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.
This is the land in winter, when snow covers the fields like cream, going from white to a weak blue to rose to gold as the sun sets. At dark, snowmelt freezes in the ruts of the dirt roads and the birds go black against tree branches. It is a brittle time. Ice has formed under the docks and along the edges of the creeks around Okisee. This is a kind of cold that the people of west central New York know deeply: How it blows across the lake with nothing to stop it. How it enters the brick of the chimney and stays, how it flattens itself against glass and frosts the insides of windows. Every February the people of Kinder Falls look longingly at their photos of a Florida vacation taken before their children were born and imagine they’ll live there someday, when they finish their working lives. But they don’t. They stuff rags around the loose panes and tuck towels under the front and back doors and carry on, going to the supermarket, to the town hall and post office, to the sale at Sears, to the fancy restaurant that puts blue cheese crumbles on their salads, and to the Holiday Inn function room to watch the one child in town who plays chess compete in an adult competition where the prize is a free haircut.
But with March comes promise. The light is lengthening and the green that lies underground is unwinding itself.
It was the sunlight in March—a sap-starting, snow-washed, ice-melting light—that made Marlena pack her ten-month-old baby into the car seat and drive 160 miles from Scranton to Kinder Falls. She needed to move, to drive, to go, and this was the place she’d known as a girl, the place she came back to even through college, even after she got married, and even after Aunt Lucy moved away and her sons sold the house, because it was a beautiful, begin-again place. And now here she was, checking into a Red Roof Inn to show it all to June, beautiful baby June, happy June. And there was Kathy behind the counter, like always.
Well, look what the cat dragged in.
Hey, Kathy. How’s your mom?
Cranky as ever. What are you doing back here in the winter?
It’s technically spring, right? Weekend getaway. Have you got a room you can give me for a few days? Not facing the parking lot if you have it. Marlena sat June on the counter. When did they get a Walmart over in Dryden?
Three years ago, maybe? Put the Dollar General pretty much out of business. Look at this gorgeous baby. What’s her name?
June.
And what brings you here in mud season? You nuts?
Roger is getting remarried, and I told him he could use my apartment for the in-laws.
Oh? I didn’t know you two had split.
Over two years now.
Sorry.
Don’t be. Everyone was pretty much relieved when it happened.
Kathy wiggled June’s toes. But . . . you have a baby?
A happy accident.
Who’s the dad?
Navy guy.
In Scranton?
Marlena laughed. His parents live there. He was home on leave.
Kathy raised her eyebrows.
No, he’s not in the picture.
Single again, Marlena had been liberal with her body, careless, with her navy man. She never dreamed she’d get pregnant at forty-two, but sperm found egg and grew, two cells, twenty-four, and Marlena couldn’t decide what to do. Hands, lungs, eyes, and still Marlena stalled. Bones, hair, toenails, ears, June.
She’d known the man only a few weeks, had a picture and a matchbook from the Cantina Bar where they’d met. But she was coming to know him more intimately in the parts of June that weren’t her. A single dimple in the cheek, length of thigh, June’s eyes, not violet like Marlena’s, but a warm brown. He’d left for Bahrain before she knew she was pregnant, and she couldn’t decide whether to tell him, or how, or when. Now that June was here, she couldn’t imagine anyone else in their little family. She knew it was selfish, but aren’t all parents selfish in some way? Roger had never wanted kids, a different kind of selfishness.
Kathy walked her fingers up the baby’s legs and tickled her chin. I can do $120 for a long weekend. Friends and family discount. Though a real friend would keep in touch.
You’re the best, Kathy.
I know. Kathy glanced out the hotel’s front window and frowned. Crap. Sharon Epps.
Really? Marlena watched a woman climb heavily out of a Bronco. I thought all the Epps were gone.
All but her, Kathy said. You remember her father—sweet, old Mitchell Epps? He died just last month. Sharon lives alone now in that big farmhouse near the old drill pad.
That’s sad.
Which? Mitchell, Sharon, or the pad?
All of them, I guess. Marlena picked up June and settled her on a hip. I remember thinking the pumpjack looked like a giraffe when I first saw it. I thought it was beautiful. I was probably fourteen.
Kathy shook her head. Yeah, well no.
The door to the lobby jingled as it opened. Sharon Epps came halfway in and swung the door back and forth to set the bells jingling. Ho ho ho! Hey, fat Kathy. Colder than a witch’s tit, right? She shut the door behind her and squinted at Marlena. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?
Marlena smiled weakly at the woman staring at her. A large, flat face. Tufts of greying hair flew out at her temples, the rest drawn back in a low ponytail. Her T-shirt said It’s Wine O’Clock! and the button on her pants pressed deep into her flab.
I’ve got a couple Wall Street burnouts who think they want to start a winery coming Saturday to take a look at my land, Sharon said to Kathy. You got a room this weekend? They’re morons, but I’ll take their money.
You selling it all? Kathy asked.
If I can. Selling it and getting outta Dodge.
Where to?
Not sure. Someplace without snow, ice, or mud.
Marlena jiggled the baby, who had started to fidget. Sharon wheeled around.
A baby girl! she said. Her voice swung into a high register. Oh, hello sweetheart, you precious thing.
Sharon wiggled June’s foot. Such a cutie pie. Hello little darling. What’s your name?
This is June, Marlena said.
Hello June, Sharon cooed. Aren’t you perfect. Can I hold her? Just for a minute.
No, sorry, I was about to feed her, she’s hungry.
Kathy passed a key card to Marlena. You can have 103.
Come on, Sharon said. I’m great with little babies. Anyone will tell you that.
Sorry. Marlena scooted around Sharon, hitched June up on her hip, and slung her bag over her shoulder. The door jingled.
Ho ho ho! Sharon yodeled. She turned to Kathy. Well, she’s a real bitch, isn’t she?
Kathy stared past Sharon at the parking lot. A squirrel arced across the pavement.
Now that I think of it, I recognize her. It’s that jet black hair. It used to be long—down to her ass. She’s a Staunch, right? Came in the summers and stayed with Lucy? She was here that week the kid died at Schuyler’s Creek.
I don’t remember, Kathy said. She drummed her fingers on the counter.
So, what room can you give me for my people?
Marlena had packed impulsively, didn’t quite think it through, all the things you’d need for a long weekend with a baby: more diapers, lotion, a teething ring. She’d have to get to a store before everything closed. Her best friend Ruth said it was mom brain; she’d read it had to do with hormones.
Marlena’s room phone rang. Call for you on 42, Kathy said. It’s Roger.
Marlena steeled herself and picked up the receiver.
We can’t find the blue thing, Roger said.
She heard Vicki, Roger’s bride-to-be, in the background. The sapphire, Vicki whined. It was in a Tiffany box. I put it on the TV. Remember, Marlena? You said it was lovely.
Yeah, Roger said. She can’t find the something blue that she needs for the wedding.
I remember seeing it, Marlena said. But no, I don’t know where it went. Did you look behind the couch?
Yes, we looked behind the couch, Roger said. We’ve looked everywhere. What’s with the fish, Marlena?
June likes to watch them.
Okay. Well, um. Thanks anyway.
