The majority of our waking hours are spent in some relation to work: commuting to/from work, thinking about work, and doing the work itself—insert argument for reduced work-time models, insert argument to stop asking people about their dream job—so of course it makes sense that our jobs find their way into our writing. But ten years ago, when I was in the thick of working as a wilderness guide, I would not have predicted that this job would become the basis for Level Watch, my first book.
Level Watch is based on my time working in wilderness therapy for a substance-abuse treatment center in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As guides, we shepherded people—most of whom were undergoing radical transformations—safely through the backcountry. I started writing the book out of a need to process the experience; I thought of it primarily as an elegy. It wasn’t until I’d been working on it for a few years that one editor told me she considered it an “untold story of the opioid epidemic”—the perspective of a treatment center employee.
In honor of Labor Day, I’ve compiled a reading list of other contemporary poetry collections with dispatches from jobs—a nursing home, KFC, a tech company—as well as commentary on labor itself. I appreciate the candor and complexity with which these writers convey such varied accounts of work—and if you contemplate your relationship to work even half as much as I do, I think you’ll appreciate them, too.
This coming-of-age book contains a series of “Requiem” poems about working on an orchard as a boy. de la Paz utilizes a “we” that transcends the speaker’s singular experience: “…how we each knew we were getting ripped off and how the filthy / dollars we’d wad into our pockets couldn’t buy us a fuller river, time…” Our earliest jobs are often where we learn how we’re viewed by others and therefore what roles we’re expected to fill in the world at-large. The boys in these poems earn “quick dollars / doing nothing except being boys, learning without comprehension, / the difficult industry of men.”
Here we read about various temp jobs. So many ways to make so little money. There’s also a quieter thread: Kunz’s poems remind me of the government’s role in our financial (in)stability. “An election happens,” we read in one poem. It’s a slipped-in, standalone sentence without fanfare, but in a poem titled “Squatters,” I would argue it’s offering commentary. In “Account,” money owed to an ex will be forgiven if the speaker will allow the ex to claim him as a dependent on her taxes: “I couldn’t believe / my luck. I let myself be claimed.”
Harrington’s poems describe the senescent body in unflinching detail that only an intimate caregiver could provide. There are moments when the nurse aides show tenderness through their competence (“Efficiency too is loveliness, is mercy. / The sheet smoothed beneath a naked haunch”) and moments when readers witness the opposite (“There is a way to drop a body atop a hard mattress, / to scrub gentle parts too hard”). Caregiving is complicated work—often moralized and underpaid—and there’s a bravery required to describe it so honestly.
I once bussed breakfast tables at a fancy hotel where all employees could eat free lunch in the staff cafeteria, but you weren’t allowed to change out of your uniform first. The higher-ups ate in their business professional clothing, so the uniform felt like a way of keeping the service workers in our place, like branding us. Tribble, in his book about his years working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks at KFC, articulates the potency of a uniform in “Polyester:” “Whatever our religion these were our vestments / now and until we disrobed … the wear and tear sure to mark us in more indelible / ways than any fabric could ever hope to cover up.”
A central thread in Stevenson’s book is the sexism within the tech industry. Her boss informs her: “the glass ceiling was high / but it was there.” A moment like this comes as no surprise after reading, in the title poem, about a department where women are sent after filing harassment claims: “each woman has her own fax machine / to do her pretend work: messages scribbled / on lightweight paper and sent / to nowhere.” I find the “pretend work” particularly devastating. In the world of this poem, a company would rather pay women to do futile tasks than to rectify a misogynistic culture. Yet another poem features women turning into inanimate skyscrapers. There’s a disembodied tone that unifies the book. The poems speak with a clinical distance, a sterile remove that is reinforced by the book’s title.
“When I stepped into the stilted trailer the crew knew I was because of a dad.” Bambrick does not write, “I was there because of a dad,” and the omitted word gives us pause, makes us reconsider what we might otherwise quickly read, accept, and move on. Through both the narrative content and the careful attention to syntax, Bambrick lays bare and upends our expectations about class, gender, and sexuality in this collection about working on a garbage crew. What for one person might be a lifelong career in manual labor, for another might be a casual summer gig brokered through a family connection. The demands on the body are viewed differently when temporary. Bambrick consistently juxtaposes people, images, and experiences in ways that invite serious inquiry.
I often hear the term reproductive labor used to describe unpaid work like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children, but I hear it less often to describe the labor of bearing children. We call childbirth labor yet not the pregnancy itself. And what’s talked about even less is the work it can take just to reach the point of conception: “I bled through the napkin put there to be bled on … My uterus, a knocked-out tooth / of dark dye on the X-ray.” Many people labor to become pregnant in the first place. The title of Moffett’s book cleverly alludes to two kinds of labor: making a living as earning money, versus making a living as creating new life.
At its core, Seam follows in the tradition of poetry of witness or docupoetics, but bearing witness—especially to atrocity—is also a type of work. A humanitarian labor. This harrowing book documents accounts from women who were raped and tortured during 1971’s Bangladesh Liberation War. Faizullah’s poems and her positionality are both rigorously considered. In “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” the shame arrives when the speaker “begins to write about it in third person, / as though it was that simple / to unnail myself from my own body.” The labor here is not just in the gathering or writing, but in refusing to look away. This is a kind of work that goes far beyond occupation. It is difficult, and it is necessary.
The most vulnerable scene in Materialists, Director Celine Song’s sophomore feature, isn’t a love scene. It’s not when John, a down-on-his-luck artist played by Chris Evans, repeatedly declares his love for Lucy, his ex and matchmaker for New York’s elite played by Dakota Johnson. Nor is it during one of the many dates Harry, Pedro Pascal’s character and a successful private equity man, takes Lucy on.
It’s a scene in the kitchen where Harry tells Lucy he had surgery to make himself six inches taller. He has opened up to her. The pair has revealed the cosmetic “investments” they’ve made to their bodies with the hopes of finding love, Harry by detailing his surgery and Lucy by gesturing to her nose and breasts. Harry is vulnerable, crouching at one point so Lucy can see how short he used to be, turning away from her when he admits he’s afraid he doesn’t know if he’s capable of falling in love.
It’s the one moment in the film where I believe they could end up together. It’s also the scene where she ends their relationship. It’s become too transactional. “Isn’t marriage a business deal?” Harry asks. “Yes, it is,” she responds, “but love has to be on the table.”
You get it. She returns to John, deciding that love, true love, is more important than money. It’s a familiar storyline. Films from Titanic to The Notebook have featured women falling for broke men. But instead of rejoicing in this outcome, audiences felt disappointed. Many a TikToker called the film “broke boyfriend propaganda,” crying “justice for Pedro Pascal.” Filmgoers didn’t want Lucy to choose love over money. They didn’t want her to choose money over love either. They wanted her to fall in love—with a man who happened to be rich.
Song is reluctant to engage with the difficult economic realities that might make a modern day New York single marry for money over love.
They wanted the ending that befalls so many of Jane Austen’s heroines. Song has called on Austen many times in the film’s press tour. “It goes back to Jane Austen, right?” she told Harpers Bazaar of working on a rom com. “Jane Austen was the first to do it. I just feel so lucky and honored to be part of a lineage of a very long-lasting and resonating genre.” To The Nightly, she said, “The question is how can a romantic film, and I believe my movie is so romantic, talk about finance so much? … My answer would always be, well, that’s true in every Jane Austen book.”
But part of why it’s difficult to take the film’s critique of class and matrimony seriously is that unlike Austen—who blames her heroines’ financial precarity squarely on patriarchal structures—Song is reluctant to engage with the difficult economic realities that might make a modern day New York single marry for money over love. Lucy isn’t worried that she and John will be unable to make rent; she’s worried they won’t be able to go to upscale restaurants. John’s lack of wealth not only doesn’t threaten Lucy’s ability to survive in the city, it barely even threatens her lifestyle.
When John and Lucy were first together, they were both struggling actors, but by the time we meet them in the film, Lucy has found professional success. She’s a matchmaker with nine weddings to her name at a high-end firm for wealthy individuals. She lives—somewhat implausibly—by herself in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It’s on the smaller side—a nod to the kind of space she could afford in a wealthy neighborhood—but comfortable, and crucially not a studio. It feels both newer and less cramped than John’s apartment. It’s difficult to earnestly believe Lucy when she says “I’ll be living in your shitty bedroom,” because why wouldn’t theyjust move into her apartment?
Economic precarity—especially in New York City—is real. According to Zillow, rent in the city averages nearly $3,800 per month; it’s fair for people to consider the economics of their romantic matches. Materialists understands this reality, but it doesn’t go so far as to critique it. Other than a passing remark about her debt, Lucy seems to be thriving. While it’s questionable that she can afford her lifestyle on her self-proclaimed salary of $80k before taxes, the film doesn’t really show her struggling. Instead—as with Carrie Bradshw, Monica Geller, and many a New York heroine—we’re meant to suspend our disbelief. Of course she can afford the gorgeous apartment and high end clothes on a modest salary. Don’t do the math.
Since John’s economic precarity doesn’t seem like a true threat to Lucy’s livelihood, viewers are left to assume that the real reason they can’t be together is that she doesn’t want to be the financial breadwinner in her relationship. Throughout the film, she’s ambivalent toward her job: She compares it to working at the morgue or an insurance company, repeatedly tries to quit, and doesn’t care about being promoted.
Lucy aspires to what many have called a “soft-girl” life.Defined by TikToker museumofmia as a desire to “live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover,” soft girls aren’t interested in the kind of corporate, girl boss feminism that dominated the culture in the mid-2000s and the 2010s. They want to engage in self care, meditating and developing elaborate skin care routines. (It’s worth noting: most of these influencers aren’t actually opting out of paid work; they’re content creators).
While the film doesn’t explicitly identify Lucy as a soft girl, her life is aligned with the movement both aesthetically and in her actions. She’s not trying to climb the corporate ladder, but she relishes in luxury—designer clothes, posh apartments, fine dining. It’s a far cry from the romantic comedy heroines of the 90s and early 2000s, who had professional as well as romantic aspirations. Bridget Jones was trying to build a media career while searching for her Mr. Right; Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days tried to leverage her dating column into a career as a serious journalist; You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly wants her indie bookshop to succeed.
In some ways, the soft girl is a rejection of the demands that women “have it all,” an ethos those rom coms of the 90s and aughts espoused. But it is also just one step away from the trad wife. The self-professed goal of many women who identify themselves as soft girls is to become stay-at-home wives, mothers, and girlfriends.
You could read Lucy’s resistance to hustle culture as a criticism of the same capitalist structures that encourage people to view dating as an investment, something the film purports to critique. This seems to be how Song wants us to view it; she has said, in a now viral TikTok from Refinery29, that “so much of feminism has been about [being] anti-corporate and anti-capitalist. And, of course, it was always at the forefront of fighting classism.” But while Song is right that some strains of feminism have fought classism, it’s also important to remember that its objective has been to make sure women can live independently of men both financially and politically.
Lucy aspires to what many have called a ‘soft-girl’ life.
