Page 355 – Electric Literature

“Salt Slow” Finds Liberation in Monstrous Women

Posted on November 19, 2019November 20, 2019 by Jo Lou

Number of stories in Salt Slow: nine. Number of men destroyed in the telling: five. Putting Julia Armfield’s literary skills aside, what excited most critics about her debut was the incredible body count for the book’s male cast, eaten alive by giant insects or torn apart by modern-day maenads. Her female characters, so sharply drawn, draw blood.

More than murder, Julia Armfield’s debut short story collection also concerns itself with transformation: late puberty is a common setting, and so are sudden sproutings, unruly desires, metamorphosis, and independence. The stories are nothing if not gothic: whether it’s a zombie ex, neglected child, end-times floods, or jellyfish strandings, some grotesquerie always reveals itself before each climax to delight and/or horrify.

A passionate horror fan from the spine-tingling to the unabashedly schlocky, Armfield gave up half an hour in her lunch break to talk It Chapter Two, ghostly visions on the Tube, and the unique cruelty of Catholic virgins. (No men were harmed in the making of this Q&A).

Ellie Broughton: I wondered if we could start with talking about transformations. The collection is full of them, but sometimes when the characters turn into monsters it seemed to be liberating. Could you tell me a bit more about where that idea came from?

Julia Armfield: Most of the time, when you’re watching a horror film or reading a horror text, the monster is the most interesting thing. You’re chasing the main character around or the character is being chased by the monster, but the monster is the thing that you’re preoccupied with. It’s always the thing that you sell a movie with, it’s always the cover art. I find it really interesting when, in terms of transformation, the idea of becoming the monster is actually a sort of reclamation. Because my collection is mainly about women, women who become monsters are stepping into their power, rather than becoming something disenfranchised.

For instance, in the first story in the book (“Mantis”) there is this girl who turns into a praying mantis and for all that it is horrendous, so much of that is her stepping into her true self, in some sense.

There’s something about women and adolescence as well I find which is often characterized as monstrous but it is essentially just becoming a different version of yourself, becoming a more complete version of yourself.

In “Mantis,” it’s already there, isn’t it? It’s beneath her skin. It’s not something that she’s becoming, a sense of the Other. It is something that was already a part of her and I find that as well, not in that story so much, but there’s also something to be said about the reclaiming of the monstrous Queer. In old Universal horror—the old Frankenstein movies and things like that—there’s such an obvious camp quality and such an obvious sense of the Otherness of the monsters being oftentimes, in some way queer, or Other. I liked the idea of taking that back and the monster being the good thing and the monster being the true thing.

EB: When the characters aren’t doing an explicit transformation (“Smack,” “Granite”), they’re often frightened of their power to hurt others or their potential for cruelty. What does that tension mean to you between the cruelty and tenderness of the characters and the tenderness of the characterization?

JA: I’m not tender with many of the male characters, to be completely fair—a lot of the time they’re being ripped to pieces.

I’m preoccupied with teenage girls or young women as people coming into themselves. So much of that is bound up with not really knowing what your potential is. I always feel incredibly empathetic with, and sorry for, young women who have not been told what their powers are.

There’s so much disinformation—like in “Mantis,” again, when they’re having this really unhelpful sex education and they don’t really know what’s normal and what’s going on. I feel empathetic towards the struggle of growing as a woman and the implicit cruelty, because nobody’s really told women what they are allowed to do, or what they are capable of doing. Ignorance is a kind of cruelty—it’s another form of suppression, isn’t it? So maybe there’s something redemptive about treating that with empathy.

EB: “The Great Awake” is probably a way in to your work for a lot of readers. The story is told quite calmly, but the subject matter is so frightening. The embodiments of sleep [“Sleeps”] are beautifully imagined, but we also have this threat of the epidemic of insomnia. Can you tell me a bit about where that story came from?

Salt Slow is about women who become monsters and step into their power. The monster being the good thing, the true thing.

JA: There’s an image of them halfway through of them [the Sleeps] taking up all the seats on the train, and all the actual awake people sort of like forced to the doors. I remember thinking about that particular image—it’s a nice thought—and how I would sort of weave something into that because I often come to stories kind of from the idea of an image or a tone. I’m not particularly “plotty”: there’s always something that I want to evoke and I’ll build the scaffolding around that. With that one, it was built from that image.

I live in London, and the exhaustion of the city, the overcrowdedness and the sense of isolation come hand in hand. You can be anywhere in London, completely surrounded by people, and know nobody. A lot of it came out of that.

It’s the most metropolitan story in the collection—there are quite a lot of sea stories or rural, but this one is more about the city, to me, than about sleep, and that sense of being alone in a place where there are so many people.

EB: Do you know how you got that balance between the frightening subject and the calm tone?

JA: I think it’s just the way that I write. I like being affectless when talking about something terrifying because it’s immediately more effective. Making a comparison, I really like H.P. Lovecraft, but that’s because it’s so high-key all the time. I love that but a lot of the time in modern horror it’s a lot more effective if we’re talking about something that’s completely normal but also, like, there’s a wolf in the room, or there’s a monster right in front of you. I like the unsettling slip, and the fact that you can talk your way into an ordinary situation where something terrifying is going on. It allows us to look at it more straight-on.

EB: We’ve talked a bit about the horror films and books that you read, so it’d be good to talk about what you felt were the main influences on Salt, Slow.

JA: I’m sure you can tell from the collection, but I’m completely obsessed with body horror. I love David Cronenberg. I love anything in which the general concept is the way that your body can contain and betray you, the unreliability of the body but also the fact that it’s the thing that entirely predicates everything about you.

Really really crap films which I love intensely are things like Ginger Snaps. It’s terrible, but it’s a really good film about this girl whose first period coincides with her turning into a werewolf.

Horror is the only genre that takes women’s fear seriously. The body is so bound up in that. My relationship with horror has always been more visual so it’s like what I said before, I often start from the idea of an image or a tone, like there’s a scene in a horror movie that I want to or some lighting in a film that I want to invoke myself.

But I love Lovecraft as well. It’s just really squirmy. I love Shirley Jackson and to be honest, for my sins, I really love Stephen King.

EB: Yes! Don’t apologize.

JA: I watched It Chapter Two way too many times, it’s really embarrassing.

EB: So we should definitely talk about sexuality. I guess a basic perspective on the book is that a lot of the approaches to sexuality in the book are frightening, or at least unusual. Would you be able to say a bit more about why?

Horror is the only genre that takes women’s fear seriously.

JA: I don’t know, necessarily. Quite a few of the stories have a Catholic undertone. That feeds into a sense of misinformation, and the fact that that can breed fear and the monstrous in its own way. In The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides there is this great bit when one of the boys sneaks into a sex education class the girls have. And he comes back and goes to one of his friends: “Okay, listen: when they hit 13 their tits bleed.”

And it’s the weird construction of this strange Frankenstein’s monster woman who has been created by this total misinformation. Nobody knows what’s going on.

In terms of the Queer, a lot of the time I want to give it the same balance. I don’t want it to be like, “and here is a queer story.” I want it to be one and the same. But at the same time, I’m interested in the idea of the queer monster actually being the norm, and then turning that into a good thing.

EB: We should probably address the fact that so many men die in the collection. I feel like this is probably something you get pulled up on in every interview.

JA: It depends. If it’s a man there then yes, definitely.

EB: And with women, you just laugh about it.

JA: Yep. It’s like: “Yeah, great. I’m so glad they all died.”

Your Book Might Not Sell, and You Have to Live With That

Posted on November 19, 2019November 20, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

A few years ago I started collaborating with a client on her first book. When we signed the papers, in addition to including the fee structure and the schedule, I added one important stipulation: There is no guarantee that this book will sell.

My client signed the papers but I knew that that line meant nothing to her. She assumed—still assumes—that if she writes a good enough proposal that it will sell, that she’ll have readers, the same way you think If I take all the requisite courses, I’ll graduate. She’s often talking about her hypothetical readers—not a reader, as in the hypothetical one she envisions as she writes, but her readers, real people who will go to a bookstore and purchase the book with her name embossed on the front and photograph on the back flap.

I admire her confidence—or perhaps it’s simply her ignorance—but I can’t help but brace myself. When she launches into one of her oh, but how will people react to me writing about—I often stop her: Please don’t worry about that now, write what you want to write, we will worry about selling later. She claims to hear me—oh, of course, I know that, this has been such a wonderful experience either way!—but I can tell that she doesn’t really believe me. She doesn’t yet know that you can have a compelling story, a strong voice, a well-known name, maybe even many publications under your belt, and still not sell a book you’ve spent years of your life on. (I say this, of course, having absolutely no idea whether her book will sell. I hope it will; I think it should. But I know that it might not.)

