In 1921, the silent film star Fatty Arbuckle was accused of raping and murdering the actress Virginia Rappé at an illicit gin party he’d thrown in his hotel room. Though Arbuckle was acquitted in court, the damage to his reputation ended his career and cost his employer, Universal Studios, a lot of money. As a result, Universal began to protect its investments by including morality (or morals) clauses in their contracts, which allowed the studio to simply fire any actor who acted badly off-set.
While morality clauses became standard in Hollywood, the publishing industry never really followed suit. An author’s obligation has been to deliver their work, not uphold a certain standard of behavior. It was never a secret, for example, that Norman Mailer stabbed his first wife or that William S. Burroughs murdered his second. It didn’t need to be; for better or worse, an author’s book was seen as a thing apart from their personal life. Or insofar as their personal life was relevant, moodiness and depression or even abusive tendencies have long been considered part of the “artistic temperament” and didn’t detract from sales.
In an era where publishers are still making big bets on individual writers but profits are strained, a single scandal can harm their bottom line.
But cultural standards are changing, and customers are more likely to let an author’s personal behavior determine whether or not they will read their book. This shift has become more visible since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, when allegations of sexual assault, harassment, or misconduct against authors, including best-sellers like Junot Diaz, James Dashner, and Bill O’Reilly, has led to author boycotts, rescinded or canceled prizes, and plunging sales. The stakes in publishing aren’t Hollywood-level high (in 2018 Netflix announced it had lost $39 million for unreleased content “related to the societal reset around sexual harassment”), but they can be considerable: O’Reilly was earning seven-figure advances for his best-selling Killing series before his decades-long sexual harassment history came to light. In an era where publishers are still making big bets on individual writers but overall profits are strained, a single scandal can harm their bottom line, and publishers—especially big houses like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House— have increasingly turned to morality clauses to protect themselves.
These clauses are meant to empower publishers to easily terminate contracts without going to court. That means that they are manifestly set up to protect the publisher, not the writer. You only need to look at a morality clause’s vague language to see how wide the net is for an author’s misconduct: for example, if an author’s conduct results in “sustained, widespread public condemnation…that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work” (in the words of one publisher’s contract) or “ridicule, contempt, scorn, hatred, or censure by the general public or which is likely to materially diminish the sales of the Work” (in the words of another), a publisher can cancel a book and, in some cases, demand the return of any advance payments.
For authors who are concerned about abuse within the publishing industry—which is unquestionably real and underaddressed—this can initially seem like a proactive move. The #MeToo movement has made clear that we are dealing with a culture of doubting women and pardoning men—a culture that morality clauses are trying, however ineptly, to correct. Yes, they’re vague and overly broad and point down a slippery slope, but when has our culture ever been in danger of believing female accusers too easily or punishing male abusers too much? Put another way, it’s a matter of balancing two aspects of the drive for justice: the desire to protect people from being penalized for their sexuality, lifestyle, or political beliefs, versus the desire to believe victims and hold men accountable for their crimes. As a female reader, it’s hard not to want to see publishers drop writers who have harassed or assaulted women—and in fact many publishers and agents don’t want to work with accused writers on moral grounds, either.
But as much as I would like for such misconduct to have consequences, this isn’t the way to go about it. For one thing, the self-protectively vague nature of the offenses described in morality clauses means that there’s no reason to assume they will only be used to punish harassment or assault. Even more difficult to swallow is that morality clauses are triggered by allegations, not guilt. A publisher can let go of a writer who has been accused of a crime like sexual harassment or libel without there ever being formal charges, much less a conviction in court. And the alleged misbehavior doesn’t have to have happened anytime recently. For example, in 2017 Penguin Press dropped journalist Mark Halparin, co-author of Game Change and Double Down, after women accused him of sexually harassing them during his tenure at ABC News in the early 2000s. Penguin Random House specifies in their contract that they can fire any author whose “past or future conduct [is] inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed.” Given that publishers aren’t hurt by the actual misconduct but by the backlash that undermines book sales, it’s irrelevant to them when the deed occurred—and anything in an author’s life becomes fair game.
Because morality clauses are relatively new to publishing and agents often handle contract negotiations, some writers aren’t even aware that they’re in their contracts.
Because morality clauses are relatively new to publishing and agents often handle contract negotiations, some writers aren’t even aware that they’re in their contracts. Others have refused to sign them, worried about a scenario in which publishers use morality clauses as a pretext for social policing or to repress free speech. This may sound far-fetched, but as recently as the 1940s and ‘50s, Hollywood studios used such clauses as cause to fire actors and screenwriters who’d spoken out against Senator John McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities during its witch hunt for Communists. At one time being a communist—or gay or a woman having extramarital sex—could have been grounds to be fired (and was, in Hollywood), and there’s no way to know how our definition of moral turpitude (the catch-all legal term for socially unacceptable behavior) will continue to change over time.
It’s especially hard to know what will spur public condemnation in the age of social media. On Twitter and Facebook, small incidents can quickly grow into public outrage. The Authors Guild of America, which is vocally against morality clauses, points out that women and people of color, who are subject to more online trolling, are especially vulnerable and “may choose not to speak out in their own defense for fear of drawing internet fire that might result in a contract termination.” The wording of a morality clause is so vague that a publisher spooked by a coordinated online pile-on could theoretically cut and run even if the author says nothing.
So what’s an author to do? The best recourse for writers who are uncomfortable with morality clauses is to try to negotiate with their publisher on the terms of their contract. For example, writers can change the clause’s language to be more specific as to what constitutes actionable misbehavior, or they can ask that the clause will only apply to the period of publication. Of course not all publishers will play ball, and some writers will have to choose between staying with their publisher or signing a contract with a morality clause.
We need to find a way to address abuse, both in and outside of the publishing industry, but forcing writers to sign morality clauses poses a threat to literature that isn’t worth the risk. Publishers can’t be expected to be arbiters of justice when their motivations are complicated by profits. The authors who have been accused of “socially unacceptable behavior” might one day be found to have acted in the right—though if their work is never published, we’ll never have the chance to reassess.
Suketu Mehta’s latest non-fiction book, This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, takes its title from the Woody Guthrie song, which most wouldn’t associate as a protest anthem, or link it to today’s immigration debate. But Mehta, who was a Pulitzer finalist for Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, offers this additional verse, handwritten by Guthrie in 1940:
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
A sign was painted, said “Private Property.”
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me. (pp.13)
“This Land is Our Land” by Woody Guthrie
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From this, Mehta goes in on the facts and reconsiders the narrative of contemporary immigration. The devastating question becomes: why are immigrants moving anyway? Mehta’s answer is that “we”—the West in its colonial, post-colonial, corporate, and climate change-causing incarnations—were/are there. Mehta condenses complicated histories to make the case that immigration is (and should be) a form of reparations for what has been wrought upon the Global South. The histories and numbers will enlighten and enrage but the personal stories Mehta collects, will rip your heart out. With meticulously researched facts (and a hefty footnote section for further exploration), he breaks down why immigration ultimately benefits everyone.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: I want to start by asking you about the story of your mother not being allowed to enter Germany because of her British colonial passport (issued to citizens of Indian origin in pre-independence Kenya) while you were on route to migrating to America. That must have been a traumatic experience.
Suketu Mehta: Yes, we were very young. I was fourteen and my sisters were seven and two. They wouldn’t even let my mother transit between two cities in Germany because she had this “alleged” British passport which they gave to its citizens when they got the hell out of East Africa. I remember watching this incredibly rude German immigration agent berate my mother. We had Green Cards and no intention of staying in Germany. I got my first taste of the indignity that having the wrong passport can have. I realized then that in this world, your humanity, your dignity is determined by your nationality.
JRR: What was your impression of America before you arrived?
I realized then in this world, your humanity is determined by your nationality.
SM: I got my idea of America through Archie comics. Maybe Westerns too but I didn’t know what to expect. I was completely unprepared for Queens. When we first arrived, there were five of us in the studio apartment. The superintendent of the building cut off the power to the apartment because there were too many people in it. That was his way of telling us to get out. This was our first night in America. I remember going out to Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, looking at the rusty old subway trembling by and wondering, where is the Statue of Liberty?
