John Cheever stories, A Separate Peace, Mad Men, and other stories about White Anglo Saxon Protestants continue to exert an enduring appeal: there’s magnetism to the blue blazer, the understated hymn, the stiff upper lip attempted and disastrously abandoned. We sorely need many more stories by and about other kinds of people, but by looking straight at WASP culture, treating it as something unusual and strange as opposed to a kind of literary default, we might see the water we swim in and then navigate through it better.
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My book, The Expectations, follows Ben Weeks and Ahmed Al-Khaled—a shabby genteel legacy student and an enormously wealthy son of a Dubai sheik—through their first year at St. James School, a traditional training ground for American power. I’m interested in the bargains that elite institutions oblige people from other backgrounds to make, and the snares that people at the center of power structures are caught in.
The book is also about love, legacy, the niche sport of squash, physical bliss/agony, the rise of the United Arab Emirates, money, self-doubt, how cool Tevas were in the 1990’s (why are they back?), and how fun it is to go sledding with your friends. Ultimately, it wonders what WASP culture actually is.
I love these seven books for giving an unexpected view of the American WASP—a stranger, harsher, more compassionate side—as well as the other kinds of people that WASPs crash into.
Baldwin was under enormous pressure to write a “Negro experience” follow-up to Go Tell it On The Mountain. Instead he wrote the story of a white, well-to-do American in Paris, running from his fiancée back home and falling in love with an Italian man. Baldwin gives an exceptionally nuanced view of a person suffering the consequences of denying a part of himself in order to be the type of person he is expected to be. With some of the twentieth century’s best sentences, Giovanni’s Room is among the bravest, most loving, most heartbreaking books ever written.
No understanding of WASPs would be complete without an understanding of colonialism, especially cultural colonialism. Aristocratic husband and wife Kaname and Misako belong to the ruling elite of 1920’s Tokyo, and they have acquired all the right Anglo clothes and cultivated attitudes. Kaname has built a Western-style pavilion onto his house, is fascinated by American movies, and compulsively reads an English translation of One Thousand and One Nights. But the couple is almost mute with each other and powerless to choose the divorce they both desire, and the repression of Japanese and Western white culture progressively suffocates them. The husband, Kaname, begins to see traditional Japanese culture in a new way—as a fresh expression of everyday existence rather than a musty relic—but we suspect it is much too late for him. A masterpiece.
A spectacularly innovative portrait of the consequences of post-WWII conformity in the lives of WASP women. Marriage, prosperity, stability: what more could they want? Now that these women are divorced, adrift, watching their lives wobble and crash, they see to the core of all the WASP fictions. Told in the first person plural (“We were beautiful then: newly married, not yet mothers”), Our Kind is a devastatingly observant, laugh-out-loud, outraged howl from an entire generation of white women who were told they were to be envied but who landed short of liberation.
Chee’s brilliantly lucid collection is about everything—self-discovery, politics, art—and his essay about working as a waiter in the house of ur-WASP and bigot William F. Buckley is an instant classic. Being required to make oneself acceptable to straight white people is a grim and common predicament, and Chee does not refrain from skewering the snobbery, the lethal hypocrisy, the depressingly expensive décor. But through his anger he’s able to maintain an almost heroic compassion. His depiction of Pat Buckley—heiress, battle-axe, generous patron in the early fight against AIDS—so drunk she can hardly focus her eyes, trying to express gratitude to the waitstaff at a summer party, is as moving as any writing I can remember.
A New Yorker writer once observed, “Elvis Presley was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, as is Bill Clinton, but they are not what anyone means by ‘Wasp.’” Denis Johnson’s debut novel Angels could serve as a response to this—or a rebuke—as it follows with hallucinatory urgency the lives of Jamie and Bill, two poor white Americans trying to hold back the tide of addiction and disaster. There is a rare, almost religious intensity to this book, and a total devotion to the interior life of people often overlooked and disdained by the rest of American culture. It’s also hard to believe any mortal could write this beautifully.
Not every title in this list can be totally unexpected. John Cheever is the original, the Rosetta Stone of WASPitude, the haunted genius who launched a thousand clichés. But please, please read him, or read him again. Just when you think you can predict his golfers and his Garden Club members, just when you think you know all about the highballs and 6:26 trains to Manhattan, human strangeness lights up the night and the very lines of reality start to blur. Listen to how his people worry about money: “Now and then she would speak in her sleep—so loudly that she woke her husband. ‘I can’t afford veal cutlets,’ she said one night.” Listen to what happens when a well-past-his-prime athlete tries to find his old varsity sweater in the attic: ““Kneeling on the floor to open a trunk, he broke a spider web with his lips. The frail web covered his mouth as if a hand had been put over it.” Now that’s danger. That’s the uncertain spark of life.
Okay, this sociological study of American aristocracy might seem like heavy sledding. And you might find Balzell’s faith in the aristocratic ideal—institutions of democracy, learning, and selflessness creating a leadership class from all Americans, not just white Protestants—hopelessly blinkered and self-serving. And you’d probably be right. But Balzell coined the term “WASP,” and he is pitiless in exposing the anti-Semitism, greed, and laziness that he worried were eroding what was best about America. Whether you agree with him or not, this book provides essential insight into the structure of the country’s power, as well as the opportunities and disasters it continues to create. Plus, his name is too good.
I remember feeling as if I was about to vomit. Sitting smack dab in the middle of an office—open layout, of course, as this was a startup—my foot tapping the hardwood floor, eyes clenched, hand gripping the hard, black plastic phone in my hand as it rang, rang, and rang. Silence pervading the office, momentarily punctuated by one of the other twenty-something people in the room clearing their throat, a stray sneeze, or hiccup. Me praying to every deity known to man for the stranger I was calling to not pick up. Then, eventually, hearing “hello?” The deities must’ve taken a day off.
My first sales call was atrocious. I was tasked with cold calling business owners in New Jersey to tell them about a local newspaper recently featuring the organization I worked for. The idea was that I would call these business owners, tell them about the story on us, and then somehow interest them in purchasing subscriptions to our service. The only problem was that I had no idea what I was doing, resulting in prospects laughing at me, putting me on speaker so that I could flounder to the entertainment of their colleagues, and, most egregiously, no deals.
Fortunately, this didn’t go on for too long. With the help of the organization’s co-founders, a healthy dose of fear, and a do-or-die mentality, I improved, closing $500 and $1,000 deals before moving to sales development—a specialized role where reps qualify inbound and outbound prospects—which was more in line with my skill set as a green 22-year-old. Within two years I was managing a team of 30 reps, the company had grown to over 200 people, and the sales team evolved from me trying not to wet my pants to a highly-disciplined, relentless, and inspiring group of people who knew no limits.
Disillusioned with the world of startups and sales, I focused on reinventing myself as ‘Mateo, the writer.’
In 2016, I left. Disillusioned with the world of startups and sales, I focused on reinventing myself as “Mateo, the writer.” After writing—but, ironically, not being able to sell agents on—two novels, I was at a loss. Fortunately, I was always reading. And at that point of desperation, I had Stephen King’s On Writing in my hands—cliche, I know, but true. Aside from King’s simple advice of writing and reading more to improve your skills as a writer, what resonated most with me was when he wrote that all he does to begin his 50+ novels is, “Put interesting characters in difficult situations and write to find out what happens.”
FLASH! BOOM! POP! The fireworks went off in my head. I felt foolish for not having thought of it sooner. From my years in the tech sales industry, as one Black man out of the few Black people I’d ever encountered in the same role, I had a unique perspective that afforded me the ability to create interesting characters and complex, difficult situations for them, which I’d then have to get them out of, or not. This realization—mixed, candidly, with a heavy sense of guilt that I could and should have done more to bring other people of color, especially Black people, into this niche industry I had gained privileged access to—planted the seed of a story that needed to be told, not only for myself, or for the other minorities trying to survive in white-dominated workplaces, but for those who have never even heard of things like Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), BANT, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), and a myriad of other almost nonsensical startup sales jargon. Through illustrating the meteoric rise and earth-shattering fall of Darren “Buck” Vender, a Black salesman at an all-white New York City tech startup who hatches a plan to help other people of color infiltrate America’s sales forces, I would redefine the model of the American salesman, in reality and literature, simultaneously giving people of color the skills and knowledge necessary to enter the same world I had come from, if they desired.
But in order to achieve this goal of redefining the American salesman, I needed to better understand the place that salesmen, both real and imagined, occupy in the American subconscious. And before there was ever a Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Boiler Room (2000), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Tin Men (1987), Wall Street (1987) or even The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), which likely did more to warm viewers’ hearts than really reengineer their perception of salesmen, there was Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play, Death of a Salesman (1949). And without Death of a Salesman, featuring Willy Loman, America’s most memorable salesman of the twentieth century, there is no Buck Vender, because for literature to need a new salesman, there has to be the salesman, and Willy Loman was it.
For literature to need a new salesman, there has to be the salesman, and Willy Loman was it.
Appearing in 1949, Willy Loman embodied all that it meant to be an ideal American at the time: white, male, hard-working, and forever clutching at the well-advertised American aesthetic of being able to turn lead into gold through sheer will and being well-liked.
As far as salesman go, Willy, despite believing himself to be more charming and successful than he is, is painfully sub-par. Miller, in an attempt to render Willy as a mirror-like John Doe any disgruntled white male could see himself in, never mentions exactly what Willy sells, or is supposed to sell. All we know is that he’s aging, down on his luck, and has an adoring wife he takes for granted and two sons, Biff and Happy, onto whom he tries to imprint his illusions of grandeur. In this, Willy Loman is unparalleled. Through a maniacal range of mental machinations, Willy has the ability to distort his own perception of reality, as well as that of his family, allowing him to frequently make life appear shinier than it is, or ever will be. “Be liked and you will never want,” Willy tells his sons. “You take me, for instance. I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. ‘Willy Loman is here!’ That’s all they have to know, and I go right through.”
