It’s fitting—maybe even a little on-the-nose—that the last book I finished on my commute to work was Hilary Leichter’s Temporary. Now that my twice-daily train ride has been indefinitely suspended alongside the commutes of millions of others, it’s tempting to claim Leichter’s debut novel is even more resonant, asserted in the key of the now more than ever message bombardment from every corner of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the uncanny resonance of Temporary doesn’t come from some hyper-accurate prediction about the future of work or wage labor or society; what Leichter weaves is more parable than prognostication.
Temporary‘s chief concern is with the way employment, or lack thereof, inflects every aspect of our lives, which was as true when it was published in early March of this year as it is today—differently true, maybe, but still true. If the book feels extra prescient at this moment, it’s because Temporary illustrates that before things get better, they’re first going to get much, much weirder.
I spoke with Hilary Leichter earlier this spring about her irregular writing practice, the definition of a “bad job,” and why it’s critical for her nameless protagonist to have 18 boyfriends. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Calvin Kasulke: Before we even dive into book stuff: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Hilary Leichter: I’m lucky in that I think my bad jobs are a sitcom brand of bad job. And right now “bad” job means something very different to me—not being recognized by your billionaire CEO, not getting sick days when you’re being forced to put yourself in harm’s way. That’s a bad job.
For my weirdest job, I’ll go with something fairly recent. It was advertised to me as an administrative assistant job working for someone out of her apartment. She had her own business, and when I arrived it was clear that there was no rhyme or reason to what I was asked to do. It was everything from moving boxes to sorting swatches of fabric to placing Amazon orders to helping her hire someone because I couldn’t stay with her full time.So I was Farren from my book, looking for other people for her.
After I had worked for her for several weeks, I was waiting for payment but hadn’t received it yet—this is a position I think many freelancers can relate to—so I shot her an email just saying, “Hey, waiting on my check.” And she emailed me back and asked if I would be willing to be paid less than what we had agreed on for the work I had already accomplished. And it was already a very low hourly rate, and something maybe a few years ago I would’ve said, “okay,” we all have those moments when we’re desperate for a paycheck. But I said no, and I was paid anyway, to her credit. But the chutzpah—I can’t think of anything more nervy than to ask someone to be paid less for something they’ve already done. It was a nightmare, but not in terms of our current nightmare. There’s quite a chasm between not-great and inhumane.
CK: Similarly, you can sort of characterize shifts in tone in your book based on the emotional reality of the narrator’s bosses, or whoever is giving her orders. I know you wrote this book over a long period of time, and I’m curious as to how it got the shape it eventually took on in its final form.
HL: I’ve never thought about it that way, but that is the situation when you walk into so many workplaces. You’re a part of a reality that has nothing to do with anything except the person that you work for, and I think that’s a really good way of thinking about the structure of the book. Oftentimes the narrative trajectories are just kind of strange and get the label of “surreal,” but I was really following where the emotions of her careerlessness would take her.
Very literally, the book got its shape from a short story that I wrote in 2012, and many of the jobs appear in that story. It was very short, I think only six pages or so, and she just hops from place to place. And then I went back to it and thought, “Well this is kind of perfect,” and such a great outline for a book. So I just went through and expanded. Instead of drawing the story out to something different, it was more like inflating a balloon.
CK: Were there any jobs or portions of the original that you felt didn’t fit in the final version that you had to drop?
HL: It’s not in the short story, but in one version of the book she spends a lot of time in prison in solitary confinement. She has the job of filling in for a prisoner who escaped, and I actually love that section but it kind of didn’t go anywhere, so I had to lose it. I think some of the emotions in that section could be found other places in the book. I was really interested in escalating the things that she was being asked to do, and she wasn’t being asked to do anything there except be alone. And that’s kind of where she is for most of the book anyway.
CK: You wrote Temporary very quickly, in one summer. I’m curious about how inflating an older work, the original short story, might’ve impacted the shape of the novel?
HL: I really wrote it in a sprint, but not because of any deadline or because anyone cared to read it critically. It was an experience that I am bashful to talk about because I don’t know that it will ever happen again and I think every book is different, and I think every book requires something different. The next thing I write might take 10 years.
I had been working on a different book for a really long time and just not getting anywhere with it, and I had told so many people about it that I felt weird compunction to keep writing it, even though it just was not working. I wasn’t having fun, which is not to say that writing is always supposed to fun—I think a lot of times it’s really not.
But I was looking for a way out of that and I just went back to play with this story, because it was more in line with what my life looked like at the moment and the things that I cared about and the emotions that I had.
A lot of workplace stories from the 20th and 21st century have been about men. And it is because women were invisible in the workplace, and still are sometimes.
I just took a look at it again and started fiddling with it and it was so much fun and I wrote it from a real place of—it was like a mix of joy and rage. The country was on the verge of electing Donald Trump and I was filled with this weird combination of hope that that wouldn’t happen and rage that it was even a possibility, and I wrote it from that fevered state. It took about a month and after that I edited it for a long time. I was still working on it and editing it through the process of finding an agent and selling it, and it changed a lot from that first draft, but it is very much still the same book.
In a way, the way that I wrote it is where the structure came from. It’s a very stream of consciousness word association type of structure, almost like a group of people playing charades. And that’s indicative of how I wrote it, I just kept going. I haven’t felt this way about anything else I’ve written where I would just wake up in the middle of the night and want to work on it. And I hate myself for saying that. It sounds so annoying, but it’s absolutely true. It was so much fun. I had so much fun writing it,the way the narrative works is in the name of fun.
CK: It can like the worst of both worlds, though, if you don’t have a regular practice. You seem lazy until you crank out something in a month and then everybody’s taken aback.
HL: Screw regular practice, especially right now. I have a problem with the idea that anyone can tell anyone else how and how to execute. Being a writer is something you totally have to figure out for yourself, and it’s something that each project tells you how to do. Any time someone’s like, “This is what you need to do, these are the three tricks your doctor doesn’t tell you about being a writer.” No, no, that doesn’t exist. There are no tricks.
CK: You talked about writing Temporary during one very heady period of American life, and now we’re in a very different, intense period of American life. Are there any parts of the book that are newly resonant to you as you’re seeing it discussed as part of the conversation?
HL: There was one very specific passage that keeps coming up where the narrator is learning all of the lingo that she needs to know to work on a pirate ship, and a pirate slang for being dead is “working remotely.” So that paragraph keeps popping up again and again because we’re all working remotely right now.
I think everything is newly resonant in this moment. I think for everything that was, there’s the before and after. It’s very strange having a book come out right now; it’s everything from disappointing to illuminating. The things that we care about in these moments of publication are suddenly so incredibly unimportant. I’m disappointed not to stroll around and see my book in bookstores, that was something I was looking forward to, but at the same time I’m grateful that I have a job that allows me to stay home, and that I still have a job. So everything is put into a new kind of perspective at this moment.
CK: I wanted to ask about the narrator’s 18 boyfriends and the logic behind that—
HL: Behind the number of boyfriends or just behind their existence?
CK: Behind their multitude.
HL: Even since the short story there has been a gaggle, a murder, of boyfriends. I don’t know what the collective noun is, but they’ve always been there. I envision them as this chorus line of well-intentioned doofuses, and I say that with the most love. Because she loves them, she’s not able to commit to any of them or even to all of them—because of her nature, because she’s a temp, but she does care about them, and so I care about them too.
In creating them I was really thinking about the way that female characters pop up in a male work narrative. A lot of the workplace stories from the 20th and 21st century have been about men. And part of that is because women were kind of invisible in the workplace, and still are sometimes. So I was thinking about the way girlfriends in some of those movies and books become interchangeable and are sort of window decoration. That’s where I started from, and then they all took on these very endearing personalities and it turns out I’m not really capable of writing window dressing.
My character couldn’t just decide to be a temp because a lot of those decisions are really made for us by capitalism.
They do provide a bit of grounding for her. I think that if she didn’t have some sort of story or some sort of personal life, it would be very hard to stay with her for the whole book. That’s something that I definitely discovered the more I wrote into the narrative. It became important to give her not a love story, but a social life, a family life and something else too, which is like the mythology that comes into the book, like a history.
And I think these are the things that you have when you come to New York, right? As a young person, you have your day job, your family, and you have your social life. And those are the three things that tether you in this city, whether they’re non-existent or whether they’re complicated or whether they’re tangential to work or whether they overpower work. So it made sense to have that be part of her story since it’s part of the stories of a lot of young working people.
CK: The condition of temping is passed on matrilineality in the book’s mythology, or at least in the lived reality of the narrator’s existence. I was wondering why you chose to make temping something that was passed on to her, as opposed to something she opted for.
HL: When I was creating the mythology that grounds the book, I was thinking of Greek mythology. I was thinking of fairy tales but I was also thinking of Judaism, which is a matrilineal religion. And even though it’s not overtly a Jewish book, a lot of the themes about where her history and her impulses come from Judaism.
I was thinking about that in editing it—maybe not in writing and at first, but then editing it I was thinking about again, the invisible nature of women’s work and the way that women sometimes don’t have a choice in the work that they get, in the work that they can have, in the work that’s available to them. There is often a convergence between the personal and the professional, and I wanted to explore that too. So it was very intentional that this was something that’s passed down. Even though that doesn’t happen in our world—technically—it kind of does, right? Our understanding of ourselves and what we’re capable of is passed down. Our confidence, our financial security, all of that is something that we receive from somewhere else. And so she couldn’t just decide to be a temp because a lot of those decisions are really made for us by capitalism.
CK: At the beginning of our conversation I asked about your worst or weirdest job, and I’m wondering if there is a job or a gig that you haven’t had or tried your hand at, but you think that you would absolutely crush. A job you would be fantastic at.
HL: I think I’d be an amazing publicist.
CK: What makes you think you’d nail it?
HL: Well, I had to do it for my book, right? I have a publicist who’s wonderful, but we all kind of have to be our own publicists when we have books coming out. Also, I’m a theater kid at heart, and so everything for me is high-key putting on a show. And I think that’s something you have to be very comfortable with in publicity, putting on the right kind of show for the right audience. Oh, I think I would totally nail it. If anyone’s hiring.
Amado Vazquez, a Mexican botanist, named an orchid after Joan Didion. While that was a chic gesture, I don’t think of her as an orchid. I think of her as an onion. She’s very white, very crisp, and she makes people cry.
In high school, I came up with a nickname for Didion: the windy bitch. She blew into my consciousness senior year when our English teacher herded my classmates and me into the school library to take an Advanced Placement literature test. We sat on wooden chairs, reading, grinding our teeth, annotating, flipping exam pages. At the end of my booklet, I came upon an essay whose opening line grabbed me by my anxious balls: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon…” The noir paragraph described a place I actually cared about: California. Often, when we read for English, we “traveled” to places I didn’t want a passport to. The Roman Senate. Winesburg, Ohio. Boats.
But here was home. And home was the star. And I understood the weather that this white lady was writing about! She described regional winds, the Santa Anas, which had touched my family. These shook the windows of the Los Angeles furniture store my dad’s mom, Grandma Hope, ran with her second husband, Bob.
In high school, I came up with a nickname for Didion: the windy bitch.
I lived about 150 miles north of the furniture store, in the Santa Maria Valley with my mom, sister, brother, and dad. Our local winds acted as devilishly as the ones the essay was detailing. Walking home from the bus stop, gusts spat grit and gnats into my eyes. They grabbed leaves and trash and whirled the debris in tiny cyclones along sidewalk gutters. During a windstorm, invisible hands snatched my skirt, tossing it above my ass, flipping it up in the front, inverting it like an umbrella. These same hands grabbed my dark hair, winding it around my neck, garroting me.
