I write what people like to call “coming of age” books, in which kids are figuring out who and what to be, how to navigate the world independently. So I think a lot about what the rules of the world are. Or rather, I think about what the rules of the world are supposed to be.
Until 2016, my books tended to end in compromise. This wasn’t something I ever set out to do consciously, but each time I wrote a book, it happened—I wrote my characters into situations where their personal needs and desires bumped up against the needs and desires of the larger world, and where the main character ended up recognizing (among other things) that they weren’t the only person in the universe.
Until 2016, my books tended to end in compromise.
Honestly, this is a reflection of my personal parenting philosophy. I believe in compromising our individual desires for the greater good. I believe kids need to be aware of other people, and the rules that govern the world, that make things easier and better for everyone. Sharing. Taking turns. Traffic laws. Basic etiquette in restaurants. And so on.
I saw this as something kids need to be thinking about—the social contract. Learning to accept that they can’t always get what they want. This was, I thought, one of the major problems kids face today—or rather, kids with a certain amount of privilege and affluence, whose basic needs are met.
This is not to say that kids shouldn’t follow their dreams, or operate as individuals, only that they need to recognize that everyone has dreams, and that sometimes, each of us needs to listen instead of speak, or sit back so that others can be noticed. There are a lot of books for kids about individualism, and we need those. But my books have tended to be about how to blend that individual pursuit with a recognition of the needs of others.
Three years ago, I was beginning to outline a new book. A story about two girls who are struggling with very different problems, insurmountable problems, who find each other and forge an important friendship. It was a friendship book, I thought, a book about how much we can matter to other people. But of course, as usual, my expected ending involved compromise, a chance for one of the girls to realize she would need to accept the limitations of the world, to play by the rules, accept reality.
Then came November of 2016, with the election of Donald Trump and its aftermath. The Muslim ban. Kids in cages, Supreme Court appointments designed to roll back the rights of women. Each day we wake up to new atrocities, and each day, I try to explain these things to my own children.
Like so many Americans, that election was a wake-up call for me, a reminder that this country is what we make it, with our voices, our votes, our dollars, our energy. I’ve spent much of the last three years marching, shouting on courthouse steps, calling my reps, working on local campaigns, writing postcards and making donations. We’re all trying to right the ship we’d forgotten we were riding. We’re all trying to turn things around.
And yet, though my life changed radically on that day in November, my work didn’t change—not at first. Writing was the one thing that felt the same, like a little island, a safe place. I’d head out to demonstrate, or make my daily phone calls to my senators, and then come home to spend time with my characters—Jasper and Leah—two kids who were dealing with their own individual problems and not thinking about Trumpism. It felt like a kind of relief. I just kept plugging away, working toward the ending I’d outlined—an ending in which, as usual, Jasper and Leah would have to come to terms with the rules of their world, grow up a little, accept reality, compromise.
Then came Charlottesville.
I was about halfway through my draft at that point, in residency at the Serenbe Air arts colony, working alone in a beautiful little cabin with birds singing around me, when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in what would become a deadly altercation with counter-protestors. I sat there in my little cabin, watching the footage unfold on my laptop, and I found that I couldn’t write a word. I couldn’t sit there in my lovely bubble, with Jasper and Leah, when the world was on fire. I needed to leave Serenbe, get home to my family, join the march that was being planned in downtown Atlanta. So I did that. I packed up and left.
But as I drove home that day on 85, racing back into the real world, I found myself thinking about the end of my book. I found myself thinking about compromise, and kids, about the social contract. I found myself pondering what it was I wanted to communicate about it to my readers.
I could not, in clear conscience, instruct kids growing up in Trump’s America to simply accept their struggles and move forward.
Here’s the thing—the social contract requires that we follow the rules when the system is working. But when the system is horribly broken, the social contract demands that we revise it, disrupt it, rewrite the contract. I found myself thinking that I could not, in clear conscience, instruct kids growing up in Trump’s America to simply accept their struggles and move forward as I had done in past books. I needed a new ending for My Jasper June, an ending that would suggest not a need for compromise, but a need for innovation—for kids who are ready to remake the world, rewrite the social contract, even if it means breaking the rules.
I’d been thinking about this question all wrong. The question isn’t whether to follow your individual dreams OR serve the community. The question is how to follow your dreams AND serve the community.
So I went back to my draft and my outline, and I rethought it all. I’d placed my characters in an untenable situation, one that—in the earlier draft—required acceptance, a willingness to face the hardships and inequalities of the world. Instead, I looked for another ending, one that embraced creativity, imagination, innovation—which kids are naturally so very good at. I looked for an ending that demanded Leah and Jasper reach beyond defaults, beyond expectations, beyond the obvious answers grownups might provide, and reimagine the world for themselves.
I realized that what Jasper and Leah needed to do was to see how the system was failing them, how their parents were failing them. It was only once they recognized the limitations of their grownups that they might step forward, realize their own wisdom and power, and take matters into their own hands.
My readers figured this out before I did. Kids are stepping forward today, in a way I never imagined they would have to do, as they face the world they stand to inherit—school shootings, the impending climate mess we’ve created, tangled courts and gerrymandered districts, the gross inequality of the justice system and the segregation of their schools. They are brave and inspiring, and it is utterly unfair that they have to do this work.
My Jasper June is not a political book. It doesn’t talk about politics specifically, or address race or gender directly. But we live in an era when absolutely everything is political, and as I wrote, I couldn’t ignore that fact. This political moment—and the amazing kids who are stepping forward from it, to become tomorrow’s leaders—crawled into my book, and informed everything. Kids like Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg remade Leah and Jasper, and set them on a different path. A path that required greater imagination, wilder dreaming, and the conviction to demand that dreams be taken seriously.
Ironically, this is the first novel I’ve written in which the characters are not explicitly navigating the complexities of magic. In My Jasper June, Leah and Jasper wish for magic. They dream of invitations to Hogwarts, or a portal to solve their problems. And in the original draft of the book, they found it! But a second change I made in revision, even as I was challenging my characters to dream bigger, to push back against compromise—was that I took out the magical device. I disappointed Leah and Jasper, forced them to solve their own problems, without fantastical assistance.
Kids like Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg remade Leah and Jasper, and set them on a different path.
Now I find myself thinking that these choices are deeply related. Leah and Jasper can’t do what I’ve asked of them if they don’t consider magic, dream of solutions beyond the realistic and obvious. But then they have to take those dreams into the real world, and set them into motion. Innovation is about magic. Creation is about magic. Progress and revolution are about magic, but these are the kinds of magic we make for ourselves. As long as we rely on the world as we know it, change can’t happen, but Leah and Jasper didn’t need a magical device. With their ability to see the world differently, their youthful energy, their great optimism and hope, they needed to become the magical device. Accomplish the seemingly impossible.
We are in a treacherous moment in history. Our country is in crisis. Some days, everything feels bleak. Our kids shouldn’t have to carry this burden. They shouldn’t have to rewrite the contract, remake the world. But if they are going to have to do that work, they will need to reach beyond the expectations of compromise, and believe firmly in their own magical abilities. It seems to me that the least we can do for them is stretch, open our imaginations, consider whatever magical future they are willing to dream up and inhabit.
Since Thanksgiving is a time when the collective American imagination envisions a peaceful meal shared between colonizer and colonized, where both appear to share a mutual understanding and benefit, why not make this fantasy a reality by exercising some empathy-for-the-other muscles and read literary works written from their perspective?
My list has no blood quantum standards and is complete with rez and urban, past and present, perspectives alike, which I feel is the best way to represent the beautifully tangled complex mass that is modern day Native peoples. The struggles and perspectives mapped throughout these works are some I believe to be most relevant for a well tuned socio-political perspective. Many are more recent publications as the Native literary Renaissance is currently in full effect, morphing, evolving and reaching in ways the Native literary voice has never done before.
Love is complicated no matter the setting, but the potential for love is most doomed in the place of Perma, Montana for the protagonist Louise in this novel set in the 1940s. Louise is described as a beautiful mixed blood Native girl coming of age on the Flat Head Indian reservation. Being mixed, lighter skinned, hair red-tinged, she has always been an outsider to the people of her reservation; nicknamed Perma Red, degraded and sexualized from an early age by everyone around her. The story catalogues her paradoxical existence, simultaneously craving acceptance and escape from the Rez. Sadly, it is only in the men who court her that exists her options towards acceptance or escape. Published in 2002, and winner of the 2003 American Book Award, this psychologically complex, empathic and intense novel, shows us the stark landscape of the Rez for a coming of age mixed blood Native woman — America’s fiercest yet absolute subaltern other.
Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir brought the trials of the modern Native woman into the current mainstream literary scene. In her 2018 debut, she blew open our missing narrative in one of the most striking ways one could — by publishing the journals she kept through her institutionalization during a mental breakdown after she lost custody of her first born son. It is no secret that colonialist structures put in place centuries ago still work to silence and psychically maim indigenous and First Nations Peoples, and with this memoir it is no longer something that happens in the back rooms of history. Heart Berries is now a New York Times Best Seller and was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2018 by TIME Magazine. Through her telling of her trials, family trauma, and a distinct type of oppression of indigenous women, Mailhot brings the long lost voice of the Native mother into the present, and she is screaming.
In this 2017 collection of memoir essays we travel with Melissa in uncovering her personal and cultural identity. We follow her through the breakdown of her toxic relationship with a married woman and the building of her relation with her long lost Native American father. Febos’ story is most powerful when working to convey the complex emotions involved in trying to reconnect with an absentee father — one whose history you can feel in your blood and the land all around you. Blood trauma is real and Febos makes us feel it. Febos works through memories, familial and personal, cultural myths, modern and ancient, sifted meanings, in order to understand the ontology of her being. To get closer to the kernel of her self she points her investigations towards past abandonments. By looking at her life through sequences of losses, she hones in on herself alone. She frames abandonment without tragedy, but as a necessity to growth, a natural state of emotional evolution. Abandonment is nothing but the beginning of your own story, alone.
In Jesmyn Ward’s 2013 memoir she begins by telling us what she knows of her family’s mixed lineage. She is black, Choctaw, Haitian, and white, born and raised in Mississippi. She wants us to know what and where she is so we can understand something she has witnessed. With the complexes of race and place set firmly in her reader’s mind, she begins a slow recording of the tragic premature deaths of the men in her family. She wrote this for her brothers — blood and not. At once a coming of age and a history of familial tragedy, she is trying desperately to understand the structures of race, class, culture, and intergenerational trauma that has made survival so difficult for these particular men. Men We Reaped was named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York magazine, and through this deeply intelligent, thought provoking, and tragic memoir we are enabled to see how the American machine of racism, intertwined with subsuming classism and culture, is very present; and that the subtle and not so subtle ways it continues to eat men alive can no longer be ignored.
Tommy Orange’s 2018 debut novel, long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award, is a braided narrative following the stories of twelve multigenerational urban Indians living in modern day Oakland, CA. It is a Pulp Fiction-esque novel with less debauchery and more tragedy. With each chapter being a new voice, the characters swirl together to create a vivid telling of mixed histories, politics, and lineages. The characters orbit around each other trying to understand their own identities within a harsh American underclass, continually stratified by poverty and violence. The trials they face are unrelenting yet their spirits stay strong, coming together in a final scene that will have your heart breaking with them all.
In 2007’s Dwellings Linda Hogan writes a natural history of American land, animals, spirits, and people. Her expositions show us how the natural world is an extension of the emotive dynamics of human history. The naturalism in Dwellings is concerned with how humans have imprinted on the land and animals and how the land and animals have imprinted on us, in vast subtle cycles. She reminds us that we have always already been linked to the land in this way. Hogan’s articulations of the natural world — its development, form, particular purposes and mechanisms — are all main characters, and the evolution of these characters can be seen to inform human endeavors. Everything in nature is interconnected and interdependent, and humans through history have either tried to fight this or let it lead them. In Dwellings, Hogan reminds us how nature must ultimately lead.