That Roger had asked her to house her ex-in-laws for his wedding was so presumptuous that Marlena had been stunned into silence, and now there they were—her one-time sister-in-law, her one-time mother-in-law—sleeping in her bed and making coffee in her kitchen, getting ready to celebrate Roger and the so-called love of his life, Vicki. Even the name was like a pinch. She reached over to her bag and pulled out the Tiffany box, pried open the lid, and admired the sapphire ring. She slipped it on her finger. Marlena smiled to herself. Vicki was welcome to this mother-in-law, she thought. The woman had referred to Marlena as “the renter” when she’d moved in with Roger. Marlena dialed Ruth’s number and left a message. She’d forgotten to ask Ruth to feed the fish, and she wasn’t going to ask her ex-in-laws to do it.
The hotel’s brown shag rug and gold-and-maroon striped drapes were faded. The sink had a brown stain in the shape of a kidney and the bedspread was damp. Marlena wished she’d brought more clothes and toys. She’d always thought of herself as a free spirit, expansive and adventurous, but sometimes she wondered if she was simply a scatterbrained fool.
She’d always thought of herself as a free spirit, expansive and adventurous, but sometimes she wondered if she was simply a scatterbrained fool.
June was whimpering. Marlena lifted the baby to her breast and settled into a chair to watch the trees outside her window, dark like black velvet. She ran her finger across the tiny pimples that dotted each of June’s cheeks. Her perfect ears, nearly invisible brows, tiny nails. After, Marlena buckled a sleepy June into her car seat and drove a mile to the Quick Mart.
The first flakes looked like a mistake: princess-light, cartoon-lovely. She admired them, pointed them out to June. The store was nearly empty, and the cashier stared into the middle distance, arms folded, as Marlena unpacked her cart with one hand, June clutched in the other.
Sorry, I’m a little slow.
The girl stared out the plate glass window and pretended she hadn’t heard. The snow was coming thicker now. In her summers here, Marlena remembered how quickly the weather could turn, how fast and hard the rain came in, like a wall, and left. You could watch it travel the lake: first a silent grayness far away, then a rush of cold and an exhilarating darkness, then the rain. Big droplets, like frogs falling from the sky. Then, almost as fast as it came it vanished, and the sun painted wet surfaces so that the whole beach sparkled. You could watch the gray retreat, like it had all been a joke.
Marlena protected June with her coat until they reached the car. The sky was a cypher: dark, but moving, swirling. Was the storm coming or going? She couldn’t see the lake from here.
A bearded man in a slicker loaded bags of snow melt into his truck.
How bad’s it supposed to be? Marlena called to him.
Four inches? Maybe more, he said. But the wind, I guess. Strong wind.
Marlena got June in her car seat and then buckled herself in. She’d made it in the nick of time. The Quick Mart lights went dark, and the cashier dashed through the parking lot, got into the man’s Ford, and the truck pulled away. Marlena smiled at June in the rearview mirror. It’s okay, sweetie, she said. We’ll be back at the hotel soon. She turned the key. Nothing. She pumped the gas pedal. Start, she prayed, panic rising in her chest. Nothing. She stomped on the pedal, a sweat breaking out on her lip. The engine turned over, yes! then stalled. She pumped again. Turned the key. Nothing. Marlena’s stomach tightened. She tried the ignition again. Nothing. Engine’s probably flooded, she thought. I’ll give it a few minutes. She looked around at June, who stared back with big, worried eyes. It’s okay, Junie, she crooned, everything’s all right. Want your binky? Marlena rifled through her purse. Diapers, Kleenex, lip balm, golf pencil, but no pacifier. Damn. She tried the ignition again. Not a flicker. She unbuckled her seatbelt. It was a mile to the hotel; she could walk it in twenty minutes. She’d leave the groceries and come back in the morning.
June was in a fleece onesie, a hat, and a sweater; Marlena swore at herself for not putting the baby in a snowsuit. She zipped June inside her down coat, grabbed her bag and walked. Snow thickened the air, needle sharp. The wind picked up huge handfuls and whipped the flakes in her face. She kept to the side of the road, head down, singing to June: you are my sunshine, my only sunshine. Marlena’s eyes watered and her feet were wet and going numb, not good. She thought she’d been walking about ten minutes when a light appeared in the distance. A car! She waved wildly. It slowed, pulled over, stopped. A Bronco. The driver’s window opened.
I remember your hair. You had long, black hair, down to your ass.
Sharon had a hood pulled tight around her face. Marlena saw only darkness of eyes and lips, tight and thin. She felt a hitch in her gut and hugged June closer into her chest.
Get in, for God’s sake.
Marlena hesitated.
Sharon leaned over and opened the passenger door. You insane?
Marlena and June slid in.
Thank you, Marlena said. My car wouldn’t start.
It’s your battery.
No, I had a new battery put in a few months back.
I know cars, Sharon snapped. It’s your battery. She looked over at June’s little face peeking out of Marlena’s coat. Hey, sweet thing. June made a quiet, whining sound. Oh, don’t you make sad noises, now, cutie pie. Sharon reached into Marlena’s coat and took June’s finger. We’re friends, okay?
Marlena slid toward the door, away from Sharon. I really appreciate your giving us a ride, she said. The windshield had steamed up and she was sweating in the car’s heat. June fidgeted and kicked until Marlena unzipped her coat and sat the baby on her lap. On the dash, a plastic hula girl swung her hips.
No problem, Sharon said, her eyes locked on June.
The snow was already a white veil across the windshield.
We really need to get to the Red Roof, Sharon. June’s not dressed for this.
Sharon tugged on June’s toes. She doesn’t feel cold to me. She put her face close to the baby’s. June’s eyes widened. I could eat your fat little cheeks, she said. I could eat you with a spoon, yes I could. Such a sweet girl, precious angel. Sharon glanced up at Marlena. You want to get going, do you?
Yes, if we could, please.
Then let me hold her. Just for a second.
June sneezed, then laughed at herself.
See, Sharon said, even the baby thinks it’s a good idea. Let me hold her. Then we can go.
A plow’s headlights hit Sharon’s face and it lit up. Marlena felt the same hitch in her gut. She had the sense of being with a teenager, not a grown woman, and it was such a strong feeling that she checked Sharon’s face again. There were gray spikes in her eyebrows, a sag under her chin, dark patches in the hollows of her cheeks. Still, the way she moved was like a teenager—mean, impulsive. Marlena found her voice. I’d rather you didn’t.
Jesus Christ. I’m not going to hurt a baby. Let me hold her, then we’ll go. No skin off your nose. Or do you want to sit here all night and argue about it?
Marlena loosened her grip on June.
Sharon smiled and lifted June gingerly. She held the baby on her lap like she was holding a much larger child; too loose. Marlena reached out a hand to steady June. Sharon pushed her hand away. Hey, sweetie-pie, she sang. You are too delicious. I’m going to eat you up, eat you up from head to toesies, I am. Sharon nibbled on June’s shoulder and June giggled. Yum, yum.
We really need to go, Sharon.
No, you don’t.
The baby’s hungry, Marlena said.
No, she’s not.
Sharon, please.
