heard as well as the backlash you received for talking about your marriage. In one passage, you write, “It wasn’t leaving my abusive marriage that made me the problem. It was the act of speaking that made me the problem.” When writing the book, did you feel pressure to portray yourself a certain way?
KS: By the time I started this book, I was angry. I had no desire to present myself as the perfect victim. I also knew that was a kind of defiance. I knew there are going to be people who read the book and think, “maybe she deserved it.” In a Goodreads review of my first book, someone wrote, “I felt sorry for her husband.” I have lived with all kinds of things people say about survivors.
I’m not a perfect person. I can be mean. I try not to, but if I’m hurt, I can lash out. When I was married and my ex-husband was abusing me, I would fight back and say mean things, but that’s not mutual abuse. Mutual abuse is not a thing. Abuse is about one person having control over the other. After my marriage ended, my ex-husband told me I was mean to him too, and I responded, “But were you ever afraid of me?” He said no. That’s the difference. I was afraid for my life, and he was angry. Those are very different things.
I don’t know Amber Heard, obviously. I’m not defending her because I’m a fan. But the language that revolved around her felt recognizable. For example, Johnny Depp had a therapist diagnose her with borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis that is often weaponized against abused women. It’s straight out of the playbook. Complex PTSD can look like a personality disorder, but they’re not the same thing. My ex-husband claimed I had borderline personality disorder and therefore invited the abuse onto myself. My therapist swears I do not have it.
It was heartbreaking to me how many people believed that media narrative. I’d written Goodbye, Sweet Girl and other essays about domestic violence, wanting people to understand that violence happens in an ecosystem. When I saw the hate for Amber Heard, I thought, Why am I doing this? Because my work isn’t making a difference. I may have made a difference in some people’s lives, but now, watching the Diddy trial, I see people finding ways to blame Cassie. There’s never going to be a place in my lifetime where people don’t blame victims. I’ve had to come to terms with that.
LL: The book is made up of many short lyrical essays, and I admired their spiraling effect—how they circle around common themes, always adding something new. How did the structure come about?
KS: WhenI started writing, I realized the essays were inherently linked. I have a narrative voice that’s my own, and my experience hasn’t changed. I also wanted to find ways to describe the corporeal experience of living with post-traumatic stress disorder. I wanted the language to mimic this bodily experience. For example, when my PTSD was at its most activated, one of the things that I struggled with was hearing words people said to me, like incantations, repeating again and again. I wanted to use repetition in the essays to show how these voices became my own voice.
In a similar painful way, I wanted to show how my experience of time is circular. Having an event that fractures your psyche changes your relationship to time. There’s no way around it. I didn’t want to tell readers my relationship to time is different. I wanted to bring readers into that with me. There are moments where, for example, I was having experiences with my current partner, now husband, and I was simultaneously experiencing what had happened with my ex. It wasn’t a split personality. I knew it was my brain, but that didn’t make it easier.
LL:The essays often focus around symbols, like poppies for new life that springs up after a fire or the color red to represent rage. Do symbols help you find a way into the material?
I was afraid for my life, and he was angry. Those are very different things.
KS: Symbols helped me into the material because they help me in lived experience. This is probably why I became a writer, but I’ve always seen things in metaphor. One of the themes in the book is my clumsy attempts at magic. I’m not a practitioner of magic in any kind of professional way, but symbols and magic sort of go together.
When I attach meaning to a symbol, it brings comfort. Like the poppies. I’m comforted by the thought that this beauty comes from fires. The color red indicates anger to me in this overwhelming way. I wanted to share those with the reader. I don’t even know that I did it deliberately, but a lot of these images recur through multiple essays, not just in one or two pieces. They’ve become a sense of meaning-making for me.
LL: I appreciate your mention of the role magic and spirituality plays in the book. The book has a recurring psychic therapist and also deals with crystals, astrology, and tarot. What made you originally gravitate towards magic?
KS: I was raised in a religious family, and religion is a kind of magic. I lost religion around my late teens because my church was rigid, homophobic, and represented values I couldn’t identify with. Although I stopped believing, religion had meant a lot to me. It brought me comfort through a troubled childhood.
When I left my marriage, my therapist said, “you’re going to need to find something to fill the hole spiritually.” She made a pie chart with spaces for my family and friends, and she said, “what about spirituality? Where is that in the chart?” It was absent. I started gravitating towards magic out of fear. I guess there’s no other way to put it. I thought I could try and use magic to make my life better.
Magic is like prayer. Isn’t every prayer trying to create magic? I’m not sure how much of a believer I am, but what does it matter if it comforts me? I do believe in the psychic therapist though. She’s also a licensed therapist, and I wouldn’t be married now if I hadn’t found her. She got me through a lot of doubts, fears, and self-destructive tendencies.
LL: Near the end of the book, you reach a more stable place and talk about how difficult it was to finish the book because you no longer felt the same rawness and spiritual hunger. What does creativity look like to you now?
KS: I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. I love having this stable life, but so much of my creativity was motivated by pain. I wrote one of the first essays for this book when I was twenty-six, so this book’s been in process for a long time. I’ve changed so much throughout that process. Part of the reason it was a challenge to order the essays was because I had to find some way to structure this process of incredible growth over many years.
I don’t want to be maudlin, but pain was a motivator for me to be creative. Now that I’m happy, I’m not as motivated to be creative. I like watching bad television with my husband. Ten years ago at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday night, I used to be in my office writing with a candle. Now, it’s like, “Let’s watch Nine Perfect Strangers.”
My relationship with creativity is still unfolding. I finished the book in September, then Roxanne Gay and I did edits together, so it hasn’t been finished for that long. Since then, I’ve given myself permission to be a human for a while. We bought a house, and I’ve put my creative energy into designing my new kitchen. I have a novel I’m working on, but I wouldn’t say I’m working on it in any deep capacity. As writers, we put pressure on ourselves to be writing all the time, but it’s okay to take periods to just be a person. When I’m ready to get back to writing in a passionate way, I will. For now, I want to enjoy what I have in my life.
I started by sewing together flakes shaken out from my bedding, unravelling fine cotton thread into finer strands to make my tiny stitches. But most skin cells were lost elsewhere, and of those I gathered, only a small fraction were large enough to sew, however delicately I did it. Then I learned to use Petra’s razor and peel off a long, smooth strip of skin every morning, which I’d fold gently into a tissue and add to the suit in the evenings.
It started by accident. I always stopped at Petra’s on the way to school, early enough to hang around and use her bathroom, where I’d take out her pink razor, shave my legs in long, fast, strokes, and carefully replace it in the drawer. I’d done this every weekday all year. No one had explained how, or how often, girls should shave their legs; I’d only gleaned that they should. Petra would be making her lunch and never noticed me enough to care how long I spent in her bathroom. Then, one time, her brother knocked on the door and in haste I pressed a little too hard, so that a gauzy layer of skin, one inch by two, folded up between the blades.
I pulled up my navy knee-high uniform socks, cleaned the razor with toilet paper, and flushed that away. When we were halfway to school, I finally felt blood-moistened fabric rubbing against flesh where it should have been touching dead outer skin, and thought about how I’d discarded one more part of me into city sewage.
This was all before I started working lunchtimes in the school canteen and earning my own pocket money. For two years, a supply of pads had appeared silently and regularly in our bathroom cupboard, and one time Dad gave me twenty dollars and waited in the mall carpark—as far away as possible from the entrance—while I tried on cheap bras in the department store. But I guess he never thought about his daughter wanting to shave. I owe that first suit to Petra and her razor.
The newly peeled skin was fresher and thicker than dry flakes, and grew over my stitches so the thread became invisible. I measured myself with the tape in Dad’s toolbox and made the skin to fit. I began to wear winter uniform year-round, long socks hiding where I’d taken skin to graft. I forged notes to skip PE and dropped out of swimming.
I resented having to hide it. Why would anyone remove hair when they could remove—and create—skin?
When it was finished, I repaid Petra’s friendship by wrapping the new skin around a chestnut sapling in my garden on the evening of the school dance, pulling the satiny dress she’d lent me over its crown.
“Be glamorous,” I said.