The stories of the California Native peoples are not too often heard. We learned in grade school about the Mission Indians but only of their life after capture and colonization, as if it had always been so. We spent pointless hours discussing and then recreating out of cardboard those Spanish Missions. In Deborah Miranda’s 2013, winner of the PEN Oakland — Josephine Miles Literary Award, part historical research project and part memoir, fragmented yet fluid and personal, we finally hear this history from the side of the indigenous peoples that lived through it. Miranda’s research into her family history, indigenous Californians, is the grounding cable for her to tell their collective tribal story. The book is full of photo slides, obtained through her meticulous research, as she writes to humanize the people within them; some of them her direct ancestors. Through Miranda’s poetic lyricism and objective research we cannot help but feel them through the lens.
Written in 2017 in her exceptionally crafted prose, Ernestine Hayes tells of the particular sort of survival of the Alaska Native after the war colonialism has enacted on them. Her language moves gracefully between memoir, fiction, historical research, Tlingit traditional stories, and metaphor, all complete as a war weary epic. She weaves her people’s story of the Raven and the Box of Daylight with Sun Tzu’s Art of War to create her own mythic language of strength and survival. Through her storytelling we see a real literary movement past any dry dictation of Native life after colonialism. Her epic language bestows a much needed grace to her people still living through all the effects that slow and steady genocide can have on such a secluded group of people. She creates the lyrics to walk her people out of the cycles of historical trauma, into the light of hope after war.
When I think of literary authors, I often imagine my college reading list — and my lecturer’s pontifications on how their books have been meticulously etched into the canon of cultural significance. I rarely think about storytime with Mom and Dad.
So would you believe it if I told you that Nobel laureate Toni Morrison published as many books for kids as she did adult novels? Or that Stephen King, the Mayor of Creepsville, Maine, had a lesson to impart to children? As it happens, even the most serious of authors can’t resist the challenge of writing for some of the most discerning readers: young kids.
James Baldwin
In his groundbreaking essays, novels, plays, and speeches, Baldwin certainly never pulled his punches when it came to commenting on racism and identity in America. The same could be said for Little Man, Little Man. The story is told through the eyes of four-year-old TJ, who plays ball with friends on his Harlem block and runs errands for his neighbors. The book offers strong lessons for both the characters and the reader, with lines like: “I want you to be proud of your people,” TJ’s Daddy would always say.
Baldwin saw the book as a “celebration of the self-esteem of black children,” allowing TJ and his friends to play and find joy in the face of systemic oppression. The book is also replete with vivid watercolor illustrations by French abstract painter Yoran Cazak — making this a beautiful, meaningful reading experience for children in more ways than one.
Virginia Woolf
In 1923, Virginia Woolf contributed to a small, unusual family project. She had already written three novels (and was on the cusp of publishing her breakout hit, Mrs. Dalloway) when she responded to a submission call from The Charleston Bulletin — a newspaper run by her teenage nephews. Answering the brief, she wrote The Widow and the Parrot, in which a widow inherits her brother’s house after he passes away. She travels there to collect her inheritance only to find a peculiar parrot named James. Without giving too much away, this tale of mystery and altruism reminds us all that it pays to be a little kinder to animals.
Gertrude Stein
Shortly after the founding of Young Scott Books in 1938, one of its authors, Margaret Wise Brown (who penned Goodnight Moon), suggested that the publisher convince famous adult authors to give writing children’s books a try. Many, like John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, declined — but Gertrude Stein was ready.
As it would happen, Stein had half of The World is Roundalreadywritten before Young Scott even approached her. In Stein’s characteristically playful prose, she chronicles the adventures of a little girl named Rose as she tries to make sense of the world. Printed on pink pages and blue ink (which Stein insisted upon), the book introduces its young readers to themes of identity and individuality with quirky, elliptical lines like “And which little girl am I am I the little girl named Rose which little girl named Rose.” Stein’s signature line “a rose is a rose is a rose” even makes an appearance, as our protagonist symbolically carves it around a tree.
Chinua Achebe
When Chinua Achebe became a parent, he was alarmed by the amount of racism written into the books his daughter was exposed to at school. As a response, he wrote Chike and the River, which tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who longs to cross the Niger River to a city called Asaba. He doesn’t have a sixpence — the fee for the ferry ride — so he embarks on a series of thrilling and terrifying journeys to jerry-rig his way toward his goal. Achebe went on to write several more children’s books including The Drum and The Flute, which are adaptations of traditional Igbo folktales.
Toni Morrison
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison was a prolific children’s book writer, at one point publishing at least two a year. Most of these titles were written in conjunction with her son, Slade, whose childhood musings formed the basis of The Big Box and The Book of Mean People. Morrison completists will enjoy an audio version of three fables called Who’s Got Game, which Morrison herself reads with supreme command. And don’t forget to check out Peeny Butter Fudge, a fun family tale about mischievous grandchildren visiting their grandmother — in which Nana gets in on the hijinks.
Danielle Steel
Danielle Steel might not be a traditional “literary author” per se, but we wanted to include her in this list anyway — if only for the novelty factor of a serious romance writer turning her pen to children’s lit.
Best known for steaming up reading rooms with her saucy romances, Steel is also no stranger to kid lit. Since the 1980s, she’s published picture books aiming to help children face real-life problems with titles like Martha’s New Daddy and Freddie’s First Night Away. Steel’s most recent kids’ series is about her chihuahua, Minnie, and her adventures.
Stephen King
If Danielle Steel wasn’t risqué enough, how about the master of both weird sex and chilling fear: Stephen King. Many of us probably peeked behind the cover of one of his thrillers before we were “of age,” but the horror author also wrote several books that were actually intended for young audiences.
King’s main contribution to the world of children’s literature is Charlie the Choo Choo, which he wrote under the pseudonym Beryl Evans. The title character is a sentient train with a life of his own. (Like Christine, but not murdery.) If you want to know what that looks like, just imagine a fire-damaged Thomas the Tank Engine with a Joker grin.
The plot revolves around Charlie and his best friend, Engineer Bob, as they lay down the track to adventures that reveal the importance of hard work and camaraderie. The book plays a key role in the third book of the Dark Tower series, where it’s purchased by one of the protagonists. Finally, in 2016, King decided to make it real, complete with a sly quote on the front cover: “If I were ever to write a children’s book, it would be just like this!”
It’s hard to grab a reader’s attention. It always has been. Sometimes, to generate a little buzz, a book has to be something a bit more than a book. It has to be a stunt, some kind of feat or achievement or goof that gets people talking.
There are many ways for literary work to be a stunt, and after much discussion, our intrepid Electric Lit staff has developed a matrix to map out the four basic kinds of literary stunts: gimmicks, pranks, flexes and dares. The underpinning behind each of these quadrants is explained below, and we’ve plotted some example books on our matrix to further illuminate each section.
Our intrepid staff has developed a matrix to map out the four basic kinds of literary stunts: gimmicks, pranks, flexes and dares.
The study of literary stunts is fledgling, and we understand there might be some readers who disagree with us; we welcome such disagreements. To move us closer to a unified theory of literary stunts, we need a variety of feedback. Therefore, if you have a quarrel with or addition to our matrix, we encourage you to reach out to us. If you’re especially persuasive, we may even update the chart.
For your consideration, Electric Literature’s Literary Stunt Index. We’ve plotted some notable books and some of our personal favorites to give you a sense of how it works.
Click to enlarge
Glossary
Gimmick: A gimmick book has, above all, highly a pitchable (if not necessarily commercial) concept. Here are novels you can easily break down into a one-sentence logline, designed to evoke an “Oh, interesting” or “Huh, neat” from the potential reader. i.e. It’s the Odyssey, but in Ireland; it’s a romance novel, but written entirely in Dothraki; it’s Pride and Prejudice, but with zombies; etc.
The concept behind the work is intricate in order to hook the reader, not to antagonize them; put another way, it’s high-concept for the sake of being engaging, rather than challenging. (It can be challenging, but that’s not the point.) This isn’t to say these books can’t be great works of art, just that there’s a bit of shtick to each of them. But hey, at least these are honest about it.
Prank: A literary prank is interested in making a fool out of itself so it can make a fool out of you, too. The book is a joke played on itself, and therefore played on anyone who reads it: You thought the work was one thing when it is, in fact, a different, much sillier thing. Many of the examples on our Matrix involve plot twists, of a sort, but not every book with a twist is a prank—only ones where the twist subverts the very idea of the novel or genre you thought you were engaging with. “How foolish of you to try and solve this whodunnit,” Murder on the Orient Express seems to say, “because it’s EVERYONE who done it! Haha, clever, no?” Well yes, but also, come on, man, really? That’s not—those aren’t the rules. I thought we had. I mean I thought we had agreed on some rules. But it’s fine. No, really, it’s. Fine. Okay, yeah fine, I guess I read that, yeah, sure. You got me. Fine, no, it’s fine. I get it. I see what you did there. And it’s cool, that you did that, I guess. To this book, and also, to me, personally. Sure. Fine. Yes.
Flex: A literary flex is notable because the author pulled something remarkable, or at least so unusual that no one else has ever done it. It’s flashy, it’s interesting, and it may or may not be difficult for the reader to grapple with, but the reader isn’t really the point—the writing of the thing is the point. Sticking the landing on a completely wild idea is the point. A flex displays the height of an author’s powers in an over-the-top way; at its core, a text that qualifies as a flex seems to say “Look what I can do,” and then does it.
A text that qualifies as a flex seems to say ‘Look what I can do,’ and then does it.
The end result of a flex needn’t be extraordinarily long or complex. The only real requirement is that the writing of the work was transparently difficult to pull off. To use an example that isn’t a novel, consider Annie Baker’s translation of Uncle Vanya. Translating a century-old work is tricky, sure, but it’s done often enough. What isn’t done nearly as often is someone taking on a play thoroughly enshrined in the theatrical canon and then producing a more accurate, human version of the play’s text. Baker opting to take on, and subsequently succeeding in such a task is an enormous flex.
Dare: A literary dare is a work that you don’t believe is actually someone’s favorite book, even if they swear up and down that it is. A dare does not want to be your favorite book. Literary works that qualify as dares are needlessly confrontational, chock full of obstacles to the reader actually understanding or working their way through the text. Here is a book with a dozen different maps in the first of its four indexes, or a story overflowing with footnotes, or a novel that requires an awful lot of skipping back to earlier pages to double-check you’re understanding what it is you’re actually reading. You can’t let your mind drift for even a moment while reading a literary dare, or you’ll completely lose track of what’s going on and have to jump back some ten pages or so just to catch up to yourself. If a flex book is the writer saying “Yeah, I wrote this,” then a dare is something that makes the reader just as smugly declare “Oh, yeah, I read that.” It is a challenge to take on and a brag to claim to have completed it. And most of us won’t believe you when you say you understood it, anyway.
Methodology
X-axis: From left to right, our X-axis is graded on a scale of “performative” to “combative.” This is essentially a scale of aggression: how much is the book seeking to entertain vs. how much it is seeking to confuse, mystify, impress or befuddle? Hence why both “Gimmick” and “Flex” find themselves on the performative side of the scale. A flex is inherently a performance; if someone publishes a thousand-page sentence and no one is there to read it, is it really a flex?
The combative side of the scale, then, are for works of literature that create discomfort in the reader (and possibly the author) for the sake of pulling off the stunt, whatever the game of the book may be. This discomfort can be built into the structure of the book (extensive footnotes, jarring shifts in point of view) or its content (whether it be tedious, violent, discomfitingly erotic, etc.). Any stunt book that can be described as “needlessly confrontational” belongs on the right side of our matrix.
