Elisa Gabbert Helps Us Make Sense of Living in a Time of Disaster

Posted on by Jo Lou

My brother has always loved disasters. Growing up, fights over the remote control were Buffy vs. knowing when a plane crash is most likely to occur (takeoff or landing), or Ally McBeal vs. how the crash will play out depending on where you’re seated (if you choose the extreme front or rear, at least the end will be swift). When we traveled to the U.S. for the first time and visited the Golden Gate Bridge, he looked up and asked: “What happens if this collapses?”

I should clarify: my brother is a chilled out human who is generally curious about how the world works. I, on the other hand, am a highly-strung mess, who has carried the anxieties of the Discovery Channel well into adulthood. And to make matters worse, now all my brother’s favorite TV seems to be coming to life. Floods, AI, wildfires, chemical explosions, and viruses almost feel like a fact of existence. 

As Elisa Gabbert writes, “I wonder if the way the world gets worse will outpace the rate at which we get used to it.” 

Poet, essayist, and Electric Literature columnist Gabbert’s fifth book The Unreality of Memory is an expansive collection of essays that is partly about disaster (9/11, Chernobyl, plagues), but equally about the shifting constructs of society and selfhood through which we mediate the world. From the slow violence of global warming to the fever pitch of Twitter feeds, Gabbert gracefully explores what knowledge means when its contexts are constantly collapsing—and which pieces of information we should focus on in the first place.

She writes: “We believe we need to worry about the right problems, even if we can’t solve them…And with so much that is inaccessible, unknowable, and in flux, we can’t even hold on to whatever we already know.”

I spoke to Gabbert about memory, happiness, doomscrolling, and why solving global warming is harder than eating an airplane. 

Richa Kaul Padte: Please let’s start with crises, because the way we understand and respond to them varies dramatically! Disaster is sudden, shocking, a spectacle: 9/11, Chernobyl, war—all these inspire “a sense of purpose gathering in us, an enemy taking shape.” On the other hand, “we’re poorly equipped to deal with so-called long-emergencies” even if they cause more deaths: famine, climate change, poverty. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I felt galvanized. As the British government’s plea went: “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.” There was something to do. Now, I feel so tired; I just want it all to go away. Do we respond better when we conceive of something as a disaster—and what happens when disaster turns into a long emergency? 

Elisa Gabbert: I think that’s it exactly. I’m hesitant to invoke evolutionary psychology but you could say we evolved to respond to sudden and imminent threats, via fight or flight or freeze (playing dead—which sometimes works!). These bigger and slower disasters require more concerted, organized, social effort, and the fight can be very long indeed, generations long. Often we seem to feel equal to the fight at first. But after some time goes by, and we don’t appear to be making any progress, it’s natural—and on some level even rational—to want to just give up. This seems especially true when we’re dealing with multiple crises at once. It’s like getting attacked by a bear while your house is on fire. (And meanwhile, they’re purging the voter rolls.) I think it helps to find a problem you can focus on and contribute to over the long term—like the activists who have been fighting police brutality for years and will continue to fight, whether or not it’s front-page news—rather than only responding to this or that issue when it’s reached a crisis point. Because we can’t all contribute meaningfully to everything. But we need national and world leaders to do their fucking jobs too. And we need to think of ourselves as part of a society, to have some sense of shared responsibility for human life, for quality of life. 

RKP: Yes, multiple crises, all at the same time! And even so-called “single issues” are actually so huge, right? You explore philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects”—things whose incredibly massive scales make it difficult to wrap our minds around. Like global warming, which “is happening everywhere, all the time, which paradoxically makes it harder to see [than] something with defined edges.” Is breaking up the problem a better approach, or can that also lead to missing the forest for the trees?

EG: This reminds me of a story I heard once (which may not be true) about a man who ate an airplane by breaking it up into tiny pieces. But “solving” a hyperobject problem like global warming is exponentially harder than eating an airplane. You have to break up the problem, but separate efforts might end up undermining each other. And we can’t really foresee the distant consequences of our actions. But we also can’t do nothing! 

RKP: 2020 is revealing much of what we’ve gotten terribly wrong—healthcare, community, slow living, environmental responsibility. Now, at least we can be better. But history isn’t exactly on our side. After the Black Death, you write, people weren’t more cautious. Instead, “sens[ing] a baffling meaninglessness to their being spared,” they were reckless, callous, indifferent. This really scared me, because I recognized the impulse in myself: if I survive, will I live with abandon, lessons and consequences be damned? 

You ask: “Is remembering enough, or is there a right, and a wrong, way to remember?” How can we remember to remember the right way? 

EG: It is so difficult, isn’t? In that same piece, the one about the plague, there’s a part where I say I keep thinking that we don’t deserve to be happy. But I wasn’t writing that essay in the midst of a pandemic! Now I’m not sure—I really mean this, I’m not sure—that I care what we deserve. Some days I think desperately: This is my life, my one life! I do want to be happy—not happy at the expense of others, insofar as I can help it, but I want moments of happiness, even if this time is mostly a struggle. 

The memory thing frightens me too. I wish I had an answer. I do think we have to read and engage deeply with history. There’s an impulse to sort of reject the past wholesale, to throw it all out because it’s tainted with evil, and because it’s overwhelming—the past is really almost infinite, in a sense more infinite than the future. You see this when people just refuse to read books more than X years old. I think that’s the absolutely incorrect approach. You can’t understand it if you don’t actually read it. And anyway we’re evil too, and we are part of history.  

RKP: You talking just now about moments of happiness reminded me of the chapter where you cite Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Happiness Myth, and how we prize certain types of happiness over others. Hecht writes: “we devalue euphoria…because we value productivity,” and this struck me as very true. There is a collective value placed on a long life or a successful career—compared to, say, MDMA or bird watching without a camera. Does happiness feel so elusive (even to those of us with relative privilege) because we define it according to productivity? And how can we change this approach when the premise of productivity—capitalism—is so deeply ingrained?

Crippling panic isn’t going to help us in the long fight, but it’s also dangerous to rationalize yourself out of discomfort.

EG: There seems to be an element of competitiveness to everything, like even happiness becomes competitive happiness. Social media seems to accelerate or exacerbate these tendencies—we’re rewarded more for posting about newness and achievement than the same old routine. (I’ve always found Instagram fairly boring, but it was especially boring during the first few weeks of lockdown, I noticed.) We’re constantly made to second-guess what makes us happy, like it might be the wrong kind of happiness. We should probably all read How to Do Nothing, but I must admit that part of the nothing I’ve been doing is not reading that book yet. 

RKP: Omg that was my favorite book of 2019—it absolutely changed my life! Except now I have to constantly re-read it because I keep forgetting that my life was…changed. 

Something you explore is how “we can’t actually care about everything equally, especially not at the same time.” Our resources are not limitless, so we conserve them. In the past months, I’ve read more novels than news, watched more Netflix than Twitter. It feels good, safe, calm. 

You go on to write: “These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy—they are almost innocent, almost ‘self-care.’ (We’re not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.)” My note in the margins reads: brutal. A month into the pandemic I tweeted: “It is okay to stop looking at coronavirus news. It is okay to stay at home and look at a book, show, cat, or plant instead.” But…is it? 

EG: I think it is okay! I think we have to turn it off sometimes, often, in fact. And if you’re already staying home, scrolling the news all night isn’t protecting you and your neighbors any more than petting your cat would. What’s not okay is ignoring these problems to the point of denial. Crippling panic isn’t going to help us in the long fight, but it’s also dangerous to rationalize yourself out of discomfort by saying, “Everyone is overreacting, there have always been problems, it’s going to be fine.” Because the thing is, if you’re alive right now, it’s because your ancestors managed not to die of AIDS or in Vietnam or in the Holocaust or of smallpox before they had a kid. It’s going to be “fine” for some people—some people will survive the pandemic and likely even climate change. But many others won’t. So it’s kind of incredibly arrogant to think that just because you happen to exist, everything will probably work out in the end.

RKP: You write: “My brain had adapted to high doses of news, and I needed more and more news just to feel something. But quantity wasn’t the problem, I wanted to know what it meant.” I know the feeling, and I keep hoping that the next link, tweet, or idea will somehow reveal the answer to me. Later in the book, while exploring wildly different reporting on the same crime, you write: “Whether it’s piles of evidence or piles of news, you read it through the lens of whatever conclusion you’ve already come to.”

When we doomscroll till 3am, are we trying to understand what everything means—or are we just reinforcing what we already believe it means? Where do we go from here?

Doomscrolling is like the drunk version of confirmation bias. If we want to feel even more guilty or scared or like everything’s fine, it can provide that.

EG: Your question puts me in mind of a line in a short essay by Tom McAllister, written about a day in June of 2018, which he ends in bed, semi-drunk, scanning his phone for terrible news: “I wanted to feel as bad as possible.” It also reminds me of something I read many years ago, so long ago I can’t remember if it was in a magazine article or a novel or what, but it was something about how getting drunk makes you feel more of whatever you were already feeling—it can turn happiness into euphoria, but it can turn sadness into despair. Doomscrolling is maybe like the drunk version of confirmation bias. If we want to feel even more guilty or scared or like everything’s fine, it can provide that. But I might be the wrong person to answer this question—at this point in Trump’s presidency/time-space, I have a very low tolerance for news. 

RKP: My favorite chapter in Unreality is “Vanity Project,” where you write: “[T]he brain seems to build a self-model, a representation of your own body within your mind.” This mental image is then what we use to navigate the world. And amazingly, a study you cite found “people were more apt to ‘recognize’ themselves…when their images had been enhanced to…appear more attractive.” In other words, even though we (especially as women) are credited with low self-esteem, the mental avatars through which we experience the world are often filtered and upgraded.

And I was wondering why we do this. Are we actually that vain, or is the self the ultimate hyperobject—too big to comprehend, and absolutely terrifying when we catch an unfiltered glimpse? 

EG: Yes, the self as hyperobject! Always evasive and partly hidden. I’ve noticed that images or videos of my face look more like I think I look when they’re small—like when you’re in a big enough Zoom meeting that your face is just a tiny part in the grid. I think our self-model is inherently low-res, the way faces don’t have to be perfectly crisply defined in a dream. Did you know that you can see your nose at all times, but your brain just stops processing it, because it’s not useful information? “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” 

It’s Time for the Slow, Aimless Novel to Get Its Due

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Speed has been the grand idol of our time, the focal point of our cultures, the ultimate goal of many a new technological innovation. We are taught to hanker after faster phones, faster cars, faster boats, faster jets. In the utopian future big tech companies would have us imagine, we are transported to our destinations in the blink of an eye, every transition between places, activities, and thoughts lasting a fraction of a second. These companies go out of their way to advertise themselves using jargon that evokes velocity—their operations are  “agile” or “nimble,” and their embedded intellectuals celebrate the arrival of “digital speed revolution,” “turbo capitalism,” and  “hyper-acceleration.”

Given this, it is rather incredible that a virus has ground this rampaging cult of speed to a halt. COVID-19  has spread like wildfire, and reduced the actual pace of our lives to a crawl. In the few weeks after lockdown commenced, it turned out that, when push came to shove, many of those lean and agile and nimble startups queued up cap-in-hand for a government bailout. 

It turns out that our survival is contingent upon slowing down, rather than speeding up.

Indeed, it turns out that our survival is contingent upon slowing down, rather than speeding up: only by reducing the pace of our activity can we minimize the carnage this virus inflicts. The faster the virus spreads, the slower we must be. In epicenters such as New York City in April, only a total lockdown, a total stop, could save lives. 

Trapped in their houses, people started to look around for ways of coping with this new pace of life. If social media feeds and blog posts were to be trusted, many picked fat novels off the shelf, some for the first time in a long while, and got to reading. Relevant titles like Jose Saramago’s Blindness or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera appeared frequently, as well as intimidating 19th-century tomes like The Brothers Karamazov or difficult modernist books like Mrs. Dalloway.

Yet our current predicament is actually best reflected by a type of novel that does not appear to be receiving as much attention. These narratives, forming a body of work collectively described as “loiterature” by literary theorist Ross Chambers, are about being stuck—in place and also narratively. They tell a peculiar kind of story that relies on lack of forward movement, of stalling and dithering, of wandering with no destination. 

In my 20s I traveled extensively across Iran by car. Over the course of those trips I encountered a whole way of living that was neither urban nor rural. It was a road-fork lifestyle. 

The Iranian plateau consists of large swathes of desert. In central states, sometimes roads stretch for hundreds of miles without even a bend. The forks on those roads, which are few and far between, play a large role in making those journeys possible. At the point where one of these roads bifurcate into two diverging paths towards two different destinations, most drivers pull over to refresh themselves. If you travel a lot, after a while you’ll notice that the forks across the country are strikingly similar, even though hundreds upon hundreds of miles lie between them. 

