We believe that beauty for women is a source of power and privilege. A kind of currency. But is it truly attainable? What is the flip side of beauty—when does beauty cause suffering? What happens when someone who identifies as beautiful gets stripped of it, whether by age or accident? And in the end, who decides what—and more to the point, who—is beautiful?
My debut novel Beauty is about Amy Wong, a Chinese American woman who goes into the fashion industry. She’s a gifted, up-and-coming designer; she’s young, beautiful, and seemingly has it all. And yet, life circumstances not unlike what many women face—chauvinism, prejudice, marriage, motherhood—result in a deep loss of self. The narrative arc of Beauty encompasses most of Amy’s life. Her ideas around beauty, family, and power evolve throughout the course of the novel. In Maya Angelou’s memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we see how “the caged bird” is kept from flying and freedom. Societal conventions about beauty are like cages. They often keep women from reaching their full potential. In literature and books, we see a range of characters. Some buck and transcend expectations. Others remain stuck.
Here is a list of books that speak to questions about beauty, identity, and the impossible standards for which women are expected to live to this day.
This novel made me realize I could be a writer; that I, a Chinese American woman, had something to say. It is the story of an 11-year-old girl named Pecola. She’s black, growing up in an America that worships blond hair and blue eyes, and so, wishing she could be beautiful and that her life could be different, she does too. Morrison revealed how race factors into identity and how racism can distort one’s self-perception.
Published in 2002, this nonfiction book revolutionized how we think about beauty and its effect on women’s identity. Her point is that despite the women’s movement and the power women have gained in terms of professional success and legal recognition, societal ideas about beauty keep women trapped in a cycle of reaching for ideals that are, in fact, unattainable.
A lot rides on beauty for the Bennet sisters, as their mother makes it her mission in life to see her two older daughters married to men of both means and class. Beauty is the road that she knows will get them there. Mrs. Bennet is an irritating nag, and yet, considering the circumstances, she’s being reasonable and practical. She has five daughters, none of whom can inherit their father’s estate by law. If beauty can’t catch a husband, the girls face poverty and homelessness. (Mrs. Bennet seems to exist in many mothers, and perhaps for the same reason: they desire economic security for their daughters.)
Similar to The Bluest Eye, but written as an epistolary, the protagonist, a teen named Celie, has grown up poor in rural Georgia. As a poor black girl, she is despised both inside and outside her home, and is sexually abused by her father. Later, she is physically abused by her much older husband she calls “Mister.” No one considers Celie beautiful and neither does she. In fact, she’s told she’s worthless and ugly and she believes it; her journey to self-discovery starts after meeting several strong women. She becomes friendly with Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress, and their relationship develops into something more.
What happens when beauty is dangerous for a young girl? In this searing memoir, Gay speaks honestly about her relationship with food, weight, self-image, and beauty. As a girl, she’d been sexually assaulted. She blamed herself, and as a result, turned her pain inward, hiding the truth and feeling self-loathing for herself. She buried the young girl she’d been with food, feeling that she would be safe if she made herself invisible to boys like the ones who attacked her.
Ifemelu is a beautiful, confident Nigerian woman, but when she immigrates to America, she finds herself questioning and redefining what beauty means for a black woman, and in particular, how it plays out with her hair. Back home, she had her hair braided. Her hair was celebrated. Here, to be beautiful and professional, she is suddenly expected to have her hair straightened to be more “white” and acceptable. After doing so, and reaching this kind of “beauty,” however, Ifemelu is overcome by a deeper sense of loss.
Hired as the personal assistant to one of the most powerful fashion editors, a young woman finds herself in the most unglamorous position of hop-skip-and-jumping to the beat of her tyrannical, unpredictable, and impossible boss. In this work environment, appearances mean everything, and for this particular protagonist, it requires a total makeover. She trades in her hiking boots for four-inch Manolos, $100 skirts for Armani, and her briefcase for Prada. Welcome to a world in which “trivial” matters like manicure and pedicures, hair, and the evenness of one’s tan, are not so trivial anymore. Beauty can determine one’s future and fate in the industry. It’s a job a million girls would die for. But is it worth selling one’s soul?
The novel is set during the late 1800s, a period of American prosperity and growth referred to as the Gilded Age. The protagonist, Newland Archer (a name that pretty much says it all), is a lawyer from one of the most prominent “old money” families in New York City. Newland is ready to marry the perfectly beautiful and well-bred May Welland and is unhappy when his fiancé’s cousin arrives from abroad, shrouded in scandal, thus threatening to tarnish his nuptials. But Newland soon discovers that as beautiful as May may be, she is innocent and ignorant. Newland’s idea of beauty begins to shift and he soon finds himself in love with the Countess Olenska. Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making Edith Wharton the first woman to win the award. A truly beautiful thing.
This story opens with a Manhattan-based model, Charlotte, who is only 35, but struggling to look younger in an industry in which she is already considered past her prime. Charlotte is in a car crash that crushes her face, and though it is totally reconstructed, she doesn’t look the same. What is it like to be a recognized beauty that people look at to becoming virtually a stranger to everyone?
Outrageous, intelligent, and darkly hilarious, You Will Never Be Forgotten includes characters who are harvested for their body parts, cloned, and surveilled, existing in worlds not-too-distant, or perhaps already identical, to our own.
Mary South’s debut collection draws upon the genre of dystopia (think: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and TV shows like Black Mirror) in order to defamiliarize received notions about the world we live in—specifically relating to capitalism, technology, and gender—as well as pointing to the absurdity that lies at the heart of many of these accepted beliefs. But don’t be fooled: beneath each of South’s seemingly absurd premises are characters who struggle to move past trauma, all the while grappling with shame, despair, and sadness, in order to heal.
This spring, we spoke about the origin of her stories, the effects of using humor and surrealism in one’s work, and art’s powerful ability to help “deprogram” destructive ways of thinking and existing in today’s troubled times.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: Many of the stories in You Will Never Be Forgotten feature premises that feel wildly imaginative and, yet, not far off from our own reality: for instance, a camp dedicated to rehabilitating teenage cyberbullies in “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls,” a mother who “rebirths” a clone of her deceased daughter in “Not Setsuko,” assisted living patients who call sex hotlines in “The Age of Love,” and so on. How did these stories begin for you?
Mary South: I often begin by linking an emotion to a strong image. I got the idea for “Not Setsuko,” for example, by thinking a lot on grief and what it is that finally allows someone who is intensely grieving to move on. It’s actually rather mysterious. How do our minds and our bodies allow us to let go of excruciating pain? At one point, I asked myself the question, “What if someone who is grieving simply refused to move on?” That immediately prompted the image of a mother whose daughter has tragically died, and she just can’t bring herself to feel the loss. She believes it might destroy her. Around that image I was able to build the story of a mother who is trying to exactly duplicate her deceased daughter’s memories for her second daughter so she can live in the illusion that she had never really passed away. Her daughter, Setsuko, has just been “absent” for a while.
Other stories began similarly. “Architecture for Monsters” began from imagining buildings that were designed to not just emulate the human form but to emulate the ruptured or damaged human form. I had so much fun coming up with imaginary designs; that was perhaps the most fun I had while drafting the collection. “Keith Prime” came almost fully realized at once, pairing grief again with late capitalism and a woman doing her best to survive in a job that values people only for how it can profit off them—literally, for their parts. I had this image of rows and rows of identical men sleeping in a warehouse.
DPA: I can’t help but admire the absurdist underpinnings to your work. I was reminded of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, as well as work by contemporary writers like Aimee Bender and Yukiko Motoya, where outrageous events are unquestioningly accepted as “the norm” within the world of their stories. And yet, beneath the absurd premises in your work, are characters who long for connection or are trying to heal from a trauma. Why begin a piece with a seemingly absurd, outlandish, or surreal proposition?
MS: A novel that I love and that’s been incredibly influential for me is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. “Keith Prime” owes a lot to that novel, in that I wanted to explore another side of Never Let Me Go—the logistical or bureaucratic side and what it’s like for those who are doing the actual harvesting of clones and their body parts. One of the aspects of Ishiguro’s novel that so fascinates me is how, despite its outlandish premise, none of the characters question the validity of their basic reality. They never say, “It’s unfair that we’re raised for parts. We need to completely change the system.” They say, “I wonder if it’s possible for us to get an extended leave of absence before our donations.” We’re all indoctrinated into reality, and in the process of living we have to figure out the ways in which that indoctrination was for our benefit and survival and the ways in which that indoctrination was harmful or for someone else’s benefit. I think life is often a deep deprogramming in this manner. But by starting with an absurd premise that the characters just take for granted as “this is what life is like,” it strikingly reveals this kind of reality indoctrination that we all experience.
We’re all indoctrinated into reality, and we have to figure out the ways in which that indoctrination was for our benefit or for someone else’s.
Starting with an absurd or outlandish premise also allows me to get at genuine feeling more easily. I find “The Age of Love,” for example, to be a deeply sad story; the elderly men dialing phone sex hotlines often say humorously uncomfortable things, but there’s some weird catalyst in the laughter that makes their loneliness more palpable and affecting. My characters are also often unwilling to fully reckon with their trauma, which is what’s required to heal or become a better person. Humor lets them hide for a while but also ultimately exposes their wounds. The neurosurgeon recovering from her husband’s suicide in “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” can often be quite witty, yet that wit won’t soothe her sorrow. Only feeling her sorrow can do that. But I need to show them hiding first, eliding and making light of their pain through jokes, before I can break them open.
DPA: Simultaneously, your collection and its absurdist stories also made me think of events happening in today’s world that are indeed outrageous, but accepted by some as “the norm:” children in cages, the destruction of the earth, our current president who “grabs women by the pussy.” What, in your opinion, is the role of fiction and art in today’s social and political climate, if any?
MS: I was going to say in my last answer that I don’t feel like I have to invent much or stretch the world too far past recognition in my stories—our current reality is often a horrifying dystopia. When a family can lose their house due to an unexpected medical crisis, that is a nightmare reality. My bitterness over the injustice of the state of health care in this country incited me to write “Keith Prime.” And the traumatizing content moderation jobs featured in the title story are also upsettingly real.
It’s difficult—nigh impossible—to measure what effect fiction has on the human psyche, regardless of the studies that have attempted to quantify how it influences our capacity for empathy. And I don’t think anyone would posit that fiction in and of itself is able to mobilize policy change. I do know that art, fiction in particular, has always been what I’ve turned to in order to make sense the world and the people in it. Nowhere else have I found that same kind of deep, almost cellular-level understanding. After I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time as a teenager in college, I felt I had gleaned something essential and true about life, despite not being able to articulate exactly what that was. I could spend my whole life trying to articulate what is essential and true about Mrs. Dalloway. The same goes for so many books.
Once, I heard therapy described as “releasing into the conscious mind what is unconscious.” The goal—or hope—is that revelation, of habits and traumas both major and minor, will over time fundamentally alter the self. I think fiction is capable of this, too, on both the individual and the collective level.
DPA: An aspect of your work that I found extremely impressive was how you balanced the ostensibly dark subject matter of each story—suicide, rape, and other traumas, as well the despair, loneliness, and grief that the characters feel—with humor. I found myself laughing, and my jaw-dropping: Did Mary just write that!? Humor added levity, while also drawing attention to characters’ very human contradictions and inconsistencies, or the ridiculous worlds that they inhabit. Why use humor in your work?
MS: One of the strange things about devastating emotional pain is that while you’re experiencing the worst of it, you can also, surprisingly, have a completely unrelated thought—even one that is very funny. We all contain multiple voices, internal ways of talking to ourselves, voices that are snarky, tender, resentful, forgiving, etc. It can almost feel like a betrayal to the original feeling if, in the throes of grief, for example, you randomly recall a memory that is really humorous about a lost loved one. But that’s not a betrayal, that’s your mind’s way of letting light in through the darkness of loss, of helping you to heal.
So humor is a great provider of relief, but it’s also revealing of pain, as I mentioned earlier; at some point, you can no longer use humor to mitigate your less-than-pleasant feelings. In that sense, once the laughter subsides, I think it allows me, at least, to see these worlds and these characters even more clearly than I would otherwise—and for the characters to see themselves. It’s also just fun! I think the writer should have fun. If the writing is enjoyable and interesting to you, writer, then chances are it will be enjoyable and interesting to readers.
DPA:If I’m remembering correctly, you mentioned to me once that you don’t begin writing a piece until you have a general idea of the end. This surprised me greatly, perhaps because I work the opposite way: unplanned, blindly feeling my way through. Can you speak more about your writing process; do you have any routines? What was the most challenging part of writing this collection?
