Toni Morrison Let Us Know We Are More Than the Work We Do

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Adapted from remarks given at the Toni Morrison Festival in February 2020. 

About three years ago, Toni Morrison wrote a short and, as is her style, superlative essay in The New Yorker titled “The Work You Do, The Person You Are.” At a young age, Morrison delineated an understanding of the fear of losing the power of a dollar while also recognizing the burdens of employment even with the financial reward. Morrison didn’t reveal the race of the person she worked for, but the power dynamics beyond employee and employer were clear; the status was clear. The piece concludes with her translation of a quick response from her father when she bemoaned how she was treated as an employee. Morrison condensed her father’s response to the following tenets: 

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

When we think about Morrison, we most prominently, and for good reason, dissect the writing she’s gifted us, material we can turn to weeks, months, years after her sunset. The New Yorker essay also bestows an understanding of her work ethic—though it’s an ethic we could have intuited from how methodical and responsible she was with the written word. When I read Morrison I don’t only take in the work of a magnanimous writer; I also consider how clearly her editorial framework comes through the control and distinction she pays to text, in pieces and as a whole. The impact she had as an editor further curated her love of books and at the same time distilled how she lived her life, how she represented herself, who she represented. (See Contemporary African Literature, Corregidora, The Black Book, to name a few.) 

In the first chapter of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison conveys her early way of reading, when she presumed that Black people were of no consequence in the white American literary imagination. She digs into how Black people were erased in the white-dominated “canon,” and investigates white Americans’ willful refusal to read books about or by African Americans. And if white Americans weren’t reading those books, how could the white literary establishment publish them? “But then,” Morrison writes, “I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer.” By altering her viewpoint, Morrison better informed her reading and empowered herself to acquire more books by Black writers. From the start of her time in publishing, this perspective allowed her to magnify the gaps in contemporary literature celebrated by white audiences, and to elevate books deserving the same shelf space. (See Tenet 2: “You make the job; it doesn’t make you.”)

Earlier this year I became an employee within a division of the publishing house where Toni Morrison once worked. Her name is inextricably linked with this press, due to her publications and the impact she had as an editor in the scholarly and trade divisions. There are many, though trust me not enough, hard-working and dedicated Black women in publishing. Recently, new names are being added to the roster, which we can hope is a lead-in for many more to come. Pre-quarantine we walked the halls and sat in conference rooms. Nowadays we enter virtual rooms where we are still one of a few if not the only. We speak our truths or hold our tongues, all in the name of a larger strategy to see and make a difference. We stay because we love the work and because we want to showcase the intrinsic dedication and brilliance of those of our ilk. We do the work because the work needs to get done. The navigation of being “the only” or “one of the few” requires a singular focus and a clear strategy to keep going. This is not just about the industry, it’s about our belief and love for what we bring to it. 

Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment.

It may not be a surprise that Toni Morrison was one of the first Black women editors at Random House during her 19-year tenure. It may not be a surprise that she was one of the first Black women in this space with acquisitions power. It may not surprise you that she was one of the first Black women in this space to enter a “boys club,” a club I guarantee didn’t know how to recognize her as an equal, even when they shared the same title—though not the same salary. (To this day her adamance of “head of household” in the documentary The Pieces I Am rings true of the battle cry to make a proper and equitable wage to men.) What we can ascertain from this is that Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment as editor and then again outside of it, or adjacently as author when discussing her work again and again and again. Imagine the strength of mind and character it takes to be on both sides of the coin, to uplift Black people in your work each and every day when people don’t always see them the way you do, most notably as equals and most derogatorily as people. Imagine the love for the people one has to pursue this work as adamantly and precisely as she did and bring it in all ways to a deep admiration and honesty day in and day out. (See Tenet 1: “Whatever the work is do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.”)

Black publishing professionals continue to navigate working within the system while also trying to combat an industry that continues to provide roadblocks to access let alone retention, even when it purports to value Black lives. There’s no easy or singular answer to maintaining your own values in a space that does not value you as a person, let alone the work you’re producing or helping to produce. Like Morrison did in these same spaces, we may assert or negotiate or magnify the larger importance of the content and creators we support, not just for the company but for the nation. These may be seen as negotiations and yet they’re also part of the fight. At some point we all come to terms with the fact that negotiation can no longer be about what we will tolerate, but what we will not accept. 

We know how much Morrison achieved—it is worth repeating and the right way to speak of someone who achieved so much. But alongside the achievements we know of, there are many that we do not know about. Ones that may seem small but are monumental in getting through each day. Ones in which we defend and deflect, be it ourselves or whatever opposes us. The ways of navigating what may not, outwardly, appear to be a hostile environment, but one that will not acknowledge that you deserve more. Having experienced this in ways both aggressive and passive-aggressive, I continually think of those who are the sole (or rare) entity carving out a way to be seen and, unintentionally and often unwillingly, representing so many others. As Hilton Als noted in his New Yorker profile on Morrison, she “preferred to publish writers who had something to say about Black American life that reflected its rich experience.” This is the way she published, wrote, and read. This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people. This is who she prioritized in the roles she held and I can only imagine the ways she fought for them in these same halls/rooms/spaces. 

This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people.

This year, at the height of the George Floyd protests, many businesses designated June 2nd as Blackout Tuesday, a day of (optional or enforced) mourning. My company gave me the option to take that day off. I performed my job functions anyway because my grief didn’t start or end on that Tuesday. In the afternoon, I sat at a desk in the corner of my living room. I spoke calmly into a headset for a video conference in recognition of this moment. I spoke into what has felt like a void in quarantine, even more so due to the intense quiet and periodical appearance of teary-eyed/somber faces on my screen. I had no video, so my Blackness was not on display in the way it would be if we all still shared office space. Pledges to be conscious, to be more aware, to make more efforts in the content published and the people present on the line were made. My headphones pulsed with the repetition of how valued Black people were especially as we kept producing. I talked to other Black writers and publishing professionals and we spoke honestly and with uncertainty. At the end of the day several people said to me, “All we have is us” and “Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s important” and “We see you.” The power of those words from those you know beyond a moment makes us take a breath, and a break, before we resume. (See Tenet 4: “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”)

I began with a quote from Morrison, so it makes sense to end with one: “Being a Black woman writer is not a shallow, but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.” To be a Black women editor in a large publishing world, who you are has to be as distinct as how you read and discuss what you read. Morrison has written extensively of that awareness in her reading, and how it led her to prioritize who she was always trying to reach, and allowed her to broker past the issues of “what could sell” to land on what is needed and desired. It may come as no surprise her contextual awareness of being, not just as writer but as a Black woman, also allowed Morrison as editor, as teacher, as speaker, as observer to conquer the world at large and recognize, as well as continually illustrate, that we could too. (See Tenet 3: Your real life is with us, your family.) 

An Unconventional Love Story, Told In Trinidadian Dialect

Posted on by Jo Lou

Ingrid Persaud made the grandest of debuts in the literary world by winning the BBC Short Story Award in 2018 with “The Sweet Sop,” the first short story she ever wrote. After this extremely auspicious beginning, the Trinidad-born writer, whose resume includes stints in legal academia and art school in the U.K., publishes her novel, Love After Love. 

Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

In Love After Love, Betty takes in a lodger after the death of her handsome, brutal husband. Betty and her young son, Solo, grow close to Mr. Chetan, a queer man navigating the homophobic island landscape. One night, Solo overhears Betty confess a secret to Mr. Chetan. The revelation throws Solo into despair and exile to New York where his father’s brother lives. Solo remains in touch with Mr. Chetan but he refuses to speak to Betty until a tragedy strikes and Solo has to come home. 

The novel, told entirely in the lyrical dialect of Trinidad, offers a close-focus picture of the island’s Indo-Caribbean community, as well as the diversity of Trinidadian culture, traditions (like Carnival), and life. The unconventional trio, who narrate the novel in turns with their distinctive voices and perspectives, endear absolutely with their desires and flaws. By the novel’s end, I felt so close to them, mostly because their voices shine—and I felt like I could hear them. I spoke to Persaud about her winning debut, multiple diasporic movements, and her favorite Caribbean storytellers. 

J.R. Ramakrishnan: I would love to start with your BBC National Short Story Award. You won this in 2018 with your first ever story! How incredible? Can you tell us about this? 

Ingrid Persaud: Things were rough. Within twelve months father dead, father-in-law dead and two uncles gone and dead. Grief caused all kinds of things to hold me—love, memory, regret, anger, redemption. How to write about this without depressing people? While I was there scratching my head, I came across a set of stories where people dead from eating chocolate. Yes, one of the essential food groups: chocolate. Next thing I know the son in my story was dealing forbidden chocolates to his estranged father. Look, it takes all kinds. Some deal in crack cocaine and some deal in KitKat. I had plenty fun writing “The Sweet Sop.” Chocolate was the answer to some of life’s harrowing questions. Remember what the Trini people say, laugh and cry does live in the same house.

JRR: When did you begin this novel? Tell us how you imagined this family, who is quite far from the heteronomative model. Also the title, is it a reference to the Derek Walcott poem?

For so long the literary establishment treated our dialect like bad English we were forever apologising, explaining, translating. Them days done.

IP: You know Walcott’s poem, “Love After Love”—but the rest of all you who don’t better hurry up and read it now for now. It’s a masterclass in accepting ourselves as we are: “Sit. Feast on your life.” Betty, a widow, Solo, her son, and Mr. Chetan, their lodger form an unconventional family torn apart by secrets, and we follow them as they trip and stumble towards self-acceptance. See why I had to thief the man’s title? 

The book started with a short piece about a young man who deals with his emotional pain by self-harming. In that scene, he visits a sex worker. As she puts down a set of licks in his tail, the physical pain eases up his psychological anguish. Writing that scene was like posing myself a question. The rest of the novel evolved as I kept asking myself how the poor fella reached this circle of hell, and how I was going to free him. 

JRR: You write about a very specific Indo-Caribbean community–in dialect. You’ve explained very little to those who might not be familiar with Trinidad or the Indo-Caribbean community. 