I wanted to read more about this familiar weather but I’d arrived at the excerpt’s final line: “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” Exhaling through my nostrils, I stroked the writing bump on my middle finger and scribbled an enthusiastic analysis I would’ve preferred to write in the first person, but which I wrote in the third.
I doubt my abuelito read Didion. He’s dead so I can’t ask him. He was a Mexican writer, publicist, and machista who actively avoided prose written by women. I do know that critic Michiko Kakutani’s claim that “California belongs to Joan Didion” would’ve given him a chuckle. He’d whip a pen out from under his serape and fix the line: “California belongs to Joan Didion because her ancestors stole it.”
In my imagination, Abuelito’s version of history wrestles Didion’s. The white literary establishment handed her California but I propose we wrest it away from her. The Mexican presence haunting her work could do so if those of us living outside Didion’s prose lend a hand to the diaspora trapped inside of it.
The white literary establishment handed her California but I propose we wrest it away from her.
I’m not suggesting we engage in mutiny, narrative or corporeal, because I hate Didion. To the contrary. Didion’s work guides me as much as it scoffs at me and I confess that her voice has been instructional. It invited me to experiment with gringa coolness and first-person narration. Didion’s regional fixations affirmed that California could serve as my muse. Many of Didion’s sentences resemble my favorite music, music no one should dance to. She modeled how writing yourself into the story of a place convinces readers that the place is yours. You, the author, fuse with rhetoric and fact. Your body joins the topography.
What chafes is Didion’s racial grammar. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva describes racial grammar as a conceptual metaphor involving three components. One, the rules of racial grammar govern how we see, understand, and feel about racial matters. Two, we acquire racial grammar through social intercourse. Three, rebels who develop a counter-grammar enable change.
Through rebellion against Didion’s racial grammar, we can unseat her as California’s thin-lipped literary grand dame. We can make way for other windy bitches, otras cabronas que quieran soplar…
An analysis of the racial grammar in Didion’s essay “Guaymas, Sonora” unveils why México exists: “It had rained in Los Angeles until the cliff was crumbling into the surf and I did not feel like getting dressed in the morning, so we decided to go to Mexico, to Guaymas, where it was hot.” According to this run-on sentence, México is something for gringos to do in their piyamas, o quizás en cálzon, on rainy days. It’s a pastime, and the point of doing México is similar to the point of camping. Campers seek temporary and recreational suffering and in Didion’s case, she wants “to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat…”
She and her half naked family drive through Nogales, the Sonoran Desert and Hermosillo. The further south they drive, the more her prose approaches the infernal.
Lost
Hot
Grotesque
Claustrophobic
Limbo
Moaning
Upon arriving at her destination, Didion goes into gothic overdrive, layering a symbol of death upon a symbol of everlasting life: a vulture perches atop a crucifix in the town square. To help us see Guaymas in our mind’s eye, she offers an Anglophilic reference: “As far as the town goes, Graham Greene might have written it.” Greene wrote The Power and Glory, a fine novel about La Cristiada, a Mexican religious war, but I find the reference a little galling. I’ve been to México many times and never once thought, “Ah, México…just as the British described it!”
Greene and Didion belong to the spiritual tradition of extranjeros palidos using México as a portal. “We went to get away from ourselves,” Didion explains. Now, if the writer left herself, and most of her wardrobe, in Los Angeles, who, or what, went to vacation in Guaymas? Didion answers this question by likening her journey south to the one made by the mythical queen Alcestis. Prior to her rebirth, Alcestis descends into the underworld. Didion’s transformation requires her to slip below the waistband of the Americas: the U.S.–Mexico border.
Didion’s transformation requires her to slip below the waistband of the Americas: the U.S.–Mexico border.
Terrible things populate underworlds and while Didion is in Guaymas, she comes to approximate one of these things. Sun, inertia, and liminality conspire, permitting her to indulge a persona I call Juana: “For a week we lay in hammocks and fished desultorily and went to bed early and got very brown and lazy.” (Emphasis all mine.) Didion’s punctuation succumbs to sloth as she abandons commas to conjure an enduring controlling image: the lazy Mexican. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins created the concept of the controlling image, a device that dictates social scripts. Controlling images limit who we can and can’t be, and literary scholar Lee Bebout explains how this one functions: “[w]hether taking a siesta or laboring continually, Mexicans are often scripted as lacking entrepreneurial energies and a self-reliant, Waspy work ethic.”
Because whiteness is made oppositionally, Didion relies on this controlling image. Becoming a lazy Mexican purifies her. Hibernating in the heat will restore her WASPy womanhood. Like Alcestis, she will reject the permanent sleep offered by the underworld. She will never, at her core, grow lazy enough to quit caring about the work waiting for her in the United States.
By week’s end, being Juana bores Joan. Wanting “something to do,” Didion returns north, sloughing off her Brown persona, leaving Juana to the hellscape so masterfully rendered by that Englishman.
You could say that a part of México grew up in Didion’s house.
She named her only child after one of its coastal states and most popular tourist destinations: Quintana Roo. Imagine that.
Didion pronounces it gringishly: Quinn-tana. Though it’s tacky, it strikes me as on brand that Didion did this. Didion named her daughter Quintana Roo because she saw the words on a map and liked them. Didion mines México for language. Its words hold music but their meaning remains a mystery to her. Their sound yields ignorant amusement.
Didion mines México for language. Its words hold music but their meaning remains a mystery to her.
Didion takes a similar approach to her regional monographs. Drab civilization offsets racialized kitsch and gibberish: “…Delano, Tulare, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Modesto, Stockton. Some of these towns are pretty big now, but they are all the same at heart, one- and two- and three-story buildings artlessly arranged, so that what appears to be the good dress shops stands beside a W.T. Grant store, so that the big Bank of America faces a Mexican movie house. Dos Peliculas, Bingo Bingo Bingo.”
When I sense us on the page—bingo, bingo, bingo—my heart beats faster. Brown body parts twitch between certain lines and Mexican wood haunts “Los Angeles Notebook,” the essay that first brought me to the windy bitch. Santa Anas are more than winds. Santa Anas are people. Mi familia incluye Santanas de los Altos de Jalisco. In 1988, the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame inducted the band Santana which was founded by a Santana. A Santa Anna served as a notorious Mexican soldier, General Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de Lebrón. United States history books typically place him at the Battle of the Alamo but prior to that showdown, Santa Anna governed a state on the Gulf of México. Its sound would make Didion lick her naming chops.
¡Yucatán!
Santa Anna ruled as president of México an inordinate number of times. (You could rightly call the man a dictator.) Regardless, the United States has his leg. It followed a circuitous route to the Midwest after grapeshot fired by a French cannon in the Mexican state of Veracruz tore it up. Doctors amputated it and Santa Anna honored the casualty by staging a state funeral for it. Wearing a cork and wood replacement, Santa Anna fought in what Mexican history books call la Guerra de Estados Unidos contra México but while fleeing the Battle of Cerro Gordo on horseback, Santa Anna left behind his prosthesis. U.S. Infantry captured it. Soldiers took their trophy to Illinois, where it remains a roadside attraction.
Didion writes that we know when Santa Anas are coming “because we feel it.” I know Mexicans are in “Los Angeles Notebook” because I feel it. Somos Los Angeles. Somos el viento. Somos California. Somos playas y palmeras. Somos piernas invisibles.
In a “Los Angeles Notebook” anecdote, Didion obliquely addresses Mexican existence. She tells of a scorching and smoggy afternoon when, yet again, the weather prevents her from getting dressed. She heads to Ralph’s Market wearing “an old bikini bathing suit.” A “large woman in a cotton muumuu” disapproves of Didion’s outfit and chases her. The hunt follows the format and rhythm of a joke: “She follows me all over the store, to the Junior Foods (SET…), to the Dairy Products (UP…), to the Mexican Delicacies (PUNCHLINE)…”
This instance is the only time that the word Mexican appears in this iconic essay about a place that was once México. Given how primitive Didion finds México, and Mexicans, it seems that the comedic pleasure she takes is oxymoronic.
How can anything Mexican be a delicacy?
Kids raised in California inherit a macabre history. Adults take pleasure in recounting to them the grim lore of the Donner Party, those “settlers” who schlepped westward, ran out of food, froze and dined on each other. Since I developed a taste for the morbid during childhood, the Party’s demise titillated me. Their story felt like an antidote to the triumphant pioneer legends TV, textbooks, and teachers force-fed me. My dad taught me to be suspicious of the word pioneer. “If there are people to greet you,” he explained to me, “then you’re not a pioneer.” Applying this axiom during social studies got me in trouble with several teachers descended from pioneers. I spent a fair amount of my childhood wondering what the settlers tasted like. I wondered how they prepared one another to be eaten. I wondered if I had the wherewithal to eat my family. I wondered who I’d eat first.
Who would you eat first?
Why?
“The tale of the Donner Party,” writes Michiko Kakutani, “haunts Didion.” Didion’s great-great-great-grandma, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, travelled west with the Party but she and her fellow travelers split before the settlers established what came to be known as the Camp of Death. Still, Didion celebrates her great-great-great-grandma’s courage, glorifying her as a Daughter of the American Revolution who “never seem[ed] afraid of Indians or [shrank] from hardships.”
Didion inherited her great-great-great-grandma’s cornbread recipe along with her “wagon-trail morality.” She meditates on the latter in her essay “On Morality”: “…my own childhood was illuminated by graphic litanies of the grief awaiting those who failed in their loyalty to each other. The Donner-Reade Party, starving in the Sierra snows, all the ephemera of civilization gone save that one vestigial taboo, the provision that no one should eat his own blood kin.”
I’ve always believed that pioneers who suffered got what they deserved.
Maybe I’m a ghoul for taking pleasure in the settlers’ comeuppance; I’ve always believed that pioneers who suffered got what they deserved. I reserve my sympathies for the memory of the human beings that the settlers tortured. The account written by Party survivor Eliza Poor Donner Houghton tells that “eighty-one souls” attempted to reach California. After listing every white soul’s first and last name, she concludes with “Antonio (a Mexican) and Lewis and Salvador (the two Indians…).”
Lewis and Salvador were Miwoks who knew to distrust the Party. They fled but the settlers found and shot them, making them the only human beings they intentionally hunted and cannibalized. After the settlers watched Antonio freeze to death, they ate him too. Didion’s meditation on wagon-trail morality never names Lewis, Salvador, or Antonio but their presence pervades the wagon-trail meditation. The settlers Didion commemorates carried this human trinity in their bodies. White intestines became the three men’s graves.
These days, I find what Didion doesn’t show more interesting than what she tells. Literary criticism, along with history, hands me a scalpel, enabling me to slice open the stomachs of those subjects made visible by her prose. I can poke at the exposed contents, smell them, learn from them, and give them a proper burial. Can we make etching their tombstones a collective effort?
Let’s queerly circle back to place as muse.
I must tell you a Queerlifornia story.
A few summers ago I attended a party in Los Angeles. After taking a seat in the backyard, I unsuccessfully tried not to gawk at my hostess’ house. A party-goer noticed my struggle.
She leaned toward me and whispered, “It’s beautiful. I think it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright.”
I nodded.
I was also struggling not to gawk at breasts. They jiggled and hung everywhere. The backyard was Lesbos. Topless women lounged poolside. Others congregated in shallow water. A few floated alone, arms outstretched, eyes closed. A muscular lady in a bikini bobbed in an inflatable plastic donut covered in icing and sprinkles.
Lynn Harris Ballen invited me to this party but I will let Lynn’s spouse, Jeanne Córdova, introduce her. In her memoir We Were Outlaws, Jeanne explains that Lynn is the South African daughter of freedom fighter Frederick John Harris. “The fact of her paternity,” writes Jeanne, “drove me to investigate her further and in the process, I married her.”
These days, I find what Didion doesn’t show more interesting than what she tells.