The funny thing about writing a book is that you’ll likely become a different person by the time you’ve finished it.
MS: I have worked that way until now—knowing the general arc of a story from beginning to end before starting to write. That process will likely remain the same for me when working on short fiction. There’s a lot of pleasure in just having an idea for a story and developing it, slowly, with no urgency to begin until there’s a sensation of fullness about it. I enjoy taking long meditative walks, outlining, journaling about the plot, characters, themes etc. However, I’ve begun working on a novel as my next project, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to know as much about the overall arc as I do with stories just because there’s so much more information to hold inside one’s mind. I’m doing my best to let it be looser than I’m usually comfortable with, to be more a process of discovery.
The funny thing about writing a book is that you’ll likely become a different person by the time you’ve finished it. As much as I am still proud of all of the stories in my collection, I’m not sure I could sit down and draft some of them anymore. Yet that’s also liberating—who knows what this next book will be like? Or my next after that?
DPA:What writing advice has fueled or challenged you?
MS: There should be no moment in a story where the author is just laying out information. Information should always be filtered through point of view. If it’s really important that we know a character is tall or rich, you have to find a way to communicate that through voice.
In studying with Gordon Lish and working at NOON, I’ve also become preoccupied with the sonic qualities of the sentence. Can I end the sentence with the strongest, most interesting word? And if I’m not doing that, why not? How can I carry an initial set of sounds forward through the prose, from the beginning of the first line to the next and the next after that? Perhaps I want to work in short, staccato sentences. Or perhaps I want to luxuriate in parataxis, to list and digress and embellish coordinating conjunction upon coordinating conjunction.
I also think it’s fun to voice hop—to have a story that’s incredibly ribald and then to switch registers and have one that’s deeply mournful or in denial. Or one that’s a combination of all of those. You can then write in wildly different types of sentences in order to reflect the interior realities of those characters. It’s been absolutely fascinating to learn how to accomplish those turns of consciousness in fiction.
Victoria Chang’s Obitgrapples with grief while recognizing how grief grapples us, how grief exceeds our grasp. It is a state that won’t stay still. As the end of one poem puts it, “memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” Or the end of another: “I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.”
Indeed, in grieving, the endings are endless. Yet, the book is not despairing. There’s play here and not exactly happiness but an openness to living’s ongoing mess—the ways in which life happens, alongside all the unhappening.
When I talked with Victoria Chang over Zoom, her background was outer space—or more precisely, a view of the Earth from space. The planet looked shiny and beautiful from that distance. Our conversation, meanwhile, refused a beautifying distance in favor of a sometimes disorienting up-closeness. We talked about loss, family, the American ideals of self-improvement and moving on quickly, and the need for deeper engagement with the work of writers of color.
Chen Chen: There’s such a range of people and things and concepts that die in this book, that receive obits. It starts with the core, the family—father’s frontal lobe, mother, and daughter/speaker who is a mother herself—and then moves to voicemail, language, the future, logic, memory, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, as well as other body parts or bodily functions of the parents and the speaker. The book feels expansive when building a world of grief, or transforming the world into one where everything must be grieved. How did you come to this series of transformations?
Victoria Chang: It’s always hard to talk about how one’s brain works. But I think the book is a lot like my brain—fragmented, disorganized, sloppy. In the depths of grief, I noticed how little things were dying every single day. Once I started writing about that, I couldn’t stop (at least for a few weeks). In terms of the order, I like to print things out and lay them on the ground like a lot of writers. I then read the first and last lines to see how a book might be made with some kind of arc, even if that arc is almost a flat line.
How I picked up these subjects was very much based on daily living. Sometimes they were objects, like the blue dress which is actually the dress I selected for my mother’s funeral. Other times, my mind went to more existential things and even I die because in some ways when someone dies, your whole relationship with them is gone, even the language you shared with them, the looks. There’s actually another poem, on Brigit Pegeen Kelly who died during this time but that never made it in the book.
CC: That makes me think about something Céline Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, says about relationships:
“A relationship is about inventing your own language… You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs… It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”
What did that Brigit Pegeen Kelly poem involve and why didn’t it make it into the book?
VC: That poem was about meeting her at Bread Loaf [Writers’ Conference] and for five minutes getting to talk to her all by myself when no one else was around. It was a dream to just spend that time with someone like that. As an Asian American writer, to this day, I don’t know a lot of older white poets I admire. I just don’t have that kind of relationship with people like that. I always envy one of my friends who gets emails from older white famous poets all the time. I treasure those few minutes I had with her. She was so humble.
CC: What would you like to see happen when it comes to engagement with the work of marginalized writers, maybe in particular Asian American writers?
VC: What I see currently sometimes is a kind of false engagement or engagement “lite” in the work of Asian American writers or marginalized writers. Tokenization has always been a problem. One Asian for this or that. But now, things have improved, but I still don’t see that kind of deep engagement that I often see with critics, for example, of white writers. It’s as if people are still checking off a box and then patting themselves on the back, versus really embodying the work of the Other. That also means getting to know the Other as real people, really engaging with us, befriending us, talking to us, socializing with us.
CC: Yes. Friendship. Conversation over transaction. I think of white writers and white editors who’re basically extracting resources from us—like, “send us work, teach this workshop” and then I never hear from them again. I’m rarely asked about my actual life.
Back to the book—were there aspects of grief that you felt needed to be investigated that weren’t, that were missing in poetry, in art? On the back cover, it says you didn’t want to write elegies at first, because you wanted to avoid cliché. I’m struck by how the voice in these poems refuses a nostalgic view when it comes to grieving the parents. The poems treat them not as figures redeemed by deaths of various kinds, but further revealed—and compassionately—in all their complexities. Their aliveness as messy people has not died.
VC: I’ve read a lot of poems and other works that were elegies and elegiac. I think that in American culture, there can be an idea of entrepreneurialism and self-help that permeates everything, even poetry. In some ways, I couldn’t relate to the elegy and found many of them to be unrelatable to my experience. So looking back, I think I just went my own way and did my own thing. If that meant being honest about how difficult my mother was after my father had a stroke and how much they argued, then so be it. There was/is nothing redeeming about death in my work. A lot of what I experienced and still do are negative and uglier emotions. Because dying, at least in my mother’s case, wasn’t pretty.
CC: I really appreciate how you allow for the uglier emotions in this work. When I was growing up, my parents often talked about things that couldn’t be fixed—which seems antithetical to an American mindset that demands everything have a solution and not only that, but everything be bettered, optimized. My parents insisted on what couldn’t be solved, which saddened me and I saw them as passive, but now that I’m older, I see their perspective as a sort of antidote to the hyper-optimism in the U.S. that can actually be crushing.
Could you talk about how you experience/define agency or freedom and how your thinking on the extent to which control is possible—as a person and as a writer—informed the shaping of this book?
VC: My mother was always talking about “fate.” She used to tell me that my sister’s nose is big, therefore, she would be rich. I think about writing as freedom, the only thing I can have any say in. Which is interesting, because this whole book seems to be about the loss of control, of what’s familiar. The process of writing it was very freeing though. And once I started working on these poems, I felt the freedom of saying whatever I wanted however I wanted. When I finally sat down, I was ready to be honest, to be real.
CC: I’m noticing some thematic and formal commonalities with your previous book, Barbie Chang. The parents also appear there, though the grief seems more an anticipatory grief; there’s more dying than death, maybe. There’s a similar questioning of what it means to be losing one’s parents while parenting one’s own children. Could you talk about how you see Obit developing post-Barbie Chang? Or how the two books might be in dialogue, both thematically and formally?
What I see sometimes is a false engagement or engagement ‘lite’ in the work of Asian American writers or marginalized writers.
VC: I think that books are artificial objects, meaning we as writers just write. And when they are supposed to be turned in, we turn them in, and then they go out into the world (if we’re lucky). But feelings, emotions, concerns, themes, our daily lives, don’t start and stop like that. My mother is still dead. I still grieve her every single day. My father still has dementia. I still have children and worry about them and the world. So I think I’m okay with the bleeding over that happens naturally.
But I do think that transitioning from one work to the next, say from book to book is also a conscious part of being an artist. What is going to be different because you, the artist, has changed or grown? That change has to occur (for me) to maintain interest as an artist, to really engage in what I’m making. So for me, I have to let enough time pass so that I can grow as a person and as a writer.
CC: What are you interested in, in terms of growth as a writer?
VC: For me, I’m always attracted to inventive writers, artists, sculptors. I’m very enamored with the next new shiny thing and have a very slim attention span. This is how I imagine my work develops too. But once I am attracted to something, I’m all in, meaning my mind can work both expansively/horizontally, and also very vertically, which is the obsessive part of my personality that can be very annoying to be around personally, but actually allows me to focus very intensely on something.
CC: It was a fantastic surprise, to see the tankas between the obits. They look and sound very different from the obits, while sharing many themes and concerns. What made you decide to write, then include both of these kinds of poems?
VC: I’m glad you used the word “surprise” because I think every single OBIT had been published in a literary journal by the time the book came out (to my surprise—people would ask for poems, I would send them, and they would take the whole batch a lot) or I would send five out, and they would take all of them. That cycle kept going and I was horrified that they were all out in the world. I was writing formal poems for fun, sonnets, sestinas, ghazals, and started writing tankas.
I started adding some of these into the manuscript as a way for the reader to take a breath because all that grieving in the OBITs seemed a lot to take, almost suffocating. My friend told me to intersperse them throughout so I did. I also didn’t tell anyone that they were in the book for that reason, maybe to leave something new for the reader of the book to experience. Same for the middle sonnet sequence which was from an older manuscript that I pulled into this one.
The Tankas were written for all children and my children too. They seemed more hopeful, about the future, rather than about the past, which the OBITs are. They are shorter in line, they are more breathy to read, less like a coffin which the OBITs can seem like. They have a lot of air in them on the page physically too. The book seemed like it needed that; otherwise, it would be too heavy.
It’s so weird to feed children to help them grow, and also help someone die.
CC: How does “hope,” as a feeling and a concept, change for you, with being a poet with children?
VC: I think I’ve become more hopeful but also less hopeful. Being someone who likes to make things (which takes a lot of space and time), it’s been challenging. I think of a block of 10 years as all black. I don’t recall anything when my children were young. I’ve also become more of a depressive since having children, punctuated with moments of unbelievable joy and laughter. It’s a hard thing being a poet and a mother simultaneously.
CC: One of my favorite poems in this collection is “The Blue Dress,” which ends with these stunning lines: “Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is wearing a dead person’s dress forever.” How did this poem start, then develop? And how does grief transform one’s definitions, understandings of everything else?
Grief just happens to us. We can’t change it or fix it. There’s also a very American idea of ‘getting over it’ and I just couldn’t and can’t.
VC: My mother was a hoarder so I had a lot of cleaning to do when she died. She had lost a lot of weight before she died (which ironically she had always been trying to do her whole life). I had gone deep into the depths of her closet to find an old dress that seemed smaller, that might fit her. That dress had little blue flowers. I wanted that dress back and it only occurred to me after that I had to ask for it back. That they might have thrown it out or burned it. That was where the poem started, with that dress. And it just went from there.
Something that happens a lot with me when writing (particularly with these poems) was that I had a nagging question in my mind, “who cares?” Why would anyone care an iota about me and my experiences? I imagined this while writing too at certain points and when that thought popped into my head, I tended to go larger, more philosophical, more existential, which is where the ending of this poem went.
In many ways, grief just happens to us. We can’t change it or fix it. There’s also a very American idea of “getting over it” and I just couldn’t and can’t.
CC: Language’s relationship to grief is central to this book’s movement, which tends to be cyclical, restlessly circling back to the parents, to the speaker’s own mortality. In some poems, language becomes physical and has an agency of its own—for example, “I got on all fours, tried to pick up the letters like a child at an egg hunt with a basket.” I’m also thinking of what John Yau wondered aloud in a review of Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti, “Does grief exceed words, or is it the other way around?” In this book, is language found to be inadequate or too adequate for grief? Or how would you describe the relationship between language and grief here?
VC: Interesting question and quote from Yau. The easy and more common response is that language is inadequate to describe anything, including grief. But thinking more about Yau’s quote, I wonder if language and grief are incompatible? The idea that language could even be too adequate for grief is really fascinating too. Maybe language and grief are like night and day, they pass each other mostly and if you can just get close so that the tips of morning and night touch even for a second, that would be incredible.
On a Saturday morning, as we slipped coffee down our throats and listened to NPR, Goldust declared, “There will be crustless sandwiches and when we get bored, we can alphabetize their medicine cabinets and choose one item to take home with us.”
