Grieving for Fascists

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

My father had been dead for almost seven years by the time I learned about his suicide, the amount of time it takes to have someone declared dead in absentia in the state of Massachusetts. I’m still not sure why his mother—and my mother, for that matter—kept me in the dark during that time. Before he left a note and walked into the ocean, he told me he was moving to Atlanta for a job. I suppose I had simply assumed that he wasn’t interested in keeping up a long distance relationship with me, his only child. 

I also don’t know why my mother and my father’s mother chose to tell me in the way that they did: His mother mailed me a manila envelope shortly before my 14th birthday. It contained a copy of his will, his suicide note, and his baby ring. My mother feigned ignorance when I read through the documents on our front lawn, just next to the mailbox. 

“Well,” she said, “at least we know where he’s been all these years.” 

His mother mailed me a manila envelope shortly before my 14th birthday. It contained a copy of his will, his suicide note, and his baby ring.

It wouldn’t be until I was getting ready for college, going through my mother’s safe for some financial aid documents, that I saw her file on my dad. She’d started it in the days after his note was found. Even though they had divorced five years before he decided to end his life, she was the lead in having his estate settled. But we never discussed it, not after that first conversation over the manila envelope. Around the topic, we lapsed into a dull and speechless state. 

“Dull speechlessness” is also the state Peter Handke describes falling into when he learned of his own mother’s suicide in November, 1971. Several weeks later, he began to write the taut, at times clinical work of autofiction A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (titled in the original German Wunschloses Unglück). 

From the outset, Sorrow resonated with me. I first read it when I was 25, about to get married, and just beginning therapy—the first time in my life I would begin to unravel the emotional tangle of my father’s death that I’d previously kept shelved. Prior to that, however, I’d plumbed the canon of suicide memoirs in high school and college. I didn’t have any emotional reactions to them, but I nevertheless devoured them the way other people scarf up every available celebrity gossip rag—compulsively and clandestinely, often with the same empty-calorie value. 

This sense of compulsiveness isn’t uncommon for children who lose their parents in this way. American psychologist Albert Cain, who has studied the topic extensively, places tremendous importance on the act of telling a child about their parent’s suicide. In keeping with the pace at which a child’s mind develops, it’s not simply one act of telling, but rather an act of telling and retelling over time. If the telling amounts to “a few brief, charged exchanges” that “put an end to overt questions,” the child is likely to be left “to his or her own constructions, patching together fragments of information and fantasy or joining an alliance of suppression.” In the absence of the internet, family communication, or any other real facts, I was using the grief of others to patch together my own information. 

With suicide memoirs, the results were mostly a disappointment for me, the tone consistently overly-emotional. After spending so many years divorced from grief, trying to process someone else’s was like trying to eat beef bourguignon after a weeklong fast. Perhaps that’s why Sorrow had such an impact on me: It was a work that, in under 100 pages, told and retold the story of a mother’s suicide without letting emotion take the wheel. As he pieces together information about his mother’s childhood in Nazi Austria, her unhappy marriage to an alcoholic, and the nervous breakdown that would be an omen of her eventual fatal overdose, Handke notes: 

The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten — like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is a literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.

This gave me a sense of comfort in the emotional bardo. It also allowed me to see my father’s death not from my own perspective, but from his. Just as Emile Durkheim examined suicide as a problem of society, Handke examined his mother through the world and culture that shaped her. More accurately, he looked at the role she was expected to fill in this world, and the increasing chasm between that role and her inner life. Through this, I was able to see my father and the role he was slated for as the first (and only) son born into a military family as part of the post-War baby boom. With what little I knew of him (aided by files and reports), I could see how he’d tried to cross the gap between his own sensitivities, his failed marriages, his depression, and his checkered career, and the role he was born to fill. I also came to see how easily that bridge can crumble. I felt I had Handke to thank for that. 

And then I fucking Googled him. 

Even before last week’s Nobel Prize in Literature announcement, Handke’s reputation as a genocide apologist couldn’t outrun search engine algorithms. The front page of Google included documentation of his denial of the Srebrenica genocide and his false claim that Bosnian Muslims staged their own massacres. What’s more, he didn’t seem inclined to bury these viewpoints, having spoken at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević (who died in prison, shortly before the conclusion of his trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide). Handke published an entire book on the country and the “purity” he found in the Serbs. It’s currently available used on Amazon for a minimum of $999.  

But in the last week, the spotlight pointed onto Handke by the Nobel Committee has only heightened the critical response — and rightly so. Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon dubbed Handke “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists.” The press has been quick to reprint Jonathan Littell’s more succinct assessment from 2008: “He’s an asshole.” 

In general, I’ve always preferred to keep emotion at arm’s length, in favor of intellectual thought. I struggled with this instinct most acutely in my first few years of therapy, around most topics of discussion. My therapist would say she understood what I was saying, but not what I was feeling. Such prompts to get me out of my own head and into something more elemental or gut-felt were the first tentative bites of emotional nutrition. It was a kind, but rigorous, effort to break the fast. I would push back and shut down, she would refuse to honor the alliance of suppression. I imagine that, for her, working with me early on must have been like running into a brick wall over and over and expecting the result to eventually change. 

It was around this time that I also began to develop a taste for Wagner, thanks in part to reviewing the full Ring Cycle when a new, multi-year production premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera. Where Handke eschews beauty in his depiction of death, Wagner overdoses on it, creating what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk (literally, a “total-art-work”). I’d flirted with the composer’s works in the past, but always found them a bit too long, a bit too overblown. In Die Walküre, the second installment of the Ring Cycle, however, something shifted. From somewhere, an emotion was sparked. 

It’s the scene of a daughter recognizing her father’s suffering, begging to take it from him.

“Endless rage! Eternal grief! I am the saddest of all men,” Wotan moans to his daughter Brünnhilde in Act II of the opera. Even for the gods, the only truth in life is chaos. Ever specific with his stage directions, Wagner instructs Brünnhilde to lay her head on Wotan’s knee as she begs him to unburden his sorrows onto her. Wotan, in turn, gazes into her eyes “for a long while” while stroking her hair “with unconscious tenderness.” In a low, faraway voice, he wonders if his will would be broken if he were to do so. “Who am I if not your will?” Brünnhilde responds. It’s the scene of a daughter recognizing her father’s suffering, begging to take it from him, to inherit his burden as her own responsibility. (Wagner, too, struggled with depression and suicidal ideation.)

Such a response is uncomfortably familiar to children of suicide, who are likely to hold themselves responsible for their parents either in the face of a depressive episode or, after the fact, insist (in Albert Cain’s words) “in the face of therapists’ interpretations and reality confrontations, that it was their fault.” Seeing that moment play out on stage, I didn’t know if I was thinking about anything. But I was certainly feeling the desperate need to lay my own head on my father’s knee and beg him to give me his endless rage and eternal grief. To tap into these ideas through his art was to tap into my own grief. 

I didn’t need to Google Wagner. As both a Jew and a classical music critic, I knew about the composer’s well-documented and unabashed antisemitism. His essay “Jewishness in Music” is an unapologetic diatribe on “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.” It’s available on Amazon Prime for a sum that’s about one-one-hundredth the asking price of Handke’s book on Serbia. In an echo of Littell, Auden described Wagner as “an absolute shit.” 

This was a common reaction in the 20th Century as the trend of casual antisemitism wore off and the specter of World War II rose. Wagner’s legacy is rendered all the more discomfiting when you take into account that he was idolized by Hitler. “Out of [Wagner’s] Parsifal I am building my religion—the solemnity of the Mass without theological party-bickering,” Hitler once told Nazi Party lawyer Hans Frank. Fellow classical critic and author of the forthcoming Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music Alex Ross has spent years unpacking the Wagner complex. He referenced the Parsifal conversation in an August 1998 article for the magazine, “The Unforgiven,” wherein he also drew parallels between the opera’s text and three speeches delivered by Hitler between 1939 and 1942. Handke’s own mother lived through this era, and what came after it.

While Wagner could never have predicted the rise of Hitler and a genocide that defies all adjectives (as all genocides should), scholars and fans alike have spent the better part of the last century debating what to do with his music. It’s not simply that he inspired Hitler, but that the philosophy that Hitler shaped in Wagner’s image was made (in Ross’s words) “not by distorting Wagner but by taking his words literally… the manipulation of reality in the service of one idea, the blend of mysticism and hate.” 

Would Wagner have denied the Holocaust? Such questions and parallels seem even more pressing over the last week, not because of the Nobel Prize, but because of Turkey’s attacks against Syrian Kurds. I think about what Handke would say to this development. In the next breath, I think about my grandmother, a Syrian minority who was named for her slaughtered sister. I think and I struggle to feel. Other times, I feel and try not to think. 

In some ways, it’s easier to condemn the dead while still embracing their work. The buffer of history (“it was a different time”) acts as both a cushion and a dodge. Hundreds of books have been written about Wagner’s art and politics, with titles like The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art and The Trouble with Wagner. Some scholars have taken apart his works, brick by brick, to find musical representations of antisemitism, or read key characters from his operas as stand-ins for Jewish stereotypes. But we still perform his music. According to the website Operabase, over 150 productions of Wagner’s operas are scheduled around the world throughout the next year. Even today, Jewish musicians have made his canon central to their repertoire. Conductor Daniel Barenboim, in contextualizing Wagner’s world, writes: “It was nothing extraordinary to blame the Jews for all current problems, whether political, economical, or cultural.” 

We look to history as an explanation, even an excuse. But we’re also reckoning with the abhorrent behavior of living artists, like Handke.