The unfortunate fact is that Willy, acting as Miller’s everyman, was purely a reflection of the door-to-door salesmen, and hard-working Americans, in general, of the time. For those living in the white picket fence, apple pie, Coca-Cola version of 20th-century Americana, white men in suits bearing briefcases containing samples, Hoover vacuums, or even overpriced Bibles knocking at their doors was no strange occurrence.
In the 1969 documentary Salesman, brothers Albert and David Maysles, along with co-director Charlotte Zwerin, follow four Bible salesman around America. Paul Brennan, an older employee of the Mid-American Bible Company, can be seen lamenting his lack of sales one moment, while drumming on his steering wheel and singing tunes of prosperity the next. Like Willy, Paul believes all he needs to do to turn his luck around is buckle down.
While 20th-century salesmen like Willy, Paul, and others bolstered their confidence by reconstructing the world around them in a way that often made them both hero and victim, one of the chief reasons that they were able to willfully believe they could sell to anyone was that buyers – whether unsuspecting housewives or advertisers looking to get an edge – often operated at an informational disadvantage. In his book, To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink describes the theory of information asymmetry, where “one side is fully informed; the other is at least partially in the dark.” The example he gives is that of a used car salesman: “Bad cars, what Americans call ‘lemons,’ are obviously less desirable and therefore ought to be cheaper. Trouble is, with used cars, only the seller knows whether the vehicle is a lemon or a peach.”
The stereotypical salesperson—loud, arrogant, flashy, male, and white—is still very much embedded in the American psyche.
But this information asymmetry doesn’t exist today in the same way it did for much of American history up until the late 20th century. With enforced safeguards, like warranties and terms of conditions, paired with the rise of the internet, where people can quickly Google product information, comparisons, and reviews, the salesman of the 21st century has had to adapt. And while it is still possible for modern-day Willy Lomans to exist and multiply in the breeding grounds of Wolf of Wall Street-esque boys clubs and boiler rooms, society is less forgiving.
Despite these changes in the world of sales and consumerism, the stereotypical salesperson—loud, arrogant, flashy, male, and white—is still very much embedded in the American psyche. The sex, cocaine, and money-fueled life of Jordan Belfort, as depicted in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which grossed $392 million worldwide, was nominated for five Oscars, and ranked by the BBC as seventy-eighth on its list of the “100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.” And before that there was Wall Street, for which Michael Douglas won an Oscar for Best Actor, and before that there was Glengarry Glenn Ross, the film, for which Al Pacino was nominated an Oscar and Golden Globe, for Best Supporting Actor, and before that there was Glengarry Glenn Ross, the play, which won a Pulitzer in 1983. All of this makes the goals of my novel-in-progress highly ambitious, and potentially foolhardy, but not impossible.
And it is in this context, of an America that, while regressing in some ways, is also having its ideals, models, and standards upended daily, I realize writing about a Black salesman is a responsibility I’ve undertaken and must respect. He is human. He makes mistakes. He falls into many of the same traps of material gain and fame that the salesmen I am looking to supplant glorified, but he is also the calling of a new day where his story, while being fiction, will mirror and amplify the realities that minorities striving to make space for themselves, and others like them, in the workplace know too well, regardless of if they’re lawyers, doctors, engineers, editors, entertainers, or educators.
These men are relics of what America was rather than what it is becoming, or what we might want it to be.
Boots Riley’s 2018 sci-fi film, Sorry to Bother You, succeeded in some of this, but the film is too fantastical—and its protagonist, Cassius Green, too ultimately skeptical of the world of sales—to overwrite our image of the salesman as a middle-aged white guy. If you ask Americans “Who’s the most well-known American salesman to ever grace the pages of literature or movie screens?” they’ll still think of Willy Loman, or maybe Jordan Belfort and his ilk. But this is short-sighted. These men are relics of what America was rather than what it is becoming, or what we might want it to be. While our American organizations are still disproportionately white, there are minorities of all kinds, like myself, who do not see themselves reflected in Leonardo DiCaprio’s blue eyes. And our stories must be told.
It is because of this disparity between the reality we experience and the words we read on the page that literature is sorely in need of a new salesman to root for, and, at times, hate. We are starting to recognize that the Everyman can’t be only one type of man: the white middle-class middle-aged sap, the white middle-class middle-aged shark. If the salesman is the avatar of the American dream, he—or she—can’t just be a Willy Loman. In my novel-in-progress, just as in reality, there are salesmen and saleswomen of color, gay and bi salespeople, salespeople born with silver spoons in their mouths and salespeople who still struggle to get the taste of dirt out. Because in the same way that Miller’s salesman’s failures contained a mirrored truth for white men and women of the 20th century, my salesman’s hopes for a world where people of color, and other minorities, don’t have to scream to be heard or fight to be felt embody the dreams of those in our time who understand “diversity” is only a performative buzzword online and in the workplace until people begin hacking, with an unrestrained aggression, at the roots from which our nation continues to grow.
i like to get naked
I like to get naked
I guess because it makes
Me think about death
All nakedness ends
In death even if you start
Out as Emily Ratajkowski
Death is the soul getting naked
Much like the dark side
Of the hermit crab
Scientists have no clue what
This actually looks like
I am guessing it’s very yucky
Many lovers have commented
The more clothes I take off
The less sexy I become
Sex at my age is almost
Always fully-clothed
If not extra-clothed
The older I get sex is so wild
And animalistic
Think of daisy-fed lamb
Ravaged by mountain lion
Fuck no was there time
To remove the ugg boots and xmas sweater
The sex too spontaneous to remember
I have a body beneath these clothes
I like getting down to a naked body only
It is the opposite of sexual
For me it is a death thing
I am dying
In that I am expanding
Everything far from the pump at the center
Note the direction of stretch marks
Like the growth rings of an oak
This the coroner said
Was the year of pig-belly nachos
Circling my man-titties
With her laser pointer
I ask were you shocked
My coroner was a woman
Or that her skirt
Was so tiny
What does this say about society
Is it flawed
It is flawed
skeleton of glass and marmalade
Wolverine’s superpowers are healing
The physical fleshy type wounds very good
But he sucks big time
At healing emotional wounds
Try saying a small thing
About Jean Grey
Near that keen doglike hearing
Two modes
Either he air punches the muthafucking christ
Out of the sky with his santoku knife hands
And turns his tank top into a clingy pungent confetti
Or gets all silent
Walks briskly to the nearest bar
And murders like 8 1/2 bikers
I say 1/2 since there is always one in the gang
Who hasn't saved up to buy his own bike
So less biker and more
A man who enjoys hugging
His friends upon their bikes
The point is Weapon X murders that poor dude too
He is touchy as hell
Maybe you do not even say Jean Grey
Maybe DAMN
Look at Scott there in his new gray jeans
Wish I had gray jeans from jcpenneys
Out come the adamantium fist kebabs
Another microbrewery covered floor to ceiling
In the blood and terror pee of frat boys
I wouldn't have my Wolverine any other way though
Given the spectrum of mutant abilities
You know there’s another Wolverine out there
In Portland or San Francisco
Who is the mutant inversion of Logan McClaw Face
Probably this other Wolverine is like a very mature
Well adjusted man with kleenex tissue for skin
His girlfriend dumps him but they remain best friends
Until she marries one of his coworkers
Maybe his boss from cheesecake factory
Then they organically drift apart
Only remaining friends by facebook
Where he comments on photos of her children
They look so much like his boss!!
Then at the ripe age of 28
One of his crocheting hooks pricks his thumb
And the skin of his hand falls from bone like rotten leaves
And his babyish pectoral muscles fall past his knees like rotten leaves
And his hair and teeth come out of his head like rotten fucking leaves
And his cock dehydrates and faints and tumbles over his balls
And snaps off and hits the carpet with a dry thud
He bleeds to death mid reach for a band aid
His skeleton of glass and marmalade disintegrating
Falling across the unfinished crocheted lap blanket
Because this Wolverine
Pleasant party guest Wolverine
Always complained of a persistent chilly lap he did
O my lap is so chilly!
He would say
Because my legs are not hairy at all!
No I would not want that constellation of superpowers
Good at emotions but terrible at living
In Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X, we enter a world technically altered but emotionally the same as ours. We follow the life of Cassie, a girl born with a knotted torso, a rare and hereditary (fictional) condition in women. Cassie tries to navigate adolescent obsession with a traumatically different body from her peers. Meanwhile, her mother, also knotted, offers her rocks to suck on to quell her appetite, and her father mines meat from their family-owned quarry. When she moves out on her own, Cassie tries to navigate adult life with a knotted body, and later, without. Her experience is punctuated by visions she has of a slightly altered world from her own, though not so altered that she’s able to see herself, even there, with real companionship.
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I first met Etter in Lisbon in 2014 at the Disquiet International Literary Program. There, I got to read the stories she was writing five years before The Book of X would be published, stories different from the book, but undoubtedly from the same mind fascinated by bodies, what they mean to themselves and to others, how they’re treated, and what they’re for. These stories stayed with me and made me very much look forward to this debut, which does not disappoint my appetite for more of Etter’s ideas about bodies.
Sarah Rose Etter and I talked about just that—how Cassie’s body dictates her experience, and what her experience says about trauma and the isolation it creates in a society so consumed with perfection.
Jane Dykema: I was thinking about how relatable this loneliness is that Cassie is living, and how almost all of the contemporary discussion of loneliness is couched in a discussion of technology, how technology is isolating us, etc. But there is no specific technology happening in this world-—the world is actually free from most kinds of time markers. Do you think the kind of emotional and physical isolation Cassie is experiencing is a timeless truth for people, or do you think it has to do with her specific experience?