Over and over, I remind her that she needs to write the book because she wants to write the book, not because she wants to sell the book. They are two separate things, you know this, right? I tell her again and again. The satisfaction is in the writing.

That’s exactly what I told myself for a decade while I worked on my first book. That’s exactly what I was told to focus on while in graduate school. But at a certain point it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re doing this thing day after day, year after year, and that you don’t actually care whether anything happens to it.

Here’s the central, inescapable conundrum any person writing a book faces: In order to keep fear at bay, you have to imagine that you are doing this for yourself alone—for the deep, creative satisfaction of committing to, and executing, a vision over the long haul. You dig and dig and dig and write with as much honesty and grit and bravery as you can, pretending no one will ever see it.

In order to keep going, you have to believe the book will sell. That means you have to ignore the reality of publishing.

But in order to keep going—to put in the hours day after day for years—you have to believe, somewhere inside you, that it will eventually exist outside the confines of your mind and your computer. That it will, in other words, sell.

This means you have to willfully ignore the reality of publishing. You have to forget that it is, in fact, extremely hard to sell a book. That the chances of it happening are slim, and that the reasons it does or doesn’t sell might have little to do with the quality of the book itself.

The question is: how do you sustain all these realities at once, for years on end?

And what happens when the book you pretended you were writing for you but secretly hoped, secretly believed would sell, actually doesn’t?

During the two years I spent at Columbia getting my MFA in nonfiction, there was very little talk of what happened when the doors to the workshop rooms opened and we were let loose into the publishing world. At school, we were in an incubator where we were to focus exclusively on the writing itself and not worry about anything unrelated to craft. This was part of the program’s philosophical approach, one it was easy to get behind: Craft is the most important part after all. Without it you can’t sell a damn thing.

We knew deep down that this was an enormous, expensive luxury and we took full advantage, reading three books a week, producing thousands of awful and then less-awful pages and then pretty good pages that no one but us would ever see. We were never supposed to write for the marketplace, or really even think about the marketplace, even though many of us had gone into tremendous debt to be there. It was irrelevant anyway, and maybe even a relief. Good literature, we assumed, floated to the top, or something like that.

Write the book you needed to read that didn’t exist. I don’t know how many times this was said, but that’s what we tried to do, all the while not talking about whether said book would sell. We did talk a lot about what was a book and what was—as one of my favorite professors put it—an “‘ook.” We put our heads down and dug into draft #872, trying to turn our ‘ooks into books.

But as the exit sign got closer, a lot of us started to panic. Well, this was fun, but now what? Does it really not matter if anything comes of this?

Here’s what happened to my book, in brief:

During graduate school, I knew that what I wanted to write was longer than an essay, but doubted whether I could actually write a book. During my second semester one of my professors looked at the mass of material I had so far and said, “This is a book. Get to it. You’re no spring chicken!” (I was 32.) So I wrote the book, my thesis, all 360 pages of it, which was a memoir about the back injury that ended my career as a professional dancer and the unconventional journey I went on to heal my body. It was nothing I could sell, but it was a start.

Over the course of the next eight years—during which time I got married, moved across the world twice, had a baby, and kept trying to prioritize the book while also struggling to make a living—I had three different agents try to sell it. The first signed me too early, before there was even a book there, and then quit agenting. The second tried to sell it on proposal when I was eight months pregnant, and the last tried to sell two-thirds of the manuscript, even though the whole thing was written, when my daughter was four.

The last two agents sent it out, as one often does, in a small batch, to ensure that if changes needed to be made, we wouldn’t have exhausted every publisher already. The responses were lovely and kind (“beautiful writing,” “what a story,” “I love her voice”) but the editors rejected it nonetheless. They couldn’t quite put their finger on the problem, but it was there. The ones who actually read the book—not the proposal—said it was “too quiet,” which is code for “won’t sell.”

My third agent and I regrouped. No big deal! This happens all the time. She suggested a massive rewrite, one that involved adding another story line. I didn’t quite see how it fit inside the book I’d already written, but was willing to take a stab at.

It took me nine months to figure out that I didn’t, in fact, want to take a stab at it. My total avoidance of it told me all I needed to know.

I was exaggerating when I said that there was never any talk during grad school of selling our books. There was Sam Freedman’s famed Book Proposal class at Columbia’s Journalism School, which some of us took. Other times, selling or not selling our books was chalked up to whether or not we’d finished what we started. “Ninety percent of you will never sell a book,” we were told to audible gasps. Then came the punchline: “Because most of you will never finish one.”

And issues related to the marketplace seeped through the cracks in odd moments. For example: early on in my second year—after reading perhaps two of my workshop submissions, totaling 60 or so pages—one of my mentors asked me, “How are we going to get Melanie Thernstrom to blurb your book?” Thernstrom had just published a massive nonfiction book about pain, which was a central part of my book. My book wasn’t even a full thesis yet, just a collection of chapters that didn’t yet have a proper shape. I knew there was a story there—I’d lived it, I knew its contours well—but I was swimming around in the material, trying to find my way, trying to believe that I could one day craft it into something that came to 300 coherent, magnificent pages. And now we were thinking about blurbs?

This comment almost single-handedly got me through the next two years of writing it. This was going somewhere, there would be an actual jacket cover that necessitated a blurb. A real jacket cover!

The only other time this came up was during my thesis conference when one of the readers, a writer whose work I deeply admired, wrote in her comments, “When she sells this book—and I mean when not if….”

That comment, too, kept me going for another few years. All this time I was spending away from my baby, sneaking time away from paid work, declining full-time jobs and asking my husband to foot the bulk of the bills for just a little while longer, believing in this dream: it would come to something.

Selling my book meant that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t just another person writing my novel.

It somehow didn’t matter to me that, by then, I regularly sold essays, had worked as a magazine editor for years, and had landed college teaching gigs. Selling my book was the only thing that made me believe I had made it. Selling my book meant that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t just another person writing my novel.

But also—and this is something we rarely talk about—it meant I’d make actual money for all this time I’d put in. That my skills and hard work would be compensated. It meant that this had been a worthy investment, and not just for my soul.

After my agent suggested the massive change I couldn’t wrap my head around, I called that same mentor, the one who’d imagined a Thernstrom blurb, for advice. I was sure she’d tell me to persevere, to keep working on it—she was, after all, the one who’d said we had to finish, the one who’d told me repeatedly I was telling a unique story.

Instead, she heard me out and asked, “Are you working on anything else?”

“Anything else?” I asked, confused. “Like, another book?”

“Yes.”

It had taken everything I had to write this book. No, I didn’t have anything else. At least nothing else that was remotely presentable.

“Maybe you should consider moving on.”

I hadn’t written the first one to sell it. I’d written it—like most people write books—because I needed to. Because I needed that much space to explore the issues I was grappling with: losing dance, the thing I loved most on earth, and my easy relationship to my body. I needed to explore the reality of pain, injury, identity, growing up, the frailty and resilience of the body, a swerve that comes out of nowhere, the sad fact that our parents—and doctors—can’t always protect us. I knew, in my bones, that while my story was mine alone, I was touching on universal themes. Who cared whether the reader knew the first thing about dance?

I also wanted to write a good book—I wanted to find the right structure, tone, narrative arc. To make a beautiful piece of art.

Any time you devote years and years to something, you of course want to feel that the work has not been in vain.

I did not write it to sell it, and I certainly didn’t write it to make a lot of money. But any time you devote years and years to something, you of course want to feel that the work has not been (that horrible phrase) in vain.

Now she was suggesting I move on?

The truth is that books have a shelf life. By the time I called my mentor for advice, the book had already started to feel dead to me, inanimate. I could almost see it drifting off to sea on a little raft and I just didn’t have it in me to dive in after it. So I didn’t.

At a certain point, I realized that I could spend the rest of my life rewriting this one book or move onto another one, hoping I still had the courage to try again.

Then last summer, years after I thought I’d basically let that first book go and didn’t care about it not selling anymore, I saw on Twitter that a similar book had been sold. I sobbed in the bathroom for hours, totally undone. It felt, momentarily, like I’d wasted ten years of my working life, like a fool, and here was the proof. All this time someone else was doing it better and she hadn’t failed. She didn’t need to turn to her husband, and say sorry, I guess it didn’t pay off in the end. Maybe I should just do something else?

