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.
New York City was contrary to everything I’d been told.
As a queer person, you’re supposed to move to New York and finally feel free. It’s sold as an epicenter—arguably the epicenter—of liberation for queer and trans folks.
But there’s a reason Stonewall happened in New York. There’s a reason why New York City was one of the first places where the trannies and faggots and dykes and whores finally said “ENOUGH” and began punching back.
It’s because New York City is the single cruelest place I’ve ever lived. Because, when you’re weird and different and have to rely on public transportation because you don’t happen to be a multimillionaire with car service, daily life can feel something like a war zone. Or, perhaps, a post-conflict region.
Navigating New York City as a gender nonconforming person isn’t necessarily a battlefield. It’s not organized warfare, with clearly delineated fronts, places where fighting occurs contrasted against places that are safe. There are no stable boundaries of armistice or conflict. Trans women and gender nonconforming people have been murdered in the West Village and Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the Financial District alike. It’s a region that, after war, was left littered with land mines. The anger and brutality are buried, thinly veiled by a shallow layer of dirt, a lush field waiting to explode at any moment. As a trans person, you are just as likely to be accosted leaving your apartment as you are leaving a queer club as you are leaving a museum as you are leaving a deli as you are leaving your job. Everywhere is dangerous. Nowhere is safe. There isn’t a single place outdoors where you can truly let your guard down. Violence, slander, and cruelty are every bit as likely to explode at three p.m., in broad daylight, as they are at three a.m., deep underground, in the subterranean bowels of the city.
The moment you set foot outside your apartment, you simply pray that you won’t step on it. That it won’t be your foot that trips the wire. That your weight won’t trigger the switch.
That you won’t be blown to bits.
If there’s one thing I must give New York City credit for, it’s that she was up front about it.
It was a perfect, crisp, early-fall day. I’d just graduated college a few months earlier, moved to New York City with nothing lined up, and, by the grace of God, landed a big-girl job doing diversity consulting for capitalists, telling the likes of Bank of America and Goldman Sachs how to ensure they’re being trans inclusive as they foreclose on your house and plunder the earth.
It was far from a dream job. But it was a spark, an economic lifeline, a foothold in one of the most antagonistic metropolises in the world. With this start, maybe I could become somebody after all.
It would be dishonest to say that I was thinking this acerbically at the time. At the time, I was thrilled. Overnight, I’d become the most glamorous creature on planet Earth: a young, single lady in the Big Apple. The Archetypical New York Young Professional: Genderqueer Edition. Promise and passion and potential oozing from every pore, I woke up that morning in the confidence that this was my future. That I was the future. As I got dressed and did my makeup, I had “Welcome to New York” blaring on repeat. I was the cheesiest flavor of girl imaginable. A country gal who turned pop the moment she discovered a bold red lip. Delusion personified.
I was still trying to figure out what dressing professionally as a gender nonconforming person even looked like. I’d had a little bit of practice interning in Washington, D.C., the previous summer and at the United Nations a year or so before that. But my professional best was still a work in progress.
For my first day of work, I put on a chocolate brown, faux-silk sleeveless top, a maroon, calf-length pencil skirt, a brown leather suitcase, pearls, a corresponding matte maroon lip, and supple, navy-blue leather pumps. I looked impeccable. Main-character energy. Sex and the City. Emily in Paris. Jacob in New York.
I gave my eyeliner a final check in the mirror, sashayed down the stairs, and set out into the world. Golden early-autumn rays lapped at my feet as they click-clacked down the sidewalk. An oblivious trans gentrifier, blissfully unaware of the crushing economic realities confronting the New Yorkers whose neighborhood I was sauntering through, I whisked along Franklin Avenue and crossed over Atlantic, headed toward Fulton and the C train. My life was a storybook.
Here’s what I can accept: by its very nature, New York City must wreck you. You cannot move to Brooklyn and remain unscathed. You must be broken. The Metropolis commands it. You must be shaken to your very core by something. You must grapple and claw in order to earn the privilege of calling yourself a New Yorker.
What I struggle to accept is the immediacy with which it occurred. I would’ve at least liked to make it to my first day of work before being shattered. It would’ve been nice to get one day of full-time, salaried, adult employment under my twenty-two-year-old belt before being cut to the bone.
New York had different plans for me. More specifically, men did.
I vividly remember the location where it occurred. For someone who can barely remember what they ate for breakfast, this is no small feat. A common trait of PTSD is precise, meticulous memory.
Trauma commands it. It’s an evolutionary response. In the Paleolithic era, if you were almost eaten by a lion and narrowly escaped with your life, it was important for you to record the exact place so that you could avoid encountering that lion again. Give your brain enough cortisol, and it starts jotting down geographic coordinates on autopilot.