Sarah Rose Etter: I knew I wanted to write a story that was surreal and resisted the ability to be set during any certain year and technology is one of those markers that can give a story an absolute timeframe. I didn’t want to tackle the impact of smartphones and social media in The Book of X, because it would detract from Cassie’s experience and emotions. Once you’ve introduced a device like that into a character’s life, it’s so easy to say Oh, just go on a smartphone diet and you’ll be fine! You just need more self control!
For Cassie, though, loneliness is much more complex. Based on her body, based on her past, it’s not as simple as going to a singles mixer and opening herself up to the nearest accountant. Further, this is a society that has already decided she should be an outcast because of how she looks. Her loneliness feels, to me, like an extension of her knot—it is one of the biggest ways in which her body works as a barrier between herself and the rest of the world. And once her knot is removed physically, it does remain for her mentally. There’s something so relatable about this to me—the idea of a woman being trapped in and by her own body, and being other.
I’ve been reading a lot about the research into loneliness—how there are doctors exploring whether we can cure loneliness with a pill. That seems wrong to me, for some reason—almost as if we’re curing something medically that we could fix by seeing each other and building real relationships. It seems surreal, doesn’t it?
So much of this book is about loneliness and isolation. I suspect one of the reasons I feel so drawn to those topics is because loneliness is one of the few emotions that crosses lines of gender, race, and class. Like death, and to some extent love, loneliness is one of those major human concerns that none of us can escape. In that way, loneliness is universal—in that way, our loneliness unites us.
JD: I’m interested in what we do and don’t know about our characters and what they can teach us about what we actually think, or what they can teach us to unthink. Do you think there’s a difference between how you would describe Cassie’s trauma and how she would describe it?
Like death, loneliness is one of those major human concerns that none of us can escape. In that way, our loneliness unites us.
SRE: The ability to break out of our traumas is not easy—I think for Cassie, that was just her life. She is unable to step back and look at her life the way we can see it because she is so mired in her condition. She really represents the power of heredity in some ways—of course, we often hear for things like depression or chronic illness or pain that we need to go to yoga, practice deep breathing, try CBD. But in reality, the amount of time, money, professional help, medication, self-awareness, skill, and strength required to overcome our birthrights is not easy to come by. To me, Cassie would be the kind of person to briefly explain the entirety of her trauma in a few brief sentences over a drink with a friend and shrug at the end.
And that’s an important question: What happens to us when aren’t offered the care or recognition we need? I think frequently whenever I meet someone new how I’m not just meeting them—I’m also meeting all of their trauma, pain, and previous experiences, which combine to create their behaviors and reactions to the world. Ultimately, the amount of pain we’re all carrying is immense. If you think about it, it’s incredible that some of us keep moving through the world.
JD: Yes! I was thinking when you said they’re working on a pill for loneliness in our world, there’d be so much stigma associated with taking it at first. But is loneliness just another chemical process like depression, and if you can do yoga, deep breathe, spend time outdoors, and make meaningful connections in person all day, can you manage it “naturally”? And if your life is not organized in a way in which that’s possible, you’re poor, you support other people, you work remotely, it’s always winter, etc., then what do you do? Cassie seems like a very realistic version of what you would do.
SRE: Absolutely—we often ignore those who cannot afford or don’t have access to help, whether that’s financially, or they don’t have the knowledge or resources to reach out. And you’re right—even if we invented a pill for loneliness, who would be able to afford it? What would the side effects be? How would it serve to further isolate us? By covering up the symptoms of loneliness, how do we effectively stop trying to make connections with other people? I’m of two minds about that—in nature, we feel pain as a response to a stimulus in order to set off alarm systems in the brain so we will do something to protect ourselves. If we think of loneliness as a type of pain, how does numbing it stop us from really addressing our isolation? I don’t have a clear answer to that, but those are questions we have to ask.
In Cassie’s case, too, you have so much of the medical field basically telling her We’re not here to help you. Your experience and your body don’t matter. So when you have an institution like that essentially crushing you, what’s left to do? In many ways, after writing this, I wondered how much of the desperation came from just being a woman in America right now—from having a body that is regularly discussed, regulated, legislated, but never really understood. Or simply from watching the rights and access to medical care being stripped from so many other people.
I won’t get on a soapbox here, but if you compared the amount of money being spent to address erectile dysfunction versus the amount of money being spent to invent new forms of birth control that were cheap and accessible, the numbers would upset you. To me, Cassie represents a woman who is given almost no knowledge about her body in any form, and then sent out into a world that almost runs on sex. So much of her pain comes from that alone.
JD: This seems like a perfect opportunity to transition to Cassie as a woman in this world and her relationship to men. I laughed so hard when the boy she has a crush on in high school says, “I like it when you listen to me.” It’s so innocent and true and understandable, yet so recognizably a problem between men and women. There’s a lot of both generous and realistic prodding at these relationships. We see men who mind Cassie’s knot and men who don’t, and we’re left to wonder, what would we all want if society wasn’t always whispering our own cultural standards of beauty in our ears?
The concept of American perfection is so ingrained in all of us that we can’t help but want to be other than what we are.
The representation of men in this book is complicated, but Cassie interacts with an accurate mix of the types of suitors who would be drawn to someone with her condition. She’s also a character with no working model for a true relationship—I’d argue her parents have a fairly utilitarian relationship, so her understanding of romance is limited. Further, her inability to draw boundaries with partners feels directly tied to her self-worth.
But I do like that she explores her body despite all of that—the men she attracts in the bar, for instance, do seem like a solid representation of one night stands, while her two major loves, Jarred and Henry, are both very limited in both their feelings for her, their own emotional intelligence, and how they can be available to her. You can feel how much she’s yearning for more from everyone around her—and yes, how her mother and the men she encounters either demean her or glorify her because of her condition. In her world, there’s a clear portrayal of a mother and a series of men serving as the bullhorns for capitalist expectations of how we should look as women – whether that’s coming from her mother’s magazines or the comments of the men who see her naked. In reality, her father and Henry are the only two characters exempt from this behavior. They serve as a sort of safe harbor from that entire line of thought.
What would Cassie want without all of this? I think she’d ultimately still want to be knotless. That’s how deep all of this goes, really. Even without the mothers, men, and mouthpieces, the concept of American perfection is so ingrained in all of us that we can’t help but want to be other than what we are. I could ask anyone: What’s your knot? What would you remove from yourself?
JD: I was so struck by how you treated the knot’s removal. When she’s younger, before her knot is removed, Cassie’s visions feature a smooth, unknotted belly, and the receipt of desire and acceptance that she perceived would come with it. And after it’s removed, we don’t see a huge internal celebration, much change in the way she’s treated, or even her noting it too much. What is the link as you see it between Cassie’s belief about what she looks like and her reality?
SRE: There’s an incredible book called The Body Keeps The Score that helped me portray Cassie’s experience with pain and trauma. That book is written exceedingly well, but it’s also full of research about what happens to the body and the brain after a traumatic experience – and the brain is literally re-wired after we undergo a trauma.
So, ultimately, a trauma is never “over.”
And even when it comes to our bodies, that seems to be an idealization to me. Sure, we can have surgeries to look like each other and then continue to operate in the world, but some wounds stay with us forever and I mean that literally. There is no erasing our traumas from our minds or our bodies, not really.
Post-surgery, I wanted to show that she continues to be judged by her body. Her place in the world doesn’t elevate without the knot because it was only the cosmetic she changed—she never addressed her core issues. That’s why her relationships stay largely the same. She is ultimately able to attract a partner and fall in love. In my mind, her relationship with Henry, and his acceptance of the scars on her body post-knot removal do a lot of work to obliterate her trauma for a brief stint. It gives her a few months of relief and acceptance of herself.
But in the end, her trauma and her experience are both still there, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to re-emerge, forcing her to address them. At times, I felt like the book was really a portrayal of someone battling depression and losing the fight. Her surgery illustrates that—she didn’t do the real work, and so there can be no true change.
With Cassie, it also felt important to me to reject the idea that life always gets better. It’s very American, in some ways, this arc of improvement that we constantly return to. And those are the books that sell, right? The books that tell us we can refine ourselves and improve. There’s this urge to tell each other life always gets better if we just get the next thing—the next surgery, the next phone, lose the next ten pounds, get the next great job, the next car. That is what feels so American about some of those more mainstream narratives.
JD: What are some non-American books you admire that don’t have this sort of improvement of life narrative?
SRE: Oh, this list will be long! Ha! From France, Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan definitely comes to mind, as does The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck from Germany. Both of these are really coming of age stories that take place during difficult times—familiar divorce and war, respectively – but leverage short, sparse sentences to drive their narratives forward. Neither end on what I’d call a redemptive or happy note. Similarly, Why The Child Is Cooking In The Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi, a story about a traveling Romanian family in the circus, is a spliced together, fragmented narrative that leads somewhere quite dark. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, of course, too—another one that ends with a sad bang.
Let’s even go beyond books to talk movies. I think here of The Lobster and The Favourite—both of these movies, by Yorgos Lanthimos, grapple with love, violence, and power without leaving the viewer in a safe, soft place. Rather, they imply life never gets better, really—it only gets more desolate. Both of those movies really stuck with me—I think I saw The Favourite four times while I was editing The Book of X, and I felt like it did give me some power to let the story end how it should, however harrowing that might be.
Again, it just seems to me there is more freedom for art to be raw and unsolvable whenever I look internationally. I love a lot of what’s happening in America, of course—Halle Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, Amelia Gray, and plenty of other writers are pushing American weirdness forward. Caren Beilin’s Spain was one of the most exciting books published stateside that I read this year. I was also really crazy about Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism, and Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw. So of course, there are still interesting things that are happening in America—I just tend to feel there’s a little more weird happening beyond our country, or a weird that appeals to me very much. I always get so excited for works in translation for this exact reason. I want to understand the global weird.
The Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As a genre, historical fiction allows us to shuttle back in time to stand in the shoes, clogs, chopines, and go-go boots of people—real and imagined—to consider the events that shaped their personal characters and the outside world.