Y-axis: Raging from “overt” at the bottom to “intricate” at the top, we suspect this is the part of the matrix that will garner the most ire from fellow readers and stunt-scholars; we ask that you allow us the room to explain. It could be argued that almost any concept that can be labeled a “literary stunt” is inherently intricate. If it wasn’t somewhat convoluted, one could argue, then it wouldn’t be a stunt. But that’s precisely why this gradient is here: all of these concepts have already cleared a minimum bar to be considered “stunts.” Here, now, we can grade these works against their peers in show off-y literary exploits, and not on a scale starting with See Spot Run as the basement.
It could be argued that almost any concept that can be labeled a ‘literary stunt’ is inherently intricate.
We’re also considering the complexity or directness of a work from two different angles: difficulty for the author to thread the needle, and difficulty for the reader to understand what’s going on in the work. The latter consideration is why pranks are on the “intricate” side of the axis: even if the book eventually unravels itself, a prank must inherently keep the reader in the dark about its true nature until it’s too late. (Successfully bamboozling the reader also takes some doing on the author’s part.) And even if a gimmick is apparent on its face, or even in its title—looking at you, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—the complexity required to pull such a thing off and still engage readers and still be considered ~literature~ is significant. By that same measurement, a flex might well be intensely complicated to pull off from a writing standpoint, but like an athletic stunt, the writer has to make it look easy—or at least make what’s happening clear enough for the reader to appreciate what they’re witnessing. And a dare isn’t a dare if you can’t understand, at some basic level, what you’re getting yourself into.
Conclusion
Even after laying out our terms and methodology, you may still disagree with us: with our categorizations, with our methodology, with our grouping these works of literature—many of which are beloved, cult classics, just regular classics, and/or our faves—with a term as trite as “stunt.” That’s fine. You are welcome to quibble in private or in public, the latter of which will do nothing but help our engagement numbers across our various social media platforms. Either way, we feel confident in our assessments. We have science on our side.
Today in Stockholm the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish author and activist, and Peter Handke, an Austrian writer. Last year there was no prize awarded, because a man affiliated with the Swedish Academy was accused of rape and seven committee members resigned in protest. This year, the prize is back twofold, and based on its choices, the Academy has learned nothing.
Tokarczuk’s prolific body of work, which includes the 2018 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel Flights, has made her a bestseller in Poland, where she is also known for her vocal criticism of the government and right-wing politics. In its commentary, the Academy praised her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Handke is an Austrian playwright of Slovenian descent who the committee praised for his “influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” In other words, despite Tokarczuk’s literary and political bona fides, these are two white Europeans, giving the lie to any claim that the Academy wants to represent and reward global literature. But it gets worse.
This year, the prize is back, and based on its choices, the Academy has learned nothing.
While Handke’s work covers a wide range of formats and themes (his first, career-making play, Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1969) is based on the idea that actors insult the audience simply for attending), he’s been particularly outspoken about the Yugoslav War, including his critical stance of NATO involvement and his support of Serbian nationalist beliefs, such as the false claim that Muslims staged their own massacres in Sarajevo. Handke even spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, the former President of Yugoslavia who was charged for war crimes in connection to the genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo. Not surprisingly, Handke is no stranger to controversy. In 2006, he was awarded the Heinrich Heine Prize only to have it withdrawn after protest from the city council, while his 2016 International Ibsen Award was condemned by PEN Norway and caused Bernt Hagtvet, a Norwegian expert on totalitarianism, to say “awarding Handke the Ibsen Prize is comparable to awarding the Immanuel Kant Prize to Goebbels.”
Today was the first time the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded since 2017, when Jean-Claude Arnault, a Swedish-French photographer married to a member of the Swedish Academy, was accused of sexual assault and sentenced to prison. In the wake of the scandal, Anders Olsson, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced a hiatus for the prize, saying, “We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence … before the next laureate can be announced. This is out of respect for previous and future literature laureates, the Nobel Foundation and the general public.”
The Arnault scandal shed a light not just on the sexual misconduct of one man but on the arcane workings of the Nobel Prize itself, which has a dismal track record of inclusivity. Of the 116 laureates in literature, only fifteen are women, few are writers of color, and English has more than double the number of prizes than the next most awarded language, French. Just last week, the Academy admitted that the prize was “much more male-oriented” and that the committee “had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature, and now we are looking all over the world.” The Academy promised that this year there were several organizational changes, including the appointment of five independent experts to help choose winners.
Those that support the Academy’s decision argue that Handke and Tokarczuk should be seen in context together. As Fiammetta Rocco, the culture correspondent of the Economist and administrator of the Booker International Prize, said in the Guardian, “There’s more in seeing them together than separately. The more I think about it the more I think it was a very conscious choice to pair these two writers together.” But this unique opportunity to award two prizes at once means that the authors will inevitably, and arguably should, be considered both in tandem and alone—indeed, it’s a rare chance for the Academy to make an additional statement about its values. And the Academy seems to be saying that, even with extra awards at its disposal, it could only find Western writers worth choosing. Just as problematically, it is making a tacit statement that far-right views that include nationalist and racist beliefs are valid.
When the Academy announced that it would suspend the prize in Literature for a year, it was encouraging to see such a prestigious organization make a seemingly actionable and concrete move towards change. So it’s hard not to feel let down, if not confused, that it would miss this opportunity to prove the Nobel Prize in Literature is an egalitarian prize with global concerns. While both of this year’s prize winners are from outside Western Europe (at least by descent—Handke has lived in France for the last 30 years), they are still both white and European. It would have been more powerful for the Academy to choose at least one writer from outside the West (there were plenty of deserving possibilities!) in order to underscore that great literature can come from anywhere and includes non-white and non-European perspectives.
The Academy had a chance to show its new attitude towards diversity and inclusivity in literature, and instead it proved that the Nobel Prize in Literature is limited at best and discriminatory at worst. Thanks to the scandal, The Nobel Prize in Literature had our attention and our hope, and it didn’t prove worthy of either.
It is such a wonderful time to be lost in the specific and unfamiliar places in Jac Jemc’s new stories. In False Bingo, we spend time in a haunted guesthouse in the American South, an amateur taxidermy workspace, a bingo hall, a plastic surgery waiting room, and a yoga retreat. In our time of so much fear and mistrust, peeking into the idiosyncratic lives Jemc’s character live is a fascinating and consuming exercise in empathy.
I got to ask Jac Jemc about her process of empathy and how important the gray area is both in her stories and in our lives.
Jane Dykema: I saw Kelly Link interview Carmen Maria Machado once and she said for her first question she always likes to ask what the person’s grandparents did. I remembered that when I saw you dedicated False Bingo to your grandmothers, and I want to ask, what were your grandmothers like?
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Jac Jemc: What a great question! When I was a kid, everyone told me I looked like my grandfathers, so I thought I identified with them more. One, Chester, was strong and silent, but very gentle. He’d keep me company when I was little and didn’t put up a fight when I wanted to play with my Barbies with him (as long as some sort of game was on in the background). The other, Raymond, was a real cornball. He had a seemingly endless supply of jokes—typical set-up and punchline style. A lot of groaners in his repertoire. At his funeral though, the place was jammed full of random people he’d made smile: grocery store checkout ladies and crossing guards. We always teased him for the way he’d default to telling jokes rather than having a normal conversation, but that way of being had spread a lot of joy. I share all of that as a way of setting a stage for who my grandmothers were and who they had to play off of.
Raymond’s wife, Lorraine, was a born hostess. She was a great cook—goulash and spitzbuben were her specialties. It was hard to get her to sit down at meals because she was always refilling bowls and glasses and checking on the next course. Neither of my grandmothers could drive, but this grandma would take us down to the Art Institute of Chicago on the bus. She introduced me to the miniature Thorne rooms in the basement of the museum, a childhood obsession. She took us to summer productions at the Theater on the Lake and square dances in her church basement. She made a gorgeous set of people out of wire and tissue paper for under her Christmas tree that all of us grandkids would fawn over and built a little grocery store in her spare bedroom that we could play with. She was the family documentarian, and took great photos and labeled them all clearly. She was my grandfather’s straight man, rolling her eyes at his jokes and telling him when enough was enough. I thought she was very glamorous. She always wore a fresh coat of bright lipstick and perfectly chosen brooch.
Chester’s wife, Dorothy, was a firecracker. She was smart as a whip up until the end. She had an earthshaking temper. She was practical to a fault and very frugal, but very quick to share the fruits of that penny-pinching. She had a stockpile of toys she’d bought on clearance in her back bedroom covered with a bedsheet that we knew better than to look under. If we completed a math or reading workbook, we could pick out a toy as a reward—everything had to be worked for. She was hard of hearing most of the time I knew her, but refused hearing aids. I think her condition suited her. She could talk whenever she wanted without having to worry about who she was interrupting. If someone else wanted to talk to her, it’d better be important and you’d have to address her very succinctly and very directly. In the last decade of her life she also developed macular degeneration, losing her vision from the center of her eyesight out, and that was very difficult for her because she was an avid reader. I tried to teach her to use audiobooks, but she’d lose her place with the tapes/CDs. She asked me to get her that “witch book,” by which she meant Harry Potter, so she could see what all the fuss was about, and we read it together and agreed we didn’t get it. My favorite detail about this time was that I’d visit her on weekends and we’d go through her mail together. If I tried to through out a flyer from AT&T or something, she’d catch me and say, “Now wait, what was that?” I’d tell her it was trash, and she’d ask me what it said. I’d tell her someone was trying to sell her the internet (which she never caught up to) and she’d scoff and say, “That’s trash! Throw it away! Don’t waste my time!” She never stopped wanting control.
The other fascinating aspect of her macular degeneration was that she started seeing visions, but she knew they were just images. She was convinced someone was projecting pictures into her house. She saw a naked man and she saw a little village scene, and she asked me to bring over my partner Jared, who is a videographer, to explain how someone was aiming a projector into her house. I did research and tried to tell her I thought it was something called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, essentially the parallel of a person feeling a phantom limb, but for sight. Where you no longer could see, your brain filled in images. She thought that was a reasonable theory, but insisted she was seeing these things in real life. I can’t blame her. How difficult must it be to reconcile the idea of something you’re seeing, like anything else, is made up by your brain?
JD: The way you describe them gives me a similar feeling to the way I felt when I was reading False Bingo. When I picture this book a series of really concisely detailed portraits flashes through my mind, pictures of these characters as complex and familiar as real people. And each person is so different from the others. I’m wondering about how you think of your process of inhabiting these different people and honoring them, and what implications that practice might have for the way you move through the world. It seems as though almost all of the hurting we do to each other, both on an individual level and on a systemic level, can be linked to us not being able or willing to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, someone we perceive to be very different from ourselves.
JJ: Empathy is everything. I heard that the thing that marks humans as being different from other animals (though who knows?) is that we can hold two opposing thoughts in our head and continue to function. I love to play devil’s advocate and attempt to see the opposite side of an argument. Not that I don’t have my own beliefs and habits that can become rote or lazy, but I find the current political/geological/cultural moment lacks a lot of empathy. People are cutting themselves off from people who think differently from themselves and social media is helping to silo people in that way. Refusal to make changes to address the climate issues is a failure of empathy for future humans; it’s a selfishness that favors the here and now.
It feels like we’re embracing a very black and white mentality, when the nature of most things exists in between.
I find call out culture and the way we shun anyone who makes one slight misstep to be a massive failure to show compassion, so that now the safest thing to do publicly seems to be to call out someone else for their wrongs. I invest personal time and effort into prison reform work, and it’s easy for me to transfer a lot of the issues of incarceration onto the problems created by just totally shunning people who make public mistakes. I don’t think turning people away helps anything. I’m not saying any of this is 100% good or bad or easy to address, but it feels like we’re embracing a very black and white mentality here, when the nature of most things exists in between. Those grey areas were much of what I was thinking about while working on the stories in this collection and thinking how they related to each other.