Goldust often started in the middle of sentences. I’ve learned to latch on and ask less questions, trusting that I’ll learn all I needed to know eventually.
“You mean steal?” I asked.
“I mean, like an adult goody bag.”
“Where will we be?”
“Another reveal party,” she answered. “Can’t really escape them, can we? Walking outside, a reveal of weather. Food delivered to you, a reveal of whether or not it is good. Overpriced haircut and the mirror—because I like to close my eyes the whole time, don’t you?”
“Not really, but… What’s being revealed?”
“Species,” she said, spitting each syllable into the air.
I stared at Goldust as though her entire mouth had been replaced with gold teeth, rather than just her bottom ones.
“You mean, like boy or gi—”
Goldust exhaled loudly. Her lungs were opera singers. “We are way beyond pink and blue now. How boring. How patriarchal. How twenty-first century. How pre-feminist. No. What she is having. Like genus.”
“Are there other kinds of baby?”
Goldust looked at me as though I had cut a trap door into her body and hid stolen goods.
I tried to redeem myself. “I… I… I know there are other identities than boy or girl. I just… I just mean what else can it be other than human?”
I stuffed a second triangle of crust-less sandwich into my mouth and even as I was chewing the first. I couldn’t really decipher what it was. Tuna? Chicken salad? Chopped liver? I drowned it with wine and attached imaginary strings to both sides of my mouth to smile my way across the room. Goldust sat beside me, sharing a story of her backpacking trip in Peru. Though I had heard this story at least twelve times, it never ended the same way twice.
When Goldust went to the bathroom—perhaps to choose an item for her adult goody bag—she left an imprint of glitter on the couch. I tried to angle my body to cover it up, but in doing so, spilled my glass of red wine, which left a far louder stain than the glitter. No one seemed to notice because the cake had been brought out and what else is there to look forward to at a party such as this.
“Well, I’d rather just not know,” said one guest whose hair matched the color of my underpants.
“But how do you prepare? How do you decide what color to paint the room? How do you decide what clothes, what size of toe-nail clippers, the strength of diaper.”
To build anticipation, we played games:
Guess the texture of skin!
Guess the shape of teeth and how many elements they can bite through!
Guess their risk of endangerment!
Goldust emerged with a slurred walk. Her eyelids looked fatigued.
“You okay?” I whispered against her earlobe.
“Twisting the knob, I walked into the room. I thought I’d live a life where I only pronounced pomegranates but never ate one and then I did. It was bloody,” she garbled.
I grabbed her hand and squeezed. When Goldust drank or consumed drugs of any sort, she narrated her thoughts. Sometimes, of course, she narrated mine.
While Goldust waxed on in no particular order or point of view, I leaned over to Clancey, the soon-to-be mother of some soon-to-be-revealed species.
Clancey resembled a balloon: large head and gaunt body just dangling, swaying from side to side. I would not have known she was pregnant.
“Great sandwiches,” I said to her.
“Oh, uh, thanks,” she said, sucking on the polish of her fingernails, which could not have been very good for the baby. “Ordered from the internet. You can really get anything from that place.”
“So, um, what do you… what do you think you’re having. Or what do you want? Or…” “We should cut the cake!” she announced, jumping to her feet.
“You think it’s vegan?” Goldust asked me. “If it’s not buttercream, we are leaving.”
“Don’t you want to know what she is having?”
“Oh, I already know. I peeked.”
“You… peeked? Into the cake?”
Goldust lifted her finger toward her eye and tapped. “I can see. Into her. Like X-ray vision. It’s from complications with an MRI I had when I was fifteen. I told you this. She’s having a—”
Clancey promenaded around her living room, touching each piece of furniture (couch, piano, arm chair, coffee table, wedding photo hung on wall, lamp).
“We never stopped using protection,” Clancey said. “And of course, I am still on birth control. You know, they don’t talk about the double-pregnancy risk, but it’s there. The overlap, I like to call it. My good friend who moved to Montauk or Montana—I don’t remember—it happened to her. Twice. Two overlaps onto the first. It wasn’t triplets. No, that’s what the doctors wanted her to believe. But they were many months apart. So Brick and I… well, we certainly can’t be expected to abstain, but we’ve been ‘careful.’” She curled her fingers into quotation marks.
“Maybe Brick wants an overlap,” Clancey continued. “Maybe he wants to set some record. I read about a woman who had a squatter. Have you heard this? A squatter just stays in there. Some women don’t even know they are in there and then all of a sudden, all this liquid pours out and they learn it’s the amniotic fluid! A seventy-nine-year-old woman in Florence or Florida gave birth to a fifty-six-year-old… something or other. It made the news. All the shows, I think. I could have a squatter in me now. I refused an ultrasound. I was afraid to know, to tell you the truth. This pregnancy thing isn’t what it used to be. We can blame it on the milk or the acid rain or infomercials, but whatever, it’s real.”
Goldust was snoring against my shoulder to the tune of a Dolly Parton song.
“Anyway, are we ready to learn what this is?” Clancey motioned to her belly, which looked so flat, I worried she was housing the baby somewhere else in her body.
Clancey grabbed the serrated knife that laid beside the cake. I licked my lips because it definitely looked like buttercream.
I watched the knife sluggishly rise into the air, clutched by Clancey’s long fingers. The cake glistened. My belly crackled. What was in those sandwiches? Goldust fluttered her eyes open. Each lady, decorating the room with their poses of curiosity, gasped as the knife split open the cake. A guessing game of possible species rolodexed in my head. I could feel Goldust peel herself off of me. She looked around the room.
“You okay?” I whispered. “She’s about to announce what she’s—”
I watched as Goldust stood up and walked toward Clancey, who had her hands inside the cake, rummaging around for the piece of paper. “Where the fuck is it?” she kept mumbling.
Goldust grabbed the knife and began to saw away at Clancey’s belly. Clancey did not stop her, too focused on finding the answer baked inside the cake. I tried to lift my body off the couch, but I couldn’t move. All the other women sat with their ankles crossed, in their coordinated outfits, just staring. It was as if my tongue had been cut out, all our tongues, and they were flapping on the carpet, mocking our silence. What were in those sandwiches?
Back and forth and back and forth, blood covered the knife like human jelly. Thick, raspberry jam oozing out. Back and forth and back and forth, layers of skin peeling away. Clancey’s eviscerated belly was the earth, shedding layers flooding the room: water, wind, salt, organs, an overdue History of Western Civilization textbook, a fountain pen, a fountain, a library card, a bundle of index cards. I no longer worried about the stain of Goldust’s glitter and my spilt wine. Clancey was grunting and howling and I wondered if someone should call the police or grab a towel or put away the sandwiches before they spoiled. But all I could do—and all the women beside me—was stare. And wonder, what was she having?
New York Times best-selling author Samantha Irby may have become a household name (in certain households, anyway) following the massive success of her 2017 essay collection, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, but I fell in love with her hilariously funny and shamelessly honest work on her blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, back in 2013. Irby’s voice is unforgettable, whether she’s being blunt about chronic illness, cat ownership, 1990s nostalgia, or the near-impossibility of basic human interaction.
Irby’s follow-up essay collection, Wow, No Thank You, offers more of what I’ve come to expect—insights both hilarious and cutting on a diversity of topics—but it is also an eerily prescient collection that suits our current socially-isolated reality very well. Is Irby clairvoyant, or was some form of social collapse, pandemic-induced or otherwise, inevitable in our imminent future? Who can say for sure? I’m just glad Irby is here to talk us through it.
I spoke to Irby over Google Hangouts—as all the very highest-quality personal interactions are now conducted—about aging, friendship, filling a pool with fat people and making Hulu pay for it, and why it’s easy to socially distance when most people are awful and boring.
Lesley Kinzel: A running theme of Wow, No Thank You is that people, generally speaking, suck and are boring. I’m curious about whether extended social isolation has tempered your view on this, or strengthened it.
Samantha Irby: Well, I will say that an incredibly painful part of social isolation is watching people who were never forced to be interesting, and who were never forced to entertain themselves because they were alone, spiral online. I’ve read so many threads by people where it’s like, wait a minute, are you really saying you’ve never been alone and unloved in your apartment for days at a time before? You don’t have a single book, or you don’t have any shows that you want to watch, or any movies that you want to catch up on? I don’t know if it’s real spiraling or if it’s just for show, that’s the tough thing about the internet. But as much as I think people are boring, it is weird to have it confirmed. It’s weird to see that our peers can’t entertain themselves.
It is bonkers to me that people can admit in front of everyone that they don’t know how to be left with their own thoughts for more than 10 minutes.
And I don’t mean people who are freaking out about the state of things, because that, of course, I understand. But the people who are like, “I’m so bored”—how much were you going outside? How much social interaction were you doing that now that you are left to your own devices, you’re completely unraveled? And I’m talking about on like, day seven.
It is bonkers to me that people can admit in front of everyone that they don’t know how to be left with their own thoughts for more than 10 minutes. So yeah, it’s confirmed for me that people are as boring and unwilling to find ways to entertain themselves as I suspected.
LK: I read a bunch of your recent interviews, and pretty much all of them at least mentioned turning 40 as a major topic in Wow, No, Thank You. And I mean, turning 40 is in there, but it’s not like the whole book is about fortyness. Culturally, though, and especially for women, we still look at 40 as if a tree is going to fall on you, and from that traumatic moment onward you’re just slogging toward the grave. So I’m curious about your opinion on why we hang on to this particular number as a source of panic.
SI: Culturally, we do hang so much on 40. When I was a kid, I always thought that—and don’t ask me where this number came from—but that 27 was the age you were supposed to have all your shit together. And then 26 came and I was like, “Oh, no, this is a joke. I’m still an unformed lump of clay that vaguely resembles a person.”
I don’t know why 40 is such a big number. For me, a theme of the book is being 40 and how much I still don’t know, and how uncertain I feel about so many things that I would have hoped to have nailed by 40. Like, I would have hoped that I could buy clothes, bring them home and feel like “Yes, this is the right thing that I want to wear all the time.” Rather than saying, “Who did I buy this for? Why did I think this would work for me?” You know, things like that where I just am like, “Why can’t I pick a hairstyle? Why can I ever feel good about any single choice that I make?”
There’s a sociologist somewhere who has data on why 40 is pivotal. Maybe because that’s when—and I know it’s different for everyone—but you know, your hair is turning gray and your egg production slows down? I never put any pressure on 40. I don’t even have an age at which I think things will be together. I don’t know that it’s possible.
Culturally though, in America, 40 feels so monumental. You keep hearing that it’s a big deal. And then you get here and you’re like, it’s not a big deal. And you wonder, am I aging wrong? Why do I still feel the exact same way?
So now I’m like, okay, maybe 50 is the age that you start like, feeling yourself? 40 definitely is not it for me.
Getting older is almost just like cosplaying for some of us.
I don’t think we really change much, at least not on the inside. Getting older is almost just like cosplaying for some of us. There’s definitely a woman who’s living a Nancy Meyers movie kind of life, with a beautiful kitchen, and she wears jeans inside with collared shirts, and that person may be confident and feeling good about her decisions and not feeling like a child. But the rest of us—on my deathbed, I’m gonna be like, “Oh, I still am so worried about this one dumb thing that I’ve been worried about since I was a kid.”
LK: In the book, you mention being a fan of iconic ‘90s alt-teen magazine, Sassy. As a person for whom Sassy was a huge personal influence, I’m always interested in hearing how it impacted other people. So I’m wondering if you remember finding it for the first time and what your reaction was.
SI: So, I have always been a magazine person, and I still am a magazine person. We still get print magazines delivered every month. So I was reading YM and Seventeen and all that stuff and not seeing myself reflected in it. And then Sassy came along. I can’t remember what my first issue was. But I just remember they were covering the kind of people that I was interested in. I was really into grunge and Juliana Hatfield, and that was the first time I had seen my tastes reflected, and I treasured every issue. I’m so sad that I didn’t save them. I had them for a long time but then you know, life gets in the way.
I also remember— didn’t they used to have like a little section where you could send in poetry?
LK: Yes! Yes! I forget what it was called.
SI: Yeah, so this girl I went to high school with, who I didn’t know very well, had a poem printed.
LK: Whoa!
SI: Yes! And I remember going up to her in the locker room, which is such a fraught place for any teen girl, and I was like, I’m sorry, but did you send a poem to Sassy magazine? And she said yes. And like, hearts exploded from my eyes. She was like a celebrity to me.
I was also very into My So-Called Life, and that kind of fit right into the Sassy vein. Sassy was my shit. And I read every issue of Jane magazine too, and I bought a bunch of them off eBay to try to relive that old Jane feeling. I’m a Jane Pratt devotee.