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Novelists come to historical fiction from multiple points of origin, and their research approaches differ widely. In some historical novels, the time period itself is the main event: the customs, dress, and social manners of that period are the book’s protagonists. For other authors, trying to understand what a certain person was feeling and experiencing during an upheaval is the project’s appeal: what was it like for the dancer Isadora Duncan to lose both of her children at the height of her career? How did the young Alexandrina Victoria steel herself to the surprising news that she was—suddenly, and despite serious pushback—the Queen of England?
Putting an obstacle in the path of your protagonist’s hopes and dreams is Creative Writing 101, and it’s a narrative practice that the patriarchy has been burdening women with since the dawn of time. As Trump’s regime continues to make handmaidens out of its female citizens, we’d all do well to revisit books in which women gain ground—only to lose it— so that we can more thoughtfully examine the rinse and repeat cycle we’re currently mired in. From blousy bestsellers to voice-driven literary fiction, there is a book for every tote bag on this reading list—particularly if the patriarchy’s not your bag.
In 1913, a freakish car accident saw both of dancer Isadora Duncan’s young children drowned in the Seine on the nanny’s watch. In this symphonic novel, steely-nerved Amelia Grey takes us through two years of Isadora’s mourning when she is casting about pre-war Europe trying to heal her mind and heart while gossip over her eclectic lifestyle and belief system only grew. An unflinching portrait of a grieving woman whose talent is seen as both a boon and a curse.
In Julia Alvarez’s 2010 classic, she revisits the assassination of the Mirabal sisters (who were leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo terroristic regime in the Dominican Republic) literally breathing new life into the three women who died for their political beliefs. The only surviving sister is also heard from in this piercing epic that spans three decades and shines light on the cost—and necessity—of intellectual bravery.
Although Virginia Wolf’s diaries are beloved, there are no surviving diaries of her sister Vanessa Bell, a painter also played host to the famous group of intellectuals known as The Bloomsbury Group who visited the Bell/Wolf house regularly in the early twentieth century. Priya Parmar used years of letters between Vanessa, Virginia, and the other Bloomsbury members to reimagine how the sisters’ relationship fractured when needy Virginia “lost” her devoted sister to a suitor’s love.
It is the end of the 19th century, and nine year-old Willow is bored out of her skull in rural Chinkiang. This novel—by the acclaimed author of The Last Empress (which reimagines the life of one of the most important figures in Chinese history, the Empress Tzu Hsi)—depicts a relationship between the fictional Willow and the real Pearl S. Buck, the Chinese-born eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary who would grow up to be a Nobel Prize-winning writer and humanitarian. When the Boxer Rebellion separates the two childhood friends, their friendship is the only steady element in a life of war and broken dreams.
Moxie, humor, and meticulous research always go into an Amy Stewart project, and this latest offering in the Kopp Sisters series—inspired by the life of Constance Kopp, one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs—will not disappoint. On the March revisits the military preparedness movement of 1916, in which women began taking part in military camps before the US had even entered the war. In true Stewart style, the novel also manages to tackle reproductive rights, female desire, and mother/daughter/sister bonds.
Ever-inventive Lidia Yuknavitch reimagines Joan of Arc as a dystopian child-warrior whose supernatural gift allows her to commune with the earth at the exact time that a ruthless cult leader is turning humanity’s safe-house of a platform, CIEL, into a police-state battleground. It’s as mind-bending as it sounds—no one is writing quite like Yuknavitch right now.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 precursor to her 2013 Americanah takes place in 1960s Biafra, when the state is trying to separate from Nigeria, an act of willfulness that results in a civil war of merciless violence. This seminal period in Nigerian history is told through a triangle of love stories—both requited, unrequited, and platonic—and centers mainly on a professor’s mistress, who has left her privileged life in Lagos behind to join her lover in a dull university town.
It’s Spring Breakers, but for poets—in this luminous novel about a college-aged Elizabeth Bishop who has come to Paris with her Vassar roommates to escape the husband-hunting that society expects young women to be occupied with. Instead of husbands, the college friends find a Paris on the brink of fascist occupation, along with an entirely new sense of what it means to be a woman and a citizen in a world divided.
The legendary Leonora Carrington is reimagined as the reclusive, ninety year-old painter Ivory Frame, who is quietly at work at a dictionary of animal languages when she finds out that she has a granddaughter she didn’t know of—a turn of events as disorientating as surrealism itself, as Ivory never actually had a child…
In this cultural moment where male serial killers are getting their own television shows, The Five rightfully turns the spotlight onto the female victims. This meticulously-researched book about the women that Jack the Ripper slaughtered reads like a novel, which is why I gave myself a hall pass to include it in this list.
The early history of Liberia is reimagined here through the lives of three different characters with an unexpected bond in Wayetu’s powerful debut, inspired by her own childhood during the Liberian civil war. Endowed with superhuman strengths and abilities, one of the characters is an indigenous “Vai” Liberian whose immortality convinces community-members to believe she is a witch, and to treat her with disdain and mistrust. Vai legends, magical realism and historical facts sensuously intertwine in this astonishing debut.
The book’s cover says that novelist Lauren Groff read this story of Stalin’s daughter defecting to America in the 1960s to escape her father’s brutal legacy in “a single great draught,” and you’ll gulp it down, too.
When you’ve got a long weekend ahead of you and a brain that needs some candy, treat yourself to Benjamin’s exuberant portrayal of socialite Babe Paley’s headline-making friendship with Truman Capote in the martini-fueled corridors of 1950s high-society New York.
In his 2015 Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James took us behind the scenes of the 1976 home attack on Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica. In his 2009 Book of Night Women, we return to Jamaica—but at the end of the 18th century—where a young slave named Lilith seems to be possessed of the dark powers that the older, female slaves decide to leverage for a revolt that they’ve been planning. As Lilith comes of age though, she has other plans, plans that could make her an enemy within her own sisterhood.
In Women Talking, Miriam Toews reckons as much with her own Orthodox Mennonite past as she is with the current struggle for women’s rights throughout the world. This astonishing novel reimagines the real efforts of eight of the hundred plus Mennonite women who were drugged and raped repeatedly by male members of their community over a period of years in the mid 2000s. Presented to us via the minutes of their hayloft meeting, the women grapple with whether or not to confront, escape or forgive their perpetrators, who are currently in prison awaiting their Mennonite supporters and relatives to get them out on bail.
Daisy Goodwin first started reading Queen Victoria’s diaries when she was a student at Cambridge, and the struggles and secret joys of the young nineteenth-century monarch fascinated her. The result of this obsession is the bestselling Victoria that kicks off in 1837 when eighteen year-old Alexandrina Victoria became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, unexpectedly. Goodwin writes deliciously about a young woman coming into her own powers, while learning to wield and relish all the power of the throne.
Model Lee Miller moves behind the camera in Whitney Scharer’s buzzy debut about a woman’s transition from “muse” to artist in her own right. Set in Bohemian Paris of the 1930s, this book proves that Lee Miller was much more than a pretty face. Refreshingly, it also gives its female heroine a mighty appetite for sex.
Leonora Carrington is having a moment not just in this reading list, but in the larger world. The film rights to Elena Poniatowska’s fictionalized biopic just sold at Cannes, which will hopefully bring more readers to the French-born Mexican author’s award-winning work. As a fierce defender of human rights and womens’ issues (and the first woman ever to win Mexico’s National Journalism prize) it’s no wonder that Carrington’s incredible life story becomes a hymn to passion and liberty in Poniatowska’s hands.
It’s Nantucket as you’ve never seen it. Inspired by the work of Maria Mitchell, the first professional female astronomer in American history, this is the story of two intelligent dreamers, both beguiled by astronomy, whose stars aren’t meant to align.
In a popular trope present most often in YA novels, a character finds a secret key to another world. The key is rarely literal. More often, it’s an action as banal and everyday as leaning against a train platform barrier, walking into a phone booth, or looking for a winter coat in the back of an old wardrobe, that sends our hero out of the familiar and into something stranger and better. It usually happens by accident, on a day like any other day.
These through-the-looking-glass plot devices are meant to offer the reader hope, to invite us to feel part of the story. By depicting entry into an imaginary world as something on which anyone could stumble by tripping over their own feet one morning, it allows the reader to believe that the same magic might happen to us, in our own dull, repetitive, familiar lives. We are always just one wrong step, one turn around one corner, one missed exit away from falling sideways in Narnia.
For many of us who were lonely kids, books act as portals. We are always still hoping to tumble through them into elsewhere.
This longing for secret doors to another world is largely seen as a childish way to access literature, as childish as admitting that you still read books because you love them, and for no more lofty or sophisticated reason than that. Plenty of people, plenty of serious readers and writers and critics, don’t engage with books this way at all. But for many of us who were bookish, lonely kids, and grew up to be bookish, awkward adults with lives based to some degree around reading or writing, this is a desire that we never quite scrub from our hearts. Even when we’re no longer reading books about portals, the books themselves act as portals. We are always still hoping a little bit to tumble through them into elsewhere.
Brazenhead bookstore was up two flights of unremarkable stairs in an unremarkable small apartment building on 84th street, down an unremarkable grimy hallway lit by the same awful, ubiquitous fluorescent overhead lights that preside over the conclusion of every late-night house party in New York. The door was painted a blue-ish grey-ish color like every other door in a New York apartment building that’s been painted and repainted so many times that it can’t really be any color at all. The first time I visited was in January of 2011; a friend had invited me to a literary salon at a bookstore, an invitation that sounded like dozens of other events happening every night in New York. We knocked on that unremarkable door and it cracked open, belching yellow light and smoke and laughter, and then shut behind me before I had a chance to notice where I was. I looked around and for one brief, nearly-hysterical moment, I thought: this is it, I’ve done it, I fell through the wardrobe and got into another world. The other, better, wilder, secret place had in fact always lived just at the edge of this one, and finally I’d knocked on the right door, performed the right series of accidental choices, and arrived in the place the books promised.