Common to all these junctures are the small communities that have emerged around them over time. You often see local people there, selling fruit and vegetables grown on their nearby farms or gardens. There is always a gas station, a little supermarket and a public toilet. At busier forks you are likely to find a restaurant, its menu limited to a few kinds of chicken and lamb kebab and deezi. Car mechanics often set up shop at forks. Right off to the side of the gas station you can see them in their greasy overalls, whiling away the hours on creaky chairs, smoking under the sun. 

Many tales and fables of Persian literature begin with a diverse crowd gathering around a storyteller, listening to a yarn that stretches far into the night.

This intricate, vast network of highways are dotted with little, interstitial towns inhabited by recurring types of people bears striking resemblances to the caravansaries of ancient Persia, which abounded along the Silk Road, and their ruins can be found everywhere in the central desert of Iran. Persia was the meeting point where merchants from East and West crossed paths and spent long nights under the star-strewn desert sky. We don’t know much about what they did together, but it is safe to assume storytelling was a major component of it. Many tales and fables of Persian literature begin with a diverse crowd gathering around a storyteller, listening to a yarn that stretches far into the night. Naqali, the tradition of performing stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, is the most famous example of that, and is still practiced in coffeehouses in small town Iran. Those fork road caravanserais, some of which neatly superimposed by the fork road towns of today, may have been the forgotten origin of a literary genre.

Road fork culture has evolved in diverse locales, flourishing especially in old empires that heavily relied on trade and the movement of armies. An important example of this is the Ancient Rome, which inspired Chambers to articulate his theory of the loiterly novel. 

In Ancient Rome forks were distinguishable places. Travelers there stopped to visit taverns and gambling joints, seedy hotels and brothels. Apart from the people who worked in those establishments, there were some who practically lived there: idlers with no jobs and no intention of finding one. Ostracized from urban centers,  they spend their lives wandering about the forks and killing times. 

In his book Loiterature, Chambers notes that the Latin word for this kind of place, the meeting point of three roads, is trivia. The denotation of “trivial”  in English and other European languages makes it clear how the dominant Roman culture regarded the dwellers of trivia. This disdain, Chambers contends, rose from the fact that at a trivia, social boundaries broke down. In rigidly stratified Roman society, at a trivia the aristocratic traveler, the local vagabond, the aimless wanderer, and the inveterate  gambler passed time together and participated in the same activities. 

Trivia, therefore, is antithetical to speed, progress and unidirectional movement. According to Chambers’ theory, the “loiterly novel” adopts the structure of the trivia lifestyle. The power of this form, according to Chambers, 

Lies not in not moving but in moving without going anywhere in particular, and indeed in moving without knowing—or maybe pretending not to know—where it’s going. What makes it loiterly is that it moves, but without advancing. It travels, but it travels, so to speak, on the spot, without needing to leave home.

Which brings us to the present moment, the world in quarantine: as it has become impossible to travel physically, people are inventing ways of traveling on the spot, without moving towards a pre-determined destination. 

Chambers offers delightful analyses of many artworks that fit this category, ranging from contemporary movies and memoirs all the way back to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which he considers the founding text of this genre. His decidedly Western gaze, however, misses a perfect exemplar of the loiterly narrative:  One Thousand and One Nights. 

“It is a book so vast,” Jorge Luis Borges said about the Nights, “that it is not necessary to have read,” because those stories are already “a part of our memory.”

Borges’ statement is half-true. Figures of genies and treasure-hunters, sailors fighting sea monsters to reach the shores of magical islands, are so ingrained in the global collective fantasy that we hardly bother to trace them to their origin. But his statement implies the Nights is but a collection of those stories, and the way they are assembled into a book is incidental. That is not the case. The Nights is as meticulously structured as a modern novel, and indeed a lot is lost if the book is not read cover to cover. An analysis of  the frame story of text allows us to appreciate the loiterly nature of this archetypal work. 

The book begins thus: King Shahriar, having been cuckolded by his wife, sets out to take revenge by becoming a plague upon the women of his kingdom. He demands that his vizier bring a young woman to his room every evening, and over the course of the night, he rapes and kills her. When every young woman has either been murdered or has fled town, the vizier turns to his own family. His daughter Shahrzad volunteers herself. She enters the harem not as a sacrificial lamb but rather with a plan to neutralize the king.  As part of her plan, she takes her sister Dunyazad along with her to the palace. 

When night descends, she asks the king to give her some time to put Dunyazad to sleep by telling her a story. The King permits this and while he sits waiting, he overhears the story. Shahrzad’s tale  is so enchanting that the king becomes desperate to know how it ends. But the story doesn’t end before dawn, so the monarch allows Shahrzad to return the next night and finish the story. 

But the story never ends. For a thousand and one nights, Shahrzad keeps her tale alive by digressing and loitering, embarking upon stories within stories within stories, never reaching the end of a narrative line before starting another. She keeps going until the king is completely disarmed, his anger diffused. In Chambers’ terms, the king’s “beeline,” his unidirectional, fast-moving killing mania, runs into the wall of Shahrzad’s “digression” and evasiveness. 

The aspect of Shahrzad’s character that often draws the most attention is her ingenuity and dexterity in storytelling. The frame story makes it clear, however, that she is also a spirited fighter who takes an enormous risk to halt a lethal plague in her community. Also, unlike what is commonly believed, she is not the prisoner of the king, and not just because she volunteered. Indeed, whoever came up with her name in ancient Persia, possibly while spinning out wild tales to mitigate the boredom of long deserts night in a caravansary at a road fork, took pains so the names would reveal the power structure inside the harem: Shahriar, the king’s name, comes from Shahr-dar, or literally, “landowner.” Shahrzad, which is a shorter form of Shahr-azad, literally means “free from land.” 

The list of the Western authors influenced by the Nights is practically endless. Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron, saw it as a representation of how storytelling can restrain a rampaging death machine that functioned as a plague on society, and reworked that idea into a book about an actual plague. 

The Decameron opens in Florence in throes of the Black Death epidemic of 1348 , which, as we read in the introduction, “had some years before appeared in the parts of the East and after having bereft these latter of an innumerable number of inhabitants, extending without cease from one place to another, had now unhappily spread towards the West.” As people fall prey to the disease, three men and seven women leave town for a villa in the mountains. In the pleasant greenery of the countryside they emulate Shahrzad by using storytelling as a survival strategy. They take turns telling stories every night to protect their sanity in lockdown and wait out the plague. 

Boccaccio clearly had the Nights in mind when creating the structure for his book, but the differences between these two stories are as revealing as their similarities. In The Decameron,  stories are allowed to have  beginnings and ends plots come to satisfying resolutions and impart moral lessons. For Shahrzad, resolving a narrative line amounts to a death sentence. She meanders and digresses, jumps from one story to another, postponing again and again the resolution. She faces the double challenge of keeping a story supremely interesting, then interrupting it with an equally enthralling tale, for she cannot afford a moment of frustration for her audience, the murderous man sitting right next to her, his dagger tucked away in the shawl wrapped around his waist. 

In doing so, Shahrzad transcends the “beeline” vs. “digressive” dichotomy Chambers sets up in Loiterature. Indeed, in the Nights, she executes storytelling as web-making, which is another apt metaphor for the loiterly narrative: the spider tries infinite routes, constantly moves and turns.  In weaving the web, it travels to no destination. It moves around the same spot, leaving in its wake a network of a thousand connected little routes with no beginning and no end. In the Nights Shahrzad constructs a very similar web, which also functions as a trap: on the first night Shahriar falls into it like an insect in a spider web, and over the thousand following evenings Shahrzad wraps slender but firm threads around his body, entrapping and disarming him. 

At a time when destinations are health hazards, this type of story teaches us to indulge in a different kind of journey.

The Nights, therefore, is a prime exemplar of a literary tradition that gives us a blueprint for surviving, even flourishing, in lockdown: the loiterly narrative. The texts in that tradition show us how to travel without moving, how to thrive in stasis. At a time when destinations are health hazards, this type of story teaches us to indulge in a different kind of journey, to avoid straight lines, to wander in place. 

In societies where the pace of life has accelerated at a dizzying rate, loiterly novels and their readers constitute a small, eccentric, ex-centric minority who have chosen to shun the cult of speed and traverse the world in the same fashion as Rocinante, Don Quixote’s skinny horse. They move slowly and nonchalantly, unembarrassed by their clumsy gait and occasional wobbling. They linger here, dither there, in no hurry to get anywhere specific. The journey itself is their destination. 

Many of us have gotten addicted to  speed, and now that life has come to a grinding halt, we are not sure how to function. We have spent so much time on expressways we don’t know what to do at trivia. The loiterly storytellers are among the few who do. From Thousand and One Nights to this day, countless storytellers have stepped off the expressway and sought the truth of their fiction at forks. While we were busy upgrading our gadgets to catch up with the speed of the world, they have been anachronistically honing their horsemanship to navigate craggy off-road tracks, to wander around the forks of modern life.  

The loiterly narratives have always comprised a subset of what is known as “experimental” literature, continuing a rich but modest existence on the margins of the mainstream. The global quarantine should be their moment. We need to learn to have new journeys, and for that we need new maps, new conceptualizations of place, new appreciation for pauses and for forks. The loiterly narratives can provide a blueprint for the shift of mindset required by life in quarantine, a survival manual for a world whose speedometer has dropped to zero. 

The Past Doesn’t Hurt When You Don’t Remember It

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“When Eddie Levert Comes”
by Deesha Philyaw

“Today is the day,” Mama announced, as she did every day when Daughter came to her room with the breakfast tray.

“Good morning, Mama.” Daughter set the tray on the padded bench in front of Mama’s vanity. She squinted at the early morning sun shining through the thin curtains. Mama’s vanity was covered with powders and bottles of fragrances that hadn’t been touched in months.

Mama brushed past Daughter without a word. She opened a chifforobe drawer and took out a navy-and-white-striped short-sleeved blouse. She carried the blouse over to her bed and placed it above a light-blue cotton skirt with an elastic waistband, smoothing down the fabric of both items with her hands, as if ironing. She frowned.

“Where did all my beautiful things go?” she asked Daughter, the room, the air. “My beautiful wrap dresses and my pencil skirts? I want to look my best for him. He’s coming today, you know. Where are my lovely sheer blouses and my pantsuits? Have you seen them? Did you move them from my closet? Are you stealing from me?”

“No, Mama,” Daughter said.

“I bought all of those things with my employee discount at Marshall Field’s department store. You have no right to take them from me.”

Daughter didn’t remind Mama that Marshall Field’s didn’t exist anymore, and that she hadn’t worked there since the eighties. Instead she gently led Mama away from the bed and into her recliner so she could eat. Mama’s appetite was still solid. The doctor said that was a good thing, relatively speaking.

Mama chattered on as she busied herself buttering toast and adding ketchup to her eggs, something Daughter had always thought gross even though she liked both ketchup and eggs.

“He’s coming today.” Mama said between chews. Droplets of ketchup dotted the white ribbon on the front of her nightgown. Irrationally, this irked Daughter, and she made a mental note to put some stain remover on it before throwing it in the wash. Easily irked and forever trying to make order out of chaos, she was indeed her mother’s daughter—the mother before this current mother. In some ways, Daughter preferred this current mother. In the oblivion of her mind, Mama was kinder—accusations of theft notwithstanding—and her needs were simpler.

Mama dabbed at her mouth with a paper towel. “Delicious. Thank you,” she said in Daughter’s general direction.

“You’re welcome, Mama.” Daughter was still getting used to such courtesy. She headed for the door. It was almost time for her first house showing of the day and for the home nurse to arrive and relieve her.

“You can come right back for this tray,” Mama called after her. “I got to get ready. He’ll be here shortly. Make sure you let me know when he’s at the door, hear?”

Daughter heard, but she stood silent with her hand on the doorknob, her back to Mama.

“Did you hear me?” Mama’s voice took on an edge of pleading. “Today’s the day.”

Daughter left the room and shut the door tight behind her.

As a kid during summer breaks from school, Daughter would sometimes whisper her real name to herself, just so she wouldn’t go months at a time without hearing it. Everyone except her teachers followed Mama’s lead and never called her by her name, always “Daughter,” as if she existed only in relation to her mother, to her function in the family. Daughter. Housekeeper. Cook. Babysitter. Nurse. Slave. That’s what she felt like. Daughter, could you do this? Daughter, could you do that? Which translated into: You will do this. You will do that. Without question or complaint, or else she got slapped. Meanwhile her brothers Rico and Bruce had been called by their given names and did only what they pleased.