Yes, most writers have a dreaded drawer book or two, the ones that taught us about perseverance, about structure and arc and voice and the difficulty of crafting a story out of the mess of life or our imaginations; about keeping your butt in the chair, about returning even when you think it’s hopeless, about drowning out the voices that say, this fucking sucks, you suck, this will never work, as well as the ones that say, you’re a fucking genius.

I have, ten years after starting the first one, finally started on a new book. All the work I put into my first one is informing this new project. But this attempt feels different, and I don’t think it’s just because what I’m trying to do artistically is so unfamiliar.

I think it’s because on some level I’ve let go of the idea of selling it at all, which is a small sadness at the heart of it. But it’s also a relief, at least in working on it day to day.

Which is to say: the very thing that kept me going the first time—one day this will sell!—is precisely the kind of commentary I’m avoiding altogether this time. On this project I’ve sought out almost no feedback. Every time I think about sending a piece of it to my agent, I stop myself. I want to protect it, and myself—to keep us in this cocoon for as long as it takes.

I know, for real now, that believing in something has nothing to do with selling it. I know that putting that pressure on the material doesn’t help. I know, of course, that the satisfaction is in the work itself—in making your mind and heart do the puzzling through, the hard labor, to take on another intellectual challenge—not in its complete, out-in-the-world form.

Pouring your life for so long into something that never comes to fruition is a distinct kind of shame.

But, I must point out, this is often said by people whose books exist in that out-in-the-world form, who can compare the experiences.

Still, I will say that making anything at all is terrifying. Pouring your life for so long into something that never comes to official, physical fruition is a distinct kind of shame. A broken-heartedness. A feeling of failure you need to keep at bay if you want to keep going. It’s knowing that the money you thought you’d contribute to your family had to come from elsewhere (which was always going to be the case anyway), not from The Big Thing you devoted so much of your life to, The Big Thing you swore would one day pay off—not with millions, never with that, but with just enough to say: see, I’m working, too; here’s my part. This was never a hobby.

But pouring your life into something you care about is also distinctly human. It’s being brave, it’s going for something even when you have no possible way of knowing whether it’ll work out, or even knowing what “working out” means.

Does it mean finishing it? Liking it? Feeling challenged intellectually? Moved by your choices? Pushed artistically? Does it mean you didn’t pack it in? Does it mean you actually did become a better writer during all that time you spent moving commas around and rearranging the sections and fleshing out characters and trying to think up new structural fixes while swimming endless laps in the pool, your mind unencumbered and searching?

What kind of payoff are we looking for? Because I think I am, in fact, finding something these days just by showing up and wrestling with my hopes and my sadness, with my skills and my blind spots, with each word I set down. I am, dare I say, enjoying it, even a little.

Maybe “having it all work out” simply means you’re ready to try again, to let your heart be broken, to wade down into the depths with no guarantee that you will swim up to the surface with gold in hand.

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Who Will Win the National Book Award for Fiction, According to My Dad

Posted on November 19, 2019November 17, 2019 by Intern Electric Lit

These are some important things to know about my dad: every Halloween he dresses up in a different inflatable costume to hand out candy, he’s seen Bigfoot, he watches John Wick about once a month, he wanted to name me Elvis, and when I was younger he read all my favorite books along with me. My dad did a lot to instill a love of reading in me, so I thought it would be appropriate to ask him his thoughts on the 2019 National Book Awards finalists for fiction, even though he doesn’t know anything about these books. Here, we have his guesses at what each book is about based on their cover and title, along with his odds on who will win tomorrow. Please place your bets accordingly.

Image result for trust exercise susan choi

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

A demanding psychological fitness book aimed at helping people overcome their fears about pumping iron. The green chairs on the cover symbolize the twiggy losers who are envious of a swole slab of beef like me. While I’m obviously not afraid of exercise, I’d still give this one a read just to kick my confidence up to 11.

Sadly, I doubt the creampuff award judges will have enough sand in their colon to vote this the winner. Odds at taking home the title: 1000:1

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Sabrina and Corina: Stories by Kali Farjado-Anstine

The cover art makes it look like this teenage witch has grown into a woman with the heart of a plant. I don’t know how Corina fits into the plot, but this botanical-human hybrid looks like a fresh departure from the dystopian cyborgs that plague literature these days. I’ll read it just to see if Round Up can handle this weedy witch.

The odds of winning are unclear, but I’m hoping Corina scorches the earth to keep competition at bay. 3:1 odds to win.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

I believe this book is printed with blood and testosterone instead of ink. This author must have read the manifesto for my fifth grade Kickass Skull Club and then channeled the fire in a Redbull-and-whiskey fueled writing rampage. Sounds like it’s a must read for supersecret ninja spy assassins and their victims.

I’m not betting on red or black this time. Like any good secret agent novel, the odds to win are a million to one.

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

I think this book looks like a smart response to Trump’s wall. By saying, “Native, Central, and South Americans are Americans too,” the author is confronting the divisive dualistic assumption of ethnic isolationism by using historical, economic and genetic evidence to repudiate the arguments of racist jerks. Will read—aloud.

While this book may earn the popular vote for best book, I expect the College will deny the honor. Odd to win 500:1.

Image result for disappearing earth julia phillips

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

This one has me confused. The cover has a huge mountain—which is the part of earth I’d expect to disappear last. Then the people are running away from the mountain. If Waterworld taught me anything, it’s to head for the high ground before Kevin Costner comes for you. I’ll wait for the movie reviews.

Odds of this Smoker taking home the Oscar: 300:1

Projected winner: Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, a novel about a vengeful plant-woman

I Cannot Get Over the Miracle of Cell Division

Posted on November 18, 2019November 20, 2019 by Kelly Luce

Division

 My cats were born soft and small as peaches
 and I tell my mother I cannot get over the miracle
  
 of cell division. How something minuscule 
 multiplies into muscle mass, coat patterns, a registry 
  
 of cause and effect, and divergent personalities. 
 Like, how one of my cats has grown smart 
  
 enough to open doors, chews scenery only 
 when she wants fed, while her sister, restless 
  
 as a cooped finch, is also too scattered 
 to learn the higher arts of tantrums and escape. 
  
 I confess to my mother I can hardly understand 
 this hurt of watching, loving them as they grow. 
  
 My mother gives me a look that makes me stop talking. 
 As if none of the words I’ve learned could describe 
  
 how it feels to mother two girls. My smart cat 
 comes to me each night to go through the motions 
  
 of suckling. She kneads into my right bicep, claws out 
 so many beads of blood that the skin scabs over 
  
 like sandpaper. I’m afraid, now, to tell my mother 
 about this ritual of caregiving. She has yet 
  
 to lift up her shirt to show me all her scars.

Meaningful Symbols Placed in Meaningful Places

 
 I woke up this morning to tell you there may be caves on every continent
 marked with ochre and blood and calcium, that we have never been so alone
  
 as to be alien in expressions of love. It has never been a mystery why a child 
 would trace her hand upon paper any more than any vertebrate that shivers 
  
 would turn its face to the sun. Maybe, to be alive today is too much, to choke 
 upon the lies so many people serve in lieu of common dignity. But to be alive 
  
 has always meant waking up, facing sunward, repeating to those we love the truths 
 that will outlive us. I woke up this morning to tell you Neandertals made art 
  
 in caves and as-yet undiscovered places. Surely, all our common ancestors 
 made art in leaves, art in hair, in song and other intangibles. I woke up because 
  
 our lives are holy with such truths as cell division, rock formation, mental 
 maps that leave their traces in uranium-thorium decay. I wake up in such good 
  
 company, knowing we were never the first and won’t be the last to turn the fact 
 of sunlight into symbol, symbol into body language, movement of bodies against 
  
 other bodies into such sciences, such memories, into such blinding hopes.

The Right Novels to Read in Every Life Crisis

Posted on November 18, 2019November 18, 2019 by Jo Lou

Not one for self-help books, I like to look to novels to get me through certain difficult periods in my life. Change can be lonely, so it’s best not to endure it alone. And who better to share it with than characters in a book, going through the same changes? Reading the stories of those going through similar experiences—even if they come from completely different backgrounds or live in an entirely different part of the world—always allows me to see my own situation from a new perspective. If you’ve diagnosed yourself with one of the following particularly life-altering moments, I have just the prescription to get you through it.