New York had different plans for me. More specifically, men did.
It was at the northeast corner of Fulton and Franklin in Bed-Stuy. On that corner, there’s a grungy Popeyes smooshed up against an equally grungy Dunkin’ Donuts smooshed up directly against the entrance to the subway, which is along Franklin about twenty feet north of the crosswalk. Across the street, a pedestrian bridge looms over Fulton. It has a sheet metal roof and tall, windowed sides that look out over the street, leading down to the S train shuttle to Prospect Park. In the midmorning, sun radiates down Fulton from the east.
As I approached the subway stairs, a man was resurfacing from underground. He looked at me as I approached, considered me for a split second, then hatefully made up his mind.
“Hey, FUCK you,” he declared, loudly enough for everyone to hear.
He didn’t even need to say faggot. The faggot was implied.
Then he spit on me.
My brain lit up, neurons firing throughout my body as I braced myself for whatever was coming next. I attempted the Herculean task of continuing to walk while simultaneously preparing myself for the fist or the knife that, statistically speaking, could be coming next. Fire ants in my blood, my body crawled with anxiety.
I descended the stairs, not hesitating, not pausing. With each step downward, I waited for the feeling of brute force against my back, for the wind to be knocked out of me, for the stairs to be suddenly rushing forward as I plummeted.
I was Orpheus and Eurydice both. If I wanted to save the burgeoning feminine spirit inside me, I couldn’t look back.
I had to walk forward in absolute faith. If I turned around and made eye contact with the man who’d spit on me, if I so much as acknowledged his existence, he could cast my brittle, fledgling womanhood into the underworld. If I let him know that I’d heard him, if I had the audacity to double back and face him, he would take it as a challenge. It would cement the fact that, yes, I was vulnerable. Yes, I was paying attention. Yes, he’d gotten to me.
When swimming with sharks, you can’t shed blood.
I left the spit on my skirt. Pausing to remove it was out of the question. I walked all the way down the stairs, through the turnstile, onto the platform, and into the train before I summoned the courage to wipe it off.
From then on, I lived in fear.
At night, as I drifted off to sleep, I’d imagine it. I’d imagine what the knife might feel like as it slid between my ribs. I’d imagine what it would feel like for my skull to crack open as it was bashed against the trash-strewn curb or the metal trimmings of the subway stairs. I’d imagine the cool metal barrel against my temple, the flash, the pop, what it would be like to bleed out, late at night, on the frozen sidewalk. I’d imagine what it’d feel like to be thrown into a trunk or be hurled, bound and almost dead, into the Hudson, filthy water rushing into defeated lungs. I imagined it all. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t seem to stop myself.
It’s what they wanted me to do. Each man who catcalled me in the street, each man who labeled me a faggot or a tranny or a fucking freak or a fucking bitch or a disgusting animal or a fucked-up motherfucker loudly enough for anyone within a hundred feet to hear, each man who shoved me or glared at me or spit at me or followed me wanted me to be reminded: I was asking for it. If I continued expressing my femininity and my womanhood on this unruly, masculine body, I would be next.
They wanted me to understand: We can kill you. We can rape you. We can do so with impunity. And it is coming. The desecration of your body is inevitable. If you insist on flying so close to the sun, we will melt down your wings, crash you back to earth, and shatter you onto the pavement. You have it coming, and soon.
They also wanted me to understand that I was alone. They’d loudly proclaim on the subway that I was a degenerate and someone should set me on fire. They’d say it loudly enough for the entire subway car or sidewalk or bus stop or park or CVS to hear: first, because they wanted to be sure that I’d heard them over my headphones (I always pretended I couldn’t) and, second, because they wanted to be sure I knew that everyone else had heard it, too. They wanted me to hear both the hideous words they said and the collective silence that came after. Because trust me: no one ever took those men to task. They’d yell, “FUCK YOU, FAGGOT,” as loudly as they could, snarling and hurling trash at me, and the rest of the world would turn away in shame.
Hundreds of people would watch it happen and avert their eyes.
No one ever stepped in. No one boldly intervened or asked, “The fuck did you just say to them?” No Wonder Woman swooped in with lycra and a cape, grabbed them by the collar, shoved them against the wall, and demanded that they apologize. Spider-Man never showed.
No one offered me comfort, either. They never walked over after witnessing my degradation. No one had the courage to break the unspoken fourth wall of New York public observation to ask, “Are you okay?” or to say, “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.” Everyone was a bystander. No one intervened. Not once.
And don’t get me started on the NYPD. As if they’d ever do anything to protect me. If given the chance, they were more likely to join in than help.
