Yiyun Li’s Latest Memoir Illuminates My Responsibilities and Limitations as a Parent

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Early in Yiyun Li’s latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, she writes of parenthood: “There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end.” That combination of “blind courage” and “wishful thinking” are prerequisites for any parent, and in many cases they’re enough. “A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long,” she argues. “A mother cannot follow a child’s every step of life, just so that she can make sure he remains alive.”

Any parent, no matter how helicoptery or anxious, would be hard-pressed to disagree. In Li’s case, however, a dreadful fact lurks beneath the truism: her two sons died by suicide as teenagers, six years apart. She has written previously about the death of her older son, Vincent—Li is an esteemed professor and prolific author of both memoir and fiction—but this book, drafted in the aftermath of James’s suicide, resounds with the absence of both her children and reckons with her status as a mother “who can no longer mother”.

Li—an economical writer whittled to austerity by these successive tragedies—has produced a book which is slim, spare, and almost devoid of emotion, more philosophical treatise than moving tale of a mother in mourning. This makes it difficult for the reader to connect with her experience, but Li’s pursuit of radical acceptance may necessitate her intellectual remove. As she puts it, “sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks…sometimes people don’t have the luxury to wallow in clichés.”

Li is not much of a wallower regardless. She writes that the book is “written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” She knows it’s Sisyphean to climb back out, and so doesn’t even make an attempt. Instead, she picks back up her piano lessons, resumes writing, and settles into the weary rhythm of her new existence. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life,” Li declares, “the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.”

You might wonder how much of a masochist I must be to plunge into Li’s abyss alongside her. Doubly so, since I am both the mother of young children and the daughter of a man who died by suicide—which makes their odds of suicide greater as a result. My 11-year-old son is also trans, which confers its own harrowing statistics around self-harm. I hesitated to read Things in Nature Merely Grow even as it pulled me in like a black hole: stories of suicide, and stories of losing a child, threaten to puncture the armor I’ve fashioned to make it through each day. But, once in a while, I am compelled to look. If we don’t understand profound vulnerability, we can’t access profound love. In the absence of that, what is life for?

Stories of losing a child threaten to puncture the armor I’ve fashioned to make it through each day.

Despite my own past descents into depression, my periodic panic attacks and unrelenting (though well-medicated) anxiety, the thought of suicide has never intruded on my consciousness. As I told my therapist early in our relationship, “The only scenario in which I could conceive of wanting to kill myself would be if both my children died.” Until encountering Li’s heartrending narrative, my imagination had only stretched as far as a car accident or plane crash—now the notion of losing them in successive suicides haunts me, when I let it.

This is why I insist on giving them the concepts and language to discuss their inner lives, however turbulent. It’s been my approach from the beginning, along with being open and honest in an age-appropriate way about their grandpa’s suicide despite the pervasive stigma.

In the spring of 2021, my newly vaccinated mom was coming to visit for the first time in months. While my husband and I raced to tidy up the house, E. and S., then seven and four, were absorbed in a Zoom art class; we listened in from the kitchen.

“Would anyone like to tell us about their drawing?”

E. unmuted. “I drew a picture of Gaga, my grandma. She’s on her way here, and I’m so excited!”

“That’s great. Will you hold your paper up so everyone can see?”

His paper fluttered as he tried to angle it just right.

“What a beautiful drawing! Is it just your grandma or is anyone else coming with her?”

“Not our grandpa!” S. chimed in, her little voice still rounded by a toddler’s soft sounds.

“Oh, why not?”

E. cut in. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself.”

I raced toward them as time turned to Jell-o.

“Before we were born.” S. added.

The teacher’s face froze. “Um…. I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be really sad.” Her eyes searched the mosaic of boxes for help, just as I reached the laptop.

“Yes, it is.” I hit mute and slammed the screen shut.

I sat next to E. on a burnt-orange chair. “Remember when I told you about my dad’s suicide?”

“Yes, Mama. I was really sad for you.”

“Me too,” S. chimed in.

“I said then and I’ll say it now: it’s okay to tell people your grandpa died before you were born. But it’s better not to share how he died. Lots of parents don’t talk about suicide with their kids, so they might be confused or afraid. We talk about it because we don’t keep secrets in our family. You two can never think or feel or do something scary or bad enough to make us stop loving you. You can always come to me and Papa. You know that, right?”

“Right, Mama. But what should I say if someone asks me how he died?” E. was a step ahead of me, as usual.