We look to history as an explanation, at times even as an excuse for the behavior of the past that contradicts the values of the present. But currently, we’re also reckoning—on a public scale and in real time—with the abhorrent behavior of living artists, like Handke, who ought to know better. Caught in history as it’s unfolding, we’re not 100% sure what to do with each case. One group denounces Handke; another group (which recently struggled with its own allegations of misconduct) gives him one of the most prestigious awards a writer can get. 

For me, the art of others has always been a means of catharsis, an outward manifestation of my internal life. I can point to Wotan’s heartbreaking farewell to his favorite child at the end of Die Walküre as though I was pointing to my own reflection in a mirror. It’s beyond a reflection, in fact, as I myself never got a farewell from my own father. In this sense, art became a means for me to achieve. And yet, just when I think I have some sense of closure around the legacy of my father through a work like Sorrow (not a total, complete closure — I’m not sure any one work of art could do that — but at least some sliver of resolution), the legacies of those artists then leave me with more discomfort and uncertainty. 

I can’t defend Handke. I can’t even, in good conscience, defend his art at the expense of the man. But I also can’t immediately give up his works. I can’t ride into them as a hired assassin (as Patricia Lockwood recently did for the canon of John Updike), leaving blood on the ceiling in my wake. I don’t have the energy for the (justifiable) rage that others have over the Nobel Committee honoring a man who, when told that there were corpses to prove the Srebrenica Genocide, responded “You can stick your corpses up your ass!” I’m too exhausted from reliving the sadness that comes with being let down by yet another man who is old enough to be my father. 

My first instinct, as a result, is to bury my head; to wipe my memory clean of the headlines and essays on Serbian purity. In the absence of that, I can, at the very least, say nothing. I can stash my copy of Sorrow (which also houses a small envelope containing the only photos I have of my father) deep in the back of my bookshelf. But all of this feels like yet another alliance of suppression. As blissful as ignorance might be, I know from experience that the truth will eventually arrive, often in an unannounced manila envelope. 

Many recent pieces questioning what we should do with the great art of monstrous people invariably include the same Walter Benjamin quote: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” I keep reading these articles, because it’s easier to think about this question rather than deal with the sense of loss that comes from works that once meant something to me, without any asterisk or caveat. This is its own form of complicated grief. 

This is its own form of complicated grief.

Benjamin’s quote is an explanation, but not an excuse. It’s a holding container for more thought and emotional contemplation, sitting with one of the most pernicious and uncomfortable emotions, uncertainty. Not only uncertainty about an asshole author or an absolute shit of a composer. It’s uncertainty about all of the artists I admire who haven’t been exposed as reproachable—but all of whom might be. 

It’s uncertainty about my father. For all I know, the image I have of him, a man I last saw nearly 30 years ago, is a false one. My conscious experiences with him constitute a handful of days in contrast to the 41 years he was alive. As far as I remember, he was loving and kind. But there’s a prisoner’s dilemma of synching this memory with the stories I’ve heard about him from others—that he was a deadbeat who couldn’t hold down a job, that he’s likely still alive since he would never have killed himself, that he was a shyster from a long line of Italian shysters. Perhaps, in the alternative universe where he is alive, I would hate him today. 

And here’s what really terrifies me: It’s uncertainty about myself. Realizing that this essay may be read, either in the future or right now, as morally reprehensible paralyzes me. My hands hover above the keys, afraid of triggering a landmine. I’m aware that the work I’ve done to process my father’s death was predicated in part on the work of terrible men, which may or may not render it invalid. I’m also even more acutely aware that I, too, will one day die and not be able to defend whatever remains of me to those who would call me terrible. 

We can’t outrun uncertainty any more than we can outrun our own mortality. Perhaps this is, in fact, the real takeaway of the good art/bad artist dilemma: that there is no answer, that seeking certainty and clarity only makes you more vulnerable. Finding closure to one grief opens you up to another grief.

Throughout all of this, I keep going back to a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath: “Every woman adores a fascist.” It’s both a comfort and a curse to know that I’m not alone in falling for someone on the wrong side of history. That person for Plath? Her father. 

9 Mind-Bending Books about Parallel Universes

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Tired of waking up every morning in the same old reality? Do you feel trapped by the physics of your world? Are you interested in hopping to a new world just for a change of pace? Have we got the book list for you. If you’re interested in magic doors, other worlds, time travel, and alternate realities, these books might fill a void in your life—or maybe they’ll open a new wormhole. 

A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab

Only a select few magicians can travel between the three Londons—Red, Grey, and White—and Kell is one of them. He operates secretly as a smuggler between the worlds, but when he’s robbed by Lila, a thief from Grey London, the two come face-to-face with the dark side of magic. Lila convinces Kell to spirit her away to the other Londons, and a magical adventure between worlds begins.

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow

January Scaller feels trapped in the mansion of her father’s business partner, a man who collects magical and unusual objects. Until, that is, January’s father disappears and she discovers a mysterious book, and an even more mysterious door that can lead her to other worlds. 

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Tess is a time-traveling rebel bent on destroying a group of time-traveling misogynists who want to strip women of their rights and autonomy. When Tess lands at a punk concert in 1992 California, she meets Beth, a normal girl looking for freedom. As the girls become closer, they must face the threat of war that reaches through their timelines, and defend the past in order to save the future.

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The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is the nickname for shell-shocked soldiers of the war with Mars. But what’s actually happening to these soldiers? When Dietz joins the war and begins to experience lapses in reality—memories that don’t line up with the platoon’s, orders that lead to nothing—the new recruit is forced to wonder what this war is really about.

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This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Red is part of a glittering, technological utopia; Blue is a member of an organic mass-consciousness. When Red finds Blue’s letter at the end of the world, it begins a correspondence that spans time and space, connecting the two through different timelines until the bitter end. While they begin as enemies, Red and Blue slowly realize that when you’re the last two humans on earth, the only people you can depend on are each other.

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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

In 1931, Harper Curtis finds the key to a strange house with a list of girls names on written on the wall. Harper realizes the house allows him to travel in time, and he must traverse different decades in order to kill all the girls listed on the walls—until one of his potential victims begins hunting him in return.

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The Heavens by Sandra Newman

When Ben meets Kate at a party in 2000, he’s immediately drawn to her. But as he gets to know Kate better, he finds out that she’s plagued by dreams in which she lives in Elizabethan England as a nobleman’s mistress. Kate is convinced that these dreams are real, and that her actions in 1593 are affecting the present. As Kate becomes more convinced that her dreams are reality, Ben worries that he’ll lose the woman he loves to a world he doesn’t understand.

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The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

Nour grew up in Manhattan, but when her father dies of cancer, her mother moves their family back to Syria. After a bomb destroys their new home and nearly kills Nour, her family begins a search for safety that will take Nour through the Middle East and North Africa. During their flight, Nour takes comfort in the story of a fatherless girl from eight hundred years ago who follows the same path. The story follows Nour and Rawiya as they search for new lives hundreds of years apart.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

When Mary confronts Mr. Fox one afternoon in 1938, he isn’t expecting to see her, mostly because he made her up. Mr. Fox is an author who kills off his heroines, and Mary is an imaginary muse with a challenge: Mr. Fox must stop murdering fictional women. As Mary and Mr. Fox begin rewriting classic fables, the lines begin to blur between creator and creation, author and vision, reality and alternate realities. 

Gabby Rivera Wants Queer Brown Girls to Feel Seen

Posted on by Jo Lou

Gabby Rivera’s YA novel follows Juliet Palante, a Puerto Rican teen from the Bronx, who is reckoning with her feminism and queerness. After coming out to her family, she goes to Portland to be a summer intern for her favorite feminist author, Harlowe Brisbane. Juliet believes this will be the summer that answers all of her questions and teaches her how to navigate life. 

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

Juliet Takes a Breath allows Juliet to learn, be free, and resist all at the same time. Once I read Juliet’s letter to Harlowe, full of curse words and jokes and the word pussy, I knew I’d have a great time figuring out who Juliet is, and who she’d become.

Gabby Rivera is a queer, Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. She wrote the solo series AMERICA about the adventures of America Chavez, Marvel’s first queer Latina superhero. Rivera has also been named a top comic creator by SyFy Network, and one of NBC’s #Pride30 Innovators. 

I talked to Gabby Rivera about how white feminism won’t save brown people, reckoning with Evangelical Christianity, and thriving as a loved, supported queer adult.

Arriel Vinson: How did the idea for Juliet Takes a Breath come about, and how did it change in the reprinting of the novel?

Gabby Rivera: In Juliet Takes a Breath, Juliet is mesmerized by the [fictional] book, Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind. So much so that she snags an internship with the author, Harlowe Brisbane, and takes her newly out, round brown Puerto Rican self from the Bronx to Portland Oregon.

And that’s exactly what I did when I was nineteen. Navigating white hippie lesbian Portland as a Bronx Nuyorican was incredible and so damn ridiculous and funny. But I didn’t think about crafting a story about the experience until Ariel Gore, author of Hexing the Patriarchy, asked me to submit for her 2009 anthology Portland Queer. That anthology has the first iteration of Juliet Takes a Breath and it’s super autobiographical. Juliet’s family, her Bronx neighborhood, her crush on a super sweet and cute librarian, all of that is based off of my life. 

AV: The novel begins with Juliet writing a white feminist author, Harlowe Brisbane. This lets readers know that space will either be made for Juliet, or taken for Juliet and girls who look like her. Tell me more about this decision.

There’s this idea that if you’re not from the rich white suburbs, that your neighborhood isn’t good enough so you gotta get out.