It became an accepted fact in my mind that unless I renounced my femininity, buried my high heels, and burned my dresses, I was going to have the living shit beaten out of me. I was going to be assaulted. I was going to be raped. I was going to be murdered. And as it was happening, no one was going to stop it. They were going to flee, terrified that the unchecked brutality of men would turn against them next.
Honestly, I look back on this part of my life with astonishment. Why did no one ever gift me pepper spray? Why did no one ever encourage me to buy a knife? Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve carried a gun.
Daily, I walked out into the world, into the threat of violence and death, with my head held high, like a fool. Convinced that martyr was the best I’d ever be.
Eventually, my head began to stoop. With enough pressure and heat, even a diamond will melt.
For my safety, I learned meekness. I learned to hide. I learned to conform on the train and bring what I really wanted to wear in a book bag. I commuted exclusively in sneakers, putting on my heels only when I was safely in a lobby. I learned to keep my hands in my pockets in order to conceal the nail polish. I wore long coats to cover up my skirts and dresses. Even in the brutal swamp heat of New York City summers, I often wore long coats. May through September, I would pour sweat and arrive home drenched. But at least I arrived home.
After only ten months of living in New York City, I found myself lying in bed, contemplating how I was going to end my own life.
My death wish felt autonomic, closer to a flinch than a choice. Pavlovian, even. If you scare a dog every time they leave the house, the door itself will eventually become a source of fear. It felt like my gender was being trained by an invisible fence. Each time I attempted to step outside the unseen social boundaries of acceptable masculinity, I got a rough shock. The invisible line was always somewhere, lying in wait, binding up my existence in its ever-constricting radius. Eventually, I learned to just stay in the apartment.
The men who catcalled me knew that if they were consistent enough in their harassment, they could eventually succeed in changing my behavior. And they did. Expressing myself stopped being fun. Dresses were no longer tools of self-empowerment; they were sites of struggle. I couldn’t put on lipstick with joy or a sense of whimsy. I could only put it on in fear.
There’d be periods when the harassment wasn’t so bad, of course. I’d go a month or two without an incident, start to let my guard down and feel better. But then, inevitably, something horrific would happen and it’d start all over again.
Eventually, I decided that it would be better to take matters into my own hands. These men were going to kill me anyway. I was going to die because of who I was and how I dressed. I accepted that my gender itself was lethal, that existing in the world as a nonbinary person meant embracing death.
Murder was only a matter of time, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.
The men who catcalled me knew that if they were consistent enough in their harassment, they could eventually succeed in changing my behavior.
I didn’t want some horrible man’s hateful gaze to be the last thing I ever saw.
So I’d do it myself.
There was comfort in the fantasy. Control, even. It’s so pathetic to be murdered in a hate crime, I’d tell myself. Why bleed out on the sidewalk by someone else’s hand when you can elegantly throw yourself off a building? I’d lie in bed for hours, dreaming about it. I did extensive research on the best methods. The studies are out there if you know where to look. Pills are ineffective most of the time. Though razors are what you see most often in movies, the odds that you’ll actually bleed out aren’t as high as you’d think. Most people who try that way are discovered passed out in the tub and promptly committed to the psych ward. The internet is a terrifying place.
I am not sharing this with you for dramatic effect or to be grim. I do not enjoy talking about how authentically I wanted to die. Trans people wanting to die is a trope I’m exhausted by.
I am sharing this with you as a matter of fact. It was a fact that the violence I encountered from men on the street while living in New York City was so terrifying and psychologically destructive, it made me want to die. It was so pervasive and spiritually brutal, I sought to take matters into my own hands. It’s important for you to know this because it colors what comes next. It’s important for you to know how dark things got, lest you feel that what comes next is just me being pollyannaish, lest you think that what comes next was easy for me because I didn’t really have it that bad.
I had it that bad. After a year of living in New York City, men had taken all of my power. Men were in control of my happiness, not me. My life was no longer really my own.
The psychological terror was so intense, I prayed for someone to do it. Stop snarling at me and just bite. Stop screaming at me and just shove me onto the tracks. Get it over with. Brutalize my femininity. End this. End me. Just do it.
Please.
If I were to survive, I would have to find another way.
The turning point for me was, strangely enough, reality television. In 2015, I was featured on an episode of MTV’s documentary series True Life, a show I’d grown up watching. At a dark time in my life, it was a gargantuan opportunity. And to my knowledge, it was the first documentary to profile genderqueer or nonbinary people on national television. It felt thrilling to be even a fractional part of trans history. For the show, a crew followed me from New York back to North Carolina, where I was going to spend some time with my family and give the keynote speech for North Carolina Trans Pride.
As part of the project, the crew shot extensive interviews with my parents, including my dad who, at that point in our relationship, was still struggling to wrap his head around my gender. He still said nasty things to me about it sometimes and expressed in no uncertain terms that he wished I could just be “normal.” At that point in our relationship, he refused to be seen with me in public when I was wearing lipstick or a dress.