Jeanne, whose parents named her after the French tomboy saint, was born to an Irish-American mom, Joan, and a Mexican-American dad, Federico. Jeanne’s role in her big Catholic family helped her land one of her first jobs which she got after noticing an ad pinned to a UCLA bulletin board. Jeanne applied and convinced a childcare-seeking couple that she was a competent candidate. She’d helped raise ten siblings.
Jeanne worked at the couple’s house and at first, the arrangement puzzled the baby dyke. She babysat the couple’s toddler while they remained home. Jeanne soon realized that both the wife and husband worked, each in their own book-lined office outfitted with typewriters. The couple behaved the way writers often do in one another’s presence, ignoring the other’s existence, passing the other in the hallway without acknowledgement, eyes distant, faces haunted by a preoccupation with language’s infinite problems.
The couple was Joan Didion and Mr. Joan Didion.
The toddler with the Chicana sitter was Quinn-tana.
Working for the Didions gave Jeanne a glimpse of the writing life and this exposure primed her ambitions. She became a Latina lesbian activist, organizer, editor, publisher, journalist, and author. I’m able to proclaim that I’m a free queer Chicana because of Jeanne’s labor. Jeanne’s labor also made it so that Didion could create her canonical vision of California. Jeanne’s labor made it so that my muse could belong to Didion.
Cancer had taken Jeanne by the time I dogpaddled in Lesbos.
She died of cancer in 2016.
Didion inherited a wagon-trail morality from her ancestors. From my queer Brown ancestors I inherited a different kind of morality, one that drives me to write for Lewis, Salvador, Antonio, and Jeanne. In this moment, California belongs to them. This sentence is their title, their deed.
Lydia Millet has always fought for the environment. She has written many books that take the natural world as their subject, but her signature approach is refreshingly askew, shot through with humor and satire. She gives animals perspective in her collection Love in Infant Monkeys, explores ecotourism and marine conservation through mystical creatures in Mermaids in Paradise, and extinction and evolution via taxidermy in Magnificence. That list is a mere sampling; she’s written sixteen books, including two short story collections and four young adult novels. As if that weren’t enough, she also spends her days working as a senior editor for the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, a non-profit with the mission to use “science, law and creative media” to “secure a future for all species, great and small.”
A Children’s Bible, her sixteenth book, tells the story of Eve and her companions, who range in age from young children to graduating teenagers. Their parents, friends since college, have rented a grand summer house for a protracted and debauched reunion. Eve, our narrator, speaks mostly in the first person plural, giving an account from a collective perspective. “Once we lived in a summer country,” the novel begins. “In the woods there were treehouses, and on the lake there were boats.” In this summer country, the only apparent act of parental supervision has been to lock the children’s phones in a safe. Their summer is idyllic, until it isn’t. A major storm that floods the property is just the start. Technologically incapacitated, the children move outside, where they become like the Lost Boys—self-governed and free, until the lack of adult leadership forces them to be the grown-ups.
A Children’s Bible is a thrilling novel of climate change: motivating but not didactic; electrifying, when so many of us are at our most inert. Like all of Millet’s work, A Children’s Bible gains strength from its contradictions. It is hilarious yet tender, absurd yet chillingly realistic, nostalgic yet prescient.
Halimah Marcus: The first time I read A Children’s Bible, I felt upset to no longer be a child. The young people in this story are so much more appealing than the adults. They’re not corrupted by a lifetime of responsibility and mistakes. They’re smarter, they’re savvier, they’re more loving and more kind. Did you have to battle any of your own vanity or defensiveness as an adult in order to malign the adults as a group?
Lydia Millet: I think there’s something wishful about the way that I portray the young characters in this book. Of course, in real life there are some compensations for agedness, including certain forms of wisdom and wit and sometimes vision that we don’t always have when we’re younger. We lose other things like memory and motor skills, and quickness, alacrity, reflexes, and also our experience of the world as a novelty. That’s what I most miss from being a teenager, how everything sometimes seemed enchanted and mystical.
I actually think that teenagers have as many blind spots as anyone else, just maybe different blind spots. On the matter of climate, the urgency of that crisis, and the urgency of the extinction crisis, I happen to think the generation that I’m writing about (and those say, in their twenties and maybe thirties), are more right than the generations older than them. The righteous anger that the [the younger generations] command is long overdue. I wanted to write them having a general wisdom that represented that more specific wisdom that I believe they really do have.
Not all adults are repulsive and selfish and hedonistic, and I certainly hope and kids can be equally all of those things, especially teenagers. When you’re a teenager you get to suspend empathy for a while, neurologically and otherwise. But you also have access to all these forms of rapture that I think we grow out of. I wanted to look at the more ecstatic and rapturous time of life.
HM: This particular exchange in the book hit me where I live, as they say. The parents acknowledge that they’ve let the children down by not protecting the planet. A mom asks, “But what could we have done really?” The children respond:
“Fight,” said Rafe.
“Did you ever fight or did you just do exactly what you wanted?” said Jen. “Always.’”
I was like, shit, that’s me. I convince myself that I’m doing something by taking public transportation, recycling, not using plastic bags, but I don’t make any real sacrifices. How do you reconcile compassion for your characters and the people you love in the real world with the condemnation that we all deserve for our complacency with climate change?
LM: First of all, I think that there’s plenty of blame to go around. There is personal blame that we can absorb, but really so much of this was directly caused by much more powerful actors than we are. Climate change was very directly funded and caused by the fossil fuel industry, who we now know had pretty much mastered the science of climate change back in the 70s and certainly by the 80s. They had a vast storehouse of information and actively suppressed it. We should look first to the powerful to hold responsible for this thing.
Not everyone can have a job that has to do with the things that mass social and cultural transformation. We have to have normal jobs. So how do we tackle these huge, future-oriented abstractions? It’s a tactic that has been used by climate deniers and by vested interests in big industry: just tell people they should recycle and guilt them about their own lifestyles, when really it’s macro social things that determine our lifestyles. It’s laws, it’s policies. Many of us can’t do anything about those on the individual level. So it’s a tactic of deflection from people who actually can do something on a policy level to blame regular people for their wasteful habits, and just turn everything on the victim. It’s victim blaming, basically.
That’s not to say that we can’t all live more responsible lives, but I’m someone who believes really strongly that the structural change on the scale that’s needed to tackle extinction and climate change absolutely has to come from the law and from policy. It has to come from the top. To put it on the bottom, on those of us who are just regular people, to put that pressure on us is disingenuous. It needs to come from our representatives. It needs to come from Congress. It needs to be policy that people have to live by. That’s the only way we can change the habits that we have that have gotten us into this mess. I firmly place the blame on the powerful and not on you.
HM: Well, thank you. I appreciate that!
You called climate change a huge future abstraction. How do you find narrative purchase in something like that, that’s a slow moving, global phenomenon? Is the American perception of climate change particularly resistant to narrativizing it?
I believe that the structural change on the scale that’s needed to tackle extinction and climate change absolutely has to come from the law and from policy.
LM: Those are really good questions. I’m not sure I have all the answers. It is difficult. It is difficult to make stories that aren’t dull or polemic out of these things that are so big. The only thing we can do is—other than write nonfiction, of course, and pass laws and do reporting—but in terms of fiction, all we can do is tell stories in voices that we like about characters that we like, or don’t like, or like to not like, or whatever. It’s always been difficult for me to write about these catastrophic historical events in fiction for the same reason that it’s difficult for anyone to write about them in fiction, which is that there’s a grandiosity to them. It’s like writing about God. The grandiosity is difficult to approach as a peasant, and that’s what one always is with these large things.
And there are so many landmines when you approach the majesty of some of these immense subjects that are fraught with political judgments. There’s the risk of writing too much like an activist. I think it’s great to be an activist. I don’t want to write like an activist. It’s a balancing act. I don’t think any of us ever feel we completely succeed when we try.
HM: In addition to the 100 year storms that become more frequent in the novel, there’s a nasty bug that gets passed around between the parents. In most disaster/apocalypse stories—novels, movies, whatever it is—there’s one event that threatens civilization. It’s an asteroid. It’s a tidal wave. It’s a contagion. But in A Children’s Bible, the threats are recursive and multi-valenced. How did you choose the disastrous events in the novel, and how does that thinking apply to our current situation? I’m particularly curious about connections you see between the pandemic and climate change, which on the surface may not seem immediately related.
LM: I think they’re really closely related, as you might imagine. Both climate change and the pandemic are the direct result of the way that we’re abusing the natural world. The actual novel coronavirus probably came to us from bats via pangolins, maybe via civet cats, and then via wildlife markets. We know that the disease itself is most likely the result of the exploitation and abuses of the wildlife trade, international in this case. But we do a lot of it here at home as well.
Huge numbers of animals are taken from the wild for trafficking, turtles especially. Freshwater turtles in the US are taken by the millions. Climate change and extinction, which are so interconnected you can’t really decouple them anymore, are driven by this exact same abuse of the natural world, rampant plundering of it that’s gone on for a few centuries now. They have essentially the same root cause. Of course, the economic effects and the scope of the pandemic here in the US are a political product, not an environmental product. This thing didn’t have to end up this way.
Chaos looks like everything and also like nothing. Some of us, at least, are experiencing the pandemic almost as a form of stasis, or limbo, or powerlessness. All the kids across the country having to be homeschooled and being bored out of their mind, including my two. And at the same time, for many, for those in extremist, it’s desperate and life threatening. But there are these different circles of experience. In any chaos scenario, some people are insulated from the worst effects and others are on the front lines and exposed.
HM: There are groups of people who believe that in order to be prepared for a disaster, having a gun is top of the list. The idea is outsiders will come for your supplies. You need to be able to defend your homestead. And but then there are examples of people coming together as communities rather than turning to violence against their neighbors. In New York City we have the examples of 9/11, the blackouts, hurricane Sandy.
There’s also these new prepper communities like The Prepared, which I read about in the New York Times, that are trying to appeal to “common sense” preppers that are less libertarian and even liberal. Without giving anything away, in A Children’s Bible, there’s someone who turns out to be a top level prepper. That person has guns and it becomes necessary to use those guns. So where do you fall on this spectrum? Are guns necessary for survival? Would you have a gun in your bunker?
Both climate change and the pandemic are the direct result of the way that we’re abusing the natural world.
LM: I’m not a gun owner and I choose not to have a gun in my bunker. First of all, your likelihood of actually dying in an untoward, untimely way is so much higher if you have an actual gun in your house. On that basis alone, I’ve never wished to [have one]. Also they scare me and they’re creepy and when I hold them, I feel wrong.
I’ve lived basically out in the desert for more than 20 years now. Here, the geography, the distance between people, actually emboldens people around guns, as well as making them feel more isolated and perhaps defensive to begin with. It makes complete sense to me that dense urban communities would not be as gun wielding. It’s almost not as real that people are getting hurt by these things when you’re all spread out and you don’t see another person for four miles.
I do believe in other forms of prepping, just not the guns. I’m not handy enough to be a prepper. My boyfriend is pretty handy and he can do a little prepping, but I lack the skills required. I can just basically order stuff on the internet and I can prune some plants in my yard. One of the more alarming things about the prospect of a near apocalypse is the handiness that would be required to cope. I am just not a self-sustaining organism, really.
HM: In terms of the decision to include violence and guns in the novel, I’m inferring from your earlier answer that it has something to do with the intertwining of all of these threats. Is that right?
LM: I think that America is a place where sooner rather than later in any kind of situation of mass instability, there will be guns and they will be brandished in public. The pandemic has actually already shown us a glimpse of this, with people showing up with guns at state capitals and stuff like that.I didn’t think I could really write an American chaos story without some guns showing up.
Gun stories aren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves. It’s just, are those characters who are holding the guns interesting, or not?