A minute passed. Two. The three of them filled the car with their breath and heat. Marlena felt sweat trickle down her back. She felt nauseous. She needed to be back at the hotel, away from Sharon, away from the snow, away from whatever this was. Sharon began to sing.
I peeked in to say goodnight, but my baby had flown away,
Flown away across the lake, bright red ribbons in her hair.
I peeked in to say goodnight, but my daddy had flown away,
Gone to live in Forest Gate, gone to live with angels there.
Sharon’s voice was low and tuneless. Her eyes were closed, like she’d forgotten the snow, the Bronco, Marlena.
Sharon, Marlena said quietly. Kathy told me about your dad. I’m so sorry. I remember he used to drive all us kids in his truck in the Fourth of July parades. I thought he was the kindest man I’d ever known. I can’t imagine how much you miss him.
Sharon’s face contorted into grimace; she squeezed her eyes shut and hugged June closer.
I’ll take the baby back now, Marlena said. She moved closer to Sharon and reached for June, but Sharon twisted away.
Sharon’s voice was whispery. Not yet. I need another minute. Just one more minute. She rested her cheek on June’s head and looked at Marlena. Please?
Give her to me, Sharon.
No.
Let her go, Sharon.
No.
Marlena reached for June, but Sharon clutched the baby tighter, too tight, and June gave a wail, then another, louder, and another, until the red-faced baby made an awful, choking sound and Sharon yelled sorry, sorry, sorry, and handed June to Marlena, who wrenched open the door of the Bronco, jumped out, and started walking.
Sharon clutched the baby tighter, too tight, and June gave a wail, then another, louder, and another, until the red-faced baby made an awful, choking sound.
The snow came at her in mean swirls, but Marlena put one foot in front of the other, hugging the hysterical baby inside her coat. It’s okay, June, she said, it’s okay now, breathe, sweetie, hush-a-bye, sweet Junie. We’ll be back at the motel very, very soon. Rock-a-bye baby. It’s alright now, it’s alright, hush little baby. She could see only a few yards in front of her but felt the road under her sneakers. The world was loud with wind. A faint light behind her cast a shadow on the snow. The Bronco’s headlights.
Sharon shouted out the window. I’ll give you a ride to the Red Roof, I promise. Get in the car, for God’s sake. You’ll freeze out here. Don’t be an idiot! She pulled closer to Marlena and laid on the horn.
Marlena took off into the trees. Her purse caught on a low branch and wrenched her shoulder. She yanked it free, ran faster, her heart banging, the baby’s wails escalating. She heard Sharon yell, but wind swallowed the words. Marlena kept moving, tripping and sliding over roots and wet stones hidden under the snow. She stepped hard on something sharp, broken glass? that cut through her sneaker. She ran until she couldn’t see ahead or behind her—the snow was a staticky blur in all directions—and only then did she stop. June, startled by the stillness and cold, went quiet. Marlena held her breath and listened; she could no longer hear Sharon. Her shoes were soaked and frozen, her fingers numb, and her hair dripped with snow. Freak snowstorm in March. Freak mother with baby. No clothes, no food. She swayed side to side rocking June, listening to the woods, waiting for the crack of the branch that would fall on them, the growl of coyote, the click of a rifle, Sharon. Her shoe was split open, the bottom of her foot sticky. Blood is not red. Blood is black against the snow.
A lump of freeze slid off a pine branch and thudded onto the ground, making her jump; was something moving through the trees? Marlena crouched down and prayed that June wouldn’t cry. There, only ten feet away she saw a wizened, white-haired man. The snow circled, then settled. No, not a man; it was a buck, snow frosting his thick gray coat, half molted. Head up, smelling, antlers gone. Scraggly, hungry, nosing for new grass budding under the snow, his want-belly distended from a long, scarce winter. June whined. The buck leapt away, white tail flashing. Bleached leaves hung like dead bats on the trees.
Animals were warnings, auguries, omens, Marlena thought. This was good. She limped along, trying to follow the buck, but the animal left no footprints. Dampness clogged her lungs. She struggled to breathe in, out. Panic rose up and tightened her throat. She swallowed, concentrated. She’d been in these woods as a kid. She knew them. She could do this; she could find her way out. Around her, white pine. Pine resin seals, Aunt Lucy used to say, would staunch the blood from a wound.
You don’t have to do this alone, Ruth told her when Marlena was eight months pregnant, and huge. They’d been wandering around Walmart looking for things a baby might need. Ruth handed her a pair of nail clippers so small they couldn’t possibly be of use. There’s a guy out there who could be good for both of you, she said.
I barely know him.
You liked him enough to sleep with him.
He’s probably happier not knowing. He’s on a ship on the other side of the world; how could he be the kind of man who wants a family?
How do you know he doesn’t?
It’s easier this way. It’s my decision.
It’s not fair to him. What’s this for? Ruth had picked up a white noise machine.
So babies can sleep. It has the same sounds they hear in your stomach.
Seriously?
I don’t know.
You should tell him.
And then what? Fight with him for her?
Marlena’s previous loves—a few boyfriends, Roger—felt slight, untethered, as if they could drift away in a heartbeat, and they did. Her love for June was earth-bound, it was body, the very force that kept her feet on the ground.
Why assume the worst? Ruth asked.
Why assume otherwise?
What did Ruth know, Marlena thought. Ruth had never been married. She hadn’t woken up on a Sunday morning to hear her husband confessing he was in love with a Vicki. Ruth had no idea how love disappoints. How it breaks the ground beneath you. How small you can become.
You have no idea, Ruth.
I know that you don’t have to do this alone. At least let me come to the hospital when she’s born. It shouldn’t be you in there all by yourself, with only nurses.
Marlena had said yes. Ruth had come with her, and Ruth had sat with her through labor, but then went pale and wouldn’t go into the birthing room.
Marlena had been alone, after all.
A sliver of a moon emerged and lit three wooden posts leaning into the earth. Marlena knew this place! As a girl, she’d found bottles from an old sugar shack here. As a girl she’d built fires here, played with boys here. Here is where her Aunt Lucy would come for the ramps that grew in the sweet soil of the maple trees, where she taught Marlena about plants. Marlena followed the drifts, walking and singing to June—another five minutes, another ten—sure she would find more familiar landmarks. There should be a hedge of yew and a rock that looked like a frog. But the snow flattened the landscape and she recognized nothing. A movement caught her eye: the buck, ahead in the distance. And in that direction, a solidness. She squinted. Marlena’s spirits leapt. A house? She sprinted toward it, startling the buck, who bolted. Yes, a house! Stone walls. Broken shutters. One door with a rusted padlock. She picked up a rock and banged it against the metal, three, five, ten times. June screamed and screamed. It broke. Marlena was so grateful she laughed with delight. They entered. June took in the cold, dark, room and wailed.
Marlena pushed a broom handle through the latch to secure the door. She found a musty sleeping bag under a bed and wrapped the baby and herself in it. She swayed, cradling June against her shoulder. The house was quiet. There were only dead, boneless things in it: a hornet’s nest that had papered itself to a beam, its ancient flaking skin torn open years before. Beside the bed, an abandoned mouse nest of chewed newspaper, spider silk, and wood shavings. Marlena relaxed in the comfort of wooden beam, of shelf, of chair. She fed June, who was ravenous. The smell of damp stone filled her nostrils.