Lucy, by contrast, would rather be dependent on a man than financially independent in her own right.On her dates with Harry, she feels valuable because he treats her to dinner. When she stays over at his apartment, he makes her breakfast while fielding work calls as she lounges in his shirt. Why would she work, the film seems to ask, when her wealthy boyfriend can just go to the office and provide for her? Though Lucy ultimately makes a different choice in choosing John, it’s hard to read this as a rejection of soft girl culture when by the end, she’s still trying to quit her job without having a new position lined up or a clear plan for how she will support herself and John. She doesn’t need to be careerist, but it would be more feminist and more anticapitalist for her to acknowledge she needs to work, even if it’s not personally fulfilling.
This messaging is further reinforced through the film’s portrayal of Lucy’s clients: careerist women who have failed to find love. The film features two montages of clients detailing what they’re looking for in a match: one of men and one of women. Each features absurd requests. One of the men only wants to see women who are 27. A woman is looking for a church-going, conservative lesbian…in New York City. Lucy never loses it on her male clients. She smiles politely while they make their requests—no matter how offensive or outlandish. But to the women, she responds with disdain: “That doesn’t mean you’re due to get one [a husband],” or “you’re not a catch.” These consultations come after a moment when Lucy is having a crisis in her career. Sophie S., a long-term client of hers, has been assaulted by a man who Lucy set her up with, something the film never fully reckons with, and is glossed over as a mere plot point.
It’s telling that women are the only clients Lucy tells off. Men are entitled to get what they want, while the best a professionally-successful woman—the only kind who can afford Lucy’s services—can hope for is to settle for someone who is nice enough, a little short, and won’t physically harm her. In some ways, that’s a reflection of the culture we live in. Men continually ascend into positions of power even when they have harmed women, whereas women’s careers get sidelined by marriage and motherhood. But if the film aims to be critical of the culture that produces these outcomes, the intent is undermined by its apparent judgement of the decisions women make when it comes to both love and money.
Lucy, and her choices, act as a foil to those of Sophie and her other clients, leaving us with a portrayal of two possible paths for a woman’s romantic life. Lucy’s path—a disinterest in work beyond the luxury it gives her access to—leads her to a loving marriage. Sophie’s path—pursuing her career over romantic prospects, the film implies—has left her unable to find love. Sophie made the wrong choice, by Materialists’slogic, and she can only correct her mistake by working with Lucy to find love, even though the matchmaking company put her in a dangerous situation.
The message isn’t an entirely unprecedented one. Women in rom coms have long been expected to place their love lives above their own financial stability and careers.Andie in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days chooses to stay with Ben instead of leaving New York for a job that would let her do some serious reporting. Joe in You’ve Got Mail shuts down Kathleen’s store. When women are professionally successful (think: Margaret Tate in The Proposal), they’re portrayed as shrew-like and in need of a man to soften and feminize them. Yes, these heroines tried to have it all, but if it came down to a choice between love and career, they chose love.
Given that Song was so inspired by Jane Austen, it’s worth asking how Austen was able to skewer classism and the patriarchy while empowering her female characters, and why Materialists falls short in comparison.
Consider Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s most popular novel andthe text Materialists is most clearly referencing. In Pride and Prejudice, we see a variety of marriages take place: Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr. Collins, Lydia Bennet’s to Mr. Wickham, Jane’s to Mr. Bingley, and, of course, Lizzy’s to Mr. Darcy. Jane and Lizzy’s matches are driven by love, but Lydia gets married to avoid scandal. Charlotte marries for economic security. For the most part, Austen isn’t judgemental about these options, nor does she shirk away from the real financial precarity the Bennet sisters will face if they fail to marry. The book is straightforward about their options: losing the house and depending on relatives or becoming governesses for other families, training future girls to marry. Mrs. Bennet’s histrionics and desperate attempts at matchmaking are played for laughs, but they underscore a real fear for her daughter’s well being. There’s no way for them to live well without a rich husband. Lucy doesn’t face that same kind of precarity. Without it, the movie lacks the necessary skewering of societal structures and again leaves it feeling more critical of women’s choices than of the society that puts them in such positions to begin with.
Women in rom coms have long been expected to place their love lives above their own financial stability and careers.
The appeal of a film like Materialists at this current cultural moment is clear—and it’s likely to persist. We’re a generation of voyeurs eagerly reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries. We skyrocketed Tiktoker girl_on_couch’s declaration, “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” into an inescapably viral song. Marriage is increasingly an institution only for the wealthy: only 39 percent of working class adults were married in 2017, compared to 51 percent in 1990, according to reporting from The Guardian, and that gap continues to widen. Social media algorithms are pushing content aimed at getting young women to embrace more traditional gender roles. Materialists’scritique of the classist and patriarchal systems that got us here may fall short, but it’s starting a conversation that’s badly needed.
To succeed at making its desired statement on the capitalist machinations that make people treat finding a spouse like making an investment, the film would need to spend less time luxuriating in the high-end dinners and fine fabrics of Harry’s lifestyle and more time dealing with the economic realities of living in New York that could be, understandably, making Lucy anxious about money. Likewise, it would need to move away from casting dispersions on Lucy’s female clients, for putting their careers first. We deserve a film that is honest about what it costs to live—and what that’s costing us when it comes to love.
When I met Marissa Davis in 2017, she was a baby poet. She will admit this herself. She’d just graduated from Vanderbilt University and was spending her June as a summer fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. I got my chance to hear her read for the first time in one of those seminar workshops, crowded around a beige conference table in a beige room in a beige building. It was a low-stakes chance for all of us fellows to introduce ourselves through our poetry, and when Davis read her poem, I remember feeling the colorlessness of the room drip away. The feeling of some cosmic miscalculation descended: she didn’t sound like a baby poet. She had this line in her poem that, nearly a decade later, has never let go of me: “Even ash can raise a temple.”
That sentiment—of the tender possibility for growth embedded in a moment of destruction—runs like a pulse through Davis’s debut collection, End of Empire. It’s a collection that only further reinforces Davis’s profile as a preternaturally wise voice, as a kind of interlocutor between the spiritual and the domestic, the doomed and the daring, the earth and the ether.
When I first grabbed her book, I expected it to be beautiful. It is. But I was surprised by how much the book also feels like a form of travel. Davis’ language drives us through the Upland South of Paducah, Kentucky to the small apocalypse of a bee dying on a sidewalk in Beirut. She guides us through pelvic ultrasounds alongside maple seeds alongside environmental catastrophes alongside the reaches of state-sanctioned violence. And she threads these considerations together with a baffling understanding of song and dream, hope and heresy, witness and erasure.
When I reached out to Davis to talk about the book, she explained, “I wanted to find a language that could at least tug away the helplessness that can be so easy to feel these days.” For her, poetry became a force to imagine possibility in the face of despair. I couldn’t help but remember her in that Bucknell workshop, imagining similar possibilities even then. If ash can raise a temple, a poem can defy a ruin. Davis’ collection is a wager on that possibility. We chatted more about this, as well as about the tangled faultline of endings and beginnings, the act of naming, and more.
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar: There is so much urgency in a collection like this. In its demands for witness and for change on both an individual and collective level. It’s worth noting you end this book with the section “Genesis”—which we might normally think of as a beginning. If this book is both a consideration of an ending (End of Empire) and the beginning, what is it that’s beginning?
Marissa Davis: In a nutshell, the “ending” within the book (which comes at the beginning) is hopelessness. The beginning within the book (which comes at the book’s end) is hope. Or, the beginning is the end—the end of one system, a broken one that breaks us, too—and the ending is a reconstruction; the start of a new cycle, a more communal and equitable order. Or the ending is our strident, quintessentially American individualism, and life begins precisely where the self learns that it can—and must—betray its borders. Or that all borders of any kind must be betrayed. The beginning is where the self has newly understood itself via the channel of relation; and not, as before, through the brutal and consumptive gaze of structural power. Or the ending (which opens) is meant to be the kind of wildfire whose rampage, cataclysmic, also releases the seeds of certain conifers. Knowledge that leaves the self bare to itself. That opens. At the ending (the beginning, genesis—), rises: a tree.
ADLA: I love how much music is embedded in your work; even in your response just there. (The chorus of “ors” and the multiplicity they convey!) It’s making me think of how often you turn to polyvocality in your work. You speak with so many voices in this collection: Lot’s Wife, Doe of the Haruspex, Demeter, Antigone, Persephone, even a red bell pepper…What are the voices you sit with on a daily basis when you start to write?
MD: I don’t know if there are any voices I sit with regularly, per se, but I do very much love to inhabit different ones at different moments. I think there’s something that draws me about looking at the self prismatically. In telling an ancient story anew, you have to find the commonality in particularity; the particularity in commonality. Myths are a kind of mirror: which is exactly why there have been so many poems written about, for example, Lot’s Wife or Persephone. How many different ways are there to descend into an underworld, any kind of underworld, and arise from it? How many different ways are there to miss a home, any kind of home, that one can’t or should not return to?
The form is the reader’s first encounter with the work, whether they realize it or not.
I love how persona allows us to tap into the commonality of the very experience of being human while adding our own irreproducible thread to those stories. Sometimes the persona is something I choose with intention—like for “Doe of the Haruspex,” I’d just learned the word “haruspex,” found it fascinating, and wanted to try to write a poem about the idea. A lot of the time, though, I think that the persona I choose to inhabit can be a negotiation of both a desire for and fear of vulnerability, too. For example, “Demeter and Child” allowed me to write about something I was struggling with and wanted to work through without having to make it about myself. This masking, perhaps ironically, makes vulnerability easier. I’m in many ways a very private person—even to myself! I find I can say more when I’m not attaching my own “I” to the writing.
ADLA: There is something deeply sculptural about your work; poems sprawl across the page/margins, line breaks surprise us, we are held in dense prose blocks. There is also so much about land in these poems, and it feels as though they are even building their own topographies/geographies/cartographies. Can you speak a little bit about your relationship to the page and how you negotiate where you want to locate us as readers?
MD: I like using space to tell stories. It’s something that I find unique about poetry as an art form—it relies on language, yes; but also music; but also a sort of visual art. End of Empire, for example, uses a lot of fragmentation across its pages. There’s a sort of double-sidedness to it, with reclamation the force of negotiation between them. In the beginning, it’s often a representation of a fragmented self; and at the end, of a self that aims to fragment the very fragmenting structures.
Every poem’s shape has its own specific aim, though. Several of these poems sprawl across the page (or across many pages), making more the kind of topographies you’re talking about. These poems are often trying to communicate immensity in some way—whether the immensity of a fault line, the immensity of grief, or the temporal and spatial immensity of imperial violence.
The form is the reader’s first encounter with the work, whether they realize it or not. There’s something, to me, reminiscent of a child hearing the mother’s voice in the womb and only later emerging to see her. We turn the page, and our eyes take in the whole poem’s shape even before they absorb any individual word. Form is thus the first framework and the first enigma, and I want to make that count, poem to poem.
ADLA: I know we have a shared love of Audre Lorde and her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” There is a moment in that essay where she writes, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems…” When you were writing this collection, what were you trying to name?
What I think this sort of poetry can do is strike the flint in many individual hearts.