IP: You’re talking truth. Not many writers use Trini dialect in a sustained way. And because for so long the rest of the literary establishment treated our dialect like bad English we were forever apologizing, explaining, translating. Them days done. Go through hard. Do your thing with confidence. Excellence will shine through no matter what. I bet you five dollars all them fellas from Shakespeare come down didn’t spend a minute worrying if readers would get their use of dialect. Mine is no different. Take an example: 

I was liming in a Carnival fete last month and I met a real hot man. Straight away I gone bazodee. I can’t think eat. I can’t sleep. All I thinking about is he.

I’m sure as God make Moses I don’t have to translate “liming” or “bazodee”.

Of course every language has its gatekeepers and Trini dialect is no exception. Next to my laptop are no less than four dictionaries of the English/Creole of Trinidad—just in case a little doubt catch me. It’s worth taking the time to get it right. This is my love song to the place and language of my childhood.

JRR: Your background is of multiple diasporas. You were born in Trinidad, spent a lot of time in the U.K., and had a stint in Boston. I see you live between Barbados and London right now. It made me think of other writers from the Caribbean who’ve made similar journeys (V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon, to name just two). In your book, Mr. Chetan and Solo (as well as others like Mr. England) both leave and return to Trinidad. I was wondering if you could talk about this going and coming (back) in general, in your book, and how it has impacted you as a writer? 

IP:  In Love After Love, Betty cooks a special fish called cascadoux. Once you get past how ugly it is, you’re in for a treat. That fish sweet. And watch me—Trinis believe that if you eat cascadoux, no matter where you go in the world, all England and America, you will always return to Trinidad. No spoilers, but if you’re born on a small island sometimes the only way to flee your demons is to physically ups and leave. The trick is finding your way back and making peace with yourself.

This is my love song to the place and language of my childhood.

I’ve licked down my fair share of cascadoux and hope to end my days right where I was born. But, assuming Covid-19 spare life, for now I remain in self-imposed exile, a perpetual insider/outsider. I don’t know if it’s because I am used to being in this liminal space that I have finally embraced it. I step outside the agonizing questions of identity and nationality to belong to that non-belonging. Maybe this is how we might build a place called home—as something we can carry with us. 

JRR: I see that you trained as a visual artist. I wonder if you could meditate on how this visual background has influenced your writing? 

IP:  I was raised in an ordinary middle-class Trini home where there were three career options: doctor, lawyer, or failure. I read law at LSE and for a good long while I was an academic. But something was missing from my life. I left academia and went off to art school. I had the best time ever and learned to only wear black. Seems I am a visual thinker and although the novel is character-driven, I was always drawn back to working and reworking my descriptions—especially when Mr. Chetan or Betty were cooking. 

JRR: The domestic violence that Betty experiences at the hands of her husband, Sunil, results in more violence, and manifests again with Solo’s self-harm. I was wondering if you would discuss this a little? 

If you’re born on a small island sometimes the only way to flee your demons is to leave. The trick is finding your way back and making peace with yourself.

IP: You catch me here. See, I thought I expressly didn’t make the violence cyclical. But maybe a different truth comes out in the book. Sunil was a nasty wife-beater who should have made a jail. Rather than dwelling on the violence, his wife Betty moves on. Those who are harmed can break the cycle and lead fulfilled lives. Solo’s self-harming is something different—partly his father’s legacy, but the boy had plenty other things on his mind. I can’t say what or I will give away the whole story.

JRR:  I was very struck by the character of Solo and how his innocence is shattered by the overheard revelation. I felt like you rendered his response to this betrayal so acutely. Could you talk about Solo’s creation? I see you have sons. The mother-son relationship in it seems very real. 

IP: I ain’t lying. Bringing Solo alive on the page was real pressure. Anxious, teenaged boys don’t like to talk about their feelings and the only tools I have are words. Luckily, I’ve been keeping a close eye on our sons—nineteen-year-old identical twins. They are wonderful and I hope not traumatized like Solo but I’ve learned a lot from being their mama. Family attachments and how we make those systems work when things rough—that is a minefield. I’ve only scratched the surface.

JRR: Who are your favorite Caribbean writers?

IP: What happen, like you want to put me in the bamboo? If I say Naipaul, people go bawl he’s a traitor and a misogynist. If I say Sam Selvon, people will want to know if I don’t read all the new talent around. If I say Claire Adam, people will say the women them sticking together. Mention Marlon James, Kei Miller, and Lorna Goodison and people will say I favoring the Jamaicans them. Nah. You can’t trap me so. 

Langston Hughes Knows You’re Tired—But He’s Not Letting You Off the Hook

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

My friends and I discuss the news once a week during our Zoom calls. The conversations are a mix of sympathy, frustration and opinions, but all I can bring myself to say is, “I’m tired.” Apparently, I wasn’t alone. It’s a sentiment reflected by Langston Hughes in a poem that has been posted all over Twitter and Tumblr since late May, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In simple words that clearly resonates—I found a Tumblr post with 20,000 notes, and a tweet with more than 28,000 likes—Hughes describes our shared exhaustion: 

I’m so tired of waiting 
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind? 

In this poem, Hughes reflects our feelings of being buried  in injustice. There are moments where we can feel like we have no power over what’s going on. We’re just waiting for something to fall out of the sky and make the world good again. We acutely feel the time pass as we’re waiting. We answer, “Yes, I am tired of waiting.” 

It can be exhausting trying to stay optimistic while hearing the news of people dying from disease and murder and countless other atrocities. Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process. It can make a person bone-weary. I read a news headline, and I feel like I’m melting into my bed and becoming a puddle. “Tired” encapsulates this puddle feeling.

Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process.

Hughes’s career took off during the Harlem Renaissance. A lover of jazz, he used the music’s rhythm and diction to shape his poems, creating a song and word mix. Jazz poetry suited him as he rejected the classical approach to poetry, instead using common words and simple structures that almost anyone could read. That easygoing beat makes it quick to latch on to his words. Sometimes his poems even sound like comforting nursery rhymes. 

Hughes’s words are simple—“beautiful,” “kind,” and “good”—but they also convey a romantic air. There’s a soft mood to his words, despite the horrors he alludes to. The reader can imagine looking out at the world’s troubles, huddled inside a bubble, disappointed and wondering when things will look less bleak. Hughes’s words can decorate this little bubble creating a tragic but beautiful scene. After all, we all feel tired once in a while. 

There’s a version of this poem for everyone. A serene mountain backdrop to Hughes’s words make a great wallpaper or Facebook post in tough times. You can find beautiful calligraphy of his words on Pinterest to add to an Activism or Altruism inspiration board. There’s always Tumblr accounts filled with black text, white background quotes where “Tired” makes regular appearances.

But the words they’re sharing are only the first half of the poem. The second half is less romantic. 

Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind. 

Hughes wasn’t exhausted. He was fed up. He implores the reader not to wallow in exhaustion but to take action, and not just a performance of action but something deep. He wants action that cuts the world in half, slicing down to the foundation of our beliefs and institutions, so we can recognize what is souring the world. 

With his “Let us,” Hughes invites others to join in improving the world. Though the Harlem Renaissance is marked as a celebration of Black culture, it was also a time of race riots and lynching, and the art of the time often reflected the inequality Black people faced. Themes like institutional racism, Black identity, and the after effects of slavery  were extremely common. Amongst these themes, Hughes specifically championed unity among all those of African descent. With this invitation he recognizes that change of any amount does not happen singularly but as a joint effort. This is not only a poem for staying in and peering at the trouble from a safe distance. 

We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.

When only half the poem is presented, the context of this piece is completely lost. We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.  

It’s easier and more comforting to focus on the first half of the poem. It’s easier to stay in the comfort of being tired, to use it as an excuse, rather than taking a brief rest before continuing the fight. We may not want to hear that change might require rioting, shouting, violence. At the very least it certainly isn’t comfortable. The knife and the worms are not #aesthetic.

A poet of the people, I suspect Hughes would have loved seeing his poem shared all over social media to thousands. Hughes found great success with the average Black reader. His reach was so great Hughes may have read his poetry to more people than any other American poet, according to scholar Donald Bernard. Those audiences meant Hughes was the first Black American writer to live off his earnings from writing alone. He aimed to reach the masses of the Black community with his work either in his jazz poetry or work for the famous Black newspaper the Chicago Defender. He often celebrated the diversity of Black people, hoping Black artists would find inspiration within the community rather than looking to white creators. Dedicated to democratizing poetry for his people, we can imagine Hughes would be ecstatic to see his work shared to friends and followers online. He wanted his work to be easily consumed and shared, taking art out of the formal classroom and into the lives of people. 

Hughes saw the beauty and romance of his people, but his frustration with how Black people were treated is clearly evident in his work. And yet we repay him by taking a knife and cutting “Tired” in two—keeping the romantic portion, but not the poet’s ideas for change. We can swallow the emotion but not the action Hughes calls for, informed by his years living through a time of riots, lynching, and segregation.

We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.

Cutting the poem is a disservice to Hughes and the struggles he endured and witnessed. They were struggles not unlike what we deal with now. As history circles back we’re left with people who will step up and work for something better and those who’ll let the world rot. Hughes didn’t want us to drop everything because we felt exhausted. And after picking ourselves up he didn’t want us to stop and stare at the worms ruining the world.  Acknowledging the fatigue is only the first step, and seeing the problem is only the second. We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.

In cutting the world in half we can see past surface-level actions and demolish the core systems that are built with racism embedded in them. 

Loften Mitchel, a mentee of the poet, described Hughes’s legacy of creating a, “standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation.” Hughes wanted better for Black people, but we can’t achieve that by looking out at the world, content to feel the exhaustion of the movement but not participate in it. Don’t stay a puddle. 

Two Poems by francine j. harris

Posted on by Kelly Luce

The Meek

It’s Election Day. It’s the finest day in history. The air
is crisp and the tone is full of hope. My party is weighing in early.
There are victory flags in the sky. And the whole morning I am haunted
by the memory of a lover who at the end of everything
told me I had no ass.