JRR: As we speak (July 2019), ICE is preparing raids. This creates fear for those without the right papers. But even with papers, as in your mother’s situation, and for minority populations in many parts of the world, there’s often fear of them being taken away or being deemed invalid. I wonder if there is a special sense of security that you have bearing an American passport that permits you to see borders and how people traverse them, and to opine freely?
SM: So let’s talk about this weekend’s raid first. They’ve been announced with great fanfare. They’ve been postponed and re-announced. There’s this ghoulish gloating on the part of the administration. Obviously, the idea is to create fear among families whose only crime is that they came here to make a better life for the children.
They came here to work and they came here because we Americans fucked up their countries and stole their future. They came here because we were there. In many cases, these are people who’ve been living here all their life and through some bureaucratic accident, they happened to not have the right paper. Now the government is going to swoop in on them with these uniformed soldiers pointing guns at them and throw them in prison. This violates every principle that this country was founded on.
I think every patriotic American should stand up and fight. And this is what I’m doing. I have an American passport. I am protected by the Constitution. And it is my karma as a writer to speak out now. I’ve been writing a book about New York for a long time and I interrupted that book to do this now because I felt it as my calling. I am an immigrant and I have a platform. I feel that I have an obligation to speak out against this incredible contravention of human rights. It is un-American and it is stupid because it hurts the country in the long run.
JRR: The global breadth of the book is dazzling and you seem to have done an incredible amount of reporting. How long did the book take to write and report?
SM: In some sense, I’ve been writing this book since I came to America. I’ve been thinking about the position of the migrant for a long time but I wrote it all in a white-hot rage in just a little over a year. I’ve taken longer to write individual op-eds. I just banged it out because I felt that it needed to come out now. I’ve been doing the reporting for years. I pulled some of the work I did for my New York book, as well as, for articles that I’ve been doing. There’s a lot of personal experience too, of course.
I was very conscious that it should be a book about global migration, but also that it shouldn’t be a door stopper. I wanted this book to be read. I intended it to be a manifesto, something that people can look at as a first book when they want the numbers or when they’re confused about questions such as “do immigrants help countries or not.” They have all the latest studies, the footnotes, and the links where they can go and do further research. So this book is ammunition for people who believe that immigration is a good thing. It is also an eye-opener for people who believe that immigration is not a good thing.
JRR: What’s the most unexpected response you’ve had?
SM: Well, I’ve had my share of death threats and people wondering how they can break into an NYU building. Some calling for me to be skinned alive. It’s just a crackpot white supremacist response.
They came here to work and they came here because we Americans fucked up their countries and stole their future.
I mean I’m glad they are taking notice but in terms of unexpected, I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who’ve grown up in the Deep South. They haven’t really known immigrants and get their knowledge from Fox News or Facebook groups. They’ve said that my book has really opened their eyes to this other side. A few promised to go to Thanksgiving dinner with copies of my book to fight their families about this topic. This is gratifying.
Then there are also members of my own family, who are pro-Trump and pro-Modi. I had a tense discussion with my aunt in Detroit, who actually sponsored my family to come here, about immigration at lunch once. She said, “No, there are too many people here already. America should only take skilled people.” I pointed out that we came here on the family unification program. Then she read my book and wrote me the loveliest letter, saying she saw my point because she saw the evidence. You know, my book isn’t just a rant, it’s evidence-based anger, but with a happy ending.
JRR: I appreciated the chapter in which a Border Patrol officer educates his colleague about American intervention in Central America. The colleague seems truly awed by how much he didn’t know despite having had history at school. Do you think there is a wider desire to fill in such gaps amongst Americans?
Suketu Mehta: I think there is because I saw it with this border patrol agent you mention. I didn’t have space to include this part in the book. After our exchange, he asked me for a book recommendation. I told him about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of America. He immediately ordered it on the phone while he was standing there at Friendship Park (which marks the U.S.-Mexico border at San Diego/Tijuana). There was this hunger in him because he realized after the other border patrol agent spoke that whatever history education he had was sadly deficient.
It’s always astonished people who come to America or when people transfer to an American high school from an overseas high school. Every single time, they are shocked at how ignorant Americans are of world history. But most of their ancestors came here to forget their history in the old world. Henry Ford famously said, “History is bunk.” So there is very little knowledge of things like colonialism and imperialism. In poll after poll, American students ranked at the bottom of the industrial countries in the knowledge of world history. The country is agog about STEM disciplines. To me, history is the more important thing that Americans ought to be studying because their survival depends on it. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it
JRR: In the course of working on this book, was there something you learned that truly surprised you?
SM: The numbers surprised me. The staggering thing is how global immigration is good for everyone. The numbers prove it. In terms of GDP, if we truly opened borders around the world, world GDP would double. The world would be richer by $78 trillion a year. People talk about America and how we don’t have space. The U.S. ranks 23rd in the world for how many immigrants it takes in compared to its population. Even if we tripled our immigration intake from 1 million to 3 million people per year, we still won’t be in the top five immigrant-friendly countries. We can actually take in many, many more immigrants than we currently do and easily resettle them. We’d be a much richer country. The immigrants would be better off because the income and for many of them, their very lives would be saved.
This book is ammunition for people who believe that immigration is a good thing. It is also an eye-opener for people who don’t.
The countries they moved from would benefit because of remittances. Remittances are four times the amount of all foreign aid combined, it’s three times more than the direct gain from abolishing all trade barriers, and a hundred times the amount if we were to forgive all debts of the developing world. People sending money back to relatives in $100, $200, and $300 sums through Western Union amount to a hundred times the amount of all debt relief!
As I started going into the numbers, this really surprised me because you know, even among centrists there is the idea is that we should let immigrants in but we can only take so many because we can’t cope. This is bullshit. During the age of mass migration, one-quarter of the population of Europe upped and moved to the U.S. and what happened? The U.S. replaced Europe at the pinnacle of world wealth and power as a result.
JRR: But I guess that was different because it was European migration.
SM: Right exactly. But even then, there were the same voices using the exact same language except aimed at southern Europeans and Catholics. There were books like The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that Americans are a Nordic people and would be contaminated by the Italians and Irish people coming in. Ben Franklin in the 1700s railed against the people who wouldn’t speak our language and didn’t follow our customs. He was talking about Germans, the ancestors of the current president. He called them the “Palatine Boors.”
JRR: I have read about the declining numbers of foreign students and tourists wanting to come to the U.S. Do you think the administration and its recent efforts have dented America’s reputation as a “Land of Opportunity” destination for would-be immigrants?
SM: Definitely America’s reputation has taken a hit, but still even if there is a depression here, even if civil liberties are suspended, they will keep coming because we have made the rest of the world so unbearable. It’s not just the conflicts happening in Central America. Certainly, it’s true for parts of Africa too. And we ain’t seen nothing yet.
A populist is someone who can tell a false story well. The only way to fight him is by telling a true story better.
When climate change really kicks in, it will be staggering. In June, temperatures in northern India hit 123F. Last year, five thousand Indians roasted to death in the heatwave. If global emissions continue at the current rate, large parts of northern India and Bangladesh will be unsurvivable. It will be like Mars. You won’t be able to go outside and breathe outside for more than an hour or so before you literally roast to death. And whose fault is this? The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population but we put in one-third of excess carbon emissions. The EU another one-third. The U.S. was the only country that stormed out of the Paris Accord. So it’s our fault that there are these heatwaves, particularly the ones close to the equator.
JRR: In the book, you write that white people don’t have a monopoly on racism, as your NYU Abu Dhabi experiences showed you.
SM: It’s true. In the country of my birth, in India, the Modi government has shamefully turned away the Rohingya who have every claim to asylum. India has signed international covenants, obliging it to let in people fleeing from a genocide, which is what is happening to this group. It’s utterly shameful because Indians have sought political asylum too. During the Punjab troubles, there were a number of Sikhs that found political asylum in northern Europe. You never know when the tables will turn and you will need to seek asylum. The fear and hatred of migrants is universal.
I must say that the majority of migrants don’t go from the Global South to the Global North. They go from a poor country to a slightly less poor or unstable country to a slightly less unstable country. Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have taken in enormous numbers of immigrants. They are strained to the breaking point and getting very little help from the West. The burden of this global migration is spread very, very unequally. The countries that have done the most to cause the problems are the ones actually taking in the least number of people.
If there was any justice, there would be immigration in the form of reparations. There would be a migration tax imposed on the countries that caused these problems. If each country had a quota for migrants depending on which countries they have despoiled, then the US should be taking in large numbers of Central Americans. The Brits, just about everybody, similarly for France, and Belgium would be awash with Congolese people.