Image result for skim mariko tamaki jillian tamaki

Coming of age: Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

Mariko and Jillian Tamaki portray with delicacy and vibrancy the chaotic world of adolescence in this beautifully illustrated graphic novel. Kimberly (Skim) Keiko Cameron battles with dark thoughts, infatuation and sexuality while attending a girls’ private school.

Image result for secret history book cover

College: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s first novel takes place in an elite Vermont college and brings the setting to life through each arduous New England season. The narrator, Richard Papen, recounts his undergraduate years as he finds his way into the ultra-exclusive Plato-revering clique comprised of wealthy mysteriousstudents. After Richard secures his place at the Classics table, he realizes that inclusion wasn’t what he expected, or what he wanted.

Living abroad: The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Selin, a Turkish American student at Harvard, studies semiotics and becomes fixated on the way languages can shape the way we see each other and the world. In her first year, Selin befriends Sventlana, a head-strong Serbian, and falls in love with her Russian language classmate, Ivan, with whom she speaks exclusively through email. Following a suggestion by her e-penpal, Selin spends the summer in Hungary teaching English, where her studies and theories about contrasting linguistic lifestyles manifest in her new life abroad.

First job: Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Stephanie Danler shows her readers the intoxicating, exhilarating, and punishing world of a young waitress in New York City. Tess lands a job in a highly respected restaurant, based on the famous Union Square Cafe. She navigates the labyrinthine of fine dining during her shifts and immerses herself in the whirlwind lifestyle of booze and drugs when she’s off the clock. Tess’s story typifies the hurdle of getting and keeping a first job.

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Marriage: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The titular marriage in Jones’ novel weathers an unimaginable storm when Roy and Celestial become separated by bars. During a visit home to Louisiana, Roy is accused of rape and sentenced to prison. Celestial reckons everyday with the decision whether to stay loyal to her husband while taking her life into her own hands as an artist and entrepreneur. An American Marriage deftly questions gender roles within modern marriages and racial injustices in our current political era.

Divorce: A Separation by Katie Kitamura

After a secret separation from her husband, the narrator is forced to confront the turmoil and deceits of their marriage when he goes missing in the Greek islands. During her search for him, the narrator uncovers things about her husband that she never knew. Her dark interior monologues contrast with her compliant disposition, demonstrating the gulf between what we think we know about someone and who they actually are.

Pregnancy: The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Set in a GOOP-esque farm in Massachusetts where immigrant women carry fetuses for the wealthy, The Farm tackles messy truths about surrogacy, capitalism, the wealth gap, and racial disparities. The elite surrogacy business at the heart of the novel, Golden Oaks, offers poor women of color money in return for renting their wombs to carry the babies of wealthy white families.

Parenting: The Need by Helen Phillips

Raising a child can be terrifying. For the protagonist of The Need—a thrilling page-turner loaded with philosophical questions about identity and empathy—motherhood is a nightmare. Helen Phillips reveals how the unequivocal devotion a mother feels can lead to hopelessness and inner terror when Molly confronts danger in her own home while taking care of her young children.

Aging: The Dictionary of Animal Languages by Heidi Sopinka

Heidi Sopinka explores old age through the story of Ivory Frame, now nearly a century old, a woman who ran away to Paris in her teens and fell in love with surrealist art and a Russian artist. But her bohemian life was upended during WWII, and she now works in solitude on her final masterpiece: the dictionary of animal languages.

Facing mortality: The Caregiver by Samuel Park

In this posthumously published novel, Samuel Park writes about the complexities of dependent relationships and the sacrifice and hardship of caring for a person who can no longer take care of themself. Mara Alencer is the Brazilian caregiver of a white woman with terminal cancer in California. Before she moved from Rio de Janeiro, she lived with her mother, a voiceover actress who depended on her daughter as much as her daughter depended on her.

Leland Cheuk Writes the Asian American Antihero We Always Needed

Posted on November 18, 2019November 18, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

Whenever the topic of Asian Americans in the entertainment industry comes up, for a few moments, I mentally include Sirius Lee. And then I remember that he is only a fictional standup comedian, the protagonist of Leland Cheuk’s intimate novel No Good, Very Bad Asian. It’s such a vivid and engrossing portrait of a lovable, modern-day schmuck—a character who feels immediately iconic, like Holden Caulfield—that I was almost disappointed when I learned that Cheuk is not at all like Sirius Lee, although he did perform standup in bars while researching for this novel.

While Sirius Lee finds fame as a teenager and struggles with the fallout from that, Cheuk’s fiction didn’t get picked up by publishers until he was in his late 30s. His debut novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, was published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography in 2015; a story collection, Letters From Dinosaurs, followed soon after in 2016 from Thought Catalog Books. Before all that had happened, Cheuk survived a life-threatening diagnosis of MDS, receiving chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. Over coffee in Brooklyn recently, Cheuk revealed how his manuscript-in-progress for No Good, Very Bad Asian took a different turn after his recovery. But it’s still funny as hell.

Cathy Erway: I don’t think I’ve encountered in literature an Asian American character who’s overweight, struggles with substance abuse, and is constantly screwing up in life. Have you?

Leland Cheuk: I was very conscious when I started out that I was trying to write a book that was about everything that a model minority isn’t. I consider myself reasonably well read but I don’t think I’ve read one. But the question is, why haven’t we seen someone like that sooner? Asian American literature has a long history dating back to the early 1800s and there’s been many books about men and the trials and tribulations they’ve gone through, so I’m sure there have been many characters like that, but maybe they just haven’t percolated up in the consciousness enough.

CE: So you wanted to write about someone who’s not a model minority—why?

LC: I think there are plenty of writers that are doing mainstream literature related to immigration, which is very top of mind with all the things going on in the news, or writing about the home country. And I just didn’t want to do it. I don’t like doing things that people expect me to do. Because that’s, like, my parents. Especially with art, you know, it’s so hard to succeed to begin with. So I feel like I might as well enjoy what I’m doing and 100% believe in what I’m doing and just have fun.

CE: Is there also some desire for you as an Asian American writer to help broaden the range of experiences we’re seeing in literature, and have more diverse characters?

I think that’s sort of the crux of Asian American literature, trying to prove that you’re human to a white audience, sadly.

LC: Yeah, I think that’s sort of the crux of Asian American literature, trying to prove that you’re human to a white audience, sadly. That’s kind of the underlying subtext no matter how different the book is, and I just wanted to write a book where the person is a human. Like, he’s got all kinds of problems makes all kinds of mistakes, or he just is. It’s a book about being Asian and the existential pros and cons of being a person of color in America, specifically a Chinese American.

CE: It’s funny because I don’t think there are too many white American novelists who are like, gosh, I really need to represent a person who’s a drug addict.

LC: With white narratives, there’s so many of them. They really span the gamut, so you don’t really ask why isn’t there a book about a white drug addict because there are plenty of books. But for Asian Americans, that’s a genre of itself. Mainly around the immigration narrative or around the vacation novel in the home country.

CE: Like Crazy Rich Asians?

LC: Right. Unfortunately there isn’t a huge span of novels about Asian Americans just being here, being American, and you know I’m kind of tired of the question: When do we get to be American? I hope that the book contributes to that broadening of point of view—rather than just Asians, it’s just people.

CE: How did you come up with this character? Were you interested in comedy?

LC: I was always into standup. As a fan I wanted to write about comedy. And then I started doing standup just to validate that track. I took a class and started doing open mics, when I moved to New York City. I went to clubs did that for 2.5 years. I enjoyed it, it was for research but I enjoyed the people I was around, and I never laughed so hard. This is before I got sick, and then I basically trailed off after getting sick.

CE: Did you write the book in full before you got sick?

LC: In 2010 I had a first draft. Now it’s 2019.

CE: Did it change a lot in light of your illness and recovery?

LC: It did; it was a bigger book. The comedy part was a sort of book within a book, it was a literary mystery about a private detective… It never worked. I could never find the ending. And then I basically had to scrap the whole frame around it. And then my illness had something to do with the way this novel ends.

CE: I love how [the finished novel] is framed as a letter to the protagonist’s daughter.

LC: That came up late as well. Once I scrapped the frame, I felt like I needed to do something to bring the reader closer to the character because he’s basically spewing all his misdeeds. There are also a lot of great standup memoirs that you can read, and I was thinking, well, why would someone read my fake standup memoir as opposed to reading just a great standup memoir? Some of which are listed in the acknowledgements. I’m not a huge fan of Artie Lange’s comedy, but his book Too Fat to Fish is amazing.