HM: I don’t want our readers to think that you’re exclusively concerned with doom and gloom because you’re one of the few writers that consistently makes me laugh out loud.
I didn’t think I could really write an American chaos story without some guns showing up.
LM: Thank you. It is my chief goal, actually. It’s actually my chief goal. I laugh out loud when I’m writing. That’s what I really love to do. I’m not saying it happens all the time, but I really do enjoy it.
HM: You’re almost exactly anticipating my question, which is, how is your humor on the page different or similar to your humor in your daily life? How do you decide which jokes make it through to the final edit? Because I’m sure you can’t laugh every time you work on the book.
LM: When I write something that tickles me, it is diminishing returns of laughter. The first time, you’re like HA! Whatever, I can’t do a fake laugh. And then the second time, you’re like… [chuckles]. And then by the fifth time you read it, you’re like mm-hmm.
But the test there is actually more like, does it displease me? Does it actually displease me, actively? You come to see that something’s too clever over time, and over successive reads.
HM: Shifting gears, to a career question: You’re a very successful novelist. You’ve published 16 books, you’ve been long-listed for the Pulitzer ( for Love in Infant Monkeys) and the National Book Award (for Sweet Lamb of Heaven), won many fellowships and awards, but you still keep a full-time job. Can you tell me about your work at the Center for Biological Diversity? How does it inform your writing? How do your ambitions and aspirations apply to your two different, and both impressive, careers?
LM: My work is technically full time, but I do keep it to more like 30 hours per week, plus some evenings, so I have a little time left over to do my own things. I do the job because it feels useful and practical. My position is not fancy, even though I’ve been there on and off for more than 20 years.
I keep my work there really modest and really detail-oriented. I do a lot of proofreading and copy editing. It does require quick turnarounds during the day for press releases and action alerts that have to go out soon. We do a huge volume of those things. And so it’s busy, but I don’t manage anyone else. I’m no one’s boss.
The beautiful thing about it is that it allows me to do things that I believe in without having to actually march along the street, holding a sign or chaining myself to a bulldozer or anything like that. I don’t prefer those things. I’ve always felt really sheepish and embarrassed in activist or protest situations. It’s just not really a natural fit for me. I don’t really like sloganeering, but I really do believe in the things that we do at work. I’m really inspired by the people I work with, who are mostly scientists and lawyers. I just want to do something useful. I’ve always felt the writing I do is just pure self-indulgence. It’s just pure happiness. There’s nothing about it that isn’t selfish to me. I do exactly what I want [when I write]. I just also need to do stuff that’s practical and it’s also nice to have a salary and health insurance. I love my work at the center, but I’m no conservation superstar or anything. I’m just a worker bee.
Growing up in Baltimore, my world of Westerns was replete with white cowboys. When the idea for my novel Book of the Little Axe came to me, white men filled my first imaginings. This was despite knowing that the story of Western America is much more than the circumscribed narrative of white man versus everything in his path. I had to do the work of undoing all the tropes, bad history, the stereotypes, and in developing my story, I found myself in awe of all the writers before me who found and created stories of non-whites in a West that isn’t always easy to traverse or love.
In researching my novel, I came across writings on Edward Rose, a Black man who was also a member of the Crow tribe. I learned that Rose was a guide to many of the early Western “explorers,” yet somehow he’s disappeared from most historians’ accounts of the time. Rose is featured in Book of the Little Axe where I attempt to illustrate the interconnectedness of multiple worlds and challenge how we think of the West.
I hope the 9 books I’ve chosen by Native writers and writers of color will do for you what they did for me: open you just a little to the possibility of a broader definition of what it means to be of an expansive, bountiful, multifaceted land where our stories are embraced.
I remember the first time reading this novel, my heart felt like it was in my throat. It’s thrilling, haunting and redemptive in the best and most vengeful way. Yes, I love revenge! Set on a reservation in North Dakota, the story is told by a thirteen-year-old Ojibwe boy whose mother has been brutally raped. Like any good Western, there are good guys and bad guys, but the good guys in this story are a family who love deeply and who find themselves impotent in the face of violence. The story grapples with the startling numbers of indigenous women who are victims of violent crimes, as well as the implications of a landmark Supreme Court case that limits prosecution of crimes committed on indigenous lands. As a lawyer myself, Erdrich taught me an additional thing or two about America’s quite fallible case law. To entertain and to teach is the novelist’s sweet spot. And Erdrich does this by giving life to a story through unforgettable characters who have big hearts.
Vivid and alarming, Rao introduces us to two girls who find themselves part of a unique friendship in Indravalli, a small village in modern-day India. If you read lots of immigrant literature, the story of two impoverished girls struggling to make it isn’t all too unfamiliar, but Rao manages to zoom in with a tight lens to show us the stifling existence of domestic life for these two very courageous girls. When the story nods toward the United States, I, like someone who forgets not to buy into the myth of America, grow hopeful. Seattle will save these girls, won’t it?! But Rao manages to both invite and destroy symbols of the American West. She wields this power with a series of twists and turns through a network of human trafficking that take us through a violent and rugged Western America, while keeping our hearts hopeful that these two girls will make it back to each other.
There is something restorative about reading Harjo’s words on Cree history and her ruminations on the intertwining lives of African and indigenous peoples. I smiled a lot while reading this memoir, not that it wasn’t heartbreaking at times, but it was as if I was remembering things I’d once known and was happy to be reminded again. “Magical realism” is what some might call Harjo’s more memorable encounters with the spiritual realm, but Harjo helps those of us who believe in an ancestral world remember our connections. She says she wishes in her writing for the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors to pass through to my language, my life” and Harjo accomplishes this.
“Oh Ishmael!” is what I exclaimed after reading this book. It feels like a mad mad carnival and yet the writing is so smart and so devilish in its critique of the usual American Western narrative that you can’t help but be smitten by this story. Reed tells the story of Loop Garoo Kid, a Black man who seeks revenge on Drag Gibson, a white cattleman who murders children. The story has no regard for time or place and feels like a smoldering jazz tune that is at once joyful and raw in its riffing criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. What a mind Reed must have to write such a wild jaunt! Reading it for a second time, I feel like it could’ve been written last year and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to revisit it. But as is often the case with the best books, they find you when you need them most.
McConigley won the Pen Open Book Award for this collection, largely about South Asians living in the west. The book opens when a young Indian girl has an encounter with white boys in Wyoming who don’t seem to know or want to know the difference between her brown and any other brown. They tell her to go back to picking cotton. McConigley handles these moments with care, for her writing is both lyrical and profound. Many of the stories, rich and strange, are set in the Wyoming where McConigley spent her childhood.
Wounded is a Western in the truest sense. Set in Wyoming, John Hunt is a Black horseman who lives with his uncle and is making a peaceful life for himself after the death of his wife. Everett offers us a twisting story of out-of-towners who come to wreak havoc, and in the face of all this, we find apathy, revenge, horses, big sky, big hearts, and lots of American-style prejudices. Hunt is a character you’ll like immediately though you might not always know why.
These stories, set in Colorado, will crush your little heart. And still you won’t want to turn away. Fajardo-Anstine’s work is gorgeous, and I found characters who, like the women in my family, heal with roots, don’t believe in coincidence, and pray in many languages. Their lives are complicated and messy and the love and tenderness between the women in these stories are a clear reflection of the love and tenderness Fajardo-Anstine put into this fine piece of work.
Wilkerson’s book on America’s Great Migration is a must read for anyone interested in understanding why America looks as it does. Wilkerson details the journeys of three African Americans to New York, Illinois and California from the South, while shining a journalistic lens to the larger Black migration from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s. Having grown up in Baltimore and a frequent visitor to cities like Chicago and Oakland, I began to better appreciate the cultural landscapes of Northern and Western cities based on the migratory paths from certain locations in the Deep South, as well as to understand that like other periods of immigration, Black migration proved just as challenging. Though it is not a book set only in the West, I don’t think you can really understand any part of America without this tour de force.
I probably don’t have to tell you this, but great poetry can offer a reader as much of a thrill as a kick-ass novel. And Diaz is a kick-ass poet. These poems are earnest and vibrant with stanzas that produce heartbreak and sometimes even sobering laughter. Diaz writes about her brother’s addiction and the impact on her family. The lines she writes makes us want to call our loved ones, for they show us the commitments and bonds and resentments that make family, family. Diaz offers a rich palette of modern Native life, both on and off the reservation.
Growing up in the East, I knew little about how indigenous bodies are hunted by external and internal forces so much like in my own community; this hunting makes for both sad and triumphant stories. As a Black woman, these poems felt both familiar as in I know these people, but also new, as in why don’t I know all this? I am humbled by a collection that shows us how the west can be a setting for both a people’s nadir and also a people’s healing.
The mother worried passersby would hear the full-throated accusations and mean begging and prolonged shrieking and think to themselves, Well, that is a household I do not envy. Hugging their coats tighter around themselves. Walking quickly. Their white breath before them.
To not be envied! The loneliest hell.
We’ve got to do something, they said to each other, once the children were in bed.
Mmhmm. We will.
The mother made stew. The mother made pasta. The mother made hot dogs with French fries. The mother ordered in. The father halving and then quartering his portions. The father laying his knife and fork across his plate, their closeness funnily sensual.
The children leapfrogging from table to sofa. Ignoring their food or demanding it be destroyed. Taken away. Put on trial, convicted, sent to the gallows.
Eat! That was how it usually started. The mother saying, Eat!
She’d once seen her sister tell her own son to fuck off. It was a memory the mother held close, almost dearly. He was young enough to clutch a toy truck to himself. Young enough to not know what the word meant. Young enough to peel into laughter. Her sister’s eyes twin pools of dark glitter. Her sister’s mouth firmly shut and her nostrils pulsing, as if she were out of breath and trying to hide it.
That’s right, Eddy, you fuck right off.
The mother had tried to tell that story over the years. She never could get it right. It was something to do with her fear of her sister, a terror that felt ancient, beyond her. All of that had started ages ago, in their yellow bedroom with its bare window, which gaped at the mother, her cheek mashed into the musty carpet. Her sister’s breath hot in her ear.
There just wasn’t an end to the story, was the thing. No punch line, no bowing. What was the point?
Perhaps their mother should have yelled at her sister more, back then, all those years of a shared bedroom. This the mother considers this as she attacks a cheap pot with a sour rag. Nothing is ever nice! she rails. I can’t have one thing! A macaroni noodle is stuck to the toe of her sock. That is the straw that, you know.
She begins to narrate the evening in a loud, bitter tone. Here I am cleaning up after you! I have tried to feed you and now I must tether myself to this sink until all the dishes are done! For if I don’t, there will be no dishes for the next meal you will shit on! I asked you what you wanted to eat! Why did I do that? Am I some kind of a sucker? (The middle child begins to beg for a lollipop.) What is in this for me? She turns to face them. They are watching her like they watch the television. Flat, shining eyes. Mouths twitching. The husband drifts by; he is determined not to join in the yelling on this night.
Poor Eddy! With time and the arrival of her own children, the memory still smarts. There is no retroactive sympathy for her sister, even as the mother curses at her own children. His fat hands and skinned knees! What had he done to prompt a mother to say such a thing?
As if there were ever a reason!
Now he is a pimpled teen. At Thanksgiving he made fun of the mother’s mashed potatoes. I can tell these are from a box, he announced, swiping a finger through. He arranged his body to take up all three sofa cushions. The bottoms of his socks were charcoal black. Let it go, her husband whispered to her in the kitchen, patting her shoulder as if she were a neighbor he disliked.
I won’t let this one go! she shouts now. Her throat aches. The point is, she was a different sort of mother. Does that even matter to you? she says, nearly screaming. She holds a wooden spoon; the dog eats the noodle from her sock.