JRR: I really enjoyed (and related) to the stories of your family’s multiple migrations. You mention a South Asian writers group (which included Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri) you were part of in Brooklyn and quite a few of them have hopped around the globe after their family’s original migration. What’s up with all these Indians not being able to stay in one place?
I have an American passport. I am protected by the Constitution. And it is my karma as a writer to speak out now.
SM: Well, once we’re set in motion, it’s difficult to stop moving, right? We left because we were ravaged by colonialism. Our ancestors couldn’t make a living or were actually picked up and transported to places like Malaysia. There were active British policies to move populations around different parts of the empire for economic reasons. The Rohingya story is all about that. Taking a Muslim group and setting them in a Buddhist area. Same thing with Sri Lanka.
My family is Gujarati. We have learned that mobility is survival. I have family in East Africa, England, France, and all over America. We go around the world and we trade or are in the professions. My family really shows that migration is a good thing for everyone. It’s good for our family and it’s good for the cultures we go into and the cultures we have gone into aren’t destroyed as a result. When the East African Gujaratis started coming into England, Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968) was a reaction to the influx. He thought that the Thames would be foaming with blood. That Britain would fall apart! And what’s happened? They are the single most successful group of any kind in the U.K.
JR Ramakrishnan: You go through these really wretched histories and the awfulness of how they play out in the contemporary moment very comprehensively. I found a lot of the book devastating. Yet, you hold on to hope and end on a very optimistic note.
SM: I do mean for people to get riled up. I was getting riled up as I was writing it. This has been a universal reaction from my readers, whether they agree with me or not. It’s a passionate book and meant to be passionate. But in the end, I really do believe that it is a story with a happy ending, that when people move, everyone benefits.
We, as a species, are really meant to move. Until recently, there were no borders. And I show, why I still have hope in this country because I saw it with my brother-in-law (Jay Chaudhuri) in North Carolina. He’s a Bengali American who ran for office in a district that is 70% white against a white opponent. He won in a landslide and sits right now as the first Indian American state senator in North Carolina’s history. He’s the democratic whip in the State Senate. A progressive in the American South. He did it because he went out and knocked on doors and took his argument directly to the people. It showed me that it is still possible to change hearts and minds. He’s doing it through politics. I’m doing it through this book.
We have to fight the fight. Every generation of immigrants before us have fought this fight. It’s a contest of storytelling across the world. It’s not just here but all across Europe, and in places like India, Brazil, and the Philippines. There are all these populists, strong men like Duarte, Modi, Trump, and Bolsonaro. A populist is a gifted storyteller—someone who can tell a false story well. The only way to fight him is by telling a true story better.
A few months after giving birth to my son, a friend asked me how he was sleeping. “He’s sleeping,” I admitted, “but I’m not.” I kept waking up during the night, sure that I heard him crying when he wasn’t. My friend assured me that I wasn’t going crazy; she’d also heard phantom cries when her daughter was small—in fact she’d spent hours every night apprehensively staring through the bars of her daughter’s crib, monitoring her breathing.
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Helen Phillips taps into this new parent anxiety in her second novel, The Need, the story of a young mother named Molly who is home alone with her two young children when she hears strange noises in her living room. As Molly confronts the intruder in her home, the lines between reality and interiority blur, and she finds herself grappling with her fears about parenting, her evolving identity, and the complex nature of grief.
Phillips is no stranger to speculative fiction. Her previous books, including the widely praised 2015 debut novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, also explore the intersection between literary fiction and psychological thriller. Phillips has a knack for using the uncanny and bizarre to uncover deeper truths about humanity, and The Need mines the dissociative state of early parenthood to talk about the experience in a refreshingly original way. However you don’t need to have children to be gripped by Molly’s experience as she tries to protect her family from harm; Phillips has executed a sharply written novel that will unsettle you as it deftly pulls you along.
I had the pleasure of connecting with Phillips while she was on the California stop of her book tour to talk about living in a world filled with ominous anxiety, writing a book when you don’t have time, and why we need the great American breast pump novel.
Carrie Mullins: I’m always interested in where an author starts their book. What came to you first for this project? A character, a scene, a line?
Helen Phillips: I’m always fascinated by that question, too, because I feel like writers have such different answers to where they begin. I was on a panel not long ago, and one writer said plot and another writer said character, and for me the answer is image. I always begin with a series of images that I collect over a long period of time. And in addition to an image, I’d say there’s some kind of big question I have. To be more specific to this book in particular, there was a night when my daughter was a newborn and I was nursing her, and I thought I heard someone in the other room. It wasn’t anyone, but that flash of a feeling, that fear experience—I felt like OK, I have to write about this sensation of vulnerability. The book grew out of that moment.
CM: The fear in the opening pages is so visceral. I have a one-and-a-half-year-old, so it was definitely something that I related to.
HP: It’s gratifying to me that as I send the book out into the world, people can relate to it. Because there are moments when you feel like every other mother has it under control, and you’re the one who has these freaky thoughts. It’s been a relief to me that I don’t seem to be alone in that neurosis.
CM: Not at all! One of the things that struck me about The Need was how many little moments resonated with me. I feel like we’re living at a time when the conversation around parenthood is a lot more open than it used to be. People feel more comfortable sharing their experiences and challenges. Do you think that’s true?
HP: I wrote this from 2015 to 2018, and there is definitely more space for someone to say something complicated about motherhood than there was in the past. In general, I feel like part of the reason I write books is because I want to have a conversation about something, and that conversation begins as a conversation that I have with myself as I write. When it goes out into the world—and that’s where I am right now—it becomes a conversation with you, with others, and that’s opened up the conversation about motherhood for me in a more targeted way. I’ve had anxiety about the book being published because I feel very vulnerable, very laid bare emotionally even though the book is completely fiction.
CM: Molly is anxious about her children’s safety, but I feel like the theme of anxiety runs through the book and is treated in different ways.
HP: Yes, I don’t think it’s only a book for parents. An underlying feeling of ominous anxiety is something you can feel even if you don’t have children, and people connect to that element in the book. In a world where global warming is happening, aren’t we all feeling an ominous sense of anxiety rising all the time?
CM: In some ways I hope so because I wonder what the people who aren’t freaking out are thinking.
HP: I’m certainly freaking out. I’ve written a number of short stories with climate change as a theme, but my next book is really going to focus on that. And though this book isn’t about climate change, that underlying anxiety is the background. What you have in this book is everyday moments that are suffused with anxiety, and to me, that’s what climate change feels like.
CM: Molly finds herself traversing that porous boundary between the real and the unreal. You’ve explored these surrealist elements in your work before. Can you talk a little about how you approach world-building?
There are moments when you feel like every other mother has it under control, and you’re the one who has these freaky thoughts.
HP: For this book one of my goals, aside from the magical or speculative elements, was for everything to feel extremely realistic. I really wanted to capture that texture of having young children, and the daily labor of that, the daily labor of having a job, those tiny domestic moments with coworkers. I wanted it to feel very realistic so that when the speculative elements arise, you’ve already accepted the reality of the book. My rule was to have everything else be completely convincing and believable to our world and then this one thing would be convincing by association. I think of the book Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Everything is very realistic, but then there are these magical doorways that allow people to jump to different places on the globe. I like the idea of one magical element.
CM: That book is great. Are there any other authors who are working in this space who you find inspirational or exciting?
HP: A book that I talk about all the time, and I will talk about it here because I love it so much, is Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin. I just can’t recommend it highly enough. It has the forward momentum of a thriller, which is something I was trying to achieve in this book, and is so viscerally unsettling and is really raising deep questions about how much you can protect the people you love. In terms of people who are writing books that have different realities, Octavia Butler, Karen Russell, and Kelly Link. Ursula K. LeGuin, Italo Calvino—I mean there are so many and I could go on with an enormous list, but these are all writers I think about a lot.
CM: You just named so many fantastic and widely praised authors, but I still have to ask, do you ever find it challenging to sell people on this intersection between literary fiction and thrillers, or literary fiction with fantastical elements?
HP: We spoke about how space is opening up to offer more nuanced portraits of motherhood, and I think that, at the same time, space is opening up for more blending of genres into literary fiction. I think that someone like George Saunders has helped with that, and I feel like Colson Whitehead’s books do that, and it’s a very exciting thing. Even when I was in my MFA program from 2005-2007, I felt like what I was doing with the speculative elements was much more uncommon than it is now.