The exhausted baby fell asleep. Marlena put her in a new diaper and swaddled June in her coat. The house was freezing. There was a log pile and old newspaper stacked next to the fireplace, so she opened the flue, arranged logs on the grate, crumpled sheets of newspaper and tucked them around the wood. She felt around the mantel and found a metal tin filled with matches. Work, work, work, she prayed. They did. When the fire got going, she peeled off her sock. A big gash bisected the ball of her foot; it was still bleeding and the skin around it rippled like waterlogged seaweed. She ripped a piece of her T-shirt with her teeth and wound it around her foot to stop the blood.
Marlena tried to stay awake. She sat by the fire with June and talked to her about their family and how their people were farmers, then rail workers, then salesmen of gloves and hats, then teachers, then phone company workers, car mechanics, and paralegals, as she was. She sounded out their names, as if June’s history could protect her: Mavis, Edith, Paula, several Johns, and of course June, a grandmother Marlena had loved. As she drifted, people flickered in the corners of the room, kind people, their hands open, offering cake, singing without words in a chorus like spring leaves ruffling. There was a blur of colors—bright greens and sapphire—of women in Queen Anne’s lace-print dresses and movie star sunglasses and the bitter smell of gin. Gin like Juniper. Juniper like pine resin. Resin like canoes. A distant cousin who drowned in Okisee. A boy and a waterfall. A twin sister’s face pressed flat against her own in her mother’s womb. The dead, who float through mirrors and leave you. The living, who float through rooms and leave you. What do you want most? the navy man had asked her after their first night together. As if there was a thing. Snow in a streetlight. Grandmother’s ice cubes in a glass. A hundred days like this. Marlena felt held in the time between breathing in and breathing out, where air is not necessary, or body. The corners of the stone house erupted in colors. Thank you, house, Marlena said without sound, sending her words through the air like paper lanterns.
When she woke, planks of sun lay down on the floorboards and bent up the walls. She felt newly hopeful, teenage-giddy. She’d wanted things so desperately as a girl: I want to live in a beautiful house, she’d told a boy once; I want to be famous. There was time yet, Marlena laughed to herself, and there are still miracles. There was June.
Marlena slipped out of the sleeping bag and lit another fire to warm them. She changed June’s diaper and drew the baby to her breast. Marlena was starving. She rummaged in her purse and found two packages of peanut butter crackers. Another miracle! She cradled June with one arm and tore the wrappers with her teeth and devoured them. June sucked hungrily, then eyed her mother impishly and bit, a delighted look on her face. Okay, then, Marlena said, you’re done here. She tugged on her coat and shoes, picked up the baby, removed the broom handle and went outside. The bright sun made everything sparkle, as if the night’s terror had never happened. Trees dripped snowmelt that made water prints in the drifts. Marlena scooped a handful of pristine snow and let it melt in her mouth.
Kathy was probably arriving at the hotel, wondering where Marlena could have gone so early in the morning. Someone might call the sheriff about the car abandoned in the Quick Mart lot. How about that snow, everyone would say. Came in fast, gone fast. And Sharon, that storm of a woman, she didn’t frighten Marlena at all in the light of day.
Marlena kissed June and looked back at the stone house, another miracle. The name “Tuttle” was carved in lovely letters above the house’s door. Whoever you are, Tuttle, she thought, we Staunch women thank you.
Glints of Okisee shone through the trees. The water was brilliant, as if the lake had inhaled the sun and then breathed it out in blinding bursts. Dead leaves clung to the old growth trees that dotted the hillside. Marlena remembered Aunt Lucy’s word for it. Marcescent. Leaves that hang on until new growth pushes them out. Like people do. Like her. It wasn’t that far she’d come, and yet it seemed Marlena had been jettisoned into another life. She’d tell her navy guy about June. If it worked out with him, great. If it didn’t, she knew she could manage alone. But really, she hoped it would.
Squirrels on a branch sent down a shower of powder. She walked through the curtain of snow into a clearing where she had a better view of the water. The baby pointed: that tree, that rock, that airplane rumbling high above. She turned June toward the lake. Look, June. See how bright the water is? I used to come here as a girl, and you will too. You will learn to swim, like I did, and you will fish, and canoe, and build forts from pine branches like I did. A red-tailed hawk circled high above them, hungry, merciless. A quick wind rose and the lake thumbed page after page after page onto the shore.
June pointed. Her face was serious, her eyes focused on something far away. What is it, June? A duck? A chipmunk? Marlena looked in the direction of the baby’s gaze; the lake was empty but for a solitary canoe, stilled, no wake. June stretched her tiny arms out as if reaching for it. You’re not going anywhere, Marlena said, and she wished it was true, that she could keep June here, with her, in this moment, but June wriggled, trying to squirm out of Marlena’s arms, as she would always, as children do. Marlena shifted June to get a better grip, and they walked toward the lake, toward the road and its happy morning traffic, two figures growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared in the glare of the sun.
When people find out I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi (because they’ve asked where I’m from, because someone else has told them, because they’ve read something I’ve written or, most often, because I’ve handed them my Hawaiʻi driver’s license), I am met with one of two responses: “Why are you here?” or, inevitably, someone telling me about a past or future vacation.
It is extremely difficult for most people—most Americans—to conceive of Hawaiʻi and Oceania outside of an imperialist context. It is “paradise.” The far-off place where, if they’re lucky, they’ll vacation. But for me, my family, and so many others who call this place home, Hawaiʻi is where we’ve lived, worked, dreamed, and struggled for decades. Its history, and ours, is irreversibly tied to the mass extinction of Indigenous plants and animals, the military’s occupation and desecration of the ʻāina, and the continued displacement of kānaka from their Native land. That’s what I try to capture in my debut story collection Extinction Capital of the World.
As a Samoan-Haole settler, I was raised to view the land I lived on as more than a place. It is a member of my family, to be treated and cared for as such. This belief stems from my own Samoan ancestry and the Hawaiian cultural practices I was raised to respect. It bridges the modern separation between people and place addressed by Louise Erdrich in her essay “A Writer’s Sense of Place.” She asks: “How many of us come to know a place deeply, over generations?”
Place, to me—and to the other debuts included on this list—is not static or unfeeling. While there are many short story collections out there that circle a single place or region, these seven books are special because of how they treat place as a character to be known and loved across time. This relationship is not always an easy one, but the complications, and at times grief that this bond entails, enrich the human characters in these debuts. All published (or soon to be) within the last ten years, these collections speak to the power (and privilege) of the ability to stay in a place, the heartache of being forced to leave, and how, just as the people who leave a place change, places, too, change in our absence. From the Sunshine State to Colorado and the Pacific Northwest, each collection will ask you to see the places that grace their pages in a new light, through the eyes of those who deeply understand, care for, and, occasionally, come to resent them.