You’re an idiot, her sister had said, pushing the mother’s face into the carpet. It stung; it smelled of dust and fiber and dog pee. Say it, her sister said. Her voice quiet, like she was letting a secret.
I’m an idiot, the mother said. I’m an idiot, okay?
There is a window above the sink. The evenings started so early this time of year. The mother watches the woman reflected in the dark pane approach. She leans over the sink. The mother decides she deserves a closer look.
For poets, springtime is especially sacred. With big book releases, National Poetry Month, and the conclusion of the slam season, there is so much for readers and writers to look forward to. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve seen readings canceled, book tours halted and budgets slashed. Thankfully, as ever, poets remain resilient. In the wake of the pandemic, events have gone virtual thanks to the bonds of community and love for words.
For those who are unfamiliar, these online events are a great way to get into poetry and connect more deeply with the community. So much discovery happens at these events, and many of your favorite poets have gotten their start on the slam stage. These stages have historically been spaces for healing and care, which is something we need so much right now.
Here’s a list of events, readings, and livestreams to get your poetry fix throughout the rest of the pandemic. (Most of the events below are often pay what you wish, or free.)
Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe
Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe is NYC’s landmark Lower East Side poetry venue. It’s been the host of poets of color since 1973. In place of their in-person Wednesday and Friday night poetry slams, they’re holding online open mics on Mondays and Thursdays via Zoom. Soon they will be also offering online classes, music, and monologues. Their online information can be found here.
Bowery Poetry Club
Bowery Poetry Club is another NYC staple. Nestled in a former Formica factory, poets typically take the stage on Sunday and Monday Nights. Now, Bowery has rotating programming Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursdays. They are hosting low-cost workshops and open mics. You can find the most up to date information on their Instagram.
Da Poetry Lounge
For those favoring the west coast, Da Poetry Lounge hosts the largest weekly open mic in the United States. Originating in 1998 and based in Los Angeles, poets take the stage on Tuesday nights. The third Tuesday of the month is the poetry slam, while the rest are open mics. They’ve pivoted to online, operating via Instagram live.
Not A Cult Workshops
Not a Cult is a small publishing company based in Los Angeles. They have released work from writers Yesika Salgado, Dante Basco, Aziza Barnes, as well as many others. They also hold frequent events within their partner space, Junior High. With the closure of Junior High, Not a Cult has begun offering donation-based workshops online. Facilitators include the talents of Jon Sands, Jose Olivarez, and Karla Cordero. The schedule is updated weekly on their Instagram.
Girls Write Now: Salons & Live
Girls Write Now pairs underserved girls and gender-non conforming young adults with established writers, forging lifelong mentorships. They prepare the teens for college, help cultivate their craft and publish their work in anthology series. Girls Write Now will be hosting readings via their Live series. They also host a Salon series introducing guest artists, celebrating poets like Mahogany L. Browne and Rosebud Ben-Oni.
Jon Sands: Ps and Qs
Since the beginning of stay-at-home orders, poet Jon Sands has gathered his colleagues to converse with him on Instagram live. He calls it Ps and Qs. Sands gets intimate with other poets every Wednesday through Friday.
So Many Poetry Slams
With so many great slams, it didn’t feel fair to pick just one. The poetry slam is a competitive form of spoken word, where teams gather and compete to go to the national convention. The season usually runs from September to May. As the slam season comes to a close in May, just know that folks will still be competing at the International Poetry Slam. It’s slated for August and has yet to be canceled. The Philly Pigeon, Brooklyn Poetry Slam, Toronto Poetry Slam, Boston Poetry Slam have all moved online. Youth poetry slams Louder Than a Bomb and Get Lit’s Classic Slam are slated to be held via Zoom sessions.
The idea for my debut novel, The Down Days (a magical realist whodunit set in quarantined Cape Town), came about after chancing upon an exhibition at a medical history museum about the effects of epidemics on the history and culture of South Africa. The idea that Cape Town was so profoundly changed and shaped by disease struck a chord. Like the fact that, if it hadn’t been for scurvy, the city would have never been colonized as a pit stop between East and West.
While researching the history of disease (in South Africa and across the globe) further, three things stood out for me: Firstly, how misinformation spreads like wildfire during epidemics. Secondly, how nations throughout history have repeatedly used epidemics as excuses to feed existing prejudices. And thirdly, how periods of great upheaval, when normal rules no longer seem to apply, give ordinary people the chance to shed their skins (for better or for worse). In a way, I think, we are all Russian dolls composed of layers of masks that hide us from ourselves and others, that protect us, remake us, absolve us. In times of crisis, we surprise even ourselves to see what we can transform into.
The characters in my novel, apart from finding themselves in a situation where they are physically forced to wear masks in public, all take on new identities, new masks to navigate a post-pandemic world. Masks to survive, to hide from their pasts, from the truth and also from their grief.
One could argue that most novels are about masks in some way. And that the best books allow their readers a chance to put on new masks or skins and be transformed.
A family of alligator wrestlers run a gator-themed island theme park in the Florida Everglades. When the matriarch and star of the show dies, the family starts to unravel. A magical realist coming-of-age tale about the lies and myths we tell ourselves and our families for love and what happens when these masks/myths become undone. It’s also about the masks we put on to hide from our grief and the ones we cling to to insulate ourselves from the realities of the outside world.
Two sideshow acts fall in love in 1800s America. Inspired by the true history of “Farini’s Friendly Zulus,” this is the story of a South African Zulu man, exiled from his tribe, who travels to the West where he makes a living performing as a Zulu in a sideshow act. As he spends his days wearing and acting out the masks society has created for him, he is continually getting reminded that the audience doesn’t want to know who he really is, that they just want spectacle. Mda manages to get a book about terrible historical injustices and the trauma of being regarded as less than human to ring with hope and magic and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
A man without a face falls from the sky wearing a helmet of flames, and then both literally and figuratively sheds his skin. Can we abandon the masks of race, nation, and class we are born with and become something new? Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel is about all this and then some. Novelist Kamila Shamsie calls it “that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.”
Truth is stranger than fiction in this memoir of a Brooklyn travel writer who returns to Zimbabwe to rescue his ageing parents from violence/ruin during the land invasion upheavals in 2002 only to discover that his parents are much more resilient than he thought – having turned their backpackers into a brothel (complete with a pot plantation). This is a book about resilience in times of strife. How we change and adapt and renew ourselves when necessity calls for it. About the everyday heroism of surviving in interesting times. And the ability to laugh at the absurdities of life.
In this novel, the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction winner, a young Jewish escape artist smuggles himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and lands up with his Brooklyn cousin in New York City where they grow up to create a comic book empire, featuring a masked superhero, The Escapist. It’s about the masks we dream up to help us escape (from war, from ourselves, from the masks society expects us to wear). And it’s about finally finding the courage needed to break free.
A detective has to see the unseen in this metaphysical murder mystery set in a post-Soviet style world where two cities exist in the same space at the same time. Citizens can see each other but are forbidden to look. When a murdered woman ends up on the wrong side of the border, the mask that the detective has been forced to wear since birth has to slip.
In this classic Nobel Prize-winning novel, Kazuo Ishiguro creates a character for whom it’s a point of pride never to let his mask slip and admit the truth of his own emotions, even to himself. In the summer of 1956, an ageing butler goes on a motoring holiday to visit an old colleague. The journey becomes a chance to reflect on his past and the mistakes he made throughout his long career in servitude. Ishiguro slowly peels back the layers of masks the protagonist has been wearing to protect himself from hard truths.
The mask of small town America (with something sinister lurking underneath the surface) has been a favorite theme for horror writers for decades, and Stephen King is a master of the trope. In this classic, the small town of Derry is terrorized by a supernatural being in a clown skin. But the seemingly bucolic town itself hides many evils, from prejudice and indifference (there are many scenes in which good people look the other way) to violence.
As I was reading Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, a pandemic swallowed the news cycle, infiltrated my thoughts and implanted itself into the arc of the story, inseparable now from the story of a young woman struggling to find her place in her career, family, and love relationship. Such is the nature of modern life, the novel suggests. For its narrator, life proceeds in app platforms, work chat streams, text messages, media, memories, and of course, IRL interaction—and this is reflected in the novel’s fragmented form. Chang often writes in succinct bursts of narration, cutting through the din, allowing incisive commentary about racism, sexism, and the everyday multitudes of being Asian American.
Cathy Erway: Your book is written in fragments—the story of the protagonist’s journey from a technology reporter in the Bay area to following her boyfriend to upstate New York for his grad school is interspersed with flashbacks, reflection and often snippets of media, like historical records. Do you think that in this day in age, our lives and our decisions are more influenced by the things we’ve read, at some point in time?
Alexandra Chang: I do think that’s the case, at least for me. I, in any given day, will read bits from articles, read Tweets, go on Instagram, watch TV, then read a book. There are so many sources of information that I’m taking in during any given period of time, and I might not be aware of each individual one affecting my state of mind or an opinion that I might develop. The form allows for a lot of different sources to fold into the narrative in a way that, for me, felt more natural to the way that I take in information.
I was also interested in the fragmented form because it’s really malleable and can dramatize the psychological and emotional state. The fragments dramatize the ways the narrator in the book is grasping to find a sense of self, and then at times failing, and how she’s looking to various sources, whether it’s in her own past or something that her parents or coworkers say or doing research.
CE: As the narrator is struggling to feel at home after leaving her job and the city that felt like home to her to live with her boyfriend across the country, there is a fragment from Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, Woman Warrior. Did her work have an influence on yours? I noticed there weren’t too many other novels excerpted.
AC: I read Woman Warrior when I was an undergraduate, in my sophomore or junior year. Before that, I had never read a memoir by a Chinese-American woman… It was a foundational text to me and a book that I have gone back to time and again, so it felt apt to include a bit of it in the novel.
CE:Did you consider writing this story as a memoir? There are a lot of parallels between your life and that of the narrator’s — being a reporter for tech publications, then traveling across the country to live with your now-husband as he attended grad school.
AC: No, I never considered writing it as a memoir, mostly because I didn’t think my life was really interesting enough to be put down as memoir. I am also not as familiar with the genre and form. For me, fiction is where I feel comfortable, and where I can access and hopefully put down on the page some emotional truths about my existence and the way I see the world without having to exactly adhere to my own experiences. In a lot of ways the book drew from my life, but in many other ways it strays and it’s stylized, and in that way it’s fictional—it feels very fictional to me.
CE: Speaking of fragments in your book that are historical records, there are a couple pages that had back-to-back clippings from American newspapers the late 19th century, discussing Chinese American immigrants. Then the narrator follows it with:
“Excerpt 1: Pit minority races against one another to benefit white supremacy. The creation of the model minority. Excerpt 2: Thirteen years later: This model minority no longer benefits white supremacy. Therefore, no more allowed in this country.”
Why do you think it was important to include these pieces, specifically?
AC: As the narrator is trying to figure out her place in the world, she seeks out these historical documents and sees these parallels between the past and the present and [those two clippings] are important for her to recognize her place in the world as tied to a history of white supremacy in the United States.
Racism against Asian Americans is not something that exists outside of racism against all marginalized people.
For me growing up, I was in predominantly white spaces—and this is reflected in the book in certain places—that I did sometimes have this desire to fit in or to be accepted in white society. As I got older, I started to realize that chasing assimilation was not actually the way I wanted to live. Also, racism against Asian Americans is not something that exists outside of racism against all marginalized people, so in this moment, the narrator is pointing out and recognizing how racism against Asian Americans is part of a larger system of white supremacy, how white supremacy can utilize one race against another.
CE: Did you happen to read a recent op-ed by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang that is receiving a lot of pushback from the Asian American community?