But I’ll add that, from my perspective, I don’t ever feel like I’m trying to convince anyone to be more open because I can’t write any other way. It’s the only way that’s exciting and interesting for me, and it answers the questions, “How am I going to portray these emotions? How am I going to use all the possible tools at my disposal to capture this anxiety?” Or I decide this anxiety has to be in the form of a thriller, because that’s what it feels like to have young children sometimes. I wanted to write about how your identity shifts when you have young children and how you become vulnerable to the possibility of losing them. So it comes very naturally to me, and I don’t know any other way to explore the things that I want to explore.
CM: I always love to hear that a writer is essentially writing for themselves.
If I wasn’t a mother, I couldn’t have written The Need.
HP: When my children were young—I mean they’re still young, they’re 7 and 4, but I feel like The Need really concerns the early years, which have their own special sleep deprivation and lactation situation—I wanted to read fiction about that. I’ve read some really great nonfiction about that time, like The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and On Immunity by Eula Biss, but I wanted to read fiction that had breast pumps in it.
CM: Did you find anything? I’ve had trouble finding novels that really captured early motherhood.
HP: I don’t want to make a mistake, but at that time, I didn’t find fiction books that satisfied that need for me. People have recommended the book Afterbirth (by Elisa Albert) to me so that’s on my reading list, but I don’t think the great American breast pump novel has been written. We’re still waiting for that.
CM: I love that. I hope you write that book. And I agree—I mean I might definitely be missing something, but most of what I’ve seen has been in the non-fiction/memoir genres. It reminds me that I wanted to ask you about that infamous quotation by Cyril Connoly: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.”
HP: I haven’t heard that quote before, it’s so depressing!
CM: I know, and it’s such an ingrained cliché: that motherhood is incompatible with being an artist.
I wanted to write about how your identity shifts when you have children and how you become vulnerable to the possibility of losing them.
HP: You hear that as a female artist and you feel like there are only two possible choices for your life, and you’ll have to give something up. I would counter that with a Sarah Manguso quote, which is along the lines of “I don’t want to read books written by people who have time to write books.” I love that so much and I think of it all the time.
I teach full time at Brooklyn College, and during my semesters if I’m lucky I get to carve out 5 hours a week, like one hour each weekday morning. I wrote The Need in these little scraps of time and I think that urgency is present in the book. I think there is an energy that comes from writing a book when you don’t really have time to write one, and if you write a book when you don’t have time, it means you care about it so much that you are making time. So when I think, “How can I call myself a writer if I’m only doing it five hours a week?” that quote keeps me going.
I also want to add that if I wasn’t a mother, I couldn’t have written The Need. My children are detrimental to my work because they take up so much time and energy, but they also bring such bounty to my work, and the experience of love that I experience because of them, I wouldn’t be the writer I am without that.
CM:I agree. I’ve found that parenthood has put me much more in touch with humanity, with the universal, primal human experience, whereas before I was more enclosed in my own self bubble. The irony is that motherhood is often treated as an experience whose interest or importance is limited to females.
HP: Right, and The Need is about motherhood but also about so many other things, like can you ever take someone else’s grief as seriously as your own grief? It’s about loss, and the way as a human your life shifts among different possibilities.
CM: Have you felt gender bias with this book, for example how the publisher might want to market it?
HP: That’s an interesting question. I think the main thing is that I want the questions about motherhood to be taken seriously. The only other thing I can think of is the cover. The initial cover had pink flowers instead of ferns, and I really said no to that because it might be silly, but I think pink flowers are associated with women and it just felt like men would be less likely to pick up a book that has huge pink flowers.
HP: Me too. But I’m pleased with the ferns, I love the cover.
CM: Have you ever thought about your kids reading The Need one day? HP: I definitely have. They were at my book launch at Greenlight and they heard me read the first chapter. My 7-year-old daughter gave a cute introduction that night. When they’re older and approaching parenthood, if they decide to have children, I hope that what comes through is what that love feels like that you have for your children, because it’s really hard to articulate. I don’t know if I successfully articulated it in the book, but it’s a love that goes hand in hand with so much dread that something could happen to them. It’s so intense and scary, and it’s not just tulips and butterflies. It’s an intense, bloody, amazing thing. So I hope the force of that is what will strike them and not just, you know, all the scary things their mother thought when they were small.
If you’re like me, middle school slumber parties invariably found you hunched over the Ouija Board waiting to talk to the dead. Maybe you felt the same longing I did as your hands hovered over the planchette, pulse thrumming in your fingertips. If only someone would speak! I hungered to be in this way chosen and yearned for a life made golden by the presence of ghosts. Ghost stories still fill me with electricity. Ghosts, after all, are the opposite of mundane, an antidote to the quotidian. I’ll listen to your ghost-sighting tale anytime. I adore classic ghost stories like The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, Beloved, and Rebecca.
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My novel Goodnight Stranger is about all the things that haunt us—our secrets, our pasts. The book’s main characters live in a big, lonely house on Wolf Island, where, they joke, they don’t have any guest rooms, but they have plenty of ghost rooms. The stranger who arrives on Wolf Island feels like someone from a dream: charming, charismatic, and eerily familiar. “Good night ghosts,” the book’s narrator thinks as the stranger becomes more and more of a fixture in their lives. “Good night memories. Goodnight moon. Goodnight stranger in our ghost room.”
When I was writing the book, I sought out stories of hauntings, and I was surprised to find how many contemporary fiction writers seem to love ghosts as much as I do. Here are nine stories and novels to make you feel like you’re sitting around the Ouija board once more waiting for a sign, a word, an invisible touch on your shoulder.
This isn’t the kind of gauzy, diaphanous ghost story you might be used to. This one has teeth. Rebecca Curtis’s uncollected piece from The New Yorker chronicles how the ghost of a young man, killed in a freak accident, returns to occupy the body of an MFA student so he can finish his novel and reunite with his fiancée. It involves UTIs, “quantum entanglement,” and a bar that used to be a funeral parlor. Rebecca Curtis’s writing has a kind of insolent swagger, and this haunted house tale is unflinchingly scary.
George Saunders’ characters seem to slip from one consciousness to another as easily as you and I walk from room to room, so it’s not surprising that ghosts play a sizable role in much of his fiction; Lincoln in the Bardo’s extensive cast is made up almost entirely of complicated, excitable ghosts. My favorite George Saunders ghost story is “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” the title story in his 1996 debut. The first time I read this story, in 2001, I was gripped by the exhilarating conviction that here—finally—was a storyteller’s handbook for breaking the rules. I still delight at the madcap hilarity of the McKinnon family, compelled to reenact their own deaths in a whirlwind of bafflement and blame, as an underappreciated worker in “CivilWarLand” struggles to save the theme park, and his livelihood, from financial ruin due to marauding gangs. Sounds like classic George Saunders? It is. And the story ends with what I’ve come to think of as the Saunders crescendo, a final paragraph as lyrical, impassioned, and transcendent as the last bars of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”
“The Resident” is the best haunted house story in Carmen Maria Machado’s stunning Her Body and Other Parties, but “Especially Heinous” is the best ghost story. Told in 272 episode-descriptions of an alternate-reality Law & Order: SVU—like some glorious otherworldly TV guide written by poets and lyricists—every line of this 60-page story is incandescent. Like any great ghost story, the main characters are haunted by many things, including the ghosts of murdered girls will bells for eyes. With so many tangling threads, character arcs, and plot twists, you have to read this story as a series of luminous impressions, a brilliant collage of soundtrack and film clips.
A desperate love triangle between two women and a ghost who spends most of the story slipping in and out of existential crisis, “We Others,” from his book by the same name, is a treatise for ghosts, about ghosts, compiled by a (recently dead) ghost. Millhauser’s sentences are crisp and surprising as lightning flashes, and his ghost-narrator’s reflection on metaphysical life will make you question your own impressions. “Have I spoken of the dawn?” the story’s ghost asks us. “We do not like the dawn. We object to its youthful radiance. We dislike its suggestion of new beginnings, or the uplifted spirit. We are creatures of the downward-plunging spirit, where hope perishes in black laughter.”