And then a television crew came knocking and he had to make a choice. One way or another, he was going to be portrayed—how did he want to be seen by the world and by the hundreds of thousands of people who still watched MTV in the mid-2010s? Did he want to be portrayed as the rejecting father, unwilling to try, abandoning his child because they happened to be different? Or did he want to be seen in a more complicated light? As a father who was trying? Failing, but trying nonetheless?
Miraculously, he chose the latter. He decided to participate. He sat down for extensive interviews with the documentary crew. He spoke openly and honestly. At one point, he crawled on all fours through the attic of our house to turn off a fan that was causing audio problems for the crew. He even came to hear my speech at NC Trans Pride—willingly, if reluctantly, interacting with me in a dress for the first time in public. Him agreeing to be seen in public with me in a dress was a significant breakthrough in our relationship. And after doing it on national television, he got a lot better at doing it in real life. But what I remember most is something he said during an interview with the crew.
If you’ve never had a documentary crew plumb the depths of your life, you may not know this, but reality television can actually be a beautiful process. When done correctly, participating in a documentary can be just the thing you need to synthesize how you’re feeling. Nothing gets people talking quite like a giant camera, an eager producer, and an assumed audience of millions.
At one point in the episode, my father told the producers something he’d never said to me in my entire life. He told them that he was scared for me. He understood that having a child with a male body who wears dresses makes them a target. He shared that he lost sleep worrying about whether I’d be hurt. He just wanted me to be safe. He just wanted his child, whom he loved more than anything in the world, to be okay.
I was shocked. All he’d ever expressed to me was anger, frustration, and resentment. He’d only ever told me that he wished I wouldn’t be so eccentric, that he hated how I dressed, that he wished this whole “trans phase” would end, that I’d knock it off with “that San Francisco faggot shit.” He’d expressed hatred of and loathing for my femininity, but he’d never told me why.
The “why” landed deep. At his core, in his heart of hearts, he didn’t hate his son’s femininity because he thought it was inherently disgusting so much as he hated it because it terrified him. Because he was horrified about what might happen to me. Because he, too, had nightmares about my mangled body in an alley, sequined skirt caked in blood.
After all those years, I realized that my father was not really bigoted.
He was simply afraid.
That’s when something clicked. If my father was afraid, and his fear had caused him to lash out at me for who I am, might that be true for other men? Might that be true for the men whose catcalls and harassment were making my life in New York a living hell?
The realization crashed on me like a wave, rolling through my mind.
All of a sudden, the path to freedom was clear.
The path to freedom was empathy.
Let me take a moment to pause and say that I know how neoliberal and annoying that sounds. Empathy is a watered-down buzzword these days. As a concept, it’s been hollowed out, cheapened, and mass-produced. It doesn’t pack the punch it used to. But it’s the only word I can come up with to describe what I know to be true.
The path to freedom was empathy.
When a dog aggressively barks at us, it’s scary because we think that barking signifies malice, aggression, and a desire to harm. Through empathy, we can see that most dogs bark at us simply because they’re afraid. They’re nervous. They don’t know us. We’re bigger than they are, and they feel a need to signify a boundary. They bark at us precisely because they see us as the ones with power and control. They bark at us because we are, in fact, more powerful than they are. No matter how scary or large the dog is, it is a fallible creature, a vulnerable being scared of the myriad ways the world can hurt it.
I couldn’t find my way back to a joyful, empowered life by hating the men who terrorized me. But I realized I didn’t have to. Through the vulnerability of my father and years of contemplation, I found another way. If I wanted my life to be mine again, all I needed to do was love these men. Care for them. Empathize with them, instead.
I pursue such empathy not because it is the right thing to do so much as because it is the only thing to do. I don’t empathize with the men who hurt me because I owe it to them; I empathize with the men who hurt me because I owe it to myself. Because I understand that it is only through empathy that I can set myself free.
Before I discovered empathy for the men who catcalled me, some man would scream, “FUCK YOU, TRANNY-ASS BITCH!” at me from across the street and it would send me reeling. I’d be ruined for days or weeks. My inner monologue would go something like this:
He hates me because of who I am, and I hate him. He hates me from the core of his being. He’s a monster who wants to kill me because he hates me so much.
So many men hate me. So many men want to kill me because they hate me. Most men are monsters. The world is filled to the brim with monsters like him.
How will I ever be happy? How will I ever feel safe? I am doomed to have hatred like that hurled at me for the rest of my life. There is no escape.
It was paralyzing. It was ruinous. It made me want to die.