CE: A lot of people might think the author must be a lot like the character when it’s written in first person. Are you?

I’ve since demonstrated how the son of immigrants can be downwardly economically mobile.

LC: I’ve more or less been clean—I mean, I had a phase in college. Drugs are not foreign to me. I actually borrowed Sirius’s background more from my wife than myself. I grew up privileged, went to Berkeley, my dad still works in tech in Silicon Valley and is pretty well off. Of course, they escaped from China and swam to Hong Kong, they did that all-night swim, they were one of the freedom swimmers back in the early ’70s and they’re very lucky to survive. My dad was 97 pounds when he immigrated. So yeah, they made this American life and became far more successful than they could ever imagine, and I grew up and went to the same high school as Steve Jobs and Wozniak in Cupertino [not at the same time], drove a Mercedes to school. I was very privileged. Since then I’ve since demonstrated how the son of immigrants can be downwardly economically mobile. My wife’s from Monterey Park in San Gabriel Valley, so I know that area well, it’s very Chinese. Great food. Working class. I was very conscious to create a person not like myself, but some of the incidents were real, like I did steal that Yoda toy, and my grandfather did give me a talking-to.

CE: Some people might be shocked about how unaffectionate the parents of the main character in No Good, Very Bad Asian are, and how unsupportive they are of him.

LC: That’s somewhat autobiographical. When you come from immigrant working-class background they don’t really understand why you would do something as non-lucrative as the creative arts or comedy, and when I tried to write novels and kept quitting my job for years on end to do it. But they’re not wrong. Now I realize, “oh, my mom was right.” But it is tough. I think it’s a cultural thing and it’s just another hurdle if you’re an Asian American; your family might not be as supportive of you, and you have to prove it more.

CE: Are your parents still around? Do they like the book?

My mom looked at the book’s title and was like, aren’t Asians gonna sue you?

LC: They don’t really read English. So I don’t know if they’re going to like the book. Maybe if it gets translated one day. My mom was at my book event in San Francisco recently, and she looked at the book’s title and was like, aren’t Asians gonna sue you for calling them bad? And after the reading she was like, why do you always have to write about parents? It’s like life imitating art.

CE: Do you feel like you wrote this book for any certain audience?

LC: I hope it’s a broad audience, but I have been getting a lot of fan mail from Asian American males… I do think that their point of view isn’t necessarily top of mind in our culture and I don’t think there’s any terrible desire in big publishing to share it — this book got rejected roundly by dozens of publishers so it’s from a small press. I can probably name 45 Asian American women novelists off the top of my head but you can really only name ten men… so I hope we see more.

Carmen Maria Machado’s Memoir Is Riddled with Restless Ghosts

Posted on November 15, 2019September 14, 2021 by Jess Zimmerman

I first encountered Carmen Maria Machado in 2016, reading her short fiction “Horror Story” in Granta. Her innovative and acclaimed debut collection Her Body and Other Parties had not yet been published, but I scourged the internet for everything I could find. What I found were stories about queer relationships, folk tales updated for our times, a range of different craft techniques I’d never seen in contemporary fiction.

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Like her electrifying, bizarre stories, Machado’s debut memoir In the Dream House uses a fragmented structure to tell the story of a queer relationship she was in while she was a student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a relationship that spiraled into psychological abuse. Drawing a variety of tropes to organize each segment of the book, from noir to fantasy to Bildungsroman, Machado unearths painful and difficult memories, as well as the trajectory that led her to her relationship, observing and analyzing them from a variety of prisms as one would inspect a jewel. The book examines stereotypes about lesbian relationships and it expands the scope of how we discuss and write about abuse in queer relationships. Difficult and devastating as it is, Machado’s storytelling is playful and inventive, and her analysis rigorous and compassionate. In our phone call, Machado graciously discussed her obsession with haunted houses, time travel and fate, and the shaping of her book.

Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada: In the Dream House is a memoir, which I imagine changes how you feel about it coming into the world.

I’m having a lot of anxiety; it’s a very different process than having a fictional book out.

Carmen Maria Machado: Well, I would be lying if I said I was not stressed and anxious. I’m having a lot of anxiety; it’s a very different process than having a fictional book out and it requires more out of me psychologically, which I’m prepared for but am also dreading. And also another part of me knows what’s coming because, with the last book Her Body and Other Parties, I didn’t know it was going to be a hit so I was surprised constantly about everything that was happening. Now it’s just like: here we go! It’s a different headspace.

RRE: This book is about a literal (and figurative) house; it’s a book with a million different rooms and cabinets and nooks. You recreate your ex’s house in Indiana in many different ways. How was it different to write this book, which requires all this excavation of memory?

CM: I wrote part of the book while I was revising Her Body and Other Parties two years ago. I took a first stab at it and it sucked, but I was also working on it between other projects in a very quick process. And then I sold a sort of skeletal draft to Graywolf Press, which was a third of the material and really, really rough. So last year I sat down to finish it—thinking okay, this has got to be done by the end of the year —and that part was really awful. It was really difficult to return to that headspace while I was in a writing residency all by myself. Far from my spouse. Far from my friends. It was a dark, weird place, and that’s true for both the personal material and the research. I was like, “Oh! Maybe it’ll be easier when I’m reading about other people’s traumas and not just my own,” but it really didn’t get any better. It was just as sad, just as hard. I sort of wanted it to be over and I had to finish it, but it was one of those books that was a mess until it wasn’t anymore. And it only felt like it wasn’t a mess until the very end.

I kept struggling with this idea of “this is all garbage.” And I’m not sure if anyone is going to tell me it is! Normally my spouse is my first reader, but for obvious reasons she was just not ready; it was hard for her to give regular edits like she would for anything else.

RRE: That makes sense. She’s in the book!

CMM: Exactly, so that was hard too. It was fine that she didn’t want to do that, completely understandable, but it took me some time to get used to that because she’s been looking at my work for so long. And so there was this day when I actually emailed a friend of mine and I said, “I don’t need you to give me actual notes; I just need you to tell me it’s not a mess!” He was really sweet and she said, “it’s actually not a mess at all” and gave me concrete reasons about why it wasn’t a mess. And I felt better.

It was just a really difficult and emotional process, and I wonder if all nonfiction is that way. Not that I hadn’t written nonfiction before, I had, but there was something about this book in particular that required so much personal excavation, so much truth telling to myself, and so much accessing this well of great pain, which …part of it is sort of better and part of it is sort of boarded up. It was such a strange process to go back and access that again.

RRE: One of the segments is about your ex forcing you to write down all your worst qualities, all your flaws. How do you walk away from writing something like this?

I want to believe that I wrote from a healed place because I think it can be really hard to write well from a place of great pain, but for this book I was somewhere in between.

CMM: Actually that section used to be longer, it had to be cut down because it was too long. It’s weird, though, because I think part of being a functioning adult is being honest with yourself about your flaws and it’s something a well-adjusted person can get used to. But then I think the process of being forced to articulate that to another person is an act of violence, an act of manipulation, and then focuses all these faults and mistakes on you. And then it becomes a sort of habit. One of the hardest parts of writing this book was realizing how many of those habits are still in me. I haven’t seen this person in about eight years and the fact that I still have habits ingrained in me, fears and anxieties that I haven’t shaken. Recognizing that there was damage done and that it was done in reverse, it’s a real bucket of water in the face. I think I always knew this on some level but I haven’t been able to actually articulate it in this way. It means there are all these super straight lines between a thing she made me do and a thing she did to me, or a way that she manipulated me or gaslit me or hurt me in some way. And then recognizing that that still exists somewhere in me is really painful; it’s a hard cold dose of reality. I want to believe that I wrote this book from a healed place because I think it can be really hard to write well from a place of great pain, but for this book I was somewhere in-between. And that’s hard too because I want to say, this is something that happened to me, it’s in the past, it’s boxed up and in this book and I want to share it with you, but what’s hard is that that’s still part of me and I don’t like that. But it is what it is.

RRE: Let’s return to the topic of houses. The house is such an important trope in horror. A lot of the most violent parts of the book occur in houses, or else enclosed, claustrophobic spaces: your ex’s car, over phone calls. There are so many different layers of meaning in the concept of a house. Why do you think writers return to it as a setting of horror? In the section “Dream House as American Gothic,” you cite film theorist Mary-Ann Doane, who says: “Horror, which should by rights be external to domesticity, infiltrates the home.”