I cleaned the house.

I moved the bookshelf from the radiator.
I put my brown things in boxes.
I threw away the cardboard.
I scrubbed the stove. and dried it with a black towel.
There is no more fray coming from under the area rug.
Broke a glass while doing it. and swept the glass. and wiped the glass.
I wiped the glass. And I looked for glass, stray in the break of the wood flooring.
Moved the couch and tried to find the glass heating its way into a wedge.
I imagined the foot on glass at some worst time: a phone interview.
a lovemaking. a day of the flu. I took a magnifying glass
to the glass. I thought there were strands of slivering into a splinter
so thin so thin you couldn’t see. I imagined the glass elongating.
I imagined the glass cooling too quickly and snap. I threw away
the glove I used to look for the glass and wiped my knee with a white
towel. I shook the towel over the trash and wiped the floor
where I shook the towel and washed the towel and then washed
the sink where the towel stank. A woman came home and said
she was moving out. I put that dinner on a plate and slid it
beneath the glass bowl covering a salad on the second shelf
which upon its second onceover with a fork, has lost its verdant leaf.
In the bowl, through the glass, it’s all trunk. The beet is sparse, the avocado
soggy and browning. Lettuce stalk is bitter and watery and hard.
In that distortion, I found a sharp tongue. And I knew I would stab it.
And I knew it would be so only delicious, to me.

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Phuc Tran On Being Vietnamese American Weirdos

Posted on by Jo Lou

I love alternate takes and extended scenes on DVDs.  

It’s a chance for me to see what the movie or show might have been like and to understand the effect of the director’s choices: camera angles, tweaks in the dialog, actors’ performances. The deleted scenes from The Office, for example, are as hilarious as (if not better than) the broadcast versions.  The extended scenes for The Lord of the Rings add so much depth to the characters’ relationships. The deleted scenes from Return of the Jedi add a layer of conflict between Vader and the Imperial guards that make him (and the Imperial bureaucracy) more sinister. Outtakes give us a little peek into the shoulda-woulda-couldas of a cinematic universe. 

The alternate take rarely happens in real life, but from time to time, you’re lucky enough to see another version (or at least to imagine that you’re seeing another version). This past April, I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of sitting down and chatting (over Zoom) with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. It was the day before my coming of age memoir’s publication, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, and I had a realization: one of us was the alternate take.

You see, Viet and I are both refugees and our families escaped South Vietnam in 1975. Both of our families ended up at the same relocation camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, PA that summer (along with 20,000 other Vietnamese refugees). Once they left the relocation camp, Viet’s family stayed in Harrisburg, PA for three years before moving to San Jose CA in 1978.

My family was sponsored by some magnanimous Lutherans in Carlisle, PA who helped all twelve of us as we started our lives over. The Trans stayed in small-town PA for two decades, living out the federal government’s deliberate dispersal of Viet refugees to avoid ethnic enclaves. According to the Refugee Dispersion Policy, our separation from other Vietnamese people would accelerate our assimilation (lawmakers specifically talked of avoiding Vietnamese ethnic enclaves). Within a decade, despite the dispersion, many refugees found each other in California, Texas, and Virginia to establish expatriate communities. This was what the federal government was trying to prevent: delicious banh mi and fragrant pho.  Hello, Little Saigons! Vietnamese people found each other.

But not the Trans. We grew up without any larger Vietnamese community besides our immediate family, and our Americanization was as swift as it was relentless. In the grand experiment of acculturation and assimilation, we were the control group. Or were we the experiment?  

When Viet read an advanced copy of my memoir, he wrote to me: “You gave me a glimpse of what my life could have been like if I had stayed in Harrisburg.” Was I the ghost of Christmas Could Have Been?

As Viet and I spoke in April, I noted that we had scattered from Ft. Indiantown Gap in ultimately opposite directions (I’m in Maine and he’s in California). And that disparateness may illustrate our life’s directions, too: I went to a small liberal arts college, majored in Latin and Greek, and then served a tattoo apprenticeship in New York City. I’ve been teaching Latin and tattooing for 20 years. And Viet? He went to Berkeley, earned his PhD, and won a Pulitzer, so you know…

In 2016, I began writing a memoir about growing up in Carlisle, a project that was ignited by my 2012 TEDx about language and identity. I wanted to present the complexity and contradictions of my experience both within my small town and within my family. I survived (maybe even thrived) with the discovery of both the ‘80s skate punk scene and great works of literature—two seemingly paradoxical guides. But then again, I’m also a Latin teacher and a tattooer.  

I may not contain Whitman’s multitudes, but at the very least, I’ve got a duality. I’m the final cut and the alternate take.

—Phuc Tran 

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Even before you became a writer you had found other artistic pursuits, like tattooing, which I find completely terrifying. I assume there’s a relationship between your creative interest in tattooing, and your creative interest in writing.

Phuc Tran: Yeah, I suppose so. I’ve been trying to sort of right those two angles—two facets of myself—but other than being deeply grounded in self-expression, I’m not sure if they make a lot of sense, if they’re co-planar. I think they’re facets of myself, and I think I’m okay with that. I love the question, but I haven’t come to a satisfactory arithmetic for how those things connect. It makes me think about Steve Martin and his banjo playing; I wonder what he says when people ask him, like, “Tell us about being a master banjo player and an amazing stand-up comedian—how do those interconnect?”

VTN: I’m actually much more pissed off that he writes books.

We’re complicated people, and there are parts of us that are paradoxical.

PT: Yeah, amazing, right? And then he does the narration for it. You know my thought, Viet, is that we’re complicated people, and there are parts of us that are paradoxical, or not co-planar, and at least part of my writing of the memoir is an invitation to the reader, as well as to myself, to sort of constantly churn in that paradox of who we are.

VTN: So, the memoir, it’s very much a memoir about, you know, being Vietnamese in America, Vietnamese American, Asian American, whatever you want to call it. But, inevitably, there are very explicit markers of identity, subjectivity, and experience in the memoir, about yourself and your family, and so on. The tattooing, from what I can see from your Instagram, is not necessarily related to those autobiographical or personal things. And I’m interested in that because, for those of us that are classified, whether we like it or not, as Vietnamese or Asian American writers or minority writers, the questions of our autobiography and our identity are imposed on us all the time, even if we may sometimes want to deal with them. When you get to visual arts and cultures, of which tattooing is a part, that autobiographical link can be severed. I wonder if that’s true for you, if people see you as the Vietnamese American tattoo guy, or they think, the tattoo artist?

PT: That’s a great question. Tattooing is so interpersonal, since my clients are coming to me with the subject matter that they want already. If they say, “I want a tattoo of a mallard duck,” there’s not any part of my persona, or at least my personal history, that I’m imposing onto that execution of a tattoo of a duck, let’s say.

VTN: So, I’m curious about your relationship to these two kinds of experiences. Not just that they’re very different kinds of creative practices, but that they’re also very different—I assume—psychic spaces, in that sense, with Sigh, Gone, you really had to go deeply into your autobiography, your identity, and all that. Is being a tattoo artist more freeing, or are these just completely different?

PT: I think both. The visual arts are very different from the literary arts, but then also I think it is generally freeing. I think also because Vietnam doesn’t have a long history of contributing to the tattoo aesthetic as much as, let’s say, Japan does. People are coming to me and asking me to do what they want. It’s like being a house painter and you ask me to paint your kitchen purple; I don’t really have a say in that. I just say, “Okay, Viet, I’m gonna paint it purple,” and do the best that I can. It’s a craft, I guess.

VTN: No one ever just comes up and says, “Hey, I want you to do your version of the Sistine Chapel on my body.”

PT: It’s very rare. It’s not, like, omakase.

VTN: (laughs) That would be an interesting concept.

PT: It does happen, and I often will put it back on my client. I take the tattooing very seriously, and I feel like it’s so much responsibility for me to craft something that someone will have to wear forever, in which they have zero input.

VTN: I would find it hard to believe someone would just let you do it without even having an idea, but saying, “Sketch me something, and I can see whether I would want it?”

PT: Yes, for sure, and I always say, “Okay, give me like your top five things that you like, and then I’ll sort of look at that and cull that down to something that I think might be workable.”

VTN: With writing, of course, we learn how to be writers by writing, and we make a lot of mistakes and we graph and all that in the privacy of our own minds, it takes years and years…in your case, it only took four years, so you know…

PT: (laughs) No no, there’s a lot of bad writing in there too.

VTN: But with tattooing, how does it work? The drafting part, like, where does the learning part come in? Who do you work on? Who’s going to let you experiment on their bodies?

PT: Yeah, I mean, it’s very gradual, you start off with simple, foolproof designs, where the margin of error is much wider, and then as you get much better, you take on more complex projects where the margin of error is much smaller. And it’s cyclical; you do a great tattoo and then two weeks later you think you could have done something better. The drafting process happens in the drawing phase of it, really. To me, that’s the most important part of it. You can correct a great drawing that’s been tattooed badly, but you can’t fix a bad drawing once it’s been tattooed, or it’s harder to. When I had an apprentice, I always emphasized that the drawing part was more important for her to learn than the tattooing part. You can’t unlearn bad drawing, I guess.

VTN: Is there a book on tattooing in your future?


PT: (laughs) I don’t know, I’m open to it. I didn’t expect at my middle-age to be writing a book. Would you like to read a book about tattooing?

VTN: Well, of course, I mean it all depends on whoever writes it and does he know how to write a book. Whether that’s an autobiographical book about tattooing or profiles of tattoo artists…isn’t there a bestselling novel called The Tattoo Artist of Auschwitz out right now?

PT: Yeah, that’s right, and John Irving just wrote a book about tattooing also—fiction.

VTN: And now, of course, everybody and their grandmother has a tattoo, so…

PT: Except for you, apparently.

VTN: Did you know that you wanted to write a book, could write a book, or was it just a decision that you made right then?

You can correct a great drawing that’s been tattooed badly, but you can’t fix a bad drawing once it’s been tattooed.