MD: This question is one for which the answer evolved over the course of writing End of Empire. At a point, it was certainly myself. My chapbook, which was published by Jai-Alai Books in 2020, was actually titled My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak. Even though very few of the poems from that chapbook feature in this collection, I do feel that there were lingering questions about identity, self-hate and self-harm and self-love, reclamation…that I was still writing my way into. The lens already begins as different, though—End of Empire is seeking the roots of that feeling of namelessness, or perhaps of a stolen name or a name called out of. It finds there something that is, first, more communally experienced; and moreover, more structural, more intentionally and systemically violent.
And I think that this is something the collection aims to name, too—the many, many effects of violence. The many ways in which it is inflicted. The many victims of it. The violence not done to us is so often invisible to us, is accepted because it is invisible to us. It is simple enough for me as a Black American to grasp police brutality and what it means. It is not always an instinct, though, to grasp, say, what violences of greed might lie surreptitiously behind the clothing I buy or the food that I eat or how much I’m used to running A/C in the summertime. How do I name my part in the web of things? How do I name this odd space of being both oppressed for my Blackness (internationally as much as domestically) and privileged—at times even oppressor—for my Americanness? Or these ingrained systems that we’ve all been brought into without even asking to be?
And I suppose the last thing I wanted to name is some sort of path out. A hope, I guess I could say. One that leans on community, on the power and dignity and beauty of resisting domination and seeking togetherness.
ADLA: Speaking of systems, it’s impossible to escape discussion of empire right now, with multiple ongoing genocides, environmental, social, political catastrophes, etc. Can you speak a little bit about what empire has to do with poetry? Or maybe what poetry has to do with empire?
MD: Language is the way we construct the world. It’s through language that we understand existence, communicate that understanding to others, define ourselves, define others. It’s a tool—and one that can be used in the service of forging and preserving hegemonic power just as much as breaking it down. You can witness the former just about any given day in the news: in the right-wing discourse around immigration, for example, or in the way that headlines have framed and continue to frame the genocide of Palestinians. Pretty much any racial, religious, sexual, gender, or other minority will grasp, without having to be told, how dominant cultural narratives shape how others view you—and very often how you view yourself.
I find poetry interesting as an axis of subversion because of how it uses—creates—language that can push against what language has created: splaying open received narratives, analyzing them, composting them in a sense, and calling something fresh to emerge. It brings the interior and the exterior into contact and communication. It summons the metaphor—which calls us to find similitude in the seemingly unsimilar; to de-other any supposed other while still leaving the difference intact. As writers, it asks us to pay attention, to look increasingly deeper. We have to create in thinking both critically and unexpectedly. As readers, we have to entrench ourselves in another’s interiority, their desire and agony and vision; we have to learn to be comfortable with the discomfort of not always understanding, of letting go of certainty and control and letting feeling take its place.
I don’t necessarily think the kind of poetry I write, though, is the kind that would guide a revolution or topple a kingdom.What I think this sort of poetry can do—or at least, what I hope it can do—is strike the flint in many individual hearts. It can bear witness, tearing the mask off of violence and making its expressions and effects better known and understood; and it can put us into connection, weaving, in that process, the feeling—or better, conviction—of solidarity with one another, which is the only shovel that can dig an empire’s grave.
ADLA: Survival is another urgent consideration in this book. We can see this particularly in “Parable for the Apocalypse We Built, I: / The Forum:” where you write: “Will it survive/ … Will we survive / … Will our children survive / … How can it survive, if dying? / … Did we not deserve a prophet to warn us?” I’m momentarily electing you prophet. What’s the warning here? And what tools do we need to survive?
MD: The warning is that the path we are on is a completely and absolutely unsustainable one. When it comes to the climate crisis, for example, the outlook for global warming and sea-level rise has never been a happy one, but corporate interests, warmongering, and the increasing ubiquity of AI (all interrelated), among other conditions, have massively accelerated the issue over the past few years—a situation that was never necessary, but that the interests of the powerful have placed every single one of us on this planet in. When it comes to state and institutional violence, a refusal to see the interconnectedness between another’s oppression and your own (take as an example some of the recent online discourse about whether or not Black people should “mind their business” with regards to the ICE raids and anti-ICE collective actions in LA) is a death sentence for them, you, and everybody.
Our best tool is believing that we do, in fact, all owe something to one another and to the earth.
The challenges are many, but the tools we have are many, too. It’s putting land back into indigenous hands instead of corporate and/or colonial ones. It’s refusing to believe that voting is our only tool of liberation. It’s getting used to being a lot less comfortable—realizing that just because we can have anything doesn’t mean it’s needed. It’s learning to care authentically for ourselves and our communities instead of relying on the “retail therapy” and consumption that are marketed to us and that both create massive amounts of waste and widen the gap between rich and poor. It’s taking on education and awareness so that we can construct our values intentionally and do our best to live by them. It’s a lot of other things, too; more than I have the space to name. And I should perhaps add that I also recognize there are limitations to personal power and responsibility in the face of that of state and corporate (often, too, state-backed) actors; much less the constraints of just trying to survive in the world order as it stands, in which money rules all. At the root, though, our best tool is believing that we do, in fact, all owe something to one another and to the earth that houses us, and then doing our best to live through that conviction—knowing that communal power is its own force, too.
ADLA: The whole collection ends with some of my favorite lines: “We yearn / to become / we become it”. This whole book is filled with moments of hunger, yearning, becoming. At the risk of sounding syrupy, can you speak a bit about what you want this collective “we” to become? What you yearn for?
MD: I’ll be syrupy, too! We’ll be syrupy together. I yearn for the we to recognize itself. To struggle in its togetherness for its freedom and to win it. I want each “I” of which the “we” is composed to feel love for every other “I”. To see that they also want to dance and sing songs, to cook the meals of their parents and raise children that will grow joyfully to adulthood, to lounge in the sunlight on a warm day, to marvel at how the sunset is a little more lavender this evening than usual. I want the “we” to have the chance to experience the full awe of their life in freedom—without the dropping of bombs or the poisoning of their land or the incarceration of their children or having to labor until weary just to survive.
Humanity is so incredibly simple in some ways that it can be almost baffling that we manage to cause each other so much pain. There are many reasons behind that, but I feel that a principal one is the inability to recognize the self in each other, an inability that tends to be taught to us. I want the “we” to unteach it. And in that unteaching, in the fight that it implies, to reclaim all the rest.
“Run for Your Life,” an excerpt from Turn to Stoneby Emily Meg Weinstein
“Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man”
—Lennon and McCartney, “Run for Your Life”
He only said it once, at an Egon Schiele retrospective on the Upper East Side.
He was wearing his camel coat. We stood in front of each painting for a long time, holding hands and telling stories, and I thought: This is why this is good.
I was mesmerized by a huge canvas called Lovers Man and Woman. A couple, nude, in bed. The man on his back, staring at the viewer. The woman on her elbows and knees, head tucked under, hips raised, feet flexed, pale back long and bony. The man’s outstretched arm snaked through the woman’s folded ones. Though the woman’s face was hidden, her posture conveyed anguish, while the man’s expression was challenging, poised, collected.
“Why does she look so sad,” I wondered, “when he looks so satisfied?”
“Maybe he cheated on her,” Robbie said.
“Maybe she cheated on him,” I said.
There was a change in the weather, his eyes, the room.
Still holding my hand, Robbie said, matter-of-factly, “If you ever suck another man’s cock, and kiss me with that mouth, I’ll cut your head off.”
My brain knew it was bad, but not what to do or say. If I said something, we might have a fight, and those were always bad.
It didn’t sound like a joke, but maybe he doesn’t really mean it. Did the Beatles really mean it, in the song? Sometimes Robbie, like Lennon, called me “little girl,” as a joke, or a term of endearment. Maybe threatening to cut my head off was a similar metaphor, or figure of speech.
Not long after Robbie told me the specific circumstances under which he would decapitate me, we spent a perfect winter afternoon at the art museum in New Haven, where he kept an apartment that was empty save for a bed, a recliner, and a flat-screen TV. We made out on the benches in the empty galleries. We saw a pink neon spiral inside which blue neon letters said, THE TRUE ARTIST HELPS THE WORLD BY REVEALING MYSTIC TRUTHS.
It was mostly locals at the horse race on the beach in Oaxaca, five months earlier, in August 2008, but there was another pair of American travelers, two guys about our age. Like my college best friend, Leila, and I, one blond, one dark-haired.
The dark-haired one, Robbie, had blue eyes and thick, tan calves. Like tree trunks, I thought, finally getting the simile. The blond one had a map of the whole world tattooed on his back. They told us they were going to import mezcal to the States, that it was going to be the next tequila.
The mezcal, the pride of Oaxaca, was everywhere—in bars in shapely glass bottles, on the dusty shelves of the little tiendas, in plastic water bottles with hand-painted cacti on them.
After the horse race, Robbie and his friend and Leila and I drank mezcal at a bar right on the beach, steps from our respective cabanas, until, hours later, it was only Robbie and me, our bare feet touching in the sand.
He was some kind of business guy, he said. Finance. I said something about capitalism, and he said something that made me laugh. Then he said, “You have a beautiful mind.”
His cabana wasn’t as fancy as ours. Our sheets were new and smooth and his were old and pilled. Our fan was on the ceiling and made of wood, and his was plastic, rattling on the cement floor. This did not matter, because we did not sleep.
I was so relieved. It had been two years since my last actual relationship, with a guilty Catholic and quiet alcoholic with whom I had guilty, quiet, Catholic sex, after I drank one or two beers in the six-pack and he finished the rest that same night, in an apartment upstairs from his grandmother’s, outside which a single pair of granny underwear flapped frequently on the clothesline like a damp flag of surrender. Then the sex with various randos that was often worse than no sex at all. Then a long drought.
Before, in my early twenties, there had been a beautiful boy who stripped down to his boxer briefs each week after yoga class, climbed into my bed, and never touched me. Then, in my mid-twenties, there was an expatriate ex-Marine hippie-hermit on a walled farm in Peru who ravaged me like the world was ending for three straight days before waking up on the fourth to tell me that he’d had “a really intense dream” and didn’t want me to get my heart broken. He said I should stay until the end of the week, but only to watch David Lynch movies and rip bong hits. Then came the guilty Catholic alcoholic, the randos, the drought.
He ordered a $300 bottle of champagne and paid for it with three hundred-dollar bills.
From these experiences, I amassed a Pandora’s box of fears about my own desires for sex and love. I feared not having sex for a long time. I feared having sex I liked a lot that suddenly got taken away with zero explanation, or came and went, like mysterious weather, according to no pattern I could prepare for without remaining in a constant state of desire with no expectation of it ever being satisfied. I feared someone I wanted body and soul telling me what a fun friend I was, and how important it was that we stayed “in each other’s lives” because of our “great conversations.” I feared someone I desired turning their back on me and curling into the fetal position in my own bed, or theirs—literally overnight, in the middle of what I had naively thought could be a love affair, or maybe even love itself, and unilaterally deciding it was “just friendship” instead. I feared being wanted by someone boring and messed-up and quietly alcoholic in a way that felt more like a mucky sucking need than any kind of mutual desire, and the only way to not be alone was to give in and pretend, which was the only thing even more lonely. Being wanted by someone I didn’t want was even more gutting than not being wanted at all, because my unmet desire had at least been real, if only to me, while the numb absence of feeling was like an empty room in myself.