Mia Alvar’s National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize-winning collection, In The Country, is characterized by exile—of the characters who remain and live under martial law in 1970s and 80s Philippines, and of those who are forced to leave. There are tales of homecomings, stories of grief and regret. My favorite story, the titular novella, “In the Country,” follows a young nurse, Milagros, as she organizes a strike at Manila’s City Hospital, demanding that Filipino nurses be paid the same as their American counterparts; her political work results in a collapsing of roles—wife, daughter, mother, citizen—usually kept static by the boundaries of place that have crumbled under the country’s dictatorship. Though not all of Alvar’s stories are explicitly set in the Philippines, each center place in the hearts of her characters—across the board, In the Country deeply understands the complexity and grief of diaspora. Alvar’s debut is an ode to the places we come from and all the joys, struggles, and heartbreaks that home entails for those who leave and those who are left.
I will read anything Bryan Washington writes. Forever and ever. Amen. His first book, Lot, a literary love letter to Washington’s hometown of Houston, tells the story of people who are often erased: the Jamaican sex worker in “Shepherd” who visits relatives in the city to distract from the death of her baby; the Greek chorus of residents from an apartment complex who tell the story of an ill-fated affair in “Alief;” the broke community college dropouts in “Bayou” who find a chupacabra. Washington’s stories are written for and about the working class, capturing a moment in time in a rapidly gentrifying city. Through following recurring and one-off characters as they navigate the landscape they call home, we, as readers, are forced to accept that, as much as we love the places we come from, sometimes, in order to survive, we have to leave them.
I read Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina nearly four years before I moved to Denver, and even now it haunts my experience of Colorado, and my larger understanding of my presence as a settler in the state. Fajardo-Anstine balances coming-of-age stories like “Sugar Babies”—where the anger and grief of a sixth grader is forced to the surface after the bag of sugar she and a boy in her class are caring for like an infant for home economics “dies”—with the sex work and violence against Indigenous women present in “Any Further West” and the titular story, “Sabrina & Corina.” Steeped in history, these stories span generations of women, documenting struggles, joys, and a deep connection to and love of the American West.
Revolving around the city and suburbs of Jacksonville, Milk Blood Heat is all you could want from a Florida book. It’s sticky, tragic, a little yearning, and animated by age old questions: What and who makes us who we are? Is it possible to become someone new? How can we take control of our lives in the face of our pasts, the people we love, and the systems of power that shape and subjugate our worlds? Some of my favorite stories from the collection include “Feast,” which follows a woman haunted by the body parts of her miscarried child; “Thicker Than Water,” about a woman who road trips to Santa Fe with her estranged brother and the ashes of her father; and the titular story, “Milk Blood Heat,” showing two adolescent girls as they strain against their burgeoning womanhood, mixing their blood into a bowl of milk that they then drink in an attempt to become blood sisters. I especially love how many of these stories portray the complicated, fully realized desires of women.
I’ve been in awe of Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s work ever since I read her story “Temporary Dwellers” in Qu Literary Magazine. Navigating the stickiness of envy and desire, the grief and callousness that comes from facing ever present atrocity, and the United States’ occupation and active military desecration of Hawaiian land, this story, like so many in Kakimoto’s collection, is a queer gut punch to the heart. Kakimoto has a way of showing women in all their real, messy grief, longing, and desire. There’s “The Love and the Decline of the Corpse Flower,” where the narrator finds her deceased wife blooming in the corpse flower that grows in their living room; “Aiko, The Writer,” in which Aiko breaks her grandmother’s rules to please her literary agent, and writes a manuscript about the kapu Night Marchers; and “Ms. Amelia’s Salon for Women in Charge,” where Kehaulani goes to a salon which only accepts personal traits as payment to get waxed in order to please her haole boyfriend. Throughout Every Drop Is A Man’s Nightmare, Kakimoto tells Hawaiʻi’s stories with compassion and honesty, rejecting mainstream media’s fantastical paradise for the lived reality of Hawaiians under settler colonial rule.
Annell Lopéz’s collection is a masterclass in balancing public and private life in fiction. Digging deep into the mystery, hurt, and desire her characters don’t show to the world, Lopéz forces us to reckon with the privilege of our public personas, who we are when no one is watching, and whether or not the part we play every day is who we want to, or should, be. Lopéz’s love for the Ironbound and its people is fully realized, always circling what it means to live in, to love, and to be forced to leave a place. I love so many of these stories, but especially “Bear Hunting Season,” which follows a young widow, Nina, as she begins to date again after her husband’s death, bringing his ashes along with her as she meets new people; “So I Let Her Be,” where a daughter comforts her mom after her mom’s nude photos leak; and “The World As We Know It,” where a white couple’s call to Child Protective Services leads to what will become the deportation of their neighbors who live downstairs.
Max Delsohn’s darkly comic, yet tender portrait of 2010s Seattle follows transmasc characters as they navigate the trials and tribulations of living in a city hailed by many as radical queer utopia. From the feral glamping trip found in “18 or 34 Miles from Perennial Square,” to the narrator in “Sex Is A Leisure Activity,” who, after transitioning, finds himself increasingly attracted to other men. My favorite is “Moon Over Denny-Blaine,” which tracks the drama, politics, and ultimate solidarity found when a queer nude beach is overrun with straight people on Pride Sunday, Delsohn remains unafraid to show how the complicated reality of his characters’ lives belies the utopian veneer. The emotional range of Delsohn’s work is simply unmatched—these stories had me gasping, cackling, and, like all the best fiction, crying happy and sad tears.
I love Mormons. That is to say, more accurately, I am obsessed with Mormons. Their presence in the American landscape of religion, their cultural impact, their proclivity for becoming mainstream influencers and TikTok stars in a way that’s never quite caught on with other American Christian sects. I like to see what they’re up to; I like to read about their culture and distinct religious practices. I love the HBO show Big Love and the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven. When I was shopping for a wedding dress, I kept accidentally following Mormon-based wedding influencers because it turns out I like Mormon wedding dresses, all long sleeves and full lace. My partner sends me photos of Mormon missionaries in their white shirts and black ties knocking door-to-door in our upstate New York town captioned simply: “mormons!” I feel seen, I feel loved. He knows me.
So, I love Mormons and that means I love, more than almost anything, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. I love their excessive hair extensions, their drastic plastic surgery, their earnest commitment to saying “gosh” and “oh freak,” their outsized SUVs, and their discussions of Mormon garments and the taboo of sex in the LDS church. As a Midwesterner, they remind me of girls I grew up with; there’s a comforting familiarity with the type of girl who was most certainly not my friend in high school. But like me, these are women that have eaten a pulled pork sandwich in a church basement. There’s something deeply Middle America about these wives: all married young, birthed children young, drinking immense amounts of Poppi sodas in their nondescript model homes. Their taste is tacky, but it’s home.
What sticks with me most in the afterglow of my dazed, ecstatic binges of the show is not a TikTok dance or staged confrontation over dirty sodas in an outsized Styrofoam cup. It is the arrest footage from season 1 of MomTok influencer cum reality star Taylor Frankie Paul, absolutely plastered despite the show’s ongoing assertion that “Mormons don’t drink,” shouting at her boyfriend/baby-daddy-to-be: “You don’t own me.” What I find most haunting in this exclamation—recorded via police body cam—is how quickly she comes to this conclusion, summarizing what I think is the accidental thesis of the show.