AC: Yes, that’s an example of what I was talking about, where there is this desire for assimilation and to prove one’s humanity and existence to white society. That the burden is on Asian Americans to do this work. I could have related to that feeling when I was younger, but I have very much grown out of that. It’s definitely not the message I would want Asian Americans to hear and to follow, and I was glad to see such a concerted pushback from the community.
In the book, the narrator is concerned with these individual moments of racism that happen to her as an Asian American woman, but she’s also on this path to better understanding how that fits into this larger system of racism which affects more than just her. It doesn’t seem like Andrew Yang has considered this yet.
CE: Unfortunately, your book’s publication coincides with a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. How does it feel to publish a book that explores Asian American identity in a time where racism against this group is making headlines?
AC: It’s strange and sad to think that my book might be more “relevant” now because of the increasing visibility of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. The book takes place is in 2012 and 2013, and a lot of it is about the ways in which the narrator experiences and navigates veiled forms of racism—microaggressions from supposedly well-intentioned people, lack of visibility, lack of access to opportunities, an overarching feeling of loneliness. At one point in revision, I cut a scene where a friend of the narrator’s, during the heat of an argument, calls her a “chink.” It felt too melodramatic to me at the time, too much of a departure from the more minor, but persistent and insistent, experiences of racism in the book. Today, seeing Asians in America not only increasingly called this and other racist slurs but also physically assaulted—that scene feels, sadly, ordinary.
CE:In the book, the narrator struggles a bit with her interracial relationship. There is one passage where the narrator observes that her white boyfriend, J, can’t hear the difference in tones when she says something in Chinese. It feels like a loaded description. Do you think this reflects an inherent inability on his part to really understand her or her culture?
A lot of this book is about this experience of struggling to find a way to exist in the world authentically beyond outside perception.
AC: I didn’t necessarily write it with that specific intention. I wrote that section from personal experience, knowing that my white husband and many white friends aren’t able to hear the differences in the inflections of Mandarin. But there’s another moment where J persists in calling the narrator the family nickname even though he pronounces it differently than her family does. That is a moment that exists in this gray area, where he isn’t able to access this person who she feels she is with her family, but he persists in calling her this name. So for her, she starts to think of it as this different version of herself. I do think all of these moments add up throughout the book to show how even in this intimate relationship, they can’t ever fully understand one another.
CE: Your novel begins with a fragment about how people underestimate the narrator’s height. Have people underestimated you?
AC: What’s interesting about that first paragraph is that it has always been the first paragraph of this novel, it has never changed. It speaks to this struggle that the narrator has in defining who she is, while she being very aware of the ways people perceive and misperceive her. It’s also about these distances in how she wants to be and how she experiences the world based off of other people’s/society’s perspective of her.
I have been in many situations where I’ve been underestimated or made to feel small. In the workplace, for example, not being acknowledged for the work that I’ve done or having to do a lot more in order to be acknowledged or rewarded. A lot of this book is about this experience of struggling to find a way to exist in the world authentically beyond outside perception, and of course, that is something that I also still struggle with today.
CE: Is there anything else you want to say about your book?
AC: I wanted to add that there seems to be a renaissance in Asian American literature right now and I feel like very lucky to be part of this resurgence—there are so many books by Asian American authors that have come out this year and the months to come, so I just wanted to shout out a few of the ones I’ve read and loved, including: Meng Jin’s Little Gods, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Kevin Nguyen’s New Waves, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, and Maxine Mei-Fung Chung’s The Eighth Girl. I’m also excited to read Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, and Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors.
Even though this book addresses a lot about the experience of feeling invisible or feeling underestimated as an Asian American woman, what is really invigorating and heartening right now is that I do see many more stories by Asian American authors coming out and to be a part of that is really great.
When I was growing up in West Virginia, I thought nobody wanted to read books set in my home of rural Appalachia. All the stories seemed to be about people in cities, living far more important and exciting lives. By the time I’d fallen in love with words enough to begin writing fiction, this lack of representation allowed a certain shame to settle in. A quiet voice telling me that my experiences didn’t matter. It took years, and several perspective altering books, to dispel those notions.
When I was writing The Poison Flood, a novel about a reclusive musician whose small West Virginia town is threatened by the environmental disaster of a toxic chemical spill, I was aware of the tremendous privilege and responsibility involved in writing a version of Appalachia that was nuanced, sympathetic and honest to my experience. Nearly twenty-five million people across thirteen states make up the region of Appalachia. That’s a lot of stories.
The title may put readers in mind of West Virginia legends such as The Mothman or Flatwood’s Monster, but Sheryl Monk’s collection is largely based in stark realism. Only the title story, an apocalyptic fever dream where a woman and her husband catch and display monsters in a nightmare carnival might be considered speculative fiction or even horror. The monsters depicted here are often adults, either violent men like the outlaw brothers in “Justice Boys” who menace a lone mother trying to take her sick infant to the hospital or the disappointing father from “Little Miss Bobcat,” a standout story where an impoverish elementary school girl tries to save up enough money to win her school’s Little Miss Bobcat crown. Monk is often showing young women coming to terms with the disappointing nature of their elders. In “Barry Gibb is the Cutest Bee Gee” the jaded female relatives who sunbathe with the adolescent narrator try to instruct her in all the wrong ways about love. The book makes actual monsters seem less captivating than the flawed humans who are frightening in their commonplace inability to be kinder to one another.
I was an ambitious young writer trying to find the courage to send out my stories when I first read this collection. I’d never encountered anything like it, but neither had anyone else. By following a similar structure to connected works like Winnesburg, Ohio, or Olive Kitteridge, Pollock explores the desperate aspects of rural America from an insider’s point of view. There are many depraved moments, but even the most outrageous scenes manage to avoid the feeling of exploitation. Pollock’s characters often act in reprehensible ways, but there is empathy here for the young narrator of “Real Life” who only wanted to watch Godzilla at the drive-in but is forced to fight another boy by his father, the addicts searching for a fix in “Bactine,” the weightlifter pressured into using steroids by his abusive father in “Discipline” and the lovesick loner of the title story. Together, the tales weave a panoramic view of a community on the brink of collapse and those caught in the decline.
While poaching deer to keep meat in the freezer, Daryl Moody accidentally shoots and kills the brother of Dwayne Brewer, the dangerous antagonist of Joy’s novel. Joy uses this thriller premise to explore Appalachian people’s connection to the land and their loyalty to family and friends, even when that loyalty ruins all they strive for. The true revelation of the book is Dwayne Brewer, who despite being an obvious villain, Joy imbues with intelligence and a warped moral code created by years of injustice. In a world full of chaos, Dwayne believes a man must make his own brand of reason. Such a character might have been only brawn and menace. Instead, Joy writes an antagonist who philosophizes on the nature of evil, often choosing a wicked path while knowing he should act differently. Consider an early scene that introduces Dwayne drinking beers at the local Walmart. After watching a teenager abuse a younger boy, Dwayne follows the bully into the bathroom, makes him remove his new shoes at gunpoint and submerge them in shitty toilet water. This need to right the injustices of the world is Dwayne’s main motivation throughout the novel. If life had been a little less vicious, readers can speculate that Dwayne might have chosen a better path.
Winner of The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and The Weatherford Award for Fiction, Crystal Wilkinson’s novel follows several generations of African American women living in Opulence, Kentucky from the 1960s through the 1990s. The novel is episodic in scope, each vignette a specific moment of importance in the Goode or Clark family’s story. While each chapter focuses on one individual, Wilkinson employs an omniscient narration that occasionally drifts about the scene allowing us brief access to many of the characters’ interior thoughts and emotions. In the hands of a lesser writer, this approach might keep the novel from feeling cohesive, but Wilkinson manages to make the moments of church dinners, births, love affairs and break-ups carry the same weight in fiction as they do in our everyday lives. The novel must be read for its sentences. Entrancing, lyrical and other adjectives often used to praise writing feel inadequate in expressing the captivating nature of Wilkinson’s prose.
After missing out on college to take care of his ailing father, Isaac English decides to leave Buell, Pennsylvania, the fictional, economically destitute steel town Meyer uses to represent the very real parts of America abandoned by prosperity. Recruiting his best friend, Billy Poe, the two set out on a doomed exodus that is sidetracked by an act of violence. Meyer smoothly transitions to others in Buell like Chief Bud Harris, who is busy policing a town with increasing crime, and Isaac’s sister, Lee, currently attending Yale University and experiencing the uncomfortable truth that her birthplace will keep her from fitting into her new privileged environment. Those circulating the more prominent Isaac and Billy could feel like distracted digressions, but none of the large cast are underdeveloped. Written in a Modernist influenced stream of consciousness reminiscent of literary giants like Wolfe, Joyce, and Faulkner, Meyer’s prose never delves into imitation. Social class, masculinity, family obligation, and the other well-explored literary themes never feel tired. Frankly, it’s the sort of debut novel that makes other writers jealous.
After nearly two decades in prison, 35-year-old Jodi McCarthy is released into a world she no longer recognizes. While on a trip to reconnect with the younger brother of a lost lover, Jodi meets Miranda Matheson, a struggling single mother fighting a former country music star for custody of their children. Jodi and Miranda’s romance sparks in barrooms and motels, but drab locales never detract from the moments of grace found in their connection. Maren, who spent years teaching creative writing at the Federal Prison Camp Alderson in West Virginia, understands the challenges Jodi experiences with sudden freedom. Whether it’s being overwhelmed by menu options at a Waffle House, or Jodi adjusting to having personal agency over where she travels, the novel shows real authenticity in these moments. With language as lush as the Appalachian landscape, it’s a profoundly engaging book.
In his most well-known and powerful novel, Rash introduces readers to Serena Pemberton, the vengeful wife of a 1930s North Carolina lumber baron. Serena is both intelligent and rattlesnake cold from the earliest pages where she witnesses her husband kill the father of Rachel Harmon, a young woman he’s impregnated during his short time in the country. Throughout the novel, Serena holds an almost supernatural sway over the land, its animals, and the men of the lumber camp, yet patriarchal values stifle her ambitions. Eventually, jealousy turns Serena’s aggression toward Rachel and her husband’s illegitimate child. The historical narrative deals heavily in these themes of revenge, oppression, and class warfare while bravely allowing Serena to be a multifaceted, yet unlikable protagonist. It also contains a brilliant conclusion that feels both unexpected and inevitable.
A Children’s Bible (Chapter 1, Excerpt) by Lydia Millet
Once we lived in a summer country. In the woods there were treehouses, and on the lake there were boats.
Even the smallest canoe could take us down to the ocean. We’d paddle across the lake, over a marsh, down a stream, and come to the river’s mouth. Where the water met the sky. We’d run along the beach on a salt breeze, leaving our boats on the sand.
We found the skull of a dinosaur. Or maybe a porpoise. We found skate eggs and shark-eye shells and sea glass.
Before sunset we’d paddle back to the lake, returning for dinner. Loons sent their haunting calls across the water. To wash the sand from our ankles, we jumped off the dock. And screamed. We dove and flipped as the sky turned violet.
Uphill from the dock, deer ambled onto the sweeping lawn. Their grace was deceptive, though: they carried ticks, and ticks carried disease. It could make you crazy, steal your memories, swell your legs. Or droop your face like a basset hound’s.
So when they bent their elegant necks to nibble the grass, some of us shouted taunts. Sprinted toward them, flailing.
Some of us enjoyed seeing them panic. They’d bolt in a high-kicking flight toward the trees, frightened by our power. Some of us cheered as the deer fled.
Not me. I kept silent. I was sorry for them. The ticks weren’t their fault.
What are you? asked his ears. And oh. What am I?
To a deer, people were probably monsters. Certain people, anyway. At times, when a deer saw a man walking in the forest, he might prick up his ears and stand still as a statue. Waiting. Wary. Meaning no harm.
What are you? asked his ears. And oh. What am I?
Sometimes the answer was, You’re dead.