PT: No, I had thought about it… I thought when I retire from teaching and tattooing, I’ll write a book, you know, 30 years down the road. So, there was an idea there. And when I embarked on writing the book, I thought a lot about E. B. White’s injunction to writers, you know: you’re writing for an audience of one. If I’m writing for myself, then the work is going to be more authentic to who I am. I wanted to write the book that I would want to read, and if people get it and they appreciate it, that’s great, and if they don’t, I think that’s okay too. Right out of the gate, I wrote the prologue of the book almost exactly as it is, and I thought, if the agent says, oh this is great I wanna go for it, great, and if not, then that’s okay too. I was fully prepared to not be the right person to tell my story, and I think many people are in that position, as you’ve said, for whatever reason.

VTN: I think a lot of writers, aspiring writers, don’t get that. They want to tell their story, but they have so much anxiety about who they’re telling their story to, or who might be listening in on their story, whether it’s the agent or the editors or whatever, but also if they’re writing a memoir, their own family and friends. Did you feel trepidation about that other audience? You include them in your story, it’s not just your story, it’s the story of all these other people.

PT: I did. I think having a tenuous relationship with my parents gave me, not in a callous way, some freedom and license to be more honest to myself and to my reader than someone else would have. And it’s not that I’m disregarding how they’re going to receive the book, but I’m not as afraid.

Who’s your audience? Do you subscribe to that idea of the audience of one with your writing as well?

VTN: Well, our trajectories are different, because I wanted to be a writer for a long time; I set that goal for myself. I’m the person I describe, who was anxious about my work, and “will I get published, will I get famous, will I get the recognition that I so truly deserve?” Those were disabling thoughts, and so it took me 20 years to get to the moment of simply saying, I’m going to write for myself. I literally thought, fuck it. I’ve written 20 years for other people, and now I’m just going to write for myself. And that was really liberating. I’m not as well-read as you, I haven’t read E. B. White. But every writer that I know, who I think of as having written some kind of important work, has reached that moment, where they decided, the hell with it, I’m just going to say exactly what I want to say, and deal with the consequences later. And that’s a very liberating kind of moment.

PT: And one of those consequences could be not getting published, right, like you’re too weird, or ahead of your time, or out of your step. And that’s okay too.

VTN: I think that’s okay too, it’s easy for me to say, but, for the people who want to be published, it’s pretty hard to live with. And the number of people I’ve met who I would describe as being genuine artists, in the sense of doing exactly what they want to do, and not care about getting published or exhibited or whatever, it’s a very small number of people.

PT: I think for so many people, you’re threading the needle between being true to yourself in the process, and not thinking about your audience in the creative process. But then at some point, there’s a reckoning when you release it to the wider world, and now all of a sudden you’re dealing with the interface of the thing that you created and the audience. I think about the inherent irony to what Thoreau was doing, where he was writing this total loner manifesto, Walden, and then he publishes it! It makes sense, in a larger way, in that he’s talking about this social contract that we need, that we are all interconnected, even if you are an artist and your manifesto is, “I don’t need people, and I’m gonna go live in the woods in this shack…but then, also, I’m gonna publish this book and I really hope people read it.” It’s this paradox that you have to reconcile.

VTN: We’re all stuck in it. For most of us, there’s no way of getting around that. So, the book is gonna come out tomorrow. What are you feeling about it, right now?

I was wracked by this question, ‘Who the hell am I to tell this story? Who the hell am I to be writing this?’ and I figured I’d just go for broke.

PT: I feel really excited. I’ve been in my own echo chamber for so long, with so few readers, and going back to what we were saying about the solitary nature of writing, and then the idea of being able to interact with your readers…I think for better or worse, the Internet has made that interaction with readers so low-barrier now. Anybody can go on Goodreads or Twitter and just tell you what they thought about your book. And, yeah, what little feedback I’ve gotten has been really moving, from people who’ve just said, “I’m so touched by the book,” or whatever.

I think even five years ago when I thought, “Who wants to hear my story?” I had no idea. I don’t want to sound cavalier—I was sort of wracked by this question, “Who the hell am I to tell this story? Who the hell am I to be writing this?” and I figured I’d just go for broke. If my agent and the publisher thought I had a reasonable crack at it, why not? I’d much rather regret having tried to do it, right?

VTN: I’m thrilled to have it. I think that what struck me in reading the book was, from the very first pages, its energy, its unique perspective—which is a polite way of saying that you’re a weirdo.

PT: I appreciate that!

VTN: I read a lot of books by Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers, and it’s always refreshing to find people who don’t conform. And most of the people who write books don’t conform—but to go way off…

PT: (laughs)

VTN: This book could just be described as a tangent, by most Vietnamese American people. You know, all the wrong things with your life, basically, but it worked out. We need more stories like that, to inspire other Vietnamese Americans—among others—to be weird, to do exactly what they want to do. I go around the country giving lectures, and I meet so many Asian American students and young people who say, “I really want to do something that my parents don’t want me to do. How do I do it?” And I’m always at such a loss to tell them what to do, it’s such a difficult situation to find yourself in. So, books like yours, I think, help to give people permission and an example, not that they want to do exactly what you’re doing, but to break conventions, and to break that family mold.

PT: Which is painful, and there’s a loss there, that’s part of the reckoning, I think, in writing the book—the things you lose in the process of being your own person. That individuation is painful. Thanks for acknowledging that I’m trailblazing for Vietnamese weirdos.

A Queer Memoir About Navigating Toxic Masculinity

Posted on by Jo Lou

I met David Adjmi at a fancy writing residency. The kind of place where you work all day alone and then eat dinner together, have a drink in the parlor afterwards. I remember a night when someone suggested watching a movie. As people were perusing the house copy of the criterion collection people began offering their favorite films. What’s your favorite film, Diane, someone asked. Film? I didn’t really watch films, I watched movies. And at that point, I wasn’t sure what the Criterion Collection was. Stunned, I said, E.T.? David was there and he looked at me playfully. He’s brilliant and he had already offered a proper film to the conversation. But in that mirthful look he gave me, I felt, as they say, seen. It wasn’t until reading his debut memoir Lot Six that I fully realized how literate he was across the breadth of culture and subject—from Montaigne to Three’s Company. And it makes sense why.

In Lot Six, he tracks his increasing alienation within the small, insular Brooklyn community of Syrian Sephardic Jews community (known colloquially as SYs) he was born into and eventually fled. As he moves from one environment to next, Adjmi develops what he calls “an experimental self,” trying on radically different roles with the hopes that he can build a “new self” and escape his past. Nothing is off limits in this quest. The book is everything David embodies; it’s hilarious, meditative, knowing, inquisitive, experimental, artistic and a little heartbreaking.

We chatted over Skype about Ricky Schroeder’s breakdown in The Champ, cowboy hats as gay kitsch, Derrida, and more.

Diane Cook: You write about taking trips into Manhattan with your mother when you were a kid, and how culture becomes your outlet. You have these epiphanies at a young age—not just in theatre and with art, but also with slightly trashy or melodramatic TV movies and soap operas. I was really interested in how the lowbrow and highbrow inform your development as a person and a writer. 

I was such a faker and a liar, but so much of what I faked ultimately helped me to peel back something true.

David Adjmi: I am naturally pretty omnivorous in terms of the culture I consume, and I can trace this back to my childhood. My parents were both high school dropouts, so growing up there was no concept of highbrow art, or like, even a definition of what culture was. So when it came to this very nebulous sphere of “culture” everything had equal valence—TV, theatre, visual art, books—these were my links to life. I was a very lonely, sort of depressed kid, and I was something of an outsider in my own family, so I needed something to fill in my inner experience and give it more context. So yeah, watching Ricky Schroeder deal with his alcoholic father in The Champ and experience intense anguish when his father dies caused a huge psychic shift in me. I was able to trace my own experience of life against those contours. And the soap operas were trashy, but I saw them as expressionist melodramas—not that dissimilar to Fassbinder’s take on Sirk in films I watched much later, like Martha—which I write about a little. And maybe Falcon Crest doesn’t have the depth or acuity of Ovid or whatever, but it is still a delicious artifact of the human experience. 

DC: So much of your book is devoted to this very elaborate project of you recreating yourself.  In high school you begin adopting a bunch of roles. At one point you write that a self was like a garment you could “wear and remove at will,” and at another point you talk about yourself as if you were a drawing in pencil, and wonder if you could simply “erase it and start over.” One thing I loved about your book was how the line between artifice and reality is incredibly blurred and unclear. And you do really transform over the course of your college years, and part of this transformation is due to the many roles you try on. Like, not all of it falls away, some of it stays with you. 

DA: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I was such a faker and a liar, but so much of what I faked ultimately helped me to peel back something true. In some way, these roles I tried on were a way for me to build a relationship with myself. It’s like any relationship, you need to experiment with it to understand when it feels good, and when it doesn’t, and in the process you go through uncomfortable phases. So, like, no, I do not speak with a French accent anymore—which I did for a full year when I was 18—but I’m sure there’s stuff I tapped into during that year that I’m sure is still part of me. But I don’t know what’s innate about me, exactly. I can’t even speak with a Brooklyn accent anymore—isn’t that crazy? I tried the other day, and it sounded fake. Montaigne has this idea that there’s a social self and a “true” self, and that the true self is like a “room behind the shop.” That like, hidden under all the layers of social pleasantries and affectations is the quote-unquote real you and the only way to become conscious of who you really are is to retire from society and remove the mask, but I don’t believe this. I don’t know what the “real you” is and I don’t know how to separate the social self from the private self—or, like, the artificial from the “real”. That feels very knotty and unknowable to me. 

DC: Can you talk about the Keanu Reeves shrine in your bedroom? 

DA: (laughs) Um, it wasn’t a shrine. 

DC: Well, don’t you call it a shrine in the book? Shall we call it a monument?

I wanted to adopt every patriarchal heteronormative standard because I was terrified of being cast out of society. So I kept trying to make myself toxic so I could fit in.