But when I learned a new approach, one that focused on empathizing with the men who catcalled me, something real changed. Possibilities opened up. Prospects bloomed. Expectations shifted.
Now when a man screams, “THE FUCK IS THAT FAGGOT SHIT?” at me from across the street (something that, thankfully, happens a lot less now that I live in L.A. and drive), I work to fill my internal monologue with compassion, possibility, and a sense of futurity. Instead of spiraling dark, I push myself to be curious: probative, even. I steer my thoughts toward understanding that man not as a terrifying monster but as a fractured human being. And in the process, I get to save my own soul.
It goes something like:
Okay, first things first: Am I safe? Is he pursuing me? Am I being followed? Do I need to seek help? No? Okay. Good. Phew.
You poor man. You must be so broken to say something like that to me. How much pain must you be in in order to yell at a complete stranger like that? How much suffering must you endure each day, navigating the world with all that anger and sadness?
I wonder what happened to you? I wonder what your childhood was like? Did you ever feel loved by your father? Did your brother discover you with a Barbie once and beat you so badly, you couldn’t go to school the next day? Maybe it was your father who discovered you, wearing one of your mother’s dresses.
Maybe he screamed at you until his voice went hoarse. Maybe your mother caught you coloring a picture of a fairy and refused to look you in the eye for days afterward. Maybe your friends at school dragged you out by the dumpster and broke your nose because they caught you looking at one of their dicks in the locker room.
You poor man.
Maybe none of it happened directly to you; maybe you just witnessed it. Did you watch your father beat your brother when he explored gender differently? Did you watch your father beat your mother? Did he relent, or did he refuse to stop? Does me breaking the rules of my gender remind you of your mother breaking the rules that your father set for hers? Is that why you’re acting like this?
Or perhaps you were the bully. Perhaps you’re inundated with guilt. Your best friend tried to kiss you once and you smashed his head into a tree. You saw your little brother wearing a tutu and you threw him into a lake. And now you see someone like me breaking the rules of gender and have to contend with a culpability so powerful you cannot breathe. Are you crushed by the sight of me?
Or maybe it’s jealousy. Maybe you want freedom from the gender binary so badly, it makes your blood boil. Do you want to wear bright colors, exciting patterns, and flowing fabric, too? Do you want your internal femininity to be recognized, loved, and adored? Is seeing me a cruel reminder of all of the parts of yourself that you were forced to kill off in the name of creating your masculinity? Do you want to forget about the beautiful, gentle, feminine parts of your soul that were murdered long ago? Do you hate me for reminding you of them?
Or is it that you’re turned on and you hate yourself for it? Is that it? Do you want to fuck me? Am I your shameful kink? I wonder what would happen in a world where you could acknowledge your desire for me. Perhaps we could be lovers. Maybe then you could mess up my lipstick in the good way.
I wonder.
Whatever the case may be, I refuse to shut down. I refuse to harden. I refuse to make my heart icy in return or sever our connection as human beings.
I want to help you more badly than I know how to say. I understand your pain intimately, because your pain and mine are one and the same. It’s a pain that I’ve healed from, too. It’s a pain I know how to heal from. A pain that you also deserve to heal from. I could teach you the way, if only you’d let me. If only the world hadn’t pushed us so far apart.
I wonder what it would be like for us to be friends? What TV shows do you like? What music do you listen to? What would it be like for us to meet under different circumstances, as colleagues or as in-laws or at a Christmas party? What gift would you get me for Secret Santa? I would get you a cactus. It would be an apt metaphor.
I wish I could talk to you right now, in this moment. It would help me to know more about your struggles, to see you in 3D. Are you worried that you won’t be able to pay your rent this month? Are your parents healthy? When’s the last time you called them? Do you have children? What are their names? Are you miserable at your job? Are you looking for a new one? Are you barely scraping by? Are you okay?
I know I can’t actually talk to you right now. It isn’t safe, and that breaks my heart. Our separation, this cleft between us, rips me in two.
I look at you and all I see is a scared little boy in desperate need of a hug. I wish you would let me give you that hug.
I will settle for what I can do. At this moment, what’s within my power is how I frame this interaction and make meaning of it. Though I could view this moment as a degradation of my personhood, I will choose to see it, more accurately, as you learning. I will work to understand your words not as slander but as a begrudging embrace of the world I am dreaming into existence. A positive, albeit contradictory, sign pointing toward a better existence for trans people and men alike.
Because the fact that you lashed out at me means that you saw me. It means that you perceived me enough for it to mean something. It means that I entered your heart and unearthed pain you didn’t remember was there. It means that simply by wearing a piece of clothing and walking past you, I changed how you see gender by a millimeter or two. A smidge. An iota.