Taylor Frankie Paul, arguably the most successful of the group, is the only girl to show reluctance about marriage.” Given the opportunity to remarry, she instead chooses to face the social shame of pregnancy outside of marriage. This leads to a painful scene in which Paul’s entire family, excluding her sister, chastises her for having sex before marriage, and blaming her for her boyfriend’s infidelity. It is Paul’s fault, they assert, that he strayed. She gave it up too soon, she should be ashamed.
I text my partner: “I think I don’t want to be Mormon.”
There’s a comforting familiarity with the type of girl who was most certainly not my friend in high school.
He responds immediately. “I really never thought I’d hear you say that.”
I can’t tell if I’m joking anymore, about wanting to be Mormon or not wanting to be Mormon. I’m too committed to the bit, my hyperbole telling on me.
None of the women who lead the show seem happy. Season 1 villain Whitney returns after having fled to Utah following the discovery of her husband’s Tinder account. The pressure to conceive leaves season 2 villain Demi sobbing alone on a girls’ trip. Everyone remains married, trying for more babies, driving their SUVs around the stark Utah landscape, telling everyone that everything is fine. What the show presents is a simple aesthetic mired in the complexity of a life defined by subjugation.
Twenty-five-year-old mother of two Jen Affleck’s unexpected pregnancy is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen on television, not least of all because her super blonde husband is the most Mormon looking man I can imagine. And, no shade to Jen, but this is coming from someone who’s biggest high school crush grew up to be a Midwestern Lutheran minister. Jen and the blonde Affleck’s marriage is an absolute bummer. The discovery of her pregnancy leaves Jen so depressed and physically debilitated that the show chooses to stop filming her. Pre-pregnancy Jen and her husband are briefly separated due to a very funny saga involving a Chippendales show in Vegas. During their many on screen arguments, Jen begs her husband to see her as “still the mother of your children.” This is a clear microcosm of the white Christian woman begging any man in white America to remember and acknowledge her personhood. And if not her personhood, then at the very least, her motherhood. Jen does not want to be pregnant again, despite not using birth control in any form. There is, of course, no discussion of other options she might consider.
In the brief separation, Jen achieves a degree of agency. For the first time ever, she becomes the primary—perhaps only—breadwinner financing her family’s life through her TikTok success. The most pressing struggle of the TikTokMormon wives seems to be the expectation that they must be a religious “trad wife” in contrast to a life of financial independence. It’s the potential for the riches of brand deals and major TV shows that tempt these women to step, however microscopically, out of line. That is, like Jen, until they get pregnant. Which begs the question: is there an actual exit ramp for these women from the control of religious faith, and the ownership of men?
The answer seems to be no.
There is an interesting divide in my life: those intrigued by the show, and those who want nothing to do with it. Of my close friends, the handful that watch come from a similar background to me, also from the rural Midwest. I wonder if they too are reminded of their high school’s cheerleaders. Though I was raised by largely non-religious parents, American Christianity was inescapable in my childhood in smalltown rural Iowa. My dad is firmly anti religion, my mom less so, both aging hippies who sought to correct their own Catholic upbringing. I went to church with my babysitter’s family regularly, notably without my parents, and I liked the church plays and memorizing bible verses. My first Christmas, I played baby Jesus in the nativity.
Our extended family, with which we are close, is partially Catholic and partially the distinct American sect of Apostolic Pentecostal. The women wear long skirts, long braids, no makeup, no jewelry of any kind or other forms of bodily adornment. Like the Mormons they don’t drink, don’t smoke, and don’t have sex before marriage. In my own family, my closest cousins love the show as much as me, similarly raised on the secular spectrum, but close enough to the Apostolic Pentecostal branch of our family to be interested. Perhaps they see the same mixture of comfort and intrigue, which is ironic since my religious cousins would never watch this—their branch of Christianity does not allow them to watch TV at all.
Despite the supposed separation of church and state, religion ruled my public-school education. We weren’t allowed to celebrate Halloween at school because parents complained on religious grounds. Christian teens regularly gathered and held hands praying around the flagpole at the high school in the mornings before class. To what end? I don’t know. One of my friends dated a guy who casually invited her to “see you at the pole” for a morning prayer. I think she said yes, more for the excuse to publicly hold hands than anything else. I’ve since baffled my East Coast college friends when explaining we never had afterschool activities on Wednesday night because of church. Turns out, Wednesday night church—church twice weekly,or more—is not the American cultural staple I thought it was.
American Christianity was inescapable in my childhood in smalltown rural Iowa.
My partner and I have argued about whether we would send our future children to vacation bible school. Like my parents, I am not personally religious, but it feels like a part of my cultural heritage. One of my best friends from my small hometown agreed, saying that for some reason she wanted her daughter to experience our cultural identity via eating pulled pork in a Midwestern church basement. It feels confusingly right. My partner, in contrast, is firmly against vacation bible school. He was raised religious, attending Catholic school from K through 12. He tells me the reason I’m so obsessed with religion is because I was raised only adjacent to it. He’s right. I have never been bored by religion, only held at an arm’s length, curious to know if people actually believe all this stuff. Or are they just in it for the pulled pork and the church basements?
I recommend the show to a Canadian friend of mine and she says she tried it but found it vaguely revolting. “I just hated all of them right away,” she says. This confirms my suspicion that the enjoyment of this show might be a distinctly American pastime. Because Mormonism is the most American of religions, a bizarre outgrowth of the American pioneer history, native slaughter and racism baked into their very existence. With its mixture of frontier values, Puritan ideals, and worship of super-store capitalist culture, Mormonism is a microcosm of America itself. Of the non-indigenous religions founded in the United States, none is more famous, more iconic, more widespread than Mormonism. No one else has a globally successful Broadway musical from the creators of South Park. And nothing is more iconically American than being parodied by South Park. No other American religious sect has had a major presidential candidate with as much mainstream appeal as Mitt Romney. There is no Mormonism without America, and I’d say there is no modern America without Mormonism. Plus, they wear funny underwear, and they don’t drink coffee.
I recently took a copy of The Book of Mormon from a motel room in Tennessee, the way I think most people should find and receive copies of The Book of Mormon, a certain charm of the rural American motel room. I lay across the plastic motel comforter and tried reading it. I found it incomprehensible. In contrast, I read the opening of the King James Bible in that same motel room, and the writing is slick, polished, and clear. A thousand years of edits has done wonders for the line-by-line writing. The Book of Mormon from page one is baffling. I, of course, took the book with me, and the rabbit hole of my Mormon obsession deepens.
To justify my love of the show, I talk around my fixation with Mormons as a whole and, on a more micro level, my obsession with the marriage and gender relations of these somewhat “progressive” Mormons. They preach that they are working together to fight the patriarchy of the LDS church, despite the fact that they never intend to fight the patriarchy or the control of men in their lives. But who am I kidding? Those are the boring parts of the show. I’m not here for these women to overthrow the patriarchy that dominates their everyday lives. I’m here for this lifestyle. I would enjoy the show less if they were less Mormon. In fact, I wouldn’t watch it at all.