The other thought that came to mind with your question is about the lens through which we see the world. I was watching the Eddie Murphy (talk about a gray area) episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld, and they were talking about how the difference between comedians and humans is that, no matter how tragic, comedians can always see the comedy in a situation. I don’t know that that’s always true of me, but it’s usually true, especially in regards to my own circumstances. When I feel sorry for myself, I often quickly transition to laughing at the absurdity in my situation. Or if someone says or does something that is meant to upset me, my instinct, after the hurt, is to imagine what would cause the person to behave in that way. I’m making myself out to be a saint, which I am not. At all. I love to complain about people, but part of the fun of complaining is the speculation as to what drives people to behave in the ways they do.
JD: There’s a lot in this answer I want to come back to, but where you ended makes me have to ask: can we talk about LISA? I will never, ever forget Lisa from “Maulawiyah.” My muscles are tensing just typing her name.
JJ: Oh gosh, Lisa. I have so much love in my heart for Lisa. She is struggling and she’s not shy to share her struggle. I guess she’s pretty selfish, but she ultimately seems good-natured, even if that doesn’t always manifest in the most considerate way. She forces Raila to face some of her own ugliness in an uncomfortable way, and I’m grateful for people like that in the world who can prompt you to reevaluate yourself.
I’ve been in therapy for over a decade, and it’s taken only about that long for me to learn you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself. I heard that advice for years before I could actually put it into practice at all, and I certainly can’t do it quickly and constantly, but it’s something I’m always thinking about: what would it take to not only get along with this person, but to enjoy their company? I adore all of the Real Housewives, and one of the things that fascinates me is the number of times they vow to never ever talk to someone again, and then weeks later, they’re inseparable best friends. My emotional/social scale is so much narrower than that, but I’m riveted by people who feel and behave in those extremes.
JD: Yes, I love where we end with both Raila and the reader really feeling Lisa’s absence, and despite, at least for me, the aversion I felt toward her desperation and selfishness, missing her! Opposing feelings! This is a good segue into the gray area you were operating in in these stories. I feel like one of the ways you’re constructing this gray area is through the use of lessons. There are some real lessons, like in “Don’t Let’s” and “Bull’s-Eye” and some false lessons like in “Loitering” and some totally surprising ones like in “The Halifax Slasher.” Did you have a specific effect in mind for the reader by putting all these experiences in conversation with each other?
If there’s no conflict, then even a happy ending doesn’t feel earned or satisfying.
JJ: If there was a specific effect I was after, I think it was examining that gray area from different angles, and finding various ways to approach it, maybe suggesting that whatever meaning we take from an event, it’s easy to imagine how a completely opposite meaning might have been gleaned, or how we might stop just short of being able to take away something useful from an experience, or how evidence can indicate a certain truth in many cases, but there are still exceptions and mistakes, and evidence is most often subjective because it’s selective or incomplete, but we might not even know what’s missing.
JD: Some of my favorite moments were these moments of deflation: when one character imagines an exchange she would have with her friend so thoroughly she decides not to have it, or when it’s clearly stated that the people leading unusual love lives have surrounded themselves with people who accept and nurture them and have no obstacles to overcome. These moments seem so excitingly real, and actually like a harder story to tell. In places like this, is the decision to tell it a certain way an instinctual choice or a conscious one? Are you thinking more about the characters or the readers?
JJ: I remembered that another thing I was thinking about was the idea of what makes a story happy (as is talked about in the story “Gladness or Joy”), and how a story needs conflict, even when it’s happy. If there’s no conflict, then even a happy ending doesn’t feel earned or satisfying. In a story like, “Pastoral,” which I think is what you’re referencing with the idea of the lack of obstacles, the story is maybe more unsettling because there’s implied conflict, but the narrator “deflates” (love that choice of word!) that conflict by insisting there isn’t a conflict. I have to admit that I’m a person who, even on a good day is evaluating the range of what I’m feeling. I can find something to grump over no matter what, but that downside brings the successes and joys into sharper relief. I can’t believe I’m copping to how much I love complaining a second time here, but it really serves a lot of purposes for me.
“How Does a Person Become a Nun? A Practical Guide” by Blair Hurley
There is a process to these things, phases to the journey that you’ll be expected to pass through.
Period of Inquiry
Start young. When you’re walking with your mother down the streets of Boston, clinging to her hand, stare at a gaggle of nuns going by, the arresting flutter of their habits, the graceful uniformity of them. Point. “What are they?” They look like the swans that live in the Public Garden, moving in one honking crowd along the bank, an ungainly grace in their steps. “They’re sisters,” your mother will say. You’ve always wanted a sister. Cry without understanding why.
It begins with a vocation, but that small inner voice, that question that can’t be put aside, that call in the night, can seem at first like the normal wonderings of childhood, the fears and pressures of an ordinary life. Say your prayers at night even though no one is making you. Ask God to bless Mom and Dad and your brother and the dog. It will become a compulsion, a list that gets longer every night, a need to protect everyone you’ve ever known, until your mother makes you stop. “They don’t need your prayers,” she’ll say. “Go to bed.”
When you begin to contemplate being a nun, your mother will know before you do. She’s always been grateful for your quietness and obedience. The way you wash dishes and bag leaves on the lawn without complaint in the late afternoon sun, lost in your own world. “What are you thinking?” she’ll ask, and you’ll startle; you were in the middle of a vivid daydream, but now you can’t remember what it was.
Watch the swift steady motion of her hands as she sews a hole in your father’s sock. Take up the next holey sock in the pile and learn to do it, too. Hum to yourself in the soft stillness of the room. Forget to turn the light on until it’s nearly too dark to see, lost in your own shadowed otherworld, a place you go when you’re allowed to be alone, until the light comes on and your mother stands in the doorway, telling you you’ll go blind.
Your mother will notice the dreamy way you gaze up at the sky in the outfield at softball practice. Even when you think no one’s watching, she, working in the next room, will hear the whispered prayers you say over your dolls. When you watch the Alien movie, and the creature kills with an empty nihilism, an inhuman grin on its long jaws, you’ll wake up shaking and sobbing with terror for weeks afterward.
Your mother will watch you make a witch’s brew of maple syrup, mayonnaise and rubbing alcohol in a cracked flower pot in the backyard, chanting a spell and anointing the dog’s head with it to protect him from evil.
Imagine you’re friends with Jesus. Imagine his soft brown lambish curls and doey eyes. He has asked you among all the girls to dance with him. By twelve you’ve been to school dances where the boys lined the walls of the gym, miserable and hating you for making them miserable. The girls stood around in whispering packs, or rushed to the bathroom en masse to apply glitter scented like baby powder to their hair. Your friends are mostly the shy Jewish girls from your neighborhood, the ones who like spending free period in the library doing crossword puzzles. You promised each other not to split up, but when the next song came on, half of your friends were suddenly gone, shimmying on the floor with strange boys you didn’t know. A boy asked you to dance once, and you put your hand in his clammy, cheeto-ed hand and suffered through a slow number, both of you looking away. The boys are always disappointments.
From her office window your mother will see you dancing slowly across the yard in your girl shorts, your skinny white legs tangling. Already, you will seem very strange to her.
Normalcy
There will be a period of normalcy. You’ll fight with your older brother over who gets to play basketball. You’ll skip chores and lie and say you did them. You’ll have long games of catch with your father, and laugh at his clumsy Dad jokes, and squirm away from his hand ruffling your hair. You’ll buy gummy worms from the corner store even though she said no candy, and you’ll stash them in the back of your closet and eat one a day, parceling out the pleasure, until your mother finds them stale and hardening weeks later. You’ll sneak out of Debbie’s bat mitzvah with her to try her brother’s vape pen, sucking in the smoke and laughing, feeling wicked, getting caught and hauled back inside. Each of these small infractions will be in some way a relief. She’ll punish you, but with a sidelong glance and a smile, a look that seems to encourage your healthy greed.
She’ll punish you, but with a sidelong glance and a smile, a look that seems to encourage your healthy greed.
Period of Catechumenate
You’ll be fascinated with church, all that poetry and ritual that enters your life on occasional, haphazard Sundays. Listen wide-eyed to the sermons that bore other children your age. Think about the women rending their garments and weeping. Think about the star that guided the shepherds. Think about the Mysteries. Your mother never goes up for communion herself, but she’ll keep taking you and your brother out of a vague sense of obligation, fulfilling what she knows her own mother would want. She thinks of this Irish church in Boston as your cultural inheritance, and she doesn’t want you to grow up divorced from that long unbroken chain of unsmiling women putting oatcakes and potatoes on tables, making crosses over the soda bread. She likes the look of you in your lacy white First Communion gown. You’ll spin in your dress, delighted, imagining yourself floating like an angel. Try to tell her that sometimes you talk to angels, that now that the girls you knew are different, and you spend free periods in the library alone, they’re your most constant friends. Raphael is your favorite because he is a healer. When you had meningitis as a little girl and a dangerously high fever that threatened to cook your brain, your mother prayed to Raphael, and he protected you. When she tells you this story, in a half-laughing, shamefaced way, you’ll tell yourself that you now belong to the archangel.
Once you’ll go to church alone to get a closer look at the plaster statue of Raphael. You’ll light a candle at his sandaled feet. There are many candles here, for people seeking healing; you’ll watch their tiny flames guttering in the dim light. Raphael carries a spear and a caduceus, the healing staff; his face is both warlike and strangely feminine. As you’re standing there, sending out a shaky prayer, a great crack will sound, and a shower of dust and gold light will fall from above onto the angel’s face; you’ll look up, blinking, and see a workman staring down at you from a hole in the ceiling where he’s been fixing roof tiles. “Be careful,” he’ll shout to you.
This is too difficult, though, to make your mother understand; don’t try.
Doubt
The truth is, all that chanting and incense has always made your mother uneasy. This illogical insistence that the host contained the body and blood of Christ. How could he exist simultaneously in all the thousands of bodies around the world, and why do we eat Him? She is a practical woman who washes and re-uses yogurt containers, who thinks every woman should know how to change a tire so she will not feel obliged to the first man she knows who picks up his phone. Her common sense forbids her from believing that there is room for God inside the wafer. There is no room for two truths to live together in her head.
You’re facing an uphill battle. Your mother will be worried.
She’ll ask your father, Do you think Molly’s getting too fervent about church?
He’ll shrug. He has been raised in the church the same way she has; it’s as routine as traffic on the Mass Pike. These are the ritual obligations that he has returned to again and again–the yearly christenings, weddings, and funerals. He’ll ask, How do you get too fervent? Is she going to start bombing abortion clinics?
Your mother will shake her head. Your father has a morbid streak of humor, and he likes making fun of your mother when she starts taking herself, or motherhood, too seriously.
Your mother will say, I just wonder if she’s becoming — too devout.
He’ll laugh. So, she’s a nice Catholic girl. What are you afraid of?
She could become a nun, your mother will say. She could lock herself away in a convent somewhere, and we won’t be able to prevent it.
He’ll laugh. “A nun? You’re serious?” He can’t picture his little girl putting on a black veil, covering her glossy brown bangs. Those nuns that educated him, that he sees occasionally traveling in packs through airports, all old ladies with carpet bags, are beings entirely separate from you.
And anyway, fathers don’t want to think about their daughters as sexual beings. They don’t think about it as missing out. They couldn’t be happier if that part of growing up never entered the story at all.
Your mother knows the threat is real. She has prowled through your bedroom when you were at school, looking for secrets the way she sought out your brother’s wrinkled magazines under his bed. In the back of the closet she’ll find a black leather Bible, like the kind you might find in a hotel room. She has fingered the tissue-thin pages, seen the red ribbon flagging the page, the underlined verse: “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” She has cried, privately, at the thought that she has raised a daughter who believes herself a slave.
She has cried, privately, at the thought that she has raised a daughter who believes herself a slave.