CMM: I’ve always been interested in houses and in the past few years I’ve worked and thought about houses, haunted houses, and the ways in which that idea can be both chilling and a useful organizational principal for lots of different ideas. I think this idea of domestic horror, horror that’s coming from the wrong direction, is funny because home invasion is a horror genre I don’t relate to very much, whereas a horror that’s coming from within the house is much more interesting to me.

Home invasion is a genre I don’t relate to. A horror that’s coming from within the house is much more interesting to me.

So, I first started thinking of the house in Indiana and what it means for a house to have metaphors built in, because it was never my house. I was just a visitor. But the fact is that we both spent a lot of time in this house. It was ours in a very personal way. There was also something about having all that created and shattered in the same brush. And the way that destruction was reproduced in enclosed spaces: in the car, in a shipping container flea-market in New York. Or even flying in an airplane or being in an airport, all these places that have these enclosed, liminal qualities about them. The more I thought, the more I was into it, the more I realized that being with her was just a sequence of being trapped in many different kinds of spaces. In the book I talk about Gaslight the film and that enclosure is very literal; as the film progresses she doesn’t leave the house and that’s sort of self-enforced. But when she does, when she removes herself from the house, the structure is still around her. To me there’s something so chilling about that, that the house follows you. Even when you’ve left the space. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can be good in a way; it can be a good house, it can be a happy house. But in my case it was really bad because I felt like the house was following me around and falling on my body.

RRE: That reminds me of White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, where the character Miranda leaves the house for university, only to return to it at the end of book; it consumes her.

CMM: And that’s what a haunting is; a haunting is a state of being unable not to return. There’s always a sense of returning, a sense of inevitability, a sense of being yoked. I give this craft talk on haunted houses and there’s this great line in this poem by Jane Kenyon and she talks about depression as a ghost. She says, unholy ghosts are certain to come again. It’s a thing you can never exorcise; it’s never gone.

But once I had the house as an organizing principle of the book, the whole thing kind of changed. It was hard to write the book without having a form, so this brought everything together.

RRE: How do you choose which pieces fit into the narrative you’re trying to tell? You include a section about a close and almost inappropriate friendship you had with a priest when you were in high school, which is sort of distinct from the narrative with your ex and the dream house. How do you decide what matters to the overall story?

CCM: I think for the most part they were things I felt were impossible to omit. The more I thought about the thing with my pastor—actually this section is adapted from a piece I wrote years ago for Catapult—I realized that more than anything in my whole life that event really prepped me, and not in a good way. I think the lack of what happened to me exactly, why this situation was so fucked up, why these boundaries were being violated weren’t obvious to me for years later, and there were a lot of things that were prepping me in a really weird way so I had to write about it. And then there was stuff that I just wasn’t sure would fit or just needed to go. The case of the priest felt more obvious to me and it fit with this element of: What does it mean to be this young woman trying to figure out what sexuality is, trying to figure out what desire is, with this weird religious angle and also all this body shame and everything? So that felt obvious. And then there were all these other pieces and I knew I couldn’t write a thousand page book, so I realized I really need the reader to get a sense of it but this is not an autobiography. I don’t need to give every detail.

There were all these moments where I had to think: what does this do for the book? Does it give it dimensionality? I wanted to create a sense of who I was as a person, who I am as a person, and also give a sense of what the path to my ex-girlfriend, the path to this situation, looked like and what were the points along the way that kind of guided me in that direction. And I don’t mean that in a cosmic sense. I don’t think a deity was punishing me there. But more, what in my life made me ready for this? And that was a question I wanted to answer for myself. So looking back and examining your past pain, and trying to honor that. We can never go back to our former selves and just tell them: “Oh honey, that’s just a normal part of adulthood.”

RRE: You touch on fate in a few points, for instance “Dream House as Time Travel,” how you couldn’t change something even if you went back and tried to intervene. What are your thoughts on fate or inevitability?

There’s something really horrible about wanting to reach back and say: I’m so sorry.

CCM: The time travel theory I draw on is that if we could access the past in some way we still wouldn’t be able to change a thing that’s already happened because, by definition, it’s already happened. And this is just one theory of time travel, but what was compelling about it to me was that it reminded me of this great Ted Chiang story called “The Merchant and the Alchemist,” which is a really good example of this theory: He wants to travel to the past to rescue his wife but he can’t. She’s already dying; she’s already died. This is far more interesting to me because we can’t go back and change things. I don’t think of it as fate, just that things have already happened, they’re done. And I think for me that also creates a kind of grief because I want to reach back to this person that I used to be and say, “it’s going to be okay but it’s also really going to suck.” I just want to go back and do something or say something but I obviously can’t. So it might as well be fate for her, for that past version of myself. And there’s something really devastating about that; there’s nothing you can do because the moment in which you were that one person is gone and you’re now someone else for better or for worse. Which is okay because that person is still me, but there’s something really horrible about wanting to reach back and say: I’m so sorry. The thing is I don’t actually wish I could undo it because I wouldn’t have met my wife. Even if I could go back in time to keep myself from interacting with this person, I wouldn’t. It brought me the person who gives me the most joy in the world.

Go Beyond Sally Rooney With These 13 Irish Women Novelists

Posted on November 15, 2019October 4, 2021 by Jo Lou

It’s a confusing thing, being Irish. We’re European with none of the sophistication, and for a tiny island, we have an impressive lack of consistency. That said, we also have an impressive literary output. Our politics, social movements, and religions have born enough conflict to make a canon that is varied—and vast. Ireland was one of the few white nations colonized by the Brits, and Fredrick Douglass’s 1840s campaign in Ireland (alongside a national forefather, Daniel O’Connell) is often framed as evidence of kinship with oppressed peoples. The truth is the Irish in America were hostile towards the African Americans—today’s Republican party has a lot of Pats and McSomethings knocking around, so it seems the whiteness found a home in the U.S.

To that end, the literature of Irish-Americans is very different from that of the Irish; an analogy might be the famed Irish Oral Tradition as Americans understand it (bardic storytelling) versus Kevin Barry’s understanding (sex). On the topic of sex, I would like to officially dispel the notion that there’s no one as romantic as an Irishman with a couple pints in him. Firstly, he needs many pints, and secondly, forget Heaney and his fecund feckin’ landscapes (sacrilege!). The good smut is in the pages written by the women (bless you, Edna) who’ve had to fight for it. In 1990, Ireland elected a female president, Mary Goddess Robinson—yet a woman in Ireland had no more rights than the foetus in her womb until January 2019. In the darker, ruminative Irish novel, the religious narrative is a pervasive one, but the Catholic country that had constitutional religion, the laundries, and abusive clergy was also the first country to legalize gay marriage by popular vote.

My point is, there’s a lot for our literature to talk about. To be described as an Irish writer should indicate a citizenship and nothing more, not style, subject matter, setting, and certainly not something “Joycean”—the regal Juan Villoro told me Jim-Jo copied his aesthetic from the Mexicans. Go figure. It’s very exciting when an exceptionally intelligent and young author like Sally Rooney becomes an ambassador to the world, but (no offense Sally) she is not the voice of Irish women, or a generation, or Irish literature today. She is an important voice in a writing landscape that is more robust than it’s ever been. The following reading list does not include Rooney, Anne Enright, Tana French, or Dame Edna. Some might argue that failing to mention these supernovas leaves gaping holes in the picture; I direct you to the previous sentence where I mentioned them. You already know how incredible they are, right? You’re here to discover more.

This is a list of novelists, so I can’t include the likes of Claire Louise-Bennett, Danielle McLaughlin, Wendy Erskine, and Nicole Flattery who uphold (and progress) the revered craft of the short story in Irish literature. I also wanted to incorporate some of the brilliant debuts that Irish women put forth this year, among them Sarah Davis-Goff, Aoibheann McCann, and Sue Rainsfield, but I’ll include their sophomore books in my next list. They say the boom is back in Ireland, and They (bankers) mean Property (which scares me), but I would say Irish lit is certainly booming. Despite my best efforts, I can’t fit everyone here. The following authors are all Irish and they call upon many eras, societies, Irelands, and worlds to craft their novels.

Mary Lavin

“In the Middle of the Fields” is Mary Lavin’s most commonly anthologized work (included in the excellent collection The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of Irish women writers edited by Sinéad Gleeson), but her novels had all the immediacy and adroitness of her short stories. Lavin’s work often focused on widowhood as it pertained to land ownership and religion.