Brazenhead was, as you probably already know since it was the worst kept secret in New York City, a speakeasy bookstore run by the legendary Michael Seidenberg, who passed away earlier this week. At the time I first visited, it was housed in what had once been, and was technically still supposed to be, Michael’s rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment. Books covered the room, only grudgingly making space for people to walk and stand between them. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, some of them in shelves and some of them just accumulated into teetering piles. They covered all of the windows, making it perpetually nighttime in Brazenhead, a place that kept insomniac hours and only came to life at night anyway; if you emerged from Brazenhead into daylight, it was because you had stayed there until the next morning. There were no clocks; a friend called time inside Brazenhead “bookstore casino time.” There were two front rooms in which the books were divided with meticulous disorganization into sections by genre, which included New York Literature and Science Fiction next to each other near the front, and Pornography in a highly popular heap near the back. Behind a small curtain and furthest from the door there was the First Editions room, which was smaller and darker and more secret than the rest. It had a little cushioned bench, a very dim lamp, and shelves of first editions, mostly novels, some rare, some signed, some just weird. It was where people went to hook up during parties, because they didn’t know everyone knew what they were doing back there, or maybe because they did.
For one brief moment, I thought: I’ve done it, I fell through the wardrobe and got into another world.
Since Brazenhead was an illegal business, the only way to visit was hearing about it by word of mouth. It was best to buy books if you could, and it was advisable to bring whiskey to share with whoever else might be there, and most importantly with Michael. Some nights there were fifty people there, some nights there were two. You never knew quite what kind of party, or what kind of evening you would walk into. It was secret but not exclusive: The price of entry was merely that you had to want to be there, that you had to want to sit around talking shit with Michael about whatever ridiculous topic Michael wanted to talk about, that you had to think a night where you were allowed to lapse out of conversation and sit in a corner taking books down from shelves for 45 minutes was a good time. It was a place that attracted weirdos and losers and social climbers and grown-up awkward kids who still wanted to live inside books, and it is where I met or became close with many of my very favorite people.
If I say that Brazenhead was like stepping inside a book but for real, it sounds stupid; stuff that is magic always sounds stupid. The belief in it always sounds childish and naive. But the people I knew who frequented Brazenhead, and especially Michael himself, who ran it and had created it and from whom its magic originated and emanated, were anything but naive. We had grown up past the idea of books being somehow enchanted, past the YA novel idea of being special enough to be offered the right accidents. I understood well by the time I first walked into Brazenhead that books were no more magic than a corkboard coaster, a bunch of paper jammed together into a physical object that mostly sat around underneath drinks. But I still carried through my life the hope underneath everything that something big enough, something enough not-myself, would lift me up and carry from away from the essential mundanity of my life, and I continued to seek in books this temporary and artificial escape. That reaching for elsewhere was both hopeful and, like many hopeful things, desperately crushing when it turned out not to be true, one of the many processes of necessary disappointment that propels one from childhood to adulthood.
Brazenhead was the place where it did turn out to be true, where there was another world, not beyond this one, but right here inside of it. When I walked in there for the first time, and every time when I walked in there after that, no matter how bad a mood I was in, what kind of day I had had, what I was worried about, or how drunk I already was from where I had gone before, I always felt just the tiniest bit transformed. It was always welcoming in the same way the worlds within books is welcoming, a place that said all those promises of escape might be true.
Escapism in the manner of the bookish kid longing to get away from their own life seems selfish. A lot of adolescent loneliness turns out in hindsight to be selfish, predicated on the inability to heave yourself up out of your own experience and see that other people are in pain, that other people are struggling, that your own difficulties are neither unique nor spectacular, that they do not excuse you from kindness. Eventually, you learn that your pain is not large enough to replace the slow and hard and gentle work of listening to others.
The type of escapism found in books at its best provides an experience of selflessness.
But part of what books can offer, in their portal-worlds, is nearly the exact opposite of the adolescent self-pity that seeks to evade connections with others by hiding in an imaginary world. Reading can temporarily grant us the ability to shake off self-obsessed worries about the events of our own humid little lives. The type of escapism found in books at its best provides an experience of selflessness. That selflessness is not necessarily generous or empathetic, but it is escapist precisely in how it allows us to de-center ourselves. In books, we forget, abandon, or transcend the self for a few hours, dwelling somewhere other than our own small and falsely urgent life.
In a similar way, Brazenhead was a living argument against the idea that the belief in portals, the longing for escape, was childish or naive. That’s not why Michael, who was definitely not a wide-eyed kid trying to find Platform 9 ¾, created the store. He didn’t have some magical or idealistic mission for it; he just didn’t want to leave his house. He wanted to know lots of people, he wanted to hear about what people cared about and were reading, he wanted other people to bring him booze, he wanted in general to live entirely on his own terms. Lots of us who love books have claimed we wanted to live in a bookstore, to hide inside a library and never have to leave: Michael actually did it. But by the force of his belief in the world as he wanted it to be, he built a portal to a place where that live-all-night-and-forever-in-the-library feeling seemed briefly available to everyone who walked through the door. It was a better world, even if it was only five hundred square feet of it. It was a place where the limits, rules, laws, and logistics that bind us, the pedestrian nagging and worry that we are bound to, were left outside—which was, in the end, always the escape I was hoping for when I submerged myself in books. At Brazenhead, going inside books was literal and real.
Michael was a myth by the time I met him, and more so by the time he passed on Monday night. His bookstore could never really stay secret because everyone wanted to know him, and everyone wanted to talk to everyone about how they knew him; I like to think it was because none of us could quite believe he was real, and we were all trying to narrate him into reality, to pin him down into our own stories. Jonathan Lethem, a Brazenhead regular, and a dear friend and former employee of Michael’s, had actually turned him into fiction, basing characters in both Motherless Brooklyn and Chronic City (the which book, my favorite of Lethem’s, always feels to me like it is about Michael more than anything else) on him (his dog is in Chronic City, too). Michael would sometimes jokingly sign copies of these books, implying he was their real author.
Of course, he wasn’t an author, not primarily. He was a beautiful, skilled, fiercely intelligent writer, as evidenced in the “Unsolicited Advice for Living In End Times” columns he wrote for The New Inquiry, which are collected online here and which I truly can’t recommend enough. But his enduring genius was what he created with Brazenhead. If books are seeking to invent imaginary worlds into which one might escape, then Michael authored that portal experience in real life, through his insistence on living exactly how he wanted, and then being fiercely, radically generous with that living, opening up this elsewhere to anyone who wanted to visit. He was a host at a level of genius so great that it created a world.
Michael authored that portal experience in real life, through his insistence on living exactly how he wanted.
I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe about a year ago, an immersive art installation piece in a bowling alley that is also a 20,000 square foot science fiction novel. It was, again, that experience of stepping into another world, of submerging oneself in an elsewhere. Meow Wolf is full of literal portals; you actually can lean through a wall and fall into a different place. It made me miss Brazenhead more sharply than I had in years. Brazenhead was this same thing, but the portal led back to the real world. These things, it said, could actually exist. You could actually hide in the library and live there forever. Brazenhead may have felt removed from reality, but it wasn’t. It was a very real place in which I could travel vertically into the idea of books, into the unreasonable desire for a better world, into the early longing created as a reader and as a lonely kid looking for anything that was not myself.
There was a night once when Michael opened Brazenhead just for me and two friends. It was past midnight by the time we arrived. All three of us were heartbroken about failed relationships or unrequited loves. Michael would have been fine with it if we had just sat around in his bookstore and gossiped about our little personal sorrows while we smoked his pipe in the background, but instead we did the thing that people usually did when they came to Brazenhead: We took books down off the shelves and read them out loud. We competed to see who could find the saddest, most absolutely heart-punching poem or prose excerpt to read out loud. It was both a serious expression of our pain, and a mockery of it. Michael listened, and laughed at the right times, and very occasionally offered very gentle no-nonsense advice. We all three of us needed to escape into books that night, and had we all just gone home separately to cry ourselves to sleep, we probably would have individually done just that. But we went to Brazenhead instead. The portal was right here where we lived, a few subway stops away. We slid out hours later into the early sunlight, to go home and sleep through the morning. Nothing was fixed, but I knew I could go back anytime I wanted, I could knock on the secret door that wasn’t really secret, and be admitted into this elsewhere that wasn’t really elsewhere at all.
Brazenhead moved locations since then, the original one on 84th street eventually becoming unfeasible and shutting down. There was a long series of “last” nights there, one last night after another after another for at least a month, and then, eventually, it re-opened. I rarely went to the new location; it some ways I felt I had outgrown it, that it was better to cede it to newer people who needed it more than I did. In some ways I was just too afraid of not knowing anyone, too afraid it wouldn’t be the same. But I always loved knowing it was there. I loved walking around with buried knowledge that I could go back any time I wanted, that I could still knock on the secret door, and trust in the world that waited behind it.
In the days since Michael passed, tributes to him have proliferated online, and at first some part of me felt jealous or possessive, that other people I’ve never even met had loved someone I loved, that they too had known how to lean sideways just right and fall through this reality into a better and stranger one. But I remind myself that these remembrances are what he created; they hold together a world, hopeful and unlikely, that once existed in a room made of books, where there were no clocks and no windows, where it was always nighttime, and the night never had to end.
On the 230th anniversary of what the French call quatorze juillet (July Fourteenth), and we call Bastille Day, when that infamous fortress was seized—of which no trace remains but a few stones moved to another location and an opera house on the site which bears its name—it’s amazing to recall the space it occupied in the popular imagination. As Jules Michelet writes in his History of the French Revolution:
“The Bastille was known and detested by the whole world. Bastille and tyranny were, in every language, synonymous terms. Every nation, at the news of its destruction, believed it had recovered its liberty.”