What power: to change hearts simply by existing. For a mere garment to serve as source and site of healing? For a mere outfit to alter someone’s perception of reality? Being catcalled by you does not mean that I am weak; it means that I am strong. It is not an affirmation of my vulnerability so much as it is a confirmation of my power.
For now, I will continue walking down this sidewalk, I will get where I’m going, and I will carry on with my life.
But one day, when I’ve been able to rest and heal a bit, I will write a book. In it, there will be a chapter about you. About how scared men like you made me feel, about how hard I worked to overcome that fear, and about how I learned to wish the best for you in spite of it all.
A message in a bottle, I will drop it into the proverbial ocean and pray that it makes its way to—
Ding! The subway doors open. It’s my stop. I’ve been on the train for thirty minutes, lost in empathic exploration, turning harassment into something more.
These days, street harassment no longer has the same effect on me. When a man catcalls me, I no longer internalize the slurs or the things he says. I no longer take it home with me. His words don’t ring in my mind with the same voracity, because I no longer see him as an enemy or as someone I hate.
Instead, I see him as a friend who is struggling. A friend who isn’t acting right because he’s scared, traumatized, and lonely.
I have yet to rid myself of the devastation entirely, but the texture has changed meaningfully enough. These days, I’m merely devastated differently: devastated that, in the moment of being catcalled, it is not safe for me to show this broken man the love he so clearly needs.
Jessica Gross’s sophomore novel, Open Wide, centers Olive, a mid-30s, New York City radio host and interviewer longing for emotional intimacy. In her spare time, she walks around the city with a recording device, sometimes picking up the everyday sounds of forks clinking or footsteps receding, other times recording personal conversations unbeknownst to the other parties involved. Alone, she analyzes these recordings, attempting to understand people as a whole through conversation patterns and social norms. This compulsion serves her well in on-air conversations with writers, but even this one-on-one format disturbs Olive. She recognizes power imbalances inherent to the art of interviewing that have the potential to stymie organic conversation and prohibit people from ever truly knowing one another.
Everything changes when Olive meets Theo, a dreamy bachelor with strange impulses of his own, and falls into the kind of love that verges on obsession. When privately recording their conversations still leaves her yearning for a truer intimacy, she notes a gap in Theo’s teeth just wide enough for someone to slip through. So she does. What happens next is surreal—there’s no way around that—but is also a moving, sometimes unnerving, articulation of a deeply human desire: to know someone so completely that you feel you become one with them.
Sharply psychological, vivid, and compulsively readable, Grossexplores the ways that consent, obsession, art, intimacy, intrusion, and perception intersect with the idea of love. How much of any relationship is knowing another versus being known? Can anyone ever really know someone else’s truest, realest self? Or are art, conversations, and love inevitably failed attempts at communicating our inner worlds?
I had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Gross over Zoom about the complexities of intimacy, parents, privacy, and what happens when human impulses are taken to surreal places.
Jacqueline Alnes: The question I had after reading this book is obviously: Can we ever really know anybody?
Jessica Gross: What do you think?
JA: See, this interview is so meta. In the novel, Olive interviews writers and thinks about the power dynamics in terms of who gets to ask the questions and who shapes the final product.
There is something scary about being extreme on the page.
My answer, though, is no. This novel gets at the desire that all of us likely share on some level, which is to feel safe in relationships through something measurable. We want to feel like relationships are stable, but relationships are always capable of fracture and people are always changing. Your book seems to be asking: What do you do with that?
JG: Yes. And, can we ever really know ourselves? People spend decades trying to study themselves in therapy. I think we can make headway. I’ve been trying really hard for a long time to know myself, and I am me, so if I’m still a mystery to me, how could I possibly know another person better than that?
But then, do we need to understand people completely to love them? What counts as knowing? That’s an epistemological question. If we know our most intimate people 50-70%, is that enough? Not for Olive, obviously, but maybe for us?
JA: Olive takes closeness to the extreme—she literally crawls inside of her boyfriend—but there is so much truth within the book’s surreal elements. The novel makes me think about how complicated intimacy can be. You want to be close to someone, but being too close can feel like an intrusion. What about this tension inherent to intimacy interests you?
JG: It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. In Hysteria, my first book, my narrator is very promiscuous. She has issues with intimacy but she doesn’t have issues with making herself vulnerable. I’m more like Olive, where I would crush very hard from afar, but be nervous to take the risk of making myself vulnerable to somebody or to rejection. It’s something I took from my personal life and then amplified and fictionalized. I have my own tensions between wanting to be close to someone in a romantic way and also being very afraid of what that means giving up, control-wise or safety-wise.
JA: Is there a truth that you took back to your real life from exploring this in a surreal way?