What about evolution, contraception, women’s rights, gay rights? Doesn’t all that matter to you? Your mother will shout unexpectedly one day in the car, when you’re trapped in traffic with her. They do, of course they do. You tell her stories about nuns fighting malaria in Africa, nuns researching particle physics, nuns running AIDS clinics. It seems like nuns are the best of the Catholic church these days, marching for truth and equality, daring excommunication for giving pregnant mothers life-saving abortions against orders. They’re free from the old shackles of marriage and family and men. They’re the ones breaking down doors. I’ve heard that before, your mother will say tiredly. That’s the argument they always give the slave, to convince him that he’s free.
Your mother will show your father the contraband Bible. It’s not that it’s forbidden, exactly, but that you’ve hidden it, aware that your feelings about it are too confused and strong just to have the book on the shelf with your unicorn fantasy novels. Your father will undo his tie, smile good-humoredly. Your mother will be half-laughing, embarrassed at her sleuthing. “Our daughter is a secret nun,” she’ll say.
He’ll put his hands on her shoulders. “Would that be so bad?”
“Of course you’d say that. You don’t understand.” She knows that he can’t imagine a sexless life for their daughter as a deprivation.
She’ll learn that he won’t be an ally in her fight. But it’s he who makes her strongest case. His calm and steady love for her is what she knows you’re giving up. The tenderness in his hands, whether he is buttering bread or cupping her breast. He is a good man, their marriage is a good one. It pains her, to imagine your life, without that chance of happiness.
Your mother would not tell you this, but she thinks of herself as a sensual person. She likes putting her bare feet up on the dash while your father drives, walking naked and brazen out of the shower and painting her nails without a towel on. There were boys, and then men, that she knew. She used to be the kind of girl who rubbed the TV remote between her legs when no one was home. You don’t know this about your mother, but you’ve always sensed something bubbling and alive about her, a glowing warmth under her freckled skin, an extra delight when she curls her tongue around an ice cream cone. Unlike so many other mothers you know, yours wears her body without shame, allowing it to expand a little each year, becoming more generous.
Unlike so many other mothers you know, yours wears her body without shame, allowing it to expand a little each year, becoming more generous.
She’s afraid of everything you stand to lose.
Rebellion
There will be brief campaigns of prevention. A month or six months where you are forbidden from attending church or praying. You’ll have to do it in secret, whispering Hail Marys under your covers at night the way other kids hold books and flashlights. A period where, when the seniors are allowed to sign out from school for lunch at the mall, you run to a nearby chapel in the city, where a priest will hurriedly administer the sacrament. You’ll whisper out your confession in the warm wooden closet smelling of rose water, as if she could hear you even here. You’ll run your strange secret rebellion, and she won’t know until you finally break down and tell her, because you cannot keep things from your mother, you never have been able to. She’ll listen, sorrowful, and tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. Well, I guess it’s better than drugs, she’ll say.
You’re still not sure what you’re fighting against, or why this rebellion must go on. You’ll only know you have been raised to be suspicious of a certain way of being — and that is precisely what draws you in.
Why do you have to punish yourself to be good? She’ll cry.
You’ll think of the ballet classes you took as a young girl, and the horrible feet of the girls who were actually any good: cracked and bleeding, the toes purple and warped beyond recognition. Their feet were war wounds, badges of excellence. They showed them off proudly.
You want to tell your mother about the ecstatic dreams of Hildegard von Bingen, of the women saints who chose to die rather than marry, the girls who burned at the stake or were assumed in magical puffs of air, who felt a keen kind of joy in their suffering, in their choice. But of course, you can’t tell her this. There are ways in which you and your mother speak the same intimate language, and ways that you don’t speak the same language at all.
The Call to the Sacraments
There will come a night that your father is out of town and an old friend of your mother’s is visiting with his son, a boy who is sixteen like you, startlingly beautiful, with dark hair and eyes and long romantic eyelashes like a camel’s. He likes the same Ursula Le Guin novels you do. He’ll trace his finger along the spines of your books in your pink bedroom, nodding approvingly, and you’ll shiver as though his hand has touched you. You won’t be sure how you feel. Your mother will want to go out to dinner with her old college friend, they’ll order a pizza for you and the son, rent a movie. You’ll watch her throw her head back to laugh at something her old friend has said. The free arch of her back, her bare freckled breastbone. She’s trying to show you something about the pleasure you can get from the company of men. How they can surprise you, open up parts of yourself like turning a key in a lock. Don’t wait up, she’ll say. You’ll understand that you’re being left alone deliberately. Halfway through the movie, the sound turned low, your lips still greasy from the pizza, the boy will start kissing you and his lips will be very soft. You’ll enjoy the small click of his teeth against yours, the feeling of his tongue on your tongue. Your heart will start to pound. You’ll wait for a sign, anything to tell you what to do. A gust of wind will blow the shutters against the side of the house like a booming knock on the door and you’ll go stiff.
The boy with the soft lips and the long eyelashes will pause and look at you, really at you, for the first time. “You okay?”
You’ll wonder, idly, if evil is working through him, using this boy for its aims. Or perhaps it’s your mother who is acting now, hoping you’ll take the bait.
You’ll straighten, and still be on the couch watching TV when your mother returns. She’ll come in and quickly scan the room for signs of something, anything. Your Dad’s waiting in the car, she’ll say to the boy, and he’ll yawn and stretch, give you a courteous little handshake. The understanding that something could have happened, it came close. Your mother’s face is flushed. You feel her eyes search your pale neck, then the top of your blouse for undone buttons. You’ll register the disappointment on her face, and coolly look away.
Period of Puriftcation
There will come a bright fall day in Roxbury, after graduating from high school, when the two of you tour convents as though they are colleges. Your father has made a few halfhearted visits with you, but it’s awkward for him, touring these spaces that men aren’t supposed to enter. “You know, there’s always time,” your mother will say, the hundredth attempt. “You could go to college first. Keep your options open.”
“I know,” you’ll say, and smile brightly, to show her you are fine, everything is just as you wanted. Really, though, your heart is pounding. You’re approaching the broad iron gates of the Daughters of Charity, and suddenly you’re afraid to go in. Two sisters are approaching in their black and white habits, an old one and a young one, and in your plain wool dress, your black socks, your gold earrings that now seem ostentatious, you feel immediately like an imposter.
Your mother takes your hand, squeezes it. When you were little you had this secret code with her: when you were in a public place, in line for Santa Claus or crushed among screaming kids at a fair, you’d tuck your little finger into her hand and scratch the palm. And immediately you would leave the scary place. You know she is waiting for that signal, and you know that if you gave it she would instantly spirit you away, back into the life you know. Driving with the windows down. Bad movies. College acceptance letters. Trashy magazines. The uncertainty of getting a job. Buttery popcorn and long hot baths and sleeping in on Saturdays. Arguing with your brother over something too stupid to remember, all of you in the backyard on a hot summer night, the smell of cookfires and charcoal in the air, your mother laughing at your father, saying, You always burn the burgers. You squeeze back, and then gently drop her hand.
This chapel is grand and gothic, but the dormitory is an ugly, modern concrete block. Your mother can’t stand the thought of you living here for the rest of your life. She hates it already. But she knows she has to swallow the feeling down, eke out a smile for the nuns approaching, their hands folded neatly into their wide black sleeves. The older nun shakes hands with both of you, then back hers go into her habit. “We welcome those considering the contemplative life,” she says.
Contemplative. That doesn’t sound so bad.
You know that beneath the usual questions you have prepared about the novitiate process, the meals and charity works, your mother has two questions of her own: how do parents let their children do this? And what could they have done to keep them from slipping away?
The air is cold and blustery, wet dead leaves picking up in little eddies at your feet. Your mother is imagining her girl, you, rising before dawn in those chilly cement rooms, hurrying down a corridor in the dark for the morning prayer. She can picture a line of those novices, all in their matching uniforms, their black habits brushing the floor, perfect in their conformity. To her, these images are heartbreaking.
“Let’s have Sister Catherine show Molly the rooms, and I’ll take you to my office so I can answer some questions,” the older nun says. Your mother looks at you, rolls her eyes. She knows she’s being separated from you, so the waves of disapproval won’t roll off her in your presence, tainting your impressions. Divide and conquer.
The young nun, Sister Catherine, beckons. “I’ll show you my cell,” she says, and then laughs, as if she’s suddenly aware of the word cell and all it evokes.
She’s small but busty, a petite curvy shape walking with a surprising sashay under her blocky black habit. A stray lock of blond hair wisping out from under her headpiece, a white band of cloth that’s wrapped snugly around her skull. The full forehead piece, she explains, is only for fully ordained nuns, and Sister Catherine is still a novice. “But I’ll be taking my vows next month,” she says, delighted at her own good news.
She leads you inside the dormitories, up a narrow winding staircase and down a hall streaming with sunlight. It’s not too different from any college dorm, really: shared bathroom at the end, small dark wood doors with small name plates. A crucifix over each door, tastefully small. “Have you thought about the name you’ll take?” she asks.
The question sounds surprisingly intimate: like asking what your new name will be after the gender confirmation surgery. The names on all the doors are the names of saints. “I can’t decide,” you say honestly.
Sister Catherine pauses and turns, that one lock of hair swinging before her face. “Don’t overthink it; just follow your feelings,” she says. “Take the saint whose story speaks to you.”
She shows you a rec room, with shafts of light dancing with dust, and outdated board games in a stack on a shelf; a music room with an upright piano and a line of recorders, like the kind you played in third grade, stumbling through “Eight Days a Week” and “Tequila!” There’s a low-grade panic in your chest as you imagine wiling away the hours on your recorder. “What do the — younger sisters do for fun? In their leisure hours?” you ask. You know there is time off, sometimes. You can picture your mother taking this in, the lameness of it.
Sister Catherine looks around. You’re alone in the dorms; everyone else is in chapel, getting ready for vespers. “Well. There’s this place we go. Do you want to see?”
She leads you down a back staircase, past the kitchen, and on into the basement. There’s a laundry room, a storage room, and then a tiny black door in one corner. You have to duck your head to fit inside: it’s the boiler room. An old-fashioned New England boiler fills most of the space, but there are folding chairs and cushions down here, a line of paperback books with shirtless men on the cover. A half-full ashtray, the smell of smoke in the air.
Sister Catherine covers her nose and mouth with her hand. “I hate the smell myself. But we have a few sisters who can’t quit. Sometimes at night — we come down here and talk. Just, you know. Blow off steam.” The boiler hisses, and you laugh, and she does too. Everyone, even nuns, have their secrets. You can picture the gathered few here, the girls who were cool in their school days or at least the coolest among the girls who eventually become nuns. Telling dirty jokes, reading their romance novels, putting their wool-stockinged feet in each other’s laps.
She leads you back upstairs to show you her cell. The room is bare, but light-filled: a simple cot and bedspread, a nightstand, a chest of drawers. A few family photos on the dresser, and a framed painting of Saint Catherine, a Caravaggio. She’s young, clutching a bloodied sword, her face fierce and luminous and nearly militant. Something sensual and knowing in her sidelong glance to the viewer, a bold invitation.
“She’s my matron saint, I really feel it,” Sister Catherine says, sitting on the bed. “The Romans condemned her to death on a spiked wheel, but she touched the wheel and it shattered. She is patron saint of libraries and all those whose livelihoods depend on wheels.” She smiles. “I love libraries. I thought I might be a librarian one day. But then — you know. The call.”
You sit on the bed beside her, listening to the quiet rush of air outside the window, traffic noise or just the breeze, trying to imagine this sound outside a cell of your own. You want to ask her how the call sounded to her, what form it took. Was it the sound of a voice in the night? Several times you thought you heard such a thing as a child, but when you woke it was always your mother, sitting by your bed because you had been moaning in your sleep. It was always her voice that soothed you back into darkness. You’ve been waiting all your life for a sign, an invitation.