GR: There’s this idea that if you’re from the Bronx or any neighborhood that isn’t the rich white suburbs, that your neighborhood isn’t good enough for you to flourish or find yourself in so you gotta get out. I heard that refrain all the damn time in the Bronx. People are either Bronx for life or just itching, waiting, and hoping to get out. It makes sense, it feels like there’s never a moment of quiet. The Bronx is jam-packed with people, city buses, sirens, beauty salons, Pentecostal churches, beef patties, graffiti, and baby strollers. Feels like there’s never a moment to honor the brave chubby round girls of color that are trying to navigate the world around them while catching the train to school and helping their baby siblings with their homework. 

Juliet writes the letter to Harlowe cuz she’s steeped in the myth that she’s gotta get out of the Bronx to be somebody, to figure out queerness and feminism. 

And yet at the very same time, Juliet Takes a Breath opens with a welcoming to all round brown girls encouraging them to take up all the space they need and to love themselves and each other. 

AV: When Juliet comes out, her family responds with anger/shock, then love, though resistant. Why did Juliet need those reactions instead of more positive ones?

GR: Hah! Juliet comes out at the dinner table after her Titi Wepa, who’s a cop, tells a story about her chasing down a perp by Yankee Stadium. So like the family’s already hype and laughing and at first they don’t take Juliet seriously at all. So she’s gotta fight for her space and then everything gets quiet.

It’s gotta sink in and again, Juliet’s coming out scene is similar to mine. I came out at the dinner table and was met with the deepest silence I’ve ever felt from my mother in my whole life. Like the wild silence right before a glacier breaks off on its own. My dad was chill, quiet, but still there. 

Not everyone in Juliet’s family is resistant. Her grandma offers her big love right away and so does her Titi Wepa. It’s Juliet’s mom that takes her coming out super hard and that felt right to me. Juliet and her mom are also trying to find their way back to each other.

AV: This isn’t only a novel about queerness, but a novel about stepping out of your comfort zone. Juliet grew up Christian with a Latinx family in the Bronx, a stark difference from what she saw in Portland. Why was this important for Juliet, and how does this mirror your life experience, if at all?

All you are to these white folks is some brown other who needs to be saved.

GR: So much of the Evangelical Christianity that I experienced growing up was about making sure women knew their place. Women had to be obedient to their husbands and let them lead the house. You know all that stuff. And of course the real deep homophobia, sex-shaming, and rigid rules about gender presentation. Women wear skirts and men were suits etc. All that stuff that’s designed to keep everyone in place cuz apparently God can’t handle it otherwise.

There’s a lot of guilt and fear that comes with being told that there’s only one acceptable way to be a girl, to be someone worthy of divine love. Lots of Juliet’s anxieties in the novel stem from that upbringing. She feels connected to God and is trying to also work through how being queer and a sin verguenza impacts her relationship with God.

AV: In Juliet Takes a Breath, themes of womanism and white feminism are present. How did this help Juliet understand her queerness and place in the world? Why did Harlowe need to disappoint for Juliet to gain a greater understanding?

GR: Harlowe actually kinda crushes Juliet. Juliet is convinced that this writer, this white lady feminist, that she looks up to actually sees her as a whole person and not just the stereotypes of her identities. And in one fell swoop, Juliet feels what so many people of color feel either in their classrooms, boardrooms, court rooms, that in this moment all you are to these white folks is some brown other who needs to be saved.

That shit is violent and it happens every day, under the radar or right in folks faces and Juliet needs to be able to develop the language to name what that is.

And via Maxine, Zaira, and their womanist circles, Juliet receives that real community love and understanding. Max and Zaire consent to offering Juliet that education and understanding of what it can mean to be a woman of color claiming her queerness and body and boriquaness and self. They urge her to find her own way. 

AV: All of the things that make Juliet Juliet, are also things that further marginalize her identity—her queerness, her race, her class, her body size, and so on. What made you create such a complex character?

GR: Um, this is me, I am her. Like, I am a queer Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. I’m thick bodied, and my gender presentation is butch dyke papi so like hi, the complex character is me. It’s all my friends who embody the limitless possibilities of sexuality and gender every single day. Like we’re real people. And we deserve to see ourselves everywhere. 

AV: In an interview with Sarah Enni from First Draft, you said you wanted to be a responsible community member for the LGBTQ community. What does that look like for you, both in the novel and outside of it?

There’s a lot of guilt and fear that comes with being told that there’s only one acceptable way to be a girl.

GR: I am alive. I’m a thriving, loved, supported queer adult. I’m a fucking miracle. So many of us in LGBTQ communities don’t make it to see 30 or even 13. I’ve lost loved ones, kids in LGBTQ youth groups, all cuz the pain and rejection folks feel specifically for being LGBTQ is so damn horrific sometimes. And so my job is to offer all the love and care I can at all times to all the queer kids of color.

I gotta keep telling stories that uplift and offer as much truth and gentleness as I possibly can. I gotta listen to and offer access, resources, money, time, energy, hugs, to all the queer kids out in the world trying to live and live good.

In the novel, that’s Juliet getting loved on by her cousin Ava, her Titi Penny, Maxine, Zaira, and finally writing a love letter to herself. In real life, it’s me going to schools and talking to young people about how loved they are and how important their stories are. 

AV: What are you working on now? 

GR: I’ve got a new original series coming out with BOOM! Studios in December titled b.b. free. b.b.’s fifteen, ready to take on the world, and secretly manifesting cosmic powers that turn a road trip with her best friend into an epic eco-divine adventure! b.b. and Chulita take on the Fractured States of America, healing polluted earth and ocean while still just trying to figure out what it means to be fifteen.

Also, I have a podcast coming soon called Gabby Rivera’s Joy Revolution. So get ready to listen to me talk to my favorite revolutionary QTPOC humans and allies about how we maintain joy in a chaotic ass world.

Coming Out in the Home of the Brave

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Democracy Was

1. Democracy was being told by my mother that I shouldn’t marry anyone without first living with that person for a year. Compatibility, she said, was crucial to a good marriage. I wanted to ask her if she wished she’d lived with my father for a year before marrying him, but I didn’t. It was 1976, and I was eleven years old. She assumed, as I did, that one day I would marry a woman.

2. Democracy was watching Barney Miller with my family and laughing at the gay characters and at the way the straight cops reacted to them. My father laughed along with us, but he wasn’t amused when I started mincing around the living room the way the gay characters had. “You know,” he said, “they didn’t used to have characters like that on TV.”

“What about Mr. Mooney?” I asked, still mincing. “What about Uncle Arthur? What about Dr. Smith?”

3. Democracy was discovering, upon turning eighteen, that when I did my compulsory registration for the selective service, I could also register as a conscientious objector. I told my parents my intention, and my father became irate. Only communists and homosexuals were conscientious objectors, he said. My mother defended me, said the choice was mine to make.

4. Democracy was cowering with my college boyfriend in his dorm room while some of the other young men who lived on his floor tried to kick the door in, yelling that they would kill us both if they got the chance. They didn’t know us but had caught on. My boyfriend called the campus police and explained what was going on. The banging and shouting were so loud that he couldn’t hear the response on the other end of the line.

“Can you repeat that?” he asked.

“You’re just going to have to deal with this yourselves,” the voice said.

5. Democracy was coming out to my recently-divorced mother when I was twenty-three and having her cry and say she was worried I’d get AIDS. And coming out to my father when I was twenty-five and having him reply, without the slightest change in his expression, “I know that. I’ve known since you were eighteen.” When I asked him how he’d known, he said, “You’re not a communist.”

6. Democracy was telling my father, nine years later, that I’d been seeing someone named Fred, that it was serious, and that I was in love. “I’m not saying I understand it,” my father said, “but I want you to be happy.” I thanked him for that. He said, “You’re welcome.”

7. Democracy was arguing with my father about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” While I clearly had no intention of ever joining the military, I said, “You think that if I were in the Army, I should have to hide who I am from my commander?” The word commander felt ridiculous on my tongue. But it didn’t matter; we were having two different conversations. “What I’m saying,” he told me, “is I don’t think it’s healthy to have homosexuals and heterosexuals in combat together.” I pointed out that he’d never been in combat.

8. Democracy was one of our last conversations, not long before he died. He told me he thought the Defense of Marriage Act was reasonable. “How can you think that?” I asked. “I’m your son.”

“It should be left up to the states,” he said.

Appalled, I spun a scenario wherein Fred and I were on a road trip, and as we drove across state lines, we were married in one state and not married in the next. Married, not married, state after state. And let’s say we got into a car wreck in one of the anti-gay marriage states and I went to the hospital, and Fred wasn’t allowed to visit me because he wasn’t considered family. Was that okay?

“Don’t bully me,” my father said. “You don’t have to drive through those states. Who’s holding a gun to your head?” I left the question unanswered.

All the Presidential Candidates Need to Read These Books About Climate Disaster

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There’s a strong need to build climate empathy. Hundreds of media organizations worldwide have banded together through the Covering Climate Now project. Millions of people, led by youth activists, are marching in the streets demanding action. Yet some people, including many politicians, still don’t seem convinced we’re in the middle of an emergency. Maybe it’s because they don’t recognize themselves in the crisis. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to. The books I’m recommending invite us inside the lives of people already fighting for water rights, riding out extreme weather events, and trying to survive in future landscapes. Sometimes fiction can convey truth more effectively than facts can. Yes, we desperately need the facts, the science, and a healthy dose of fear. But we also need an infusion of empathy and belief if we’re going to motivate people to act. 