Not much changed in their adulthood, only that Bruce was dead. Drugs. Rico, his wife, and kids lived on the other side of town. Daughter had to shame him into coming over on occasion to give her a break at least, even if he didn’t care about spending time with Mama.

“Yo, she’s gotta stop saying, ‘Today is the day,’ ” Rico had complained to Daughter the first time Mama told him about Eddie Levert. “I don’t want to keep hearing that crazy shit over and over again.”

“I listen to it day in and day out,” Daughter snapped. “You want to trade places?”

“You could hire someone full-time—”

“Or you could act like a son who gives a damn.”

Rico crossed his arms and sighed. At forty, he still had a baby face and a perpetual pout.

“I shouldn’t have to pay someone to sit with her when you’re right here,” Daughter had said. “I know she wasn’t a perfect mother. But she is our mother.”

“Don’t lecture me about her,” Rico said. Daughter knew that Mama didn’t like Rico’s wife, and the feeling was mutual, so she’d never gotten to know her grandkids. But Daughter had never asked Rico what it was like for him those two years between when she’d left home and when he left to join the air force. They had all been grieving Bruce’s death in their own way. But whatever life with Mama was like for Rico after Daughter moved out, she couldn’t imagine it being worse than what she endured: Mama had never laid a hand on Rico or Bruce.

“Fine. I won’t lecture,” Daughter had said. “Just . . . if Mama wants to talk about Eddie Levert, let her. She ain’t hurtin’ nobody, Rico.”

At least not the way she used to.

The Bible says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” In Mama’s case, in her old age, she never spoke of the Bible. Instead she preached the gospel of the coming of Eddie Levert, lead singer of her favorite group back in the day, the O’Jays.

Both Eddie and Mama, son and daughter of the South, had had to bury their children, something even Daughter, who had never had kids, understood as especially cruel. Perhaps Mama had followed Eddie’s life and career over the years and felt a special, unshakable bond with him.

In one of the family photo albums in Daughter’s basement, there was a Polaroid picture of Mama with Eddie, taken in the seventies when the O’Jays came to town. Mama had somehow gotten backstage after the concert—Daughter had never been told the details—and took the picture, which Eddie signed. In the picture, Mama wore a low-cut, fire-red dress that hugged all her curves. Her hair, dyed a brassy reddish brown, had been hot combed and then curled into Farrah Fawcett flips. If not for her full nose and lips, she could’ve passed as a Farrah lookalike, as she was barely darker. Eddie was as dark as Mama was light. He wore a white suit, his chest bare, lapels wide. With his arm wrapped tight around Mama’s tiny waist, Eddie grinned big at the camera. Mama grinned big at him. As a child, Daughter would pull out the album from time to time and stare at the photo, proof that Mama had once been happy.

When Daughter moved out at eighteen, it was partly because she feared Mama’s unhappiness was contagious and partly because she was tired of being everyone’s maid. Once she was out of the house, Daughter didn’t walk away completely. There were no more slaps, no more wounding words, and from the outside looking in, Mama and Daughter could’ve been mistaken for close.

One Friday evening, Daughter and Mama sat at the kitchen table waiting for Rico to arrive. Daughter had shamed him into coming over for a few hours so she could go out to dinner with Tony, an old friend from high school. Tony stopped by from time to time to take care of things Daughter needed taken care of around the house. Including Daughter. The year before, after Mama had a second stroke and the doctor diagnosed her with vascular dementia, it was Tony, not Rico, who had helped Daughter pack up Mama’s belongings and move her into Daughter’s house.

When Tony arrived, Mama told him, “Today is the day. Eddie is coming.”

Tony smiled at Mama and said, “Okay, young lady. I see you!”

Mama beamed and stood up to show Tony her outfit. “This is all I could find in that chifforobe to wear.” She cut her eyes at Daughter, who just shook her head. “Do you think he will like it?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am!” Tony said, “If I was a few years younger, Eddie would have some competition on his hands.”

“Oh, go on!” Mama said, blushing.

“It’s been so long since I seen him,” Mama said. With one hand, she tapped her tapered nails against the tabletop. With the other, she scratched her head. Daughter felt negligent; Mama was overdue for a wash and condition. Daughter would call her friend Tami in the morning to see if she could squeeze Mama in at her salon.

When Rico finally arrived, forty-five minutes late, Mama clapped and said, “There’s my baby boy!”

Rico kissed Mama on the cheek, but rolled his eyes when she told him Eddie was coming. “Why is she scratching her head like that?” he asked Daughter with entirely too much bass and accusation in his voice.

“Don’t.” Daughter hissed at him in response. She turned to Mama. “Mama, Tony and I are going out. Rico is going to stay with you. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” Mama said to the air. And to Tony: “You have a good time, young man.”

Inside Tony’s car, Daughter wept openly, and he rubbed her back and let her.

Once she had calmed to just sniffling, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Tony asked.

“For . . . all of that. I don’t know where that came from.”

“Maybe it came from the fact that you taking care of your mama and she doesn’t even know who you are. But then Rico comes in, doesn’t lift a finger to help without you asking, and it’s all love from your mama. I’m just surprised it took you this long.”

Daughter sobbed again. Tony started the car and began driving. “Dinner can wait,” he said. “We can just drive, if you want.”

Daughter nodded. “You know, even after I moved out, I was still there for her. After Bruce died, she threw herself into everything—children’s church, Girl Scouts, Sunday School. And I drove her anytime she needed a ride. I took her to the grocery store every other week. I made sure she didn’t spend Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving alone. Me! Not Rico. And now I’m taking care of her. Even after . . . even after how things were for me growing up. Trying to let bygones be bygones. I was there for her. And I still am. But for all she knows, I’m just another home nurse.

“And I try not to be an asshole like Rico about the whole Eddie Levert thing, but she cares more about that man than she does me! Every single day, it’s the same thing. Sometimes I just want to scream, ‘He’s not coming! Ever!’ ” Daughter exhaled. “Is that terrible?”

Tony stroked his beard and tilted his head from side to side, like he was working out a kink in his neck.

“What?” Daughter asked.

“I don’t want to speak out of turn . . .”

“Just say it.”

“First, you need a break. And I don’t mean this, us going out for dinner. You need a real break. A vacation. But more than that . . .” Tony sighed. “Look, I don’t know what all went down when you were growing up. But you gotta make peace with it. I know that’s easier said than done. But I think you have to find a way.”

That’s all I’ve ever done, Daughter thought but didn’t say. Find a way to keep from upsetting Mama, find a way to keep Rico out of Mama’s hair, find a way to get away from Mama, find a way to take care of herself with no help from Mama. Work low-wage job after low-wage job until she became a Realtor and found she had a knack for selling, buying, and flipping houses. And now a second job: take care of Mama. Daughter cursed under her breath.

“Like I said, I don’t know what all went down. . .” Tony said.

“I’ll tell you,” Daughter said. “But let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

People in the neighborhood used to say that Mama kept pushing out babies until she got the color right. Daughter, her middle child, was darker than Bruce, the oldest, despite Daughter’s father being lighter than Bruce’s. Mama’s third and last child, Ricardo, called Rico, fathered by a Puerto Rican musician who passed through one summer, was a buttery yellow baby boy with green eyes and sandy hair. His tight curls, thick lips, and broad nose meant that he could never pass. But passing wasn’t the point. From what Daughter could piece together between her own observations and what she overheard Mama telling her friends, the point was that Rico had Mama’s color. So for once the genetic dice had rolled in favor of the light-bright girl who believed dark niggas fucked the best of all. She played a kind of DNA roulette every time she brought one into her bed. And then Mama got saved. It happened one Easter Sunday—they only went to church on Mother’s Day, Christmas Eve, and Easter. On Mother’s Day, Mama would wear a white flower pinned to her dress—Bruce called it The Dead Mama flower—and spend all day before and after church in her bedroom sobbing and missing her mother.

Daughter, Bruce, and Rico had few memories of their grandmother, a well-dressed, white-looking Black woman who had disowned their mother for having children out of wedlock. But she did come to visit a few times when they were growing up, always bearing bundles of toys, a crisp twenty- dollar bill for each of them, and for Mama, withering words about how she was living outside the will of God. Even as a child, Daughter understood her mama’s tears on Mother’s Day. She understood how your heart was still connected to your mama, even if she hurt you sometimes.

At first Daughter and her brothers felt joyful after Mama got saved, even though they didn’t fully understand why. They were twelve, ten, and eight years old, and the best they could figure is that the church ladies who surrounded their mother as the pastor prayed had done some sort of magic. Mama had walked to the front of the church weeping during the altar call, but left the service smiling, her arms wrapped around her children, holding them close as they walked home. Mama’s mama had died suddenly the year before—Daughter had overheard Mama say the word aneurysm, but didn’t know what it meant. She’d also overheard Mama tell her friend Miss Lajene that she’d wished she’d gotten right with God before her mama died.

Unfortunately the zeal of the newly converted is bewildering to the children of the newly converted. One Saturday night, you’ve got every blanket in the house draped over your head to drown out the sound of your mother’s headboard banging against your bedroom wall as she hollers her soon-to-be-ex-best friend’s husband’s name. And the next Saturday night, she’s snatching the softened deck of playing cards from your hands because “Games of chance are from the devil!”

Daughter, with the logic of a ten-year-old, thought she could understand how gin rummy might be from the devil, seeing as how the name of the game had gin in it. But what was wrong with “Knuckles” or “I Declare War,” her and her brothers’ other favorite games?

Some things changed about Mama A.C. (After Church, as Daughter thought of her). Like banning cards and men from the house. But some things didn’t change. She still told Bruce and Rico to shut their mouths—and Daughter to shut her Black mouth—if they talked too loudly when her stories were on.

And the church was no match for Eddie Levert. The O’Jays were still Mama’s favorite group, and Eddie Levert was still her favorite in the group. Mama B.C. (Before Church) would tell her girlfriends Miss Nancy and Miss Lajene, “Eddie Levert can have me anytime, anywhere, and anyway he want it, honey! You hear me?” And they would all fall out laughing.

Mama B.C. played O’Jays albums on Friday nights after dinner, if she didn’t have a date or a card party to go to. She’d close her eyes, swing her hips, and sing along with the music. Her dance partners—a Kool cigarette and a glass of whisky, on the rocks. Johnnie Walker Red was her drink of choice.

On those Friday nights, Rico played DJ, changing the albums for Mama, while Daughter played bartender, adding ice and more liquor as needed, before Mama could ask for it. It was like a nightclub for one, with Mama getting lost in love songs and crying by night’s end. Bruce would be out in the streets somewhere, staying out long enough to sneak in after Mama passed out on the couch, but before she woke up in the middle of the night to check on all of them and drag herself to bed.

As they entered their teen years, Bruce was the one out smoking dope, stealing, and brawling over crap games. But it was Daughter whom Mama warned, “Don’t be out there showing your color!” on the rare occasions Daughter went out in the evenings.

Mama A.C. still spent her Friday nights with Eddie Levert, and she needed Daughter around to entertain Rico. Without a cigarette and a glass of whisky, Mama was free to wave her hands in the air as she sang, much like she did at church. In both places, Mama’s nightclub for one and church, she was moved by the spirit to sway and eventually cry.

But over time, Daughter couldn’t discern any joy in those tears. Mama’s friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lajene, remained “in the world,” as Mama would say. So Mama distanced herself and soon lost touch. And the ladies at church who had surrounded Mama at the altar that Easter Sunday stopped calling after Mama finished the new member’s class. Their work was done. They had led the poor unwed mother of three to the Living Water, as church folk referred to Jesus. But she wasn’t their kind of people.

Years later Daughter wanted no part of the church or brown liquor because they had both made her mama cry.

When Daughter and Tony returned home from Red Lobster, Daughter paused at Mama’s bedroom door and motioned for Tony to keep going down the hall to her bedroom. She cracked the door open just enough to see Mama curled up beneath her thin blanket and hear her snoring lightly. She closed the door and stopped to wash her hands in the bathroom once again, convinced they still smelled like crab.

In her bedroom, she found Tony already beneath her comforter. She undressed and slid in beside him. They had fallen into an easy groove with each other when Tony first started coming around, a decade earlier. He was thirty-two then, had been twice divorced, and was lonely. Daughter had never seen marriage or children in her future, had always been independent, and preferred her own company. Still, she had needs. Tony made her laugh and made her think. He was a generous lover and he was handy. For Daughter, that was enough.

Daughter tried to stay in the moment, to savor how alive her body felt next to Tony’s. But her thoughts wandered to Mama. Always, Mama. Tony gripped her tighter and stroked her faster, as if he knew he was losing her. The headboard banged against the wall, and Daughter remembered how Mama B.C. didn’t seem to care if her children heard her having sex. But the headboard banging had stopped when Mama found Jesus.