“Maybe just that…his brain stopped working?”

“It must have stopped working if it told him not to keep living, right?”

“Right.” I left it there. It’s a fine line between being instructive and forthright with my children about dark or controversial matters—like sex, politics, and their grandpa’s suicide—and leaving them susceptible to society’s penchant for shaming in a way that’s unfair to their guilelessness. So much of parenting boils down to this tricky balance between preparing our children for the world and protecting them from it.

Parents who lose their children, Li writes, “either live or follow their children down to Hades”. The ones who live do so “because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths…Dying is hard. Living is harder.”

In its own context, living was certainly harder for my dad. I’ve pieced the narrative of his suicide together from fragments, clues. But I know him almost like I know myself. The rationale, the response, it all makes sense to me. Like the suicides of Vincent and James make sense to Li.

Of course, any insight I have to offer derives from inference and projection, not the marrow-sticking pain of lived experience. Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children. The onus was not on me to keep my dad alive—but that is the most fundamental responsibility I have to my children. The drive to ensure the survival of our offspring (and of the species) is encoded in our DNA and manifested in the deepest, most reptilian quarters of our brains. How gut-wrenching it must be to feel like you’ve failed at this evolutionary mandate.

Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children.

I don’t wonder whether I could have, should have, done more to stop my dad, not that I knew what was in the offing. Those questions are impossible for either of us to answer because, as Li puts it, “on this side of death no answer can be trusted.” It was also his life to end.

Li views her sons’ suicides in a similar vein. “It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”

That perspective, controversial as it is in a culture which places primacy on happy endings, may be necessary in retrospect. I agree, in part. I know better than to discount my fortune that my narrative as a parent continues in the present tense, while Li’s has crashed to its conclusion. I can love E. and S. here in front of me, hold them, project them into the future. I can still mother as a verb. To the end of my days, I hope. An essential aspect of that mothering involves the first part of Li’s sentiment: that we should honor our children’s peculiarities so that they can grow to be their own individuals. I couldn’t endorse that more. Our children are not carbon copies of us; they exist outside our experience. No one has argued this more eloquently than Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, in which he writes, “In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.” 

In order to prop up those fantasies, adults often discount children’s self-awareness and identity formation. This comes into play when parents refuse to relinquish control over decisions as mundane as what their children eat, wear, and read—and even more insidiously when adults deny children the right to assert their gender identity. 

Today’s toxic climate offers countless examples of this diminishment, as adults from the White House, Supreme Court, and Elon Musk to local school boards and sports leagues deny the self-determination of trans and nonbinary kids and teens out of fear. They worry about what will happen if children are allowed to develop and grow without the pressure of their parents’ thumbs forcing them into the desired shape. This is far from a new concern in our culture: from the Fifth Commandment to Locke’s “blank slate” or even the lengths to which the Wormwoods go to quash precocious Matilda’s curiosity, the dominant narrative is that children do not, or should not, have agency. From fascists on down to patriarchs, parents, it’s all about control.

As the cisgender parent of a trans child, I have had to jettison any semblance of control from the moment my son came out to us in fourth grade. Transness is the epitome of what Solomon coins “horizontal identities”, those aspects of ourselves which are not handed down from our parents by nature or nurture but diverge from their own experience and, often, escape their understanding. Since then, my understanding has unfolded alongside E.’s transition—as has my determination to help others empathize and accept.

A piece of hate mail I received in response to my recent essay in HuffPost says the quiet part out loud: “Your daughter is going to regret the day she decided to transition and look to you as the adult who should have had her best interests at heart and exercised mature judgment with regard to life altering steps at 11 years of age. Do you recall when you were 11 years old? Unless you were a child prodigy, I seriously doubt you had the maturity to make any drastic decision about what you wanted to be as an adult.”

My son E. is smart, empathic, and mature beyond his years. When he came out, he’d only landed on the language to describe his transness a week or so earlier but arrived at the dinner table with a fully fleshed out understanding of his identity.

“Mama, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said while awaiting his cheeseburger, his serious tone incongruent with his broad smile. “I’m trans. My pronouns are he/him. And I’m changing my name.”

He looked happier than I’d seen him since kindergarten. His “best interests” are exactly what we acted on, when his dad and I embraced him as the person he knew himself to be. What hubris it would be to think we know him better than he does. 