And the deer crumpled to his knees.
A few pets had come with us for the summer: three dogs and a cat, a pissed-off Siamese with a skin condition. Dandruff. We dressed up the dogs in costumes from a wicker chest, but could not dress the cat. She scratched.
One dog got makeup applied to its face, lipstick and blue eye shadow. It was a white-faced dog, so the makeup showed up well. We liked to have an impact. When we were done, the lipstick went back into some mother’s Fendi handbag. We watched her apply it, unaware. That was satisfying.
We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.)
The lady urinated.
“Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?”
Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance.
“Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained.
Those parents were in a hurry, then.
“No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head.
“Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?”
“Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.”
The great house had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.
They liked to drink: it was their hobby, or—said one of us—maybe a form of worship. They drank wine and beer and whiskey and gin. Also tequila, rum, and vodka. At midday they called it the hair of the dog. It seemed to keep them contented. Or going, at least. In the evenings they assembled to eat food and drink more.
Dinner was the only meal we had to attend, and even that we resented. They sat us down and talked about nothing. They aimed their conversation like a dull gray beam. It hit us and lulled us into a stupor. What they said was so boring it filled us with frustration, and after more minutes, rage.
Didn’t they know there were urgent subjects? Questions that needed to be asked?
If one of us said something serious, they dismissed it.
MayIpleasebeexcused.
Later the talk grew louder. Freed of our influence, some of them emitted sudden, harsh barks. Apparently, laughing. From the wraparound porch, with its bamboo torches and hanging ferns and porch swings, moth-eaten armchairs and blue-light bug zappers, the barks of laughter carried. We heard them from the treehouses and tennis courts and from the field of beehives a slow neighbor woman tended in the daytime, muttering under the veil of her beekeeping hat. We heard them from behind the cracked panes of the dilapidated greenhouse or on the cool black water of the lake, where we floated in our underwear at midnight.
I liked to prowl the moonlit grounds by myself with a flashlight, bouncing its spot over walls with white-shuttered windows, bicycles left lying on the grass, cars sitting quiet on the wide crescent drive. When I came into earshot of the laughter, I’d wonder that any of them could actually have said something funny.
As the evenings wore on, some parents got it into their heads to dance. A flash of life would move their lumpen bodies. Sad spectacle. They flopped, blasting their old-time music. “Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh yeah.”
The ones with no flashes of life sat in their chairs watching the dancers. Slack-faced, listless—for practical purposes, deceased.
But less embarrassing.
Some parents paired off and crept into the second-floor bedrooms, where a few boys among our number spied on them from between the slats of closet doors. Saw them perform their dark acts.
At times they felt stirrings. I knew this. Although they did not admit it.
More often, repugnance.
Most of us were headed to junior or senior year after the summer was over, but a few hadn’t even hit puberty—there was a range of ages. In short, some were innocents. Others performed dark acts of their own.
Those were not as repugnant.
Hiding our parentage was a leisure pursuit, but one we took seriously. Sometimes a parent would edge near, threatening to expose us. Risking the revelation of a family bond. Then we ran like rabbits.
Hiding our parentage was a leisure pursuit, but one we took seriously.
We had to hide the running, though, in case our haste betrayed us, so truer to say we slipped out quietly. When one of my parents appeared, my technique was: pretend to catch sight of someone in the next room. Move in a natural manner toward this figment of my imagination, making a purposeful face. Go through the door. And fade away.
The first week of our stay, in early June, several parents had mounted the stairs to the rambling attic where we slept, some of us on bunk beds but more of us on the floor. We heard their voices calling out to the youngest. “Coming to tuck you i-in!”
We hid under our covers, blankets pulled over our heads, and some of us yelled rudely. The parents retreated, possibly offended. A sign went up on the door, parent free zone, and we spoke to them sternly in the morning.
“You have the run of the mansion,” said Terry, calmly but forcefully. “Your own private bedrooms. Your own private attached baths.”
He wore glasses and was squat and very pretentious. Still, he looked commanding as he stood there, his short arms crossed, at the head of the table.
The parents sipped their coffee. It made sucking noises.
“We have one room. For all of us. One single room!” intoned Terry. “For pity’s sake. Give us our blessed space. In that minuscule scrap of territory. Think of the attic as a reservation. Imagine you’re the white conquerors who brutally massacred our people. And we’re the Indians.”
“Native Americans,” said a mother.
“Insensitive metaphor,” said another. “Culturally.”
“One of the mothers has a clubfoot?” asked Jen. “Huh. I never noticed.”
“What is a clubfoot?” asked Low.
His name was actually Lorenzo, but that was too long, plus he was the tallest one of all of us, so we called him Low. Rafe had coined it. Low didn’t mind.
“It drags,” said Rafe. “That shoe with a thick heel. You know? That fat one’s Sukey’s mother, I bet.”
“Sure, sure. Is not,” said Sukey. “My mother’s way better than that shit. My mother could kick that mother’s ass.”
“It can’t be no one’s mother,” objected Low.
“Well. It could,” said Sukey.
“There are some single ones,” pointed out Juicy. He was called that because of his saliva, which was plentiful. He liked to spit.
“And childless couples,” said Jen. “Sadly, barren.”
“Destined to die without issue,” added Terry, who fancied himself a wordsmith. His real name was Something the Third. As if that wasn’t bad enough, “the Third” translated to “Tertius” in Latin. Then “Tertius” shortened to “Terry.” So obviously that was what they called him.
He kept a private journal in which his feelings were recorded, possibly. The possibility was widely mocked.
“Yeah, but I saw the fat one in the kitchen groping Sukey’s father,” said Rafe.
“Untrue,” said Sukey. “My father’s dead.”
“Been dead for years,” nodded Jen.
“And still dead now,” said David.
“Stepfather, then. Whatever,” said Rafe.
“They’re not married.”
“A technicality.”
“I saw them too,” said Low. “She had her hand right on his pants. The package. Right on there. Guy had a raging boner.”
“Gross,” said Juicy. He spat.
“Goddammit, Juice. You almost hit my toe,” said Low. “Demerit.”
“Your fault for wearing sandals,” said Juicy. “Mega lame. A demerit to you.”
We had a system of accounting, a chart on a wall. There were merits and demerits. A merit was for an outrage successfully committed, a demerit for an act that should bring on humiliation. Juicy got merits for drooling into cocktails undetected, while Low got demerits for kissing up to a father. Probably not his own—Low’s parentage was a well-kept secret. But he’d been spotted asking a guy with male-pattern baldness for wardrobe advice.
Low was a baby-faced giant of Mongolian descent, adopted from Kazakhstan. He was the worst dresser among us, rocking a seventies look that involved tie-dyed tank tops and short-shorts with white piping. Some made of terrycloth.
We wouldn’t have been able to keep the parent game going if not for the parents’ near-total disinterest. They had a hands-off attitude. “Where’s Alycia?” I heard a mother say.
Alycia was the oldest of us, seventeen. And already a freshman in college.
“I’ve barely seen her since we got here,” went on the voice. “What is it, two weeks now?”
The mother was speaking from the breakfast room, out of my field of view. I liked that room a lot, with its long, oaken table and glass walls on three sides. You could see the bright sparkle of the lake through the glass walls, and sunlight shifted through the moving branches of an ancient willow that shaded the house.
But the room was teeming with parents every morning. We couldn’t use it.
I tried for a voice ID, but when I edged into the doorway the conversation had turned to other matters—war in the news, a friend’s tragic abortion.
Alycia had gone AWOL to the nearest town, hitching a ride from a yardman. The town was a gas station, a drugstore that was rarely open, and a dive bar, but she had a boyfriend there. Some decades older than she was.
We covered for her as well as we could. “Alycia’s in the shower,” announced Jen at the table, the night she left.
We checked the parents’ expressions, but no cigar. Poker faces.
David, the next night: “Alycia’s in her bunk with cramps.” Sukey, the third: “Sorry, Alycia’s not coming down. She’s in a pretty bad mood.”
“That girl needs to eat more,” said one woman, spearing a roasted potato. Was she the actual mother?
“She’s thin as a rail,” said a second.
“She doesn’t do that puking thing, does she?” asked a father. “With the vomit?”
Both women shook their heads. Puzzle unsolved.
“Maybe Alycia has two mothers,” said David afterward.
“Two mothers, possibly,” said Val, a tomboy who didn’t say much. Mostly she parroted.
Val was so small and slight it was impossible to tell her age. Unlike the rest of us, she was from somewhere in the country. She mostly liked to climb. High and nimbly—buildings or trees, it didn’t matter. Anything vertical.
“Kid’s like a goddamn monkey,” a father once said, watching her scale the willow.
A group of parents were drinking on the porch.
“A gibbon,” said another. “Or Barbary macaque.”
“White-headed capuchin,” offered a third guy.
“A pygmy marmoset.”
“Juvenile black snub-nosed.”
A mother got fed up. “A shut-your-face,” she said.
We were strict with the parents: punitive measures were taken. Thievery, mockery, contamination of food and drink.
They didn’t notice. And we believed the punishments fit the crimes.
Although the worst of those crimes was hard to pin down and therefore hard to punish correctly—the very quality of their being. The essence of their personalities.
In some arenas we had profound respect. We respected the house, for instance: a grand old fortress, our castle and our keep. Not its furnishings, though. Several of those we opted to destroy.
Whoever had the most merits, at the end of each week, got to choose the next target. What object would it be? Choice Number One: a china statuette of a rosy-cheeked boy in knee breeches, holding a basket of apples and smiling.
Choice Two: a pink-and-green sampler embroidered with a dandelion and, in a swirly script, the words Take a Breath Gently. Blow. Spread Your Dreams and Let Them Grow.
Choice Three: a plump duck decoy with a puffed-out chest and creepy blank eyes, sporting a weird painted-on tuxedo.
“It’s a fat faggot duck,” said Juice. “A bowtie duck. A faggot, like, crooner duck. A Frank Sinatra duck faggot.”
He giggled like a maniac.
Rafe, who was out and proud, told him to shut his trap, homophobe idiot.
The winner was Terry that week, and he chose the apple boy. He fetched a ball-peen hammer from the toolshed and smashed in its head.
The house itself, though, we’d never have harmed. Rafe enjoyed setting fires, but limited his arson to the greenhouse: a pile of hockey sticks and croquet mallets. He also burned stuff in a clearing in the woods—immolated a garden gnome. Its melting plastic gave off thick smoke and a disgusting smell. One of the parents noticed the smoke rising above a stand of pines and elected to stay on the porch, nursing a dry martini.
The smoke dispersed, after a while.
We respected the lake and stream and most of all the ocean. The clouds and the earth, from whose hidden burrows and sharp grass a swarm of wasps might rise, an infestation of stinging ants, or suddenly blueberries.
We respected the treehouses, an elaborate network of well-built structures high up in the forest canopy. They had solid roofs, and ladders and bridges were strung between them to make a village in the sky.
Crude drawings, names, and initials had been etched into their planking by previous vacationers. Those old initials could harsh my mellow fast. Maybe the offspring of the robber barons themselves had carved them—the scions of the emperors of timber or steel or rail, long since turned into baggy triple-chinned matrons of the Upper East Side.
I’d sit up high on a platform, now and then, with others sitting around me, swinging their legs, drinking from soda cans or beer bottles. Idly throwing pebbles at chipmunks. (The little boys put a stop to that, citing animal cruelty.) Braiding each other’s hair, writing on each other’s jeans, painting their fingernails. Trying to sniff glue from the so-called rec room we didn’t use. It never gave you a high.
I’d stare at the initials and feel alone. Even in the crowd. The future flew past in a flash of grim. The clock was ticking, and I didn’t like that clock.
Yes, it was known that we couldn’t stay young. But it was hard to believe, somehow. Say what you like about us, our legs and arms were strong and streamlined. I realize that now. Our stomachs were taut and unwrinkled, our foreheads similar. When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born.