There’s an old saying: mothers raise their daughters and love their sons. But who had ever loved Mama, besides her children? Despite her devotion to the church and chaste living, Mama had never had that peace that passes all understanding that was supposed to be yours when you invited Jesus into your heart. Nor did she have that joy, unspeakable joy, promised in the Scriptures. What Mama had was the love of Jesus—whose touch, Daughter imagined, was too ephemeral to quench anything—a quieter, more passive lover than the men she brought into her bed, but who nevertheless demanded everything.

The next morning after breakfast, Daughter asked Tony to sit with Mama for a little while.

Instead of calling the hair salon, she ran to Target and bought tearless baby shampoo and conditioner and everything else she would need to do Mama’s hair herself.

After Tony left, Daughter explained to Mama that she was going to wash her hair. Mama could still shower alone and dress herself, so Daughter, wanting to respect her privacy, asked whether she would mind leaning over the kitchen sink.

“Well . . . I don’t know.” Mama patted her hair. It was mostly white now, too thin for the Farrah Fawcett flips, but still hung to her shoulders. “Do you think Eddie would like it? He’s coming today, you know.”

“Yes, Mama. I know.” Daughter swallowed the lump in her throat. “And I think Eddie would want you to let me wash your hair over the sink.”

“Well, all right then.”

It took a few tries to get the water temperature just right. Daughter had lots of towels on hand so Mama could pause and wipe her face whenever she needed to.

When they finished washing and conditioning, she took Mama back to Mama’s room to change into a dry shirt. Then Daughter sat Mama at her vanity table and stood behind her to blow-dry her hair. Mama smiled into the mirror.

As Daughter parted Mama’s hair into sections, taking her time to oil each section and massage the scalp, Mama sighed and leaned back into Daughter’s middle.

“You know, Mama,” Daughter began. “Eddie called and told me he’s going to be late.”

“Oh, no!” Mama said.

“But he doesn’t want you to worry. He wants you to know you’re in good hands with me. He said, ‘Now you take good care of her until I get there, Daughter.’ ”

“Daughter?”

“Yes, Mama. It’s me. Daughter.”

“And what else did Eddie say?”

“He said . . . ‘You tell her I’m coming and take good care of her.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir. I will tell her.’ ”

“You always were such a polite girl,” Mama said.

She reached up and patted Daughter’s hand. “You remember me, Mama?”

“Sure I do!”

Daughter began to tear up, but also couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t know whether Mama remembered her. But it was enough to know that Mama wanted her to believe she did.

She continued massaging Mama’s scalp. “Does that feel good?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” Mama said, over and over until it turned into humming, a random tune Daughter didn’t recognize.

Daughter looked at the two of them in the mirror. Light and dark, but an otherwise matching set of round faces and big, brown eyes stared back at her. Mama’s scalp was still pale, but the rest of her had darkened over time. She was still lighter than a paper bag, she might’ve bragged, if her mind still fixated on such things.

“Mama, a long time ago, you were real hard on me. Real hard. And I don’t know if you remember any of that. Part of me hopes you remember, because I can’t forget. But then, if you remember, I wish you would apologize, or at least recognize. . .”

Mama kept humming. Then she said, “You know when Eddie sang about having a lot of loves, I was one of them loves.” Mama poked at her chest. “Me. Lil nobody me.” Mama chuckled to herself. “Eddie loved me once upon a time. That one night.”

“You’re not a nobody, Mama.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, who am I, then?” Mama sounded so lucid, it startled Daughter. As if someone else had come into the room with them.

“You’re . . . someone who can’t give me what I need. But you’re not nobody.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Daughter twisted Mama’s hair into a single braid. Then she laid out a new turquoise sundress on the bed for her to put on.

“I’ll step out and let you get dressed. And I’ll bring your lunch when I come back.”

“That would be nice,” Mama said. “I want to be ready when Eddie comes. Today’s the day.”

When Daughter returned with Mama’s lunch tray, Mama was in her recliner, smoothing her hands over the sundress dress, smiling. “I look beautiful,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” Daughter said. She placed the tray on Mama’s lap.

Mama picked up the Polaroid next to her sandwich plate. She stared at it for a moment before putting it down and picking up her sandwich.

Daughter sighed and played the song she’d cued up on her cell phone. As the opening chords of the O’Jays’ “Forever Mine” filled the room, she expected some flicker of recognition from Mama, a smile or something. But there was nothing. Even when Eddie came in on the third verse, it didn’t seem to register with Mama that this was the same song she had quoted earlier. The song played on. Daughter wasn’t sure whether Mama was even listening. Mama ate her sandwich and fruit salad, the Polaroid forgotten.

And then, as Eddie begged his lover to stay, Mama picked up the photo and began to sing along with him, her voice strong and certain.

A Self-Destructive Woman in Her 20s Looks For Love, Sex, and Bad Influences

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Sarah Gerard’s latest novel, True Love, Nina Wicks navigates the late Obama era in a maelstrom of narcissism and malcontentment, the formation of her creative identity informed by a dark political backdrop, a hatred for the gig economy, and a string of toxic relationships.

Nina says that “self-destruction is [her] trump card.” This is true for her both physically—she’s cut herself, had an eating disorder, been addicted to pills—and emotionally, between dating a man whose solo art show consists of trash-filled tupperware (Seth), cheating on that boyfriend with her editor (Brian), and getting involved with a filmmaker who still lives with his parents (Aaron). But these harrowing relationships give Nina a certain focus: “A partner is a conduit for conducting a certain dimension of one’s experience, a way to collage and create oneself, like a walking, breathing search engine: it’s expedient to have one, affords one’s life content and depth and authority and direction.” 

Nina’s platonic and familial relationships come with their own degrees of toxicity. Her emotionally detached mother lives with a polycule in a nudist colony (“I don’t have the space or the time to clean for you,” she says when Nina wants to visit); her best friend, Odessa, harbors her own grievances against Nina (“I didn’t say you don’t work hard. I work harder than you do”). Still, Nina tries to love the people in her life in the ways that she knows how. “I’m not a sociopath,” she says. “I’m in pain. We all are.”

Gerard’s first novel, Binary Star, was named among the Best Books of 2015 by NPR and Vanity Fair and the Best Fiction of 2015 by BuzzFeed; her 2017 essay collection, Sunshine State, was a New York Times Critics’ Best Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a NYLON Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, among many other accolades.

We spoke on the phone in early June, as protests following the murder of George Floyd took place throughout the country. From our respective quarantines in New York and Florida, we discussed privilege, political intersections, self-delusion, and art.

Deirdre Coyle: True Love takes place in the years leading to Trump’s election, with references to situations like the Flint water crisis and Elliot Rodger’s shooting spree, giving the novel a sinister backdrop. How did the politics of those years affect the way you wrote Nina’s relationships?

Sarah Gerard: There are a spectrum of relationships in the novel, and not only romantic relationships, but also friendships—especially the kind that I learned a lot from in my early 20s—and Nina’s relationship with her mother. I was looking for a way to make the novel feel more expansive than just—how do I say this?—I was looking at all the different kinds of influences working upon these relationships. How is the personal political, to fall back on a cliché? I don’t want to give away the end of the novel, but the precipitating event in one of these relationships is Trump’s election. And that was true for me, too, in my relationship at the time when he was elected. I mean, it was one of the precipitating events in the end of one of the most life-altering relationships of my life, significant relationships of my life. I think a lot of people felt that way, too, felt that pressure on their relationships when he was elected, because it exposed so much of what had been subterranean before that. These different tensions in people’s relationships. All of that was brought very rapidly to the surface, and people had to confront these really uncomfortable things about each other.

Some of that, in the book, is gendered, some of that is more atmospheric frustration of Nina’s with, for instance, the Florida state government in the beginning of the novel, that has allowed the fracking that has caused this red tide—this infection of red tide—that is wrapping all the way around the state. Phosphorus mining, too. So some of that is a broader frustration of Nina’s, but some of that is a conflict that she has to confront in her life every day, like in her relationship with [her boyfriend] Seth, and his kind of backwards ideas about how she should be using her body, just to give two examples. Some of it was like, how do I make this novel feel more expansive, and some of it was like, how can I dissect what’s happening between people?

DC: I hadn’t known about the red tide. Very intense.

SG: Yeah. In the book, [Nina] compares it to a fungal infection of the ocean. She says, there’s no solution, because you can’t just Monistat the ocean. So some of it’s baked into the setting, too. In the imagery, you have a number of different modes, or intersections, political intersections happening. The kind of white, patriarchal, capitalist mindset that has given the ocean a fungal infection. It was kind of a joke, but also kind of dark humor.

DC: At different points, Nina finds herself involved with a struggling artist, a struggling screenwriter, an editor, a musician. I struggled trying to decide which of her romantic partners’ work I hated the most. Did you have any favorites or least favorites among these men’s creative endeavors?

SG: Oh, god. I have a soft spot for the script that she begins writing with Aaron [the screenwriter] because it’s so earnest, and it’s also the first time that she is working collaboratively with a partner. I was exploring this spectrum of dynamics in creative partnerships. Some of it is this erotic tension, like she feels with Seth [the artist], and some of it is this trance-like worship relationship, where he’s almost like this oracle figure at the beginning, and she is his devotee. But with Aaron it’s much more a common ground where they begin, and they’re trying to help each other and fix each other, so I feel a lot of tenderness towards that. They want to get off the ground together, and they learn a lot from each other, and they grow up a lot together, even though the dynamic becomes explosive. But in the beginning, that project feels very tender to me. 

The one that I laugh at the most might be either [her friend] Jared’s benches, or Seth’s tupperware show. Brian, the editor, I don’t know—it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek commentary on predatory editors, maybe. Because his work is not really his own;  he doesn’t really have a project of his own. He’s very parasitic.

DC: We don’t see anything he’s making, just what he’s telling Nina that she should be doing.

There are so many reasons why you might stay in a situation that’s not always happy. People can get used to a lot.

SG: Which says a lot, too, about what she might need from that relationship. She’s very hungry for approval at that stage. Also, I think every character is a line of inquiry, and Nina is very much looking for her creative voice via these different [characters]. She’s kind of a tourist in other people’s creative practices, as she finds her own voice. What was your favorite project?

DC: Oh, I had a hard time. I mean, the trash in the tupperware is just classic. Because it’s so annoying, and because you see him taking advantage of this opportunity he’s being given. He’s inconveniencing all these different people who are trying to help him. In that way, it was more annoying because it’s so self-involved and ungrateful.

SG: Yeah, remarkably. Did it remind you of anyone you know?

DC: Nobody too close to me—fortunately I guess. But it feels like something that I’ve witnessed in action. I think we’ve all been adjacent to that kind of person, in some way.

SG: It’s just a classic example of male entitlement. Especially recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude. I mean, I’m glad I have a safe place to live right now, I’m glad that I can practice my art right now, grateful that I have books to read right now, and people that I get along with, that want to help me, and keep me safe, and protect me. Just how basic it is that not everybody has this laundry list of things that I have, and so. But I think some of that, too, comes from being forced to confront those things, you know? Confront my privilege. Obviously that’s not something that Seth has ever been made to do.

DC: After hurting someone, Nina often refers to herself as “caring,” “selfless,” or “not a sociopath” (my favorite). Relatable! I know this is an unfair question to ask any author, but would you consider Nina a reliable narrator?

SG: Oh, no. No. Nina is very self-deluded and, you know, I think she is really trying. She wants to be a good person. She does really care about the people in her life, and sometimes rationalizes what she’s doing because she knows she’s fucked up but doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And also because she has been hurt as well, and often is reacting to—how do I say this—repetitive trauma. Doesn’t trust people very easily, expects people to hurt her—and they do—but also really, really longs for someone to protect her, and really wants to trust someone, and really wants to think the best of people. She really likes giving people the benefit of the doubt. She thinks that if she’s generous enough, people might love her in return, and for some reason, [she] hasn’t learned yet that that’s not always going to happen. So no, she’s not a reliable narrator, because A) she’s pretty naive, B) she’s pretty good at lying to herself, and C) she feels a lot of shame and she really wants to hide from that feeling. So that entails telling herself a different narrative, and it might not always align with the truth. She also cares a lot what other people think of her, especially Seth, especially Brian. Wants to be the person that that person wants. She’s maybe not reliable, but hopefully she’s relatable.

DC: Well, I thought so. When she’s talking about having a partner, she says that “it’s expedient to have one, affords one’s life content and depth and authority and direction.” I feel like most people can relate to that on some level. I think we’ve all been there. I mean, maybe not, maybe I’m just speaking for myself.