DA: I cut out a photo of him from a Rolling Stone fashion issue and kept it over my bed. I guess in the book I compare it to keeping an icon of the Virgin Mary. That was the photo with the cowboy hat. I was completely obsessed with Keanu Reeves and with that hat, and I ended up buying it. There was this whole cowboy theme in the late eighties. So I got this cowboy hat and I started speaking with a Southern accent and pretending I was a cowboy, because it made me feel macho or something. Of course, I had no idea I was doing gay kitsch. I was so naïve—I couldn’t read how Gaultier was coding sexuality and gay archetypes into his clothes. All that was lost on me.  

DC: You just mentioned wanting to be perceived as macho. Reading the book, I was really interested in how you talk about masculinity. How do you think your ideas about gender evolved into your twenties and thirties? 

DA: I mean, I didn’t understand gender as a construction when I was younger, because, you know, they weren’t really teaching Judith Butler at the yeshivah. (Laughter) But I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, and what we’re calling toxic masculinity now was the mold for manhood, so I wanted to adopt it. I wanted to adopt every patriarchal heteronormative standard because frankly I was terrified that I would be cast out of society if I didn’t. So I kept trying to make myself toxic so I could fit in. 

DC: I loved when you talked about forcing yourself to listen to a Bad Brains album someone gave you in college, even though you hated that band. You called it a form of homeopathy, “a bit of poison to cure me.” And there’s that great scene where you’re a closeted undergrad at USC, and you’re trying to lose your virginity to a woman, and you get wasted and take her back to your dorm room, and you go through all this choreography in your head—you’re trying to go through it the way you imagine a straight guy would do it. 

DA: Yeah, like “Oooh, I should squeeze her neck—maybe she’ll think I’m straight if I do some neck squeezing!” (laughter) Yeah, that was awful. I felt like I was wearing steel armor and it was like 100 degrees and inside I was suffocating. And I was so wooden and scared to move my arm or smile in a way that might reveal me as gay. It was a moment to moment deeply arch, painfully self-conscious performance. I was miserable, but I thought I deserved to be miserable.  

DC: When did that change for you? 

I was miserable, but I thought I deserved to be miserable.

DA: Well, so, in the book, I chart my little sort of Candide-like journey through toxic masculinity, and all the really lame and very laborious efforts I made to be a macho man. I laughed writing it all down—these crazy scenes with me wandering around with packs of straight boys and playing frisbee and wearing tie dye… It was—I mean if you know me—It is so ridiculous to think of me that way. But at some point I got tired of exerting all this effort to fit in with groups of people I didn’t like. I became more academic, and I actually did read Judith Butler, and Foucault, and a lot of other writers who freed me up. And I transferred to Sarah Lawrence, which is this amazing, very progressive place, and I was surrounded by queer people. I just started to relax a little bit. 

DC: I’m really interested in the way you crafted your book around identity and taste and sexuality. They all helix and wrap around one another. 

DA: But these are all linked, though. It’s all about desire. How can I come to express my desire when I’ve been encouraged to believe I’m shit, and anything I like is shit? In many ways the book is exploring this tension between accepting one’s desire and becoming civilized—because desire is messy and maybe disgusting to other people, and one wants to be part of the world, right? So what’s that unbalancing act like? What does it mean to be civilized, and whose norms are you adopting to do the so-called civilizing of oneself? What’s a legitimate object for desire? What’s a legitimate subject for art? For a long time I believed that I could slink unobtrusively through the world. I wanted to camouflage myself. I wanted to find a cloud of signifiers that would camouflage me. I thought I could just decide “Ok, so I’m going to like this thing, and that’s going to be my taste.” But human beings aren’t just endlessly moldable—I mean yes, we are moldable, and we have to be for our survival, but there is a stubborn little nucleus of every human self that is resistant to change. That’s both a good and bad thing. 

DC: And when you’re at Juilliard that stubborn part of you—which I guess is the artist in you, right?—that becomes an obstacle to your survival in the program. Like, you’re incredibly protean and able to shift and change, but when it comes to your writing, and your artistic core, you can’t figure out how to adapt or protect yourself. To me, it’s one of the most moving parts of the book. Like when you force yourself to see a commercial Broadway musical because you think you and this will finally give you something in common with a professor who hates you, and her response is sort of like, “Ew, who would ever want to see that play?” (laughter) And you describe the look your teacher gives you, and how in taking in that gaze you felt almost poisoned. 

DA: It’s funny, there’s a lot of poison imagery in the book. It was all unconscious—but I think in any bildungsroman, or any story where a person leaves home to tarry with the big bad world, there is always a threat of death hovering over that person. And I really believe that to come into one’s self, one has to experience a psychic murder and be in some way reborn. But what if you’re not reborn? What if there’s just a death, and you can’t come back from it? That’s the fear I tap into in that Juilliard chapter. Change is always invasive, because to change, one has to let something into the very fragile ecosystem of a human psyche. That doesn’t come without risk. But I was basically optimistic, and I believed the poison would ultimately heal me. And I think it did heal me, actually. My year at Juilliard shattered me, but the shattering forced me to put myself back together in this new way, and that changed my writing and ultimately it changed my life. 

DC: Near the end of the book, you write that being a Lot Six–which in the SY community is slang for queer—that this was your redemption, that it “turned your nightmare into dreams.” And it feels like accepting your queer self and your artist-self feel very linked, which is so interesting. Do you think being closeted for all those years and making these attempts to erase your identity and start over—like, were these consciously linked for you at the time? 

How can I come to express my desire when I’ve been encouraged to believe I’m shit, and anything I like is shit?

DA: Yeah. I deeply believed that everything I liked was somehow wrong, and would relegate me to some abject terrible existence I didn’t want. So I was running away from that. But at the same time—and it’s so complicated—but at the same time that I was hiding and camouflaging myself, and pretending to be all these people I resolutely was not, I was also building myself, I was building a vocabulary for who I could one day become. Some of the fake stuff became activated and real. 

DC: Did you ever, through all of this shifting and self-creation, did you ever think, like, “I miss my Arab roots?”

DA: No, because I felt very deracinated as a kid, and my heritage never felt like it belonged to me. Derrida once wrote—and I’m probably gonna mangle this but it’s something like: “I speak only one language, and it’s not my own.” And I completely relate to that. Nothing from my past felt native to me. And the Arab sensibility wasn’t ingrained in me, or—I mean, it was very diluted and mixed with this Brooklyn mall culture. I never really got it. And this community, the SY community, didn’t exactly want me. It was sort of like a super capitalist Little House on the Prairie, and when I left the prairie, they were like, “Ok, bye!” I knew there was no future for me there. But I didn’t just ditch my past—I abandoned it but then I returned to it, and found a way to embrace it in my work. 

DC: Once it no longer threatened you. 

DA: Right. Once it evaporated into nostalgia—or maybe that’s not the word, but once my past wasn’t hurting me anymore; once the nightmares stopped. Nabokov has this great line in Speak Memory, he writes that a spiral is the “spiritualized form of a circle,” that it “frees the circle from its vicious containment.” I love this image—there’s an implied return to the origin, but at the same time you’re moving away from that origin. It’s both at the same time. That’s what art makes possible, that double movement. That’s why it’s magic. 

8 Books That Will Make You Glad You’re Not at the Beach

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Although socially distanced outdoor activities are certainly safer than indoor ones, this year a lot of people will be avoiding crowded beaches and packed seaside bars out of fear of COVID-19. But the beach was fraught with peril anyway. From gulls attacking your sandwich to jellyfish stings to undercurrents that could drag you out to sea, many things can go wrong to interrupt an idyllic beach vacation in even the best of years. If sprawling out on the sand with a typical beach read is not in the cards for you this summer, consider diving into one of the following books that might make you glad to be far from the shore after all.

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Creatures by Crissy Van Meter

Evie, the bride-to-be protagonist of Van Meter’s debut novel, prepares for her wedding on a fictional island off the coast of southern California. However, the festivities are overshadowed by the presence of a malodorous beached whale carcass, the uninvited arrival of Evie’s long absent mother, and the fact that the groom (a fisherman) might be lost at sea. Circumstances prompt Evie to confront the topic she’d most like to avoid: her unstable upbringing and complicated relationship with her charismatic, drug-dealing father.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

30-year-old Margot works as a desk clerk at a Jamaican beach resort frequented by wealthy white tourists. Pimped out by her abusive mother at a young age, she now has sex on the side with white men who visit the island looking for poor women to exploit. While she does this to pay her younger sister’s tuition at a private school, her romantic inclinations tend toward a wealthy local lesbian who has been branded a witch by their village.

They Are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill

Human rights researcher Anya travels to a beach resort in Thailand for Christmas in 2004, hoping to track down a presumed-dead brigade commander who may have participated in the gang rape of a Bosnian woman during the war a decade earlier. She also hopes to reconnect with an old boyfriend teaching English in Bangkok, but the imminent Boxing Day Tsunami threatens to engulf her in another horrific international crisis.

Being Dead by Jim Crace

Middle-aged zoologists Joseph and Celice, who have been married for 30 years, revisit the sand dunes of Baritone Bay, where they first met and made love while researching their doctoral dissertations. There they are surprised, robbed, and murdered, their bodies left to return to nature in the dispassionate manner they themselves used to teach about. Chapters about their shared history and their daughter’s search for them are interspersed with chapters narrated by their decomposing corpses.

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

If you’re looking for a more light-hearted beach disaster, consider the latest release by Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan. In this updated twist on E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, half-Chinese half-WASP Lucie meets George, an attractive boy from Hong Kong who has spent years surfing in Australia, at an over-the-top wedding on the Isle of Capri. Though the two have instant chemistry, a drone-related PR disaster forces them apart. By the time they reconnect at the Hamptons years later, Lucie is freshly engaged to a terrible, social media-obsessed nouveau-riche white guy.