LK: Both of these examples, Sassy and My So-Called Life, capture this point in the ‘90s where outsider girls were having a moment. The weird kids on the margins were suddenly getting this light shined on them. It was incredibly validating.
It truly can’t be overstated how much it means to see a part of your outsider self reflected in a pop culture thing.
SI: It meant so much, and it truly can’t be overstated, especially when we think of our young selves, how much it means to see a part of your marginalized or outsider self reflected in a pop culture thing. It’s like, “Oh, god, yes, that gives me hope. Like my existence is valid. Yes, I am worthy of being reflected in a television show. This means a lot to me.”
LK: This is a good segue to my next question. You spend a chapter in the book talking about the summer you spent working on Shrill, the brilliant Hulu series based on Lindy West’s book. ln my own limited experience with working on a TV show, the one thing that always blows me away about the whole process is how miraculous it is that anything ever gets made. There are so many tiny little fiddly pieces that must fall together in just the right way for a show to even happen. But it does, and sometimes it results in an episode that is truly culture-changing.
The pool party episode of Shrill, which you wrote, is one of those moments that could have gone so wrong, given that it features dozens of fat people in swimsuits. And somehow it avoids every terrible possibility and comes out so right. I’ll be honest, as a person who has been doing fat politics for over 20 years, I was a wreck when I was watching it the first time, because I kept thinking, “Hollywood is gonna fuck this up. Something’s gonna go horribly wrong.” And it didn’t. It was just great.
My question is, what is it like to be the force behind an episode that was just so powerful and so important for so many people just starving for that kind of story, and that kind of representation?
SI: Well, first of all, that’s incredible of you to say and I’m still so humbled. Also, I love what you said, that putting a show together has so many little pieces, and so few of them are in your control as the writer. You write your thing, you put in all the things you want to happen, and then you just hope for the best.
I was lucky, because I knew that Lindy, as executive producer, was not going to let it get fucked up between my writing it and them shooting it. I knew nothing horrific was going to happen. But also, in the script I was like, I want this place to look like Candyland. I want to see people eating and enjoying themselves, and the people at the party need to be real fat, not TV-fat. They must be actually fat. That’s the kind of thing I can put in the script. And I can nag Lindy about it, but ultimately, she’s not the casting person and she’s not the director. It is a collaboration.
So when I got to Portland, the first two days we shot the office scene, and the scenes in the house. I kind of eased into the pool scene, which for me was the biggest thing. A friend of mine had seen the casting call for the people for the pool party, and the casting call said, you know, “fat babes.” I was like, okay, but what if the person doing the choosing is somebody who thinks a size 10 is the fattest you’re allowed to be? So I was worried those first couple of days.
And I’m also thinking about taking care of the people who show up. Everyone’s going to be in bathing suits. Will they be comfortable? Will the crew be sensitive, or is somebody gonna oink when I walk by? There are all these things to worry about. Your brain does a number on you, and I was just buzzing with fear by the time we got there.
We got to the country club and I walked out and saw the pool. No one was there, and it was truly like a dream. The water was the bluest blue, and all the floaties were perfect, and it’s clear that they had taken such care to make this look nice. They had all of the extras in a ballroom at this country club. Lindy and I snuck in the side, and I peeked around and I think the first person I saw was this woman in a wheelchair. I was like, yes. And then I saw all these fat, very fat, super fat bodies in bikinis. There was food available for everyone. They had a full wardrobe crew, like three or four people, and racks and racks of clothes, all sorts of things that people could choose from. I saw all of these people being treated like I imagine every other show treats people.
And everybody just seemed happy. They were walking around, and I think they were all just as surprised. Because there’s that part where you wonder, “Am I going to be the only size 32 in a swimsuit?” You could feel the energy of all these fat people looking at each other. At that moment I knew, “Oh my god, they’re gonna let us do this.” I met the director, Shaka King, and I just knew that he was gonna do it right.
Not to overstate it, but it feels like a miracle that it worked. I am still in disbelief.
We shot with a Portland crew, and these guys were all so sweet and nice. As I was leaving the second day, this crew member came up to me—a young white guy, dressed all in black. And he was like, “Hey, are you Sam?” And I thought, oh my god, what, did I clog the Porta Potty? I’m always like, what’s the worst possible thing I could have done?
But he’s like, “Are you Sam Irby?” And he says, “I just wanted to say thank you for writing this episode.” It’s one thing to resonate with your target audience, right? If it had been like a fat girl in a cherry printed dress, I’d be like, well, of course. Of course you’re glad. But a young white dude who doesn’t have to care about fat liberation to come up and say, “Hey, working on this is incredible. Thank you for doing this,” that’s the moment.
You hear people being like, ‘Why preach to the choir?’ And it’s like, well, because I want a good response. Duh.
You know, I want to preach to the choir. You hear all the time people being like, “Oh, why do you want an echo chamber? Why preach to the choir?” And it’s like, well, because I want a good response. Duh. But that was the moment when I thought, maybe some people who are outside of the intended audience are gonna see this and be changed by it.
LK: Yes!
SI: Even if it’s just that one guy, saying “I worked on Shrill so I’m a zealot about fat liberation now.” Then it’s worth it. But I know that more people saw it and were changed by it. You never know, when you’re making a thing, what the impact is gonna be. You just grit your teeth and hope your intent is clear.
LK: You have a wildly relatable and funny chapter about the difficulty of making friends as an adult. A few years ago I moved to a whole new city. The first new friend that I made, I had met for coffee to talk about a volunteering gig. But then we hung out for two hours. And towards the end of it, she actually said to me, very thoughtfully, “I feel like you and I could be really good friends if you’re interested in that.” And I was like, oh, how civilized! I feel like one reason we struggled to make friends in adulthood as we lose the knack of just making observations like that out loud because it feels so scary and vulnerable. How can we make that kind of blunt friendship overture like a normal adult social thing?
SI: I feel like—I don’t know how to cure people of the fear of rejection.
LK: True.
SI: Right? You can’t. I guess the way to do it would be to normalize the asking for friendship, and being honest. First of all, people in general need to start giving more compliments, and telling people that they like them more. So I think we start by normalizing that, by being like, Hey, you look cool. You seem cool. Your car is cool? I mean, whatever it is that drew you to the person that made you think you could be friends. And then once we normalize that, we need to normalize the next step: Would you like to talk to me? It feels so much like dating, and dating is so loaded and fraught. If we could get the feels-like-dating element out of it, it would be so much easier.
We’re so conditioned to not tell the truth and not be complimentary because you don’t want to look like a creep, but I really think it’ll feel less creepy the more we do it. You just got to start walking up to people—maybe it sounds a little formulaic—and saying, “You look like a cool person. I’ve seen enough of you to think that a friendship could work. Would you want to have a low stakes coffee with me?” Or drink or whatever. We just have to start like asking each other out on dates that aren’t dates. And then see if a friendship naturally blossoms out of that.
We just have to start like asking each other out on dates that aren’t dates. And then see if a friendship naturally blossoms out of that.
And it’s hard. I mean, the thing is, it takes work. But I think we also are aided by our pocket computers, and by the fact that we have access to people’s social media, because that can tell you a lot, between the coffee and following people’s Instagram. You just have to get over it. Pursuing someone feels awkward. You don’t want to be annoying. You don’t want them to get the wrong idea. But if you’re just straight up like, “Listen, I think you’re dope. Let’s let’s try to cram 40 years of history into a coffee date, and see if a friendship sprouts from that.” It’ll connect and the roots will burrow and the flower will sprout. I don’t know why I’m doing this flower analogy. If it’s meant to work out, it’ll work. And if it doesn’t, then it’s like, it’s truly a low stakes thing. Maybe they’re too busy. Just try it with the next interesting person you meet.
LK: Another interesting thing that I’ve noticed during this pandemic is, I’m having some really deep and meaningful conversations over text. I think many people are letting go of worries about rejection and reaching out more. Some of my friends who are not normally emotionally effusive people are now saying “I love you!” all the time.
I’m hoping one of the lasting impacts of this experience, when we get on the other side of it, is that we learn to treat friendships with the same value that we do dating or romantic relationships. The friendships in my life are every bit as important and nourishing as romantic relationships. And we need to prioritize those just as much as we do any other relationship.
SI: Yeah, and I also hope that it confirms for more of us that the relationships and the bonds that you are forming through your computer, or your phone, or whatever, are as valid as the ones that you’re forming with people in real life. I feel like I know more about people I only know on the internet than I do about people who are my neighbors, and those relationships are just as real and valid as the in person ones.
I’m not sure why I’ve always been obsessed with novels about depressed famous people.
Maybe it has something to do with growing up in Washington, DC, a city devoid of glamor. Or maybe it was that DC fancied itself powerful, which felt like a big sham. Maybe it had to do with being raised as a woman in a patriarchy, seeing fame as a grand metaphor for the ever-present male gaze. Maybe I’m drawn to these narratives because fame is elusive. I’m probably drawn to fame because it’s attention without the icky strings of intimacy.
But of course, adoration without intimacy is a magic potion for emptiness.
Growing up, books didn’t really interest me. They always seemed to star boy-crazy, frumpy girls with poor emotional regulation. They took place in New England or Old England or the past. Books were earnest and lacked humor and had nothing to do with me. I much preferred Saved By the Bell.
Then I came across Bret Easton Ellis. Ok, fine, first I read Gossip Girl. The series didn’t blow my mind but I enjoyed it—something I didn’t think possible from a book. Then in college came BEE. His sentences were exciting but not gushy. His characters didn’t cry; they numbed out with drugs. He wrote about beautiful people and dark subject matter. I wanted to do what he did.
My debut novel, Vagablonde, is about a young woman in Los Angeles who prefers dissociation to emotional expression. She’s a lawyer by trade, but she wants to be a rapper. She meets a producer and they make a track that goes viral. She gets everything she thought she wanted, but she’s miserable. That’s because she’s self-medicating to an unsustainable degree. Also, fame is fragile.
Obviously, all art comes from other art. (Queue: The Life of Pablo.) I didn’t write my book out of thin air. I wrote it based on the thoughts in my head, partially, but also on reality TV and movies and conversations with friends and books I’ve read. And now, at 33, I read quite often! Some could call me a book nerd. In Southern California, where I live, I certainly qualify as a nerd. Anyway, here are 8 excellent books about the dark side of fame.
The Informers is not Ellis’s most famous book by any means. In fact, it was pretty universally panned, mostly as an uninspired repeat of his previous books. But it was the first BEE I ever read, so it was fresh to me. I borrowed it from my college friend—a genetically blessed blond gay who looked like he had been plucked straight from Ellis’s universe. I enjoyed reading about characters who felt numb at glamorous Hollywood parties and in their psychiatrists’ offices. This reading started a long journey of me trying to copy him. (I have several repeat characters in my first few novels as an ode to BEE.) While a recent reread of Rules of Attraction failed to charm me as it did in my late teens, I will always respect BEE for opening my eyes to what literature can be.
Play It As It Lays is an utterly perfect novel—sparse and haunting and darkly funny. It follows Maria Wyeth, 36-year-old actress in the midst of a mental breakdown, and my absolute hero of fiction. Maria renders glamorous so many traits of which I’m personally ashamed. She lives in her head, casually degrades her body, and can’t keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers. All her friends are gay men or people with whom she is sleeping. She tends towards dysthymia, her body crackles with sensitivity, and she really just wants to spend her time wandering around and looking at the way the light hits random objects.
Most feel compelled to play the game—that is participate in our uber-competitive, capitalist society—but Maria knows the game is ultimately meaningless. She instead finds solace in beautiful images, soothing her mind through sleep, wandering, and driving. Her vision may seem depressing on its face, but there is actually something Zen about it. Maria doesn’t overthink things. Most people ask why Iago is evil. Maria doesn’t ask.
While Didion and Ellis focus on Hollywood fame, Stagg’s debut novel deals with a more contemporary form of celebrity: Internet notoriety. While 23-year-old Colleen is mostly anonymous at her job at Arizona mall, she’s an online personality with tons of followers. Her fame increases when she begins a public online romance with another online celebrity. Colleen reflects on fame dryly:
“One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my past was too great. When I was legit famous, it was hard to tell when the change occurred. It was traceable, sort of, because of the Internet, but it was very quick.”
The LA Review of Bookswrote that Stagg’s “prose vaguely recalls the affectless monotone of the drug-addled rich kids who populated Bret Easton Ellis’s late-’80s novels.” Colleen begins to unravel when a girl named Lucinda arrives online and plays the game a bit better. She’s also wise. “In the future, no one will want to be famous,” Lucinda writes in an online essay. “We will aspire to be less and less known as we grow up.” Reading this again, I hope she’s right.