Kelly Link’s new book Get in Trouble is brimming with ghost and haunted house/spaceship stories, but my favorite Kelly Link ghost story is “Stone Animals,” from Magic for Beginners, about a house haunted by rabbits, a marriage haunted by a lie, and an armadillo purse haunted by I’m-not-sure-what. Actually, household items become haunted at an alarming rate in Link’s brilliant story: toothbrush, TV, alarm clock, toilet. What has haunted me as much as the story itself are Link’s word about the writing of “Stone Animals”: “Sometimes I think all good short stories function as ghost stories, in which people, themes, events that grip an individual writer occur again and again like a haunting.”
Set in Aokigahara, the haunted forest known as the most popular destination for suicides in Japan, Donald Quist’s “The Ghosts of Takahiro Ōkyo” from For Other Ghosts is ominous, severe, and haunting as a melody. In it we meet Daisuke, a young man so adept at finding dead bodies in the forest the other forest workers call him the “god of death,” and his uncle, haunted for years by a friend he left for dead in the heart of the forest.
Robin MacArthur’s unforgettable debut novel follows four women in one family: Vale who returns home to Vermont to search for her mother who’s been missing since tropical storm Irene; Deb trying to find her path as a widow in middle age; Hazel slipping into dementia; and Lena, long dead, who we get to know through her charming letters to trees, bees, and owls. The book is about family, landscape, and deep intergenerational love—and the way the past resurfaces whether we want it to or not. The ghost shows up near the end, but the book is haunted all the way through.
Bereft siblings Timothy and Wallow search the marina for their dead sister Olivia, who slid out to sea on a giant crab-shell-sled two years ago. With the help of magical goggles, the boys find the sea’s population of ghostly underwater life. Every line of this story from her collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is haloed by grief and regret; it’s bittersweet and tender as a bruise, and the writing is just plain gorgeous—especially the agile descriptions of bioluminescent creatures and murky aquatic light.
This is my favorite contemporary ghost story, and maybe the most romantic book I’ve ever read. It tells the story of orphans Ruth and Nat, and a salesman, Mr. Bell, who helps the teens charge money for contacting the dead. It’s also the story, decades later, of pregnant Cora, who follows her mute auntie Ruth hundreds of miles north—on foot. The book is terrifying, and mystifying, and the love story is so pure and fierce and strange, it reminds you that love, like death, can be brutal or sublime.
Tom Waits grew up in southern California, and “Going West” is probably the most famous of his California songs (“Little brown sausages / lying in the sand. / I ain’t no extra, baby / I’m a leading man”). But there’s a great early riff, “Diamonds on My Windshield,” that puts you in the front seat with the young, aspiring musician, driving all over southern California at night, presumably from gig to gig:
So 101 don’t miss it There’s rolling hills and concrete fields And the broken line’s on your mind The eights go east and the fives go north And the merging nexus back and forth You see your sign, cross the line, signaling with a blink
“Diamonds on My Windshield” by Tom Waits
It could almost be another entry in the SNL series of sketches The Californians, what with the number of freeway references and city names he checks (“It’s these late nights and this freeway flying / It always makes me sing”). But there’s also a cast of characters and a noir mood that feel quintessentially of the region and of a certain time.
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In writing a southern California noir, I came to realize: isn’t that one of the main pleasures they offer? Not the whodunnit but the excuse to hit the road: go to parts of town you don’t normally visit, talk to folks you maybe see but don’t understand, get behind the gate and knock on the rich guy’s door and check out his dirty laundry. Mystery novels are road novels, oftentimes, with moodier lighting.
There are the classic writers that get referenced when someone wants to introduce southern California’s place in literature—Chandler, Didion, Fante, West, Mosley, Ellroy, etc.—but if that’s your window onto our half of the state, there’s a lot you aren’t seeing. It’s like sticking to the freeways, instead of getting off onto some surface streets and fire roads. So here are a few idiosyncratic rest stops I’d recommend as you cruise the southland at night, trying to figure out how the hell you ended up at the end of the known world, with a front-row bucket seat and a sea-misted windshield as we hurtle toward the end of life on Earth.
There are so many writers on L.A. that choosing one is impossible, so I have to start with Wanda Coleman—not because we share a name—but because she gave voice in poem after poem to the many difficult aspects of life in southern California, deeply reflective of her experiences as a working class black woman. The language in her work is fiercely alive, wildly veering, containing a rich vein of multitudes. Take a look at “Requiem for a Nest,” which is as good as description of Los Angeles as one could hope for.
It’s easy, if you’re only thinking about television and film, to forget that California is mostly away from the coast: suburban, rural, agricultural, desert—places like the Inland Empire. The shifting demographics and economic realities of making it in California (as Woody sang, “If you ain’t go the do-re-mi, boys…”) mean the Inland Empire is dynamic, quickly changing.
For an immersion into ways of life in the IE, you couldn’t do better than Still Water Saints. Centered around a botánica in the fictional town of Agua Mansa, the people who turn to the shop’s owner, Perla, and her remedies for their troubles each give a window into different aspects of life, especially Latinx and queer experience, in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. A stunning, sensitively written book.
I lived in Orange County for a long time—behind the Orange Curtain, as we’d say—and I recently read The Barbarian Nurseries, which brought me back to and inside some of the complications of that world. It’s so bright, so brilliantly sunshine-filled and overdeveloped with glass and fake grass, that it might as well be a black hole and all that glitter the event horizon. In The Barbarian Nurseries, we see the area through the eyes of Araceli, the undocumented housekeeper who lives with Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson, wealthy OC suburbanites, and their children. Sweeping and thorough, incisive about race and immigration and money, it’s also funny and human and beautifully told.
In Parable, a climate apocalypse has wrecked Los Angeles, making communities more insular, more tribal, more openly racist. Violence is common to protect resources and fight off threats, neighbors. It’s so close to where we are you can taste it. Which makes it hard reading—or did for me, when I tried to read it again after the last election. But as most science fiction is really about the present, Butler has a lot to say about the southern California the book’s future is extrapolated from (she was from Pasadena), how unevenly that future—and our present—is distributed, and what it may take to envision and enact something better.
Disney is in the Southern California DNA, for better or worse, and Gabler’s biography—despite that “triumph” in the title—gives the better and the worse. The young man with an idea for what animation can be, slowly becoming an anti-union conservative stalwart and cultural icon who has a utopian vision for reshaping American life (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT) left unrealized at the time of his death. He’s the blueprint for so many “visionary” men in California today, and the effect he had is hard to overestimate. (Don’t we all live in Disneyland now?). And yet I can’t read through the end without sobbing like a child, and I don’t exactly know why. That might be the most Californian contradiction I can think of.
Elsa, the darkly charming protagonist of Catalina, enacts a road story of her own. She’s fled an upbringing in Bakersfield for a low-rung toehold in the New York art museum scene. When an affair with her senior curator boss goes south, she heads back home, then flees again to Santa Monica, at the end of her rope, before she goes a little farther still: to the titular tiny island off the coast (where Natalie Wood drowned, no less). Accompanied by prescription drugs and a few old friends (though “friend” is too strong by several degrees, and at the same time too simple), Elsa gives Jacobs room to make breathtakingly fresh and sharp observations about self-destruction, female anger, and the complexities of desire and pain.
So much has been said about this novel, I’m wary of just saying it all again—but if you’ve had too much coffee, and you’re driving around LA until four in the morning waiting to come down, the audiobook of The Sympathizer might be the perfect company. With its portrayal of a half-Vietnamese, half-French double-agent during and after the Vietnam War and his eventual relocation to a community of refugees in Los Angeles, the novel is big and alive and endlessly rewarding. It also will change the way you see the Vietnam war, and Hollywood’s role in shaping it into a narrative for white Americans, in a profound and, I’d hope, permanent way.
Compton (and Other Coastal Cities): The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Hilarious and dangerous—like hazardous to your health and mental well-being—The Sellout is perhaps the most Californian book on this list.
It’s got everything: police violence, segregation, urban change (and outright disappearance), but also the fading fame of a Little Rascal, sociology, a lot of weed, and surfing. Just when you think the novel has left nothing untouched by its sharp eye, it finds new room to move, like it’s a VW Bus that’s secretly a pop-top Vanagon with NOS, a roof rack, full kitchen, built-in cooler, exterior shower, and no privacy curtains.