The sandy, sleepless night in the cabana soothed these fears. Or obliterated them.
The next day, Robbie and I exchanged numbers while Leila glowered from a waiting cab. Then Leila and I took his recommendation and went up to a town in the misty mountains, where the locals would sell you magic mushrooms fresh from the mist, and the family that rented the cabins came to build and light your fire for you while they took effect.
It was all just as he described. Leila and I stayed up all night, and I burned a recent bestseller, page by page, because I was sure I could write a better one. Leila briefly believed she had lost her engagement ring, but then remembered she had left it at home, in New York.
Back in New York, a few weeks later, Robbie called.
It was the final Friday of September 2008. I had just turned twenty-nine.
He named a café on Park Avenue in the twenties, a part of Manhattan I never went to. When I got there, he was wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, already finishing a drink.
He ordered a $300 bottle of champagne and paid for it with three hundred-dollar bills. We drank it and talked, and it was just like Mexico. His eyes were so blue.
The hundred-dollar bills gave me pause, but they went with the shirt. He had a jacket, too. It wasn’t from a thrift store, like the ironic suits of the struggling artists in my ironic Brooklyn neighborhood. Robbie’s jacket was a finance jacket, new and expensive. There were no tears in the pale pink lining, only a label.
It was still light when we went out on the street to smoke. Robbie lit a cigarette, and we passed it back and forth. With one hand, he threw the butt on the ground and ground it out with his dress shoe. With the other, he hailed a taxi and opened the door.
“Where do you live?” he asked, standing before the yellow taxi with his red hair in his blue shirt with the white collar.
In the cab, he pulled me astride him. He tasted like cigarettes and smelled like the beach. Crossing the East River, as we squeaked on the vinyl, I saw the bright steel beams of the Williamsburg Bridge speeding by, flashing red.
It was four days before Robbie called another taxi and left my apartment. That first weekend, and for all the months after, we slept and woke and fucked and fought at all hours. We lived beyond time and did not always eat food. That first weekend, we were so in our own world that we didn’t even notice that the stock market crashed.
Right away, Robbie said he wanted to be my boyfriend. He said he loved me. He said he was a direct descendent of a European revolutionary I’d never heard of, which was actually why his dad had had something to do with the bauxite mines in Jamaica, which was why Robbie sometimes spoke in a Jamaican accent that reminded me of the false patois of the highly problematic Sacha Baron Cohen character Ali G.
At the end of that first week in October, something happened at Robbie’s job because of the stock market crash. He worked at Citigroup, he’d said. Or maybe Citibank. Chase? One of the banks. He called me, drunk, from a pay phone. His cell phone had been shut off, he said, because of work.
He hadn’t lost his job, but he was going to work in London now. He was going to fly there every two weeks. He’d already been going once a month, but now he was going to be relocated to the London office, and they would give him his new phone.
He didn’t have a cell phone for the whole rest of the time I knew him. I could only call him on the landline at his condo in New Haven, where, he said, he was also attending the low-residency executive MBA program at Yale. When he was in London, he called from numbers that showed up with the country code 44.
My junior year of college, I studied abroad at Oxford. I knew the country code for England. It really is 44.
The first time he came back from London, Robbie called me from a pay phone and asked me to meet him at Penn Station.
At Penn Station, he said we needed to go to Grand Central, to get oysters at the Oyster Bar. Even though it would have been only a short walk, Robbie insisted on a taxi from Penn to Grand Central, and paid with a crumpled bill.
At the Oyster Bar, we ate oysters and drank martinis. I drank one and a half martinis, which was the most I could drink without puking, and Robbie drank two and a half, then ordered another.
The check came. It was well over a hundred dollars. I waited for Robbie to pull out his hundreds, but he told me something was going on with his money, with his bank, with his card, because of the financial crisis and the new job in London.
He asked if I could cover it. He said he’d pay me back. As soon as things got sorted out in London.
I had only recently gotten my first credit card. It had JetBlue miles.
This is good, I thought, throwing it down. Miles.
Quite quickly, despite the condo in New Haven, Robbie was basically living with me, when he wasn’t in school for a weekend or in London for a week or two at a time, working at Citigroup. Or Citibank.
We went to art museums and walked in the park. We had sex for hours at all hours and then lay on my velvet couch in silky bathrobes, reading philosophy aloud to each other and then had sex again on the velvet couch in the silky bathrobes.
“Anytime,” Robbie said.
That part was true. He’d have me anytime, and I had never had that.
There were other reasons why it was good. He was an amazing cook, a magician. He could make a delicious meal out of anything. If there was a can of sardines in the cabinet and a single, slimy scallion in the fridge, somehow, with condiments and spices, Robbie made something delicious. Later, when nothing made sense, I would wonder if I let it not make sense for so long because he made things that did not make sense—like a can of sardines and one slimy scallion—taste so delicious.
One night, I came home from my day job tutoring kids all over the city, and Robbie had made two pots of soup. One was dark purple—he’d found a can of black beans. The other was light and creamy—he did something with coconut milk. He put them in bowls in the shape of a yin-yang. He put a dot of the dark in the light, a dot of the light in the dark. He didn’t touch his, just waited, watching me, as I tasted.
“How is it, baby?” he asked, tenderly.
“It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted,” I said, and I was telling the truth.
By the end of October, the problem with Robbie’s credit card had not been resolved. Every meal we ate and every drink he drank went on my credit card. Miles and miles.
At the end of that first week in October, something happened at Robbie’s job because of the stock market crash.
Robbie wanted to go to Bermuda for Thanksgiving. Robbie wanted me to get an IUD.
He bought plane tickets with his frequent-flier miles. I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood.
Robbie wanted to buy expensive knives to give to Leila and Simon for their wedding gift in June. That, I didn’t do. June seemed far away.
The night Obama was elected, we were at his place in New Haven, having a fight. I wanted to go out and watch the victory speech in a crowd, but the fight went on too long, though I didn’t understand how it started.
Suddenly, for reasons unknowable, he would be very angry—maybe screaming, maybe crying. He always said it was something I did, or said, but then the next time, when I tried not to do or say that thing, it was something else.
When the worst of it passed, I could hear the people outside, shouting and honking their horns, but Robbie didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want me to go out, either. He said I’d get raped. It sounded more like a threat than a concern. So I watched the speech on my phone in the condo bathroom, listening to Barack Obama’s kind, sane voice echoing off the marble walls.
As November darkened and things got weirder, I’d think of Bermuda, and decide to figure it all out after that. I hated everything about Bermuda from the moment we arrived. The water was not warm. It was like a subtropical Britain, Union Jacks everywhere. White people being rich and Black people still working for them. Every other building in the colonizer town was a bank, and I hated every moment I spent hanging, terrified, on to the back of the motorbike Robbie insisted on renting and drove too fast.
I was homesick for my family in a way I hadn’t been since kindergarten. My parents fretted, as usual, about how to contact me while I was in Bermuda, and, once there, for the first time I felt scared by the fact that they couldn’t reach me instead of liberated, as I usually did by travel. I felt bizarrely disappeared, like I’d never come back from the Bermuda Triangle.
Robbie brought hash, cleverly packed into emptied-out vitamin capsules, and it was surprisingly strong. I hated hash anyway, but Bermuda made me hate hash more, and the hash made me hate Bermuda more.
We broke the headboard of the bed in the dark, cheap room he rented us. It was a cheesy, eighties pastel curve. I looked at the broken plastic and thought, I want to go home.
When we arrived at the airport to do just that, there was a misunderstanding. Robbie had not, as promised, bought round-trip tickets with his frequent-flier miles. His miles had bought one-way tickets, the ones that got us there. Robbie insisted otherwise, but I couldn’t make him look up the email in his phone because he had no phone. I couldn’t make him look up the email in my phone because we were in Bermuda, and I had no phone service.
But it’s no big deal, baby, he said. I’ll pay you back, I promise. Besides, he frequently reminded me, we were going to get married one day and would be very rich.
In order to leave Bermuda, I had to pay for our tickets. On the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. At the counter.
As they swiped my card, I didn’t feel the usual queasiness that struck as the tally of Robbie’s expenditures rose. I’d have given literally anything to leave Bermuda.
By December, we were fighting all the time, but we still had sex all the time, and when this was over, was I really ready for another long drought, and did I really want to be dateless, yet again, at Leila’s wedding in June?
Also, the money. I had to get him to give it back first.
One night, we had a fight about whether our future kids should go to boarding school in Switzerland. Another night, he told me that my writing was “like an emerald covered in moss,” and for some reason that made me cry, and for some reason that made him yell. Another night, we put up water for tea and then started having sex and didn’t hear the kettle whistle. All the water boiled away, and the teapot my mother had bought for me was melted and charred and smoldering, almost on fire. I opened the kitchen window and threw it, sizzling, into a pile of snow.
Every meal we ate and every drink he drank went on my credit card.
I went right online and ordered a new teapot, even though I owed a lot of money on my credit card already. I couldn’t not have the teapot. I’d loved it so much. The teapot arrived two days later, and I placed it on the stove. It was just like the old teapot, but a little too new. It was not the same teapot. Or maybe I was not the same person.
When he got in a mood, I just tried to give him what he needed. That’s what I learned, in all earlier iterations of intimacy—that having “trauma” meant needing “support,” and getting “support” meant “sharing your feelings,” and if that meant screaming or crying, then later, we could “repair,” which meant that I apologized for whatever I did to cause the screaming and the crying, and then tried my very best not to do it again. Sometimes Robbie even noticed me trying, and he whispered into my hair, “Get to know me. I’ve had a crazy life.”
It wasn’t the thing he said at the Egon Schiele exhibit on the Upper East Side, when he casually told me he’d decapitate me. It was the night a few weeks later, in February, when, riding the subway back to Brooklyn from the Upper West Side, I decided to hop off at Penn Station and take an affordably off-peak Amtrak train to New Haven, instead of going home to Brooklyn first and taking the cheaper, grosser bus the next day, as planned.
When I called Robbie’s landline from the train to tell him I was coming, he started yelling at me that I couldn’t come, I just couldn’t come, he couldn’t tell me why, but I couldn’t come there, not tonight, please don’t. The whiplash of the way he yelled “DO NOT COME HERE,” and then pleaded, tearfully, “Please, baby, please don’t come,” turned me around.
I got off the Amtrak train somewhere in southern Connecticut, crossed the platform, bought a different ticket, and took another train back to Penn Station. Rather than go through the subway turnstile to take the A train to Fourteenth Street to get the L home to Brooklyn, I walked through the familiar tunnels to the Long Island Rail Road and took another, very late train to the very last stop—Port Washington.
I always told people that I didn’t grow up there, just “adolesced.” I always told people that it was East Egg, where Daisy lived in The Great Gatsby.
The station was so quiet, and the air so sweet, late at night coming back from the city. I crossed the parking lot to Deluxe Taxi and climbed into an idling Cadillac reeking comfortingly of air freshener. I charged the ride to my father’s business account and signed for it on triplicate carbon paper on a little clipboard with a ballpoint pen. Then I let myself into the house with the key under the mat, and crawled into my childhood bed.