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Even though only a handful of prisoners were left to liberate by that time, everyone recognized the symbolic importance of the moment when power passed from the crowned head of France into the calloused hands of the people. Except the king himself.
Away at Versailles, Louis XVI went to bed early and unperturbed. The Duke of Liancourt woke him to explain the enormity of what had just happened. The king, still half asleep, asked if it was a revolt. According to Michelet, the Duke’s grim response was, “Sire, it is a revolution.”
Here, in deliberately random order, are fourteen books, each offering a different perspective on the seminal event that changed the course of history in France . . . and in the world:
Mantel’s astonishing gift for bringing history to life, on full display in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is just as evident in her earlier novel about the French Revolution, where three men emerge from provincial obscurity to dazzling influence in Paris. In this page-turner (with some 800 pages to turn), Mantel shows how the braided destinies of Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins were inseparable from the course of the Revolution: from exhilaration to excess, from power that goes to men’s heads, to the violence that in turn claims their heads.
In this slim volume, an unnamed narrator describes Corentin’s famous painting, “The Eleven,” a group portrait of the Committee of Public Safety during The Terror which followed the Revolution. The primary concern of the eleven men (with Robespierre at their center) was for their own safety, which they ensured by sending their old allies, Danton and his followers, to the guillotine. “The Eleven is not a painting of History, it is History,” writes Michon slyly, for there is no such painter, and no such painting; but if History tells us about the men whose signatures sent thousands to their death, Art ensures that they will live forever in their infamy.
The Marie Antoinette Romances Series comprises of five novels—Joseph Balsamo,The Queen’s Necklace,Ange Pitou,The Countess de Charny, andThe Knight of Maison-Rouge—filled with palace intrigue and Dumas’ characteristic plotting and pacing, detailing the conflicted loyalties between revolutionary ideals and royalist sympathies. It’s astonishing how Marie-Antoinette, so loathed by her people, is so loved by writers. And by royalists like the Knight of Maison-Rouge, who tried to save her life.
The Gods Will Have Blood is the story of an unsuccessful painter during the Reign of Terror that swept over France: Évariste Gamelin is a follower of Robespierre, and his fanaticism about the ideals of the Revolution outweighs his love of family and friends, whom he consigns to the guillotine as a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal. The times ensure that any portraits of the era are painted not in oils or aquarelles, but in blood.
Originally a play, this novel loses none of its theatricality in the transition from stage to page. A dim English baronet, Sir Percy Blakeney, is such a master of disguise that even his own wife doesn’t know he is the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel, who leaves messages with his characteristic insignia of the little red flower––from which he takes his sobriquet––as he foils the French revolutionaries and rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine.
From a famous first line to famous last words:“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad” is chiseled on the author’s tombstone. Andre-Louis Moreau tries to avenge his friend’s death by the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr and stirs up the crowd with revolutionary words only to find himself forced to flee for his life. He disguises himself as Scaramouche in a traveling company of commedia dell’arte players and finally, during the French revolution, meets his friend’s killer and challenges him to the long-awaited duel.
A story as racy as the life of Marie-Louise Murphy—a woman of Irish descent, whose name morphed into Morphi in French and whose titillating nude portrait by François Boucher attracted the attention of King Louis XV. She went from the proverbial gutter to become one of his petites maîtresses, little mistresses—hidden from view as opposed to the maîtresses-en-tître presented at court. But once she vied to replace the official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, she was quickly banished from Versailles.
The story is told through the eyes of Agathe-Sidonie Laborde, whose job is to read to a Queen not particularly interested in books. The court at Versailles is a parallel universe to the unrest in Paris, with courtiers dining sumptuously while citizens starve in Paris. Long after Marie-Antoinette lost both the loyalty of her subjects—their affection she never had—as well as her head, Agathe-Sidonie, who escaped from Versailles, remains faithful; she is clear-eyed about the court, but still dazzled by the Queen.
One of Jules Verne’s lesser-known works, theCount of Chanteleine bands together with local peasants and priests as they fight to preserve the old traditions of France. They are loyal to a land of church steeples and a history of crowned heads, and united against the Revolutionary Army that would tear it all down. He loses everything in the fight, his home destroyed, his wife murdered, his daughter on her way to the guillotine. Can he save her?
Victor Hugo last novel, Ninety-three, deals with the most terrible year of the French Revolution. The idealism and optimism of 1789 had darkened into blood and betrayal, with its most violent counterrevolutionary manifestations in the Vendée, where the bloodletting between the monarchist blancs and the revolutionary bleus was more ferocious than at any time in Paris. (This historical terrain was also the setting for Balzac’s novel Les Chouans.)
Prolific and often voyeuristic, Bretonne claims he has promised a noblewoman that he will report his nocturnal wanderings to her. This fictional framework allows him to blend fact and fabrication, first-hand accounts and hearsay. Above all, these sketches give an invaluable contemporaneous rendering—a precursor to today’s fascination with eyewitness news—of the nights in Paris during the revolution and its aftermath.
Frank Yerby, prolific and popular in his own time but largely neglected now, tells the story of Jean Paul Marin, who starts out as a poor country lawyer, and through the revolution rises to become one of the most important men in France. While he believes in the ideals of the revolution, his grudge against the nobility is as much personal as political.
For once, three women are given equal weight as actors in the Revolution, and indeed, one of them is a performer whose theater group puts on plays for aristocrats. Both Claire Lacomb, the actress, and Pauline Léon, a chocolate-maker, founded The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women to argue for women’s equal rights, but they were firmly put down by a political movement that seemed to loathe independent women as much as aristocrats. The third woman is Madame Manon Roland, who disseminated revolutionary ideas in her salons. Though Danton, Robespierre, and the Marquis de Condorcet also appear, it’s interesting to see women in the spotlight.
Perhaps the single fictional woman most closely associated with the Revolution is the infamous Madame Defarge, one of the tricoteuses regarding the sliced heads of the guillotine’s victims as calmly as they treat a dropped stitch in their knitting. The family drama of Dr. Manette, a prisoner released from the Bastille, his daughter Lucie, and the two men who look uncannily alike—Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay—plays out against the backdrop of the Revolution. The opening lines are justly famous; but more pertinent is the warning: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
In Lila Savage’s novel Say Say Say, Ella is hired as a caregiver to Jill, a woman with rapidly advancing dementia. The moment Ella steps into the house, she is swept into a world of extraordinary intimacies and wrenching, private grief. Still, there remains a distance she can’t quite cross—particularly with Bryn, Jill’s husband and her employer—even when she yearns to do so. She’s a domestic worker, not family; she’s full of youth in a house where aging and decline are on stark display; she is able to walk out of the house at the end of her shift. How does she navigate a space full of boundaries but resounding with cries for true human connection?
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Say Say Say gives us a close-up look at the work of caregiving, and how the tasks of physically caring for another human being can be simultaneously monotonous and momentous. In the process, it also explores societal stratification—particularly of gender and class—but resists easy commentary. Instead, the novel is full of complexity and page after page of piercing insights.
I was hungry for this novel before I knew it existed. Here is a book that does not chase the hot-button issues of our day and yet feels timely and crucial. Here is a book not held hostage to plot, but whose drama involves the highest stakes.
I felt compelled to talk to Lila Savage about her novel—what drove her to write it, her own work as a caregiver, and, really, anything at all she cared to tell me about creating this strange and gorgeous book.
Chia-Chia Lin: Contained in this slim, 161-page book is a stunning array of inquiries. The novel tackles sexuality, gender roles, power dynamics, class, grief, and more. Was there one obsession that called to you especially? Put another way, what was your entry point into the novel?
Lila Savage: Two things really drew me to write this novel: finding personal meaning in the caregiving work I engaged in for so many years and also exploring the nature of intimacy in such settings. I studied sociology and social justice as an undergraduate and remain very interested in the sense of identity and purpose found in employment, especially working-class labor.
As a much younger writer, I hoped to become an oral historian or labor journalist, but fiction has thus far provided a more flexible emotional framework for the ideas and feelings I’ve sought to explore. What are the roles and interpersonal obligations of employee and employer in such emotionally fraught situations? What does it mean to perform caring and to be compensated for emotional support? What does it mean to bear witness to loss of self and in what ways might this be a gift to both client and caregiver? Say Say Say is my attempt to grapple with these kinds of questions.
CL: Each one of those questions is so richly and deeply explored, and the scenes are packed with the details and specificity of real-life experience. Can you talk more about your caregiving work, and also about any challenges that arose as you created art inspired by your experience?
LS: When I began writing this novel I was working as a full-time caregiver for a woman with Alzheimer’s. It was very challenging to work with her all day and come home to relive the feelings of stress, boredom, isolation and shared grieving associated with caregiving work as I tried to capture them on the page. My progress was very slow until she moved into assisted living and I qualified for unemployment. I felt such gratitude for the opportunity to write full-time while I looked for work and then for the further opportunities to write full-time that followed (two years as a writing fellow and then two more as an MFA student).
What does it mean to perform caring and to be compensated for emotional support?
Now that I haven’t worked as a caregiver for a few years, however, I find myself grateful that there was overlap between caregiving and writing about it. I think it’s very likely the work is better for it. Still, balancing a day job and writing is a significant challenge most writers face. Not very many writers from class backgrounds like mine receive the remarkable opportunities I’ve been graced with, and yet I so crave more art depicting working lives and jobs and the experiences of folks whose struggles with various forms of marginalization overlap or differ from my own. Some criticize MFA programs as rendering writing lamentably homogenized. That differs from my experience but also neglects to acknowledge how crucial time and funding are for working-class writers.
CL: It’s surprising to me that you had a period of overlap in caregiving and writing. The novel feels so ruminative, full of the kinds of insights that come with time and distance. One of the things I love most about this book is how unapologetically interior it is. With the weight of Ella’s sharp insights, even the smallest of gestures suddenly becomes far-reaching in significance. So many novels being published today contain dramas and conflicts that play out externally rather than internally. Why were you interested in writing something that pointed inward?