A liquid shuffle of branches into hunched shoulders, roots into flat feet, knots into dark brown eyes, autumn leaves darkening into black hair, and this smoother, firmer me stepped into the borrowed heels I’d placed on the ground. I waited until she strode around the corner and went to sit in silence next to Dad, who was watching TV.
He was astonished to find the tree uprooted in the morning, though he missed the blue nail polish stains on its bark. When I arrived a few hours later with the jewelry I’d found in the grass beside it, Petra yelled from behind the door that she would never forgive me. I didn’t learn what that version of me had said or done, but I glimpsed her in photos passed around at school the next week, wavy hair gelled and neatly held by Petra’s silver-beaded hairpins. She had indeed been glamorous.
Despite her solidity, the costume had already begun disintegrating along the early skin-flake stitches when I pulled it off the trunk. I let the remnants flutter apart in the warm nor ’westerly wind.
I had to use Dad’s razor to start again, discovering it was no different to Petra’s for my purposes.
Although I didn’t miss her razor, I missed her—her careless benevolence, the shield of her popularity. My classmates had started to notice me since the dance, but I didn’t want to be noticed that way. And I was lonely without her.
I stuffed the second skin with bedsheets on Athletics Day, drew on eyes with a ballpoint pen—I could paint them brown later—and told her, “Be powerful,” before I let her out the door and went back to sleep. She was round, sleek, and better muscled than the first. She was for me, not for everyone else. When she got back, we’d divide my chores between us, and I’d have a new confidante.
But swollen sheets were tearing through her skin when she returned dripping to my room, and the blue ink of her eyes had run. Even after I squeezed out the water, I couldn’t get the sheets back inside. I pulled the skin apart and discarded it, a little at a time, into rubbish bins and the toilet. I kept the swimming trophy that had dropped from her bloated fingers.
The next term, I was allowed to start working at the canteen and could buy my own razor. This time, I haven’t rushed. I used skin from all over my body, sewing multiple layers so the suit would be thick and strong. I waited until Dad was away for work to dig out the hole where the chestnut once grew, and fill the skin with its fertile earth.
And here you are.
I don’t need glamour from you, or power. Those never last—not even in those of us who grew into our bodies the usual way. Maybe you’ll have what it takes to reconcile with Petra. Or maybe you’ll find new friends.
Maybe this life will be worth something to you. If not, I hope you’ll find your own freedom later, when we’re older.
In the meantime, everything I leave behind is yours. Be me.
Jamaica Road, Lisa Smith’s first novel, is both a love story and a testament to the struggles of immigrant families in 1980s London. Daphne, the lone Black girl in her class, has determined that assimilating and keeping herself small is the easiest way to survive her classmates’ racist taunts. But when Connie Small, a new immigrant from Jamaica, arrives at her school, he’s the opposite of what Daphne is trying to be.
With a shared heritage, Daphne and Connie are pushed together. What begins as a tentative friendship blossoms when Daphne’s family welcomes Connie and his family into their circle. Unlike Daphne, Connie and his mother are undocumented immigrants living with the constant threat of deportation—a threat that rises daily in a racially charged city where police officers randomly search and arrest Black boys and raid businesses to root out undocumented immigrants, and Black students march for their rights and basic protections. Amid the social upheaval, Daphne and Connie learn how to love despite the forces that threaten to keep them apart.
I spoke with Smith about the social conditions that influence events in the novel, the parallels between her novel and present-day America, and the impact of racism on immigrants trying to build new lives in a new country.
Donna Hemans:Your novel is set in 1981, but there are a lot of parallels to our current times. What was the original inspiration for the novel and how do you see your novel in conversation with the present time?
Lisa Smith: I never set out to actually write a novel about the 80s, per se. The idea for the novel came during a creative writing class. The course instructor asked us to think of an outsider and write a short description of this outsider. And I’m usually rubbish at those kinds of exercises. My mind just goes blank and I’m still gazing out the window, and everyone else is writing. But this time, as if by magic, the image of a boy who arrived at my primary school just fell into my mind.
I went to a school which, at the time, was in a very white, very working class part of South London. I was the only Black child in my class. And this boy arrived, and he was very tall, and his uniform was kind of shabby and he had a really strong Jamaican accent. It was the first time I’d ever heard a child my age speaking with a Jamaican accent. All the Jamaicans I knew—my mum, my grandma, my aunties and uncles and all of their friends—were older people who spoke with a Jamaican accent.
I was intrigued, but also a little bit alarmed, because he was just himself. I was busy trying to assimilate and not be too Black, and he was just himself. This image fell into my mind, and I started writing this description. At the same time I heard the voice of Daphne in my head. But I didn’t necessarily think I was going to do anything with it. But for some reason, these characters wouldn’t leave me alone. When I came back to the novel, I started thinking about my childhood, growing up in the late 70s, early 80s, and that’s kind of when I started thinking about how, to some extent, things have moved on, but in some ways, they really haven’t.
I was busy trying to assimilate and not be too Black, and he was just himself.
DH: In a way what came to mind as I was reading your novel is the idea that we’re always struggling for acceptance.
LS: My background is documentaries, so I’m used to researching, and my primary source is newspapers, particularly local newspapers, because they’re quite easy to come by in our local archives. I was astonished by the prevalence of racism and anti-immigrant feeling there was in the 1980s and how politicians then, like now, kind of leaned into that to suit their aims.
Margaret Thatcher, in 1979 actually gave an interview on a TV program, where she said that British communities felt they were being swamped by foreigners. And you know, it’s extraordinary when you look back because she was referring to people like my mum and my uncles and my grandparents, who came in the 1950s and 60s. When I say came, they were invited by the British government to come and rebuild the nation, the motherland, and they came willingly. And they weren’t foreigners. They were British subjects. But by the 80s, all of that had been kind of forgotten about.
DH:You mentioned Margaret Thatcher’s speech in 1979. Was that something that you heard yourself, or did you find it in the research?
LS: I was eight, I think when she made that speech so I was not really aware, but I remember particularly my grandma, my maternal grandma, being really pissed off about it. But then I also came to it through the research, through newspaper articles. In the 1980s they wanted to make amendments to the Immigration Act to make it even harder for people who were from the former colonies to come to the U.K., and also that their children wouldn’t necessarily be British, even if they were born here. I remember hearing my parents talk and it came up in the newspapers when I was doing the research. It just felt so similar to what’s happening now in the U.S.
DH: There’s a sense throughout the novel that England is an inhospitable home. What does the novel say about home and belonging?
LS: The interesting thing about Daphne and Connie is that Connie is the immigrant. Daphne is British Jamaican, but she is the one looking for belonging throughout the novel. She’s the one who basically is like, ‘Well, where do I belong? Do I belong here, or do I belong in Jamaica?’ It is something that I struggled with when I was that age, when I was a teenager, because there was no concept then of being Black and British. We have moved on a lot since then. I think young Black people who are born here will call themselves British, or they’ll call themselves British Jamaican, or British Nigerian, or British Ghanaian, or whatever. But then it was just a strange thing.
In fact, something else that astonished me when I was doing the research and looking at the newspapers was the fact that they would constantly refer to young Black British people as West Indians. The 13 young people who died in the New Cross fire in 1981, they referred to them as young West Indians. They were British of West Indian heritage, but at the time, they just felt they couldn’t write that they were British people.
DH:It feels very circular to me. We have gone through all of these things—immigration raids, protests, police randomly searching Black boys. And if you go back to 2020, we had the Black Lives Matter protests, and now we have all these raids. It all feels circular.
LS: Racism is power and people with power are not going to give it up without a fight. And they will resort to things like just basically telling lies and othering people to maintain that power. And that’s certainly what is happening here. Unfortunately, we have various right leaning politicians who will say things like the reason why the NHS waiting list is so long, or the reason why there’s no housing, or the reason why your council hasn’t filled in the potholes in your street is because of all these diversity initiatives that are happening, and all the immigrants that we’re letting in, all the asylum seekers that are sucking up the NHS resources. Anything that is kind of morally decent is seen as woke. Now, in the 80s, they called it loony lefty, but it’s the same thing. It’s just a way of denigrating what is the morally decent thing to do to maintain power.
A lot of the Windrush generation sucked up all this stuff and taught their children to be good citizens.
DH: And one of the things you did in the book, too, was create a generation of young people who were just not going to sit down and take it.