I broke up with Robbie over Google Chat from my parents’ house. He called me a bitch.
When I got back to my apartment in Brooklyn to change the locks, Robbie had left me a suicide note under the doormat. It said he had jumped off the Williamsburg Bridge, called me a bitch again, and said that he loved me.
When I worried he was dead, my parents encouraged me to call their couples therapist, who told me, very calmly, “That man is a pathological liar, and he is manipulating you.”
Then my mom sent me to another therapist, who had me tap on my upper lip while repeating the words “I am safe.”
My parents came to Brooklyn and packed up all of Robbie’s clothes in two cardboard cartons so I didn’t have to get near enough to smell them. My dad was so swift with the tape dispenser; it was just like I was leaving for college again. They helped me pay off the credit card debt, and I felt so fucking privileged—and so fucking stupid.
“At least it’s not rehab,” I mumbled.
“Or legal fees!” said my mom. “Could be worse!”
Eventually, they told me they’d gotten rid of the boxes. The camel coat. The blazer with the pale pink lining. The blue shirt with the white collar. Were they in a landfill? At Goodwill?
Put it out of your mind, they said. And I began to.
I slowly went back to being myself. And then I went looking for someone else to become.
My love affair with corporate America started out like many ill-fated dalliances—with the intention it would be fun, short-lived, and I’d walk away unscathed. During my first year out of college, I worked in publishing and after my first editorial profit and loss meeting, realized it wasn’t the best place for an aspiring writer to work. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to hear otherwise educated and kind people say things like, “Black and Latinos don’t read or buy books.”
When a college friend called me to tell me there was a job opening at the insurance company where she worked—that paid almost twice what I was making at the time, I figured it was a no-brainer. I was getting ready to apply to M.F.A. programs and as someone who didn’t have a family who could support me financially, what better way to maximize my time as a sell-out than making as much money as possible over the next year and then getting the hell out of dodge? One year turned into twenty years, and when I finally managed to leave corporate America to try to make it as a writer, I did so having lined up my pockets and my retirement plans. It’s now been five years since then, and as more time passes, the more bizarre it seems that I thrived in such a toxic environment.
Staying in corporate America as I struggled to carve a path for my writing career radically transformed my class in American society. But that’s not all I got out of the two decades of working full time. I was left with a lifelong preoccupation with workplace dynamics that has consumed me and my work as a fiction writer.
After my first novel was published—where my protagonist Luz swiftly loses her job in the first chapter and must redefine who she is in the absence of work—I wanted to turn my attention to tackling the complexities of a job while my central characters were still in it. In The Grand Paloma Resort, I decided to follow a cast of employees who work in a luxury resort and, through the course of one week, are consistently pushed to become more and more callous at times toward themselves, at other times toward members of their own community. I also wanted to create an atmosphere where it would be clear that work can be a refuge from heartache and isolation, that it is a seductive, life-affirming pursuit.
I’d like to offer you a list and a truth: the defining books of our time are mostly rooted in a person’s relationship to work. Below are seven books that tackle this in a myriad of ways: from views into the lives of a working population during genocidal mandates from the government, to tender illuminations on what it means to be part of a society that fails to count women’s work as labor, to the seduction of wealth and power that lead many of these characters to become complicit in systems that benefit from their own dehumanization, each of these novels offers an unvarnished understanding of an individual’s search for self-actualization through labor.
Published in 1998, Danticat’s historical novel follows Amabelle, a young Haitian woman who lives through the 1937 Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle is a domestic worker who lost her parents in the river that would become the setting for tens of thousands of murders decades later. In this lyrical novel, Danticat weaves the present and the past in a dream-like structure, showcasing the fluidity of a border between two countries where most people travelled daily for work and commerce. Danticat is deft at showcasing the class divide between the Haitian workers and the rich Dominicans they work for—here the toxic work environment extends past private homes, beyond sugarcane plantations to encompass an entire country. Early on in the novel, we witness as the death of a sugarcane worker goes unpunished due to the status of the person who commits the crime. Amabelle becomes aware of the intricacies of state-sponsored crimes as her employer is a high-ranking member of the army. As news spreads that the government has unleashed a massacre, we follow Amabelle as she attempts to find her lover and escape death.
Cara Romero is a protagonist unlike any other. The novel is a one-sided conversation between a senior citizen, Cara, and a work-place counselor who is attempting to help Cara re-enter the workforce after she has lost her factory job during the great recession of 2007. It becomes clear to the reader that there’s a big difference between being unpaid and out of work. Afterall, Cara works almost non-stop in her community from picking up and dropping off children, to helping feed and care for the elderly and beyond. Yet, the precariousness of her circumstances is exacerbated because the cycle of poverty, housing insecurity, and job insecurity are intricately connected. Cruz is masterful at establishing the gender dynamics that activate one of the biggest rip offs in modern society—women’s work isn’t just unpaid; it is often unacknowledged as true work.
After witnessing his father’s murder at the tender age of twelve, Javi Perez learns there is much that can be capitalized about victimhood. His teacher offers him a pass to the nurse to deal with his grief, which Javi uses to cut class. Eventually, he learns he can use tragedy to pave the way for his ambitions to become a successful writer, and as his own fountain of tragedy thins, he begins to appropriate and manufacture tragedy in order to scale the echelons of the writing world to much success. This debut is delicious in so many ways. I loved how Boryga tracks Javi’s transformation from victim to victimizer, and how this propulsive path is fueled by greed and ambition. The questions in this book about how personal history can be commoditized and how there is always someone ready to cash in loom large. Those who prosper from stories of victimhood and systemic oppression are rarely those who suffer the most.
As someone who “sold out” for several decades of my life, there was something wonderfully comforting about seeing that experience reflected to me in Danzy Senna’s hilarious novel, Colored Television. Jane, a mixed-race woman in her thirties, has been suffering as an underpaid academic for decades, waiting to finish a novel that she believes is genius and will launch her into tenure and financial stability. But beyond that, we quickly discover Jane’s true desire is wealth and status because of what she’s been deprived of. When her friend Brett, a successful television writer, allows Jane and her family to move into his mansion to house-sit, she gets to cosplay at being rich. This experience animates her desire to a point where she lies her way into meeting Brett’s television agent and pitching an idea that sounds awfully close to a television show Brett has been developing.
So much of what happens for the rest of the novel felt powerfully insightful for those of us stuck on the bottom rungs, striving. I loved that Jane’s immediate response to being told her novel was a failure was to pivot toward what she considered the life-draining world of television on the way to an easier life. The concrete material goods Jane feels entitled to and cheated of—good schools, a great house in a multi-cultural neighborhood, a finance stress-free life, the right support for her special needs son, an American Girl doll for her daughter—leads directly to exploitation. Senna offers such a wonderful ride that reveals complicity, duplicity, in a wild, page turning narrative.
Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, follows sisters Margot and Thandi as they struggle to survive in a Jamaican town that largely caters to a tourist economy. Their mother Delores sells trinkets to tourists to support her family and has committed inexcusable acts that placed her daughters in danger. I was most fascinated by Dennis-Benn’s portrayal of older sister Margot, who works at a resort and is also involved in sex work. Once exploited, Margot becomes an exploiter as she hides her deepest desires and identity. She is a difficult character to understand yet so much of what motivates her actions is trying to create a better life for her little sister. Dennis-Benn’s portrayal of the ways siblings attempt to step in for a parent’s shortcoming is poignant. This is a complex novel that digs into the underbelly of tourism, homophobia, and colorism.
The Farm is a brilliant debut by Joanne Ramos that follows Jane, a Filipino domestic worker and single mother to an infant daughter named Amalia. When Jane loses her job, her elderly cousin Evelyn “Ate” guides her toward a position at Golden Oaks, a facility referred to as “The Farm” where women serve as surrogates to the wealthy. The payoff for spending the better part of a year to conceive and birth a child is significant. Yet, the sacrifice is to be away from Jane’s own child. The story unfolds in a series of events that help a reader ask profound questions about immigration, class, gender, and race. As Jane’s body becomes commoditized, we understand the interplay between childbearing as an act of survival or the sacred. Ramos does a remarkable job of laying bare the ways that certain paths to progress are closed to immigrants, especially women. It’s a refreshing take on the American Dream.
In Camila Sosa Villada’s bold short story collection, I’m a Fool to Want You, the persecuted take center stage in a harrowing series of tales centering exploitation, hatred, and survival. I’ve been teaching this short story collection since it was first released last year. There aren’t many writers I’ve encountered who display such mastery in creating a sensory experience that mirrors the conceit of each of these stories. Many of the protagonists are trans people involved in sex work, but the story collection also reaches toward stories rooted in other types of othering—from a Black little girl facing racism to a straight woman who becomes a girlfriend for hire to her gay friends. Sosa Villada guides the reader with surprising humor and irreverence as she reveals the violence that trans people face. This is a story collection that doesn’t shy away from pushing darker themes that prove revelatory of our current times—when the toxicity isn’t fixed in a place but rather is a state of being for humans, central characters must transcend the human body to survive.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofWaiting on a Friendby Natalie Adler, which will be published on May 26, 2026 by Hogarth. You can pre-order your copyhere.
Renata is a young dyke-about-town who can see ghosts, something she’s doing more and more of lately as too many of her friends are dying of a new, terrifying disease. When Renata’s best friend Mark dies of complications from AIDS, Renata is devastated by the loss of the person she loved most in the world. And to her disappointment and increasing despair, Mark seems unwilling or unable to return for the proper goodbye they both were denied.
While Renata waits anxiously for Mark, she must stay vigilant: a mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighborhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. What first seems like a scam reveals itself to be far more sinister, targeting the soul of Renata’s community. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends’ memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York. But haunting her every step is Mark, the one ghost who stubbornly refuses to reappear.
Both heartbreaking and healing, tragic and triumphant, Waiting on a Friend is a magical retelling of queer history and a celebration of youth and camaraderie. With pathos and humor, empathy and an edge, Natalie Adler freshly reimagines the past for a new generation, reclaiming the spirit of resistance and determination that would become one of the era’s defining legacies.
Here is the cover, designed by Cassie Vu:
Natalie Adler:Waiting on a Friend is a novel about the kind of friends you make when you’re young and on your own, who transcend familial or romantic boundaries. Throughout the AIDS crisis, such friendships were the height of care. I dedicated the book to my aunt, who became a hospice nurse in 1987 after her friend died of AIDS. This book is for people like her, driven by fierce love for those who have been let down by indifferent systems (which is to say, everyone). I also wrote it with my friends in mind. I hope queer and trans readers born during or after the AIDS crisis learn more about their historical inheritance and I hope the generations who lived it feel their struggles have been remembered and honored. And I want everyone who reads this book to feel the joy of belonging to a neighborhood, even as what makes it home is being changed by forces aligned against you—and to imagine the exhilaration of fighting back. What do we owe one another? How do we mourn our dead while also fighting for the living?