At the time it came out, I’d been writing about San Diego surfer Evangelicals for a few years, but here was this very different narrator, talking about why he surfs Venice and Santa Monica: “No real reason. The waves were shit. Crowded. Except that every now and then I’d see another surfer of color. As opposed to Hermosa, Redondo, and Newport, which were much closer to Dickens, but the breaks were dominated by straight-edge Jesus freaks who kissed their crucifixes before every set and listened to conservative talk radio after the sessions.”
Philip K. Dick grew up in the Bay Area but spent the last ten years of his life in Orange County, living between Fullerton and Santa Ana and setting A Scanner Darkly in Anaheim—wildly hallucinatory, divinely touched years, which is oddly appropriate given the area’s support of both Disneyland and Crystal Cathedral (former broadcaster of The Hour of Power television show). In A Scanner Darkly, an undercover agent embeds with a house of addicts hooked on the drug “Substance D.” Self-dissociation, drug dependency, deception, recovery and the recovery industry all tangle, in a soulless, consumer-driven America. Okay. Sounds familiar enough. But it’s on loss and how institutions fail those they purportedly protect that A Scanner Darkly especially sings, and stings.
Across three books—Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and The Border—Winslow has created a crime fiction epic about the drug trade and the war on it, US policy and politics, and the lives on both sides of the border with Mexico. Okay, fine: it’s not all set in San Diego—the story goes from Washington, D.C, to South America, with stops between—but the San Diego/Tijuana region comes into play often enough. It’s massive, and grim, and there’s so much to absorb here about how we understand a place like this in a larger cross-border and global context.
Oedipa Maas hits the road from northern California after her ex, the real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, dies and she’s named in the will. She spends most of the novel piecing together elements of a conspiracy by driving around San Narciso (a fictionalized LA) in the mid-1960s. There are sleazy men, psychedelics, too much pop music energy, countercultural scheming—and Oedipa, a brilliant character on a mission to find meaning in a chaotic world but riding an uncertain, paranoid edge through the U.S. postal system. It’s gonzo, I know—but, as Bob Dylan once said, every word of it’s true, except the parts he made up. A good guide to southern California then, southern California now, and America for the foreseeable future.
Keep driving, technically just beyond the true border (whatever that means) between southern and northern California, and you’ll reach Manzanar. When I read this book about coming of age in the Japanese internment camp there during World War II, I was a kid, and I never expected that we’d need to read it as much as we do now. Concentration camps for children was once a part of the California story, the American story. They are again.
Writing literary fiction stories? Forget what you’ve learned about complex characters and earned endings. What you really need is to include the required tropes. To help you out, we’ve created this handy checklist.
Literary Fiction Trope Checklist
_____ 1. Starts with character waking up
_____ 2. Starts with character looking out of window, describing scenery
_____ 3. Protagonist is writer with writer’s block
_____ 4. Protagonist teaches English comp; hates self
_____ 5. Death of child/miscarriage in past no one talks about
_____ 6. Character describes self in mirror
_____ 7. Character describes self in window
_____ 8. Character describes self in polished spoon
_____ 9. Taste of blood described as metallic
_____ 10. Woman who looks good without trying compared to female protagonist who looks bad despite trying
_____ 11. Main character drives to ex’s house and watches through window
_____ 12. Shoebox of letters/keepsakes under bed
_____ 13. Story is a story protagonist is writing
_____ 14. Wise child
_____ 15. White savior
_____ 16. Villain who is kind to pet
_____ 17. Staring at floor/staring over shoulder/staring into middle distance
_____ 18. Refrigerator empty except for beer/spoiled milk
You don’t know what to write and your Twitter feed is horrible? Kill two birds with one stone by loading up on weird, loopy, gently inspirational Twitter feeds that auto-generate plots, settings, and characters for creative writing. You’re going to be compulsively looking at Twitter anyway when you don’t know what to write; what if it gave you creative energy instead of making you want to lie down on the floor for the rest of time? If you follow these ten accounts, and unfollow everyone else, maybe it can.
To no one's surprise, the robots kiss and save the world, and then eat cake.
This bot by @chrisrodley & @yeldora_ describes scenes from a slightly off-kilter world. Some are funny, many are beautiful, and we’d read almost any of them as a short story.
Setting Prompt! ============ Location: 🇱🇷
Weather: 🔅
Time of Day: 🕟
Transportation: 🛳
Ruler: 🐅
— Writer's Block Bot (@WritersBlockBot) July 20, 2019
Sometimes trying too hard to come up with a story idea just burns out the words part of your brain—meaning that by the time you hit on one, you’ve lost the ability to actually write it. @nicfoley‘s bot does an end run around that problem by generating prompts using emoji.
K482.1 Husband and wife each receive money (from different persons) to bury the other,
This bot by @SolemnPhiz does what it says on the tin: creates premises for stories that range from the realist (“When a scandal rocks high society, a gangster throws a life-affirming party”) to the genre (“When the locusts return, a magician faces her worst fear.”)
fallen leaves around the willow the feel of moonlight now we are leaving deep winter
This poetry bot remixes haiku (its source material is mostly English translations of poems by Kobayashi Issa) for tiny, sometimes surprising snippets of beautiful imagery.
You are in a British garden. You can feel the fire within the tulips. There is drifting and there is suffering. The birds are well dressed.
Character is plot, but sometimes setting is character, and this bot that generates surreal, poetic garden scenes can put you in a fertile frame of mind.
I was laid off from work. I am looking for work. I work in motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment. I got married in 1973.
Many of the best inspiration bots are slightly fantastical, but this bot (by @jiazhang) that tweets tiny portraits of actual Americans based on Census data is straight-up realism. These bare-bones sketches are perfect to populate your literary fiction.
It's like if Slaughterhouse-Five met Fight Club, but in cyberspace.
@NoraReed‘s bot plays on the idea that a lot of cultural properties catering to nerds are just two or more established cultural properties shoved together—but sometimes that’s all you need to find inspiration.
Why write your own work, when there’s a Twitter bot automatically compiling sonnets for you? Pentametron collects tweets that are coincidentally in iambic pentameter, and arranges them into couplets (more or less). Machines still can’t write poetry, but they’re not bad at finding it in unexpected places.
When I came to write The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, a book peopled with famous literary characters, I was very excited to create my own version of Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t alone. Since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story, in 1887, there have been hundreds—perhaps thousands—of adaptations, retellings, studies, and spin-offs related to the famous detective. Something about Sherlock Holmes remains a perpetual well of inspiration. He is more than a detective; he is the Victorian equivalent of a superhero: both cleverer and physically stronger than a normal human, protecting England from murder and blackmail and spectral hounds through the power of science and deductive reasoning. And yet he is also more than an archetype: his mood swings, his love of the violin, his drug use, and his deep friendship with Dr Watson give him real complexity, and the fact we see him almost solely through Watson’s narration makes it impossible to judge what goes on beneath the surface of his mind. He’s irresistible.
With over 250 Holmes adaptations on screen alone (according to Guinness World Records), this list could never be definitive. Billy Wilder’s utterly bizarre The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), for instance, is equally deserving of a mention; so is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), based on the book of the same name, or Murder by Decree (1979), wherein Christopher Plummer’s Holmes investigates Jack the Ripper. And that’s without mentioning any of the radio dramas, or the stage versions, including two musicals and a ballet. (Yes, a ballet.) But these twelve adaptations, all iconic in their own way, explore different facets of Sherlock Holmes; together, they testify to the character’s infinite adaptability. Here they are, in order from worst to best.
12. Elementary (2012–2019, Holmes played Jonny Lee Miller)
This is more of a U.S. version of Sherlock than a genuine Holmes adaptation (as signified by their decision to title the show after Holmes’s most famous quote-that-he-never-really-said), but it makes some bold moves of its own. The series reimagines Sherlock Holmes as a recovering drug addict and police consultant in New York, and adds a number of new elements to his persona, including a past with MI6 and numerous father issues. (His father is played by John Noble, who was also Denethor in the Lord of the Rings films, so issues are understandable.) Compared to Sherlock, the references can feel flat and obvious, even gimmicky. Yet Jonny Lee Miller’s performance is quirky and energetic, and the series makes commendable efforts to create and update roles for women, albeit in a way that arguably plays into a whole new set of stereotypes: from Lucy Liu as Watson, to combining the characters of Irene Adler and Moriarty into one “femme fatale” played by Natalie Dormer, to the inclusion of Kitty Winter, one of Conan Doyle’s most fascinating yet underused female characters. And, with seven seasons of 24 episodes each, Miller has long since become the longest-serving Holmes, making him an important contribution to the canon.
11. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, Holmes played by Tom Baker)
Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes have always had a close literary relationship, from the Tom Baker-era Victorian pastiche The Talons of Weng Chiang to Steven Moffatt’s tenure producing both Doctor Who and Sherlock simultaneously. This is perhaps the closest brush between the two: not only does the Fourth Doctor Tom Baker star as Sherlock Holmes, but Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks reunited to bring this multi-part adaptation to the screen. It ought to be better than it is, frankly, but what it is still works well. Baker delivers a compelling if subdued performance, and the script is faithful. It just lacks a spark.
10. Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962, Holmes played by Christopher Lee)
This an odd West German/French/Italian co-production, loosely based on The Valley of Fear. Christopher Lee played Holmes twice more after this, in two television films; Thorley Walters played Dr. Watson in three further completely unrelated films (two of them comedies). I’m picking on this film because it was both actors’ first time at the roles, as well as their only time together, and they’re very good. Deadly Necklace itself is not a great film. The English version suffers from poor dubbing; the plot is serviceable but drags at times; the humor is often forced. I don’t know why Holmes is obsessed with The Times. But Christopher Lee has unmatched gravitas, and he uses Holmes’s disguises to great effect (even when the plot doesn’t really justify them). The confrontations with Hans Söhnker as Moriarty have real tension. It’s good fun.
9. Sherlock Holmes (2009, Holmes played by Robert Downey, Jr.)
This film and its sequel A Game of Shadows (2011) take a different slant on Holmes, emphasizing his action-hero skills and bohemian eccentricity to create a larger than life, comic book version of Conan Doyle’s hero and world. It could have been a disaster, but Robert Downey’s charisma and the prickly chemistry between him and Jude Law as Watson mostly carry it over the bumps, and the villains and set design are gloriously over-the-top. It isn’t faithful or even particularly witty, and it isn’t trying to be—though the script’s focus on the conflict between science and magic pick up nicely on the themes of the Victorian gothic.
8. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Yes, really. This film is underrated as a clever, playful take on the Holmes canon, and moreover, it’s plain hilarious. Based on the children’s book series Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus, Basil is a mouse who lives under the floors at 221B Baker Street—the real Holmes and Watson are glimpsed at points throughout the film. Their world replicates that of Victorian London, complete with smoky pubs and a mouse Queen Victoria. Basil (voiced by Barrie Ingham) homages Holmes’s quirks beautifully, from his mood swings to his enthusiasm for disguises to his discomfiture at strong emotion, while Vincent Price steals the show as the voice of the dastardly Professor Ratigan. Dawson, the Watson mouse, is frankly adorable. The climax takes places behind the clock face of Big Ben and there are clockwork robots. Who wouldn’t love this?
7. Sherlock Holmes film series (1931–1937, Holmes played by Arthur Wontner)
Arthur Wontner was born in 1875 (old enough to have read the Holmes stories as they came out), and was technically too old for the part even in the first of the five Holmes films he made. The later productions wisely lean into this rather than trying to disguise it: Wontner is a genial, friendly aging Holmes, and Ian Fleming is a likable Watson, though he risks disappearing from the plot at times. The banter between them is gentle and sweet. (For The Sign of Four Fleming was replaced by Ian Hunter.)
Most of the films are very faithful to the source texts. The exception is the final film, Silver Blaze (U.S.: Murder at the Baskervilles), which is charmingly bananas. Holmes and Watson are doing a straightforward adaptation of “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” albeit rewritten as a sequel to Hound of the Baskervilles. Meanwhile, however, Moriarty and Moran are sneaking around in the hedges like Dick Dastardly and Muttly trying to gatecrash the plot. They finally manage to derail “Silver Blaze” entirely by kidnapping Watson, whom they threaten to throw down a disused elevator shaft. But Holmes saves the day by (spoilers, I’m sorry, I can’t help it) fixing the elevator and descending to the rescue. If this sounds like something you would like to see, then you should.
6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979–1986, Holmes played by Vasily Livanov)
This series of five Soviet television films has become iconic for its accuracy to the source material, its atmospheric production design, and the performances of the cast, headed by Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr. Watson. In the U.K., Livanov was made an honorary MBE for his portrayal of Holmes, the only Russian actor ever to be so honored, while in Moscow a statue to Holmes and Watson as portrayed by the films’ lead actors stands near the British embassy. I’ve only seen fragments of this, but both actors’ commitment to the mannerisms of their characters (Livanov’s quicksilver energy and intellect, Solomin’s quiet composure) and the unmistakable chemistry between the two is impressive.
5. Sherlock Holmes TV series (1965–1968, Holmes played by Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing)
This series was beset by production difficulties, which contributed to Douglas Wilmer leaving after one series and Peter Cushing coming to replace him. If their performances suffer, however, it doesn’t show. Wilmer’s depiction of the great detective is still warmly regarded by Holmes fans. Cushing, who had played the role previously, is similarly a delightful Holmes: deceptively unassuming, yet capable of turning to steel when the villains are unmasked. He and Nigel Stock as Watson (who also played alongside Wilmer) have a touching friendship that underscores Holmes’s loneliness: in “The Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes’s delight at seeing Watson at Christmas and his overwhelmed surprise that Watson has brought him a present is very moving. Cumberbatch and Brett (to a lesser extent) have so thoroughly entrenched the idea of Holmes as a cold, calculating borderline-sociopath that it’s easy to forget how rarely he has in fact been played that way.
4. Mr. Holmes (2015, Holmes played by Ian McKellen)
This is a controversial entry, especially as the film doesn’t even adapt Holmes canon directly but is instead based on Mitch Cullen’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. I don’t care. This film is a masterpiece. McKellen plays a 93-year old Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs and struggling with memory loss; the plot slides between the “present” of 1947 and Holmes’s unreliable memories of his last case 30 years earlier. McKellen’s performance in both times is exceptional, at times heartbreakingly vulnerable, and at others dry, witty, and keenly insightful. This film is truly about Sherlock Holmes: as a person, as a fictional character, and the line between the two. It explores the tension between Holmes’s passion for truth and his growing understanding of the power of story. It’s about loss (in one haunting sequence, Holmes visits Hiroshima), but it’s ultimately a gentle, joyful film about memory and legacy. I don’t know how they did this, but it’s beautiful.
3. Sherlock Holmes film series (1939–1946, Holmes played by Basil Rathbone)
Basil Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce as his loyal Watson by his side, played Holmes across fourteen films (and over 200 radio shows), and he is arguably the first iconic film version of the detective. While the early films are set in Victorian England, the later films are often original stories and foreshadow Sherlock in being updated to the present day—in this case, WWII. These stories are imaginative and fun, stretching the limits of what Holmes can do and establishing him, as the opening titles state, as a hero “ageless, invincible, and unchanging.” Yet the real strength is in the performances. Rathbone is magnificent: commanding, gentlemanly, fiercely intelligent yet capable of warmth and kindness. Nigel Bruce reinvents Watson as a bumbling, sweet-natured comic sidekick—a characterization untrue to the Conan Doyle stories, but revolutionary in giving Watson a defined role and purpose that was often missing from earlier adaptations. (Besides, his duck impressions are funny.) And, as is true of all the best adaptations, the chemistry between the two actors is perfect.
2. Sherlock (2010–2017, Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch)
If the Granada Holmes series is a study in faithfulness to Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock is a postmodern pastiche of those stories, bringing Sherlock Holmes into the modern world. Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance is electric, all tumbling curls and cheekbones and arrogance and intellect. Martin Freeman’s irritable, defensive army-doctor-turned-blogger John Watson serves as our viewpoint on Sherlock from the start, as Watson does in the stories, and the rapport between the two is one of the show’s many strengths: it’s perhaps the only adaptation where Watson seems to carry as much dramatic weight as Holmes. The production is revolutionary in the way it dramatizes Sherlock’s deductions, through various on-screen depictions of his “mind palace”: for the first time, we’re able to see him thinking. The best thing about the show, however, just might be the writing. When this show is at its best, it’s truly brilliant, not just in itself but in the way it constantly embraces and playfully subverts its own source material—at times, such as in the early acts of in Scandal in Belgravia and His Last Vow, the references to Conan Doyle stories and previous Holmes adaptations cascade so thick and so fast that keeping up with them feels like trying to snatch at falling snow. The result is something very special: at once homage to Sherlock Holmes canon, an exploration of that canon, and a definitive Holmes adaptation in its own right.