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi 

By the end of the first chapter, you will be thirsty. Let the thirst sink in as you enter a future where the American Southwest has dried up, and people routinely drink their own filtered urine to avoid wasting water. Racism and anti-immigrant sentiments are on full display in The Water Knife. Economic inequality manifests in compounds that rise up with lush green vegetation and abundant water—but only if you can buy your way in. Characters jostle for control of water rights along the Colorado River and a mysterious ancient deed could change everything. As the mystery of the deed unfolds, and  characters battle over water, we are reminded they are doing so on stolen land. Feeling uncomfortable yet? Good. Sit with the discomfort and ask who in this country, on this planet, is experiencing this reality. 

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

Deen, a rare book and antique dealer, is beguiled by an old Bengali myth that seems to be reasserting itself in the present. As he follows the legend into the ecologically precarious Sundarbans in India, Deen is pulled into a world of climate refugees, human trafficking, changing landscapes, and unsettled nature. Animal habitats shift, oceans warm, and wildfires rage. Close your eyes and allow yourselves to imagine the unstable mud of the Sundarbans between your toes. When you open your eyes, you might notice the ground beneath your own feet is shifting as well. 

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The Wall by John Lanchester

Well, we finally did it. We built the wall. But not the one you might be thinking of. In Lanchester’s near-future novel, the United States has constructed a wall along its coastal borders to keep out boats full of desperate climate refugees known merely as “others.” Lanchester does not tell us the nature of the climate catastrophe that altered the world, but the blame lands squarely on the shoulders of the generations who refused to step up when they still had the chance to contain the climate crisis. The Wall not-so-subtly indicts us all. 

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

The Water Cure is a deep dive into a dreamlike stew of environmental anxiety mixed with toxic masculinity. Mackintosh invites us into a tension-filled household masquerading as an island utopia. The main characters – a mother and her three young daughters – have been taught to fear everything: the outside world, environmental toxins, and, most of all, men. The Water Cure connects toxic masculinity and ecological contamination in ways the reader and the characters don’t fully understand through much of the book. This book might leave you anxious and angry about the lies we have been fed. Stay angry. We need you to be angry and acknowledge hope. 

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

This sweeping debut novel publishes next year and centers a mysterious unpublished manuscript written just after the Great Depression by Adana Moreau, a prescient science fiction writer from the Dominican Republic who immigrated to the United States at age sixteen. Generations later, a man named Saul discovers the manuscript and embarks on a mission to return it to Adana’s son Maxwell, now a prominent theoretical physicist. Accompanied by Javier, a natural-disaster-obsessed journalist, Saul goes to New Orleans in search of Maxwell shortly after Hurricane Katrina hits. With references to other disasters in the U.S., Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile, Zapata will leave you pondering the damage humans inflict on each other after the water recedes. What is our role as observers in the never-ending stream of crises? As Javier notes: “The whole fucking media is addicted to disaster and the money that comes pouring in during one.” Who profits off the damage inflicted by climate disasters? Who benefits from the chaos? How can we do better?

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Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

This urban fantasy is set on the Navajo reservation of Dinétah in a future after the climate crisis has drastically altered our world. When monsters from Navajo legend rise up from this new landscape, people look to a young woman to stand up against the evil. As our young heroine confronts the beasts elders cower from, you may find yourself thinking of real-world teens, like Autumn Peltier, who are assuming the roles of climate protectors. 

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The Overstory by Richard Powers

This book aches for the forests we are losing. As a reader, you will experience life in a self-contained ecosystem that exists only in the canopy of a redwood forest. You will fall from a plane and be rescued by a tree that emerges from the ground just in time to catch you. The Overstory leaves readers with a sense of awe for the wisdom that exists in a centuries-old forest, and in a single resilient tree. Through his broad and diverse cast of characters, Powers will push you to acknowledge the loss of biodiversity and planetary health as the world’s trees fall to timber operations, agriculture, development, and wildfires. The Overstory will challenge you to recognize forests not as objects or locations, but as sentient repositories of history, time, and knowledge.

American War by Omar El Akkad

American War by Omar El Akkad

American War reads like U.S. history that just hasn’t happened yet. In this near-future setting, most of the United States has banned the use of fossil fuels, but the South clings to oil, triggering a second civil war. Florida has all but disappeared into the ocean, and New Orleans only survives in history books. Sarat, the main character, grows up in a refugee camp in the Free Southern States, where resources are scarce. She transforms herself into a calculating warrior, but even she questions what is right and who to trust in the unstable political climate. American War shows us a vision of our country divided against itself as climate change eats away our shores and our national identity. The good news is that we haven’t hit this tipping point yet. We can still break our addiction to fossil fuels if politicians and industry leaders choose to be brave. 

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South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby

South Pole Station follows Cooper, an artist serving a residency at the South Pole, where a fun and sometimes prickly cast of characters live together in a claustrophobic research setting. When a climate-denialist shows up to conduct research intended to disprove generally accepted climate science, the other residents resent the resources being allocated to pseudoscience. As a non-scientist, Cooper serves as an observer in the world of climate research and allows the reader to question whether it is unfair to limit scientific inquiry. Shelby lifts the curtain on how private interests often fund climate-denial research, leaving the reader with a deep respect for the scientists who dedicate their lives to real climate work.

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Salvage the Bones by Jesymn Ward

Salvage the Bones depicts a poor, Black family in Mississippi dealing with loss, longing, and uncertainty as Hurricane Katrina approaches. Ward organizes the chapters as a twelve-day countdown to Katrina’s landfall. Wealthy white landowners board up their properties and evacuate as Katrina edges closer. Meanwhile, Ward’s characters are left to scavenge for scrap wood to secure their windows as they prepare to ride out the storm. Vast swaths of our country are vulnerable to climate-related disasters, but communities of color are usually the ones hit first and worst. The ticking clock Ward establishes is a warning to all of us. The next storm, fueled by warming oceans, is coming. 

7 Novels about Mythical Creatures

Posted on by Jo Lou

When we are kids, every adult is a mythical beast. Whether it’s Uncle Larry Fartpits bursting into trollish spurts of unearthly armpit noises, or Haddy the hirsute neighbor beckoning us back to see her recently tenanted rat traps, or our best friend’s dad groping out of the daytime dark after sleeping off the night shift—monsters have always been around us.

It can be hard early on to determine what a human being is and isn’t, what we can and cannot do, what we should and shouldn’t say and think. How do we know what to emulate? How do we know what to avoid? Is it normal that the babysitter served us Kool-Aid from the water in the toilet tank? Is it odd that our nanna flicks droppings from her couch before sitting us on it? Should we really try that game at camp with the mud and the eggs and the blindfolds? Where are the adults here?

Isn’t that where they all come from—all those mythical creatures, beasts, and ghouls of our childhood—these first fears and fantasies of what is human, of who and what we’re vulnerable to, of what we ourselves are capable of and expected to do?

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Then we grow up. Some of us never get to relive the lusty abandon of running, or the slick bewitchments of fingerpainting, or the gritty gastronomy of beach sand. The world may still be full of glory and distortion, but it’s not breathing down our necks anymore—nor is it opening its sweaty, effluvious bloom to us. Our smallness no longer feels big; we no longer pulsate with dread and delight over our own human prospects. So what do we do? We get out our best playing cards and look back and reminisce, we recreate and reinvent with our own children, we get a little drunk and watch a few movies and read a few books.

When I wrote From Hell to Breakfast, I didn’t expect to see monsters populate it. They just came, without invitation, trampling my intentions, sitting down to the dinner table in their funk and their glee. I was intending to write about people—the absurd and indolent ways we indignify our intimacy, the way we abuse our close proximity, the way we entomb ourselves in our versions of the self. But people are monsters and monsters are people. Most of these humdrum savages have started out as our own friends and family. So when I was done writing I went looking for others, more of these blithe homunculi that flossed their teeth with the mail on the front porch, the ones more human than human, the ones more familiar than not. The books I found are a special breed: they bring us back to the mythical creatures inside us and around us, and they show us once again that they are us.

Grendel by John Gardner

Grendel by John Gardner

Poignantly visceral and mystical, this is the Grendel of the infamous old-English tale who fed on the poor saps at the meadhall. But what we find out is how tortured, how debilitated he is–by the universe, by the close enclaves of the wretched and warring humans, by the blithe and blundering beasts of his own woebegone wilderness, by the rank domesticity of his dear and rumbling mother. This book is everything under the stars colluding with his own interminable slurping of blood, which he does ambivalently, feeding on victims who seem to be unfolding all the evils and mercies of human history right out in front of him. It’s an enthralling and poignant tale of monstrous forbearance, the plaguing mysteries of brute existence, and the chasms that are crossed between cohabitation, fellowship, and conquest.

Labrador by Kathryn Davis

An angel, mysterious and instrumental, goes incarnate in the top floor of a house where two sisters are growing up. It’s the cusp of the 1960’s and the sisters are beset by the gross distortions of male desire—a grandfather’s original betrayal, a father’s ogling eye, an admirer’s perverse attention, a community’s uncouth children—even a civilization’s storytelling and mythmaking. The angel, Rogni, bristles with a perilous consuming light—not the protector of either sister. As they grow up, these sisters turn against each other and fail each other over and over, trying off and on to touch upon a time when things did radiate a pure light, when love was fresh and fertile and unbeseiged by others, when one could belong to another and in that way be her whole self.

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Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaetan Soucy 

In this one, there is a beast of a father. Everyone and everything is distorted by his original vision, and the reclusive siblings that live with him have been spooled into being on his lies and cruelties. He is dead now, and his chirpy and delusional progeny must tend to the practical matters of his dispatch. The jaunty and singsong raconteur of this story slowly and atrociously opens a vault on a life of vicious neglect and abuse, without a hint of awareness. What comes through is such an alienated version of self that this becomes the very beast that we thought had already been dispatched, or at least a new one, begotten by the father and sent alone and luckless into the wilderness.

Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Our hero takes shape under the tender scrutiny of a doting biographer—over and over again. From young nobleman to foreign ambassador to gypsy vagabond to wife and mother, Orlando is the quintessential changeling, traversing centuries with epic aplomb, shifting sex and gender with serene relish, endearingly earnest—eternally a poet—Orlando charmingly courts all of life’s vagaries and insults, trailing a series of philosophical, existential and civil questions behind. Though it can sometimes be lonely and dissonant, Orlando ultimately captures an optimistic sense of possibility, a celebration of human potential, a promise that human transformation, and therefore transcendence, is always on the verge.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

In Greek myth, Geryon was but a minor character dispatched quite summarily by Herakles in the tenth labor. In Carson’s rendition, he is transplanted into modern times and with us from boyhood: getting walked to kindergarten, dreading the babysitter, hiding behind his manual-lens camera, hooded up under his coat. He has a brother who sexually abuses him and a mother who laconically dotes on him. His red wings are pinched and tidied under his coat. He makes it to adolescence and meets Herakles, after which he scrawls some graffiti, leaves home, takes day drives to volcanoes. Thus he seems to re-write the tale about himself, allegorically-yet-factually, the volcano looming ever larger as a newfangled manifestation of his red self—of a red, raw fate he may actually seize, or sidle up to, forgetting for a moment the lens of his camera, and coming out clean and sure.

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter

This novel about a 19th century aerialiste extraordinaire is fanciful and flamboyant in its attentions to Sophie Fevvers, the part woman-part swan who runs the show of this book. Or so she claims. She’s a self-cultivated spectacle, glitzy and lurid and flaunting an air of greasy hoax, and she wields a raunchy feminine virility that wins everybody’s adulation. For all her audacity, Fevvers is sly and calculating, as she must be, for she exists in a man’s world and must fly torpidly into the swarm. While we cling to her migrations across London with the circus, through St. Petersberg, and into the wilds of Siberia, we experience her great soaring escape, which is always a woman’s dubious triumph, and especially at the end of a restless century—as if it is the natural order of things to slip from gaudy spectacle to the strange tribulations of the unmade self, and finally go out on the truancy of real myth.

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When We Were Animals by Joshua Gaylord

During the full moon, the pubescent population of this town goes gruesomely carnal, thrashing and sexing it up in the neighborhoods while their parents and other institutional wardens cower behind locked doors. The next day, baths are run for them. This seems to be the way of things as Lumen, a late bloomer, finds herself slowly unraveling into the fray. Among other things, she wants to know why her mother did not succumb to the “breach.” Her mother who is dead now. The story is told by a Lumen who is reflecting back on this lost time of lycanthropy as a mother and wife, now far away and long gone. This is an interesting novel about the horrors of growing up and how harrowing it is to be ushered into a world that will grope and brutalize you, one that you have made yourself and will surely pass along. 

Am I Allowed to Break Up with My Book Agent?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The Blunt Instrument is an advice column for writers, written by Elisa Gabbert (specializing in nonfiction), John Cotter (specializing in fiction), and Ruoxi Chen (specializing in publishing). If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Dear Blunt Instrument,

I struggled to find an agent for my memoir and I was thrilled when one finally reached out based on an essay I wrote. But now that the book is sold (for a tiny advance, after many rejections, but to a publisher I feel good about), I’m realizing that I could have used… a lot more hand-holding and information throughout the process. It felt like everything happened offscreen for me, and I don’t even fully understand the details of the deal. I also find my agent brusque in a way that’s embarrassing by proxy—he has always been nice to me on the phone and in person, but when he emails editors I have to fight the desire to apologize for him. I haven’t signed anything saying I would work with him exclusively, but I’m not sure how to break up, or even whether to. What are my responsibilities here? Or should I stick with this guy because beggars can’t be choosers?

If everyone in the publishing industry had a true bird’s eye view on things, we’d make capitalism work a lot better for us. So we guess. Your agent, your editor, and your publishing team are guessing right alongside you, with more information and more context, yes, but we’re guessing all the same. That feeling of “we’re all in this together” can be one of the great pleasures of writing and publishing, an industry that can feel stitched together out of targeted naïveté, low margins, long hours, and the hope that you’re creating more than just widgets. But it can also make you forget that you’re in a business—that, if you’re a writer, you are a business. You shouldn’t. You’ve set out to make a career out of something that may feel emotional and intangible and impossible to quantify. You’ve hired someone you trust to help navigate. The fact that we’re all bumbling along together doesn’t change the fact that you get to decide how to guess—and decide whether you guessed wrong.

In your letter, you sound like a thoughtful person who doesn’t want to hurt any feelings unnecessarily, but this is not about feelings. It’s OK—and important—to prioritize yourself. We are trained to romanticize the work in a way that often blurs the lines between the personal and professional, and even if we weren’t, the job of an agent doesn’t slot easily into most professional metaphors. An agent is not your employee, or your coworker; you’re not exactly his product, but your role as his client is also atypical (you’re not paying him for a service; he’s taking a cut of what he gets for you). The “finding an agent is like dating” metaphor gets tossed around a lot—I notice you also talk about parting ways with your agent as “breaking up.” Sometimes it’s an imperfect lens (no one should imagine themselves trapped in a loveless agent marriage) and sometimes it’s right on the nose (this is a business relationship but it’s also absolutely about chemistry). Here’s what there’s no question about: it is a professional relationship, and it’s one where you get the final say. 

Part of your agent’s job is to be your proxy, your voice to your publisher.

It’s also one in which you should have the final say, because your agent is representing you. Part of your agent’s job is to be your proxy, your voice to your publisher. If that voice is embarrassing you, he’s not doing that job. This doesn’t mean he’s a bad agent; he may be the perfect champion for a different author. Some authors don’t want to know any of the gory details or have a contract broken down into every little sub-clause. Others might want to know what toothpaste their sales reps are using. Most are somewhere in between.

When you write a book, especially a memoir, you are taking something vulnerable and visceral and introducing it to a world of strangers. When you sell that book, you are putting this fragile piece of yourself into the hands of a huge team of people, many of whom you will never meet. Your agent’s job is to make this process feel manageable and safe. It sounds like that hasn’t happened in this case, and it’s perfectly fine for you step away. It’s not uncommon for authors to leave agents (and vice versa), and for it to take a few tries before you find the right agent for you. There are also so many factors—a genre switch, a career shift, a geographic move—that could be involved. If you’ve never had a check-in conversation where you bring up your reservations, I might do that first to gauge his response, but if you know in your gut that you’d be more comfortable working with someone else, don’t be afraid to listen to your gut. There is so much uncertainty and cause for anxiety baked into the process—your agent shouldn’t be part of that.

As for how to break up, as long as you’re doing it definitively and clearly (and before you start querying other agents), the medium will depend on your communication style and his. Keep in mind that he’ll still be the agent of record on your first book and that one of you will need to coordinate with the publisher on how to distribute royalties if you don’t want to keep getting payments through your old agency. Same goes for any unsold rights on the project. If you have your next project ready to go, you might want to start the process right away. If you’re still working on it and need the time to strategize, you might want to wait.

I know authors who are still personal friends with their former agents even though the business part of their relationship stopped making sense. Editors will find themselves having friendly heart-to-hearts (as friends) with the same agent they might have to send an awkward email to the next week (as colleagues). It’s a small, close-knit industry and social intimacy happens. Everyone understands that sometimes you have to make hard decisions because sooner or later, they’ll be in the same shoes. If you make them thoughtfully and kindly and remember to be human about it, that’s all anyone expects. Publishing is wonderful because you get to work with friends on something you love. Publishing is terrible because you have to work with your friends on something that can break your heart.

You sound like you have a clear idea of what didn’t work for you with your agent. If you’re just asking for permission to pull the trigger, here’s my permission. Congratulations on having this first book out in the world and good luck on finding the right person to champion all the books to come.

There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Rosemary Woodhouse has unwrapped a piece of steak from its waxy brown paper. She cuts it in half and drops it into a hot pan. It sizzles. She flips it. She takes it out after a few seconds and places it on a floral plate. Slicing a corner, she eats quickly, happily. 

When I first watched this scene in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) I had been a vegetarian for two years, but was oddly compelled by it: the yellow kitchen, the rose-red of the meat, the graceful ease with which Mia Farrow plunges into the steak’s fleshy center with a fork. I woke up craving steak the next day: blood pooling against the lip of a plate, the tangy taste of metal against my teeth. I was ravenous and repulsed by my own appetite. 

But maybe what I was feeling was not so much the desire to eat steak, but the desire to be allowed to desire. The desire being met, being recognized, something clearly being given in to. An appetite satiated, without complication.

Horror is a genre of excess, of abundance—and food is the perfect metaphor in its narratives because it holds so many meanings at once. Food, from the grotesque to the delicious, populates the screen: the raw steak crawling across the kitchen counter in Poltergeist (1982); a distracted Drew Barrymore burning her popcorn in the opening scene of Scream (1999); the chocolate bars Charlie routinely snaps with her teeth in Hereditary (2018). Hunger is everywhere in horror: from werewolves to zombies to cannibals, the protagonists we find on screen are either devouring or being devoured. But what I’m interested in is not the readings of food as metaphors for capitalist consumption, the disintegration of the American family unit, or sexual taboos—but simply in the act of eating itself. 

There is something uncomfortable and enthralling about watching a woman devour what she likes with intent.