Some of the poor choices [my protagonist] makes are in search of privacy, solitude, a sense of her individual self.

SG: No, no, no. There are so many reasons why you might stay in a situation that’s not always happy; that’s one of them. People can get used to a lot. Especially if they don’t know how much better it could be. And she’s pretty young, you know, she’s in her 20s. I put up with so much shit in my 20s because I had not learned yet that I could expect more. I hadn’t learned how to give myself a more comfortable life yet, how to disappoint people and be okay with it and move on. Let go with gratitude. We date people in our 20s that—well, we’re still finding ourselves, and they’re still finding themselves, you know? Or, in Nina’s case, we’re still finding ourselves, and they might be at a slightly later stage in their life, and more authoritative. So she’s learning. One of the things she has to learn is to let go when something’s not working, and that a meaningful relationship is much more than just a quick fix.

DC: Someone to split the rent with.

SG: Yeah, no. God, no. That’s a huge mistake. But sometimes you don’t know how to solve a problem otherwise yet. Maybe this person is solving it for you right now.

DC: In one of my favorite scenes, Nina looks at Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott painting while telling her therapist, “I want everyone to leave me the fuck alone.” Truly a mood. I found her desire for solitude in a living situation, with Aaron, where she can’t physically have solitude particularly relatable during quarantine, when a lot of us are not in our space, or we are in our space and we can’t leave our space. How do you think Nina would fare under quarantine? 

SG: Ooh. Not well. Well, is she living alone, or is she living with Aaron? (Laughs.)

DC: Good question. I mean, I’m sure if she were still living with Aaron, that would not be good.

SG: Yeah, I think it really depends. Who is she quarantining with? Let’s start there. I think if she’s quarantining with [her friend] Claudette, she’d be fine. Or even Odessa, they’d find equilibrium in some way. They’d get through it somehow.

DC: So if she’s just not with a romantic partner, she’d do better, you think?

SG: Yeah, I think it depends. I mean, the book is a contained world. And of course, Nina’s life extends beyond the book, and the book ends on a cliffhanger, kind of, so who knows what happens afterward? At this stage, she might be fine. But in the book, she’s already in some ways quarantining with Aaron, and we can see how it goes. Some of the poor choices she makes are in search of privacy, solitude, a sense of her individual self, you know? Some separateness that she’s unable to find for reasons of income, her living situation, her interpersonal relationships, et cetera. 

Actually, Patty [Yumi Cottrell, Gerard’s partner] and I were talking about this earlier, too. Who has the luxury right now of living alone, or living with people of their choice, you know? It says a lot about the way society is organized. And the stratification of class across racial lines and lines of ability, gender, sexual orientation. But in particular, right now, looking at issues of race, people are dying in higher numbers in Black communities than any other, and that’s not an accident. 

I actually think Nina might be fine during quarantine because, you know, she does have [her grandmother] Nana, and Nana might actually just fly her down. Fly her somewhere else. Maybe she could. Nina is a very privileged person in certain ways. Odessa points this out to her at one point, too. Like, ‘how do you like your fancy college degree that your Nana paid for?’ It doesn’t feel good to hear that, but it’s a very fair question. And actually, some of the reason that Nina is in that situation she’s in—in that apartment with Aaron—is because she’s too proud to ask her Nana for financial help, and [Nana has] been there all along. It’s important to recognize that. So she might be just fine during quarantine. Good question. I’m glad we dissected that.

White People Need to Reckon With Atticus Finch’s Racism

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

When Go Set a Watchman, the controversial supposed sequel (or prequel, or first draft) of To Kill a Mockingbird, was released in 2015, I thought of the babies. In the novel, which was also haunted by irregularities around its release, righteous lawyer Atticus Finch is shown many years after the events of Mockingbird as an outright racist. The name Atticus first cracked the list of the top 1,000 most popular baby names in the United States in 2004, when the generation of white people brought up with To Kill a Mockingbird as part of the American public school canon started having babies of their own. How awkward for those kids, I thought, to bear this problematic name. Of course, I have no way of knowing exactly how many of these babies named Atticus are white, but I suspect as with all things relating to racism in America, many Black people have long known that something was rotten in To Kill a Mockingbird and have just been waiting for the rest of us to catch up. “I read To Kill a Mockingbird [in school],” said Barnard historian Dr. Kimberley Johnson in a 2015 Vox piece on Watchman, “I was the only black person in my class, and it was a horrific experience.” 

I had assumed the name would drop off in popularity after Watchman was released, but that didn’t happen. In 2014, Atticus was the 369th most popular baby name, and it’s gotten more popular every year since. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, it ranked 326th. More than one thousand American babies were given the name Atticus in 2018—which is the most babies named Atticus of any year since 1960 when To Kill a Mockingbird was published. 

As a nation, we’ve decided to pretend that Go Set a Watchman doesn’t exist. Or anyway, white people have. Whenever I’ve brought Watchman up in casual conversation with other white people it’s as if I’ve blasphemed: I’ve heard lamentations, denials, howls of dismay. People hate books for plenty of reasons—because they were required reading in a long-ago English class, because they were written by some divisive figure, because they’re about sparkly vampires—but the way that people hate Go Set a Watchman is different. I can’t think of another book that destroys what its predecessor had come to represent the way Go Set a Watchman destroys the fantasy of Atticus and white goodness. But fantasy is all it ever was. The Atticus of Go Set a Watchman is the same Atticus we knew in To Kill a Mockingbird, and if there was any question in 2015, there should be none now. In some ways, there are few books more appropriate than Go Set a Watchman for the current moment in which a national reckoning with racism is unfolding. 

Those white people who read and loved To Kill a Mockingbird in their youth, surrounded by white students and led by a white teacher, will probably relate deeply to Scout—now grown, living in New York, and going by Jean Louise—when she comes back as an adult to visit her childhood home of Maycomb, Alabama in Go Set a Watchman. Both start from the same vantage point and both are in for an unpleasant time. Jean Louise and her readers remember Atticus as measured, reasonable, kind to all. He was a man who took a stand for what was right even with a whole town against him. The Atticus that Jean Louise encounters in her adulthood keeps racist literature in the house. He attends town council meetings in the same room where Tom Robinson was tried and sits placid and silent as other men rant hate speech against their Black neighbors.

Jean Louise, like her readers, has ignored race her whole life. Like a lot of white people, she considers herself “colorblind,” even as her racism pervades Watchman. Still, she understands the harm that happens when white people—Atticus in this case—don’t speak up against racism:

She knew little of the affairs of men, but she knew her father’s presence at the table with a man who spewed filth from his mouth—did that make it less filthy? No. It condoned.

Many white people have that one relative they can’t talk about race with, and even more white people have relatives who spend their lives condoning the racism of others. And Jean Louise is, like her readers, really freaked out about it: 

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

Her reaction reminds me a bit of that howl of dismay that happens when I bring up Watchman with other white folks. It is, of course, not easy to learn that the people (or books) we love aren’t what we thought. But Atticus’s racism was there all along. Some of us, like Jean Louise and her readers, distracted by his quiet grand gestures and talk of love for all in To Kill a Mockingbird, missed it. Some of us—because our lives are untroubled by the grinding daily racism Black people face in America—had the privilege of missing it.

Atticus’s racism was there all along. Some of us had the privilege of missing it.

Among those who didn’t miss it, Malcolm Gladwell pretty thoroughly laid out the case against Atticus in the New Yorker in 2009. In one passage, Gladwell discusses Atticus’s thoughts about Walter Cunningham, a Maycomb man who attempted to lynch Tom Robinson in Mockingbird:

Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

And that’s not even close to all of it. Atticus tells Jem that their neighbor Mrs. Dubose—who screamed racial slurs at his children daily after learning that Atticus would defend Tom Robinson—is a “great lady” and “the bravest woman I ever knew.” Atticus waves away the activities of the KKK in Maycomb of just a decade prior as if they were ancient history—another humorous anecdote about wacky old Maycomb. He tells his children that no matter what the outcome of the case, no matter what racist feats the people of Maycomb next conjure, they will still and always remain friends: “Remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home,” he tells young Scout. But good feelings and neighborliness can’t stop racism—in fact, they encourage it. As long as white people passively condone the casual racism of people like Mrs. Dubose, racism in all forms will continue to flourish. The only evidence we need of that is American history.

When Jean Lousie finally confronts Atticus about his participation in the town council meeting in Watchman, he says:

Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people…They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet. They were coming along fine, traveling at a rate they could absorb, more of ‘em voting than ever before. Then the NAACP stepped in with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government.”

Compare this to a scene from Mockingbird in which Atticus explains to his children that the worst possible thing a white man can do is cheat a Black person: 

Atticus was speaking so quietly his last word crashed on our ears. I looked up, and his face was vehement. “There’s nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who’ll take advantage of a Negro’s ignorance.”

To the Atticus of both books, Black people aren’t fully realized individuals, they’re children who need protecting.

Atticus’s character arc over the two books not only feels true-to-life, it’s practically modern. After all, this grand public stand for what’s right while double-dealing private racism offstage is the natural mode of many white people, whether they’re aware of it or not. Atticus’s behavior is no different than that of white people who praise diverse schools and communities and then pay tens of thousands of dollars and drive miles out of their way to send their children to private school. It’s no different than white people who march for Black lives but won’t live in Black neighborhoods. 

White people have been bamboozled by Atticus because his lessons are ones we’re inherently drawn to.

White people have been bamboozled by Atticus because his lessons are ones we’re inherently drawn to—the ones that tell us we don’t need to do anything differently, we’re doing just fine the way we are. How comfortable to have to respect the beliefs of others even if those beliefs are abhorrent. How nice to not have to break ties with those in our community who believe Black people deserve less. How easy to go on living our lives just as we want to. This is the stuff that underlies systemic racism and allows it to continue. If Atticus is a champion of anything, it’s not justice or equality but comfort. And white comfort is always going to be the enemy of Black people in America.

White people have clung to the myth of Atticus, and objected to the book that tears it down, because we want it to be possible for a person to be so morally correct, so anti-racist, so willing to stand for justice in the face of everyone and everything. We want this to be true because it means we could be just as good—we would be just as good were we in his place. As John Oliver said in a recent episode on the failures of the American public school system: “The less you know about history, the easier it is to imagine you’d always be on the right side of it.” In truth, some of the people who love Atticus would have opposed integration. Some of the people who love Atticus would have voted to convict Tom Robinson. Just as Atticus cites the so-called ignorance of Black people as justification for holding them back from equality, some of the people who love Atticus turn to myths like Black-on-Black crime, welfare queens, and absent Black fathers to justify their racist thoughts and actions in the present day. Wherever and whenever Black Americans strived for equality and equity, masses of white people opposed it and masses of their white friends let that opposition go unchallenged.

If Atticus is a champion of anything, it’s not justice or equality but comfort. And white comfort is always going to be the enemy of Black people in America.

Go Set a Watchman may seem easy to dismiss because it is a bad book in many ways. It’s a book about race that tries to convince its reader it’s about something else entirely. Its pacing is weird, and it spends way too much time on flashbacks that don’t have much to do with anything. It helps that it was published under shady circumstances, that Harper Lee most likely never intended it to see publication in its present form, or at all. But the one thing Watchman does successfully is make Atticus’s racism undeniable.

A baby’s name is a wish about what he will become at a moment when all possibility extends before him. When thousands of American parents named their babies Atticus, they were naming them for the myth—the hero Atticus, the Atticus who would stand up to anyone and everyone. We can read Atticus then as a hopeful name, a name that says white people want to do better and be better, even though we have often failed. In 2015, white people weren’t ready to accept a racist Atticus Finch. But perhaps now, in the post-George-Floyd world, when slightly more white people are beginning to understand that we are the crux of the problem, we’re ready to understand the truth about Atticus and ourselves. One day, all those little Atticuses are going to grow up. Maybe one of the ways they can fulfill the optimistic dream of their problematic name is to serve as a reminder of all the ways we’ve grandstanded, condoned, and ignored—and all the ways we’re going to learn to do better.  

How Women Prop Up the White Nationalist Movement

Posted on by Jo Lou

Seyward Darby’s Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism opens with the author witnessing another white woman screaming a racial slur at a Black woman at a gas station in the Shenandoah Valley. Darby describes the Black woman’s face as revealing “only mild surprise—or maybe it was practiced defense.” In conversation, Darby is quick to note that she had no idea what the woman was going through internally, that this was all the woman was choosing to reveal, but Darby herself was caught off guard. When I asked Darby about her reaction, she described feeling complicated, the way she felt in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when “so many white people were surprised with the outcome, but anybody from a different perspective, particularly anyone who was Black, was not. I was surprised that I didn’t feel surprised,” Darby said. “I realized I had buried my understanding of race and what I had grown up around. When I wasn’t as surprised as other people,” she said, “I wondered what I had been ignoring.”