Éilis Ní Dhuíbhne

Say Eye-lish Knee Div-nah. The Dancers Dancing is a good starting point for her body of work which includes both English and Irish-language novels and short story collections. Dancers is set in 1972 and is a dialogue driven narrative about young girls from Dublin and Derry sent to the gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region) of Donegal. A picturesque coming-of-age story of young Irish women.

Lisa McInerney

I’ve heard Lisa McInerney described as the female Flann O’Brien of our time, but I submit that she is Lisa Feckin’ McInerney, an original force of brilliant satirical storytelling and artful profanity. Her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (the Bailey’s and the Orange prize, variously) and is indeed a glorious book about how one gangster murder ripples through a web of innocent, lovelorn, and truly terrible people. Her short stories are just as gripping, and I hear there’s a third novel coming soon—keep a weather eye out.

Mary Costello

Mary Costello’s latest novel, the beautifully titled The River Capture, just got the nomination for the Irish Book Awards, but her debut, Academy Street, was as deserving. Costello’s writing is singular for its tight intensity which quietly untangles (the often dark) teleological questions.

Eimear McBride

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing! The Lesser Bohemians! Brilliance in fragmentism, stream-of-consciousness, bildungswoman (forgive me), sex that is written perfectly even when it’s terrifying and brutal. If we had to make the Joyce comparison (ugh), we would make it here.

Claire Kilroy

As the cycle of literature follows the cycle of society, the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger is now a pillared theme of contemporary Irish fiction. Claire Kilroy’s fourth novel, The Devil I Know, uses this period as its framework, but her previous novel (All Names Have Been Changed) is set in the 1980s version (so grittier and sexier) of Sally Rooney Land, i.e., Trinity College. Her novels have been awarded and praised since the get-go, so take your pick, you can’t go wrong.

Christine Dwyer Hickey

I am a sucker for stories about trains, on trains, referencing trains, but even if you have no interest in the sub-sub-genre of literary railroad fiction, Christine Dwyer Hickey’s work, including Cold Eye of Heaven and The Last Train from Liguria, will read something special. She captures the Hiberno-English of Dublin without the kitsch, and the sequences of life without the saccharine glaze.

Sara Baume

While we’re on the topic of language, it would be remiss not to mention Sara Baume. She plays with phraseology and form in a way that is reminiscent of Olivia Laing or Jenny Ofill. Her subject matter, too, recalls Laing and Ofill; loneliness and loners are her recurrent subjects. It’s not always easy reading, but it’s provoking.

Anna Burns

So, Anna Burns is a Booker Prize-winner, but when she won last year for Milkman, lots of people were like, wow, where did Anna Burns come from? And Irish writers were like, Belfast. It’s true that her pages are not for the whiskey-tippled reader, but every page is worth it. Milkman is set in the troubles-era North and is something between a literary experiment and a harkening to the ol’ stream of consciousness thing you’ve heard a lot about already.

Nuala O’Faolain

I am cheating. Nuala O’Faolain wrote a sensual novel called My Dream of You, published in 2001, that incorporates themes and ideas from her gorgeous memoir, Are You Somebody, published in 1996. So yes, read the memoir to understand the novel; and while you’re at it, read Sinéad Gleeson’s experimental memoir Constellations, which occupies much the same significance as Somebody but in the contemporary.

Maria Edgeworth

This one is a throwback and controversial because Maria Edgeworth was born in England and was the daughter of a Lord—her family relocated to their estate in County Longford in 1782. She is notable, however, for writing against the political ideals of her time, such as ascendancy and land ownership. She was a literary celebrity in her day, and yet largely unrecognized today. Think Jane Austen, but Irish. If you’re looking to pick up the baton, start with The Absentee or Belinda.

Belinda McKeon

Speaking of Belinda! Belinda McKeon. McKeon’s pensive novels Solace and Tender bring together rural Ireland, the effect of tragedy on family and family land, and latterly, the social dynamics of Trinity College Dublin (and you thought Sally Rooney put the famed snobbery of Trinners on the literary map). Her writing is spare but textured by poetry and art.

Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell’s second novel, The Meeting Point, won the Dylan Thomas prize and is largely set in the expat community of Bahrain before the Iraq war. It’s a carefully wrought story about the perspectives and truths of a marriage. Caldwell is also a playwright and her prose, long and short, has two qualities of great theater: compelling but crucially human.

Cyrus Grace Dunham on Turning the Body Into a Home

Posted on November 14, 2019November 12, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

What does it mean to be “at home” in your body—or rather, what does it mean for the body to be a home? We often conflate these two things metaphorically, and our skin acts as boundary and border, just as much as it offers points of contact, touch, and intimacy with place and people. We aspire to have the containers we reside in offer us the same level of comfort as the domestic sphere, and yet, everyone inevitably confronts the fallibilities and betrayals of their own body and the bodies of others. And if the body is your home, then a name is your address: a way for others to locate you. In the memoir A Year Without a Name, Cyrus Grace Dunham charts their experience of inhabiting and dissociating from their body, reckoning with the ways queerness, gender, desire, home, and family inform and intersect around the corporeal.

When I spoke to Cyrus, Zoom kept failing and we had to start the call again several times. It felt fitting that that we could never quite pick up in the exact place where we left off—it wasn’t seamless, and this oscillating between starts and stops seemed to reflect just how few answers there are when it comes to identity, just how impermanent and nonlinear this thing called a body is.

Ayden LeRoux: I wanted to start by thinking about the geographies and landscapes that you move through in your book, because you are able to convey this real reverence and ache through people and places simultaneously. You’re going to India and New York and Los Angeles and the Bay Area and the desert in Southern California and you’re also moving through, and with, these relationships with Zoya, Antonia, Joshua, GD. How does place influence your sense of self and how does place shape who we are as lovers?

Cyrus Grace Dunham: I’ve always had this ache for another place, which can also often feel like an ache for another person. I think they have a similar effect—when you fall in love with someone new or find yourself someplace new, you get to feel different. You get to feel like a new version of yourself, you know?

AL: There was something subtle—even if you weren’t naming it explicitly—that was happening as I was reading that I could feel this rootedness in LA developing. I think a lot about that quote that’s in The Poetics of Space by Bachelard: Je suis l’espace ou je suis. I am the place where I am.

CGD: Our bodies mediate our ability to feel and be in a place. Dissociation can make it really hard to really feel the textures of a place. It took me a few years in Los Angeles to start to locate markers of time passing because there appear to be minimal seasonal changes. You have to be someplace a little while to start to understand how time works there. I wanted to nod to those markers of time in the book. Things like the guavas starting to fruit or when the bark falls off the eucalyptus trees.

AL: The sensorial or sensual self that you’re talking about connecting with place is so much about who you become as a lover to all these different people and the tactility of that.

CGD: Totally, and every different relationship has a different set of symbols. I appreciate you bringing this up because I love writing about people and love and sex and place. So much of conveying attachment is picking a few symbols because we can never communicate the entirety of a relationship to a place or a person. You get a smell, a color, a fruit, a sensation. We have to reduce things to the building blocks of sensation as a way of communicating the intensity of attachment.

AL: Definitely. It’s one of the things I reflected on in reading your book, and then again in Ocean Vuong’s new book and in T Fleischmann’s books. People always say, “The hardest thing to write about is love, or illness, or death,” but I think sex specifically is the hardest thing to write and not have it be totally corny. The three of you do that so tactfully. Maybe this is silly, but what are your tips on how to write about sex?

CGD: I love how both T Fleishmann and Ocean Vuong write about sex. It’s really hard to communicate the sensuality of sex without relying on cliché metaphors and symbols. I was so impressed by how Ocean Vuong seemed to rely on a totally uncharted symbolic realm in describing sex, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. T Fleischmann has this way of saying things exactly as they are, letting things be the symbols of themselves. I believe there’s a line in their new book: Jackson’s sweat tasted like Jackson’s sweat. That may not be exactly it, but it’s something like that.

Sometimes I held myself back writing about sex because I was afraid of being corny. I would under-describe or under-give. It’s really hard to describe sex between trans and gender-nonconforming people because most of the language that we have to describe sex acts and genitals are gendering in a very violent way. What if someone has what the world would think of as a pussy, but it doesn’t feel like a pussy to them? I avoided describing people and their bodies and the specifics of sex because I wasn’t confident that I knew how to do so without relying on gendered descriptors.