To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially. But, in order to function, we must keep it tucked away in some inaccessible recess of our minds, must tell ourselves we are in control even when the evidence across millennia threatens that necessary delusion. One of the ways we maintain the pretense is by transforming experience into narrative. Shaping and sharing our stories. The storyteller exerts a mastery of causality, linking events into chains which seem to add up to truth. In the retrospective, however, one is left with the feeling that the story could have had a different ending.

To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially.

This is especially true of stories that end in suicide. We perceive the act as a decision—which leaves open the possibility that the deceased could have chosen otherwise. That their survivors could have intervened to change the outcome.

From the moment I heard my dad had killed himself, however, I understood and respected it. Like Li in the wake of her sons’ suicides, I felt in the aftermath like that reaction was more sublime than love, or perhaps its ultimate manifestation. However, while Things in Nature Merely Grow offers readers Li’s philosophical musings on this, it fails to grapple with what James’s state of mind actually was, dismissing it as irrelevant or insignificant. In doing so, she creates the unintended perception that she felt neither responsible for it nor capable of trying to help.

“Parenting—is that not the ultimate effort to hold a place for children, so that, to the best of one’s ability, they can be given all they need to grow?” Li wonders, but quickly dismisses it as futile. “The children are bound to outgrow the space the parents provide.”

Yet even in light of that, we must do anything, everything, we can to protect our children and keep them alive. This is our most fundamental responsibility as parents—not just understanding them, and emphatically not asserting dominion over them—even if that alone can’t always prevent the worst from happening. Our limitations do not obviate the need to do whatever we can. They make it more important.

As fertile as I’ve found this foray into existential dread, I have to put it back on the shelf. Parenting in the present vs. the past requires that separation from the theoretical. The day-to-day takes place on a more physical and practical plane, and my children demand every ounce of functionality I can muster.

Still, beyond meeting their needs on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s incumbent on me to make sure they have the space to imagine a life for themselves. A life that’s authentic and right to them—no matter the extent to which it exceeds my own imagination.

“It’s been my experience that adults…are extremely good at underestimating children,” Li writes. “A 10-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness.” They also have the capacity to know themselves, if not always the words to express it.

But allowing E. to self-actualize is not only about honoring that ability. It’s also about the basic need to keep him alive. According to the Trevor Project, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year and 16 percent made an attempt. Living in a supportive home reduces the incidence by a third. When E. came out, supporting him was our only option.

In this fractious climate, however, our support of his transition—social and then legal and medical—is insufficient. We must also ensure he can survive the bleakness, which is why my husband and I are doing all we can to help create a future our son wants to live in, not just imagine.

We have to hope that it’s enough.

Geovani Martins Wants Brazil to Stop Denying Its Past

Posted on by Willem Marx

Geovani Martins has been making waves since his 2018 debut, a story collection titled The Sun on My Head, was instantly translated into tens of languages around the globe. A few years removed from its release, the collection has been named one of the best Brazilian books of the century. Now, his equally brilliant debut novel from 2022, Via Ápia, has finally arrived in English. 

Via Ápia is a big book. It spans three years and five central characters. It’s a story about police violence rooted in the moment in 2012 when a special police force, designated the Pacifying Police Unit, began invading and occupying favelas around Rio. Politics and history constitute the book in the way water constitutes an ocean—they create a world and background against which other stories unfold. Via Ápia is the story of young men and women becoming themselves, deciding what kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives, while, at the same time, their community is upended by senseless government aggression. What is there to do in the face of a small army of cops? The characters adapt, sacrifice, and try to keep living until, eventually, the police make that level of pragmatism impossible. 

As a writer, Martins stands out for many reasons—he’s young but writes with a voice that is fully formed, at once funny, rambunctious, and wise. He portrays the favelas of Rio, where he’s from, in a way that few writers have done before, capturing the unique sense of community and joy that exists in a place often pigeonholed by descriptions of violence, drugs, and poverty. While all of that exists in Martins’ work, his are stories of family and friendship, love and parenthood, the ever-strange experience of growing up. In writing the landscapes of dismissed places, Martin is making space for people who don’t usually find themselves in books. To read Via Ápia is to experience the rush of emotion that comes with encountering a story for the first time and feeling a deep sense of recognition, like it’s been there all along.

Over several weeks, Geovani and I wrote back and forth via email in a sort of call and response that bent around the shape of our lives. Geovani generously spoke about his origins as a writer, his connection to the world he writes about, and the techniques and styles he’s drawn on to recreate that world on the page. 