Like Surveys, Romanoff’s third novel also deals with an internet influencer. Lulu Shapiro has 10,000 followers on the fictional app Flash (which I read as Snapchat meets Tik Tok). Throughout the novel, Lulu grapples with what it means to be looked at while also navigating her first lesbian relationship. I’ll admit I was nervous to read a lesbian romance written by a straight writer, but I was impressed with how it rang true to my own queer experiences. Particularly, the ways in which the male gaze both idealizes and cheapens lesbian relationships. And, yes, I cried!!!
I firmly believe you CAN judge a book by its cover. And that’s exactly how I found this book, which is now one of my favorites. Taipei addresses a more niche type of fame than the others on this list: lit world fame. While Tao isn’t a household name, anyone who spends time in indie bookstores or on literary Tumblr knows him as the founder of the “alt lit” movement.
Taipei is semi-autobiographical. It’s about a famous writer on a book tour, self-medicating with drugs throughout. It’s also a love story. Upon its release, Brett Easton Ellis said Taipei rendered Tao Lin “the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” He also called Taipei “boring.” Maybe he was jealous, I don’t know. I’ll admit it took me a minute to get into Taipei. But once I did, I was captivated. I was moved. I laughed, and I cried. And I’m still trying to copy his endearingly peculiar voice. What else do you want from a novel?
How to Murder Your Life was the type of book I had to read slowly because I didn’t want it to end. The memoir chronicles the writer’s life from childhood (in DC, where I grew up!) to boarding school to Conde Nast to becoming a famous Internet writer, the unifying thread being her addiction—first to stimulants, and eventually to essentially every other drug imaginable. In the final third of the book, Cat’s addiction hits its peak and her fame skyrockets. An essay she writes about Whitney Houston’s death while high on a potpourri of substances goes viral, and at that point the Internet begins to glorify her twisted brain (Jezebel wrote, “Cat Marnell is Both Fucked Up And Fabulous,” and Vice gave her a column called Amphetamine Logic).
Marnell wants to stop using—she’s exhausted and feels ill all the time—but she’s also being praised for her addiction, and making money off it. Sad for Cat but a killer conflict to keep the reader hooked. I also fell in love with Cat’s writing style. She writes such energy, using exclamation points with abandon (might be the speed!!!) and frequently addressing the reader. Her subject matter is dark but the narrative remains light. It’s not easy to make reading fun, and Cat is the Queen.
Confession: the author of this novel is my ex-girlfriend. I read it before we started dating, and before I even met her. And I’ll admit I read it with a lot of envy. Catie was my age, 28, and her thoughtful novel about a pop star who goes missing landed a glowing review in The New York Times. I hated her a little. But I loved the novel, a structurally inventive and intricately-plotted ride filled with trenchant social commentary. My favorite were its asides on Situationist philosophy (the fictional pop star Molly Metropolis is obsessed with Situationist leader Guy Debord). Getting critical theory fed through a queer pop culture narrative is heaven to moi.
Teddy Wayne tells this charming story from the perspective of an 11-year-old, Bieber-esque pop star named Johnny Valentine. Given that I don’t care about boys or anything boyish, I didn’t expect to enjoy this novel. But I fell in love with Jonny’s funny, sympathetic, and ultimately very sad voice. I didn’t even mind reading about Jonny’s masturbatory frustrations. After Jonny can’t make himself come, he imagines a groupie accusing him of getting her pregnant and then having to issue a public statement saying that would be impossible because he couldn’t even come on his own. “[A] policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in [my bodyguard] to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator.” It’s these sorts of darkly funny interior monologues that sucked me into the narrative. In the end, the book nails home how just lonely it is to be a super-star.
“Write soon. We long for your lines, especially because the post from Sweden arrives as it should. Take care of yourself. May God protect you, a thousand kisses from Mutti and your loyal dad.”
So concludes the final letter written by Elsie and Josef Ullmann to their son Otto, posted from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in August of 1944 to Otto’s newfound home in Småland, Sweden. The next month, September, Josef was sent to Auschwitz. The following month, October, so too was Elsie. Neither survived.
The tragic correspondence was thrust upon Elisabeth Åsbrink by Otto’s daughter, who believed that the award-winning Swedish journalist would be able to do something with the collection of more than 500 letters to Otto from his parents, two aunts, and an uncle. That something is And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain, a heartbreaking reconstruction of one family’s annihilation by anti-Semitism in both its most rabid and staid forms. Åsbrink complements the Ullmanns’ letters to Otto with archival material from state, church, and news sources, painting a complex picture of compassion and complicity, which stretches from Otto’s family home in Vienna to his adopted home in Smaland. On one hand, a kindertransport organized by the Swedish church following the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria rescues Otto from the Nazis; on the other hand, Swedish society at all levels conspires to keep Jewish adults, like Otto’s parents, from joining their children. On one hand, Otto’s adopted family, the Kamprads, come to regard him affectionately; on the other, Ingvar Kamprad, the future founder of IKEA, is all the while actively supporting the Swedish Nazi movement.
I had the pleasure of recently speaking with Åsbrink about And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain. We discussed the weight of such heavy material being entrusted to a writer, the surprising role that ABBA played in her research, how Otto’s family history resonates with her own, and more.
Arvind Dilawar: The letters from the Ullmanns to their son Otto, which form the foundation of your book, And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain, were thrust upon you by Otto’s daughter. Was it a difficult decision, deciding to pursue the story those letters tell?
Elizabeth Åsbrink: I really did not want to deal with the Holocaust. It’s a terrible subject. It’s something that’s been painful and I would say traumatic in my family. So I said no, I declined her offer. But then, every night when I was going to sleep, I kept thinking of this boy, this 13-year-old boy, alone in Sweden, and his parents all alone in Vienna, and these letters that went between them. And I just felt obligated.
To such a great extent, there are no graves, there are no bodies. This is one of the specifics with this genocide. OK, there are mass graves and we’ve seen the photos of the piles in the camps, but generally, six million people have just vanished, erased from the Earth. And I could, through this material, pick up five people, give them their names, their lives, their bad jokes, and I could research my way almost all the way to their deaths, so I could give them that as well. The family had no idea of the particular fates that these five people who wrote to Otto had met. I did something, at least, for these people.
AD: You mention that there’s this exchange of letters that’s happening. But you were only able to get the letters that Otto saved, so there’s no record of his replies back. Did you try to track that down? Was there any chance of getting it? Or are those permanently lost to history?
EA: The people he wrote to were murdered. I have no idea what happened to their personal belongings. The parents ended up in Theresienstadt and then were murdered in Auschwitz. One aunt and uncle were deported to this little Polish city that was overcrowded, and if they died by disease or if they were shot, I couldn’t say for sure. And the second aunt, she was taken to a woods in Ukraine and shot. So letters, if they’d kept them, if they’d taken them with them, they were not preserved. I looked in several archives for letters from Otto to other people, and I did find some of them. There was one letter that he had written that had been returned when his father was in this forced labor camp in this Eichmann project, the Nisko project. So I had one returned letter that he had written. That is all I had.
AD: An important subject that your book focuses on is Jewish immigration during World War II. Can you describe how restrictive immigration laws condemned Otto and his family in particular and Jews in general? Do you see any resonance with how immigration laws are used today?
EA: Each European country had their different twists on this, so I could briefly give you a picture of what Sweden stood for. Sweden had a very restrictive attitude towards Jews before the war as well. And, for instance, Roma people were not at all allowed into Sweden. That had been the case for some hundred years. So Sweden, nationally, their identity was very attached to ethnicity, very strongly so. I actually think it still is quite strong in that way, but it is changing, slowly. But if we talk about pre-war, it was very, very connected, ethnic identity and nationality. And they didn’t want foreign elements. This is a term that one can find in official documents, “foreign elements.” They didn’t want them in the country, so very few were let in.
In November 1938, when the Jews in Germany realized they had to get out, there was this huge refugee wave. All the European countries met to try to solve it, but no one really wanted to take responsibility, and Sweden was no better. Actually, Sweden was worse. Sweden was so afraid of getting immigrants from this refugee wave that they made a deal with Nazi Germany. They said, if you want German nationals to be able to travel to Sweden without a visa, you have to put a stamp in the Jewish passports so we can say no to them by the border, because if we let them over the border, they have to be here for a couple of months and it’s more difficult to get them out again. So Sweden actuallly negotiated with Nazi Germany and put pressure on them and succeeded. German Jews had a J stamped in their passport and, therefore, were very easy to keep out of the country. Switzerland was also in on this dealing with Nazi Germany.
But in 1943, something happened which actually changed the whole scene, one could say. It begins in November ‘42, a year ahead, when the Germans deport the Norwegian Jews. They do just like they’ve done in all the other countries: They take them out of their homes, put them on a boat from Oslo, and it goes directly to Poland. And the Swedes, then they react, because Norway is so close. It’s a “brother country,” that’s what the Swedish term is. So this was shocking. I read comments in the papers from then saying, well, I don’t really like Jews, but this is unacceptable. So suddenly Sweden woke up when it came to the Norwegian Jews. And then a year after, in ‘43, it was the Danish Jews who were going to be deported. And at the time, the opinion towards Jewish refugees had turned. When the Danish resistance movement contacted the Swedish government, it said, now we have to do something. It said, let them in. Over two nights, 7,500 people came over a strait between Denmark and Sweden, with boats, small fishing boats, any boats. And they were allowed to be there for the whole war. Sweden took care of them, gave them places to stay and school, all that. The next miraculous thing is that a lot of the Danish people actually guarded the Jews’ homes, so when they returned, they had their homes, nothing was stolen or robbed. This is a complete anomaly in the history of the Holocaust in general.
If you want to connect it to today, I would say that Sweden is still quite deep into connecting ethnicity with nationality. We have a law of citizenship that is still based on the blood principle [jus sanguinis], whilst in the US you have the [birthright] territorial principle [jus soli]. Sweden has now received a huge amount of refugees from Syria, from Afghanistan, just from the last 10 years. Since 2015, Sweden has received 170,000 refugees from Syria. I think this huge change of society, where Arabic is the second biggest language within the Swedish borders, it must lead to a change of the citizenship laws and the way that we look at nationality. I would prefer the American way. I think that’s more democratic, but that’s my personal opinion, being the child of two immigrants.
AD: How were you able to investigate the history of Austria and Sweden in the 1940s? Germany is relatively open about that time period. Is the same true for Austria, which was annexed by Germany, and Sweden, which was officially neutral during World War II?
EA: I don’t think it’s got anything to do with neutrality, these things. I found material in Swedish archives, especially about the individuals. The book is very much based on material that I found in the Swedish church archives. All the papers concerning the priest that saved these children, they are from the church archive. And that was completely open, and it still is for anyone who wants to look at it. In Austria, I found the information I needed from the Jewish community archive, which was open, but actually they didn’t want to help me because they were out of staff and under such pressure. They don’t have any money. It’s a very poor congregation. There are hardly any Jewish people left there, so they’re struggling.
Sweden came out from WWII with a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has made Sweden welcoming to refugees to a certain extent.
There was a funny story: The guy I spoke to there, the historian, said, I can’t help you, I haven’t got the time to help you. And I insisted on going there anyway, and he said, alright, we’ll meet that day, OK. I showed up and he really didn’t want to help me, but he gave me this and that. And then I went out for lunch and he Googled me. He came to my website and he saw that I had been working on a radio show with Björn Ulvaeus, one of the guys in ABBA, the Swedish pop band. This historian loves ABBA, so when I came back from my lunch, it was a different situation. He helped me enormously. I could find out the things about Otto Ullmann’s parents, what they did in Vienna, how their life was. And that was absolutely invaluable. So thanks to ABBA, I did some good research.
AD: That’s amazing. It seems like a very Swedish story, at its heart. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, features prominently in your book. Now that you’re describing the changes that Sweden underwent during the Holocaust, it almost seems like he sort of captures, in one person, the two different sides of Swedish culture struggling against each other. Because on one hand, he was an active supporter of the Swedish Nazi movement and, on the other hand, he became a close friend of Otto. Is there a way to resolve that apparent contradiction?
EA: I think you’re right in that Ingvar Kamprad is a good symbol of the Swedish attitudes, but maybe not in that way, because I don’t think he changed and the Swedish attitudes actually changed. Some speculate that it was because of humanitarian reasons, others are more cynical and say that, when Hitler was defeated at Stalingrad, the Swedes saw that things were changing and also changed their policy. I think it’s probably a bit of this and a bit of that.