The Last Night at Tremore Beach by Mikel Santiago, translated by Carlos Frías

In this debut novel by Spanish writer Mikel Santiago, creatively blocked composer Peter rents a secluded seaside house in County Donegal, Ireland. His only neighbors are an older couple who live down the beach. Returning from dinner at their house one night, Peter is struck by lightning and begins to experience violent headaches and visions of disasters befalling his children, girlfriend, and neighbors. Are these a mere side effect of the lightning strike, or is Peter now able to see the terrible things that may be lurking in his future?

Jaws

Jaws by Peter Benchley

In this 1974 novel that inspired the hit Spielberg film, the fictional seaside resort town of Amity, Long Island is plagued by a great white shark. After the first victim’s body is found, the local police chief attempts to close the town’s beaches, but the mayor—worried about lost tourism revenue and declining real estate prices—overrules him and beachgoers flood into town. More attacks ensue, until a trio of shark hunters set out by boat to solve the problem once and for all.

The Shape of Night by Tess Gerritsen

The Shape of Night by Tess Gerritsen

In this supernatural thriller from the author of the Rizzoli & Isles series, Boston food writer Ava escapes to the coast of Maine after a tragic incident, renting the house of a 19th-century captain who was lost at sea, where she hopes to finish a cookbook project in peace. However, she soon discovers the captain’s ghost stalks the house, looking to seduce her. Then a dead woman’s body washes up to shore, and Ava learns that the previous tenant left in a hurry, the townspeople may be covering up a longer list of dead women, and a killer—human or ghostly—might even now be on the loose.

The Feminist Confessional Poetry of Alanis Morissette

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I’ll never forget riding in my mom’s car as a high school student in the late ‘90s, and hearing a male DJ on the radio introduce the Alanis Morissette song “Unsent” by commenting snidely that “someone should tell Alanis that not everything she writes in her diary needs to be turned into a song.” I laughed along at the joke, but on another level I felt alarmed. If we were all mocking Alanis for sharing her words with the world; for having the self-indulgent audacity to think that her private thoughts and feelings were worthy of the public, what did that mean for me? Like so many women and girls do all the time, I laughed at the joke because I didn’t want to be the butt of it.

To be undeservedly fair to the sexist ‘90s DJ, though, “Unsent” is a lot. It’s four glorious minutes and ten seconds of Alanis’s most personal reflections on her past relationships, naming each ex-boyfriend one by one, i.e. “Dear Lou, we learned so much,” and “Dear Marcus… You got me seriously thinking about spirituality.” The whole thing feels very TMI, but that’s what I love about Alanis. The unabashedly confessional foregrounding of personal detail that characterizes so much of her work ranges from the cringe-y to the profound, but it’s empowering by virtue of how it claims space for an unapologetically complicated, messy female experience—its assumption that duh, of course the world should care. It reads like therapy homework or a NaPoWriMo prompt—”write an angry letter to each of your exes”—but Alanis doesn’t see any reason why her personal catharsis shouldn’t also be on the radio. As a teenager, Alanis’s music often made me feel all at once like maybe she was no good—like the DJ said—but also like, hey, wait, the poems that I wrote in notebooks hidden in my bedroom were maybe not that bad. 

Alanis doesn’t see any reason why her personal catharsis shouldn’t also be on the radio.

After some success as a pop singer in Canada, Alanis Morissette burst onto the music scene in 1995 with “You Oughta Know,” the hit single off of her album Jagged Little Pill: a scathing takedown of a cheating ex-lover. “I’m here / to remind you / of the mess you left when you went away,” proclaimed the song’s chorus. Alanis’s songs shared intimate details about ex-boyfriends and power-abusing record executives alike, sometimes still hot with rage, and always unflinchingly vulnerable, and most people didn’t really know what to do with her. While Morissette has never identified who “You Oughta Know” is about, it was rumored to be Full House’s Dave Coulier—a fact that was widely regarded at the time as laughably absurd (Joey Gladstone, really?) but is actually pretty disturbing when you consider that he was 35 when the song was recorded, and Morissette was just 20. It’s far from the only one of Alanis’s songs to touch on power imbalances and abuses in relationships with men: “You took me for a joke / You took me for a child,” she writes in “Right Through You,” addressing a lecherous music industry gatekeeper, “You took me out to wine, dine, sixty-nine me / but didn’t hear a damn word I said.” And in her 2002 song “Hands Clean,” she reflects on breaking her silence about a secret teenage relationship with a much older man, speaking from his perspective, “If it weren’t for your maturity, none of this would have happened. / If you weren’t so wise beyond your years / I would’ve been able to control myself.” “Oooh this could be messy,” the song’s chorus chides, the sickening words of a manipulative creep seducing a teen girl flipped on their head and turned into permission for other girls to do the same. With Alanis, it always gets a little messy. That’s the beauty of it. 

There’s a tricky history of critics and readers conflating the speaker in writing by women with the author herself, but in this case, Morissette has never been shy about her personal investment in her work. Before writing the album Jagged Little Pill, Alanis worked with a team who didn’t encourage her to write her own lyrics, but she said in a 2015 interview that she always knew she was a lyricist — and that once she began writing, her lyrics took on a “hyper-autobiographical” quality. “Only I could write these stories,” she said. Morissette has talked about how her own life has served as the inspiration for many of her songs—but at the same time, whether or not they were purely autobiographical doesn’t really matter. What makes them powerful is that they foreground the experiences of a firmly female speaker, everyday observations that so many women share but are often seen as not valuable or worthy of being called art. They place an emotional female speaker in a position of authority that she’s regularly denied by a patriarchal culture, which so often requires women to subsume our feelings in order to be taken seriously. 

Personal writing by women is often seen as indulgent, while personal writing by men is more often lauded as high art.

Personal writing by women is often seen as indulgent, while personal writing by men is more often lauded as universal, reflective of the human condition, high art. As Lori Saint-Martin writes in Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media, “The realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men (Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Michel Leiris, Henry Miller) and confessional for women (Colette, Erica Jong, Anais Nin).” Many critics were condescending in their reception of Alanis’s work—even in ostensibly positive reviews. In a 1995 profile, Rolling Stone’s David Wild called Morissette “queen of this year’s pop culture prom,” whose live performance is “less like a concert than modern-rock group therapy.” And AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote, “Her bitter diary entries are given a pop gloss that gives them entry to the pop charts.” Then there was all the widespread discussion of how the scenarios presented in Morissette’s hit song “Ironic” were in fact not actually ironic.

The brash vulnerability and confessional nature of Alanis’s lyrics often led to sexist critiques and dismissals like the one I encountered in my mom’s car that day. And yet her music felt right on time. Morissette has never framed her work’s expression of anger as overtly political, but it’s hard to imagine that her transition from bubble-gum pop to emotionally charged confessional rock wasn’t influenced by the political moment, centered on women’s outrage, into which she wrote these songs. Or that the vast popularity of Jagged Little Pill wasn’t, in part, the result of a culture ready to hear women divulging the details of their repressed anger; a generation of women that were growing quite angry themselves.

Jagged Little Pill came out just a few years after Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and Rebecca Walker’s subsequent coining of the term “third wave feminism.” In her 1992 article for Ms., Walker writes that the hearings served as an appraisal of women’s credibility and power. “He was promoted,” Walker states, “She was repudiated. Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis/power. Women were admonished to keep their experiences to themselves.” The court’s dismissal of Hill’s account is a particularly abysmal example of a culture in which women’s stories of injustice or pain are not taken seriously. Across a spectrum from the dismissive treatment of Hill—and later, the similar treatment of Christine Blasey Ford—to our culture’s condescension towards confessional women artists like poet Sylvia Plath and Alanis Morissette, the overwhelming message to women is that their stories should be kept to themselves. Walker concludes her Ms. essay by noting that the Thomas hearings have radicalized her, shaken her awake. She ends her article with a plea to other women: “Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger.” 

Twenty-five years after the release of Jagged Little Pill, we’re feeling a cultural déja vu.

The emotionally charged, truth-telling elements of Morissette’s music also resonate with activism of the past several years centered on women’s discounted experiences of sexual assault and abuse. The past several years have a lot in common with the ‘90s. Both eras brought a “year of the woman“: a record-breaking number of women elected to public office in response to the country’s grappling with high-profile sexual misconduct cases, and women’s rising outrage and resistance. After Hill’s testimony, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, giving victims of workplace sexual harassment more legal resources, and anti-sexual harassment programs became standard in workplaces across the country due to work by feminist activists. Similarly, the Women’s March and the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements brought a long-overdue cultural tipping point in overall tolerance of sexual misconduct. But still, not nearly enough has changed. Twenty-five years after the release of Jagged Little Pill, we’re feeling a cultural déja vu. Perhaps that’s why the album has now been translated into a musical, which debuted on Broadway in December of 2019. 

Written by Oscar winner Diablo Cody and featuring songs off the 1995 album and others by Alanis, the Jagged Little Pill musical follows The Healys—Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley), Steve (Sean Allan Krill), and their teenage son and daughter Nick (Derek Klena) and Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding)—a suburban Connecticut family that, from the outside, appears picture-perfect. The show deals with sexual assault and trauma—and looks at how trusting women is key to changing a culture of pervasive misogyny and victim-blaming. That the play has been well-received thus far shows how, in some ways, our culture has caught up with the themes of Alanis’ music, at least on the surface. In his New York Times review of the show, Jesse Green writes that it feels like a summation “of our world’s worst ills but also the way song can summon resistance to them.” It’s reassuring to see the general public taking art addressing sexual misconduct seriously. But the play also reminds us of how far we still have to go — there’s still a predator in the White House, after all, and two on the Supreme Court. And the Democratic nomination of a septuagenarian white dude who led the Senate Judiciary Committee that grilled Anita Hill nearly 30 years ago feels like a disappointing thud after so much feminist activism over the past four years—and that was before he was accused of sexual assault.

It’s no surprise that confessional women artists like Morissette have been so frequently patronized by cultural gatekeepers.