JG: It takes a long time to write a book. From 2019, when I started the book, to 2025, which it is now, I went from being single, living in New York, to being married, with a child, in West Texas. That’s a huge amount of change. I do feel like exploringmy ownboundary issues through this fictional lens helped me process certain things, but it didn’t magically make me stop having issues. I still think about giving proper amounts of space to other people, whether it’s to my husband, my daughter, or myself. Giving space isn’t something I was properly taught growing up, so I’m continually trying to figure it out. How much space do I need? How much space do other people need? What does that look like in intimate relationships?
JA: I love how, in the novel, you articulate the idea of how other people’s relationships are so private that it’s often difficult to know if the relationship you are in is “normal” or not. What we encounter shapes who we are and it’s really difficult as an adult to suddenly learn new things.
JG: Totally. Intellectual learning is the very first step and then how do you actually change your innermost tendencies? It’s so hard.
JA: So much of the book is about control. Even Olive’s methods for knowing other people, like secretly recording them, allow her access without alerting anyone. In some ways, that closeness is not real because it only happens for one person instead of two people.
JG: It’s so interesting you pointed that out. That’s an aspect that’s more fictional. What she does is pernicious. It’s not very fair. She definitely has a double-standard. Olive wants to pull the strings.
I had a close friend, years ago—we lived in New York together—and I was rather dependent on her. At one point, she was going on vacation, and I was like no, please don’t go. And she was like, “Oh, I’ll be back on this date,” and I told her I’d be on vacation at that time. She was like, you can go on vacation, but I can’t? Control, what can I say.
JA: I can’t tell if this is just my experience or if it’s something about this era or where I am in terms of age—I feel like there isn’t as much casual intimacy in my life as there once was. I’m thinking about college. I lived with people and we had a daily repertoire, touch and inside jokes. I have very good friends now, but that specific closeness is gone. We have intimacy online, but that’s a different way of being with and seeing other people.
JG: A combination of growing up, becoming an adult, and doing all of it in this particular era is insanely depressing to me. I love being close to people—I think about college, too. Even my childhood friends. There was a level of physical intimacy that’s not really possible to replicate with people you meet when you’re like 37 years old. Maybe it is for some people, but I haven’t found it.
The whole social media thing, what can I say about it that hasn’t been said? I have a nineteen month old daughter and I feel so sad that she will have to contend with these things. I didn’t have social media at all until college and that was such a blessing, I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel. I want to simulate it for her, but we can’t. Everyone she knows is going to have this. Either she’s going to be on it and damaged by it or off it and disconnected from the social scene that she will be thrust into. It feels like a lose-lose situation. I’m sure someone with a less binary mindset can come up with something better by the time she’s going to use it. It’s sad. It feels like a lot has been lost in terms of capacities for intimacy.
The one thing I will say about living in a smaller town is that, compared to New York, I see people with a lot more regularity. It’s a smaller community, people are more available. That is a kind of intimacy I’ve discovered in more recent years.
JA: I think that’s why readers will relate to Olive. I didn’t agree with her methods, but I understood her impulses and her want for closeness.
JG: I think the seed of her struggle is deeply human.
JA: What did the surreal element in this novel allow you to explore?
JG: It let me grapple with the problem or question with a little more distance. It’s like looking at an object from a bit further away instead of being inside it. The absurdity—it’s funny. It makes me laugh. And on the other hand, I think it’s philosophically interesting. Okay, you want to be one with someone? What does that look like? It forces a deep interrogation.
Emily Temple at Literary Hub wrote that this book is “pushing things to their logical conclusion and then pushing them a little further than that.” That’s what I want to do, and that’s what I have good readers to push me to do. I kept writing up to the point where she opens up his body and I kept getting scared, going back, and revising, over and over. Finally, I sent it to my agent and told her I thought I should scrap it and make it a realist novel. She was like no, keep going. She held my feet to the fire. It was really helpful. There is something scary about being so extreme on the page.
JA: In both your books, there are parental issues around closeness, rejection, and desire. There are boundaried and un-boundaried relationships. What draws you to writing about these parental figures?
JG: I joke that Hysteria is my daddy-issues book and Open Wide is my mommy-issues book. I don’t know what the third book will be? Now I’m a mommy book, maybe?
I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and interested in the way people are shaped. I think that our families of origin shape us in incredibly potent ways. Now, as a mother, I feel it as an enormous responsibility because I know how impactful the relationship is forever and how things that can feel minor to a parent are felt very strongly by children, depending on their temperament. It’s something that I’m intellectually and personally interested in. How we are formed, what factors go into making us who we are?
JA: I was thinking about how people say, “My heart is outside my body” when they have a kid. It’s obviously a figure of speech—I say this as someone who is not a parent—but your kids are of you and also their own selves. It seems like this terrible reckoning you have to have every moment, in that you are responsible for them and you are responsible, in part, for what experiences they have in the world, but at the same time, they are of themselves. How do you negotiate that line?