In Sisters in Hate, Darby profiles Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff, three women associated with the modern white nationalist movement, a sub-group often overlooked by the mainstream media. She explores their motivations for joining the movement, how they use their platforms to exploit the grievances and fears shared by a growing number of white Americans, and highlights the abuses the women are subjected to in this highly gendered environment. Along the way Darby traces the ties of the modern white nationalist movement to earlier hate movements such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Third Reich, and Neo-Nazism, examining the connections between the far-right, white Christian evangelicals, paganism, and mainstream liberalism.

Darby and I spoke in early August on a day when America felt like it was literally unraveling—165,000 Americans, disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous, have died from Covid-19, the protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd are continuing, the economy is in free fall. Darby and I both identify as white. We discussed how white women have historically exercised power, how the far-right distorts demands for racial justice to provoke backlash, and what we can do to dismantle white supremacy.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: How have your views on whiteness changed over the course of writing this book?

Whiteness as an identity is a measure of power and of privilege as much as it is one of appearance, so even if I didn’t feel like I was white in any conscious way, I was benefitting from the identity constantly.

Seyward Darby: Growing up, if somebody asked me to list five things that described me, whiteness would not have been one of them. In the course of working on this book, I realized that whiteness as an identity is a measure of power and a measure of privilege as much as it is one of appearance, so even if I didn’t feel like I was white in any conscious way, I was benefitting from the identity constantly. My research also very much clarified for me what whiteness isn’t. It isn’t defined by the same things that define Black identity or any number of other identities. There’s not a white culture or clearly shared white heritage. Who counts as white has changed dramatically over time. Whiteness is a constructed category at the top of the social hierarchy, accessible only to some. 

I think that what the far right does, what white nationalists do, is they try to make whiteness into this coherent cultural identity. They are perfectly aware that it is a measure of power, but they don’t want to talk about it like that. They need it to be a definition of self and community that is at once more neutral and more tribal, something people can rally around and that critics can’t easily target. 

That’s frightening. Ashley Jardina, a political scientist who studies whiteness, has found that a substantial percentage of white Americans are now identifying as part of a racial group and that they are not satisfied with the group’s status.  She’s quick to say that a person who sees themselves as part of a white community isn’t necessarily bigoted, but here’s the thing: if there is a concretizing sense of white identity as demographics change in the United States, the far-right may well exploit it. 

DS: In Sisters in Hate, you follow three women from the modern white nationalist movement, but you also follow how white nationalism has operated historically, highlighting the work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Can you briefly trace how the UDC served to reinforce white supremacy?

SB: When you think about hate in America, the first thing that comes to mind is the KKK. That was a fraternal association when it was founded in the 1870s. No women were allowed at that point. White women were symbols, they were what the KKK was fighting for, what they were claiming they were trying to protect—the purity of the white woman, and by extension America as a white nation. 

At the same time, the UDC was organizing, and by the turn of the century, there were chapters everywhere. They were the soft power to the Klan’s hard power. The KKK was a terrorist organization that was lynching people, whipping people, doing horrible things. The UDC was sipping tea, talking about how can we erect monuments to the Confederacy? How can we demand that textbooks be edited to share this halcyon idea of the antebellum period? With the KKK, we can look at them and say they did terrible things, but with the UDC it’s more complicated because they were not breaking any laws. Their work is a side of the perpetuation of white supremacy that we don’t talk about as much, the part that’s more deeply ingrained in our everyday lives—what we see memorialized in the streets, what we read in books, how we understand the country’s history. It’s still an organization that people are involved in today.

This is the thing about hate: there are the very obvious crimes and slurs, the stuff that is so abhorrent, but there’s also the quiet and frankly more impactful work of writing narratives about what America is, what it should be, what history has been like. And I think that women have been crucial whitewashers.

DS: Definitely! They whitewashed white supremacy into heritage. What I love about this book is that you show us the history. Why is it important to trace the throughline between Reconstruction and now?

SD: People who are part of the far-right, particularly the digital neo-fascists of today, will try and separate themselves from the past. They’ll say they’re not in the KKK, they’re not neo-Nazis. They’re just asking people to see the truth about an anti-white agenda, to rebel against what they see as a  too-liberal mainstream. They are trying to make themselves into prophets but if you actually look at what they believe, it’s the same old garbage. That’s why the history is so important: it lets us hear the echoes and put the lie to what white nationalists today try to claim.

The other reason I wanted to trace the history is because whenever that history has been traced by journalists or scholars, everybody talks about these male figureheads, these idealogues, and women are just a footnote. I didn’t want to place George Lincoln Rockwell or Nathan Bedford Forrest or David Duke at the forefront. I wanted to highlight the work that women have done and to show the ways it’s still very similar to the work that women do today. In some ways, it’s almost a feminist approach to history, though what’s strange is I am trying to shine a light on people who are anti-feminist—giving anti-feminists a feminist treatment.

White nationalism is all about exercising and negotiating power. I remember early in my research I was speaking to Kathleen Belew who wrote Bring the War Home, about white nationalism in the post-Vietnam era. She told me that to understand how women have power in this space, you have to relocate and redefine what power is. If you just think who is the president of an organization, who is committing the violence, who is the face of an ideology, women are not going to seem that powerful. But if you think of power in a more intimate sense—in homes, communities, relationships—suddenly women hold a lot more. Thinking about activism in a more multifaceted way allows us to see women more completely in the movement. A handful of feminist historians have done that to an extent. I wanted to bring their work together and apply my own research.

DS: White nationalism is inherently sexist. It treats motherhood as the cornerstone of its racial project. You trace this historically to the Nazi cult of motherhood. Why is white nationalism appealing to white women?

SD: I think that the appeal for white women today is that you are promised value and power simply by virtue of being physically who you are, a woman who looks a certain way and can have children. You are necessary to the future of the white race because of your aesthetics and biology and voice. You are literally being told that you are empowered without having to do much of anything. That can be alluring to some people. 

The appeal for white women today is that you are promised value and power simply by virtue of being physically who you are, a woman who looks a certain way and can have children.

It’s a hyper-sexist space, but there are women I studied who weren’t finding their place elsewhere, who were disenchanted with other communities they’d been a part of, more feminist ones. White nationalism offered them a platform.  

There is a certain level of mental gymnastics involved in being a woman in this space. On the one hand, supporters claim that men of the far-right love and respect women and just want the best for them, but what “best” means is remarkably antifeminist and misogynist. The far-right does not remotely define women’s interest in any way that I would define them. 

They are coming to the table with completely different terms of the conversation, defining words in different ways, believing falsehoods. You cannot apply your way of seeing the world to their way of seeing the world. If you told a woman on the far-right that she was fighting against her own interests, she would likely say, “But my interests are the patriarchy, my interests are traditional gender roles, my interests are protecting my race.”

One of the tricky things about covering white nationalism is being able to see the world through white supremacists’ eyes, so that you can better grasp their motivations and aims. But you also have to be able to articulate why their way of seeing is unethical. You can’t just say that they have their worldview and you have yours and each is valid because frankly, that is exactly what they want outsiders to say. They want that to be the response from people who are covering them. But you also don’t get very far if you dismiss their worldview out of hand as idiotic or cruel and thus not worthy of serious analysis. Too often in history, unethical, fringe viewpoints have been treated that way, and so people are shocked when they gain traction. Understanding something doesn’t mean condoning it. You can understand something and still call it abominable. 

DS: Can you talk about how the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner awakened the far right?

SD: People talk about how Trump was so important as a catalyst, but the seeds existed before his candidacy in 2015-2016. Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. When Dylann Roof murdered 9 people in Charleston in 2015, he pointed to the reaction to Martin’s death as the key awakening that he had. #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag and a movement formed after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, but even before that Trayvon Martin had become this touchstone for Black and progressive activists. Later we saw protests in the streets after Michael Brown’s killing and Eric Garner’s killing. The chatter on the far-right was very much in the vein of “this is what we have been worried about. This is what we should have been planning for.” Black Lives Matter in the minds of the far right had to be—still has to be—anti-white lives. That myth became a rallying cry, an organizing kind of tool. It was the conspiracy theory of “white genocide” for the new millennium.

At the same time BLM was finding its footing and becoming the most important social movement of the last 25 years, the far-right was taking fuel from it in a different way. Backlash was forming. Dylann Roof is the ultimate example, but as Lana Lokteff, one of the women in my book, said, “2012 was a big year.” Why? Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, and we started having this national conversation about police brutality, and then we started talking about the dignity of Black lives, so that by the summer of 2014, when Lokteff started to use her platform to go hard in a white nationalist direction, she was citing as all these cultural trends that would not have existed without the rise of a new kind of civil rights movement. 

I hate to be such a downer about the present moment because in terms of the activism this summer and people taking to the streets and demanding justice in such a nuanced way—it’s not just about police brutality, it’s also about supporting communities—that’s all just so deeply exciting. But at the same time, I think there will be backlash. There will be fuel for the far-right. They are already saying things like “we’ve been telling you that Black lives means anti-white.” I’m not saying this is going to lead to a Dylann Roof style massacre, but from an ideological perspective demands for racial justice are something white nationalists can use to play on white people’s fears and uncertainties about the present moment.

DS: In Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene Carruthers writes:

“White rage in the face of college-aged people wearing polo shirts and khakis makes liberals fearful. They are fearful because the country they thought they knew is not only slipping away; they realize that it never truly existed.”

How do people get past the fear and recognize that white nationalism is as you wrote “a crisis of individual and collective responsibility”?

SD: I’m so hesitant to be prescriptive because I don’t think that I have any great answers, but I do think that the first step is realizing that we never had a post-racial America. Black scholars, artists, and activists have been saying this for so long—from James Baldwin to Ibram X Kendi to Nikole Hannah-Jones—insisting that we recalibrate what we mean when we talk about American ideals. In practice, they have been so exclusionary. Equality for some. Liberty for some. If we don’t acknowledge that and work from a place of truth, people are going to make the same mistakes and fall for the same tropes. 

DS: You write that women are the hate movement’s “dulcet voices and its standard bearers.” Given that white women have historically supported white supremacy, do you think that women who consider themselves white should play a particular role in dismantling white supremacy?

SD: Absolutely. I think that women have such an important role. White women are uniquely placed to recognize the mythologizing, the whitewashing, that far-right women engage in—seeing it for what it is and not letting people get away from it under the auspices of “we are just nice white women.” Also, white women who are not white nationalists can have an impact by recognizing the ways in which their own choices might play into structures of white supremacy and making new ones, better ones, more just ones. Certainly, this is where the podcast Nice White Parents and conversations about opportunity hoarding are important. The least white women can do is look at the ways in which our individual choices and actions play into structures that very much need dismantling.

The other important thing, as a white woman engaging in racial justice work of any kind, at any scale, is recognizing that you are going to say the wrong things. You are going to say things that don’t come off the way that you mean. You’re going to say things based on incomplete information or biases. Frankly you are going to fail sometimes, but if you want to be a real supporter of a better, more just future you can’t run away from the hard stuff, say “I can’t handle it.” That’s why one of the quotes at the beginning of my book is from Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail Again. Fail better.” To me that is a mantra almost. You’re not going to play the perfect part in dismantling white supremacy. That’s not the point, because it’s not about you in the first place. Certainly, in my own life, I’m trying to walk the walk.

DS: That’s part of doing the work.

SD: Right? And listening more. Knowing where you can contribute. People ask why did you pick this topic for a book? There are any number of reasons, one of which is that it was something I had unique access to as a white woman. I could spend time in this space in a way that maybe other people who don’t look like me couldn’t. I could interrogate my own life experience as I went. I was trying to approach the conversation about race and hate in America from the standpoint of what—as a white woman—was in my lane, as opposed to veering into someone else’s lane. That’s the work I think.