Willem Marx: Your novel is so rooted in time and landscape. It’s in the title, Via Ápia. What is it about the specific days and months of 2011 and 2012 in Rio de Janeiro that you wanted to capture in this book? 

Geovani Martins: It’s been over fifteen years since the first Pacifying Police Unit was introduced in Rio, and by now we can see the impact that kind of state repression had on the favelas. While writing Via Ápia, I wanted to capture that moment of transition. I wasn’t interested in focusing only on the police presence, but on everything it stood for politically.

In doing that, I felt it was necessary to retell the story from the perspective of the people who actually live there. To look at that history through the everyday lives of those whose lives were reshaped by a state policy they were never consulted on, not before, not during, not after. That’s why the chapter structure, organized by exact dates, is so central to the book. It was a way of saying these characters are part of the official history of the city.

WM: Did you experience that moment when the Pacifying Police Unit started taking over the favelas first hand?

GM: Yeah, I was living in Rocinha during the whole period the book covers. But the truth is, even before the police officially came in, we were already dealing with the weight of that expectation. With every new favela that got occupied, the questions kept getting louder: When’s it gonna be our turn? And what’s gonna happen when they do come?

WM: To step back a moment, can you describe what the favelas are? In my reading of Via Ápia, they’re both places of extreme poverty where basic services like water aren’t guaranteed and, at the same time, kind of utopias that have a unique freedom and sense of community not found in Rio’s richer neighborhoods. 

 
GM: Favelas are quilombos embedded within the metropolis. Quilombos, for those unfamiliar with the term, were and still are places of Black resistance against slavery. A great quilombola thinker named Nego Bispo once told me that favelas are not part of the cities, they exist on the borders of the cities. So from that perspective, Rocinha is not in Rio de Janeiro. It borders the city of Rio. That’s why, within the space of the favela, we live by different rules of social interaction and coexistence. We raise our children differently. We learn from an early age to live less individualistically.

Within the space of the favela, we live by different rules of social interaction and coexistence. We learn from an early age to live less individualistically.

This resistance, this refusal to conform to the dominant patterns of white supremacy, comes at a cost. The stories of the first quilombos, founded by people who escaped enslavement, are marked by violent invasions carried out by the Brazilian state. That same violence continues today in the favelas. On top of the brutal operations by police and the military, there is another form of repression: the denial of basic rights, like access to sanitation.

With that context in mind, I’d say favelas are the places where Afro-descendants can most fully express their culture. But unfortunately, we still pay a very high price for that pursuit of freedom.

WM: There’s a scene near the end of the book where Murilo, Biel, and Douglas—three of the central characters—find a bag with decades old photos of Rocinha. I was struck by their fascination and joy at seeing a piece of their home’s history. A kind of recognition takes place when they look at Rocinha’s past. At the same time, this moment underscores how little they know about that past. The fact that old images of Rocinha are preserved at all seems like a small miracle. I wonder if those pictures might be a metaphor for Via Àpia itself? And more so, why is the history of place in Rocinha so rare and unpreserved? Why are those pictures so exceptional? 

GM: A great Brazilian thinker, Millôr Fernandes, used to say: “Brazil has a great past ahead of it.” In other words, we were built as a nation that ignores its own history. There’s a strong political project rooted in denying our past. All throughout the 20th century, the dominant slogan was “Brazil is the country of the future,” which basically suggested we should stop thinking about what’s already happened and just look forward. So these gaps in historical knowledge aren’t exclusive to the favelas. They’re a problem that cuts across all social classes and territories.

That’s why it’s so important that they find those photographs. Because in that moment, we see the history of that place begin to unfold in front of their eyes. At a time when everything seems to be falling apart, they’re gifted—almost miraculously—with this realization that Rocinha has a history. And that realization makes them think that they too are part of that history, a story that’s still being written.

So yes, I’d say that moment of finding the photos is absolutely a metaphor for the book, both in terms of its ideological foundation and its formal construction.

WM: At a craft level, I was fascinated by the precision each date has in the arc of the book. In one chapter it’s January 8th, in the next it’s February 13th. These swaths of time aren’t seen, but they’re felt in story and character development nonetheless. How did you go about tracking and accounting for events that occur off the page across 5 different character arcs? What did that look like in your writing process? 