You’ve thought a lot about Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval German nun who had ecstatic visions. It was like being hit with a thunderbolt of the divine, she said. The name is ridiculous, though. Do you really want to be Sister Hilde? Beside you, Sister Catherine is breathing quietly, letting your eyes wander around this plain concrete room and imagine yourself here. “There’s a sense of peace here, you’ll see,” she says. “We pray and sing together. We feel joy that doesn’t have any equivalent out there.” Her hand waves, indicates the world outside the room. The fingernails are nubby. Sister Catherine bites them, you can tell.
You nod. “I want that.” You want to explain to your mother that you have a sensual life too: you are seeking a greater intimacy with God. You’re so sure that’s what it means to feel love, purely.
You want to explain to your mother that you have a sensual life too: you are seeking a greater intimacy with God. You’re so sure that’s what it means to feel love, purely.
“You do, don’t you.” She touches your arm, leans in. She smells like sweat and honey. The nuns, you’ve been told, keep bees. You think, suddenly, that she might kiss you. There are these moments in life when someone comes close, when you think they might be prepared to share an intimacy you didn’t dream possible. You have to rise to meet it.
A part of you will want to lean closer to Sister Catherine and whisper, let’s get out of here. We’ll drink and put glitter in our hair. Kiss who we want because we feel like it. We don’t have to love God any less. There are so many ways to be good. There’s still time for us to be ordinary.
There are these moments in life when someone comes close, when you think they might be prepared to share an intimacy you didn’t dream possible. You have to rise to meet it.
Instead you ask, stammering, “Do — do you believe in reincarnation?” As a child, you thought sometimes that you were Joan of Arc. Or Hildegard. Or Darlugdach of Ireland, who was tempted by desire and put burning embers in her shoes to burn the sin away from her body. Maybe the doctrines have it wrong; maybe you are Darlugdach, not just her spiritual twin. Maybe her story is yours.
Sister Catherine pulls back, offended. “Of course not. I’m Catholic.” It has been we all along, but now it is I.
Period of Mystagogy
“We’ll see the chapel now,” says Sister Catherine, with a new briskness. You can feel her doubt like a cold wind between you.
Your mother is a slim dark figure across the quad; she’s too far away for you to read her expression, or for her to read yours. Sister Catherine is beside you, guiding you on the stone path around, but you break away, cutting straight across the damp grass. You know your mother has been interrogating the old nun, demanding answers about whether you will be well treated here, about whether you have the chance to be happy with this kind of life. You want suddenly to fling yourself into her arms like a child, have her shepherd you home. You want to hear her voice in the night. You’re still so young. You know you’ve been terribly bad, going down this path that might take you away from her. As a daughter, your life is never fully your own; it’s hers too. By handing it to God, you’re fencing stolen goods.
But when you get there, your mother doesn’t reach out to you. You don’t fully know it, but these choices you make are a reflection on her own sins. You don’t know it, but that night with the boy a year ago was really her chance to be out alone with the boy’s father, the man she loved in college. They kissed like teenagers in the car while it was parked a few streets away from the house, and cried a little, that life had brought them here. She never told your father. All the while she hoped you were kissing the boy back home, because it would make her own sins forgivable, and you’d be united that way.
“You could like it here,” she says. “You could make a life here, if that’s what you want.” There’s heroic effort in her smile. She’s not going to make the choice for you. There are many such times in the period of mystagogy, when we embrace the mystery of God’s plan, and walk uncertainly on the path.
The older nun has reached the two of you, and she looks stern. Your stockings are soaked. Already you’re breaking rules. You look down, a little ashamed. This is a feeling you’ll have to get comfortable with, you can tell. This life you want so badly runs on it.
“Would you like to speak with our priest?” she asks.
It’s just a meeting. A handshake and a conversation about the beauty of a life lived on principle. You can hear him now, a man old or young, explaining the rules you’ll be expected to follow, the rigorous training and prayer that lies ahead. He’ll sit with you in the chapel. You’ll be alone with him. The cool filtered light of stained-glass windows will fall on your heads and it will feel like it is time for your decision.
“Well?” she says.
You wait a little, though, before answering. There’s all the time in the world, a lifetime of signs and symbols to read. Your mother looks away, leaving you to gaze at her sun-weathered neck, the dense pattern of freckles there that you know so well. You could have the same, someday. Or you never will. You look back at Catherine, her bright untroubled eyes. And you look back at your mother. You wait, hoping.
New Orleans. Here’s a mini list of what I think comes up for the uninitiated or the casual traveler: French Quarter debauchery. Pastel shotgun cottages of Treme and columned plantation houses on St. Charles Avenue. The romance of the old-fashioned streetcars chugging down that avenue and now through to the Bywater. Beads thrown on Mardi Gras Day. The city submerged after Hurricane Katrina. Beignets and crawfish. Second line parades.
All of the above are true, per tourism board and media portrayals. But New Orleans defies one—or a million—quick platitudes of who and what it is. There is always another face, another layer of history and of the present, and another jolt of energy swirling, stewing—be it its history, recent and ancient, or the hurricanes blowing in from the Gulf—in the city, a below sea level bowl wedged between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain.
For seven years, I lived on a street that ended in the historic (as is everything in New Orleans) Bayou St. John, and in a house from which I could hear Jazz Fest. During this time, I worked at a literary festival, held in honor of Tennessee Williams. I spent much time considering books about the city, how it was portrayed, the transplant class and gentrification-on-speed, and much else. There are a ton of lists for old-time picks (Google away!) and there are many works that illuminate the city’s specificities. On the latter, random but, I think, excellent, suggestions would include this anthology on the iconic Baby Dolls edited by Kim Vaz-Deville, this study of Congo Square by Freddi Williams Evans, this characterful short story collection by Fatima Shaik, Royce Osborne’s classic film of black Mardi Gras, and the outside choice from my earliest memory of learning about the city, Paul Schrader’s extremely 80s of remake of Cat People, for David Bowie’s theme song, and the slick visual design upon New Orleans’ own gothic character. I could go on but for now, the hugely subjective list below, however, hews to recent titles by contemporary New Orleanians and a few personal older favs.
Having been born and grown up in other sediment-rich estuary cities and lived in several entrancing metropolises since, I know well the impossibility of ever fully knowing a place, especially one as charismatic, complex, and contested as New Orleans. Still, these books offer different windows, into, for me, the most interesting city, the most American andthe least American city in America.
In The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom offers the story of her family’s home—and a view into a city that is rarely seen by outsiders. Her tour begins by swerving away from the usual New Orleans landmarks like the French Quarter (though she later returns to this with both the extra-piercing gaze of both a native and a returnee who’s lived around the world) via the Chef Menteur Highway to New Orleans East. Broom writes: “By bringing you to here, to the Yellow House, I have gone against my learnings. You know this house not all that comfortable for other people my mother was always saying.” As readers, we can count ourselves lucky she did—and did so with such exacting reporting on the histories of her family and city in especially elegant prose. The National Book Award judges agreed—Broom’s memoir made the organization’s 2019 nonfiction shortlist.
We Cast A Shadow is meant to be set in a white supremacist future America, where a black man is attempting to get his biracial son a “demelanization” procedure to secure the boy’s future. The opening scene of a soiree in a mansion on the “Avenue of the Streetcars,” however, reads as only ever so slightly out there. The unnamed narrator, a lawyer, notes: “She was one of the good ones, even if, as she once drunkenly admitted to me in a stalled elevator, she sometimes fantasized about wearing blackface and going on a crime spree. After shattering storefront windows and mugging tourists by the Cathedral, she would wash the makeup from her face, content in the knowledge that the authorities would pin her deeds on some thug who actually had it coming.” Ruffin, a former lawyer, paints the scene of the city’s Uptown surrealism with a mini museum of multicultural gods and a library that includes a title called The Hip Hop Ontologist’s View of Leda and the Swan, an especially intriguing title I’d love to borrow from the author. By bending reality without excess throughout, Ruffin’s sleight of hand with the peculiarities of New Orleans, which goes unnamed in the book, is even more hilarious. But what he cuts apart about race in America, now and in the book’s future setting (where the past is not even past in elements like the Dreadlock Ordinance and the Black Panther-like ADZE group), is unsurprisingly not easy.
Alex, comes to New Orleans when her father, a real estate developer, has a heart attack. The novel, Jami Attenberg’s first set in her adopted city, goes on to pick apart the family’s various dysfunctions, in pointed, raw prose that has become her signature. Alex, for example, almost tells a doctor, who gives her the news that her sick father hasn’t got much time left, “Do you promise?” The book zips around the city’s various neighborhoods, and is soaked in the boiling intensity of August in the city: “It has been hot since April. Was there ever a time when it was not this hot in New Orleans? They can no longer recall. Their will has been broken. Wake up, it’s hot. All day, hot. Nighttime, it feels cooler, but it’s a lie; it’s still hot. And wet. Everyone’s skin glows. Hide inside. Hydrate. Shield yourself. Too hot.”
Albert Woodfox begins with his childhood in New Orleans’ Sixth Ward but Solitary’s setting is two hours away from the city in the confines of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Otherwise known as “Angola,” the prison is named after the plantation it is located on, which in turn was named for the country from which the enslaved there were taken. It is a maximum security prison farm, which holds a biannual rodeo open to visitors. Woodfox was sentenced to 50 years for an armed robbery, and spent close to 45 years in solitary confinement there. He was finally released in February 2016. The survival of his spirit and resolve is awe-inspiring. An angering and intensely powerful read, the book is on the 2019 NBA nonfiction short list.
Ned Sublette’s packed, pacy social history of early New Orleans is the title to purchase right after you book your flights to the city. Sublette, a musician and musicologist who is also a hell of a storyteller, frames the city’s history in the context of Europe, Haiti, and Cuba, centering its African influences while not averting his gaze from the brutalities of enslavement (as well as its obscuring in other accounts). While most of this won’t be in your average plantation tour (unless you are headed to Laura or the Whitney Plantation; maybe also support a show and/or buy works by contemporary black artists too) and none of it qualifies as light, it will make the city’s past feel absolutely real, and its musical cultures more stunning than you previously realized.
In A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton portrays the New Orleans lived by three generations of an upper-middle-class black family in the city’s Seventh Ward neighborhood. Beginning in the mid-forties, Sexton traces the family through the 1980s to 2000s and shows how their fortunes change dramatically with Jim Crow and continued systemic racism. Sexton’s debut is both a feast of prose and story. Deservedly, it landed on the National Book Award long list in 2017, an incredible year, which included the eventual winner and great chronicler of the black Gulf South, Jesmyn Ward with her Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Set in Storyville, the infamous nightlife district of New Orleans at the turn of the last century, Coming through Slaughter has at its center a highly-fictionalized Buddy Bolden, the legendary cornet player, who is considered the progenitor of jazz, and of whom very little is known. Ondaatje adds the equally enigmatic photographer E.J. Bellocq, who photographed the sex workers of Storyville, to the mix. In its utter disregard for conventions of anything, all-over-the-place pronoun- and time-jumping, and the text’s unbearably alluring confusion, sensuality, and madness (as jazz, perhaps), Slaughter (a reference to a town near Baton Rouge, but to much else too) feelslike New Orleans to me. Case in point is this scene of a threesome:
“Then Bolden did a merciless thing. For the first time he used his cornet as jewelry. After the couple had closed their door, he slipped in a mouthpiece, and walked out the kitchen door, which led to an open porch. Cold outside. He wore just his dark trousers and a collarless white shirt. With every sweet stylised gesture that he knew no one could see he aimed for the gentlest music he knew. So softly it was a siren twenty blocks away. He played till his body was frozen and all that was alive and warm were the few inches from where his stomach forced the air up through his chest and head into the instrument. Music for the three of them, the other two in bed, not saying a word.”
Publishing has come a long way in the past few years, with acknowledging its shortcomings in gender, race, and sexual orientation. The industry, however, doesn’t seem to have put much focus on class. Meander Belt, M. Randal O’Wain’s debut memoir, which was published this month by Tobias Wolff’s American Lives imprint at the University of Nebraska Press, is a perfect example of a remedy.