Relatively speaking.
And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no.
Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect?
They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.
The parents had been close in college but hadn’t gotten together as a group since then. Until they picked this season for their offensively long reunion. One had been heard to say: “Our last hurrah.” It sounded like bad acting in a stupid play. Another one non-joked, “After this, we’ll see each other next at someone’s funeral.”
None of them cracked a smile.
Anonymous, we put descriptions of their careers in a hat. It was a collapsible top hat from the toy closet, where many antique artifacts were kept. (We’d found the klaxon there, and BB guns and a worn-out Monopoly.) We wrote the job titles in block letters so that the handwriting couldn’t be easily distinguished, then pulled the papers from the hat and read them out.
A few were professors, with three-month summer vacations. Others went back and forth between their offices and the house. One was a therapist, one a vagina doctor. (A raucous laugh from Juicy, then a quick kick by Sukey to his knee. “You got a problem with vaginas? Say it: vagina. Va-gi-na.”) One worked as an architect, another as a movie director. (The slip of paper read making gay movies. “Demerit for homophobia,” said Rafe. “When I find out? Major demerit to the closeted queen who wrote that. Followed by a beating. It better not be you, Juicy.”)
Went without saying: our parents were artsy and educated types, but they weren’t impoverished, or they couldn’t have afforded the buy-in. A great house didn’t rent for cheap. Not for a whole summer. We figured there were probably a couple of charity cases, or at least a sliding scale. David, a techie who dearly missed his advanced computer setup back home, had let slip that his parents rented. Received a demerit for that. Not for the lack of home ownership—we hated money snobs—but for getting soft and confessional over a purloined bottle of Jäger.
Drink their liquor? Sure, yes, and by all means. Act like they acted when they drank it? Receive a demerit.
For it was under the influence, when parents got sloppy, that they shed their protective shells. Without which they were slugs. They left a trail of slime.
My own parents were: mother scholar, father artist. My mother taught feminist theory and my father sculpted enormous busty women, lips, breasts, and private parts garishly painted. Often with scenes of war-torn or famine-struck locations. The labia might be Mogadishu.
He was quite successful.
Our younger siblings were a liability in the parent game, constantly threatening to reveal our origins. These belonged to Jen, David, and me.
Jen’s eleven-year-old brother was a gentle, deaf kid named Shel who wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. He suffered a bout of food poisoning just one week in and had to be tended by their parents, so that ID was made. The mother had adult braces and droopy shoulders, the father a greasy ponytail. He picked his nose while talking. He talked and picked, picked and talked.
We’d thought you grew out of public nose-picking in grade school, but in his case we were wrong. It was actually mind-boggling.
We felt bad for Jen.
And David was toast too. His sisters, IVF twins named Kay and Amy, were straight-up brats and had no interest in the game. They’d sold him out on day two, grabbing and caressing their mother—even going so far as to sit cuddled in her lap, nuzzling her neck. Whispering sweet nothings.
My own small brother, Jack, was a prince among boys. When he contracted poison ivy he came only to me, refusing to ask a parent for assistance. I felt proud. Jack had a sense of duty.
I ran baths for him and sat beside his bunk holding cold compresses to his legs. I smoothed on pink lotion and read to him from his favorite books. He barely complained, saying just, “It does itch, though, Evie.”
Jack was hands down my favorite person. Always had been.
Still, he was just a little guy—I worried he might slip up. Vigilance was required.
And at a certain point we made a collective decision: we had to tell the parents about the game. It was getting too hard to evade them through tactical maneuvers alone.
Of course, we’d put a positive spin on the thing. We didn’t need to reveal why we’d been playing in the first place. It didn’t have to be spoken aloud that our association with them diminished us and compromised our personal integrity. It didn’t need to be mentioned that direct evidence of our connection had been known to make us feel physically ill.
We needed a project, we’d just say. Hadn’t they deprived us, for the whole summer, of our most dearly beloved playthings and lifelines? Hadn’t they confiscated our cell phones, our tablets, all of our screens and digital access to the outside?
We were being held in an analog prison, said David.
The authorities were most receptive in the magic hour before dinner, when they were lightly, pleasantly buzzed. Earlier, they tended to be cranky and might refuse. Later, they might be shit-faced and not remember the next morning.
Drinking and talking time, they called it.
It was then that we broached the subject.
“We’re playing this game,” said Sukey.
“A social experiment, if you will,” said Terry.
Some parents smiled indulgently when we explained, while others resisted, trying to master their annoyance. But finally they said OK. They made no promises, but they’d attempt to avoid incriminating us.
Also, we planned to camp on the beach for a few nights, said Rafe.
Practicing self-sufficiency, added Terry.
“Well, now, that’s another ball of wax,” said a father.
One of the professors. His specialty was witch-burning.
“All of you?” asked a mother.
The youngest ones nodded—except for Kay and Amy the IVF twins, who shook their heads.
“Good riddance,” muttered David.
“But we didn’t bring tents!” said a second mother.
That mother was low in the hierarchy. Wore long, flowing dresses, in floral and paisley patterns. Once, drunk-dancing, she’d fallen into a potted plant. Bloodied her nose.
I sensed some condescension coming toward her from the other parents. If they were being hunted, she’d be the first one abandoned by the herd. Sacrificed to a marauding lioness whose powerful jaws would rip and tear. Next vultures would peck indifferently at the leftovers.
It would be sad, probably.
Still, no one wanted that mother. We pitied the fool who would be implicated, down the road.
“We’ll handle it,” said Terry.
“Handle it how?” asked a third mother. “Amazon Prime?”
“We’ll handle it,” repeated Terry. “There are tarps in the toolshed. We’ll be fine.”
Jen, impressed by Terry’s masterful attitude, consented to hook up with him in the greenhouse that evening (we’d piled a nest of blankets in a corner). Jen was strong but had notoriously low standards, make-out-wise.
Not to be outdone, the other two girls and I agreed to play Spin the Bottle with David and Low. Extreme version, oral potentially included. Juicy was fourteen, too immature for us and too much of a slob, and Rafe wasn’t bi.
Shame, said Sukey. Rafe is hella good-looking.
Then Dee said she wouldn’t play, so it was down to Sukey and me. Dee was afraid of Spin the Bottle, due to being—Sukey alleged—a quiet little mouse and most likely even a mouth virgin.
Timid and shy, Dee was also passive-aggressive, neurotic, a germaphobe, and borderline paranoid.
According to Sukey.
“Suck it up, mousy,” said Sukey. “It’s a teachable moment.”
“Why teachable?” asked Dee.
Because, said Sukey, she, yours truly, was a master of the one-minute handjob. Dee could pick up some tips.
The guys sat straighter when Sukey said that. Their interest became focused and laser-like.
But Dee said no, she wasn’t that type.
Plus, after this she needed a shower.
Val also declined to participate. She left to go climbing in the dark.
This was while the parents were playing Texas Hold ’Em and squabbling over alleged card counting—someone’s father had been kicked out of a casino in Las Vegas.
The younger kids were fast asleep.
Spin the Bottle was a weak choice, admittedly, but our options were severely limited. All the phones were locked in a safe in the library. And we hadn’t cracked the combination.
I was apprehensive, but since Dee had pulled out I had to hang tough. And as it turned out, I got lucky. I only had to French-kiss Low.
Still, unpleasant. His tongue tasted like old banana.
We set out the next afternoon. Packing and loading the rowboats had taken hours.
“Lifejackets!” screeched Jen’s mother from the lawn. She held a wine bottle by the neck, a glass in the other hand, and wore a white bikini with red polka dots. The bottom exposed her ass crack and the top was pretty funny: her nipples showed through the white of the bra cups like dark eyes.
“Make it stop,” said Jen, wincing.
“Put on the lifejackets!”
“Yeah, yeah. Christ on a cross,” said Sukey.
We didn’t bother with the lifejackets, generally. Except for the little boys. But we were under scrutiny, so I brought a pile of them—bright orange and spotted black with mildew—from the boathouse. They scratched our skin and were bulky. Once we were out of sight, they would come off. Most certainly.
When we pushed away from the moorings various parents waved from the porch and others clustered on the dock. We rushed, worried that they’d betray us with last-minute asinine chitchat. Sure enough, one dimwit yelled: “Did you remember your inhaler?” (Two of us were asthmatics.)
“Shut up! Shut up!” we implored, hands over ears.
None of us wanted to see a man go down that way.
“And what about the EpiPens?” shouted the low-status mother.
I’d been reading a book about medieval society I’d found in the great house library. It had a dusty paper smell I liked. There were peasants in the book: serfs, I guess. Using the filter of that history, and with reference to her flowing-dress wardrobe, I’d come to see her as the peasantry.
We ignored them and rowed with all our strength. Damage control.
“Damn they are imbeciles,” cursed Low.
I was looking at him with my head cocked, I think—musing. Remembering the taste of banana.
“Mine were cool as a cucumber,” boasted Terry.
“Mine didn’t give a flying fuck,” bragged Juice.
The parents were still trying to communicate with us as our boats drew farther offshore. A few made exaggerated gestures, flapping ungainly arms. Jen’s father was doing some sign language, but Shel turned away from his waggling fingers. The peasant mom dove off the dock—in hot pursuit? Taking a dip? We didn’t care.
We reached the creek and shipped our oars. Coasting along to the ocean. This was a narrow waterway, and often our vessels would bump the banks, lodge in the muddy shallows and need to be freed.
The water carried us: we were carried.
We lifted our faces to the warmth, closed our eyes, let the sunlight fall across our eyelids. We felt a weight lift from our shoulders, the bliss of liberty.
Dragonflies dipped over the surface, brilliant tiny helicopters of green and blue.
“They live ninety-five percent of their lives underwater,” said Jack helpfully. He was an insect fan. A fan of all wildlife, in fact. “In nymph form. You know, larvae. Dragonfly nymphs have big huge jaws. They’re vicious predators.”
“Is that interesting?” asked Jen, cocking her head.
Not mean, just speculative. She hadn’t decided.
“One day they come out of the water, turn beautiful and learn to fly,” said Jack.
“Then they drop dead,” said Rafe.
“The opposite of humans,” said David. “We turn ugly before we drop dead. Decades before.”
Yes. It was known.
The injustice floated over us with the dragonflies.
“We have been granted much,” announced Terry from the prow.
He tried to stand up, but Rafe said he’d flip the boat. So instead he sat down again and made his voice hollow and self-important like a preacher’s.
He pushed his glasses up on his nose with a middle finger.
“Yes, we have been given many gifts,” he projected. “We, the descendants of the ape people. Opposable thumbs. Complex language. At least a semblance of intelligence.”
But nothing was free, he went on. Watching the parents in the privacy of their bedrooms of a night, he’d been struck by the severity of their afflictions. They had fat stomachs and pendulous breasts. They had double asses—asses that stuck out, then sagged and bulged again. Protruding veins. Back fat like stacks of donuts. Red noses cratered by pores, black hair escaping from nostrils.
We were punished by middle age, then long decrepitude, said Terry mournfully. Our species—our demographic in the species, he amended—hung out way past its expiration date. It turned into litter, a scourge, a blight, a scab. An atrophied limb. That was our future role.
But we should shake it off, he added, suddenly trying to wrap up his speech with an inspiring takeaway. We should summon our courage! Our strength! Like Icarus, we should rise on feathered, shimmering wings and fly up, up, up toward the sun.
For a moment we considered this.
It sounded OK, but was devoid of content.
“You know it was his own fault the wings melted, right?” said David. “His father was a genius engineer. He told him not to fly too high or low. Too hot up high, too wet down low. Those wings were baller, man. Icarus totally ignored the specs. Basically, the kid was a dick.”
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