But Ingvar Kamprad, he was involved in the fascist movement very intensely, which was deeply anti-Semitic. And then I found that he had also been a member of the Swedish hardcore Nazi party. I don’t know when he left that party. I couldn’t find out and he himself wouldn’t comment on this information. But when I met him—which was before I found out about the Nazi party—I knew he had been involved in the fascist movement, and the fascist movement I knew for sure was very anti-Semitic. So, of course, I asked him: How did these things work together? Loving your friend, Otto, because he really did love his friend, and still being a member of this movement? And I pressured him, and finally he said, I see no contradiction.
How do you explain that? I think one explanation is that Ingvar Kamprad was not a person who reflected. He did not sit down and think over his ideas and his thoughts. He was a doer. He was a workaholic. He did amazing things, but he did not stop and think. I don’t think that was a part of his personality, and I don’t think maybe he would have created IKEA if he’d been someone who stopped and sat down and had a good think about who I am, what my ideals are. He just went on. And also you have to remember that he was born into a family where his grandmother was very dominant and she was a Nazi. She loved Hitler. And his father was also a Nazi, Ingvar Kamprad told me himself in this interview that I did. His mother was definitely not a Nazi, also important to remmber, but the democratic ideals weren’t something that was natural to him. So that’s one part of the answer.
The other is that all these totalitarian ideas need the exception. I think that any totalitarian ideology makes exceptions for the neighbor that you like, the nephew, or the bus driver or the woman in the shop. There’s always an individual that you like, because this is what’s human in us. And these ideologies can only work if you allow these exceptions. I think that’s what Ingvar Kamprad is a good example of: the exception going parallel with the ideas. And I think the Nazis were very aware of this. Himmler, when he held his famous speech in 1942 at Posen, he talked to his generals. It was time to implement the so-called “final solution,” and he said, we all know a decent Jew, but now we have to put that aside. So he was aware that personal relations and friendships were, to a certain extent, compatible with the ideology, but now, when it was time to go to the final step, he wanted them to cut off these personal feelings. That’s the closest to an answer I have.
AD: Despite some simmering xenophobia, the Scandinavian countries today are still considered relatively welcoming of refugees. Your book illustrates how this was not the case during World War II, when Jewish refugees were systematically turned away. Did something in Sweden change between now and then?
My father and Otto have similar backgrounds: assimilated big city children. And suddenly they were Jews and were supposed to be murdered.
EA: I think Sweden came out from the Second World War with a sense of guilt. It had economic dealings with Nazi Germany, and when the rest of Europe was ruined and bombed, Sweden was in a quite good place. The welfare state thrived after the war. This sense of guilt has made Sweden welcoming to refugees to a certain extent. Because it’s also the case that, when, in the ‘90s, we had a recession, it suddenly became a much more racist society. That is also the time when the old fascist movement connected with new right-wing movements, like skinheads and others, and created a new right-wing, racist group, which developed actually into the right-wing populist party that we have today, the Sweden Democrats. So they are directly linked to this fascist movement that Ingvar Kamprad was a part of. The recession in the beginning of the 1990s opened space up, and since then, we have had them. They were small and violent, and now they have costumes and have changed the way they speak and the way they see the future, but they’re still in the same corner.
AD: Early on in this conversation you mentioned that, part of the reason that you were hesitant to follow Otto’s story was because it mirrored that of your own family. Could you describe how your family arrived in Sweden? And did completing this project help you come to terms with that?
EA: Otto’s story connects to my father’s story very much. My father is a Hungarian Jew. He grew up in Budapest, very close to Vienna. I mean, they were part of the same empire, they’re like sibling cities. Just like Otto, my father was assimilated. He was even baptized because his parents thought that would protect him. Hungary was one of the first countries with anti-Jewish laws. He didn’t know he was Jewish until someone said “stinking, filthy Jew” to him when he was a child, and he went to his mother and said, what is that? But then things happened very quickly in Hungary. He is a survivor of the Holocaust. It’s a miracle that he survived. Long story, but the background is very similar: big city children, assimilated with the rational, scientific ideas of the world, etc. And suddenly they were Jews and were supposed to be murdered.
I grew up mainly with my mother, and she also has Jewish heritage. She told me never to tell anyone that I was Jewish. Never, ever tell anyone. It was like a shameful secret and if I exposed it, something very bad could happen. And this is something that she gave me without words. … It was scary to deal with this material, but I was also grown up and not under my mother’s influence anymore. But still, I had a sense of danger doing it, but I decided I wanted to. I decided it was so important and I also wanted to break this secrecy. I’m not a believer. I don’t believe in blood communities, like a folk of people, but I am Jewish. Hitler would have murdered me. That’s a terrible thing, but it’s true. Writing this book was, actually what my gay friend said, like coming out. They saw it as a coming out process, and I think they’re right, it was. I think it did change the way some people look at me, and it also changed the way I see myself.
I once went to a school and they had this book as a theme for a whole term. It was amazing. Young grown-ups—the art students had made art, and the music students had made music. And then there was quite a huge group of refugees, who were in this school to learn the basics about Sweden before they started their new life. So there were a lot of 20-year-olds, a lot of people from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we had a talk. One of these Kurdish Iraqi guys, he said it was the best book he’d ever read because everything Otto had experienced, he had experienced. He’d been sent away, by his Kurdish parents, to Sweden to find a new future and he was told to be decent, to learn the language, to get a good education, all these things. He completely identified with this Jewish fate. That blew me away, and it still does.
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life and two other collections of personal essays. You can still get on the waitlist for her 12-month memoir generator at Catapult, an intensive yearlong boot camp in writing and publishing creative nonfiction. But if you don’t get into the class, her answers to our standard ten questions are a mini seminar in themselves.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I took a class on story structure with the writer Patricia Ann McNair. One of the stories we dug into was Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” now one of my favorites but back then—
“I hate this thing,” I said in class.
Patty is infinitely patient but takes zero shit. “Tell me why,” she said.
I went off on Kafka, finishing with “—I just don’t get it!”
Patty set the book on the floor. Then she leaned forward and said the single most important thing I learned in college, if not ever: “You don’t get to hate something just because you don’t understand it.”
A student wrote a story about my death. He was not subtle; the character was named Megan Stielstra.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
A student wrote a story about my death. He was not subtle; the character was named Megan Stielstra. He included a scene of my funeral—the only person who showed up was a character based on himself. He wrote that it was very sad that nobody else loved me.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Sure. I don’t know if everyone has the discipline to actually write it, but who knows what we’re capable of? Six months ago I thought running was hell on wheels and now I’m months into lockdown, training for a marathon, and it’s like, Who even am I? We get to try and change and fall on our asses. If writing a book is something that you feel in your bones and you want to explore the possibility, I’m here to support you.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
Years ago, a young woman came to a scheduled conference sobbing. She’d met with another writing professor just beforehand and he told her she didn’t have a voice. Typing that makes my blood boil. How dare he. I am committed to direct and transparent conversations about the realities of art-making—money, academia, publishing—but those of us who work in education need to look long at power, how our words can crush or lift. People are putting their hearts on paper and handing those papers to us. It’s a profound act of trust and I will work like hell to be worthy of it.
Some of the writers I work with make their living as artists. Some as teachers. Some as marketing professionals, lawyers, journalists, bartenders, sex workers, counselors, doctors, administrators, acrobats. They work in childcare, healthcare, politics, finance, theatre. None of them ever gave up writing. The practice looks different, but they find how it works for them.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
Both. Your stories matter and I will damn well challenge you to make them better.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
Students should be turned on to all sorts of different ways to engage with the creative process so they can figure out what works best for their deeply unique lives.
Your stories matter and I will damn well challenge you to make them better.
That said: for me it’s helpful to consider potential homes for my work during the rewriting process and I try to arm my students with knowledge about that process. Whether or not they make the personal decision to submit, such consideration can offer ideas for shaping the final draft. If you want to submit to Brevity, you need to cut. If you want to submit to Longreads, you can linger. Read the last five essays published in a place you love: are they more narrative-based? More argumentative, more experimental? What do you notice about how they are written and how does that influence your rewriting process?
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Show don’t tell: Show and tell. One isn’t better than the other—they’re tools. We have to learn when and how to use them. Start with Dorothy Allison on place in The Writer’s Notebook from Tin House and Sonya Huber on telling in LitHub.
Kill your darlings: Depends on where you’re at in the process. Early drafts, where you’re figuring things out? Cling to the darlings for dear fucking life. Later, when you know what the piece is doing, ask yourself if the darlings serve that intention and if not, cut-and-paste them into another document to use in another piece. Later still, before you hit send to an editor (or teacher ☺), read the draft aloud. Listen to what you’re doing with language. A deep, thoughtful line edit focuses what you’re saying and how you’re saying it (shout-out to the copyeditors I’ve been lucky enough to work with. You’re the real heroes).
Character is plot: Characters have bodies and our bodies move through this beautiful stupid mess of a world with all sorts of histories and stories and assumptions. I never found it helpful to think in terms of plot— I thought bodies. I thought action, reaction. More recently I’ve been reading the work of Matthew Salesses, who defines plot as “an acceptance or rejection of consequences.” I love that so much. He has a book coming out soon from Catapult called Craft in the Real World and I can’t recommend it enough.
A woman I didn’t know tapped at her laptop across the Amtrak aisle, Northeast Direct. She had to be running on batteries because the whole train’s power had shut down. Like when they used to switch to electric in New Haven, the reading lights snapped off and quiet appeared, making the hum we hadn’t noticed at once audible and gone. Outside the window was all salt marsh, that depth of green you only find in high summer, when the daylight’s not glaring off the water, a few spots of gold through the dark stalks. You feel as though it would be soft and cool to the touch.
I had this idea that we were invisible, the train and everyone on it. That minute when the lights overhead banked out and the engine coughed, it was like we’d shrugged on a magic cloak. Adjusting my eyes, I could make the darkening window fill with her reflection—the stranger over the aisle. I saw her hazily, an outline colored in. In the glass she looked maybe twenty-two or twenty-four: grown but with a leanness in her neck like a teenager’s, serious-minded. Maybe it was my fantasy; I was lonely enough to feel wistful about a stranger. Without realizing I’d been doing it, I had a story for her face, a personality: shy kid, straightened into one of the professions, keeping up with work even if the outage might have offered her an excuse to break off. She probably did well in college. College couldn’t have been long ago.
I turned my head to look across the aisle. The window had lied. She had to be forty, my age, as though twenty years had passed in that second. The kid I saw in the window lived in a world of potential, so many things she hadn’t done for the first time—travel, real estate, heartbreak, maybe kids. The woman across from me, meanwhile, had filed whole parts of her life into drawers she wouldn’t open a second time. Maybe life was starting to bore her.
I turned back to the window. I watched the tip of her nose vanish, watched her chin sharpen by blurring. I had to remind myself that even though the train was stopped, the past kept receding at the same rate.
Earlier, I’d caught a glimpse of something she hadn’t, a reminder of my old friend Taylor’s house—we were passing through his part of Rhode Island—or rather the auto-parts store across the street from Taylor’s house, on the other side of the rushes, spike grass and mermaid’s hair nearly camouflaging the place at the marsh’s edge. I made the trip from DC to Boston once a quarter and always thought of Taylor when the train approached Westerly.
But that’s not entirely true. It wasn’t the Rhode Island marshes that made me think of Taylor so much as the marshes outside of Newark, when I looked up and caught sight of the Freedom Tower rising out of a hillock of trees, radome and beacon. Twenty years ago I’d been drinking coffee with Taylor in the kitchen of our dorm suite at UMass when the planes hit the old towers. My dad called the house phone. “We’re at war.” He sounded excited. “Pull your head out of your ass and turn on your goddamn TV.”
I was a sophomore, badly matched with a computer science major. Taylor was the one who turned on the TV. Aside from the fear and the anger everyone else felt—anger that didn’t know how to occupy itself—I felt trapped by my dad’s voice. He’d been right all along: the world was booby-trapped. He’d tried to snap me out of my dreaminess all through my adolescence, yet it wasn’t until that moment, age nineteen, I saw how delicate my safe life was. Guys like Dad thrilled to it.
Six hours later, Taylor and I were distractedly eating soup I’d reheated when he said, “Are we gonna go over there and kick some ass or what?”
It took me a minute to realize over there meant Afghanistan, but of course on the evening of September 11th Taylor would have been implying some indeterminant zone of dry mountains on the other side of the world, halfway to the other side. Taylor didn’t seem like he was serious, just giving in to a feeling. This was the same Taylor who avoided conflict unless he could make jokes about it, who made himself the butt of those jokes to diffuse any tension. But I worried because his money hadn’t come through for that year and his situation was precarious. Isn’t that why people join the army? It’s a place for your body to go.