The cover for Waiting on a Friend promises the vibe inside: alternately bright and moody with a hint of mystery. The title does a lot of work in letting readers know what the novel is about, so it’s prominently featured here. The novel is very much about living in a city where so many lives have passed through and how gentrification erases the traces of those lives. I tried to capture both the tough material realities of New York and the ghostly sensation of sharing it with something unseen, but no less present. Cassie did such beautiful work in illustrating that feeling. The cover graphically references both the architecture and the ephemerality of city life. The texture and font are both a little vintage without being overly nostalgic. (If there’s nostalgia in this novel, it’s for a time where we could all afford to live and go out in the same neighborhood with our friends without having to work too hard.) The sunset colors suggest a gorgeous moment in time but also a sense that something is slipping away. My dream is to see someone reading my novel at golden hour at Riis or the Rockaways or on the Q train crossing the river.
Cassie Vu: For this cover, I actually read the manuscript a full year before I got to work on it, during a time in my life when I really related to the journey of the main character. I think it might be the first time this has happened to me, but I had the general idea and the concept for the cover floating around in my mind months before I sat down to design it. The book gives such a strong sense of place, Manhattan in the 1980s, and the writing has an emotional quality to it that deeply resonated with me, so all I had to do was tap into those emotions and visually depict it for the sketch phase. The colors and shapes of the letters are meant as a nod to the vintage time period, while still feeling fresh. The chosen cover was actually the first option I made when I started designing. Sometimes it just clicks!
In her debut novel Julius Julius, Aurora Stewart de Peña creates an outsized, funhouse mirror of the advertising industry, one she knows intimately. Drawing on her career of over a decade, the novel sweeps us into the fictional sprawl of the world’s oldest and grandest ad agency: the titular Julius Julius. Divided in three parts, a trio of employees in various time periods and roles reveal the agency’s machinery: its peculiarities, injustices, and day to day toil. All the while, blonde, long haired dachshunds scamper through its halls.
The legacy of Julius Julius has been preserved with a fervor bordering on religious fanaticism, where ads that are hundreds of years old are kept under lock and key in underground caves. This is the kind of satirical wink that Stewart de Peña carries through the novel, poking fun—not unkindly—at the self-seriousness of creative labor. Like the labyrinthine halls of Lumon in Severance, the mythic, expansive agency created by Stewart de Peña affords the author a lot of room to play. Julius Julius, as a result, is a singular blend of satire and magical realism inside the most unlikely of vessels: an office workplace novel.
The novel’s scope is by no means insular or reserved for industry insiders; each of us consume advertising every day, whether consciously or not, and in that way the novel also implicates us. With a wry brevity, Stewart de Peña tugs at themes of consumption, vacuous corporate culture, and the politics of a desirable, idealized worker. Julius Julius is a subtle, compact novel that considers the void invented and filled by advertising, and its effect on consumers and creators alike.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Stewart de Peña over Zoom in June, where we got into Mad Men and the significance of the novel’s dogs. A day later, we met in person at the book’s launch, where you could find tiny pies being served, complete with dachshund-shaped crusts.
Elizabeth Polanco: One of the novel’s characters, the Creative Director, says that a person’s creative output is a map of their life. In turn, can you tell me a bit about your experience in advertising, and how it informed or generated Julius Julius?
Aurora Stewart de Peña: Julius Julius is really an expression of my feelings in advertising. Obviously not the events—there weren’t that many ghosts anywhere that I worked. I became aware, sort of midway through my career, that I would continuously bring elements of my own life, and my own emotional state, to the work that I was doing in advertising. And it became interesting, because after a while I was like, is this insightful? Am I understanding the assignment properly, or am I in a specific place in my life, and I need to communicate this to masses of people through the vehicle of like, canned soup or something?
It changed the way I perceived advertising, looking at work and thinking about what the creative team, and the strategists, and the accounts people had gone through. That’s where the impulse of that line comes from.
EP: I’m sure people talk to you about Mad Men all the time, but it makes me think of how whatever Don is going through is reflected in the work. When his personal life is in shambles, it comes through in pitches to clients.
ASDP: That observation the show makes feels really accurate to my experience. Fundamentally, advertising is an industry where you have to access a creative part of yourself, and then the business side of the work demands that you chop off the portion that is personal. But of course, that’s impossible, because it comes from the interior dark forest of the self. At least in my experience. Whenever a creative impulse makes itself known, it’s tied to some personal stuff, always.
So I appreciated that. Maybe we’re both thinking of the episode where Anna dies.
EP: I’m also curious about how you organized the novel and differentiated between the three different character’s voices, and arrived at these short little vignettes or moments or lines.
ASDP: The short answer is that the voices are kind of a monolith, because they’re all speaking on behalf of an agency. Agencies tend to streamline the way that their communications are—an agency has a voice, and so do the people in it. I wanted to represent the three different sets of experience, and maybe three different ages. You have someone who is mid-career, which is where we start the book, someone who is late career, which is the middle, and someone who is at the beginning of their career, at the end. I guess it’s funny, she’s the only one that leaves the agency.
They’re also all in different disciplines, so you have a strategist, a creative director, and an account person. That’s the skeleton crew of an ad agency—the inception of an ad before you get to a production.
The brevity, I think initially, was just an intuitive choice. The vignettes were intuitive, but they also reflect the way that advertising communicates. So I felt like it made a lot of sense.
EP: I found that structure really effective—we would move on to a new character, and I would immediately feel that I understand who this person is. I understand what they’re dissatisfied about, what they’re excited about, what they’re feeling in this agency.
I was also amazed by how elaborate and believable the brand identities and the histories were for these fictional companies, or clients of the agency. What inspirations did you take, or resources did you look for?
ASDP: Honestly, that was just a fun thing to come up with, obviously they have reference points. I do love a historical ad. I do love to read Victorian and turn of the century ad copy because it’s so weird—it’s like a cousin of what we would write today.
In the novel, there’s a campaign for wood, and in real life, I worked on a campaign to raise the minimum wage. That felt like an analogous assignment to the wood campaign, because it’s this fundamental idea you need to communicate. It’s not like you’re selling a granola bar with specific attributes. I worked for a while at an agency that had a lot of government clients, and it was often that you’re not promoting a product, you’re promoting the idea of wood, or water, or something like that.
EP: I also thought a lot about exploitation as a theme of the book—I’m thinking about how extractive these creative industries can be. Using your creativity, your imagination, and not always being rewarded for it. Exploiting people as consumers, preying on certain feelings, emotions. Was that something that you wanted to reflect or satirize?
ASDP: Absolutely. I try to get at it in so many ways, and the success of that exploitation is a bit mysterious to me. I think, particularly in creative industries, about how vulnerable and hopeful the creative part of ourselves is, and how that impulse is used in this fairly neutral tool to benefit a lot of systems that do a lot of harm.
It was on my mind all the time, I think it’s on the mind of a lot of people who work in advertising. The Senior Brand Anthropologist in the first chapter is an advertiser, but also a voracious consumer—she’s constantly decorating her house and buying homeware, which is reflective of something that I do, trying to get to the bottom of this creative part of ourselves that we harness to damage ourselves, and to extract resources from the earth, and our well-being.
EP: At their core, there’s nothing wrong with things like fashion or home goods or beauty—they’re wonderful means of expression, they are joyful and there is a creative drive behind them. But when they become so inextricably linked with capitalism—having the new object, consuming, not caring about the impact of these products on our lives—you can no longer divorce one thing from the other.
ASDP: Fashion is emblematic of that, because it does the thing that all advertising attempts to do: it creates this enticing world for you to step into: You’re working from home, you see this beautiful editorial of women on an Italian beach, living these lives where you imagine that they are actually free from the impulse you are following. And then the clothing arrives, and you open it, and you’re in your apartment in Toronto, and you’re like, “I’m going to wear this once to the convenience store, and then it becomes part of a pile.”
All of these piles on piles that we create with these objects, everything that is advertised to us, lose their gloss as soon as they step into our lives. It’s interesting, but it’s not interesting. It’s horrendous. I was thinking a lot about the hillside singing Coke commercial. I have loved that since I was a kid. I remember seeing some version of that as a child, and thinking, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.”
The impulse and culture that it grows out of gets divorced from its context and put into the context of Coke, which is engaged in all kinds of dealings. I think the agency was McCann, and at the time, McCann had young creatives, who were probably going to protests, listening to the Mamas and the Papas—so they recreate this feeling and attach it to this entity. It has worked for decades. It is quite something.
EP: One thing I noted down was how these characters have such a vivid, emotional attachment to a product or a brand or a feeling, and everyone has something like that. We remember seeing something on TV that we wanted, some object that was so enticing for so many different reasons. It represented something to us.
There’s this viral tweet where someone’s like, “Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend? Is this pop star a feminist hero?” It’s these identities and emotions that we put onto brands, and obviously it’s very beneficial for them. They get to reap the rewards of us feeling warmth and attachment towards them. It’s really interesting to see that represented in the characters who work in the agency, because they understand the impact that advertising can have on a person.
ASDP: It is inescapable. If you are ever on YouTube and you see a collection of kids’ commercials from the 90s, it is intoxicating. It taps into these innocent desire centers where you’re like, “Oh my God, if I don’t get this pony or this Barbie or this game, my life will be bleak.” It sort of fills this world in you, and it continues to work like that. As adults, we think we have so much more barrier protection—look, a beauty term—against those mechanisms, but I don’t know that we do. To your point earlier, the global fast fashion crisis is really evidence of that.
EP: Another thing I thought about a lot while reading the book was Severance. And Mickey 17 a bit too, popular media where cultivating or adhering to a very specific kind of persona or identity at work is rewarded, through a promotion, being well-liked, getting the exciting assignments. The novel really adds something to that satirical, dystopian perspective on what makes a desirable worker.
ASDP: Thank you so much for mentioning Mickey 17. I saw that a couple of months ago, and I thought about it for so long afterwards. Severance too, I actually hadn’t seen it until the book was all done and dusted. Then I watched it and was like, “Well, that’s what I was trying to do, that’s what I was going for.”
We were talking about this a bit before; in advertising, you have to access this very emotional part of yourself, and you also have to be the highest performer ever. You have to give so much, be so productive, have so much output, be so collaborative, but yet you’re asked to access the feelings that will help you make this emotionally impactful work.
I’m not comparing these two disciplines at all, but when I have worked in theatre as a playwright, I’m allowed to have emotions. I’m allowed to have a day. I can’t be abusive to the people around me, but I’m allowed to have my full spectrum of humanity.
EP: The setting of the agency is almost surreal—there are ghosts and caves and little wiener dogs roaming around. When you started writing, did you know that you wanted to build this expansive world, or did you start off a bit more limited?
ASDP: It revealed itself to me as it went along. You might not be surprised to learn that I often don’t start out with a very clear idea. I write, and these things make themselves evident. The easy answer is that they are reflections of an extremity and intensity of feeling, a reflection of the absurdity of experience. But that is the device of absurdism. Of course that’s what it is.
I was just thinking about these agencies that are over a hundred years old. You have these places that represent brands with mythologies, so it felt useful to blow those mythologies up into something that was as big as they feel.
EP: Like they’re mythic.