LS: The Windrush generation came to this country to help rebuild the U.K. And when they came here, they found out that they weren’t universally accepted, but they endured and they remained. A lot of the Windrush generation sucked up all this stuff and taught their children to be good citizens.
But then you scroll forward to the 1970s and the 80s—a time of high unemployment and we now know more about the reasons for the poor educational outcomes of Black children: institutional racism in education. Despite being a good citizen, we weren’t really getting anything. The second generation were in some ways worse than the Windrush generation, and whilst there was a mood amongst some of the Windrush generations, certainly, my paternal grandmother was like, ‘Oh, just buck up and just behave. If you’re getting in trouble with the police, it’s your fault because you’ve done something wrong.’ There was also the second generation just saying, this is not the case, and we deserve more.
The New Cross fire, the Black People’s Day of Action and the first Princeton uprising were a kind of testament to the fact that there was blackivism for the first time, that people were going to be collectively trying to make change, because they weren’t having it anymore.
DH: You used teenage romance to explore racism. What does it mean for Daphne to become involved with a boy from a white racist family?
LS: I thought long and hard about the kind of people I knew growing up in urban centers where there are working-class Black people, working-class white people. So more often than not, we live on the same sort of streets and certainly, if it’s a housing estate, we’d all live on the same kind of council estate. Often our parents would do the same sorts of jobs. So we were mixing on all different levels in all different places.
There was a girl who once wanted to be my best friend at secondary school, and we were best friends for a little while. She invited me to her house for tea one Saturday afternoon. I went to her house, and she introduced me to her mum, and her mum said, “Well, is it true that you lot eat goats and cows’ feet and pigs’ noses? And I was like, “Well, we do eat goat in curry. It’s very nice. And we have cow feet sometimes in soup. I’ve never had pigs noses, personally. But we also eat English food.” And she said, “Okay, so you’ll be alright with fish fingers then?”
But then later on, I was sitting eating my fish fingers, and this girl’s big sister arrives. And the big sister turns up in her Fred Perry shirt, her Dr. Martin boots, her shaved head, and she just glowers at me the whole time, all through this meal, until I leave. And my friend just walked me back to the bus stop. She was saying that was really, really nice, you must come again, completely ignoring her mum’s rudeness and her sister’s hostility. It was a difficult friendship to have, and I suppose that’s kind of what happens with Daphne and Mark. It’s just too difficult a relationship for her to have. And when we meet Mark later on he has had a child with a Black woman. But they aren’t together either, because he’s not quite there yet. He is a work in progress.
DH: At its core, it feels to me that the novel is about community. How do you see this theme intersecting with the immigrant story?
It was really common for people to live in shared houses and shared accommodation.
LS: At the start of the novel, Daphne lives with her grandmother and her auntie and her uncle and their five children in one house. That was so common. People look back now and say, ‘Oh, my God, it’s overcrowded.’ But that was normal, because when Caribbean migrants first came to the U.K. there was basically nowhere for them to live. The people on the Windrush ship were housed in the tunnels underneath Clapham Common. It was really common for people to live in shared houses and shared accommodation. And not only because it was better in terms of them not being homeless. It meant that you were kind of safe, and you were around people who understood you, who you could lean on and who supported you.
DH: And there’s also this idea of control. Over and over the characters say, “We run tings, tings nuh run we.” Connie explains it as having the ability to control how things turn out. How does this also intersect with the immigrant story?
LS: It starts off as just a useful mantra, just something to keep yourself going. But I think it is really important for immigrants to not lose sight of themselves. It’s really easy to come to a country like Britain in the 1960s and just think, oh my God, I just need to assimilate and keep my head down, and then things will be all right. But there’s no amount of assimilation that is going to suit certain people. When I was young, even though I was British born I never felt British enough. And that’s the thing about assimilation. You always feel as though you’re not quite there yet. And I think you have to just assert yourself and say, This is who I am. This is who I want to be, and this is what I will be. That comes from ‘we run things; tings, no run we.’ We’re in charge of who we are. We’re in charge of our destiny.
Folk horror lives in soil and between the shadow of the trees. It’s the stories we inherit, the rules we’re taught not to break. Don’t whistle at night, don’t look back if you hear your name called from between the trees. And always, always, respect the dead.
But beneath the rules and rituals, folklore is prejudice and misogyny wearing a mask of moss. It is colonial violence, cloaked in the skin of deer. Guilt wrapped in prayers and fetishes.
In House of Monstrous Women, Philippine folklore bleeds through the pages as Josephine and her friends chase each other through the Ranoco house. Skulls stuffed with names watch the hunt from dark altars. Insects with all too intelligent eyes follow them through the walls. And worst of all? Their hosts might be aswang—beautiful women with a hellish appetite for the dead. The fresher the better.
Like House of Monstrous Women, these eight unforgettable folk horrors will crawl beneath your skin and make your blood run cold. Some root their terror in history—where superstition, greed, and the law itself become weapons deadlier than anything that might lurk in the wood.
When Abitha’s husband dies in a strange hunting accident, she becomes a widow in 1666 New England—a dangerous place to be a woman alone. Soon the men of the village start conspiring to take her land, using a mixture of legal maneuvering and accusations of witchcraft. But when she stumbles across a horned creature from local legend, she strikes an uneasy bargain that might deliver her from danger… or drag her into something far worse. Slewfoot is both lush and brutal, offering a sharp examination of misogyny and prejudice.
On the last day of hunting season, four young Blackfeet men trespass on sacred ground and commit an act they’ll come to regret. The consequences are long-reaching—and they come on hooves. More than just a tale of supernatural vengeance, The Only Good Indians is a haunting novel of intergenerational trauma, guilt, and a past that refuses to let go.
Lotería might just be one of the most unique items on the list. Lotería is a traditional Mexican board game made up of 54 cards, each with a different picture. Cynthia Pelayo uses these nostalgic images as doorways into short stories that blend folklore and superstition, packed with horror and surprise. Lotería is an innovative treat and a love letter to the culture.
Mackenzie is plagued with dreams of her sister’s untimely death. Dreams where crows circle and the fog of guilt hangs heavy. But when the dreams begin to ripple into reality, Mackenzie knows she must return home. What’s waiting for her is the same heavy sadness she tried to escape… and an entity that’s only growing stronger. Bad Cree is a tale of suspense, grief, guilt, and the strength found in family and tradition.
A story of three women across time, bound by a legacy of witchcraft and danger. Minerva, a graduate student in 1998, is researching horror writer Beatrice Tremblay—a woman who vanished from public record decades earlier. The deeper Minerva digs, the more she uncovers fragments of protective symbols identical to those her grandmother learned as a girl in rural Mexico, where Alba once used them to fend off a dark presence. Now, that presence may have its eyes on Minerva. The Bewitching is a powerful tale of legacy, resistance through storytelling, and the defiance it takes to survive as a woman in a world that wishes to silence them.
When Sam returns to her childhood home in rural North Carolina, she finds it’s nothing like she remembered. Her mother, once chatty and warm, has been broken down into someone guarded and overly polite. The house they once shared has been stripped of its color and personality, reduced to white walls. Sam quickly realizes there’s something very, very wrong in the house. A House with Good Bones is a story about generational trauma, independence, and the need to break free from oppressive traditions that do more harm than good.
The Hotel is a unique collection of 15 interconnected stories, bound by the same cursed location and the legacy of a witch drowned in the marshy Fens. A sin that echoes again and again in the hotel’s twisting corridors, the violence a permanent stain. Each chapter that comes after is narrated by a different woman, ranging from guests to porters and even the hotel itself. With them comes quiet grief and dangerous secrets, filling the rooms of the hotel with a smothering suffering that will stay with you until the last page.
Red algae blooms poison the bayou surrounding the town of Mercy, twisting and mutating everything that lives within it. As townsfolk begin to disappear, the domineering harbormaster demands Noon capture the monster that’s been hunting them—a creature that sounds all too much like the water spirits in her family’s legends. But the red algae is affecting more than just the fish… and what it’s doing to Noon may be more dangerous than anything she’s been sent to hunt.
Excerpt from The Orange Notebooks by Susanna Crossman
I remember this:
We’ve just got off the Channel ferry. On the motorway, we’re heading to London. In the backseat, you say:
“Mama! Mama! The wire things are round and then go straight.”