There is no Mormonism without America, and I’d say there is no modern America without Mormonism.
As the editor of this essay reminds me, I am allowed to consume media that I don’t agree with or necessarily support, though my days in the Twitter trenches of the 2014-2020 make me feel otherwise. I’m also aware I have a lingering personal preachiness that is tiresome to many around me about media I don’t deem worth engaging with for moral reasons, looking down my nose at anyone who wants to watch an Ansel Elgort movie. Don’t they know and care that he is a bad person? But does my dislike of those movies come down more to the fact that I just…think he’s not a good actor? More than I think he’s a predator? Debating whether or not the women of #MomTok are better or worse than the various male predators of Hollywood I try to avoid is a fool’s errand (spoiler: these women are better). I bring this up because my love is not guilt free. I can justify my viewing as cultural critique, an attempt to understand the other side of American life or even supporting women in conservative settings who come into their own. I could blow hot air all day about how I’m supporting these women finding their own voice, agency, and financial freedom within a system I don’t support. Which is real #feminism, isn’t it!?
But I know, and you know, that’s not what I’m watching. That’s not why anyone is watching. If that were true, we would all be engaging with media that’s far less titillating and far more informative. We would be donating to supportive groups online, instead of sending snapchats about the Mormon Wives reunion and renewing our Hulu subscriptions. We would be better people, probably, but we would be bored. We can enjoy the titillating, take a break from our morality for the sake of entertainment as a treat. But when do we go from watching the lotus eaters to becoming them? When do we go from mocking them to wanting to be them? And is mocking them, which I have in this essay, perhaps to an unfair degree, the cynical, superior, liberal defense to a life that, in many ways, looks appealing?
It is not a noble pursuit, my love of the Mormon Wives. I don’t love them ironically; I love them actually. It is less that I am conflicted about liking something problematic, but that I feel conflicted about why I like it so much. I see the appeal of being controlled, of having my life dictated to me. I fantasize about not working (or, to be more accurate, working in a vague influencer sense) while making homemade graham crackers and having nonsensical arguments with female frenemies. That is my idea of heaven. The burden of the modern-day liberal is that we have to spend so much time caring. We care because we have a human soul and a brain and an idea of what’s going on in the world and an obligation to care for the other souls on our planet, but wouldn’t it be so much easier if we didn’t? Wouldn’t life be easier if I wrote off the troubles of the world and reveled in my own privilege? If I lived in a giant house in Utah and let myself off the hook for the world’s troubles? Which I would be allowed to do only because I am a CIS straight white woman with Christian-passing privilege. And if what I said above was true, that Mormonism is the most American of religions, am I not just now fantasizing about being a white American? Is the fantasy that I am embracing my existing white American identity and privilege now without the burden of liberal guilt? I spend so much time decrying my own American-ness, resenting my monoculture Christian Midwestern roots, that I’ve turned my brain into a pretzel trying to justify my liberal guilt with my love of this show.
My desire and my fantasy is to think my actions and choices do not have consequences, as long as I behave in the strict regulation of my husband’s dictation. Because then they are barely even my actions or choices. What millennial woman wasn’t particularly haunted, and honestly turned on by the scene in season 2 of Fleabag where Phoebe Waller-Bridge explains to the hot priest that she wants someone to tell her what to do all the time. She does not want to make decisions anymore; she wants someone else to do it. Is this not what the Mormon Wives are doing? They are told what to wear, what to do, what to eat, and how to spend their days— by their temples, their bishops, and by social media where they make their fortune. It is no coincidence that the appeal in both Fleabag and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is religion and the subjugation of women. Waller-Bridge’s monologue is given in an actual confessional. Here I myself confess: give me the freedom from myself, the freedom from choice. I beg in my darkest, most secret thoughts.
I don’t love them ironically; I love them actually.
So, here is the truth: I’m not observing the system from the outside, I am the system. I am comforted by my own nightmares, the things I hated about growing up in the Midwest, the white Christian monoculture that led to small mindedness, fear of the outsider, and oppression of women. My imagined flirtation with the trad wife fantasy is as much a fantasy of giving up my own rights. It’s terrifying to love this show, to see what is so clearly illustrated— that these women’s lives are not their own.
But the glow of the phone screen, the TV screen, still pulls me in, promising sourdough bread and aesthetically pleasing long-sleeved dresses, promising again and again: this would be simpler.
Yiming Ma and I first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2019. We were in the same workshop, where he was working on the vignette form that would later make up the structure of his inventive debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us. I remember being struck by his path to writing, which began with an ambitious career in tech that forked into a passion for the page.
This tension is clear in his novel, which sets up a dystopian future where memories—told as stories—are accessible through an invention called Mindbanks, and shareable among citizens and government entities alike. The novel begins when our narrator decides to release his mother’s memory “epics” after her death, many of them arguably critical of the authoritarian Qin government (formerly China). Through his courageous choice, we’re introduced to a series of vignettes that give us glimpses of this new, frightening world: a boy offers charity to his childhood love after the world war that destroyed her family and raised Qin to global dominance, a sumo wrestler from the since-incinerated Japan reunites with his elderly mother, a female writer and her mentor inadvertently become two of the sole survivors of the Chrysanthemum Virus after their town is locked down for quarantine. More chilling than the imaginative spaces these vignettes go is how familiar these tragedies feel to our present day.
As the publication date of These Memories neared, Yiming and I discussed his novel over email, while trading texts about life updates and creative ventures. That our current technology enabled these glimpses into each other’s lives to dovetail with our conversation about storytelling, agency, censorship, and AI was its own commentary on the impossible tangle that is technological advancement and human connection.
Lillian Li: This is such a structurally unique novel, made almost entirely of vignettes that can be read in any order. What inspired you to go down a more experimental route?
Yiming Ma: Have you heard of Olga Tokarzuk? Her book Flights was the first time that I heard of the term constellation novel. It was a revelation to me.
I just arrived in my studio at the Millay Colony, which I didn’t realize would be in this massive and beautiful barn. Here in upstate New York, I can finally see the stars. That night sky is truly the inspiration for my structure: a constellation of memories/stories that can each stand on their own and shine brightly, but also combine to form some greater power.
LL: Constellation is an apt term. It speaks to our ancient inclination to group things, and to project over that grouping a shape, image, even narrative.
I’m interested to know how Flights inspired you and/or taught you the structure of a constellation novel, and what the experience was like to go from reading one to writing one. Any learning curves or dead ends along the way?
I am both fascinated and terrified by the nature of censorship.
YM:Flights blew me away with how it was able to hold together thematically, despite its 116 narrative passages differing greatly in content, form, and length. What I took most from Tokarzuk’s Flights is that artistic forms do not have to be so absolute in their definitions.
These Memories is a novel but also, it’s structured as a collection of banned memories, banned stories. At the beginning, I worried about the invisible lines between different forms, whether they truly mattered; later, I came across an interview Tokarzuk did in the Yale Review in which she described borders as “one of the most amazing ideas humanity has ever devised: to cut yourself off, delimit the zone of your influences, divide into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Especially in Central Europe… the borders have ceaselessly changed depending on political shifts… devised by people arbitrarily.”