Numerous Poetic Facts About Swine

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

Pigs

They are born in a flood of magma.
They claw their way to the center of the earth.
They don’t know what a blouse is, and they don’t care.
There are seventeen constellations named for their kin.
They coordinate all the Monday briefings.
When they read the wrong books, they return them to libraries with bookmarks still inside.
They have decided not to have piglets.
They’re opposed to the question, “where is the healthiest seat on an airplane?”
They call their mothers.
They call out corrupt politicians.
In fact, they make calls every day.
They are good at advocating for what they want.
They understand the difference between camouflage and communication.
They do not dream of tumors in their flesh.
They don’t reply to spam.
Shovels are modeled after their mouths.
The sound of drilling makes them nauseous.
They use their perceived softness to their advantage.
They can actually make holes in wood with their snouts.
Which tells you something about softness. And persistence.
They never ask for the “good friend discount.”
They do appreciate the “old friend discount.”
They are made of soap, a little plastic, and red dye #5.
They believe putting books on a body is a healing act.
Their memory is 251 million years old.
They experience the world as time-lapse abundance.
They can’t look up.
At night when they are sleeping, wrestlers come.
They don’t use the word “casualty.”
They are excellent listeners.
They don’t mind perpetually wet nostrils.
When they relax, they make two figure fours with their legs.
They never say, “nature is constantly surprising us.”
For they remember the porcine age.
They keep the entire planet in delicate balance.
When they are angry they throw something extremely light, like feathers, or gods.
They’re not sure there’s a big takeaway.
Their ancestors spread fragments of the seven wonders all over the world.
Over centuries they have carried them, in their bifurcated hooves.
Rocks make them feel tender.
They get high on dust motes.
The worst insult is to be told they have “pigeon hands.”
They are often the only ones at the light therapy station.
They never shorten ‘yours’ to ‘yrs.’
What they want is simple.
They have no vestigial organs.

Slop

after Major Jackson’s “You, Reader”

So often I think of the men
who tried midnightly to enter
my room or how tidelike
we crawled skyward to ground
the teetering bus, and so often too:
keys in doors, doors wide open, credit cards
on tables in public spaces. Should I be offended
that my phone doesn’t recognize my face
in the morning? Should I throw my clay body
at every tottering night prowler? How I will
the tree’s craw to magick an owl there—
our unblinking communion!—how it is
in my mind, always, but for that one
time. If it’s true that there is only one
notable death, and that is the pig farmer’s,
I’ll speak, yes, you know what’s coming. Already
I have debased myself: the skin of my belly
hangs loose as a sigh, so yes. I see
how this slop unfurls before me: a sea
of nutritious glop and I sing its praises.
I am a mother, after all. Tell me again,
how you ate what I would not, could not;
how your skin burned like mine and I shamed
you for it, buried you beneath an idea
of something delicious that would
finally satisfy me. Take me by handfuls
and lay me down—the whole pudding of me.
It matters not that you won’t eat me, it matters
that you don’t. It was you who made me, one rib
at a time, and me who made you: domestic
and domesticated, both unfit for the wild
life, spewing methane and wallowing
in the puddle we’ve homed.

A Mother-Daughter Survival Story in a World Destroyed by Climate Change

Posted on by Jo Lou

The first time I read Diane Cook’s fiction—as a workshop classmate in Columbia’s MFA program—I followed her to the water fountain in Dodge Hall, professed my admiration, and insisted that we become friends and read each other’s work for the rest of our lives. Luckily, she wasn’t put off by my intensity. Eleven years later, I can attest to great friendship, much draft reading, and so very many novel writing pep talks.

Even in the story that made me a Diane Cook superfan, which, if memory serves, involved a tragic accident with a pen on a crowded bus in Brooklyn, it was obvious that Diane had a singular voice and worldview, full of wisdom, wit, and yearning. Readers were introduced to this worldview in her acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. 

Now, Diane returns with her bold, haunting, Booker Prize-nominated debut novel, The New Wilderness, which takes place in a world destroyed by climate change, pollution, and overpopulation. Set in the near future in a country that resembles America, the book follows a group of twenty people chosen to participate in a government study where they’ll live in the last remaining Wilderness State. At the novel’s center are a mother and daughter: Bea, who fled the City for the Wilderness to save Agnes, her sick young daughter, who needed different air. 

Jessamine Chan: Not to limit your future subject matter, but I want there to one day be an English Lit course called “Climate Horror: The Fiction of Diane Cook.” Maybe it’s just going to be “the early fiction.” What drives you toward the end-times as a subject? 

Diane Cook: I really enjoy world-building, and perhaps I am too pessimistic, but in building future worlds or alternate worlds (which are often future worlds) I can’t help but predict a dire situation. A lot of my scenarios—in my stories or in the novel—seem impossible, but they’re actually playing out in some form currently. Sometimes when I think of my book, I forget it isn’t really happening somewhere. I like to use the big fictionalized world to blow out and make very visible something you could see today if you knew where to look or cared to see it. This isn’t often my intention when I set out, but our world seeps in when I’m writing. I can’t stop being a person in our real world even when I’m immersed in the one I created. 

JC: Without giving too much away, what are some ways the real world seeped in?

DC: Environmental deregulation. Most deregulation, actually. Immigration and migration and border enforcement. I remember early on in writing the book, I worried whether my premise seemed too far out there. But the Trump presidency has made it all seem almost inevitable. He sets twelve fires so you can’t put them all out. People can’t commit to all the issues all at once. Something falls through the cracks. He’s done major damage to the country and its future that most people don’t even know about because those weren’t the fires they were fighting. 

JC: I was struck by the many rules for survival, and the parallels, in terms of behavior for the common good, between pandemic rules and Wilderness rules. How did the government “study” and “the Manual” provide useful constraints for storytelling? At what point in the development of this world did these rules emerge? 

DC: I follow rules. Full stop. I have a lot of theories as to why…suffice it to say, something made me very rule-oriented. I’m fascinated by the different relationships people have with rules. How some people follow them, while others don’t think they are applicable. There are a lot of rules in my first book, Man V. Nature. There’s even a Manual. Rules govern everything about how our society does or doesn’t run. Most interesting to me might be the unspoken rules, the spaces between us where there aren’t bright red No Trespassing signs. Putting those constraints on a world brings out our prickly humanity. Which comes in handy in a book that is pressing characters toward their more animal sides.

I think the idea for the Rangers being nitpicky enforcers was there from the beginning, as was the Manual. I couldn’t envision a wilderness area without needing rules and a method of enforcement. I used to teach in a literature and writing program, and as part of the program, we went on camping trips into state and national forests. These trips seemed composed of one big rule to follow. That’s how it is in wilderness areas. I’ve never been in a wilderness where I wasn’t potentially breaking a law or rule. This is not me complaining—see above, big rule follower—but it’s interesting that to preserve something wild we must impose a system of regulation over it. It’s so stupidly and necessarily human. 

JC: How did you decide how much technology to use in a story set in the near future? There’s surveillance and drones, but the maps “look like a child had dreamed them up.” 

Rules govern everything about how our society does or doesn’t run.

DC: I didn’t so much decide as avoided. A pleasant byproduct of writing about people living as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the wilderness is you’ve built in a natural logic for not using technology. I had played around with a lot of different ideas about how their world might look in the future, about what kinds of tech would exist. But then I would get so wrapped up in the minutiae. What would it look like, what would it do, and how? And then I’d have to think about just how far in the future the book was, and what would be possible, and all of that parsing made me unhappy, and took me away from what I was actually trying to write about.

My book wasn’t about technology, and so I decided I would barely mention it at all. And that made me happy. In that way, any idea or object could be free from the association of the future, and could just be the thing that I felt made the most sense or created the image I wanted, or the idea I wanted to play with. The surveillance drones echo our current world. The childish maps evoked images of treasure maps, of x marks the spot, of kid adventure. I liked playing with the tension between this adventure narrative aspect of the book and the real life and death stakes. The maps have a menacing quality. Like kids playing a game that suddenly gets real. 

JC: What’s your own relationship to technology? We’ve talked sometimes about your aversion to social media.

DC: Social media is not for me. It turns me into my worst self. I’m happier away from it. I wish I could access the community aspect of it in a genuine way, but I couldn’t parse that from everything else. Best to walk away. I’m a bit of a luddite. I never update my phone. Half the emojis people send me are white squares or question marks. It’s fine. I don’t think I’m missing out on too much. It’s the thought that counts. I know I sound so boring right now. I just am not made for the future. Which is probably why I wrote a book about future people being forced to live like prehistoric people and no one has a cell phone. 

JC: Let’s talk about motherhood. Entire families are trying to survive in The Wilderness State, children are being born. A family is necessary to stay warm at night! The depiction of Bea and Agnes’ relationship is so unsettling, because you really get into the unknowability of parents and children. What were some of the mysteries of motherhood and daughterhood that you hoped to explore? 

As mothers and daughters, we are drawn together and repelled apart by the very relationship that binds us.

DC: I really wanted to look into the things we don’t want others to see in ourselves, especially when it comes to these big archetypal roles we inhabit. I long to know all of my mother’s secret feelings about motherhood. When she hated being a mom. What she really felt when our relationship was at its worst. What frazzled her as a young mom. When I broke her heart. The things she probably never would have offered up on her own, but maybe if I had asked…. When she died, all that potential knowledge left with her. Like the ways she might have instructed me in how to be a mom. Not in the tips and tricks realm, but in the secret feelings that would save me from feeling bad and ashamed of myself in my worst moments. I can complain or be candid with my friends, but it’s only a bit of tension release. It never feels truly liberating. If I could do that with my mom, though, it would feel like discovering truth. Because I am of her. If she felt it, then I would know there is nothing wrong with me. We are from the same line.

I wanted this line to be present for Bea and Agnes. I wanted this sense of loss to be present, even when they are together. To explore how, as mothers and daughters, we are drawn together and repelled apart by the very relationship that binds us. My mom was my person in our family. Without her, I feel pretty detached from everyone else. But, still, there was a distance between us that we always tried to bridge but never quite managed to. I think in the end we didn’t know each other as well as we wanted to. As I got older and became a mother, I think I looked for ways to know her as I never did before. It’s a poor substitute, but I think in the losses we experience we have to look for something to discover that we couldn’t have found otherwise.  

JC: We became moms around the same time, and being “art moms” is something we talk about regularly. Rather than asking how you “get it all done,” which male writers are never asked, I’d like to know how motherhood has informed your writing of this book, and generally.  

DC: It’s made me feel really protective of my ability to write as my work. To try to make sure this can always be my job. To that end I’ve been trying to, er, diversify. I love books. But I love writing more. I just want to write creative things. I want to write fiction. Whether it’s in book form or some other form. Like, I’ve written these two books. Now I want to be a writer on a broader scale. To try other forms. To know how to do it all. So I can always pivot when needed. Publishing is too fickle. I can’t put all my eggs into it.

Publishing is so hard because that very basic desire is never guaranteed, even when people care and work hard for it.

Being a mom has made me more practical about the act of creating. I remember going back to work after my daughter was born. I was on deadline—it was the most recent of many missed deadlines, so it’s possible I could have pushed it yet again. But I just felt like I had to just finish this fucking thing once and for all. It was time. Now that I had this kid I had to stop finding my way and be there already. So I went back to work before I was ready and it was really hard. It was a self-imposed thing that was physically painful. I felt like I was being a terrible mother, hurting and abandoning my daughter. But my other art friends and mom friends were good about reminding me that I was teaching my daughter something about ambition and passion and work, not about abandonment. There are so many things that she will encounter in her life that will attempt to derail her from what she is trying to accomplish. I want to make sure I give her an example where she feels loved and cared for, but also where she sees how to take the time she needs in order to make things, to do things for herself.

I just had another baby in June, and without even meaning to, I have already set myself up to start a new project when he is about four months old. I think I will have a different relationship with that return to work this time, but if anything, it makes me realize how important it is for me to do the work that I do. 

JC: And now your book has landed on the Booker Prize Longlist! Congratulations! What’s that been like?

DC: It’s been awesome and unreal. I’m really proud of my book, and all of us launching it were working hard. But before the announcement I was expecting that while The New Wilderness would have its fans, that group would probably be small. I’m not trying to be dreary or insecure by saying that, I’m just being realistic. My galleys shipped the week the country went into lockdown. They sat in mailrooms and empty offices rather than potentially getting read or piquing interest. I don’t have a social media presence. Most people didn’t know I had a new book coming out, even people who loved my story collection. With the longlist announcement that changed overnight. And I’m so grateful. Writers just want to find readers. Publishing is so hard because that very basic desire is never guaranteed, even when people care and work hard for it. Add in the global pandemic, and it just felt like an impossible situation. I now know that many more people will read my book and take it seriously. They may not like it. But they’ll read it. That is all I ever wanted.

10 Short Stories About Women’s Transformations

Posted on by Jo Lou

The Little Mermaid sacrifices her tail for a human soul. The Navajo Changing Woman grows old and is reborn with the seasons. The nymph Daphne becomes a tree to escape lovesick Apollo. Women transform because we are hungry. We transform because we’re restless, and because we’re dangerous. Women transform seeking liberation from domesticity, obscurity, prescribed roles, our own bodies. We transform for fun. 

Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich – Red Hen Press Presales and Broadsides

My book Animal Wife is a collection of stories about women’s transformations, from girls into wives, mothers, and monsters. In “The Vanishing Point,” a woman constructs a mechanical deer suit to live in the woods behind her childhood home. In “Animal Wife,” a girl embarks on a quest to find her mother, who she believes is a swan. In “Desiree the Destroyer,” a timid proofreader creates a cage fighting alter ego. 