In the Jagged Little Pill musical, high schooler Frankie performs “Ironic” as an “essay, poem, story-type thing” in a creative writing class. When her classmates tear down her work for not being technically ironic, a nod to the endless criticism of Morissette’s lyrics, a new student named Phoenix defends her: “You’re obviously a great writer,” he says. “Their only defense is to be super literal.” It’s no surprise that confessional women artists like Morissette have been so frequently patronized by cultural gatekeepers. Women have long used their anger and personal stories to call attention to inequities in this country, and when their voices aren’t taken seriously, it’s for good reason. As Rebecca Traister writes in Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, about the many social movements catalyzed by women’s outrage, “What becomes clear, when we look at the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger—via silencing, erasure, and repression—stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.” 

Before the pandemic, Alanis was set to go on tour this summer in celebration of the  25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill, and the release of her new album Such Pretty Forks in the Road, which is due out this month. I was planning to go see her at the Xfinity Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, formerly Meadows Music Center, the same place where I saw her perform in the summer of 1996, my second-ever concert. Radiohead opened for her. I went with my older sister and her friends, and I had just been dumped by my 8th grade boyfriend and was about to start high school. I wrote a poem about him recently, just because why not. Our first kiss was in a neighboring town’s two-dollar movie theater. When he broke up with me, I was on a cordless phone in my bedroom and he told me that relationships are like books; you can like the beginning but you might not like the end. And I cried for weeks, until I met a new boy. It was totally earth-shattering, and it was totally ordinary, and if I could sing about it on the radio, I would.

I Reject the Imaginary White Man Judging My Work

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

It felt like someone was standing over my shoulder. The presence was palpable, so much so that I physically kept turning around even though I knew I’d find no one standing there. When I turned back to my laptop to finish the personal essay I’d been working on for about two months, the sinking feeling that someone was watching and judging me returned. That voice in my head repeated the questions I kept trying to push back: “What will they think?” “Will it sell and to whom?” “Will these words activate the Defcon level of racist trolldom I’ve seen other writers endure?”  

These inquiries felt detached from my personal intentions and yet they still pummeled me. They were integrated somehow into my being, even as they unraveled me emotionally. They distracted me from the questions that should have been most important at the time: “What did I really want to say in this essay?” “How will I best show confrontation in my story?” “What does dignity look like when disrespect has been enacted against it? And why is dignity necessary in this particular telling?” “What is dignity anyway?” Inevitably, as one can see here, questions like these lead me outside myself. Who defines what it means to be dignified in American culture? How has dignity and respectability been defined for Black folks and how should that show up in our art? These questions take me outside of my lived experiences as a Black woman raised in the South and living on the East Coast; a mother wrestling with all the things moms do; a person with a story to tell that might be more unique than universal. They lead me into the realm of perception and how said perceptions potentially affect the way I tell my story and where it will ultimately be read. They lead me to the white gaze. 

These questions take me outside of my lived experiences as a Black woman. They lead me to the white gaze. 

Toni Morrison once said, “What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze. … In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of.” What I gather from the godmother of literature is that it doesn’t only matter that I’m a Black woman telling my story. What matters is the lens through which I’m telling it. And sometimes, many times, that lens, if we’re not careful, can be tainted by the ever-present consciousness of Whiteness as the default. Whiteness as gatekeeper. Whiteness as the dominant narrative even in stories where all the players are Black. Thankfully, in the last five to ten years or so, there have been writers, particularly in non-fiction and memoir, who have walked with pure swag and intention through the door that Mother Morrison kicked down. 

Regina Bradley, assistant professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University and author of the forthcoming book Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip Hop South, recently challenged the threads of white supremacy—which ultimately fuels the white gaze—in Southern literature. “In particular, the southern literary canon is a monument of white supremacy,” she wrote in a Facebook post (which I’ve reproduced with permission). “People get huffy and in their feelings when you de-center white people [when] talking about the south. Cut and dry, the canon represents what is considered the ‘best of’ for a particular historical moment that is documented in literature and culture. Usually this documentation is heralded as white, male, conservative. It [also] tokenizes people who ain’t white, male, or conservative.” She goes on to dismiss this presentation of Southern literature as authentic, especially the canon’s interpretation of Black southern characters and writing:

When I study southern Black writers, I keep “southern blackness ain’t a monolith” and “white folks ain’t needed to understand southern blackness” at the front of my mind. I write about Jesmyn Ward [author of the memoir Men We Reaped] and Kiese Laymon [author of Heavy: An American Memoir] in my book. I use southern Black lit and culture to understand what they are trying to do. It’s a pushback against trying to push them out of the Black South into the comforts of a white imagination. I address the Faulkner parallels because they’re both from Mississippi but point out that they subvert Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha trope (Laymon’s Melahatchie County and Ward’s Bois Sauvage) to center southern Black people. White folks on the fringes. That’s real. In their work, southern Black folks are complicated, broke, and far from flat. They let the messy and the ugly shine through with the tenderness and humor and communities they inhabit. What southern white writer do you know that can create messy, janky, and humane black characters?

I know the answer to that. There are none. Because while white writers can certainly access messy and potentially janky, the white supremacy that shows up even in their most progressive and well-intentioned attempts always seems to leave the humanity out. 

Black writers who have been able to successfully disconnect themselves from the white gaze seem to do so with extreme intentionality. Rebecca Carroll—cultural critic, host of WNYC Studios’ podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 Essential Conversations about Race in a Pivotal Year for America and author of the forthcoming memoir Surviving the White Gaze—chose to “divest from the white gaze” in telling the story of forging her identity as a Black woman in light of a completely white childhood.  “[I wanted to] unpeel the layer of definition it painted on me as a child and then all the way through my childhood,” Carroll told me in an interview. “And that definition was multifaceted. It was about beauty standards and language and anti-Blackness and erasure—so I had already begun to disengage from that voice and disempower that gaze when I started writing the book. And that I think is a process that is very personal. There’s no one way to do it, because how to disarm it has so much to do with its original hold on you.”

The white gaze looms for Black writers who want to be published in the mainstream, because overwhelmingly, white people still hold the keys to the kingdom.

For me, the original hold of the white gaze is very much connected to the trauma response of “I am not enough.” Because of how I processed early childhood experiences, I’d long become invested in this idea that I had to be three times better, stronger, and more persistent than anyone else in order to be generally seen and loved and recognized as talented. Triple all of that if I wanted the perception of me to be equal to the way white people are perceived—white people who may or may not even have the same level of tenacity or talent as I did. This has never been more evident than when I entered the publishing industry as a writer and editor. The white gaze looms for Black writers who want to be published in the mainstream, because overwhelmingly, white people still hold the keys to the kingdom. The recent uproar over #publishingpaidme is a prime example of the extreme disparities that exist in the industry despite Black writers proving their worth and work a hundred times over.

Carroll makes it very clear that the white gaze is still pervasive in the publishing industry, even now, in a time when the business has gone near-acrobatic in trying to contort itself as Black lives-affirming by publishing any and every Black voice possible. Even as I personally choose to leverage this access, I can’t help but be somewhat skeptical of it. Carroll affirms that skepticism:

It’s everywhere in marketing and jacket copy—all the Black characters are described as Black, and the white characters are just people. Because, of course, the default is always white. Insofar as interest in Black stories in publishing…amid this so-called “racial reckoning”—I will say that it’s not a reckoning if there isn’t long-term accountability and transparency around the evolution of thinking. So if you’re super hype for my Black folks’ lives and stories right now because people are protesting, you’re going to need to be very clear about why you weren’t interested six months ago. And also be really honest about where you think you’ll be with that energy in six months from now. It’s not just about making permanent change, it’s about finding the language of accountability.

The good thing is, memoirs like Heavy by Kiese Laymon, The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty, and More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth—all very different stylistically—seem to have been able to eschew the white gaze while still finding acclaim within the “system” of publishing. Maybe there is a glimmer of hope? I’m not sure. I often wonder what it means that we (the collective “we”) are so desperate for the validation of the mainstream. But then I remember that, for some, it has less to do with validation and everything to do with access and resources. I’ve published both traditionally and independently. The latter gave me freedom, the former gave me access. I could never deny how intertwined these two things are. I would never deny that I want both.  

If we choose to not write about race or social issues related to race, are our stories just as viable? They should be.

Nevertheless, if we are solely considering the work, it’s evident that we are seeing more writers free themselves from the gaze. Take Laymon’s Heavy, for instance. He writes: “My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.” Laymon doesn’t try to hide from the intersectional nature of violence. He clearly delineates the perpetrator and victim at every intersection—gender, race, sex, age. It’s all there, without apology. 

One of the ways that Black storytelling is often subverted by the white gaze is the insistence on defined categories for our work. If we choose to not write about race or social issues related to race, are our stories just as viable? They should be. A few years ago, I wrote an article for The Guardian about the complexities of writing and race within the publishing industry. I stated that too often it’s believed that “good” writing by black authors is birthed from oppression; that marginalization is viewed as a key marker for black literature. Sadly, this implies that there is some mandatory link between the sociological or political status of Black people and the authenticity of the stories that come out of that experience. Today, in the wake of the uprisings around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the New York Times best sellers list is filled with books about race, racial justice, etc. And rightfully so. But I suppose I wonder if the white gaze subverts the breadth and depth of other stories by Black writers. 

Any time a writer takes the courageous step to tell a story, it’s a revolutionary act. It’s an act of exposure.

Any time a writer takes the courageous step to tell a story (fiction or nonfiction), it’s a revolutionary act. It’s an act of exposure. For Black writers, this is especially true. If we consider revolution to be about overhauling a culture or society or overturning the systems that hinder a culture or society from working at its best and most humane…then who does that better than the scribes who feel led to chronicle our stories? Writers have the capacity to expose the nuances and complexities of a culture and its people—good and bad—and shift how that group is seen, and maybe more significantly, how that group sees itself. 

The challenge is when that capacity becomes a clearly defined box that hinders the telling of stories outside of what white folks in publishing deem “Black enough” and therefore sellable. 