ASDP: Yeah. The ghosts felt like they needed to be there, because when you are working in these places, you’re often dealing with a lot of memory, a lot of history, a lot of work that came before you.
EP: Does being a playwright bleed into your work? Is that something that helps you, in writing prose? What’s the overlap there?
ASDP: You know, it’s a really different, different experience. When you’re writing a play, you’re often in conversation with a theater, you have collaborators. This was a lot of time alone. But I do think the freedom I felt in writing the novel was, oh my gosh, I can go anywhere, I can do anything. Sometimes the constraints of a play are really wonderful and useful, it’s nice to have a framework to work within, but the expansiveness of the novel…there’s so much that got cut. It was interesting to have no limit on what I can do. Some of these people don’t even have to be real. Some of the characters are dogs. You can’t do that in a play.
EP: That’s actually my last question—why, specifically, blonde wiener dogs? Is there a little sentimentality there for you, or are they just a dog you like?
ASDP: Those dogs are based on a real dog. First of all, agencies have dogs. Some agencies will recruit you as an employee by telling you that they have a great dog culture. You go to work and there will be a lot of dogs running around. This is true.
I worked at an agency called Taxi, which otherwise doesn’t make it into the novel because I had a fairly nice, boring, unproblematic time there. But there was this beautiful, silky haired little dachshund called Dougie that was everybody’s favourite dog. Dougie would bound around the agency, all low to the ground, ears flying, with a big, dog smile on her face. I just really fell in love with her. She would occasionally go under my desk and I’d feel this little breath on my ankles. Anyway, there are dogs in most agencies, and Dougie made the cut.
I was pregnant, swollen, and tired. I couldn’t get comfortable. I lay on the sofa and loudly said some version of, I’m so swollen and tired. I can’t get comfortable, and dramatically piled pillows beneath my feet, hoping my husband would magically appear with a glass of water. That my legs would swell was expected—it’s part of pregnancy, as any pregnant person will tell you—but because my ankles are damaged from years of corrective surgery for severe birth defects, they’re swollen even when I’m not pregnant. When my husband failed to appear, I turned on the television. Things immediately got weird.
Here is what I beheld, in all its bizarre glory: Pamela Anderson, tan and blond and busty in a crop top, slowly spinning the spokes of a wheel. A dude—inexplicably wearing an open, sleeveless shirt, also tan and blond and muscly—appeared beside her, his abs glistening as he lowered a visor, wielded a welding torch. Sparks, in every sense of the word, began to fly. More Pamela. More slow, seductive wheel spinning. More welding. Once I realized that the result of this collaborative project was a beach-ready wheelchair, I lost my shit screaming for my husband—Get in here! I’ve found softcore wheelchair porn!—at the top of my lungs. This time, my husband appeared in the living room. Oh my GOD, he said, squinting at the TV. Are you watching Baywatch?
The truth is that I can’t reliably work any remote control, so that night on the sofa I got stuck on a channel that only played one show—and that show was, in fact, Baywatch. The first time those red bathing suits and slow-motion running montages filled the screen, I expected lifeguards to simply save drowning people. But, as I quickly learned, watching the water for potential drownings is just a fraction of how these LA County lifeguards spend their time. Lifesaving on Baywatch is an expansive, multifaceted endeavor. Sometimes it involves making sure everyone wears sunscreen. Other times it involves stopping a jewel thief. “Lost and Found,” season 6, episode 18—the episode I first stumbled across—involves sexy welding.
In this episode, C.J. Parker, played by Pamela Anderson, and Cody Madison, played by David Chokachi, take it upon themselves to address an issue that plagues beaches everywhere: accessibility. A disabled comedian named Jess, played by Chris Fonseca, approaches the lifeguards about building a ramp to the beach so everyone can access it. Instead, C.J. and Cody decide to build a beach-ready wheelchair. Of course, they don’t ask for Jess’s opinion. The lifeguards just know everything will be better if they grant Jess access to the world’s sexiest able-bodied stage not by building a ramp, as he requested, but by taking on this secret project. So, appearing extra shiny and tan, exchanging serious looks, they get down to lifeguard business.
Jess is not a regular character on Baywatch, only the focus of this one special episode. He’s first introduced in the episode’s opening moments, rolling his chair toward the beach. He stops when he reaches the edge of the walkway, unable to traverse the sand. But while Jess is stalled at the edge of the path, some jerk is bothering C.J., hot lifeguard that she is. The viewer stops worrying about Jess and starts worrying about C.J. Who will save the lifeguardfrom this pest?
Of all the fantasies the show enacts, imagining a disabled man as a lifeguard’s love interest isn’t one of them
It’s Jess who intervenes, running over the man’s foot with his wheelchair. You’re lucky you’re in the chair, says the man, who is apparently fine with harassing women but draws the line at punching a cripple. That’s what I tell myself all the time, Jess replies.When C.J. expresses surprise at Jess’s intervention, he asks her, Who’s going to hit me?
When I lived in Southern California during college, I never noticed a lifeguard on a beach. This is likely not a reflection of reality, but of my own preoccupation with everything else the beach entailed. As a person with limited mobility, navigating sand is an irritating task. It is not relaxing, and it is not sexy. When you can’t move your ankles, it feels like, I imagine, what it might feel like for an able-bodied person to walk in quicksand. But Southern Californian beaches have one thing going for them that the New England beaches of my childhood don’t. They are fairly level, and the sand is fine enough not to hurt my highly sensitive feet. On the beach as a kid, it wasn’t until I was completely submerged in water, floating and weightless, that I’d begin to relax. The sexiness, though, never arrived.
In California, the relative ease with which I could reach the water was one way I could avoid confronting my own physical limitations. Attending college far from home was another. I figured if no one knew me in Los Angeles, I could arrive at a version of my life where, even if I knew it wasn’t true, my body appeared as unremarkable and ordinary as everyone else’s.
It almost worked: For those four years, I was as pain-free and mobile as I’ve ever been, and surgery was, at least briefly, in the past. I could pretend that I belonged among scarless, tan bodies—the ones runningand playing volleyball. I could sit down, hide my feet in the sand, and enjoy the spectacle of the beach. But there always came a moment when suddenly the spectacle was me.
I am not a regular wheelchair user, and I know the fact that I can access a beach at all is a real privilege. No one stares as long as I’m wearing long pants, and rarely does anyone notice or comment on my scars, my limp, or gait. But the places those things are most visible are places bodies are most vulnerable. Part of being a woman on the beach is trying to gauge whose staring is harmless and whose is dangerous; who is registering your body with ordinary appreciation and who feels entitled to it. Part of being a visibly disabled woman on the beach is watching someone register you as a woman, then watching their expression shift when they register you as a disabled woman. There’s a moment when desire—or even just a glance that establishes your body’s presumed normality—turns to something else: disgust or curiosity, wonder or confusion. This is a moment I’ve never gotten used to, despite how many times it’s happened. A moment that living in California didn’t alter, or let me forget.
There’s an unspoken hierarchy of awful behavior, in which hurting a disabled man is worse than harassing a woman. Jess knows this. C.J. doesn’t. But the scene where Jess defends C.J. gets weirder. When C.J. tells Jess she’ll see what she can do about building a ramp, he handcuffs her to himself. Handcuffs himself to her? Who is the subject, who the object? I’m exercising my First Amendment rights, Jess says, as if the freedom to petition is best exercised by preventing a county lifeguard from returning to her post on the beach.
When other lifeguards show up to cut off the handcuffs, C.J. doesn’t even appear mad at Jess—which makes me mad. Instead, she offers to talk to him when she finishes work. In the hierarchy of awful behavior, if a disabled man handcuffs himself to a woman in protest, the able-bodied world presumes he is so harmless, so inconsequential, that the woman isn’t angry or afraid. The woman should probably think about ways to help him. Or maybe that’s just part of being a lifeguard.
We’re supposed to find the lifeguards sexy and kind, supposed to believe that rendering a beach accessible is a good thing. Which, of course, it is! But we are not invited to consider the implications of access, to consider disabled bodies sexily alongside able-bodied people, to consider Jess’s desirability. When Cody sees Jess with C.J. and introduces himself, Jess responds, Don’t believe the rumors, we’re just good friends. Of all the fantasies the show enacts, imagining a disabled man as a lifeguard’s love interest isn’t one of them—instead it’s the punchline to an unspoken joke. We don’t get a slow-motion montage of Jess in a wheelchair sexily rolling through ocean spray. We get a montage of a partial wheelchair, and its able-bodied builders fill the frame.
The first time I watched the welding scene, without any additional context, I laughed so hard I was practically in tears. It hadn’t yet really occurred to me that the body most like mine had been replaced with an inanimate object. I could already see the problematic simplification of disability, of course, but I hadn’t seen the earlier part of the episode yet. I didn’t know I was watching a woman being kind to a man who physically detained her—not because she was scared of him, or attracted to him, but because disabled men must need charity.
Obviously, access to the beach doesn’t fix ableism. It just means more ableism now happens at the beach, disabled bodies hyper-visible among the able-bodied throngs. Those moments when I see someone register my body as deviant are awful because they mostly happen silently, unacknowledged by anyone else, and I am alone in the awfulness while able-bodied people around me are slathering on sunscreen, blissfully unaware of my momentary fear, my persistent shame.
Baywatch aimed to generate desire, while simultaneously mitigating the audience’s presumed shame.
But sometimes these moments aren’t silent. Sometimes people ask, What happened to you? I always explain—especially to men, because I don’t want to get called a bitch for saying that’s none of your business, which has happened—because I’ve learned it’s my job to make my body make sense to others. After I’ve made myself legible, this person goes back to their day at the beach, and I’m stuck in a weird loop of talking about my body and trying to avoid talking about my body. My desire to simply forget I even have a body is eclipsed by a larger need to make it palatable for everyone else.
Baywatch isn’t only about desire—it isn’t porn—it’s about living by a code of ethics. The lifeguards on Baywatch believe their job is a calling, and the show positions them as the best among us: the strongest and most fit, the most beautiful and handsome, and, more importantly, the people who embody classic ‘90s American values like stopping crime and cultivating the power of kindness and friendship. It was these kinds of stories that overtook living rooms across the country and the world, as 1.1 billion global viewers tuned in at the show’s peak in 1996.
Baywatch aimed to generate desire, while simultaneously mitigating the audience’s presumed shame: If you derive pleasure from watching scantily clad lifeguards, what saves you from having to admit you enjoy low-budget smut is that they are also good people who do things like weld a wheelchair in their spare time. But the show doeswant you to feel shame about characters’ (and presumably your own) moral shortcomings. Before she enlists Cody to help her build the chair, C.J. hides from Jess behind her lifeguard tower, not because she’s afraid of him, not because he handcuffed himself to her, but because she is ashamed she hasn’t helped him. When she relays her embarrassment to Cody, that embarrassment is meant to extend to all able-bodied viewers.
But, like C.J., the viewer knows we can’t just make beaches uniformly accessible. The world isn’t for disabled folks. Not today, and probably not tomorrow either. But there’s still time for shame to transform into kindness and care. That’s what Baywatch is all about.