Buy the book
The book charts O’Wain’s early life, growing up in a ramshackle house in inner-city Memphis that is constantly under construction, raised by his carpenter father and a mother who was handicapped by polio. As a teen, he moves away from his family, to try and break away from what is expected of him as a son of working-class parents.
Through these events, O’Wain deftly parses the larger cultural forces that shaped his youth—the heavy thumb that is family, class, place, and tradition. The result is something that straddles the line between the intimacy and immediacy of someone simply telling their story, and the perspicacity of the best cultural criticism. It’s a tender, funny book with a clear vision and a true heart—I cried three times.
I spoke with Randal O’Wain about class, misconceptions, and his former life as a musician via email.
JE: The subtitle to your book includes the phrase “Working-Class South.” Would you describe your upbringing as “working-class”? What does that phrase mean to you?
MRO: The summer I turned fifteen, I was already a public school dropout, and my father put me to work cleaning up at construction sites while his crew did the skilled-labor. When I wasn’t working, I walked the streets of midtown Memphis. I met a homeless man named Father John. He was not a priest. He was paranoid schizophrenic and the Bible helped him stay locked into one frequency. One day, I saw Father John near my house. He looked so tired with his Bible and threadbare suit. I invited him to stay in my father’s engine-less Wonder Bread truck my friends and I used as a clubhouse (if kids who are fucking and doing drugs nightly can still have a clubhouse). I was afraid to tell my parents because I didn’t want them to refuse Father John. I happened to be home when my father found this strange black man leaving the backyard. I explained the situation and my mother made him dinner and gave him blankets, a pillow.
I knew that I would have to break from family if I wanted to make manifest the person I wished to be: a person who wrote books and went to college.
I haven’t thought about Father John in years, but I think about him now because it was always so important for my parents that I learn to be generous with those in need. My parents had never witnessed the benefits of college firsthand—I am the first person in my family to earn a degree—but we followed an old-world code of loyalty without question, labor as pure income, family as essential knowledge. This code is what working class identity means to me and I knew I would have to leave it behind, even before I found myself walking the streets of midtown without a knowable future. I knew that I would have to break from family if I wanted to make manifest the person I wished to be in my imagination: a person who wrote books and went to college. It is a heartbreaking choice to have made, no matter how necessary, especially in light of my father’s death.
JE: Personally, I grew up in California, went to school in New York, and have lived in West Virginia for the past five years. One thing that I’ve been confronted with, over and over again, during these past five years, is how ridiculous my ideas about the types of people who live in mostly rural, mostly “working class” areas really were. What are some things that people get wrong about working-class America?
MRO: What people often get wrong—pure and unabashed speculation here—is equating working class with what is actually the image of the bourgeoisie: driving expensive trucks, white people with faces that are somehow pasty and pink; or they imagine a nightmarish conflation of need and addiction. Working class folks, at least my family, are extremely private and insular and the phrase “We are all you have. We are all you will have in the end,” hangs above the bricked-up fireplace next to a plaque that reads: “What Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong.”
When labor is your 9-to-5, the focus on survival narrows—red state or blue—onto family. This labor-lore is inherited from fathers and mothers and then imparted onto children. I mean, you might have a drunk uncle or uptight cousin who talks about the border or tax brackets, but this focus on national affairs belongs to people with something to lose from the system they benefit from and laborers, especially without representation, are often at odds with the system. Example: my father was fired from his job as foreman at a construction firm when discs in his spine slipped on the job. No severance. He had to sue in order to get his medical bills paid. Labor was his only resource, and his body was our trust fund.
JE: Conversely, what is something you wish outsiders—or, if we were to put it in media speak, then let’s call them “coastal elites” —knew about life in these regions?
MRO: It’s funny, but I think I am by association one of these “elites.” I’ve lost my southern accent and I now have two degrees and spend a lot of time speaking in teacher voice. When I go to the gas station in Alderson, West Virginia, and say hello to someone, they look at me like I’m an asshole. When I’m back in Memphis and meet a stranger, they inevitably ask what I’m doing there. This doesn’t change my connection to the Deep South, but in terms of belonging, I often feel as if I’ve been kicked out of the club.
But my favorite thing about West Virginia and Memphis is that there is a love for where you come from and a desire to maintain historical memory. The narrative upheld by the coasts is one of transience (of which I am a product), one of stylistic mobility where wealth provides the right clothes, the right books, the right loft, the coffee shop, and the microbrew, but does not concern itself with longevity or sustained livelihood. What is lost in this trade are roots and the pride of toughing it out at home. I often feel sorry for generations of locals from Brooklyn and Oakland, working class families and immigrants who have been displaced by people who have left the suburbs of Illinois or North Carolina to collect culture as if a city-scape, a loft, or metro ride to the art gallery could ever erase the suburban flight of fearful, but wealth-driven parents. I’m not concerned with what “coastal elites” think about the South because they are often not truly “coastal,” as I am not truly “elite.”
JE: I’ve noticed, though, that oftentimes city people seem to almost fetishize “authenticity,” in terms of microbrews, coffee, various cuisines, and certain characteristics about the background of an artist or businessperson, etc. Do you think that is related to this “transient narrative”?
MRO: This question sparks a lot of feelings. When I was growing up, the major intersection near my house included a used car lot, a Chinese restaurant, a canning factory, and vacant lots. My father worked for a contracting firm (for the same man who fired him after his injury) that was given urban renewal incentives, and soon one vacant lot became a Mexican restaurant, the used car lot became a bank, the unused factory became storefronts, the Chinese restaurant turned into a fine-dining spot. All of these changes were actually a lot of fun when I was a teenager. Eventually, I saw my first show—Oblivions—on the corner where my father helped build a concrete gazebo.
Labor was my father’s only resource, and his body was our trust fund.
With all of these changes, changes that my father had overseen as foreman, came higher property taxes. The ultimate goal of urban-renewal was achieved. The working-class homeowners were priced out. My father was forced to sell the family home he owned after money tightened once he’d lost his job.
But to return to your question, I think the word “transient” was a poor choice on my part; what is being sought is not movement, but a material-relationship to culture, or, you know: Hip stuff. Hip-stuff has a catalogue with pictures of cafes and bars, hip-stuff includes condos with earth-tones in reds and greens, it has a television series and a podcast . Places like Portland and Asheville are now Myrtle Beach or Gatlinburg, but for people who like beer, coffee, and most recently, throwing hatchets. The families who lived in modest working-class homes on the west coast now live in tents along residential streets because they cannot afford housing. This does not feel like capital-C-culture, but instead a fad that was fabulously marketed to people who are not artists, but want to be around artists; people who are not musicians but want to be around musicians.
I am a hypocrite. The only difference between the gross generalizations I am making about others and myself is that I was first-wave gentrification (unwittingly, of course) in places like Portland and Asheville, and I was later priced out with other musicians, writers, and artists when these areas became playgrounds.
JE: One of the things the book covers is your eventual turn from a musician to a writer. I’ve always been confused by and jealous of musicians. If you’re in a band, you’re collaborating with other people, in a medium that is meant to be shared with an audience. Writing, on the other hand, is done alone, and books are generally consumed alone. Readings are such a strange outlier, in that you take a solitary work and share part of it with an audience. Do you ever miss the collaborative elements that come with making music? Did performing in a band teach you anything about doing readings?
MRO: I really miss being a musician. I started touring in bands when I was sixteen and stopped when I was thirty-one. I loved going to practice two nights a week. I loved recording and making records. I loved living in a van for weeks at a time. But my favorite part was playing live shows and flailing around on stage, dripping sweat, and permanently damaging my hearing. But, truthfully, I was always so nervous that I never turned around when playing. I don’t think I began to feel comfortable playing with my face to the audience until my last tour.
At a reading, it is just you and so you have to own awkwardness in a different way. It would be awkward to read backwards.
I quit playing music. I realized I was not getting better at the guitar. My dear friend who passed away recently, the novelist Katherine Min, told me years ago that I had to choose. She said it was hard enough to do one thing well in a lifetime, let alone two. This off-handed comment stuck with me and I made the choice to move my creative efforts from music to writing. I still play air-guitar quite a bit. Most recently, I’ve been air-jamming with Reigning Sound and Neurosis.
The Older Brother in Mahir Guven’s debut novel drives for a ride-sharing service in Paris while his Syrian-born father is an old-school taxi driver. Their Uber politics conflict is further sullied by their religious divergence. Into this, Guven adds a Younger Brother, a talented nurse who could well become a doctor, who decides to pursue his humanitarian intentions—in Syria.
The novel, narrated by the Older Brother and Younger Brother, vibrates with sharply driven prose and wry humor, and takes us into the streets and the insides of working-class immigrant life in France, and to the battlefields and hospitals of Syria. We don’t find out the brothers actual names until the last pages of the novel—and readers will see why when they get to the terrific, mind-bending end. By then, why the novel, which won France’s prix Goncourt du premier roman in 2018 and is published in translation in the U.S. this month, will be absolutely obvious. In Guven’s inventive hands, Paris and its discontented inhabitants, as well as the bizarre, brutal world of ISIS-era Syria, come alive, grab you hard, and won’t let go.
I spoke to Mahir Guven, who just became the editorial director of a new imprint for debut works at French publisher JC Lattès, about being French, taking Ubers, and being spoken of in the same breath as Michel Houellebecq. (Thanks to Miriam Gordis for translation.)
JR Ramakrishnan: What was the question (or idea) that began the writing of this book for you?
Mahir Guven: I wanted to shout. By the way, in French, the letters in the word “to shout” (crier) are almost the same as the word “to write” (écrire). I was full of cold anger. Cold anger is never violent: it forces you towards awareness, it forces you to take action. This was a few months after the Bataclan attacks. I had experienced various strange emotions: incomprehension, bitterness, pain. The political climate had deteriorated and the executive branch was threatening to start revoking people’s citizenship. A portion of our country began to see French Muslims as internal enemies, almost like a virus or a disease invisible to the naked eye. Some people started to look suspiciously at anyone with Mediterranean features. It was terrible because when I was growing up in the 1990s, France was a peaceful place. Raï, which is a type of North African music, was extremely popular. Khaled came out with his hit “Aïcha.” So I started to write about a character, one of whose parents was French by heritage and the other French by choice. I deliberately avoided using the term “native French.” There are no French natives, there is no such gene, that is a stupid, racist idea. France is a melting pot of cultures that together form a nation. My nation.
In February 2016, I went to an exhibition about Martin Scorsese. I was interested in Taxi Driver and in the character of Travis Bickle. I knew that he was a former soldier lost in New York, who took a job to get by. The day after that, I was talking to a taxi driver who worked for an app-based company and he explained to me that his father was a traditional taxi driver and that they had a strained relationship. After this conversation, I sat down full of feverish anger and energy and wrote chapters one and three of my book.
JRR: The book seems to be a grand novel of a very particular slice of contemporary Parisian life. You were born in Nantes and my understanding is that in France, regional differences are huge. Would you reflect on the differences between growing up outside of the center and writing about it so intimately?
Cold anger is never violent: it forces you towards awareness, it forces you to take action.
MG: I see what you’re getting at. I generally believe that it is easier for us to understand things from the outside. I understand life better in Nantes now that I don’t live there anymore. Last year I lived in Germany and I understood France better than ever before. When I arrived in Paris, in 2006, it was a shock. So much wealth and so much speed. Paris seemed like a place of limitless possibilities. And then in less than a year, I wrote and staged a play there. The big difference between Paris and Nantes is that Nantes has almost no urban ghetto. I grew up in a small town of twenty thousand inhabitants, where all the social classes lived together and mixed. I almost never experienced racism, or at least, I didn’t notice it. Unlike my mother. By contrast in Paris, you can come from an ordinary background and study at a grande école, you just have to get on the metro. Paris seems inaccessible to people living outside of it. This is the drawback of very centralized countries. Finally, I would say that writing comes from what you see. You have to look around with your eyes wide open.