The elders in my family certainly were storytellers. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. I used to sit and watch my aunts and uncles play Spades or Pokeno and tell the tallest of tales. My nanny (great-grandmother) used to talk about growing up in Alabama, and every time she’d tell the story, a little bit of it would change. This gave me an incentive to listen. I suppose she could have explained the economic disparities that led to having no shoes or having to leave school to work the fields. I’m not sure I would have been moved by that as much. It was her joy and pain and carefully crafted avoidance of “foolishness” that made her stories real to me. 

There has always seemed to be a desire by some Black writers to tell the stories that exist outside of or in tandem with our social positions. Stories where the narrative is less about commenting on political or social challenges directly—as the white gaze often expects us to do—and more about illuminating our humanity within these white supremacist power structures and institutions. To tell an “ordinary” story about the joy I felt as a little Black girl doing cartwheels in a park is, maybe sadly, revolutionary. To tell a story about being a Black man who falls in love and loses said love and then falls in love again—and to tell it with no agenda, with no apparent consciousness of the “white gaze,” with no firm commitment to the pathologies of the hour—is necessary.

To tell an ‘ordinary’ story about the joy I felt as a little Black girl doing cartwheels in a park is, maybe sadly, revolutionary.

Breaking news: Black people have families and jobs and romantic interests and hobbies and challenges and yes, we have all of this within systems not designed for us, and yet we exist. We live and love and die. Those institutions and structures don’t HAVE to be in the forefront of the stories we tell and it’s also okay when they are. The question is more about who is driving the agenda of which stories get told.

Unfortunately, most Black writers who aspire to do this for a living must contend with is reconciling the work we want to do with the ways in which it’s received. This raises the question of whether we can ever truly be rid of the white gaze. Black stories and literature will always be critiqued through the lens of wherever Black people exist in society in that moment. 

So as I continue to write my essay, fully cognizant of the white man standing over my shoulder and the white supremacy and patriarchy that looms ever present in this business, attempting to distract me from my story with tainted whispers of “what if no one loves it?” and “maybe that’s a wee too Black,” I choose to, in the vein of Laymon and Carroll and others, banish him to the void where he belongs. If I’m honest, it’s hard to not tie my worth to these stories I tell. But if I’m going to do that, they might as well be fully and wholly my stories, told the way I would tell them, for people who will get it. Gaze be damned. 

Emma Straub on the Future of Indie Bookstores

Posted on by Jo Lou

Emma Straub is a New York Times bestselling author and owner of the beloved independent bookstore, Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. Her latest novel, All Adults Here, explores the complexity of love for your family, the love for yourself, and for the town you grew up in. 

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

The story revolves around Astrid and her adult children, all living in a small town where people love to talk but rarely address the unresolved issues they have with one another. The day Astrid witnesses Barbara, a woman whom she doesn’t necessarily like, get hit by a bus everything changes. Astrid starts questioning her role as a mother, lover, and human. Life suddenly seems messier to Astrid, more fragile, without always allowing enough time to say what needs to be said. 

But this isn’t a sad book about life’s frailties. Quite the contrary. It’s a feel-good story at its finest, with characters that are humble, real, dysfunctional, and downright delicious. Each one is so finely layered, relatable, and easy to love—flaws and all. The flaws especially. Everyone knows everyone in this cozy little town of Clapham. Childhood friends have long since blossomed into adult ones, neighbors aren’t afraid to get into each other’s business, and the kids are often more in-tuned than the adults think. But everyone has their secrets, which begs the question: how well can we truly know a person? 

And although the world, and the people in it, can remain a mystery one thing this book reinstates is the importance of togetherness in one family. Your family is always there for you no matter what. And no matter how crazy they can drive you.   

Carissa Chesanek: I love how the book is about family—and a big one at that—relating to the complications and drama, but also the love that is unconditional. Where did the idea behind this particular family come about? 

Emma Straub: It starts with one person and then you build it from there. I knew that I wanted it to be multi-generational so I knew the family had to be of a certain size. I wanted sibling relationships, parent to child and grandparent to child. I needed all of those interconnecting and overlapping relationships. I just kept adding people until I felt like the family was there.

CC: Astrid changed after witnessing Barbara get hit by a bus. It ultimately allowed her to grow closer to her children and show more affection while giving her the courage to come out about her relationship with Birdie. Why do you think that is?

It’s so hard to run a business right now. People are scared, the world is scary.

ES: I think all of us are holding on to certain things. You know, certain slights or psychic traumas of one kind or another, and we don’t always recognize those things consciously. But I don’t think Astrid would have had Barbara on a list of things that were weighing on her before she got hit. It was seeing this thing happen during this experience that provided a sense of relief and sort of release. It just sets her on her merry way.

CC: I’d like to go back to the subject of affection and relationships for a minute. The story intertwines this sense of love within family and love within personal relationships, which to me, seems similar in a lot of ways. Astrid questions her love for Birdie, wondering if it’s romance or codependence, with this “overwhelming need for another person in order to function.” Yes, that is romantic but that also seems a lot like unconditional love for family. Porter also says “knowing a body so long and watching it change” can be both maternal and martial. Was intertwining the two types of love something you were interested in exploring?

EM: Yeah. My husband and I have been together for almost 20 years. Your partner becomes your family, not just with time or when you get married or whatever. It’s not the symbolic act, but it’s the literal number of days that you spend together under the same roof and the amount you have to trust each other and rely on each other. I think that I do see those things more equivalent maybe than I used to when I was younger.

CC: I’m glad you brought up the past because I feel that’s examined a lot in this story. More specifically, how the past impacts the present within grief, loss, and heartache in general. Astrid and her kids still mourn the loss of Russell, while Porter also grieves the loss of a high school love, and both Nicky and Elliott struggle with their mother’s past reactions that caused them pain. How important were these issues for you when writing this story?

EM: That’s definitely something that I didn’t think about or plan. It sort of evolved. That’s one of the things I love about writing fiction. I started writing this book thinking that I wanted to write this very romantic, small town love story but then as you get to know the characters, things deepen and change. The loss of their father was a thing that I didn’t really figure out until several drafts in when these kids, who are now pushing forty, are in these moments of change in their adult life or in emotional crises, and would think about the parent they were missing in addition to the one who’s still there. And, you know, at least some of them, maybe all of them, would idealize the parent that was gone. Because, you know, how can you not, right?

CC: We’ve been chatting a bit about Astrid’s kids, who are not actually kids anymore, but let’s veer toward someone who is in fact, a kid: August, who plays a significant role. August is transitioning to Robin and ultimately shows us the importance of being true to oneself no matter how scary. Can you talk more about this?

We are all trying our best to keep our businesses afloat and to make sure our employees have jobs. But man oh man, we are tired. 

EM: Generally, I can just say that I know a lot of young people, who, to me, seem like kids or very recently have been kids, who have transitioned at a point in their life where not only was I not aware of myself at all, but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have made such a brave choice. I’m so amazed by all of the young people I know: kids, teenagers, and young adults who have come out and transitioned.

CC: It is pretty remarkable and inspiring to see. 

EM: I just think it’s so beautiful. 

CC: I’d like to ask about your Brooklyn bookstore, Books Are Magic. What has it been like running the store during the lockdown?

EM: Running the bookstore during the pandemic has felt like triage—months and months of triage. The whole business changed overnight, once the booksellers were all quarantined at home in March.

I think most people think of bookselling as a vocation, and something that has to do more with the brain than with the body, but in the last three months, all the actual bodily work has fallen on my husband and our two managers, and it is an astounding amount of work. There’s a lot that can happen remotely—our events and marketing folks, for example—but the actual work of getting books into people’s hands requires bodies, whether in our store, or in warehouses, and I feel deeply aware of all the labor that all of us take for granted when we order something on the internet. I will never, ever take it for granted again. Obviously ordering from Amazon is against my religion, but what this period has cemented for me is how important it is to support your local businesses, and to support them with patience and humanity. We are all trying our best to keep our businesses afloat and to make sure our employees have jobs, and to make sure our customers get what they want. But man oh man, we are tired. 

CC: I can imagine. Thank you and your team for all that you do. During these strange times, you’ve also had to change the way you hold literary events at the bookstore. How has it been going from in-person to virtual?

EM: My events team has been heroic. They totally changed course overnight and entered the wild word of Zoom. In some ways, I think it’s been great, because obviously now anyone from anywhere can come, and we can host authors from anywhere. Those are exciting things, for sure, but I think like everyone else, there’s some Zoom fatigue. Aren’t you fatigued?

CC: My eyes have never seen so much screen time. The virtual space is a great resource, but it has changed the way we interact with the book world. Besides everything being done virtually these days, how else do you think the bookselling business has changed during COVID-19?

[That feeling] of finally walking back into your favorite bookstore, and looking at real books chosen by real people just for you? There’s no substitute for that kind of care and attention.

EM: For months, it was all shipping and processing, with almost no staff. Now it’s pick-ups and masks and hand sanitizer. It keeps changing over and over again, and we’re the lucky ones. There are two wonderful stores in NYC that have decided to close: Stories and Bank Street. Both beautiful, meaningful children’s bookstores. I know that’s true across the world, that stores are struggling. It’s so hard to run a business right now. People are scared, the world is scary. We’re trying to be as conservative as we can, and to plan ahead for the long climb back to normal, or to a vaccine, or to whatever’s on the other side of this. 

CC: On that topic of “the other side,” what do you think the future of indie bookstores will look like?

EM: Well, I think that indie bookstores are the past, present, and future, that’s for sure. I think indie bookstores are the best way to buy books and to sell books. I think everything else is a pale imitation. The internet doesn’t do it, the big chains don’t do it. Those places will sell you a book, of course, and they’ll do a fine job, but how will you feel about it? And how do you feel finally walking back into your favorite bookstore, and looking at real books chosen by real people just for you? There’s no substitute for that kind of care and attention. And so I feel fine if it’s just a few people in the store at a time for now. We’ll get back to capacity eventually. People have been supporting us wonderfully throughout, and we have never worked harder—-none of us, not the events team, or the booksellers, or my husband and me. I know it’s been the same for many of my bookseller friends. But we’re getting through it. And who knows. Someday, I might even have childcare again. Then there’s no stopping us.