LS: I’m drawn to interiority, I think, because where else besides reading do we have such ease of access and empathy to the innermost thoughts and feelings of another? Narrative action can take other forms with great success but this depth and reach of access is in some ways unique to writing. In Say Say Say, however, I think the interiority on offer is particularly unusual, in a class sense as much as anything else.
Most folks know much more about how people experience aging or the aging of their loved ones than they do about the internal experience of being a professional caregiver. It is a role observed by many from the outside, and it is maybe more comfortable to deny domestic workers interior lives. One reason may be the feeling of uncomfortable exposure—it may be easier to imagine detachment and uncomplicated contentment as the primary responses from close observers to deeply personal loss. That is understandable. But I think there is much more to be gained from making room for the emotional complexities of full personhood.
CL: Earlier, you mentioned the compensation aspect of domestic work. Stuck at the back of Ella’s mind is the fact that money is exchanged for her care: “[I]t was a strangely limited intimacy, it always was, no matter how much Ella loved a client, loved their family, because there was always a degree of withholding that came with being paid for her time.” This notion is present throughout the book and returns at the end, when money prevents Ella from saying what she wants to say to Bryn, her employer. The ending intrigued me. It’s moving and complex. Why did you end the book with this small-yet-enormous, incomplete connection?
I crave more art depicting working lives of folks.
LS: I suppose in the end it’s a book about work, about employer and employee. It’s about workplace intimacy and its limitations. However, too much can be made of the transactional aspect. More than one concern interferes with Bryn and Ella’s ability to connect—there’s age, and gender, and temperament to a certain degree. But the tenuousness of their connection is part of what interested me in writing about these characters—their imperfect, complicated, and heartfelt esteem for one another. It’s more unusual than romance and I think deserves a more nuanced ending than we might expect from something romantic.
CL: I also want to ask you about bodies. In a way, the novel’s intense focus on physical bodies—its needs and hungers and desires, but also its limitations—provides a counterweight to the interiority, the depths of the mind. And in the character of Jill, we witness both the body and the mind in decline. “Every skill was leaking from her.” We start to ask terrifying questions about what makes us human.
LS: I love that observation, that the physical provides a counterweight to the interiority. Thank you. On the subject of bodies I would say I am fascinated by physicality, especially thoughts and feelings about bodies and having a body. Writing a book about decline offered welcome opportunities to explore that. After observing the similarities and differences in the decline of so many clients, I’ve maybe become somewhat desensitized to that terror. Of course not entirely—I’m not at peace with aging—but there’s a certain amount of inevitability involved. I suppose I’m saying that aging is a human experience.
CL: I love short novels. Do you? Do you have favorites, or did you have models in mind when you were writing Say Say Say? Was it always a short novel, or did you pare it down to its current size?
LS: I do love short novels, but I didn’t set out to write one on purpose, at least not in the beginning. I am, I think, a writer and reader who tends to value succinctness, and once I realized more than half the pages I’d written weren’t necessary, it became a pleasure to concentrate it down to its essence. I did want a degree of claustrophobia to permeate the story and that left less room for digression.
My grandmother, who came to North America following the brutally thwarted 1956 Hungarian uprising, had a thick accent (think something along the lines of a Mrs. Dracula) and a line she would say when asked about escaping the Iron Curtain: “People think I was fleeing Communism. I was fleeing my mother-in-law.”
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I stole that line for my first novel, Russian Winter, and not just for the laughs. It spoke to something deeply true about the interplay between politics and family life, between foreign and domestic relations. After all, the arrival of the Russian Soviets in Hungary and their appropriation of formerly private housing meant entire families now squeezed into single rooms—ratcheting up my grandmother’s desperation to ditch her husband’s mother.
This intersection between the political and the personal has long interested me, and while I have no great desire to peruse a treatise on foreign policy, I’ll gobble up any good novel that vividly brings to life the ways U.S. interventions abroad—whether in the form of helpful rescue or troublesome meddling—affect individual lives and interpersonal relationships. I’ll also wager that for many of us a novel can be just as effective a way of gaining a sense of a government’s machinations (whether overt or behind the scenes) on foreign soil. To have this political and historical information delivered through the intrigue, suspense, rising action, climax, and denouement of a satisfying novel, whether as the focus of the plot or as background to the storyline, whether obliquely or in nuanced detail—these are the spoonsful of sugar that help the medicine go down. And that is precisely what these worthwhile novels achieve.
Burkina Faso Cold War: American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
In this elegantly engaging novel, a Reagan-era FBI agent gains a new perspective on herself and her country when she takes part in the CIA’s covert efforts to unseat Burkina Faso’s popular Marxist leader. Smoothly ranging back and forth in time, the narrative at first builds slowly yet thoughtfully, lending equal weight to the titular protagonist’s family background (via Martinique, Harlem, and Queens) and her assignment to “get close to” Burkina Faso’s president on his visit to New York. When, midway through the book, the assignment requires her to travel to Burkina Faso, this entertaining read, with smart plot developments that stay true to the complexities of relationships both romantic and diplomatic, becomes a page-turner concerning the lies we tell others and ourselves—regarding the true nature of ourselves and of our homelands.
Philippine-American War: Insurrecto by Gina Apostol
This vigorously postmodern take on the consequences of colonialism centers on “a blip in the Philippine-American War (which is a blip in the Spanish-American War, which is a blip in latter-day outbreaks of imperial hysteria in southeast Asian wars, which are a blip in the spiral of human aggression in the livid days of this dying planet, and so on).” Specifically, in 1901, locals on the island of Samar ambushed occupying American forces, killing 40-something U.S. soldiers, for which the U.S. retaliated by killing thousands of Filipinos. In Apostol’s brilliant and roguishly comic novel—set in current times—a young white American filmmaker who lost her father following a childhood stint in Manila returns to the Philippines to make a movie based on the Balangiga massacre, with the help of a local translator who decides to improve the script. Told from multiple female perspectives, including a delightfully opinionated appendix mixing fiction and fact, this unique work raises smart questions about why it matters who tells a story.
The Iran-Contra Affair: Legacy by James A. Michener
Michener’s great strengths were his ability to understand historical sweep and cultural context while dramatizing these elements at the personal level; at his best, his characters are always living human lives in the midst of big moments, so that we care about what happens to them as they struggle to survive, build homes, fight wars, make money, fall in love, and adapt to change. Legacy is not the typical 1000-page Michener novel but, rather, a novella springing from an army major’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Preparing to defend himself before Congress, the protagonist, who justifies his actions through his fierce patriotism and fervent anti-Communism, is advised by his lawyer to cite his venerable Virginia ancestors as evidence of his moral character. As he brushes up on their histories, we learn about a framer of the constitution, a slaveholder freeing his slaves, a suffragist, and others—including a bigoted grandfather who, when told FDR has died, replies, “Just saying that to make me feel good on my birthday.” Each of these vignettes returns in some way to a discussion of the U.S. Constitution and its amendments—the actual stealth history lesson in this fleet multigenerational tale.
Criminalization of Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
What could have been a flat portrayal of a hot-button issue from the headlines comes poignantly to life in Luiselli’s hands. Based on a real life road-trip she took in 2014 with her husband and children to the southwestern border (about which she also wrote a non-fiction account, Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions), this moving novel presents richly imagined passages about the often perilous journeys taken by unaccompanied children crossing from Central America into the U.S. in search of asylum. Luiselli dramatizes not just the suffering of child refugees but their bravery and ingenuity—to the degree that the reader experiences their eventual surrender to Border Patrol, their mass deportations back to the countries they have fled, and their unexplained disappearances as gut-wrenching. In a brilliant move, Luiselli uses the narrator’s 10-year old son and a 5-year old daughter riding in the back of the car to celebrate the wonder, curiosity, intelligence and wisdom of childhood. Because we get to know these two children so well, the specter of their loss feels all the more real and devastating.
This beautiful, heartbreaking—and often piercingly funny—novel of the Iraq war takes place over the few brief days that Billy, a 19-year-old army Specialist and newly minted war hero (thanks to Fox News), returns home to Texas with his troop to participate in the Superbowl halftime show before heading back to duty in Iraq. In Fountain’s hands, the random absurdities of war meet the crassness of the television industry, creating a compact, propulsive, and absolutely believable story in which every character feels fully real. From Billy’s complex feelings for his sister to his love for a sergeant killed in action, the tug of his emotions and growing confusion of his heart and mind feel absolutely true—perhaps mirroring that of his country.
The power of this expansive, mesmerizing work is its unraveling of deep historical wounds and scars—both personal and political—that are then replayed in different countries and contexts (WWII Balkans, Cold War Turkey, 1980s Haiti) generations later. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this magnum opus is divided into five books and deftly brings to full light the sticky, extensive web of U.S foreign policy decisions, revealing the way those strands stretch through time and space, with ramifications that never allow the characters to break free. Troublingly, there is some narrative lingering on the sexual traumas enacted on the main female character that at times can feel voyeuristic. But the collective traumas and betrayals experienced by the protagonists expose their hidden lives in ways that resonate hauntingly to tell a larger story of America’s pre-9/11 coming of age.
America’s war in Vietnam and the resulting exodus of Vietnamese refugees to the U.S. gets a masterful satirical treatment in this compelling saga of a young Vietnamese double-agent who settles in L.A. The virtuoso confessional voice and razor-sharp insights keep us turning the pages, along with a plot somewhere between a mystery and thriller. A scathingly comic section concerning the filming of a would-be Apocalypse Now is also a mordant send-up of racial stereotyping that will make you think hard about the persistence of typecasting into the present. And though the final pages might not be fully in keeping with the book’s satirical bent, this Pulitzer prize-winner will leave you moved.