We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.
JG: It’s wild. Even just the minutiae of responding throughout the day. My daughter isn’t a baby, she’s not in the tablet era yet, she’s a toddler. She is going through an interesting phase where she is negotiating her attachment and separation from me. I feel incredibly aware of wanting to handle it well, in a way that shows her I’m here, but that I don’t cling, but then I don’t want to push her toward independence too fast. It’s really delicate and very minute-to-minute. There are one billion moments every single day. I don’t have to do every moment perfectly, but the majority I need to do a good enough job that she feels stable, held, and also confident exploring. It’s really hard.
JA: Olive and her mom highlight the guilt that can come up when you are a child trying to establish independence, especially when it’s not given to you in a way that feels good. It’s a difficult negotiation to say, “I love you and I hope you know that—and I need privacy in order to be a person.”
JG: When I started writing, I was only aware of the child’s perspective because I had only been a child. I knew I needed respect for my independence. Now, as a parent, I understand how it’s hard. I struggled more than anticipated with my daughter’s own burgeoning independence and will. There is something really sweet about having a baby and being really close. There is loss involved in them growing up and I’m already feeling it. I get it from the parent’s perspective now.
JA: I think Olive starts to identify her own need for boundaries by reflecting on moments when hers have been broken in significant ways by her mom. What did you learn from exploring boundaries or boundary-making?
JG: What’s interesting about Olive’s situation, which I think is true for so many people, is that we can struggle with things our parents did—even be completely aware of what they did that we don’t like—and still find ourselves replicating it. It is so deeply unfortunate that humans are built to do this neurotic repetition thing. We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.
JA: Your novels are both psychological in nature and it strikes me that writing itself seems to allow for an opening up of a character, or an exploration of the hidden parts of humans. Do you feel like writing does allow that deep probing, or is it just another illusion of closeness?
JG: I do think it’s a way of probing, but it’s not like writing is therapy. It’s almost like an interesting way to play around with or reapply insights gleaned from introspection, for example, from therapy. I think it often lets me look at something from a different angle or in a different way or even just again. It’s interesting and often necessary for me to look at something again and again and again to feel like I’ve gotten it. I think writing can be revealing, but in concert with other things.
What do you think?
JA: I was struck by the idea that sometimes writing can feel like what Olive does with her voice recorder, it gives you the sense that you’ve contained the world in a scene or in words that help you understand or navigate it. That’s the beauty of writing.
When I read this novel, I got to sit with some of your thoughts and apply them to my own set of similar questions—it creates this opening for us to encounter parts of ourselves that we otherwise might never encounter. I also thought about the way you write about art as an artifact separate from our true, inner selves. It’s this interesting way that what we create becomes something that is both real and artifice at the same time.
JG: I don’t know that I have a neat answer to it. In a way, this is so many performances of introspection and discovery.
JA: But then it’s also real, in a way. I wouldn’t say that this wasn’t real.
JG: Right.
JA: I crafted these questions, arranged them, asked them, and—like you wrote in the novel—the subject of an interview often knows that the audience is much wider than just the listener on the other end of the line. That changes our answers.
JG: It comes full circle in thinking about how we started the conversation, about knowing people. What does it mean to know someone?
you take me to the village where you were born wind rips the sky from our hair
our faces are blown off by the squally edge
the sea does that it makes us gusted
the past leaps into the present in yoga I align my chakras
you like science, surgeon fishes, and logical explanations for feelings
on the window you smoke cigarettes a habit you never picked up and will never have to quit
that’s life saying things you want instead of the things that are
I will take you to a place that opens your mouth with its bigness
it’s called America you can spread your thrill across it until you lose it
it’s that big with the correct papers you can have it
draw electricity on my arm while I cook your dinner
we drive through the middle of many things we watch our hair turn gray
I want to eat your hair I think that’s love
love is warmer than sex and wounds it’s so big
Tell Me What It’s Like to Love Me
A woman can look like this, too, I say, to my face in the mirror. By this I mean boy, and by boy I also mean woman. I touch my cheek like I would touch the cheek of someone I love. You. You are someone I love, and I touch your cheek like it. I run a hand over close-cropped cowlicks cut with kitchen shears in a friend’s bathroom. So many lines, there and there, a record of jokes. My existence lives right here for strangers to see. How personal it feels to be alive. How unhide-able it is to have a face, and especially, I think, mine. When in certain geographies yes sir turns cruel. Where a mistake cuts the air between us. Where a man is made to feel dumb, lied to about the ellipsis of my life. They were wrong and I am wrong. Boyish butch me smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles like I’m sorry like forgive me like please please don’t.
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