Names are supposed to have permanence, rather than being something more like an outfit or the weather or a mood.

AL: It’s interesting that you say that because so much of what was evocative was the way you allowed yourself to become gendered by certain acts in the book. It created the sense that you are accumulation of selves rather than a person erasing their past. Do you think names are a way of taming us? I was thinking about the scene when Joshua gives you the collar. Taming isn’t always bad. There is a sense of feeling safe or at home.

CGD: Joshua would often say this thing to me, like, “Being trapped is often the closest thing we know to feeling held.” That always resonated with me. I think about it all the time. But yes, I deeply agree that names tame us. All words as representative symbols tame that which they describe. We use specific words to communicate identity as if these are stable and obvious facts. And a name is connected to questions of loyalty because ultimately a name is something that’s given to us—it’s not something that we consent to—and we primarily accept it. Last names functions as vehicles of inheritance, a way of passing down power. Even in queer and trans spaces, the assumption is often that someone will find a name that suits them better than their given name and it will be their name forever. Names are supposed to have permanence, rather than being something more like an outfit or the weather or a mood. What does it say about how we relate to fact and stability and false notions of permanence that we expect people to keep names?

AL: Your book does this great work of not following that traditional arc of self-discovery of completion or arrival. And yet, a name is an arrival of sorts.

CGD: I’m in an odd moment because there was so much relief in coming to the name Cyrus, but now I’ve written a book that’s out in the world that has the name Cyrus on it. I have a lot of fear that I’ve given that name away. I have a lot of fear that I’m going to lose it.

AL: Your word choice of “losing” it is striking, as if it could fall out of your pocket or something.

CGD: Or it could be taken. It’s hard for me to look at the book and see the author name and not experience the commodification of the name. And it is a commodity now, but it’s also evidence of a process that I went through. What you said about taming is relevant. All of the stable language that we use to communicate ourselves, whether it’s a gender marker, a pronoun, a name, is a way of making ourselves consumable and palatable. A name means something so different when you hold it inside yourself, like a secret.

A name means something so different when you hold it inside yourself, like a secret.

AL: I’m curious how you feel about this being pigeon-holed as a memoir about gender or a trans memoir. For me, part of why I was so moved is because I have a genetic predisposition for cancer, so the fragility of the body is very relatable. I feel there is all this rich potential for crossover between writing about sexuality and illness and disability and mortality, because of how they undo assumptions about bodies. All of our bodies betray us, as you say. How do you feel about being forced into genre categories?

CGD: Binary ideas of sex and gender are extremely violent and harm everyone. They harm people not only because they disidentify with the gender they were assigned at birth, but because anyone who has a body that strays from supposed biological norms is, in a way, failing at gender. Because of this, there’s so much crossover between thinking about transness and thinking about illness and disability, something that many people have written about much more eloquently than I can. All that’s to say, I don’t feel any scarcity around identification with gender nonconformity and gender deviance. It should be as accessible as possible.

I’m interested in any way of being embodied that undermines binary ideas of sex. I never want to impose gender non-conformity on other people, but I do think that genetic conditions, and of course intersex conditions in particular, do so much work to show us that binary sex is not real.

In terms of your specific question, I don’t necessarily see this as a trans memoir. It’s as much about the affective, embodied experiences of whiteness, elitism, alienation rooted in cultures of fame, recognition, and achievement. And, of course, the interconnectivity that pulses underneath all those forces, that transness allows me and so many of us to access. The book probably will be thought of as trans memoir. I don’t want to play naive around my using the genre as a Trojan Horse to address other questions I want to address.

AL: The people that I’ve been able to relate to most about my body—because I’m advised to have a mastectomy—are other people who feel that their body is fragile at a young age. That’s friends of mine who’re intersex, trans, GNC, and who deal with chronic illness or disability. I worry that I’m imposing my own projections into gender because I am a cis, white, queer woman. But I wish there were more bridges between those conversations about illness and gender and how they liberate us from assumptions made about what sex and gender performance looks like.

CGD: A disservice that the contemporary mainstream trans movement has done to larger movements around intersexuality, around gender nonconformity outside a binary sex logic, is perpetuating the notion that must feel “not at home in their body” in order to be trans. What does that even mean? To not feel at home in our bodies? Like, how can one feel at home in their body in a culture that’s built around rampant alienation and individualism? Most people don’t feel at home in their bodies, and yet the construction of I’m a woman, but I feel like a man is a remarkably simple and reductive one.

What does that even mean? To not feel at home in our bodies? Most people don’t feel at home in their bodies.

I know lots of people who don’t experience dysphoria but also don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. To me that’s a deeply legitimate position to take, a deeply legitimate feeling to have. What’s funny is that I’ve actually experienced quite cliché forms of dysphoria. But I don’t see those forms of dysphoria as being necessary for a trans experience. I hear you saying you’re cis and I find myself thinking I don’t even know what that means. If you feel like you will never be able to perform womanhood, in the way it’s expected of you, well… that sounds pretty not cis to me. But I’m not here to debunk your sense of self. [both laugh]

AL: But you’re totally right, there are many ways to not feel at home in one’s body. Going back to what we were talking about with lovers and geography and place—I don’t feel at home in my body in San Diego. Or there are people that I don’t feel at home with.

CGD: I think what we’re talking about is that there are many people whose experience of gender deviance can never be contained by, disciplined by, the construction of “being born in the wrong body.”

AL: Do you feel committed to nonfiction?

CGD: I love nonfiction. I don’t like the idea that nonfiction has an obvious relationship to truth or fact. I don’t like the idea that nonfiction is necessarily about the past or the present. Nonfiction can be speculative, just as much as it can be rooted in recollection. There are moments in A Year Without a Name where I’m describing the future. I’m describing a way of being embodied, of existing as someone who uses he pronouns, as someone who looks like a man, and it’s all a fantasy. I use language to catalyze a transformation in myself. I’m committed to a nonfiction that holds space for fantasy, speculation, and alternative ways of being.

Jana Casale Says You Don’t Have to Kill ALL Your Darlings

Posted on November 14, 2019August 21, 2024 by Jess Zimmerman

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time, we’re talking to Jana Casale, author of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (which is a novel, but also coincidentally the title of my memoir). Jana’s upcoming six-week workshop focuses on capturing everyday life in fiction—and using your own everyday life as the inspiration for your work. Catapult writes: “Whether you’re looking to write a novel as subtly effective as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or you’re hoping to get the most out of the quieter moments of your Game of Thrones-esque epic, this class will give you a greater understanding of how depth and minutiae can be threaded together to form beautiful and meaningful prose.”

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Learning to edit your own work is the most important skill any writer can get out of workshopping.

Learning to edit your own work is the number one most important skill any writer can get out of workshopping. It is such a hard skill to learn and is so vital to doing good work. For me I think I was so much better equipped to write a novel more quickly and effectively having been a student in so many workshops than I would have been if I hadn’t had the opportunity.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I think unfortunately badly run workshops can damage your ego and really kill the joy in writing. At the end of the day absolutely all criticism of fiction is subjective, and a properly run workshop should have that as its starting point. A workshop should feel like a positive, collaborative experience that brings your work to the next level rather than be something that tears you down and makes you feel like you want to quit writing and get a law degree.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

The more you write the better at writing you will get.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

I think if that means that everyone has a great story to tell there’s truth to that, but I think a novel is more than just a great story.

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

I don’t think anyone needs to be encouraged to give up writing because writing is hard enough of and in itself.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

I think they go hand in hand. If I feel you’re on my team because you value my work, your opinion will matter to me a lot more than if I feel you dislike my work, and I have to defend it to you for you to even see the inherent value of it.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

There is such a thing as over-editing.

It depends on what their goals are. If their goal is to turn this into a profession then yes, but if their goal is to just enjoy writing as a hobby then no.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

Kill your darlings: Overrated. There is such a thing as over-editing.
Show don’t tell: Another overrated saying. Sometimes telling is faster and more efficient. We all have things to do with our time.
Write what you know: This is good advice in the right context, but I would say don’t forget to bring a sense of wonder to your work. I think good fiction is about discovery and asking questions that none of us have the answers to.
Character is plot: I’ve never heard this before, but I would say character is not plot.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Something that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with books (we all need a break sometimes).

What’s the best workshop snack?

When I was a grad student at Oxford they’d actually give us tea breaks where we’d have biscuits. Very British and very lovely.