When I first began watching horror, I was drawn in by the display of appetite—specifically female appetite—in all its forms: not only the way Rosemary slices into her steak, but also the way Ginger Fitzgerald begins eating human flesh in Ginger Snaps (2000), her eyes a disturbing jolt of light; the way Justine tears into uncooked chicken with her teeth in Raw (2016); the way Rose and Iris Parker steadily eat their father’s body at the dining table in We Are What We Are (2013), the remake of the 2010 Mexican film Somos lo que hay.

Food-based metaphor in horror is so often visceral and tacky and overwrought, so why does our delight still stand? As a woman, to say that you have found eating uncomfortable at times is not particularly groundbreaking. The anxiety has become mundane because it is so common for women, but isn’t that in itself noteworthy? Horror invites us to sit with this disgust, this anxiety, to acknowledge our appetite, to refuse to let us suppress it. There is something uncomfortable and enthralling about watching a woman devour what she likes with intent. It was the kind of eating I longed for. I looked on with jealousy, with desire, with newly-found resolve. 

Food is everywhere in Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 film mother!—the kitchen table is covered at different points throughout the film with grapes, cheese, cake, lemonade, tea—and yet the focus is not on Mother’s consumption but the suppression of her appetite. The film follows a couple, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as two guests arrive unannounced at their house in the country, and Mother finds herself catering to their demands: cooking for them, cleaning up after them, unfailingly accommodating and generous. Mother makes her discomfort at their presence in the house clear, but her husband encourages them to stay. 

On the guests’ first morning in the house, Mother lays the table with food. We watch her guests and her husband pluck grapes, sip tea. She blinks at him in shock when he invites their guests to stay as long as they like. Discomfort spreads across her face. When they leave the room, without thanking her for breakfast, she asks him: why would you do that without asking me? He replies, Do what? She says, Invite them to stay. He seems unfazed. I didn’t think it was a big deal. After he walks away, she is left alone in the kitchen with the dirty plates, cups, cutlery, leftover breakfast—one of many instances in which she finds herself clearing up after other people. Toward the film’s mid-point, her guests are clustered around the table at a wake, eating and drinking, dressed in black. Somebody knocks over a glass of red wine. I got it, Mother says, frantically mopping the table with dishcloths. 

The final instance of food is the elaborate feast she cooks to celebrate her husband’s book publication. She draws a cake from the oven, pokes a cocktail stick into its spongy centre. The table is covered with food she has prepared: cheese boards, fruit, pastries. She has carefully laid the dining table with candles and crockery. When her husband’s guests crowd the porch, she is visibly crushed. He is more compelled by them than he is by her—and no amount of work, of food, of devotion can convince him to respect her. Keep everything warm, he tells her, I’ll be right in. Her effort is for nothing. She waits for him inside the house and does not touch the food. Later, she watches in horror as one of the guests cuts into the cake with a spoon. We overhear one man direct the others: take the fruit and the cheese and the pickles. Her hard is work undone, unraveled, consumed by others while she eats nothing. Throughout the film she has suppressed her own desires—for love, respect, privacy—and it is still not enough. 

On first viewing, I didn’t notice that Mother barely eats, while her husband and guests devour the food she has prepared. Unsurprisingly, my attention was captured by the violent brutality instead. But, on second viewing, I was struck by the abundance of food—and her lack of consumption. It’s clear why critics focused on the film’s other themes—its violence and misogyny garnered most of the attention, and rightly so—but reviews seemed to have missed the central role of food in the film. The feast Mother prepares for her husband is so full—the table overflowing with cheese, cakes, pastries—and yet she doesn’t have a chance to enjoy it. Her appetite goes unsatiated, and it slips under the film’s layers unnoticed. This is, I think, deliberate: her lack of nourishment is designed to be unremarkable. Not something we would look to, but something to look away from.

The denial of appetite is threaded throughout Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. It is as much about recovery from alcohol dependency as it is other forms of addiction: love, desire, food. “In addition to my calorie-counting notebook,” Jamison writes, “I kept another journal, full of fantasy meals I copied from restaurant menus: pumpkin-ricotta ravioli; vanilla-bean cheesecake with raspberry-mango coulis; goat cheese and Swiss chard tartlets. This journal was the truth of me: I wanted to spend every single moment of my life eating everything. The journal that recorded what I actually ate was just a mask—the impossible person I wanted to be, someone who didn’t need anything at all.” 

I think about Jamison’s phrase—the impossible person I wanted to be, someone who didn’t need anything at all—a lot. Throughout the book we see Jamison’s struggle to allow herself to need, to know when to resist, to know when to give in. So much of her shame circles this question of desire, of appetite: of wanting, of wanting too much, of succumbing to the want when she thinks she should have resisted, and vice versa. This passage—diligently copying elaborate meals from restaurant menus while consuming nothing, desiring to be a person who needs nothing—confronts something I recognize: that beneath the resistance and suppression of appetite is something wild, something demanding, something terrifying. This desperate wanting—and the denial of this wanting—seeps through the book, painful and illuminating. 

Beneath the resistance and suppression of appetite is something wild, something terrifying.

Throughout The Recovering, Jamison grapples with traditional narratives of alcohol addiction, with unexceptional stories of recovery, with avoiding or submitting to cliché. Writing about food as a woman can be subject to the same narrative difficulties: the desire to comb the story for something that separates it from the others. But these stories of recovery do, by definition, follow a similar trajectory: as Jamison listens to one woman describe her experiences in a meeting, she writes that she tells her story “not because it distinguishes her, but because it doesn’t.” I was so reluctant to write about my own discomfort with food because I found myself bristling at the unoriginality of it, how unremarkable it seemed. When I read The Recovering, I began to look at these narratives—disordered eating, addiction, recovery—through a less skeptical lens, one that did not conflate noteworthy with wholly unique. The narrative that I was struggling with—a discomfort with food, shame at the discomfort, shame at expressing it, and then exhaustion with the topic altogether—became remarkable precisely because it was familiar to so many other women.

My reluctance to write about my discomfort with food stemmed, too, from an exhaustion with narratives centered on the same discomfort, similar to the one Jamison articulates in “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” in The Empathy Exams. She writes, “I’m tired of female pain, and also tired of people who are tired of it.” The essay speaks to the desire to let two truths exist at once: that a woman can be exhausted by the discourse surrounding women’s pain and also exhausted by attempts to erase that discourse. My own feeling stemmed from a similar place: an exhaustion with narratives that framed women’s hunger as either pitiful failing or epic triumph—as well as with the argument that narratives about women’s hunger were overdone and obsolete. I was uncomfortable with the idea that a woman eating was seen as somehow radical—and I would not make any claims that it is—but the truth was that I was affected by watching women devouring their food on screen.

Like Jamison, I want it to be possible to acknowledge these two truths at once, to make space for a conversation in which the exhaustion with both sides of a narrative might produce something more nuanced. Horror makes this space: it’s a genre designed to engineer our shock and repulsion, as well as our desire and our compulsion to engage—a genre, in other words, uniquely placed to mirror the contradictory ways we might think about food. In horror, women’s hunger so often overrides the moral attributes ascribed to her food. Her hunger is neither inherently good or inherently bad, and her seemingly opposing emotions—both shame and desire—are allowed to sit side by side.

A predictable combination of bullying and teenage angst meant my most important friendships disintegrated at school, and so there was a period of roughly half a year when I found myself alone at lunch. I either skipped food entirely to avoid the embarrassment of eating alone, or ate quickly in the corners of the room, so that nobody could watch me.

If I was eating alone, it was the result of two mortifying facts: because I had nobody to eat with, and because I was hungry.

Eating alone was shameful because it couldn’t be disguised by anything else. I didn’t have company, so the attention couldn’t be diverted from me. If I was eating alone, it was the result of two mortifying facts: because I had nobody to eat with, and because I was hungry. I couldn’t pretend I was eating for the social experience, or because I was keeping somebody else company. I had to claim the desire as my own. It was my appetite—raw, exposed—and nothing else, and soon appetite itself began to carry the shame. 

If I ate alone it was because I had to—it seemed to me to be admitting a need, confronting the fact that something was missing. It made me visible in a way I hated: it highlighted my hunger, not just for food, but for company. I remember the hot panic at eating something I found difficult—something not able to be neatly or quickly eaten, or broken up into small pieces—while other people watched me from all sides of the room. I became so used to other people watching me eat with a look of pity or judgement that I couldn’t shake it loose for years. I found myself ricocheting constantly between two desires I had: the desire to eat, and the desire to hide the fact that I did. On the way home each day, I too composed lists of meals I wanted to eat, imagined working my way through a fantasy menu: chocolate mousse, cheese on toast, ginger snap biscuits.

When I began watching horror regularly, I found its relationship with food satisfying because it often spoke to those dual desires at once: hunger and disgust. It was the same split sensation I had seeing Rosemary plunge into the steak with a fork. I was disgusted, but the disgust arrived with the ignition of my own appetite. The task was to let the hunger override the disgust. To let appetite overwrite the shame. 

Unsurprisingly, considering that it is in many ways the spiritual predecessor of mother!, Rosemary’s Baby is also full of food. There’s Rosemary’s steak, but also: she and Guy eating tuna sandwiches on the floor of their new apartment; the kitchen table covered with prawns, eggs, lemons, chicken for their dinner party; Minnie’s fluffy chocolate mousse with the chalky undertaste that Guy denies; red wine sipped by the fireplace—and, of course, the milky vitamin drink that Minnie brings across the hall in a glass each day.