JRR: It’s bewildering to think of how real the phenomenon of young people going to Syria is, and how much it will be part of life (i.e. parents searching for their kids, etc.) for some time to come. The scene where the Older Brother has to pay off the bus station clerk for the passenger list was super powerful in these terms. I have often wondered what life is like over there amongst this multinational set who maybe don’t have much (or any) Arabic—the fight scene of the Younger Brother was amazing in illustrating this (“So they talked in English. But the French and their English…well it was a shitty mess.”) Also, he notes, “It did me good to hear my own language,” by which he means French.
MG: In reality, somewhere between 1400 and 2000 French citizens have gone to Syria. A tiny percentage compared to the International Brigades of the past. Seven hundred of these are fighters, the others are settlers looking for a utopia. History repeats itself. Those who suffer too much, the most fragile try to find a way out, an escape route to feel as though they exist. You might think this is a dangerous oversimplification, but I think we are experiencing a massive psychological crisis of hyper-existentialism. Everyone wants to find meaning in their lives, wants to be something. And young French people going to Syria are a part of this very modern dynamic.
You’re right that many people who think they are Arab realize that they are actually very French. Personally, I was born in France, undocumented, with refugee parents, and I became a French citizen when I was fourteen years old. When I was 20, I identified as a “ketur,” which is French slang for a Turkish person. Then I went to live in Turkey for a year and felt very, very French. The main problem then is the self-image that you receive from society. You might feel completely French, but some close-minded people who remark that “you come from somewhere else” will make you feel different. Now, at 33, I don’t care what anyone else thinks anymore, and if someone asks me, I just answer “I’m French. How about you?” until they start to feel stupid.
JRR: You inhabited both worlds so incredibly. How did you research and imagine the Syria that the Younger Brother experiences?
MG: I traveled through Syria by motorcycle in 2007 and 2010. So I was familiar with the landscape. It’s a bit like Nevada. Huge, magnificent stone deserts, where the solitude and the heat are your only travel companions. I also read Lebanese newspapers written in French, where they have profiles of refugees. I read David Thomson’s research on French people in Syria. I watched a lot of video blogs on everyday life there posted by French YouTubers. It was all astonishing. I remember one lifestyle blogger, who I think was named Samir, describing how you should dress in Syria. He recommended sweatpants and Nikes with all-over camouflage print. On Sunday, they have soccer games. I also read a lot of blogs by women in Syria, public reports by the French Ministry of Defense, BBC documentaries, art documentaries, and geopolitical journals which describe the structure of ISIS. It all blended together into a milkshake in my head and I became immersed in this world that a young idealistic, frustrated, and naïve young French man discovers in the book.
JRR: Your book has a number of tragedies, but an especially cruel turn of fate was the incident at the PSG tryouts, which ends the brothers’ dreams of being football players. Would you talk about this scene and more generally about the options available to kids of color like the brothers?
MG: Firstly, it’s not an issue of color in France. You can have white skin and still experience discrimination. If you come from the countryside, for example, or if your family origins are Romanian or Balkan. It’s all about your first and last names. You can have foreign roots, but if you’re named Jean, life will be easier for you. It’s strange, but for a long time France assimilated foreign populations based on first names. People would have to make a choice between their family’s culture and the culture of their new nation. This model has disappeared, but its reflexes and beliefs have remained in our nation’s subconscious. I would also say that sports are a fantasy because they promise to make you into a hero, whereas studying offers more security. This explains the profoundly different attitudes that boys and girls from poor backgrounds have towards studying. Society doesn’t encourage girls to become heroines (and when they succeed despite the odds, it is because they are truly exceptional).
There are no French natives, that is a stupid, racist idea. France is a melting pot of cultures that together form a nation. My nation.
There is another aspect to this. For a long time, sports have been a vehicle for social cohesion in the countryside and in poorer neighborhoods. For a hundred years, the French state has invested in this area. In fact, sports stars have almost always come from working class backgrounds. It is just more obvious today that poor people tend to be foreign. This scene is really about young people’s passion for soccer and how seriously devoted to it they are. They are capable of doing great things when we let them express themselves. But I wanted to show how someone’s dreams can be broken in a simple accident, how it can destroy your life and take you off track.
Finally, social advantage is more important than ethnic background. When I moved to Paris, I became friends with rich Moroccans from Casablanca. They had no problem studying and finding work. They knew all the social codes. Social codes are the most important thing.
JRR: Both brothers struggle with identity in France and abroad. They are not just children of immigrants but are also mixed race via their Breton mother. I loved this line from the Older Brother: “Aliens without knowing why.” What is your idea of home these days, and how do you identify in terms of ethnic and/or national identity?
MG: I am so happy you asked me this. We haven’t talked about race in France for a long time, for the simple reason that scientists told us that race didn’t exist. I agree with that. Race doesn’t exist. It’s imaginary. My mother had white skin and green eyes, she looked Russian, but she was Turkish and had a strong accent. She was called a dirty Arab, a dirty white woman. Try to find the logic in that. It’s incredibly stupid.
I am still amazed that a country like the United States, which prides itself on its liberalism, is still so attached to the concept of race. We can talk about discrimination without talking about race. It is enough to say, “people who have black skin experience discrimination.” This phrasing humanizes the individual, it doesn’t reduce them to the color of their skin and discriminating against a group based on a physical characteristic is clearly absurd. Right now, I am writing a book about a parallel world where people with red hair discriminate against people with blond hair. A person from our world appears and doesn’t understand what’s happening.
On another note, I was in Madagascar a few months ago. When I came back, I told my friend that I had felt incredibly guilty about how rich I was there, basically a walking gold bar. I was ashamed to have been born in Europe when I saw children picking bananas that would be sold for less than apples in France. My friend told me, “They thought you were white, that’s why.” And I was annoyed. In Madagascar, people are identified by their tribal origin or their status. I was a vasaha, a foreigner. Even if I were Senegalese and had black skin, I would still have been a foreigner. It’s a different way of seeing the world. To say that I’m white is to impose a European and Anglo-Saxon concept onto a different reality and dismiss this culture. By the way, my friend in this story is French and a militant antiracist.
We have to get past the idea of a unique identity. It’s completely outdated. Identity is individual. And it is unique to each individual. Identity is made up of all the cultural patterns that help us form groups, friendships, nations. Our identities are formed at the start by the identities of our parents, the neighborhoods where we grow up, our cities, our regions, and our countries. On top of that are layered our passions and the languages that we speak. All of this forms an identity and all these cultural patterns help us form relationships with other individuals. For example, when I lived in Germany, I quickly became friends with people who played basketball like me, who also spoke French, or who liked to cook like I do. I believe that each individual should define their own identity: everyone can define it however they like and ignore what others might think.
JRR: The conflict between the Older Brother and his taxi driver father includes amongst other things, Uber. I wonder after dwelling into much of the economics and ethics of ride sharing via the Older Brother, do you take Ubers yourself?
You might feel completely French, but some close-minded person saying ‘you come from somewhere else’ will make you feel different.
MG: Not anymore. To be totally frank, before Uber, it was very hard to get a taxi in Paris. The taxi union was very powerful and stopped the government from giving out more taxi licenses by blocking roads and striking. Then, almost twenty thousand young people found work in the Paris area. That is one hell of an achievement. However, these people didn’t gain any real work status, they didn’t get any benefits or unemployment. I support a tech economy that doesn’t destroy working conditions. I can’t just think about my own comfort. It’s stupid. I have had all kinds of odd jobs: I picked flowers in the fields, sold antivirus software, worked in a fast-food restaurant, but I always had rights. Uber doesn’t pay taxes in France and pays very little in the United States. They take advantage of common property, laws, traffic rules, the asphalt on the roads, without paying taxes. They can go fuck themselves.
JRR: I laughed so hard when the Older Brother pulls a minor con on the English couple he’s driving in his Uber and then says: “If you do it with Parisians, man, it makes them vote for the National Front. Gotta be on your best behavior with them.” Your novel is often hilarious. I feel like amongst all the perceptions of people of Arab descent, a fantastic, wry sense of humor doesn’t get mentioned often enough. I am not sure if it’s general culture or language but I never laugh as much as when my Arab friends are telling stories. Would you discuss how you inserted humor into what is a serious book?
MG: In truth, humor is a characteristic of working-class neighborhoods. It’s very important. I have never laughed as much as I laughed in my childhood. It’s not an Arab cultural trait, but popular humor that has always existed in France. Poor people entertain themselves, they’re funny because they don’t worry about what “people will say.” I have never been as happy as when I was poor. We laughed all the time. Everything was serious because we had no money and so we kept things light. I wanted to capture that spirit in the book. Also, the main character likes to smoke joints, which makes him a bit odd (which isn’t true of me. I only smoke marijuana two or three times a year).
JRR: What an ending! I won’t give it away, but I want to ask you about the power of stories in our times. Throughout the book, you reflect on words and the Older Brother is towards the end, writing. In our current world, what do you think stories can do for us?
MG: Our perception of the world is fictional. Right now, as I’m writing this, I don’t know what’s actually happening in Japan, so if I think about Japan, my mind comes up with images to represent it. Fiction began with stories told around the fire by prehistoric humans and cave paintings are fictitious representations that attempt to make sense of the world. Books help us understand the world. They reach into the depths of the human soul, more than any other art form. Internal monologue is one of the precious tools that only novels can use. Films and paintings have other strengths, but they can’t do that. There is nothing better than literature for understanding another person’s mind. And reading is an active practice, like sports, you have to concentrate. Reading is pleasure. Reading helps you grow, helps you relax. Reading saved me from my crazy adolescence and my infinite energy.
JRR: I was reading about your book in the French press and saw this piece mentioning Michel Houellebecq in relation to Older Brother. What do you think about this and his work in general? To English-speaking and American readers, who are maybe less familiar with contemporary French literature, your book would seem to be on some level in conversation with Submission.
Populists are Hitler’s grandchildren who got a keyboard and a mouse and who toy around with the internet.
MG: Michel Houellebecq is a great writer. A seismograph of the contemporary world and the devaluation of masculinity. In France, I have the feeling that he is angrier with men than with women. Michel Houellebecq idealizes women, which is why he also often writes crudely about them. He refuses sexuality and is too romantic, which transforms him into a pessimist. Submission is a racist novel. When he published it, people called him a genius too fast. His best book, in my opinion, is The Map and the Territory. The writing doesn’t feel labored, but it is grandiose. Even the title of Submission is a fraud. Submission is how the far-right in France translates the Arabic word “Islam,” which really means submission to peace. You see the mistake? It’s terrible. It’s dishonest.
So, I am happy to be compared to Michel Houellebecq because he’s a great writer, maybe because we are both realist writers, sharing the artistic current of dirty realism. But otherwise, I am an enthusiastic hyper-humanist. I believe in trust, I love my country, I love its past, its present, and also its future. Michel Houllebecq has a death wish. I would like Michel to have a life wish, which pulls us upwards and doesn’t make us depressed. He is close with populists, like Laurent Obertone, who he introduced to Nicolas Sarkozy. Their ideas are similar to Steve Bannon’s. And I can’t accept that. These fucking populists, we’ll show them how to live together and what civilization means, we’ll kick their asses. Sorry, I am getting carried away. He spreads hate everywhere, he plays with nations like he’s going bowling. These are Hitler’s grandchildren who got a keyboard and a mouse and who toy around with the internet.
JRR: Would you share some of the new writing in French that you are excited about?
MG: Some must-reads are Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, Vernon Subutex 1 and King-Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, Un océan, deux mers, trois continentsby Wilfried N’Sondé, and The Life Before Us by Romain Gary, which is a masterpiece. I also recently discovered Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, who is a German author, and German Autumn by Stig Dagerman, which are two extraordinary books.
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