Toni Morrison knows how to tell a story. When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, she opened her lecture with a fable: Standing before the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, she outlined a tale about some disrespectful young people, a blind old woman, and a bird. She turned the story over like a prism, examining how the angle might differently refract its biases, its perspective, the very language that translated it from narrator to audience. “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created,” she said, describing the generative power of literature and its inverse: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
So it’s fitting that Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s new biographical documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, frames Morrison’s life in her own words. “Toni is a brilliant, brilliant storyteller herself,” Greenfield-Sanders said recently. “I’m not talking about as a writer—I’m talking about as a speaker. She can weave a story so beautifully.” Morrison is a stately presence on screen—the film is anchored in a lengthy series interviews with the writer herself, now 88, conducted at her home in upstate New York by Sandra Guzman (Greenfield-Sanders estimated he had 20 hours of interview footage, shot over the course of several seasons). And the title, The Pieces I Am, is itself a fragment of a passage from Beloved: “She is a friend of my mine. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
The Pieces I Am takes a fragmentary approach to Morrison’s life and career, moving between the various spaces and identities she’s inhabited.
The Pieces I Am takes a fragmentary approach to Morrison’s life and career, moving between the various spaces and identities she’s inhabited: Chloe Wofford, the young woman who grew up in Lorain, Ohio, and eventually adopted her baptismal name, Anthony, professionally; the Random House editor who shepherded books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones, as well as the seminal anthology The Black Book, into the world; the professor who encouraged her students not to—as the adage goes—write what they know, but to take imaginative leaps; the single mother who raised two boys while writing novels before dawn; the eventual Nobel Prize winner. Along the way, guest appearances by friends, fans, and critics attest to her far-reaching influence—including Oprah Winfrey (who memorably called the fire department to acquire Morrison’s unlisted home number; Winfrey also produced and starred in the film adaptation of Morrison’s Beloved) and Fran Lebowitz, who accompanied Morrison to the Nobel prize ceremony.
A filmmaker and photographer by trade, Greenfield-Sanders first met Morrison during a portrait session for the Soho News in 1981; over the intervening 30 years, they’ve cultivated a friendship as he’s photographed her for her book jackets, press photos, and magazine features. (Among the other artists in Greenfield-Sanders’s portfolio are Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Beyoncé; his 1998 documentary, Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, won a Grammy for best long-form music video.) The director’s respect for his subject radiates through the movie; The Pieces I Am delves into what has made Morrison such a legend while also sustaining the legend itself, braiding together its subject’s easy humor and warmth with the more obviously serious elements of her personal and family history.
“Toni Morrison’s work shows us through pain all the myriad ways we can come to love,” Oprah says in The Pieces I Am. “That is what she does—with some words on a page.” I spoke with Greenfield-Sanders about how he distilled Morrison’s rich history into film.
Katherine Cusumano: The title encapsulates the project of the film, which is taking these different elements of who Toni Morrison, the writer, the person, the literary icon, is, and reconciling them and exploring what makes them, them. Who were the different Toni Morrisons you wanted to explore in the film?
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: People see Toni Morrison as the writer, and we really wanted to show Toni Morrison the single mother, Toni Morrison the teacher, the editor, Toni the great influence. We wanted to also show how much she meant to people by bringing in fine art from all these artists—it was all a way to bring that beauty of African-American art into the film, because they’re all influenced by Toni, I assure you. My mission was to bring art into it, to bring other voices into it—African-American voices, specifically. Mickalene Thomas’s magnificent opening montage [a collage of Greenfield-Sanders’s portraits of Morrison], which of course, plays again with the title, The Pieces I Am.
We wanted to show Toni Morrison the single mother, Toni Morrison the teacher, the editor, Toni the great influence.
KC: The secondary sources in the film seem to speak to that far-reaching influence—the urgency with which Oprah, for example, needed to get ahold of her, as well as her influence among visual artists and musicians. So what do you think sets Toni Morrison apart as an icon?
TG-S: Toni speaks to us in a way that very few people do. There’s something that’s very musical about her writing, that’s very emotional, that draws you in, that changes you, and I can’t think of another writer that does that for me. There’s a profoundness to her. She’s the Shakespeare of our time.
KC: The film strikes a balance between the Toni Morrison who has a great sense of humor and bakes carrot cake and loves parties with the graver elements of her life and her work. How did you balance the fun and delightful parts without trivializing the larger picture? For example, how do you incorporate an anecdote about her secret carrot cake recipe into a segment that’s also discussing inequality in the workplace?
TG-S: With great difficulty. [Laughs] I think that’s what the magic of editing is—that we were able to. The film is very deep and profound and also has moments of real, great humor. Toni is a complex person. She’s not this monolith; she’s very much a human being herself, and people don’t see that. They see Toni Morrison, the iconic figure. I think Chloe [Wofford, Morrison’s birth name] comes through in the film in some way—that kind of person who’s not the famous person who everyone’s excited to meet and means so much to them.
KC: In that editing process, how did you remain cognizant of the parts of the film that would get you there, that would strike that balance?
TG-S: We structured the film so that it was not linear. It doesn’t start with her birth and end where she is today. It’s more these little sections—The Pieces I Am really is a metaphor for the way we edited it. So you have Toni, Random House years. You have Toni, the single mother. You have the Nobel; Lorain, [Ohio, where Morrison grew up]; her parents’ migration from Alabama. All of these sections were created as pods and then we tried to figure out how we could connect by going forward in time and back. My concern was that there was too much material. She lived such a rich life; how does one put that all in there? Toni could have 10 hours. We had to leave a lot of things out, but you make decisions as a director.
KC: Right, you mentioned in another interview that the Peter Sellars interview was one that was pretty gutting to have to leave out.
Toni is a complex person. She’s not this monolith.
TG-S: It was wonderful, yeah.
KC: Have you tried the carrot cake?
TG-S: I’m close to getting the recipe from her. [Laughs] It’s the best, absolutely. I want the recipe, though. My wife is a very good baker as well, so her carrot cake is pretty damn good. Toni thinks it is, too.
KC: That’s probably pretty high praise.
TG-S: That’s very high praise. Her pride in that, that she was a very good baker—I love the way we carry it through in the film.
KC: Why do you think those moments where you see Toni’s humor and what she’s like as a person are especially striking or captivating?
TG-S: People have not seen the side of her that we show in the film. There’s an intimate quality in the way she talks here, direct-to-camera. The others talk off camera, so it sets her apart from everyone else. You want to come back to her over and over again, because she’s so wonderful.
KC: The Pieces I Am also explores how her work has been siloed and compared to writers she doesn’t actually have that much in common with, like Ishmael Reed, just because they are both black and writing black characters and had the audacity to do so not necessarily taking a white audience into account. It must have been in the back of your mind that you are a white male filmmaker making a documentary on a black woman writer for whom centering black characters is paramount. How did you negotiate that?
TG-S: It was certainly on my mind at all times. I made a very strong effort to bring in other voices into our team, from Mickalene Thomas to Kathryn Bostic to Tommy Walker, who’s a producer with me for a dozen years, to all of the fine art that’s in the film from African-American artists. Ultimately, I think it’s about Toni’s trust in me: that Toni said, “You can do this, I’m agreeing to let you make this film about me.” I think that says so much and gave me so much—what’s the right word—it gave me the courage to do it.
KC: When was it among all the portraits you took of Toni that you thought, this should be a film?
TG-S: I think around the time of The Black List [Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary film series about notable black Americans], which had come from an idea in 2005 from Toni, who had been working on an opera, Margaret Garner, to do a book on black divas. That idea turned into The Black List.
Once I got it funded and we started to do The Black List, Toni was the first to sit for it. Certainly, when that film was finished, I thought everyone in it was so extraordinary and deserving of a documentary, but if I had to pick one, it would be Toni first. [The Black List also features Reverend Al Sharpton, rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, and former Planned Parenthood president Faye Wattleton, among others.] I knew her the best; she was very part of my life in many ways; and her story is extraordinary. Aside from the Nobel, there’s all the other pieces to her life—her life as an editor, a teacher, a single mother, all the things we address in the film. It was rich for documentary.
KC: So you and Toni already had this established relationship both as friends and as photographer and subject before The Pieces I Am. How did those two dynamics translate into the film for you?
You’re seeing a very open and funny and real Toni Morrison that very few people get to see.
TG-S: It’s very helpful. She knew me well; she knew my crew; she knew my producer, Tommy Walker, from The Black List. She was at ease with the team I had, and there was a very strong trust there. My skill as a photographer is being able to read a person, being able to sense the nervousness in a photoshoot or a film interview. I’m good at making people feel comfortable. I think that’s what you see in the film: You see people very relaxed and willing to open up and talk. You’re seeing a very open and funny and real Toni Morrison that very few people get to see—the Toni Morrison that I know. I think she enjoyed the interviews; she had fun thinking about these issues and talking about her life; it was a really magical experience.
KC: How has that subject-photographer relationship changed over the 30-odd years you’ve been working together?
TG-S: Each photo session, you become closer to your subject. A few years ago, we were talking about the portraits and I said, “‘I’ve really got you here in this one. It’s really you.”’ And she said, “‘Yes, because I let you see me.”’ And I think that’s a great point—that’s the level you want to get to with a subject, where they’re open to you and allowing you to see them.
KC: Was there anything over the course of those interviews that surprised you or you hadn’t considered?
TG-S: When you know someone as a friend and you have a professional relationship as well, you haven’t researched the person; it’s your friend. When you start to research them for a film like this, you learn so much more. I was familiar with her work at Random House to some extent, but not to the extent that I was after research for the film. [In 1995], one of Toni’s writers, Toni Cade Bambara, died, so Toni Morrison took a year of her own life to finish Toni Cade Bambara’s book, These Bones Are Not My Child. It was an extraordinary thing. All of the parts of Toni that you kind of know in a peripheral way, you find much more depth as you get into the filmmaking process. If it were possible to have more admiration for Toni Morrison, I have it.
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