The most memorable, though, is Rosemary’s craving for meat. From the side of the kitchen counter, Rosemary picks up a piece of chicken heart with her fingers, raises it to her mouth, and begins to chew. It is uncomfortable, nauseous viewing—not least because Farrow was a strict vegetarian at the time of filming. Rosemary is tentative and methodical, nothing driving her but desire—simple and unapologetic. Appetite, and nothing else. She catches sight of herself in the reflective side of the toaster, and, suddenly confronted with the image of what she is doing, she retches into the sink. The shame of being caught desiring, even by herself. Being caught wanting, being caught with an appetite. 

And, really, wasn’t my shame at eating alone about the shame of being witnessed, being caught desiring, too? To be witnessed wanting, and then to witness the capacity of your own appetite.

This journal was the truth of me.

As Grace Lee states in her video essay, From Zombies to Cannibalism: Finding Humanity in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, horror is “a genre that eats itself”—and there are several scenes in Raw that resonate with Rosemary’s shame and shock at the stretches of her own appetite. After eating rabbit kidney as part of a university initiation, Justine—a strict vegetarian—develops a sudden craving for meat, and then for human flesh. Jamison writes I wanted to spend every single moment of my life eating everything; in Raw, that struggle is made literal. 

Eating the kidney sparks Justine’s appetite, and whatever she eats, she devours. But this devouring—or desire to—is also accompanied by the shame of being witnessed. Sitting on a car bonnet in a petrol station, Justine and her classmate Adrien eat meat-filled sandwiches. She holds hers in both hands, raises it to her mouth. She tells him, I can’t if you watch. As if being witnessed satisfying hunger is a source of shame. In another scene, we see Justine’s reluctance to be seen again. She is crouching by the fridge, bathed in neon white light, clutching a packet of raw chicken. Interrupted by Adrien, she hides what she is doing from him. Once he leaves, she holds the chicken to her nose, inhales its smell, closing her eyes to the pleasure. She tears the flesh messily with her teeth, alone and satisfied. 

The first time she tastes human flesh is also reliant on privacy, the pleasure of eating something shameful without an audience. Her sister Alex has accidentally severed her finger with scissors, and Justine is sitting by the fridge, holding it, weighing up a decision, tentative and curious. She lets the blood drip steadily into her cupped palm. She looks over at her sister passed out on the floor, as if to check for surveillance, for witnesses. Then she lifts her palm greedily to her mouth, licking the blood, fast and ravenous, feral with hunger. She stops, suddenly, guilt and panic spreading across her face—not unlike Rosemary watching herself eating liver in her reflection. Slowly, Justine lifts Alex’s finger to her mouth and begins to chew on the skin. She switches deftly between shame and desire, looking over to Alex, and then back at what she is doing, as if she can’t settle on one sensation. Each second she looks ready to change her mind. The scene speaks so well both to the illogical desire-driven forms of hunger, and the anxious guilt of giving into it.

Alex slowly sits up, catches Justine and widens her eyes, a single tear dripping down her cheek. But, as what we realize later, this apparent look of horror is actually one of recognition, of looking her own desire in the eye. In Raw’s final scene, it is revealed that Justine and Alex both inherited their hunger for human flesh from their mother. Alex is horrified, then, not because of what Justine is doing, but because she sees her own capacity for it reflected back at her. “[Justine’s] fear”, Lee tells us in her video essay, “is only of her own desires and urges, of her own body”—but I think this is also true of her sister. What if you allowed yourself to want what you want? What wonderful, terrifying things would happen then? There are dual horrors here: the horror of recognizing your capacity for desire in another person, and where it can drive you—and the horror of being observed in this primal state, unedited and unfiltered, acting on what you want. 

The first time I ate alone in a restaurant was the summer I travelled to Edinburgh. I had watched Raw for the first time earlier that month, and felt desperate to override the shame I recognised in Justine on screen. Her anxiety—of being seen, alone, made feral with her hunger—was the mirror of my own. I sought the source of the shame to try to unravel it, and sat down in the restaurant by the window. I watched the other people there—couples, families, friends—and as they looked up at me I felt my chest knot itself in panic. I plucked at the menu corners with my fingers and ordered anyway: steak frites (a temporary vegetarian break), a glass of port, a ginger cheesecake. I was hungry. When the food arrived, I ate everything. 

Horror offers a place where conversations about appetite might be able to hold both shame and desire at once.

That summer, and the summers after, I spent time eating in front of other people. I ate with friends in restaurants and at their houses. I ate on dates. I ate on my own in public: twirling spaghetti messily around a fork; collecting pastry flakes in the fabric of my jumper; tomato sauce lining my mouth like smudged lipstick; plucking ramen from the bowl with chopsticks. I let my hands shake with nerves, let my chest knot itself. Sometimes I would put the fork down, and wait until the shame felt manageable to begin again. Sometimes the knot still tightened, but it happened less frequently, with a lower intensity. 

I thought I was tired of the narrative that tells us women’s hunger is radical, but what I was really tired of, I think, was the culture that has generated the necessity of these narratives in the first place. It wasn’t my exhaustion with women’s hunger itself, but with the binary way conversations about it are so often framed, as if a woman eating can only be pitiful failing or epic victory. Horror offers a place where conversations about appetite might be more nuanced, able to hold both shame and desire at once, both repulsion and delight. In horror, a woman’s hunger exists caught up in her shame, her curiosity, her anger, her desire, but that hunger falls on neither side of a moral dichotomy—not even in Raw’s gory depiction of cannibalism, which encourages us to view Justine, before anything else, as a young woman grappling with her desires. Women’s hunger in horror is presented as neither failure nor victory, as neither inherently shameful nor a source of pride. It is allowed, instead, to exist in its complexity.

Sitting in the restaurant that afternoon, I thought of Justine bundling the chicken into her mouth. Her desire wrestles with her shame, but she eats anyway—guzzling, greedy, ravenous. 

“Your House Will Pay” Is a Fictional Account of the L.A. Uprising

Posted on by Jo Lou

On March 29, 2017, my wife and I went to the Hammer museum. We attended a talk as part of the Her Dream Deferred series, a program that aims to offer substantive analysis on the status of Black women and girls in the U.S. This particular conversation was between historian Brenda Stevenson and legal scholar Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and was centered around Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old African American girl, who was shot in the head and killed by Soon Ja Du, Korean grocery store owner in L.A. Her death, which happened just 13 days after the Rodney King beating, garnered little attention. 

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I share this story because afterward in the signing line, I’d bumped into author Steph Cha and her partner. While we were talking, a woman came up to my wife and said, “See! I told you I would do good things.” My wife is a deputy and at the time she worked at the Central Regional Detention Facility, a women’s jail in Lynwood. The woman who came up to her was a former inmate and she had promised that once she got released she would get involved in her community, do good things. It was a strange moment, because this night could incite rage or perhaps get you into some good trouble. Either way, in that standing small space, you had a Latinx woman and her daughter, (a former inmate), a Cherokee deputy, a Korean American attorney and writer, her white husband, and me, this multi-culti writer person. We must have been in L.A. It was then that Steph Cha mentioned she was writing a book on the topic of the L.A. Uprising and Latasha Harlins. It was then that Steph Cha mentioned, she was writing a book on the topic of the L.A. Uprising and Latasha Harlins. Cha has indeed written a novel that explores the racial tensions of ’90s L.A. by braiding the narratives of two families, linked by a moment of violence that sparked the city on fire. 

I remember thinking what a big topic that is and how in the world would she do this. Having grown up in L.A. in the ’90s, I have been desperate for a novel that captures this moment with the attention and sensitivity that is this compelling and deeply human novel, Your House Will Pay. I’m so grateful to Cha for capturing our city’s complicated history, in such an empathic novel. I can’t wait for you all to read it.

Melissa Chadburn: I first just want to speak to this construct, how you dated the chapters into the recent future, well as I was reading it since I got an ARC I was reading into the future and when it comes out people will be able to read it—as if things were taking place in the recent past. Can you talk a little bit about that choice? 

Steph Cha: I wanted Your House Will Pay to feel as current and entrenched in the real world as possible. When I first started working on the book, I optimistically thought it would both come out and take place in 2017, 25 years after the L.A. Uprising. As it became clear that this was a much harder, more time-consuming project than my previous books, I pushed the timeline to 2019, hoping that I would at least be able to publish by then. Because of how tightly everything is tied to real events in the early ‘90s, I felt strongly that it had to take place within 27 years of 1992. The main reason for this is that Grace Park, one of my protagonists, is pretty sheltered and naive in a way that I decided would get even less cute if I made her 28. This is all kind of arbitrary, of course, but I can get a little obsessive about things, and I’ve never been as obsessive about anything as I’ve been about this damn book.

MC: It really is my experience that you take on THE BIG issues in this novel, and wild how relevant this narrative of my adolescence is so relevant to right now. One thing I’ve grappled with and many of my students grapple with is how to have fellowship with people we don’t agree with. In particular with social media, and the current administration, and people constantly sharing how they’ve chosen to block people, which brings to mind the idea of conflict or our aversion to conflict and I think that this novel really unpacks that moment, what to do when you disagree with the people you love.

People are messy and contradictory, and as much as I wish we could all agree on what is right and moral, the fact is that’s never going to happen.