And that’s where sexy welding comes in. If the lifeguards—the show, America, you, me— can’t build ramps because they can’t actually commit to scalable accessibility, then they can at least get one of those harmless, inconsequential, sexless people onto the beach, where he might enjoy getting sunburned like everybody else. At least until the able-bodied world asks some version of the question what happened to you? because accounting for your body is the true price of admission.
I made it through my pregnancy without any major loss in mobility, and my daughter was healthy. Her legs and feet aren’t made like mine. This is a source of relief for me, but that relief is also a source of shame. Of all people, shouldn’t I be ready to help her celebrate and navigate life with a disability? Shouldn’t sexy welding offend me? Yes. But at the end of every interminable day with a newborn, I popped the baby in her little swing, drank a Negroni, and let Baywatch take me away.
At first, I watched the show because it was comically bad, and because I kept asking myself questions, sometimes out loud, like, Can a lifeguard actually tell the coast guard to stand down? or, Is this episode with a surfboard-stealing octopus actually about eating disorders? and before I knew it, I was telling my colleagues and anyone else who would listen all about what was happening at Baywatch HQ.
The show is just so sincere, so self-serious. The lead lifeguard, a former Navy SEAL named Mitch (played by the inimitable David Hasselhoff), is also a single dad, and his relationship with his son centers single-parenting, challenging our cultural notion of good childrearing. I wondered if there was anything this show didn’t do.
But so much of what the audience was supposed to find quintessentially kind, generous, or brave merely perpetuated the very thing a given episode sought to avoid or illuminate, including ableism. To its credit,Baywatch did, for the most part, cast people with disabilities to portray characters with disabilities, but even then, they often didn’t cast people with the same disabilities as their characters. (Chris Fonseca, the actor who plays Jess, was born with Cerebral Palsy, but this is not part of Jess’s character arc—he was injured in a car accident.) In other instances, the show missed the mark entirely. It featured Mila Kunis as a blind child who is saved from a fire by Mitch’s son; it included a host of dwarves playing Santa’s elves.
One of the reasons I never saw Baywatch in the ‘90s is that I was in and out of the hospital for the better part of that decade, and the showwasn’t a popular choice in the pediatric ward. I missed a lot of the ‘90s. Coming back to Baywatch lets me in on a trashy, problematic version of the decade. But when I’m laughing at sexy welding, I’m also laughing at Baywatch’s depiction of women and disability—I’m laughing at Pamela Anderson, and at the spectacle of her body, which became the iconic pin-up of straight male desire in the ‘90s. I’m laughing at misogyny and ableism, which the show tries to sell to me as feminism and advocacy. I’m laughing at both the depiction and absence of my own body—I recognize parts of myself in both C.J. and Jess’s characters—and I’m persecuting them both for the very things I’ve criticized in myself: her sex appeal and ability to perform the role of desirable woman; his inability to mask his disability, his reliance on others, his desire to be among the flawless figures on the beach. His desire to be mistaken for one himself.
On my father’s desk, there’s a picture of me at four years old, twirling on the beach in South Carolina. My father loves this photograph because it captures the first time both my feet were completely flat on the ground, the first time that maybe the promise of a normal childhood was beginning to come into view.
I don’t want to have to do the work of translating disability anymore. And yet I can’t stop doing it.
The child in that picture is not ashamed, shy, or scared. She doesn’t know about Baywatch, or boobs, or welding, or ways to dress to hide scars. She doesn’t know about ableism. In this picture, she’s far away from all that. She’s at home in her body. She’s learning how good it feels to dance on the beach.
My daughter turns four next month. Already she is performing some weird ableist nonsense, claiming her legs don’t work, saying her ankles hurt—really milking it. I know she’s just imitating me. In her paradigm, my body is centered, and I don’t want to erase that, either. And though I absolutely plan to watch After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun some night when she’s asleep, I’ve come to think my daughter probably shouldn’t watch Baywatch.
In the final scene of the episode, after Jess has been helped into the water to live out the fantasy of returning to his able-bodied youth (in these kinds of awareness-raising episodes, it’s unimaginable to feature a disabled character who didn’t tragically become disabled), the lifeguards gather around Jess at Baywatch Headquarters. He performs a bit from his sit-down stand-up gig. In a restaurant the other night, I started choking, he begins, waving his arms around wildly. And wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally proposed to a deaf girl. The lifeguards laugh, the credits roll.
The episode ends with a disabled man telling an ableist joke, throwing other disabled people under the proverbial bus. So much of the episode hinges on this: Jess doing the work of making people comfortable, making disability a joke for everyone else. Every time the episode approaches confronting real ableism, it relies on Jess’s internalized ableism to excuse the show from doing the real work. If the disabled person won’t do the work for you, then you don’t have to do it either. The collective failure to prioritize accessibility, to center disability in any meaningful way, isn’t your fault.
Listen: I want to write about the ridiculous things in Baywatch becauseI don’t want to have to do the work of translating disability anymore. And yet I can’t stop doing it.I’m still making disability smaller, more palatable, so that an able-bodied reader might be more comfortable. I can always point the reader away from disability. I can say, Look! Cody moonlights as a bike mechanic! with the same enthusiasm I might say, Wow, I had no idea you could touch your nose with your tongue!
But what if I don’t do that? What if, instead, I tell you that right now I’m waiting for a flight wearing thick, knee-high compression socks on a 90-degree day, because I’d like to be able to disembark the plane? What if I make you sit with Jess’s joke at the end of the show? The joke makes me cringe. But it’s also powerful. It makes plain the uncomfortable truth that ableism is so pervasive that disabled folks internalize it and erase ourselves. When the credits roll, that discomfort is loud and central. It fills the room.
August is always a special time for me, a woman who translates the works of women. Women in Translation month is dedicated to highlighting the work of women writers from all over the world and recognizing their contributions to literature in their own language and the languages to which they are translated. It is also a time to recognize the literary translators whose intense, sustained work has led to the publication of these and other brilliant works of literature, which otherwise would remain unknown to a wider, international audience.
Below are seven outstanding works of prose by highly talented women authors writing in Arabic, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish (with Mapuche and Quechua terms preserved in the translation), and Swedish. In these works—four novels, one essay collection, and two short story collections—you will find the timely and the timeless, the local and the universal, sorrow and joy, despair and hope, hardship and resilience. Whether firmly established or debuting in English translation, these writers share a bit of their world with us, bring us into the lives of exciting, intriguing characters, and document the realities of womanhood in their various settings and forms. I am pleased to celebrate their translators as well, all of whom are named on the cover of these seven books, which is not always the case.
When Jumana’s father dies, she learns that, given their blood types, he may not be her biological father. If her father is who she thinks he is, is she really Palestinian? The narrative goes on to interrogate what it means to be Palestinian, especially to women, as it looks back on Jumana and her sister Yara’s journey, moving from relative to relative, from Jerusalem to Tunis, to Amman, to Beirut. Each chapter is told by one of the women in the family, including Jumana’s husband’s aunt, who, though deceased, still has a lot to say. A picture of displacement, violence, and rupture emerges as much from the larger geopolitical environment, where war looms large, as from family dynamics. A multi-layered story and a fascinating portrayal of Palestinian women in all their complexity.
The River by Laura Vinogradova, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis
Rute has carried the weight of loss and sorrow for ten years, since her beloved sister Dina went missing. In need of an escape, especially from herself, she spends the summer by a river in the countryside, in an old house recently inherited from the father she never knew. The river brings Rute solace, freedom, and strength, and neighbors Matilde and Kristofs offer her warmth and friendship. Still, she remains unable to open up to them, confiding only in her sister through the daily letters she writes to her. When the summer is over, Rute returns to her life in the city and to the prospect of finding connection and learning to laugh again. A gem of a novel that captivates and delights with its sparse prose and deep emotional resonance.
A Belgian soldier has no memory of his life before the day, in 1917, when he was found in Flanders and taken to a psychiatric asylum. Years later, Julienne Coppens claims him as her husband, Amand, and takes him home to their two children. Faced with rebuilding their marriage upon a past only Julienne knows, gradually they grow closer and Amand constructs an identity from the stories Julienne tells him. Despite his terrible nightmares and her shame about parts of her past, they persevere. Danjee’s short sentences, strung together seamlessly, set the cadence of the Coppens’s lives, a beguiling rhythm of ordinary days through an extraordinary time of upheaval, hope, suspicion, and revelations. This is a beautiful, sprawling historical novel and love story with enthralling explorations of memory, trust, and connection.
So What If I’m A Putaby Amara Moira, translated from the Portuguese by Amanda De Lisio and Bruna Dantas Lobato
This essay collection started as a blog in which trans author Amara Doira documented her transition and her experiences as a sex worker in Campinas, a city near São Paulo. Doira writes in candid detail about her encounters with clients, the joys of expressing her sexuality in the profession she chose, the physical and emotional pain she also experiences, and the contradictions she sees in the men and in herself: attraction and repulsion, intimacy and distance, connection and indifference. In her strongest essays, Doira reflects on Brazilian society’s views on sex, love, desire, sex work, consent, and violence against women, especially trans women. An important account of sex work and trans lives in a country where, as in many places around the world, femicide is widespread and trans women the most targeted victims.
Chilcoby Daniela Catrileo, translated from the Spanish by Jacob Edelstein
In a not-distant future in Chile, Mari, who is Quechua, and her partner Pascale, who is Mapuche-Lafkenche, decide to leave the Capital and move to Chico, the island where Pascale grew up. On Chilco, Mari has trouble adjusting and is depressed and torn. She has left behind family, friends, and a good job but also a life of hardship and little hope. The Capital is in ruins because, as a result of corporate greed and government corruption, towering residential buildings have collapsed, leaving a large segment of the population, mostly indigenous, homeless and destitute. Catrileo has created a dystopian novel, a scathing critique of unfettered capitalism, an ode to cultural and linguistic heritage, a tribute to the strength of women, and a touching love story, all rendered in lyrical prose. An impressive literary achievement.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
Most of the stories in this collection explore the ways Muslim women in southern India respond to the demands of a fiercely patriarchal society. Often overworked, undervalued, and without legal recourse against injustice, these women variously express or repress their anger, depression, and despair, as the men in their lives distort religious principles to keep them in complete subservience. The recurring theme of the vulnerability of women, ostracized and destitute if abandoned by their husbands, is epitomized in the devastating story “Be a Woman Once, oh, Lord!” Coexisting with the weighty themes in these stories, however, are moments of joy, warmth, and even humor in Mushtaq’s vivid descriptions of daily lives shaped by cultural and religious traditions. Also richly described are the inner lives of characters constantly grappling with the expectations of a complex web of social and familial relationships.
In these eight stories, Cho explores the challenges faced by Korean girls and women, ranging in age from ten to eighty. Cho’s stories uncover the strictness of gender roles, the sexism women face at work, the disproportionate demands placed on mothers, especially those who also have jobs outside the home, and the violence against wives, daughters, and even sisters that persists and is hard to combat. Despite such pressures and limitations, these women are determined to seek fulfillment and growth, some trying to do it all, others shedding burdens and shifting away from the expected course. The complex relationships between mothers, daughters, and grandmothers are particularly interesting, as the women absorb the experiences and views of previous generations or reject them as no longer fitting this particular time in their lives.
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