“Sorry, I can’t hear.” I overtake a yellow Spanish lorry, glare at the driver beeping his horn. “Speak up, buba,” I yell, tired from the overnight crossing. I didn’t sleep.
“Mama, the wire things!” you shout. “The wire things are round and then go straight!”
“Be quiet, buba. I am driving!”
A sports car with the number-plate LUV U is close behind me. The driver flashes his lights.
“But Mama, the wire things by the road. . .”
In the rear mirror, I see your small finger. From your car seat, it points to a pylon. By the road, the wires reach into the horizon. Heading out to nowhere, they seem to come from the sea. The past is behind us, I think, and wish I was still on the night boat, being cradled by the swell. Briny billows. Sailing into great waters— You interrupt my daydreams:
“Mama, the wires go round and then straight.”
Glancing up, I notice that from a distance, the curves dangle like crescent moons. As we approach, the wires seem to flatten into straight lines. In my mirror, the lines continue and then disappear.
“That’s an optical illusion.” I explain, because I am a mother and, buba, it is my job to give you instructions about the workings of life. I try to tell you the rules, about danger and love, and all the things we cannot see. “An optical illusion means things are different to how they appear. An optical illusion.”
“An illusion. An illusion,” you repeat.
I look up at a road sign. We’re sixty-three miles from London, yet already I can smell Edgware pollution and fried fish, and I feel the dry powder on my mum’s skin.
In the back of the car, you whisper, over and over again:
“Illusion. . . illusion. . . illusion.”
“Illusion” is an eighties song by the group Imagination. One of my mum’s favourite tunes. As I drive on the motorway, it echoes in my ears. The world is just an illusion.
It is June. Two years later. France. Early afternoon. I go to ring the bell. A bee flies past my ear, landing on the brass door handle. Six black legs. A quiver of fur. In my mind, thoughts swarm of nectar, of the honey cake my Aunty Deb baked, a bittersweet mouthful, swallowed and gone. For an instant, I wonder about bee-killing pesticides, bee stings, pain, and draw back my hand. In Europe, there are almost two thousand species of bees. I know they are under threat. Recoiling, I think of the movie Lou watched, hour after hour, as children do in the comfort of evermore. The film, Bee Movie, portrayed bees as humans: the bee mummies and bee daddies with two bee children. Bee mornings. Bee afternoons. Clean bee nights. Bee school. Bee work. Bee retirement. Bee conformity. Bee longings. Bee love and bee hate. This humanising of the natural world is an outrageous anthropomorphic act we must not forget. The bee world has its own mystery: bees are born. Bees die. The bees are dead. The bees are buzzing. The thoughts rattle inside me. I am an empty can. No filling. No stuffing. A mother with a dead child is no longer. A mother with a dead child is a joke.
Closing my eyes, I listen to the bees. They are flying through labyrinths of grey-green stalks, gathering pollen from pale mauve blooms. The scent of lavender coats the air. A slick veneer. The sudden heat of French summers. Siesta hour. Sweat trickles down my back; the drops draw damp lines. There is an orchestral stillness, a muffled silence I know well. It seems like an odd moment to come back, while the whole world is sleeping. As though everyone is waiting, and here I am. Finally, de retour with the lavender, the sunflowers and the fig tree in the garden. Even the cicadas seem to be resting; the only thing I hear is bees. Some legends say bees never sleep and they go on and on making honey.
Over ten years ago, on the only occasion that we met, my late Basque mother-in-law, Katixa, gave me fair warning about bees. Inside the kitchen of her cold two-hundred-year-old house, nestled in the Spanish Pyrenees, we drank hot cups of moss-coloured verbena tea sweetened with chestnut honey. Outside, mist collected on every corner. It hung over the half-timbered house, drifted in green valleys, and shrouded the steep mountain peaks. Rain fell in a soft drizzle. Water coated everything, and it felt like we were floating inside a cloud. At her table, Katixa turned to me. Her grey hair was short and neat round her heavy face. Placing her hand on my shoulder, she said to me quietly in French, for it was the only language that we shared:
“Anna, when any death occurs you must go and tell the bees. You should knock gently on the hives. Inform them of the passing. Tell them the name of the deceased and their age. You must not forget to ask the bees politely to produce wax. Their wax will make the candles to light the path of the deceased, so they may travel safely to the other side.”
In the garden, I am wondering whether the bees have been informed, when I am startled by Antton opening the door. On my way here, I practised a speech to tell him: 1) where I had been; 2) what had changed; 3) what I had understood. But he looks furious, and I step back and trip over my suitcase. Before I can say “bonjour” or “hello,” Antton blurts out:
“I can’t believe you’ve finally come home.” Shaking his head, he strides back inside. Behind my sunglasses, tears form. Antton cannot see, which is a relief. These lunettes make my face feel at home. Inside here, I am safe. Some things shouldn’t be opened. Outside there are monsters, sieges, and storms.
I step into the hallway of our house. My feet shuffle and hesitate. One of them inside and the other out. Suitcase in hand. Seven years earlier when we bought La Place, the estate agent described it as “un petit château perdu.” We joked about, “our little lost castle,” bought cheap due to a leaky roof and bad wiring, miles away from everything, except for the farm down the hill. The farm called Devant-La-Place, In-Front-of-The-Place. It is time to come home. Where to begin?
Antton paces the stone corridor in his beige trench coat. Underneath, he wears a white-ironed shirt, dark trousers, and trainers with the laces tied in neat knots. His hair swept back. New white strands in the black. He looks older, like something I once read about becoming a whisper of a man. Yet he’s still carelessly refined. After all this time, I have never understood how he remains elegant in all circumstances: working and living, birth and death. But it is the trench coat that worries me.
As he walks it flaps around him, fabric brushes against fabric and makes a swish, swish sound. The coat is too severely belted for such a hot day and should be worn unbuttoned. I want to warn him: the belt is a tightening noose. By the granite staircase he turns, pulls on the buckle. The beige colour is insipid to my eyes. I feel it gnawing in my stomach, and however much I reason with myself this feeling will not go away. Antton’s mouth twitches, as it does when he is angry.
“I’m going into town for a school meeting.”
“Could I come in with you?” I ask. “We could talk in the car. I can wait while you work. . .”
He nods and comes toward me, smelling of coffee and cologne. He kisses me. Not on the lips. His kisses land on my cheeks. Two times. Old school. La bise. Inside I smile, but sadly, I’ve always liked his formal ways. It is one of the reasons I fell in love with him, his mixture of ceremony and despair, and his ability to quote philosophy and poetry, lines of Heidegger, Foucault, Plato, and Celan. “We are made of words,” Antton said, and we joked that we had grown up in bookless houses and were building our own library in the château, and that books belonged to everybody and books could change the world. We knew that once you were inside a single book it led to other books. Each single book was a library, a universe. Long ago, word after word fell in a delicate rain, and the words became a lake from which we drew our water.
“How are you?” I move backwards. I can’t touch the beige coat; I don’t want to get too near. Antton shrugs his shoulders and takes in my tracksuit trousers, crumpled T-shirt, dirty hair. The shades. The journey to get here was long. I hope he cannot smell the whisky on my breath. The bottle is in my suitcase, wrapped in clothes, stiff with salt water. But I will not drink again.
I can’t touch the beige coat; I don’t want to get too near.
“I can’t believe you’ve finally come home,” Antton repeats, but this time with less anger and more defeat, and I want to take him in my arms and apologize. But he adds, “I’m leaving in thirty minutes. Don’t be late,” and disappears into the kitchen.
It is a struggle to carry my suitcase up the limestone steps. At the bottom are things waiting to be taken upstairs (a blue jumper, a stack of unpaid bills, a screwdriver, and a plug). At the top, I know there will be things ready to be taken down. For seven years stuff has ascended and descended this way.
Now, my legs wobble as I notice Antton has added more books to the piles on each stone step: a new biography of Freud, editions of the local newspaper, Sud-Ouest. A copy of Orpheus by Cocteau with lithographs. This play, I once told a class, was “Inspired by the Greek myth of a grieving troubadour, his descent to Hades—a katabasis—to find Eurydice, his dead wife. It’s been revamped a million times. The story told a different way. Cocteau included mirrors—troubling gateways to the underworld.”