“Are we gonna go over there and kick some ass or what?”
I tell myself now I wasn’t ever going to join up and, looking back, that story makes sense. But I don’t want to misrepresent things: I was susceptible to manipulation back then, the power of suggestion, cowed by my father but also afraid of being shot in the desert.
Isn’t that why people join the army? It’s a place for your body to go.
“I’m picturing Osama Bin Laden’s mother.” Taylor got solemn. “Crying her eyes out, ‘cause her son is dead. Can you see that? Just pulling at her hair she’s so sad. I wanna make that happen.”
I said “Here’s to it.”
“You in, man? I’m dead serious.” Taylor said the same thing when our buddies Rudy and Noah showed up later with Rolling Rock and, like me, they both said yes. I’m surprised I had the wherewithal to caution them.
“You guys aren’t going to do anything right away, right?”
“You worried about what Jenna’s gonna say, man?”
Jenna was my girlfriend. She was on her way to join us.
Rudy held my eyes. “Dude, there’s pussy in Afghanistan.”
“Go call Jenna and get your balls back,” Taylor said. “Tell her we’re gonna save the world and you’re gonna need ‘em. Seriously, you in?”
Rudy got surly. “There’s no faggotry in the army though. That’s probably why he’s not interested.”
Strength, at times, is just the concealing of a weakness. All my life I’ve been subject to powerful emotions, usually anxiety, tearing at me from the inside, but I’ve generally been able to hide these feelings: inappropriate fear, inappropriate joy. The minute I heard Rudy say “faggot” I had the impulse to surge up from the couch and belt him. Not because I was gay but because Rudy was an asshole. I was barely able to put up with him for short stretches; I only hung out with him because of our suitemate Noah, a shy kid who played basketball with Rudy. But I learned early you have to control those inner jolts of emotion because anything you act on becomes something you can regret. Ten years after his discharge from the service Rudy filled his mouth with C-4 plastique and lit the fuse. Taylor called to tell me. He said, “It’s the first time I’ve ever felt sorry for that guy.” Perhaps, but they’d stayed friends, served together. Taylor was closer to Rudy by then than he was to me.
Strength, at times, is just the concealing of a weakness.
The sound of a couple of teens playing cards in the aisle drew me back to the train car. A sound where there wasn’t any. We’d been stopped for over half an hour and decorum was breaking down at the edges. Strangers relaxed their voices. The club car started handing out drinks—they couldn’t keep them cold.
A woman three rows back: “I heard it was a line down; that was an hour ago but the radio said they were getting another train to either push or pull—that’s what the radio asked: push or pull?”
I got a free beer from the club car. When I came back my unwitting companion across the aisle was still tapping at her laptop. What I had been taking for a nonsense flicker above her hair grew larger, caught my attention. My first impression, illusory, as though I were half asleep, was to take it for something supernatural, a little angel of thought coming out of her head. It was a black spot with shoulders, with arms and legs. It was a human figure, a real one, not above her head but above its reflection, on what I now realized was my own side of the train, in the marsh. Wait—someone was walking toward us. What was he doing out there? My adrenalin released. This was real. A grown man: stomping out there to move forward. No, he was catching his footing, brushing away tall grass as he staggered toward us, his arms in a panic. An older man, or a drunk one.
Turning to the woman (later that night, along with the EMTs, I’d learn her name was Swetha) I met her eyes and asked, “Are you seeing this?”
Swetha’s face ran the gamut: stranger danger, act like you don’t hear, evaluate risk, he doesn’t sound insane. “Are you addressing me?”
“There’s someone out there.”
She couldn’t see him from her side. She made a decision. Cautiously, she moved closer. She didn’t wear perfume.
She said, “Okay that’s terrifying.”
She looked South Asian, sounded like a New Yorker.
“Do you know that guy?”
“Why would I know him?” But she gave me a look that implied I’d arranged this with him. A joke on her.
I said, “I’m Brett.”
She brushed that away.
Out there in the evening light the stranger’s mouth moved, shouting. White hair in a cap. He wore a fishing vest but it was high tide and there was no boat. His arms waved. He wanted us to come outside.
“Do you think he’s in trouble?”
She laughed with her nerves. “Maybe he’s saying we’re the ones in trouble. Seriously, though, the engineers probably see him.”
But he stayed there waving. She left to get a conductor’s attention. I kept watching the guy outside shout at the train’s dark windows. I knew that something terrible was about to happen. I nearly took my phone out and called Tina, because she’s serene. She’s the one who keeps the children calm; they see right through my attempts at authority or competence, but Tina has infinite patience. Our oldest, Belle, is bad with the dog, bosses him around in a way that confuses him. Only Tina can get her to stop. She does it by crouching at Belle’s level and entering her world completely—what is she trying to get the dog to do? What a great idea! Only dogs can’t do that, but here’s what they can do …
In the weeks before Taylor joined the marines I stepped carefully around his pride. I told him he wouldn’t just be shooting at bad guys—that in a real war everyone crawled out broken if they crawled out at all. I reminded him about how my dad left his tibialis muscle and part of his foot in Vietnam, how he resented his cane, how that stick made him defend his war, and by extension all wars, because if Vietnam was a waste of time then he walked with a cane for no reason; he was a sucker.
Taylor said, “I think that’s between you and your dad, man.”
Taylor said, “This isn’t Vietnam. They started this.”
The old panicked guy looked toward the windows ahead, like he was searching for someone, but he couldn’t see inside the train because the lights were off. Maybe we were just shadows behind the glass.
Swetha was back. “I can’t seem to find anybody. I guess, um, maybe it’s not our problem?” But she stayed beside me, watching the stranger wave, breathing on me, transfixed. He heaved himself closer to the train, almost falling into the marsh as he wrested himself up onto the pebble grade, raised his fist to hit the metal. I could hear his shout but not the loudness, as though he was shouting into a pillow.
“There’s no conductors you said?”
“You can look.”
The man’s face crinkled. Why didn’t a conductor go outside and learn what the problem was? Were we about to be pushed or pulled?
I said, “Stay here? Keep an eye on him.” She’d have been within her rights to say where else am I going to go?
At the end of the car I found a couple of elderly girls gesturing exclamations at one another, an open bag of M&M’s between them. It was almost like sign language, the eloquence of their white hands in the dark car. They were telling a story about something bad, having fun telling it. A row of backs. Passengers in what looked to be a long line to the club car. If drinks were free the line would be long. I took my place at the back because if they weren’t taking cash the line would move. I’d talk to the guy in there.
There was a time in my 20s—a few months—where Taylor was my best friend, Noah was decent enough, always around, and Rudy was just a pain in my ass. Fifteen years later I was a patent lawyer with a laptop on a train, one who didn’t even make time—an hour—to get off the train when it passed my old friend’s house. Who didn’t even text my old friend, say I’m riding by your house. Who felt guilty. We’d moved in different directions—that was the story. The arguments we had when Taylor came back from overseas weren’t the cause of our distance, just a symptom. Taylor wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t think the way I thought. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have generalized anxiety disorder. When the photos from Abu Ghraib were published—naked prisoners on leashes—Taylor emailed me a picture of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. There were drastic differences between those pictures, but when I tried to explain he acted like I was splitting hairs. I’d tell him, “People got killed at Abu Ghraib.” He’d yell, “Yeah man, nobody got hurt in Dresden”; the mood back then made it impossible to hold a soap bubble of thought in your hands and pass it to someone else without the bubble bursting. If the person you were trying to communicate with had a big, persuasive personality then you were hopeless. What I wanted to tell Taylor, but couldn’t tell him in a way he heard, is that he would never torture a prisoner, at least not without a genuine sadist like Rudy egging him on. But Rudy was involved. And Taylor must have identified with Rudy in some way that never made sense to me, some way he hid from me, because Taylor used the fact I’d missed Rudy’s funeral as an excuse. Noah died eighteen months later of an overdose and Taylor—my only point of contact with Noah—kept it to himself. I would have showed up for Noah’s funeral, but even making a distinction between the two men was something Taylor wouldn’t stand. And here I was half a mile from his house; every minute I didn’t text him estranged me further. It felt aggressive, like I was punishing Taylor for signing up.
The line wasn’t moving. I had to crouch to see out the window in that car. The tide was going out, so the dark grass looked taller. I couldn’t find the shouting man, but my view was poor from inside. I was struck with the dark feeling there was no one at the counter after all, that we’d all been abandoned. I squeezed and excuse me’d up the car. A flock of suits clogged the doorframe until I patted their shoulders and shuffled them out of place. As soon as I got inside the club car I went cold: the server was gone. Plenty of explanations. No CLOSED sign. He might just be locating more coffee in storage.
Anything you imagine can be true, and half of what you imagine is anxiety. I wouldn’t be home in time to read Belle a story. She’d fuss if I wasn’t there—or did I only hope she’d fuss? I pushed back, annoyed with myself, preemptively annoyed. The line cleared. At the end of my own car I pushed the touch-plate to open the bellows, felt the air change before I’d stepped into the gangway. Real outdoor sounds: planes humming, voices traveling through open space. The outside door was hanging open, the door to the marsh. I stood dumb in its presence, the muck smell of crabshells and algae creeping with the last of a wet heat. A dangling red handle—pull for emergency exit. Someone had done it.
We were about to be pushed or pulled. Approaching the door, taking hold of its frame (I was violating the agreement we make with Amtrak, the agreement to participate in no activities beyond sitting, buying food, visiting the bathroom) I leaned out into the real air, which felt agonizingly forbidden. I could be kicked off the train for this. Beneath us ran a grade of raised earth and pebbles that stretched the track around a bend. To the left spread marsh that, further on, welcomed an inlet. I heard a splash, turned to locate it, and found her out there: Swetha, though I didn’t know that was her name yet. She wasn’t on the train anymore. She was slushing through the cold marsh after the white-haired stranger, shouting, “Was he breathing?”
Her voice carried over the water.
I found the latch for the stairs and—heart in my throat—dropped them from the door. She must have jumped down—a long jump. The stairs fell to ease my descent to the grade. By the time I reached the pebbles I was already shouting back. They kept running.
“What’s the emergency?” I shouted. “Is this why we’re stopped?”
I didn’t know her name yet, so I couldn’t shout it.
The water touched my ankles lower than I’d expected, tide going out. I flailed for the side of the train. This was crazy. I couldn’t follow two strangers into muck. I was trying to sleep in my own bed tonight. But I put the first foot in because I didn’t want a woman tricked and hurt, and because I had the eerie intimation the problem had something to do with Taylor. Of course it didn’t have to do with Taylor. But we were too close to his house—if there weren’t a copse of trees at the end of the marsh you could see it from here.
Dead fish and something earthier. I felt it more than I breathed it, mud draining into my shoes. This is how you learn marshes, some mysterious tragedy. Jesus, let it not be Taylor.
This is how you learn marshes, some mysterious tragedy.
“Do you need help?” My voice loud. “Club car was empty!”
They were running, as much as you can run in a marsh. My legs lurched their way. Possibilities: had the train hit a car? The grass was tall where my neighbor and the panicked man slowed ahead of me. Their bodies rose as they moved onto it. A kind of island. That higher ground was where I found them, leaning over a canoe. It was been banked there by someone. A white boy—college age—lay propped against the stern. His lips were blueish.
Swetha flew into action. Okay, she had to be a doctor, something like that. “Help me pull him out of there,” she told both of us. “Cradle his head.”
I grabbed the kid’s LL Bean boots while the stranger—the boy’s father? uncle?—eased his head down. He was too heavy for a fit-looking kid. He was dead weight. She had his coat open, reached for his pulse, locked her fingers together, pushed his chest. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Steps were being taken. Was he already dead?
“How can I help?”
She didn’t answer.
“Are you a doctor?”
The old man was breathless, his face all wide eyes, moving mouth. He mimed his hands up and down—he couldn’t have known he was doing it—as Swetha worked on the boy. “I called them,” he said, “I called 911 first thing.” He looked up at me, panicked. “Can you call them too. Please now?”
She kept working at his chest a long minute. I called 911.
“A salt marsh outside of Westerly. I … I don’t know, there’s a young man unconscious and unresponsive. We were on a train.”
I couldn’t remember when my hands had felt so cold. But the air wasn’t cold. The light was fading because I struggled to look at Swetha, to make her out clearly. I still had Taylor’s number on my phone. He was in the damn army—they got medical training there.