SC: I think a lot of people have had to deal with this in very direct ways since the last presidential election, but it’s a question that’s been on my mind for a long time, and that informed this book from its beginning stages. I spend a lot of time on the internet, and particularly on social media dominated by young progressives (i.e. woke Twitter), and I’m sometimes taken aback by the unforgiving nature of that space, which seems to dictate that if your grandma is kind of a racist, you can go ahead and put her in the trash. I actually think it’s very human and sympathetic to feel loyalty toward the people you love, to give them the benefit of doubt, to defend them stupidly even when they’re wrong. There’s a point where that becomes hard to do, and one of the things I wanted to explore in this book is where that point is––it’s different for different people, and as Miriam tells Grace, the evil of your loved ones can’t help but infect you, either by making you a bad person or a bad daughter/sister/partner/friend. It’s hard to be pure in your ideals when you live in a society with people you love and can’t control. People are messy and contradictory, and as much as I wish we could all agree on what is right and moral, especially when it’s as clear as, say, children locked in cages, the fact is that’s never going to happen. I tend to be rigid in my convictions and flexible with my friends and family (granted, I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by people who mostly share my values).

MC: This idea too I think is something a lot of people can relate to in their political awakening or choice to abstain from politics. There’s this quote from your novel: “Grace had always believed, without really thinking, that the world was fair and reasonable. There were systems and structures to keep society alive and safely regulated, and it didn’t make sense for her to mistrust them when she understood them so little in the first place.”

SC: I didn’t pay attention to politics until after college, when I went to law school and every one of my friends was smart and engaged in a way that I just wasn’t. My family didn’t talk about politics, or even current events, really, and I grew up in this weird comfortable bubble of home/school/church, where I just had very little understanding of anything I didn’t learn in school or read in a book. I am not an apathetic person––I always cared abstractly about equality and justice––but I think I assumed that things were just running okay and didn’t worry about them too much, largely because I was insulated from harm by a sheltered, privileged upbringing. I wasn’t an idiot, I was always a good student, but I kept busy with school work and didn’t ask any difficult questions. This is more or less where Grace is before the political becomes very personal for her and she’s forced to face things she’d been all too happy to ignore.

MC: This question may be a bit of a doozy. Most days at the core of me I have this fear of being perceived as a class traitor. That I’m betraying my class or sharing all our dirty secrets in my writing. I guess the same can be said for being a second-generation immigrant, do you worry how Korean Americans, particularly Korean Americans in Los Angeles, will receive this novel? Also I suppose that could build its own resentment, simply because Steph Cha the author is Korean to be called to this higher duty.

I write about Korean Americans like the ones I know––a diverse group of people, some of them wonderful, some of them terrible, none of them perfect.

SC: When I started writing this book, my mom requested that I not make Koreans look too bad. I get why she felt the need to say that––Soon Ja Du is one of the most notorious Koreans in Los Angeles––but I never really sweated it. I guess maybe because this is my fourth book, and I’ve written so many Korean American characters, I don’t worry about writing about the bad apples. There aren’t a lot of Korean American Angeleno authors writing about Korean American Los Angeles, so I feel like I’m doing good work for my community just by writing about it in depth over and over again. And you know, I write realist social crime fiction, I’m not doing the Korean mom thing and writing about the great accomplishments of good Koreans boys and girls. I write about Korean Americans like the ones I know––a diverse group of people, some of them wonderful, some of them terrible, none of them perfect.

MC: Can you share a little bit about your writing process? 

SC: I write at home on my couch, usually between two basset hounds. I do best when I’m on deadline; I’ve always done well under pressure, and I actually feel good and happy when I’m producing on a tight schedule. I’m very distraction-prone and have poor self-control, so I try to set strict rules for myself when I need to write. I use the Pomodoro method (Amelia Gray introduced me to this, and it has changed the way I work), which forces me to focus for 25 minutes at a time. I adhere to my rules once I set them because if I don’t, chaos will reign. 

MD: How do you balance between research and writing? 

SC: I’m lazy about research and tend to do it as I go, but I did have to do a good amount of it in the early stages of this book. I was dealing with real history for the first time and wanted to get everything right, and I also wanted to read up on the history of L.A. and learn more about the communities and neighborhoods I was writing about. Some of my research was just talking to people, and I usually enjoy that, especially when drinks are involved. Most of the work for the book, though, was in the writing. This thing was tough to write, and with the tight points of view, I couldn’t even jam in a lot of the stuff I learned in research.

MD: I wanted to close off this interview with another incredible bit of Los Angeles ’90s history. After the L.A. Uprising, there was a nonprofit that was formulated called Rebuild L.A. Their objective was to create jobs for people displaced from work mostly in South L.A. They also posted billboards with inspirational slogans.

But my favorite little factoid is that they purchased a song, to be L.A.’s anthem and on June 6, 1992, one thousand chorus members of South LA churches were bussed into the Hollywood Bowl to perform the anthem: David Cassidy’s “Stand and Be Proud.”

This is our chance

Now we gotta take it

We may never get to pass this way again

We gotta be strong

If we’re gonna make it

Now it’s time to dry the tears.

Through the ashes hope appears

And if we reach out for the sky

We might touch the stars. 

Stand and be proud

Of who we are

We’ve come so close

We’ve come so far

Now and forever

Our light will shine

Shout it out loud

Stand and be proud

The song brands RLA as a beam of hope and poverty as an identity problem and a result of poor life choices, rather than a lack of access or circumstances.

10 Intimate Stories About Love and Loss

Posted on by Jo Lou

“My favorite word is yearning because it suggests the deepest level of desire.”

–Robert Olen Butler

Yearning is at the heart of every story because it’s at the heart of every human—rooted in what we’ve loved and lost, or that which never loved us back. Whether that’s a parent, a child, a lover or a country, what fascinates me is how we’re defined not only by our desires but also by how we choose to negotiate those desires (or not).  

Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok
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The stories in my collection Last of Her Name are about the intimate, interconnected lives of diasporic women and the histories they are born into. Set in a wide range of time periods and locales, including ’80s UK suburbia, WWII Hong Kong and urban California, the stories feature an eclectic cast of outsiders: among them, an elderly housebreaker, wounded lovers, and kung-fu fighting teenage girls. What binds them together are deep-seated currents of love, loss, and longing across time and place. 

This is a selection of devastating (and devastatingly beautiful) stories on this theme that have stayed with me long after I’ve read them. Yes, there are novels in here, but what is a novel but a story that takes a few more words to tell? Although they vary in length, from the very short (1 paragraph) to the very long (a 4-part novel), what they have in common is their intensely intimate portrayal of love and loss in a variety of forms, their depiction of the epic in the everyday, and their quiet, unshowy, enduring power.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

“Dimension” in Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

This is a story that doesn’t let its reader look away. Doree, a young mother and wife, cannot stop visiting her criminally insane husband in prison after he commits a heinous crime–the horror of which is heightened by Munro’s flat, blank description of the atrocity. This is the kind of act for which any reaction besides wrathful vengeance seems pointless, but then Munro forces us to grapple with Doree’s empathy and desperation. Unsettling, unblinking, uncompromising.

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“The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day” from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

This is one of the best stories I’ve read about the nature of obsession. Haunting, heady, and pacy–like slipping under a spell—and propelled by gnawing questions: Why won’t my lover tell me what she does for a living? Where did that kidney-shaped stone come from, and why does it keep turning up in a different spot each day? The kind of story that makes you feel increasingly, mouth-wateringly irrational the further you read. 

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“Goldfish on the Roof” from Palm of the Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata

This entire story (that fits in the palm of your hand) is like a manic fever dream. A fable-like tale of Chiyoko, the unloved daughter of a concubine haunted by her heritage and also by the visions of fish invading the mirror above her bed–apparitions of goldfish that her father raises in tanks on the roof. The story, dense, surreal, and knotted with cruelty and violence, unfolds at a breakneck pace and leaves me breathless and slightly nauseated every time.

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“Lincoln” from Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge by Peter Orner

Peter Orner is a master of depicting the negative space of heartbreak. It seems the shorter the story, the deeper the cut. I’ve read this very short story countless times, and pretty much each time I return to it I manage to forget what a punch to the gut it is until I’ve reached the end, and by then it’s already too late.

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Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo

A Chinese family trying to make a life for themselves in ’60s England. The mother’s secret past, the father’s folly that puts everything at risk. The sinister, looming presence of the crime syndicate. Intimate, comic, and chilling. Also, possibly the best depiction in literature of the drudgery, cacophony, and adrenaline rush of working in a Chinese restaurant. 

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

An emotionally vivid tale of diasporic mothers and daughters, generational trauma, and female resilience. There are many excellently drawn characters and heartbreaking moments throughout, but it’s the evolution of Tante Atie—the aunt who lovingly raises narrator Sophie in her native Haiti before having to release her to her mother in New York—that left the most indelible mark on me.

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“Medusa Jellyfish” in All Roads Lead to Blood by Bonnie Chau

Steeped in a just-out-of-reach sense of place and time, this story captures a unique kind of nostalgia: how you can miss someone, in this case an ex-lover, not because you’re out of each others’ lives—they’ve since become friends living in the same city who share cigarettes and gossip—but because you know you’ll never be the same people together again. 

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

The affair is between Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix, until God, rather than Sarah’s husband Henry, gets in the way. A triple hankie story of jealousy, obsession, and humility. 

“The Raft” from Pink Harvest: Tales of Happenstance by Toni Mirosevich

The short story as existential theater. Life and death and liberation. A reckoning with the things that matter and the things that don’t. Moving, wrenching, and utterly, gorgeously life-affirming.

The Neopolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante

I’ve rarely mourned a fictional relationship as deeply as I’ve mourned the friendship between Elena and Lila. There’s something incredibly infuriating, compelling, tragic, anxiety-inducing, and inevitable about how the two keep circling each other, wrenched together in great intimacy and trust one moment and then repelling and hurting each other the next, entwined over decades in waves of destruction, renewal, and fragile truces.