“Greek and Roman gambling,” Antton called the classic myths. “Gods playing at the cosmic game of life.”
Snakes and ladders, I think, heading upstairs, everything rises and falls, comes and goes. But the Ancients are still everywhere. Our shelves are lined with les belles lettres, red volumes and mustard copies of the Orphic hymns. “Your house is like a bookshop,” visitors joke. But, as I reach the landing, dust jackets curl, and piles of books topple onto the floor. All the paper feels suffocating, and in the heat, it smells of mildew as though mould has attacked the core. Antton has accumulated stuff while I was away; he’s been building a shelter to hide from the storm.
At the top step, my foot hits the corner of a stacked collection of second-hand French detective novels: Cet homme est dangereux by Peter Cheyney and Pas d’orchidéespour Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase. Covers show revolvers, cadavers, and long stockinged legs. Each Série Noire is printed in yellow and black. Books striped like buzzing bees. It makes sense, I think. My Basque mother-in-law was right. The bees need to be informed.
Outside our son’s room, Antton has piled more dusty cardboard boxes. Inside one is a collection of Basque comic books written in the Latin alphabet that Antton always wishes he knew. Glancing over, I see the comic books are stories of separatists, berets, and gastronomy. Witches and mountain cheese. I wonder why he’s bought books that no one in our house can read. Antton often tells people, “All I have from the Basque language are the two awkward T’s in the spelling of my name.” But I picture these T’s like trees with outspread branches. They hold his centre.
Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I go into Lou’s room, put my suitcase down, and slide onto his bed. Around me are Lou’s toys, clothes, and his drawing stuff. Everything is the same yet Lou isn’t here. He is gone. My Lou is gone. Months have passed since I last lay here, but the grief remains, and it falls on me, a tumble of pain. If I could give it a shape it would be a boulder, a weight. Every day, I topple. Every day, I’m felled. Yet, his death has been easier when I am beneath this rock, resting in the dirt, next to Lou.
“It is more suitable,” I told my psychiatrist, Dr. Vidonne, in one of my first sessions, “when I don’t try to pretend things are normal.”
On his bed, I ache for him, in my heart, my belly, my womb. Twenty-two bones in my head miss him, and the rough grain of my senses remembers his skin. Those two square metres that my doctor friend Rachel told me are the largest bodily sense organ. Cutaneous receptors captured Lou’s touch, the feel of his small fingers, and his arms tight around me, tickles and hugs. My baby is stuck in my deep skin, absorbing shock.
A crack runs across the ceiling plaster, reaching the light. The dangling lampshade is patterned with stars, and it sets me thinking of orientation, and the damp map in my suitcase. Yann gave it to me on our very last morning together, to show me our path and notre destin.
“There must be hope,” Yann insisted, and traced our journey on the blue paper sea. At the port, we prepared to leave as the sun rose. Beneath the dawn sky everything was still, and we could never have imagined what would happen that day. On the deck, Yann’s eyes scanned the waves. “Don’t forget. Without hope we cannot breathe.”
Clutching the duvet, hope shifts inside me. Things have changed, and I don’t want them to be the same.
During the weeks I was away, I often pictured Lou’s room. Late at night, or early morning, when I couldn’t sleep, I imagined my head on his pillow, the starry lampshade swinging above. Since he has gone, the room hasn’t been touched. Small folded T-shirts and crayons gather dust. No one is allowed to tidy or clean. For inside this room are particles of Lou, flecks of his skin and strands of his hair. Tucked in his sheets, I glance over at a mirror on the wall. Lou spent hours playing here. Eyes wide open; he plunged into a trance, frowning, grinning or opening and closing his eyes. His hand stroked the glass, an incomprehensible door.
“Hello,” I remember him saying, “Hello.”
In his bed, his soft toys surround me, and I press my face into worn fur. A cocoon of fuzz: three stars from his godfather Miguel. A teddy. Two unicorns. Beside me is Lala, a small fluorescent pink rabbit that Antton won at the local fair. White stuffing leaks from a rip. Absentmindedly, I tug at this hole. Often, Lou pulled at Lala’s stuffing. Now, I roll fluff between my fingertips, repeating his gestures as if Lou’s movements were a dance and if I learn the steps, I’ll bring him back. It is wrong but somehow right, and I cry and cannot stop.
Then I remember—must unpack. But when I open my suitcase the orange notebooks are on top. An amber pull. Turning pages, I read jumbled sentences, and a series of obituaries. During my time away, I collected announcements of death, French notices nécrologiques, for: Monsieur Roger Aguinet, a happily retired butcher, the much-loved Madame Louise Pennec, the beautiful Clotilde Tressier, and the erudite journalist Marie-Bernadette, devoted Ingrid, Paul the husband, Alain and Nicole. Hubert and Dominique. Karine and Ingrid. Loved. Cherished. Beloved. Never forgotten. The last name on the page is in capitals. Letters scratched in blue. They stand five centimetres tall. LOUIS.
When I finally admitted to Dr. Vidonne that I was keeping these notebooks, she looked at me curiously. I’d never mentioned them before because despite trusting her I was frightened she would want to read each private page. I muttered, I was always muttering with her:
“It is so difficult for me, even now, to get things to make sense. Everything blurs. Me. Lou and Antton. There is so much wreckage. Irrevocable blank spots. All this.” I waved my arms in the air as I often did when I spoke, “It does not stop. But when I write in these notebooks it’s different.”
Dr. Vidonne said:
“Writing it down may help you to remember what came first, what came after and next.” Then, she looked at me with that slow stare of hers, and whispered, almost tenderly, “Write it all down, Madame. Write!”
At La Place, Antton appears in the bedroom. When I sit up, the sight of his beige coat is too much. “I’m not coming with you,” I tell him, slurring slightly. In the mirror, I catch a glimpse of myself. It is as though my face has been left out in the rain. My hair stands on end. My eyes are swollen and red. White fluff is stuck to my chin.
“I can’t believe it!” Antton shouts, and then he lowers his voice. “You’ve only just got back and you’re already playing games. I don’t even know where you went with that sailor, the man from the hospital. Do you know how terribly worried I’ve been?”
Antton storms out and slams the bedroom door. Seconds later, he yells “Merde!” I hear the sound of tumbling books, and imagine the yellow and black Série Noire falling. An avalanche of books. A swarm of bees.
I read in my notebooks:
The word swarm designates a cloud of bees or insects. There is a general sense of a large dense throng. But in old Norse “swarm” is also connected to the word for whispering. The bees are whispering, and I cannot decipher their code.
My hands tremble, and I wish I had talked to Antton, and I hope that when he gets back I find the words. I begin to think about his school meeting, and then worry about the beige coat. It is like a bird. This fact is apparent, and I am not sure where it is flying next. I pick up another orange notebook, and with a blue biro I try to draw the trench coat’s shape. The front angles of the coat stretch into vast, flapping wings. The collar rises into two horns, or eyes. It isn’t clear, and my sketch is badly done, but I am trying to depict the coat as a gigantic bird.
This beige bird, I suspect, is linked to Lou’s death. But Lou is not the only one, there are other names, everything is connected and I will write to my local magistrate. There is a list, and it will form part of the case condemning the coat, not Antton, but the power leading the beige.
For a while, I have realised people think I am going crazy, so methodically I have prepared my case, documenting my theory with hard facts, ascertaining what is behind the plot.
Closing my eyes, I think I will explain everything to Antton later, but when I push my nose into the duvet, I catch my buba’s scent. For a happy moment, I inhale Lou’s little boy smell, and everything returns. . .
It all began nine months ago, last September. Before, everything was different. Two hundred and thirty-seven days ago, my world spun, rolled, and crumbled. It is like a pregnancy wound backwards. Before that I was a language teacher, a reader, a lover, and a mother.
Back in Monsieur Kassar’s school, the Centre Via Langues, I taught English to students from all walks of life: tourism, business, medical, and literary. It was a way to make a living, and I wrote on paperboards and led conversations, explaining the difference between the phrasal verbs “getting on” and “getting off.” Each week, Monsieur Kassar, an amateur poet, placed a single rose in a vase on his desk, “in memory of the Lebanese Bekaa valley of my childhood where thousands of roses are grown each year.”