Flights gave me a sense of permission, the courage to ignore the borders within fiction that can also sometimes seem arbitrary. I chose to believe that regardless of how the publishing machine might one day market my book, that the right readers would eventually find it. And that to them, it would feel like reconnecting with a long-lost brother, or discovering some other kin that they never knew they had.
LL: That seems very freeing, and potentially frightening, to relinquish control like that. In the prologue, your book gives permission to the reader to pick and choose which vignettes they want to read, in the order they want to read them, even providing a map to help them do so. I have to admit that my first read through I went the traditional route and read them in order, but my second turn through I’m picking and choosing. Given that order is an illusion in your book, how did you choose the current order as it’s been printed?
YM: It’s fascinating to read you describing order as an illusion uniquely in the novel, when I believe that order can often be intrinsically artificial, especially in story collections when a reader objectively has the power to flip to whatever chapter or tale they wish at any moment. By actively relinquishing control of the order in my prologue, I truly felt as if it was an act of reclaiming power rather than losing it.
A vast majority of readers do follow the original order, so it did require significant consideration to arrive at those decisions. Certainly, it did not start in that order…
LL: That’s true, a reader can read a novel in whatever order they want to, like those who always read the last page first. So I suppose it’s the permission you grant that feels unique to me. You even go beyond permission with the narrator actively encouraging people to choose their own order, like choosing their own adventure, or fate. “Embrace your freedom,” he tells us.
The narrator is grappling with this decision himself, to continue going down the path set for him by society—which would be to delete the blacklisted memories he’s inherited from his mother—or to follow what he believes is right by uploading the memories to the public domain. The memories themselves are incredibly varied (from folk tales to a new immigrant’s story to a pandemic thriller), but what they share is that they have been labeled as dangerous by the authorities. What a government bans is so telling of what they fear will be their unmaking. What was the relationship for you as the writer between creating these memories and figuring out why this dystopian government has censored them?
YM: I am both fascinated and terrified by the nature of censorship, namely its duality of explicitness and the vast room often left to interpretation. As the narrator grapples with the memories left by his mother, I wanted him to also question why certain memories were banned, because in reality, there is always ambiguity—a human or AI authority figure must eventually make a decision in situations that are mostly not so black and white.
How can one not be seduced by the memories of strangers?
I wanted readers to recognize the power of such uncertainty, in how ambiguity may expand the scope of power. Fear is created, whether or not that was the original intention of a ban. Especially if the line is blurry, how close do you want to get? What if you belong to an identity group that is less powerful? The most careful people I know regarding borders, always ensuring that their documents are in order, are immigrants. In many cases, the more precarious one’s situation is, the less they may feel like they can afford to risk. The less they may feel like they can afford to resist.
Another theme I wanted to highlight through my collection of memories is how the same ideas once celebrated can later be disowned. History reveals how precarious the dominant beliefs of any period can be. When the author and artist Tessa Hulls was reading my novel, she texted me asking whether the exploding Chrysanthemum on my cover was a reference to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, a brief period starting in 1956 in which Mao encouraged intellectuals to speak freely, to “let one hundred flowers bloom in social science and arts and let one hundred points of view be expressed in the field of science.” Unfortunately, the very ideas and critiques invited became the basis for persecution once the political winds shifted. Highlighting this cyclical nature of censorship and ideas was important to me.
LL: With your fictional invention of Mindbank technology in These Memories, in which one’s memories can be uploaded and made public, you’ve followed the forfeiture of one’s inalienable rights to its logical and terrifying end by coupling it with the advancement of technology. How were you thinking of technology and its place in our current and future world during the writing of this book?
YM: Before writing These Memories, and perhaps after writing too, I had an intense career that often crossed over with tech. It’s slightly taboo in the literary world, but many people do intersect with the business world, whether in their past or through their spouse or even in their secret jobs at Google or Amazon. I used to serve as the Chief of Staff to various leaders, and I will always remember these competitive cultures focused on continuous improvement—in order to win. What winning meant varied across teams, but in the case of AI for instance, I find that most tech colleagues are keen to offhand the crisis of the labor transition to the government rather than address the impending job losses themselves. It’s really not difficult for me then to envision a future in which the advancement of technology does not lead to a more equitable or fulfilled society.
As much as literary folks like to denigrate business and tech leaders, I believe that many are constantly in a state of stress and fear. They are under immense pressure and may very well be afraid for the survival of their organizations. Nevertheless, their actions can cause great harm. Regardless of intentions, there can be a dark side to any new technology. Why would that be any different for a technology allowing memories to be shared—or sold?
LL: I’m always interested in the world-building within books like yours, which imagines a not-too-far-off dystopian future. It seems like you’d have to balance escalating current geopolitical tensions with creating entirely new conflicts and socioeconomic issues. At the same time, you’re walking the reader through this world with vignettes that can be read in any order. How did this affect the world-building for your dystopian future setting?
YM: It’s no coincidence that I began the Memory Epics with “Patience and Virtue and Chess and America,”set during the transitional period soon after the Qin empire conquers the West, rather than stories set in the distant future. The majority of this Memory Epic takes place in a former private school for wealthy dignitaries and families in Washington DC, now turned into an orphanage after the War. It’s written in a more traditional narrative style, as I wanted the first story to feel grounding for the reader. Since the War has only recently ended, and the Mindbank technology is still restricted to a few, the teenage protagonists of this story are in some ways engaging with a “brave new world” as much as the reader.
Here’s a secret: the first draft of the novel opened with “Fantasia,”one of the most speculative Memory Epics. When one publishing confidant read this draft, they gently advised me that their recent pandemic “experience with submissions… is that [editors] are unwilling to be challenged/don’t have the energy.” To tell the truth, that contributed to my decision to open with the story that arguably features the most straightforward prose and structure in the book.
All of those authorial decisions were intentional, along with the alternating rhythm of Memory Epics, the stories ranging not only in style but also length, set in vastly different eras before or after the War.
LL: The way these Memory Epics jump in time also allows you to create a sense of history, even as you’re spinning a future narrative, and one of the most convincing ways you do so is having references to other Epics within the one we’re currently experiencing, such as the armless swimmer of Yangtze, which outside of its Epic is referenced as a folktale from an immigrant father’s childhood. I love how your book makes the argument that stories are the connecting thread across generations of humanity. We can’t help but be moved, persuaded, and shaped by stories, and Mindbank technology is seductive because it takes the power of storytelling even further, into complete immersive empathy. So given all you’ve considered, are you tempted at all by the possibility of sharing memories with other people?
YM: How can one not be seduced by the memories of strangers? Not only to experience the world from their eyes—to appreciate what they notice, to embrace whatever emotions flow through them—but also to forget at will.
Like so much technology, wouldn’t such be the sharpest double-edged sword? Since we can all empathize daily with the pain that memories and stories can inflict, while simultaneously understanding that they may also contribute to what makes us human? Isn’t this why we’re so worried about the stories of our future being written by AI? But also, imagine how joyous it might feel to be fully understood because it suddenly became possible to share memories and convey your deepest emotions without the inadequacies of words.
How could you give up that dream?
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