  I, and the ten women whose stories I’ve assembled here, use transformation to illuminate the raw places inside our female protagonists and their worlds. Our women escape, they devour, they create life—and they discover their true selves by stripping away their known skin.

The Bloody Chamber

“The Tiger’s Bride” from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

In this story by the queen of modern mythology, a girl’s father loses her in a game of cards to a carnival-masked beast who carts her away to his palazzo, “a world in itself but a dead one, a burned-out planet.” She finds strength in her imprisonment (“He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.”), and when the beast offers to send her back to her father, she realizes that her existence has been as vacant as the clockwork maid who now serves her. “I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves in all their unreason.” Rather than return to the father who had sold her, she transforms into a tigress whose vitality rivals the beast’s.

The Pushcart Prize XLI by Bill Henderson | Penguin Random House Canada

“The Mushroom Queen” from Tin House by Liz Ziemska

A restless wife wants more than she has; wants to be more than she is. One night, she wishes for “a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip,” and she gets her wish, in the form of fungus. A mysterious Mushroom Queen transforms into the woman’s doppelganger and steals her life, while the original woman dissolves into a fungal colony, “the discontent of one calling to the desire of the other.” As the Mushroom Queen molds her new human life to her will, the original woman “runs her mycelium under fields of cabbages and cantaloupe,” trying to find her way back home.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

“Reeling for the Empire” from Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

When a change in government bankrupts their families, women are recruited to work in a silk-reeling mill with the promise of an “imperial vocation” that would free their fathers and husbands from debt. They’re spirited away to a factory room with a single window where they’re forced to spin silk from their own bodies. As they feed their thread into a giant reeling machine, the girls transform into silk worms until “every droplet of our energy, every moment of our time flows into the silk.” The narrator, Kitsune, chafes in her new role and organizes a rebellion. “Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds?” she says. “I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next.”

“Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story” from Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Fatima, one of two Black girls at her private school, “had existed like a sort of colorless gas” before she met Violet, a Black girl with albinism who is as confident as Fatima is insecure. Under Violet’s tutelage, Fatima “absorbed the sociocultural knowledge she’d missed…through committed, structured ethnographical study,” like watching Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Although Fatima enjoys a newfound sense of self—“there was something prettier about her now”—her “transformation” is tested when she begins dating Rolf, a white boy from her school:

“The conventions of such a transformation dictate that a snaggletooth or a broken heel threatens to return the heroine to her former life. That snaggletooth, for Fatima, was either Rolf or Violet, depending on how you looked at things…”

“Babies” from Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray

In this fierce, funny flash story, a woman awakens having given birth although she wasn’t pregnant. “But there he was, a little baby boy, swaddled among cotton sheets, sticky with amniotic fluid and other various baby-goops.” Although the woman’s boyfriend is “not amenable to babies,” she embraces her newfound motherhood and insists they keep the baby—and the one she births the next night, and the next…

“The Husband Stitch” from Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

This narrator owns her desires and knows what she wants. She savors the way her body transforms through desire—“the silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been”—and through motherhood, and in the aftermath of birth, when the doctor obliges her husband’s request for “that extra stitch.” She gives her husband all of herself, and all she asks in return is that he refrain from touching the ribbon she wears around her neck. But, “brides never fare well in stories, and one should avoid either being a bride, or being in a story,” the narrator says. “After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.” 

Awayland by Ramona Ausubel

“High Desert” from Awayland by Ramona Ausubel

A woman whose daughter drowned decades ago feels her uterus falling. She visits the doctor, she goes to the mall where she buys lime-green thongs—“they look fertile to her and she finds themselves wanting them, needing them”—she rides the bus. Throughout this deceptively simple day, the woman revisits the loss of her child and anticipates another loss as she considers a hysterectomy: “The problem is that her body was once a house where her daughter lived…. All these years she has carried the tiny inland sea her daughter swam in.”

“The Wives are Turning Into Animals” from May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks

Men recall their wives’ “soft smooth faces” as the women acquire bestial features and strange appetites. The husbands are concerned about violating social boundaries (“that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns”) and grapple with deeper worries that gnaw at the roots of their marriages, “that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.”  

“How to Survive on Land” by Joy Baglio

Amphitrite and her twin sister Thetis are accustomed to the strange things their mother does, like eating shellfish for breakfast, keening like a whale, and showing off her glistening tail. She’s a mermaid, after all. But when the girls are twelve, their mother begins to change, starting with a fateful day at the aquarium when she dives into the beluga whale tank.

“She was still wearing her floral-print blouse, and her hair and shirt billowed with weightless beauty. I had never seen her like this: both fish and woman, something ancient and forgotten, no longer an invalid in an aqua chair, but mythic and powerful.”

When her restlessness becomes unbearable, the mermaid leads her family on a voyage to the Arctic where her daughters must confront their ancestry. 

“Starver” from Fen by Daisy Johnson

In this story, which begins with the account of a 17th-century eel massacre, Katy stops eating. Her sister Suze tries to feed her, “surprising her with peeled carrots chopped into mouthfuls, chunks of melon, halved avocados,” but Katy resists and Suze can only watch helplessly as her sister withers and begins to transform into an eel. “[T]he skin on Katy’s arms was bleached of color; her mouth was a stretched line.” Even still, Suze enjoys a novel closeness with her sister. “In a way she’d never done when I trailed her to netball practice or balanced on the edge of the sofa while she and her friends watched films, she included me in this: her starving.” 

“Breasts and Eggs” Grapples with the Weird Mess of Women’s Bodies

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Though you’ve probably only learned Mieko Kawakami’s name recently, with the release of Breasts and Eggs from renowned indie press Europa Editions, she’s been a well-known figure in the Japanese literary world for several years. Haruki Murakami called her his favorite young novelist, and the novella that became Breasts and Eggs was the winner of the prestigious Akutagawa prize. The novel is Kawakami’s first translated into English, as well as the first of a three-book deal with Europa. In Japan, she’s also a pop singer and popular blogger. In fact, the book began as a series of blog posts years ago.

Breasts and Eggs is presented in two sections. The shorter, novella-length section of the book centers around Natsuko and her sister, Makiko, as well as Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. Makiko and her daughter are visiting Natsuko from the more rural Osaka, and Makiko has come into the city to explore her options for breast implants. Though she works as a waitress and is a single mother, she’s set on breast implants as both a physical and mental manifestation of a femininity she can’t grasp. Natsuko doesn’t necessarily approve of her sister’s desire, but she also doesn’t interfere. Over the course of a few days, the personalities of the three women clash with their desires for their bodies and their minds, creating a simmering atmosphere of resentment and ambition.

The second, much lengthier section finds Natsuko ten years later, with a well-regarded novel, and confronting her own relationship with intimacy, sexuality, and fertility. This part of the novel is more experimental, and heavier on moral arguments. As Natsuko explores her desire for a child, and her options for having one considering that she’s repulsed by sexual contact, she gets involved with a community of people who were born from sperm donors. All the while, she questions whether she actually wants the child she is considering, and what it means to want a child in the first place. 

Kawakami was attempting an ambitious project with this novel: to question the role and function of the female body and how it is interpreted in society, through the lens of one woman with an unconventional path. We spoke via email about the role of the literary industry in the novel and the complex arguments the characters undertake with regard to fertility.

Translated by Hitomi Yoshio 

Rebecca Schuh: I loved how specifically Mieko charted the trajectory of Natsu’s writing career. What made you interested in showing the ins and outs of the literary industry to a broader audience?

Mieko Kawakami: It wasn’t my intention to write a kind of tell-all story about the literary industry, but when I set out to write seriously about the life of the protagonist Natsuko and the problems she faced in her life, it became essential to write about aspects of her writing career. The novel is about people who are drawn to things that are not of their own choosing—the urge for artistic creativity, sexual identity, the body—so perhaps that’s why, in that sense too, it became such a symbolic scene. 

RS: What inspired you to write about this triangle of  struggles, with  breast augmentation and fertility and sex?

The body is something that cannot be separated from the self, and at the same time, it is the closest other.

MK: I wanted to write responsibly about the cycle of how we are born, how we live and die, through the lens of one woman’s life. What happens to the body, and all the other aspects, during our lifetime? Breasts and eggs, as the title implies, are organs that are symbolic but also realities of women in terms of gender and sex. The body is something that cannot be separated from the self, and at the same time, it is the closest other. For me, writing relentlessly about the body—which is the ultimate personal experience—from all angles, is connected to writing and observing society and the distant unknown.

I had no intention of portraying what is generally perceived as the conflicts of a thirty-something woman. As women, we are often measured and defined by our gender and social roles such as motherhood, wifehood, and certain occupations and positions, existing merely as numbers in various statistics and data in society. But in reality, each one of us is an irreplaceable individual. There are parts of us that cannot be labeled, feelings that cannot be explained, and memories and circumstances that cannot be shared. This is called individuality, but these things can also be labeled as “abnormal” just because it is out of line with the norm. Heterosexuality, marriage, motherhood, a stable life… if you are not following this linear track, then you have no right to become a parent. In this sense, Natsuko Natsume does not meet the social conditions for encountering her own child. But she thinks, and she acts. Without borrowing the framework of a fable or science fiction, I wanted to write a story about one woman’s survival—a woman with no social status or power—within the same world order that the reader inhabits. 

RS: I was interested in Yuriko’s theory about the parental ego in the realm of donor conception, that parents care as much about their own fulfillment as they do about the well-being of children generally. She believes that parenting is fundamentally selfish, since the child is not asking to be born, and, by her estimation, 1 in 5 children are born into a life of pain. Do you think her theory has any credence, or is it mostly a reflection of Yuriko’s tragic past? 

MK: I understand Yuriko’s position well. Anti-natalism, or the idea that we should desist from procreating (note: for those who are already born, it is an imperative to live a virtuous life), has been eloquently expressed by Schopenhauer and Cioran, and more recently elaborated on by the philosopher David Benatar. However, I believe that anti-natalism from the perspective of women, whose bodies have the ability to give birth, is fundamentally different from their claims. Yuriko Zen has a painful past, but she doesn’t base her beliefs entirely on her experience alone. She truly believes that it is a tremendous violence to force a “body,” which is the premise of “pain,” to suddenly come into existence. Is childbirth really something to be celebrated wholeheartedly? The question Yuriko poses is an essential ethical problem that must be considered as reproductive technologies continue to be developed.

RS: What inspired your interest in donor conception that became such a deep throughline of the book?

The birth of a child often becomes a tool to perpetuate the model of normalcy.

MK: It is often said that the Japanese do not have a religion, but what plays its role instead is patriarchy and the pressure to conform. Most families are created on the basis of blood ties, and the hurdles of adoption are astronomical. There is little diversity in terms of family structure. The ethics and acceptance of sperm donation (also called artificial insemination with donor sperm, or AID) are completely different in the West and in Japan. The birth of a child often becomes a tool to perpetuate the model of normalcy, for the sake of the parents or the family name, and the whole ordeal is treated with absolute secrecy. I was moved when I read the accounts of those born through AID and to learn of their suffering and unceasing fears. And it’s not just men who enforce these oppressive norms. Many women have also internalized these patriarchal structures. 

RS: Can you talk a little bit about your life as a writer? 

MK: I grew up in a poor single-mother household. All through my teenage years, I’ve had to lie about my age so that I could work various jobs—as a restaurant server, dental assistant, dishwasher, cashier, factory worker, bar hostess, and many others. Now that I write as a living, I’m surrounded by highly educated intellectuals who grew up doused in cultural and economic capital, and I often feel dizzy because I cannot comprehend that we have inhabited the same world. I happened to be able to make a living through writing, but I cannot help feeling incredibly lucky. First of all, I was blessed with a body healthy enough to survive, a resilient personality, and a mother who was a loving, altruistic, and truly wonderful human being. I am grateful to her from the bottom of my heart for teaching me how to think, and to overcome any hardship with laughter. No matter where I am or what I write about, I will never forget the town where I grew up and the people who were there.

RS: Who are your favorite writers or artistic influences?

MK: There are many, but I learned from Haruki Murakami the intricacy of description, the manipulation of information inside a novel, and the persistence and perseverance toward the act of writing. He is an enormous writer for me. In a similar way, the artist Hokusai always gives me inspiration and courage. He’s an artist who produced so many works throughout his life with every fiber of his being, creating incredible masterpieces in his seventies while lamenting that he could not draw even a single cat to his satisfaction. At the age of 90, he is known to have said on his deathbed, “If I had five more years, I could become a true artist.” I want to live and produce work that lives up to their standards.