“You’re sentimental,” his wife complained.
“I am romantic,” he replied. “We are symbolic animals. We need metaphor.”
When I finished work, at home, I played dinosaurs with Lou, moving plastic models from sofa to floor. Some evenings, Antton and I discussed future renovations for La Place, for everything was unfinished, needed re-wiring, and tiles fell from the roof. But “It will be done when we have time.” We threw our hands up into the air because “que sera.” Instead, I read Duras in bed, and when the dawn lit the garden at La Place, I had sex with Antton. Days began and ended and, for six years, time turned that way.
Then, nine months ago, Louis went.
We were unhinged from the axis of the earth. A creak of tangled iron. A groaning fall. But perhaps the beginning is elsewhere.
Golden light fell into darkness, and we went to meet death and tried to journey to the end.
Maybe we could draw the starting line at the moment Yann (the boatman) and I met, the day I arrived at the hospital, or four months later, when we climbed over the wall. That June night when we left, I barely knew Yann, but it felt like a lifetime had passed between us, as though we’d been young and grown old beneath the moon. Golden light fell into darkness, and we went to meet death and tried to journey to the end. At least, I think that is what we were doing, for I am still trying to understand. It was the journey of a mother (me) refusing to abandon her child. Alone in the underworld. Alone in a non-world. I was a woman who had lost time, who went to look for the end of time. At the start of time, I found something else.
Or. . .
Maybe everything began the August day our son was born, and we chose his name. For a name can be a fresh beginning, and we wanted a name that started anew. We wrote down names for both girls and boys: James, British names, Marguerite, French names, Hannah, Jewish names. Arrosa, Basque names, Pierre, classic names, names of poets, writers, and philosophers. Finally, we chose Louis, as it suited our baby, and the pronunciation was similar in English and French. From that day on, we called our son: Lou, Louba, little Lou, mostly I called him buba.
But, after his death, I wanted Antton and I to be the only ones allowed to pronounce his name: the soft “L” followed by the voiced OU and the unvoiced IS. Louis. In silence, my lips say his name, and I call him: Louis.
Or. . .
The beginning could be the once-upon-a-time summer day I met Antton, when I was working on the ferries. The ship sailed across the deepest part of the Channel. A red line tracked our path on a TV screen. Without this meeting, our son could not have been born. A child demands a name, a place, and a destiny.
That eighteenth summer I began to equate liberty with water and got to know the sea. To start my first job, I had travelled down from London. A turn on a coast road revealed a vista, a vast blue-green. Water moved as far as the eye could see. Fourteen years ago, something rose inside me a bit like a fighting energy. Winds spilled across the surface. Tides rose and fell. Water also forms this story. There is a surface and a deep. Froth and abyss. Water has currents. It pushes and pulls our boats.
Or. . .
We could go back earlier, to a linguistic initiation, when I was five, and my mum paid our neighbour Betty to teach me French, sparking off my love for the langue française. I learnt the lyrics to the song “Alouette” and sang about larks plucked from wing to tail. French became my second language, unlocked another world. And later, that morning bird flew me from suburbia across the sky to the ferries and Antton, to the other side of the Channel. In France, I spoke and translated birth and death. Louis and I lived and died in two languages. Gentille alouette. Kind lark.
Or. . .
I could start with my roots, dig into the past, the clay, my land, my geology, the scraps and clutter of my origins, my absent English Christian father, my omnipresent Jewish mum, Helen, Aunty Deb, my stepfather, Cyril. My family. Floating around is what they also call “the gift” which I still can’t grasp. Sometimes, it feels like a river runs fast through my veins, and I must follow its course. Is the gift the fact that until last year I was never scared? Aunty Deb called me a “plucky kid,” because I was headstrong and once slapped the school bully for calling my best friend, Rachel, a “Paki.” Or is the gift my solitary, awkward character? Because since I was small, I don’t fit-into-the-crowd, can be charming or haunted by a black dog, a sullen fury. The “gift” was bestowed on Aunty Deb and her mother, my great-great-grandmother, who in 1912 foretold her own death on the Titanic.
My friend Dr. Rachel says superstition is all in the mind. She told me, “It’s just the brain taking a break. A recent study in Helsinki showed that sceptics possess greater powers of cognitive inhibition. They have the ability to reject superstitious impulses.” According to neuroscience, giving meaning to randomness is the easy way out, the basic reaction. Yet, the water inside me does not stop trying to reach out and find the answer.
For the past few months, I’ve written about this in the orange notebooks. Pages and pages trying to find the start. But what are beginnings? Shifting, treacherous things. It is like trying to identify the movement between silence and sound. Lou took piano lessons, pressed small fingers on the keys, and I tried to see when sound emerged or went. It was almost impossible. Beginnings are harder to pinpoint than ends. Full stops are a sign to show where a sentence is completed.
“Read to the end,” Lou always said when we had stories at bedtime and it got too late, “Don’t stop in the middle, Mama. Not the middle. Get to the end.”
In his room, it strikes me I need to finish the story. Put the parts of Lou together before it is too late. A Roman philosopher believed that after death there is a scattering of the union. This scattering is forgetting. Things get washed away. I must gather everything I have written in the orange notebooks. Lou cannot be left stuck in the middle. These thoughts sound like a pulsar. A rapid breathless beat.
An urgent plan emerges from the crack in the ceiling, the lavender, old books, and the nectar-drunk bees. Recently, I read that 9 percent of European bees are threatened with extinction. A red list has been made. Things have happened to the bees: habitat loss, pesticides and fertilizers, urban development, and climate change. Things are getting lost. Bees and boys.
Frowning, I write in the orange notebook:
Assemble Lou. Every memory, recollection.
Explain the journey I have been on. What I’ve understood.
Tell Lou his story. My story. The story of Antton and I. Tell him the things I never got a chance to say.
I must put Lou in the right burning place in my heart, for my baby wanders; he haunts me, day and night. Sometimes, I feel his small hands clinging to my legs, and his grip stops me from advancing. He is calling me. Yann heard him too. Antton may have caught Lou’s whispers, but we couldn’t talk about this. It was a pain that hurt too much if we went too near.
Lou is lost, and our little buba is adrift. He roams between worlds unable to find his way home. Lou should have lost his milk teeth, finished childhood, become a teenager, grown into an adult. He should have, I have said to myself so many times, because “should have” is a conditional tense, expressing a past expectation that was not met. I taught this to students, wrote on a blackboard:
We use “should have” to describe a situation with regret, where we wish to go back in time and transform an event. A “should have” clause is often followed with a BUT.
Lou should have been here BUT he is dead. Death is definitive. Death will be definitive. The grammar tense does not change.
Yet, I wrote in the notebooks:
Orpheus went down into Hades to get his dead wife, sang songs charming the underworld. He did the impossible: wept 247 litres of tears. Used 350 boxes of Kleenex bought in bulk. He spent sleepless nights reading thousands of self-help books. Orpheus implored to a gaggle of Olympian gods, who told him grief had five stages he should accept. But Orpheus couldn’t follow that path. “I mean,” he told them, “I can’t erase my wife’s photos from my timeline. She’s been there for 2,000 years.” Instead, he dared to pass through the Gates of Tenaro, and the dark torrents of Styx to reach the place of the dead.
As for me, I’ve read the book, got the T-shirt, seen the movie, and re-told the story. I am a mother with a dead child. A not-mother, stuck between worlds.
I am writing these notebooks. All of it is here, even if my psychiatrist said, “There are memories we’ll never recall, and our memories of things can change. It is a healthy process for everything we have known to evolve. The present affects the way we understand the past. Memories are living things.” Dr. Vidonne used the word “vivante,” which means “living” in French. The opening “vee” sound feels buoyant and fresh. On the periodic table, V is the symbol for vanadium, turning certain emeralds a milky-green. Green is a sign of life. In the lush Basque valleys, the word for life is bizitza, pronounced bee-zitz-ah.
When I have finished writing, I will try and get the notebooks to Lou, I can teach him languages, about bees and the chromatic wheel. If he is growing up somewhere, he can read this when he is ten, eighteen, or thirty-four. He can flip through these notebook pages in his forties or fifties. He will be older than me.