“Hello? Is Taylor there? Oh, no I wanted him for … it’s Brett, I met you at the wedding.” Taylor’s wife answered, her name was Maddy. Maddy something. “Taylor knows medical … uh, I mean I’m by your house. Just in the marsh. He’s at work?”
She couldn’t understand why I was calling. A baby howled in the background. She apologized, said she couldn’t leave the house, said if I was in trouble I should come there. She offered to call Taylor at the dealership.
I’d wanted Taylor there to think for me. I didn’t trust myself to think. Vaguely, I felt ashamed at this. Mostly I felt dizzy.
Swetha shouted, “Come here. I’m going to give him breaths. Right here.” She pulled me down kneeling. I knelt beside her in shallow water, the kid’s chest cold to the touch. It wasn’t warm like something living, the fire in us, spirit furnace. Somewhere, in a corner of my mind, I was aware of the sound of what I later came to understand must have been two trains coupling. Escaping steam. I realized that was the sound weeks later while I was pulling weeds out back: that vegetal smell, murk and dirt.
“Not so fast.” She put her hands over mine, showed me how hard to pump his chest: hard.
I hadn’t been pumping a minute—I can’t be sure, but I assume I was feeling time much slower than it moved—when I felt a push back against my palms. A quiver. It panicked me because I didn’t want to lose it. I used all the concentration I could drum up to push as steady as I’d been pushing, even as I shouted, “It’s beating! We maybe got him!” and Swetha felt for his pulse again, pulled back my arms to stop me pushing. Before she did, an instant before, I felt the kid’s warmth return, life in his heart, enough to spread up my arms into my own chest. He was breathing. He wasn’t awake but he was breathing.
I rubbed my hands together but they were already warm. The sound of his labored breath in the water acoustics brought my own breathing down. I’d been gasping with pleasure, a pulse up my chest of real joy rising and rising against my throat as I stood there staring at—what? an osprey nest. People built those on the marsh, tripods of timber. Frogs clicked and croaked surrounding us: all of the marsh was alive.
Swetha had her phone out now. Two hundred feet away from us, in the humid night, the pair of kissing engines and the cars that trailed in opposing directions switched back on with a wooosh and pulled off from the marsh, north. I didn’t see it for the boat lights growing larger, EMTs grounding a PVC against our small island. By the time the boy was strapped to a palate any far-off lights from the train were obscured by the flashlights moving around me.
“Pop your head out of your ass,” Dad used to tell me, “the world isn’t all effervescence and light.” I used to be impressed he’d put it so well, effervescence and light.
We introduced ourselves to the EMTs as some firemen drew up a pontoon. Swetha, who turned out to be a doctor, an osteopath, briefed everyone on what had happened. The old man told me his name—I’ve forgotten it, though I remember his son’s name. I hold that name to my heart. I haven’t had the courage to look him up. Swetha shook our hands, laughed nervous and elated.
Later, when I researched CPR on my laptop—Amtrak, when I got hold of them, was able to hold it for me behind the counter at South Station—I learned that while it was effective in clinical settings, that patients reliably lived for years after their hearts had been started up again, CPR in the field was less promising: various reasons, length of time that the patient was clinically dead, transportation. But it was possible. Young, otherwise healthy people, “free of comorbidities,” lived long lives after CPR in the field, just not many of them.
Since I’d called and talked to Maddy I had to go to Taylor’s place. Madeline was too busy putting the baby down to understand what had happened, but she understood I was safe—I’d always been safe—and set me up in the yard with a pair of Taylor’s warm socks and beer that tasted like cake. She said Taylor’s shift was almost over; when he got home he’d drive me to Westerly so I could catch a late train. I called Tina, tried to explain the emergency. She took it in with suspicion, put Belle on the line, told her to say goodnight to daddy.
“Night Daddy Night Daddy Night Daddy.”
I hoped Taylor got held up at work. I didn’t want to see him because I was crying by then, to my humiliation. The excitement drained out of my body; I shook wet sobs off my face, trying to keep it down so Maddy could get the kid asleep. But I couldn’t stop the sound or the shaking. My life was blinkered until that moment, made of mostly fear. I’d moved as though the earth was thin glass. Because I’d been thinking about it earlier, or because of the beer, I kept coming back to that afternoon fifteen years in the past while I cried, sitting with the three of them and the TV on, that day I kept my mouth shut and stared at the screen. I could have tried harder with Taylor. I should have even tried with Rudy, come at him with patience, brought life. Jesus, the way he died was so useless. Did the way Rudy and Noah despaired have to do with what they’d seen or done? Should I have tried to beg them off the army more gravely that afternoon? Should I have said, “The chances anyone you shoot at will have done anything even remotely connected …” But it was my own ass that concerned me, my future.
I’d signed up for pre-law, then applied to law school at BC. I didn’t talk politics unless I knew someone well. On the TV talk shows hosts floated racist accents. We poured our treasure into bombs. Taylor deployed to Fallujah. My dad clipped a yellow ribbon sticker on the back of my car and I just left it there.
Genevieve Hudson has already made a name for themself with their short fiction, which appears in McSweeney’s, Catapult, Joyland, and No Tokens, to name a few, as well as in their 2018 story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books). Hudson’s prose has an almost mystical quality, often blending magical realism, unbridled imagination, and tender characters with a dazzling talent for crafting sentences that tremor through the body of the reader.
Hudson’s debut novel Boys of Alabama feels like a natural new summit for this writer on the rise. The book follows Max, a German teenager who moves to Alabama for his father’s car manufacturing job. Grieving the loss of his first love, Max befriends a goth, witchy, gender-nonconforming classmate named Pan. At the same time, he joins the football team and gets swept into the fray of an evangelical Christian politician, the father of a teammate, whose dark ambition has far-reaching consequences. As Max’s world both expands and narrows, the plot heats up like an Alabama summer, culminating in a clash of love and violence that can safely be described as stunning. Oh yeah, and did I mention that Max has the power to bring dead animals back to life?
Reckoning with queerness, desire, masculinity, whiteness, and trauma, Boys of Alabama is an utterly unique and gripping novel from first page to last. I sat down with Hudson to talk about boyhood, magic, queer people expanding each other’s worlds, and writing in the voice of a European immigrant to the American South.
Sarah Neilson: What drew you to write a story that, in many ways, is about boyhood? How is this a story about boyhood, and what is boyhood to you?
Genevieve Hudson: Growing up in Alabama, I was really drawn to the boys, the idea of being a boy. I was pretty captivated by masculinity, and especially masculinity as it’s presented in boyishness. It’s interesting because in a lot of ways, as a queer adult, I’m really critical of straight men or cisgender men or men that hold a lot of power in our society. But at the same time, as a young person especially, I was really captivated by it and drawn to wanting to be a boy in a lot of ways.
A lot of my friends were boys. The people that influenced me the most when I was a kid [was] this group of friends that I skated with and hung out with, and I think in a lot of ways they shaped my idea of how I thought about boys, [and] how I thought about myself. That really stuck with me. When I think about childhood, I often think of it as a boyhood in some ways. So I think that writing the story about boys was also a way of me parsing out that time in my life when so many of my friendships were with people who presented that way. And also trying to understand what masculinity meant in the place that I grew up in.
When I think about childhood, I often think of it as a boyhood.
SN: That ties directly into the ways in which the main character Max’s idea of what boyhood is expands, especially as he befriends Pan. In what ways do you think queer and gender nonconforming people have to expand each other’s worlds, especially when it comes to possibility around gender? Was that something you knew you want to write about?
GH: [That is] definitely an idea that I returned to and think about, just as a person in the world and somebody who’s navigating my thinking through stories as I’m writing. As a queer person, my ideas of gender are always being challenged. I think that as a kid, I was just saying I really identified with these boys, but I did feel like a girl in a lot of ways too—but not the kind of girl that I saw represented around me.
I had to grow into and understand and expand my definition of [gender], because did it fit me? I think sometimes we don’t even know what’s possible or we can’t conceive of what’s possible until we see it come to life in front of us, which is a reason why representation is so important. Max had this one idea of what boyhood was and it looked a little bit more like these football boys, or like the boys he knew in Germany. But then here was Pan who made [Max] think of what could be possible.
I’ve also had that experience of meeting somebody who changed my idea of what was possible in gender and that was a really powerful moment for me. To see that this way of living and this way presenting, is also a way of being in the world and a way of being that I connect to, and [it was] inside of me, but I didn’t have access to until I saw it.
SN: How are queerness and tenderness in the book linked for you, or how are they not linked?
GH: Max is navigating these first moments of desire and connection with boys. I mean he’s had this experience before but in this moment in his life he’s navigating this and coming to terms with it, and sometimes not even really allowing himself to admit that he wants it. I think that kind of desire and want can often give way to a kind of tenderness and desire that has a sweetness in it, and a yearning. But then it can press up against a hard reality of what you think is possible, your expectations, who you thought you were before, what other people might think of you. That tender-hearted want… is quickly confronted with the cold hard metal reality of the world you live in and what you think you’re entitled to, or allowed to have in that world. I know that I struggled, in those early moments, with a tender want versus a shame or a hardness, or whatever else is bundled up in that knotted situation.
SN: Max is from Germany, and English is his second language. That results in this halting syntax and ultra-observant voice that comes from someone who’s trying to assimilate into a new place. Can you talk about writing from inside someone who is from Europe and living in the American South? Or why you decided to write a character from Germany in the South and then how you went about crafting the language around that?
GH: In the town where I grew up, there actually is a Mercedes Benz plant really close by. There would be these German people that would crop up in different parts of the community, which is notable because it’s not an international city. Although the city I’m writing about it is not the city I grew up in, it’s similar in a lot of ways. [What must it have been like to], as a child, [come] to America? America is this vast place and people around the world have a lot of ideas of what it means to be in American. It was interesting to me to [think about] coming to America, and the America you come to is this kind of Gothic Southern landscape.
I also lived in the Netherlands for five years and I had a Dutch partner who I would bring to the South with me. Living in the Netherlands, I had a lot of conversations about the South with Dutch people and often German people who had visited this South. Seeing through this other lens gave it this “stranger in a strange land” opportunity for me. I could really look at some of the violence and the peculiarity and the singularities of what happens in Southern culture through an extra layer of defamiliarization.
SN: In so many ways (that Max himself observes), Alabama is vastly different from Germany, but a pivotal point in the story comes when one very potent similarity is brought to light, namely the ways in which people have been persecuted at the hands of white people in both places. There’s a moment where Pan talks about being able to feel the evil in the place, but Max doesn’t feel it. He felt it in Germany, but it was something he didn’t want to look at. That is so telling about inherited violence. I’m wondering what that moment means to you—how do you see that as shaping Max’s character, Pan’s character, and the story as a whole?
I am very interested in how violence lives in the body of people that have done horrible and unspeakable things.
GH: That was something that I really felt was important to recognize in this book, is whiteness. I mean the South obviously has such a legacy of racism and structural racism and violence. I am very interested in how violence lives in the body of people that have done horrible and unspeakable things, and gets transferred silently through generations. And how that violence to can even live in the land and hold the memory of the trauma that happens there. And how white people, even if they try to suppress these memories and turn away from certain kinds of confrontation with that history, something about that violence is still there, within the lands and in their bodies.
It’s inescapable, and living and existing in a landscape that holds that trauma affects and harms everybody that’s a part of it. It’s perpetuated by whiteness, so it was important for me to name that as something that exists in Alabama and how different white people are reckoning with or ignoring that, and if they’re ignoring it, how you see it come out in the small moments of violence that happen in the everyday mundane aspects of their lives. [There is] that parallel to Germany too, and Max, as a white person there, it’s also dealing with his own legacy of violence.
[I wanted to explore] the positioning between these two disparate cultures, but how two different people are confronting their own responsibility in the history of racism and genocide that white people inflicted.
SN: You mentioned people carrying that in their bodies, and I wanted to ask you about the corporeal aspects of the book. The characters are carrying so many things in their bodies. How do you approach writing the body, especially in fiction?
GH: I think that looking at the body as a register for what is going on in the mind or any emotional body [is important]. [The] physical body tells you a lot about what’s going on emotionally for characters, even when it’s not a part of their emotions that they can necessarily access with the language. They feel it. For Max, this power that he has to give life back to plants and animals is also, in some ways, an irony. Because he’s looking for something to be able to heal him or for something to be able to save him. And yet he holds in his own body this profound ability to heal. But he’s looking for all these external sources that could make him feel whole or alive, or make him feel like he is redeemed in some way.
[There is also] a desire for the physical body to be in communion with the divine in some way. I found it important to look at and explore the different ways that we use our bodies to transcend or access different parts of our mind and our desires. And those two seem to be always a little bit in conversation.
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