1. Sherlock Holmes TV series (1984–1994, Holmes played by Jeremy Brett)
This famous Granada series teems with loving detail: from the scripts, which faithfully adapt the original stories, to the set design, costumes, and cinematography, which often replicate frame-for-frame artist Sidney Paget’s original illustrations. The most extraordinary details, however, can be found in Jeremy Brett’s performance. Brett researched the part meticulously, and delivers a portrayal that brings out not only Holmes’s intellect but his full psychological complexity. At times startlingly dramatic, at other times subtle and nuanced, Brett’s Holmes is a study in contradictions: prone to dark moods yet also flashes of contagious laughter, languid one moment and the next twitching with barely contained energy, majestic and arresting and brimming with charisma. When he’s on screen, it’s impossible to look anywhere else. He is ably supported by his two Watsons, David Burke in the first series and Edward Hardwicke from then on: Burke is a slightly younger, more sarcastic Watson, while Hardwicke brings a gentle kindness to the part. The later episodes were sadly hindered by Jeremy Brett’s failing health (he suffered from bipolar disorder and a heart condition), which led to his tragically early death before he could complete the series. His legacy, however, is a production which can quite rightly considered the definitive on-screen representation of Sherlock Holmes.
Peg Alford Pursell’s second book, A Girl Goes into the Forest, contains a collection of 78 short stories exploring moments in the lives of women. Pursell’s first book, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, was named the 2017 INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction and an honorable mention in fiction for the First Horizon Award.
What captivates about Pursell’s work is how she uses brevity and specificity to fully immerse readers in the worlds of her characters, regular people facing everyday problems. Most stories feel like a flash into a world, a photograph, while others linger, giving their stories room to breathe into their fullness. She writes about loss, longing, frustration, and simple pleasures, tackling problems some might call small, but Pursell approaches her characters with reverence, honoring the depth of the pain we all carry. By darting in and out so quickly from each story, Pursell must use the compact details of each character’s world to help readers grasp onto. Some stories are under a hundred words, focusing on a cake melting in the sun (“Under the Accumulating Sunset”) or a woman facing down icy winds (“The Woman in the Winter Storm”), while others like “My Father and His Beautiful Slim Brunettes”) span pages and lifetimes.
Peg Alford Pursell and I sat down to talk about mother-daughter relationships, the impact of world events on how we tell stories, and the lines between poetry and prose and the nonbinary future of writing.
Parrish Turner: As I was reading through A Girl Goes into the Forest, I was struck with the question: What is the difference between poetry and prose?
Peg Alford Pursell: I definitely work with what I think of as hybrids, which includes prose poetry. It straddles a line between traditional short story writing or novel writing and poetry.
One of the main differences is in lyricism and I’m a writer who is driven by the sounds of language. I will frequently start something because a phrase sticks in my mind. Hybrids encompass flash fiction and prose poetry. There are so many different animals and I think mine are much more language based.
PT: The language is so beautiful throughout. I have found that after readings, some people will compliment me on my poetry, which is not something I think I write. Where are we drawing this line?
It is just the nonbinary nature of this kind of writing. It doesn’t want to stay in this category or that.
PAP: I heard that with my first book in particular. It is a much shorter book and I didn’t include longer, full stories. Someone asked me why I didn’t publish it as poetry. This is why I refer to them as hybrids.
It is just the nonbinary nature of this kind of writing. It doesn’t want to stay in this category or that. It seems to be what I am able to write most naturally. I have a hard time with categorization.
In a way, we are starting to really pay attention to the fact that in nature, in people, these binaries really aren’t binaries. For example, there is not a point at which night becomes day. You can’t pinpoint any specific moment. It is always more or less night or more or less day. As a culture, I hope we are waking up more and more to the realities. It is only natural that our writing and our art forms will reflect that more and more.
PT: It makes me also think about how “traditional” fairy tales are often structured as poems. I wonder when the delineation began? But, speaking of fairy tales, your book is filled with those influences, which I have also seen pop up more and more. What do you think the value of fairy tales is today? Why this renewed interest?
PAP: I was thinking of this myself and there are so many theories. But the way it came to me, to use these epigraphs from the fairy tale, I had in the back of my mind: Which of these fairy tales do we find that the girl has agency? So “The Snow Queen” came to me because it is Gerta that saves little Kay, the boy.
I don’t know if revival is the right word, but there is something in the air where we are seeing a lot of people rewriting fairy tales. It is mostly women writers, people who identify as women doing this. Why is that?
There is an interesting desire to look back on what was and change it. Recreate it. Subvert it.
I have a lot of different ideas about it. It could be about getting back to our “roots.” A lot of these fairy tales are the kind of lore that is early, culturally [speaking]. Centuries ago. Maybe we are looking to see how this body of lore established itself. I see many women rewriting these tales in a way that is very much in keeping with what women are doing in this culture now. There is a lot of upheaval, certainly politically and in the environment. Our planet is changing dramatically and we are asking: Are we going to survive? There is a desire to look back on what was and change it. Recreate it. Subvert it. Make it ours for this day and age.
PT: How does the wider world influence what you write and how much does time interact with the two? Your book is so relevant today and aware, for example, I saw you thanked Dr. Blasey Ford in your acknowledgments, yet it takes time to write and publish a book. What is the tension there?
PAP: I submitted this book a year ago in March, so it followed quickly behind the first book. Most of it was written in a nine-month period. When I first start, I have no idea what I am writing. I like it that way. I like the mystery. I like giving myself permission to see where I will go. In some ways, it’s nerve-wracking, and in other ways, it is liberating too. I want to see what I really think about something. Once I get a sense of it, then the rest begins to aim for the same themes.
I did acknowledge Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. At the time I was finishing up the manuscript to go into galleys, the hearings were taking place. Like many, I was overwhelmed by her courage, what she had to endure, and very upset with the outcome. What she did took so much courage and I took so much inspiration from that. I didn’t want that to be forgotten. When we are living in such politically turbulent times; everything is happening so fast and it is easy for us to forget about these really monumental things. I wanted to have what she did acknowledged so that if we are still around, if books still exist a decade from now, someone will see and remember.
Christine Blasey Ford’s bravery parallels the characters in my stories—they have an internal moral compass.
I think that also her bravery parallels a lot of what I feel the characters in my stories are—they have a strong internal moral compass. They are very brave in situations that are a double bind and they are usually put in situations where there is no way out but these characters find their own ways.
PT: One of the things I loved was the variety of characters. So many of these stories center on the mother-daughter relationship and its difficulties. Have your views on that dynamic shifted over the years? What would these stories have looked like if you had written them 20 years ago, and what would you be exploring?
PAP: I think the mother-daughter relationships are absolutely affected by the fact that we live in a patriarchal society. Many women do not realize—I think this is true for a huge generation of women—they don’t realize that we have internalized the misogyny. I am very curious [about] what is going to happen in this next election. Well, it is a lot more intense feeling than curiosity. There are some women who cannot accept a woman president. That is internalized misogyny. This plays out in the mother-daughter relationship.
I try to get that across with my characters: there is a sense of betrayal. Why didn’t you let me know that this is the way it is going to be? As characters become teenagers, there is a real upset with the older women who, in their perception, haven’t done anything to change this situation. This is all a very subtle thing. It doesn’t speak across the board, but I do think, for myself, I had an older brother and I just remember that at a certain point I realized he was being treated special because he was a boy. He was 18 months older and I knew he wasn’t special because he was a boy. In kindergarten, I tried to talk to my teacher about this. I didn’t have the exact language for it. But essentially asked why does the boy get to be elevated simply because he is a boy and [I have] to accept that this is the way of the world? I wasn’t able to get answers when I talked to my teacher or my mother. I think they had their own anger or upset about it. But the idea is that you have to accept this in order to get along. When you get older you can do these things to try to make a difference but the bottom line is that, as a girl, you have to accept that this is the world we live in. That is a very difficult dynamic but I think it underpins the mother-daughter relationship. I think all women have had so much pain and how do mothers deal with and how do daughters see that. We are still dealing with the same problems.
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