Snuggling under the covers, I glance at myself a final time in the mirror.
I forget to take off my sunglasses and fall asleep thinking about bees.
The majority of our waking hours are spent in some relation to work: commuting to/from work, thinking about work, and doing the work itself—insert argument for reduced work-time models, insert argument to stop asking people about their dream job—so of course it makes sense that our jobs find their way into our writing. But ten years ago, when I was in the thick of working as a wilderness guide, I would not have predicted that this job would become the basis for Level Watch, my first book.
Level Watch is based on my time working in wilderness therapy for a substance-abuse treatment center in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As guides, we shepherded people—most of whom were undergoing radical transformations—safely through the backcountry. I started writing the book out of a need to process the experience; I thought of it primarily as an elegy. It wasn’t until I’d been working on it for a few years that one editor told me she considered it an “untold story of the opioid epidemic”—the perspective of a treatment center employee.
In honor of Labor Day, I’ve compiled a reading list of other contemporary poetry collections with dispatches from jobs—a nursing home, KFC, a tech company—as well as commentary on labor itself. I appreciate the candor and complexity with which these writers convey such varied accounts of work—and if you contemplate your relationship to work even half as much as I do, I think you’ll appreciate them, too.
This coming-of-age book contains a series of “Requiem” poems about working on an orchard as a boy. de la Paz utilizes a “we” that transcends the speaker’s singular experience: “…how we each knew we were getting ripped off and how the filthy / dollars we’d wad into our pockets couldn’t buy us a fuller river, time…” Our earliest jobs are often where we learn how we’re viewed by others and therefore what roles we’re expected to fill in the world at-large. The boys in these poems earn “quick dollars / doing nothing except being boys, learning without comprehension, / the difficult industry of men.”
Here we read about various temp jobs. So many ways to make so little money. There’s also a quieter thread: Kunz’s poems remind me of the government’s role in our financial (in)stability. “An election happens,” we read in one poem. It’s a slipped-in, standalone sentence without fanfare, but in a poem titled “Squatters,” I would argue it’s offering commentary. In “Account,” money owed to an ex will be forgiven if the speaker will allow the ex to claim him as a dependent on her taxes: “I couldn’t believe / my luck. I let myself be claimed.”
Harrington’s poems describe the senescent body in unflinching detail that only an intimate caregiver could provide. There are moments when the nurse aides show tenderness through their competence (“Efficiency too is loveliness, is mercy. / The sheet smoothed beneath a naked haunch”) and moments when readers witness the opposite (“There is a way to drop a body atop a hard mattress, / to scrub gentle parts too hard”). Caregiving is complicated work—often moralized and underpaid—and there’s a bravery required to describe it so honestly.
I once bussed breakfast tables at a fancy hotel where all employees could eat free lunch in the staff cafeteria, but you weren’t allowed to change out of your uniform first. The higher-ups ate in their business professional clothing, so the uniform felt like a way of keeping the service workers in our place, like branding us. Tribble, in his book about his years working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks at KFC, articulates the potency of a uniform in “Polyester:” “Whatever our religion these were our vestments / now and until we disrobed … the wear and tear sure to mark us in more indelible / ways than any fabric could ever hope to cover up.”
A central thread in Stevenson’s book is the sexism within the tech industry. Her boss informs her: “the glass ceiling was high / but it was there.” A moment like this comes as no surprise after reading, in the title poem, about a department where women are sent after filing harassment claims: “each woman has her own fax machine / to do her pretend work: messages scribbled / on lightweight paper and sent / to nowhere.” I find the “pretend work” particularly devastating. In the world of this poem, a company would rather pay women to do futile tasks than to rectify a misogynistic culture. Yet another poem features women turning into inanimate skyscrapers. There’s a disembodied tone that unifies the book. The poems speak with a clinical distance, a sterile remove that is reinforced by the book’s title.
“When I stepped into the stilted trailer the crew knew I was because of a dad.” Bambrick does not write, “I was there because of a dad,” and the omitted word gives us pause, makes us reconsider what we might otherwise quickly read, accept, and move on. Through both the narrative content and the careful attention to syntax, Bambrick lays bare and upends our expectations about class, gender, and sexuality in this collection about working on a garbage crew. What for one person might be a lifelong career in manual labor, for another might be a casual summer gig brokered through a family connection. The demands on the body are viewed differently when temporary. Bambrick consistently juxtaposes people, images, and experiences in ways that invite serious inquiry.
I often hear the term reproductive labor used to describe unpaid work like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children, but I hear it less often to describe the labor of bearing children. We call childbirth labor yet not the pregnancy itself. And what’s talked about even less is the work it can take just to reach the point of conception: “I bled through the napkin put there to be bled on … My uterus, a knocked-out tooth / of dark dye on the X-ray.” Many people labor to become pregnant in the first place. The title of Moffett’s book cleverly alludes to two kinds of labor: making a living as earning money, versus making a living as creating new life.
At its core, Seam follows in the tradition of poetry of witness or docupoetics, but bearing witness—especially to atrocity—is also a type of work. A humanitarian labor. This harrowing book documents accounts from women who were raped and tortured during 1971’s Bangladesh Liberation War. Faizullah’s poems and her positionality are both rigorously considered. In “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” the shame arrives when the speaker “begins to write about it in third person, / as though it was that simple / to unnail myself from my own body.” The labor here is not just in the gathering or writing, but in refusing to look away. This is a kind of work that goes far beyond occupation. It is difficult, and it is necessary.
The most vulnerable scene in Materialists, Director Celine Song’s sophomore feature, isn’t a love scene. It’s not when John, a down-on-his-luck artist played by Chris Evans, repeatedly declares his love for Lucy, his ex and matchmaker for New York’s elite played by Dakota Johnson. Nor is it during one of the many dates Harry, Pedro Pascal’s character and a successful private equity man, takes Lucy on.
It’s a scene in the kitchen where Harry tells Lucy he had surgery to make himself six inches taller. He has opened up to her. The pair has revealed the cosmetic “investments” they’ve made to their bodies with the hopes of finding love, Harry by detailing his surgery and Lucy by gesturing to her nose and breasts. Harry is vulnerable, crouching at one point so Lucy can see how short he used to be, turning away from her when he admits he’s afraid he doesn’t know if he’s capable of falling in love.
It’s the one moment in the film where I believe they could end up together. It’s also the scene where she ends their relationship. It’s become too transactional. “Isn’t marriage a business deal?” Harry asks. “Yes, it is,” she responds, “but love has to be on the table.”
You get it. She returns to John, deciding that love, true love, is more important than money. It’s a familiar storyline. Films from Titanic to The Notebook have featured women falling for broke men. But instead of rejoicing in this outcome, audiences felt disappointed. Many a TikToker called the film “broke boyfriend propaganda,” crying “justice for Pedro Pascal.” Filmgoers didn’t want Lucy to choose love over money. They didn’t want her to choose money over love either. They wanted her to fall in love—with a man who happened to be rich.
Song is reluctant to engage with the difficult economic realities that might make a modern day New York single marry for money over love.
They wanted the ending that befalls so many of Jane Austen’s heroines. Song has called on Austen many times in the film’s press tour. “It goes back to Jane Austen, right?” she told Harpers Bazaar of working on a rom com. “Jane Austen was the first to do it. I just feel so lucky and honored to be part of a lineage of a very long-lasting and resonating genre.” To The Nightly, she said, “The question is how can a romantic film, and I believe my movie is so romantic, talk about finance so much? … My answer would always be, well, that’s true in every Jane Austen book.”
But part of why it’s difficult to take the film’s critique of class and matrimony seriously is that unlike Austen—who blames her heroines’ financial precarity squarely on patriarchal structures—Song is reluctant to engage with the difficult economic realities that might make a modern day New York single marry for money over love. Lucy isn’t worried that she and John will be unable to make rent; she’s worried they won’t be able to go to upscale restaurants. John’s lack of wealth not only doesn’t threaten Lucy’s ability to survive in the city, it barely even threatens her lifestyle.
When John and Lucy were first together, they were both struggling actors, but by the time we meet them in the film, Lucy has found professional success. She’s a matchmaker with nine weddings to her name at a high-end firm for wealthy individuals. She lives—somewhat implausibly—by herself in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It’s on the smaller side—a nod to the kind of space she could afford in a wealthy neighborhood—but comfortable, and crucially not a studio. It feels both newer and less cramped than John’s apartment. It’s difficult to earnestly believe Lucy when she says “I’ll be living in your shitty bedroom,” because why wouldn’t theyjust move into her apartment?
Economic precarity—especially in New York City—is real. According to Zillow, rent in the city averages nearly $3,800 per month; it’s fair for people to consider the economics of their romantic matches. Materialists understands this reality, but it doesn’t go so far as to critique it. Other than a passing remark about her debt, Lucy seems to be thriving. While it’s questionable that she can afford her lifestyle on her self-proclaimed salary of $80k before taxes, the film doesn’t really show her struggling. Instead—as with Carrie Bradshw, Monica Geller, and many a New York heroine—we’re meant to suspend our disbelief. Of course she can afford the gorgeous apartment and high end clothes on a modest salary. Don’t do the math.
Since John’s economic precarity doesn’t seem like a true threat to Lucy’s livelihood, viewers are left to assume that the real reason they can’t be together is that she doesn’t want to be the financial breadwinner in her relationship. Throughout the film, she’s ambivalent toward her job: She compares it to working at the morgue or an insurance company, repeatedly tries to quit, and doesn’t care about being promoted.
Lucy aspires to what many have called a “soft-girl” life.Defined by TikToker museumofmia as a desire to “live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover,” soft girls aren’t interested in the kind of corporate, girl boss feminism that dominated the culture in the mid-2000s and the 2010s. They want to engage in self care, meditating and developing elaborate skin care routines. (It’s worth noting: most of these influencers aren’t actually opting out of paid work; they’re content creators).
While the film doesn’t explicitly identify Lucy as a soft girl, her life is aligned with the movement both aesthetically and in her actions. She’s not trying to climb the corporate ladder, but she relishes in luxury—designer clothes, posh apartments, fine dining. It’s a far cry from the romantic comedy heroines of the 90s and early 2000s, who had professional as well as romantic aspirations. Bridget Jones was trying to build a media career while searching for her Mr. Right; Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days tried to leverage her dating column into a career as a serious journalist; You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly wants her indie bookshop to succeed.
In some ways, the soft girl is a rejection of the demands that women “have it all,” an ethos those rom coms of the 90s and aughts espoused. But it is also just one step away from the trad wife. The self-professed goal of many women who identify themselves as soft girls is to become stay-at-home wives, mothers, and girlfriends.
You could read Lucy’s resistance to hustle culture as a criticism of the same capitalist structures that encourage people to view dating as an investment, something the film purports to critique. This seems to be how Song wants us to view it; she has said, in a now viral TikTok from Refinery29, that “so much of feminism has been about [being] anti-corporate and anti-capitalist. And, of course, it was always at the forefront of fighting classism.” But while Song is right that some strains of feminism have fought classism, it’s also important to remember that its objective has been to make sure women can live independently of men both financially and politically.
Lucy aspires to what many have called a ‘soft-girl’ life.
Lucy, by contrast, would rather be dependent on a man than financially independent in her own right.On her dates with Harry, she feels valuable because he treats her to dinner. When she stays over at his apartment, he makes her breakfast while fielding work calls as she lounges in his shirt. Why would she work, the film seems to ask, when her wealthy boyfriend can just go to the office and provide for her? Though Lucy ultimately makes a different choice in choosing John, it’s hard to read this as a rejection of soft girl culture when by the end, she’s still trying to quit her job without having a new position lined up or a clear plan for how she will support herself and John. She doesn’t need to be careerist, but it would be more feminist and more anticapitalist for her to acknowledge she needs to work, even if it’s not personally fulfilling.
This messaging is further reinforced through the film’s portrayal of Lucy’s clients: careerist women who have failed to find love. The film features two montages of clients detailing what they’re looking for in a match: one of men and one of women. Each features absurd requests. One of the men only wants to see women who are 27. A woman is looking for a church-going, conservative lesbian…in New York City. Lucy never loses it on her male clients. She smiles politely while they make their requests—no matter how offensive or outlandish. But to the women, she responds with disdain: “That doesn’t mean you’re due to get one [a husband],” or “you’re not a catch.” These consultations come after a moment when Lucy is having a crisis in her career. Sophie S., a long-term client of hers, has been assaulted by a man who Lucy set her up with, something the film never fully reckons with, and is glossed over as a mere plot point.
It’s telling that women are the only clients Lucy tells off. Men are entitled to get what they want, while the best a professionally-successful woman—the only kind who can afford Lucy’s services—can hope for is to settle for someone who is nice enough, a little short, and won’t physically harm her. In some ways, that’s a reflection of the culture we live in. Men continually ascend into positions of power even when they have harmed women, whereas women’s careers get sidelined by marriage and motherhood. But if the film aims to be critical of the culture that produces these outcomes, the intent is undermined by its apparent judgement of the decisions women make when it comes to both love and money.
Lucy, and her choices, act as a foil to those of Sophie and her other clients, leaving us with a portrayal of two possible paths for a woman’s romantic life. Lucy’s path—a disinterest in work beyond the luxury it gives her access to—leads her to a loving marriage. Sophie’s path—pursuing her career over romantic prospects, the film implies—has left her unable to find love. Sophie made the wrong choice, by Materialists’slogic, and she can only correct her mistake by working with Lucy to find love, even though the matchmaking company put her in a dangerous situation.
The message isn’t an entirely unprecedented one. Women in rom coms have long been expected to place their love lives above their own financial stability and careers.Andie in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days chooses to stay with Ben instead of leaving New York for a job that would let her do some serious reporting. Joe in You’ve Got Mail shuts down Kathleen’s store. When women are professionally successful (think: Margaret Tate in The Proposal), they’re portrayed as shrew-like and in need of a man to soften and feminize them. Yes, these heroines tried to have it all, but if it came down to a choice between love and career, they chose love.
Given that Song was so inspired by Jane Austen, it’s worth asking how Austen was able to skewer classism and the patriarchy while empowering her female characters, and why Materialists falls short in comparison.
Consider Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s most popular novel andthe text Materialists is most clearly referencing. In Pride and Prejudice, we see a variety of marriages take place: Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr. Collins, Lydia Bennet’s to Mr. Wickham, Jane’s to Mr. Bingley, and, of course, Lizzy’s to Mr. Darcy. Jane and Lizzy’s matches are driven by love, but Lydia gets married to avoid scandal. Charlotte marries for economic security. For the most part, Austen isn’t judgemental about these options, nor does she shirk away from the real financial precarity the Bennet sisters will face if they fail to marry. The book is straightforward about their options: losing the house and depending on relatives or becoming governesses for other families, training future girls to marry. Mrs. Bennet’s histrionics and desperate attempts at matchmaking are played for laughs, but they underscore a real fear for her daughter’s well being. There’s no way for them to live well without a rich husband. Lucy doesn’t face that same kind of precarity. Without it, the movie lacks the necessary skewering of societal structures and again leaves it feeling more critical of women’s choices than of the society that puts them in such positions to begin with.
Women in rom coms have long been expected to place their love lives above their own financial stability and careers.
The appeal of a film like Materialists at this current cultural moment is clear—and it’s likely to persist. We’re a generation of voyeurs eagerly reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries. We skyrocketed Tiktoker girl_on_couch’s declaration, “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” into an inescapably viral song. Marriage is increasingly an institution only for the wealthy: only 39 percent of working class adults were married in 2017, compared to 51 percent in 1990, according to reporting from The Guardian, and that gap continues to widen. Social media algorithms are pushing content aimed at getting young women to embrace more traditional gender roles. Materialists’scritique of the classist and patriarchal systems that got us here may fall short, but it’s starting a conversation that’s badly needed.
To succeed at making its desired statement on the capitalist machinations that make people treat finding a spouse like making an investment, the film would need to spend less time luxuriating in the high-end dinners and fine fabrics of Harry’s lifestyle and more time dealing with the economic realities of living in New York that could be, understandably, making Lucy anxious about money. Likewise, it would need to move away from casting dispersions on Lucy’s female clients, for putting their careers first. We deserve a film that is honest about what it costs to live—and what that’s costing us when it comes to love.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