GM: When I started putting together the ideas for Via Ápia, I knew from the beginning that I couldn’t work with a single protagonist. I wanted to portray a very specific generational snapshot of young Black people, drug users, whose lives were shaped by that state policy. Each character was designed to help me go deeper into different aspects of that story. My goal was to cross perspectives in order to reach an idea of reality built collectively, rather than through a single point of view. From the very beginning, when I was developing the characters, I had clearly defined roles for each of them. With these clearly drawn archetypes, I felt I could get closer to a collective view of that generation at that moment in time.

My goal was to cross perspectives in order to reach an idea of reality built collectively.

Having to balance five characters really helped me take on the challenge of the book’s timeline and ellipses. I realized that the structure would only work if I could constantly weave the characters’ perspectives together. Like, if something happened to Wesley on a given day, but the next chapter is told from Washington’s point of view, I kept asking myself: how can I bring in the previous chapter through this new perspective? What happened in the time between those days that can carry into the next scene? That also helped me shape each character’s personality, because by crossing perspectives, the book keeps shifting between how each character sees themselves and how they’re seen by others. The same logic applies to the bigger events in the city.

WM: In many ways, there are two sides to the novel: a grand piece about politics, society, and norms, and another that focuses on lived realities. How did you think about balancing the enormous forces buffeting the characters—drugs, police brutality, the scarcity of work, the absence of parental figures with the day to day intimacies, the wants and needs, the simple joy of sitting on the beach or surfing? 

GM: While writing the novel, it was important for me to understand that I wasn’t interested in writing about the police, but about how the arrival of the police affected the life of a community. How that major change in the environment impacted people’s intimacy, disrupted social codes, and gave rise to new fears. 

To do that, I worked with narrative situations where questions of violence remained at the edges, building offscreen tension and, in that way, painted a picture of this shift slowly and carefully. There’s a very different rhythm from the fast-paced action usually expected in stories set in favelas or dealing with urban violence.

As I worked on each chapter, I tried to build a main situation rooted in the characters’ personal world. Then I would weave in elements of the broader social and political changes, letting them collide with the personal. I think the first two thirds of the book work like that, until the political and social forces start crashing into the characters’ lives in a way that makes it impossible to separate the two.

WM: Can you tell me a little about your background coming to writing? When did you realize you were a writer and what did that realization look like?

GM: I grew up surrounded by great storytellers—my grandmothers, my parents, my neighbors. I’ve always loved stories. Maybe that’s why I got into books really early too. My family noticed and started encouraging it, always giving me books and comics. It didn’t take long before I started writing. I must’ve been around nine when I wrote my first poems.

But even though I’d always been close to words, it took me a long time to even consider that I could be a writer. I didn’t know anyone who did that for a living. Most of the books I read were really old, which kind of made writing feel like something only dead people did, laughs. 

Then in 2013, a friend recommended I check out the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP). That’s where I wrote and published my first short stories. I met other readers and writers from favelas all over the city. I found my people. Being part of FLUP was a deep dive into my own identity. Through that process, I started to understand the aesthetic richness I had access to, the language, the stories from the places where I grew up. I began experimenting, bringing the sound and the street stories into the writing. And people really connected with those stories.

I had dropped out of school and was bouncing between all kinds of precarious jobs. In 2015, I published a short story in an anthology and got paid for it. After buying myself an açaí with that money, I decided I was really gonna be a writer.

WM: How does FLUP function as a literary community? And how did it help you dive into your identity? What did it look like? 

In 2015, I published a short story and got paid for it. After buying myself an açaí with that money, I decided I was really gonna be a writer.

GM: FLUP has been active in Rio de Janeiro since 2012. But the cultural impact of this literary festival, which has been committed for years to cultivating new writers and readers in the favelas of Rio, is something that resonates across all of Brazil. FLUP has definitely played a key role in giving visibility to writers from the margins and has contributed to this moment of greater diversity of voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. 

As for diving into my own identity, here’s what I mean: like I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been an avid reader. I’ve always written, too. At the same time, I’ve always lived in favelas. I moved around a lot, but always within different favelas. And until I got involved with FLUP, I saw those two parts of my life — being a reader and being from the favela — as separate. As if one had nothing to do with the other. At FLUP, by meeting other writers and readers who also came from favelas, I had the chance to bring those two worlds together. I realized that my lived experiences, the slang I spoke, the stories I’d grown up with, and my critical perspective shaped by the favela could and should coexist with my knowledge of literature. That was when I stopped trying to emulate distant realities and started writing about the world around me. It was incredibly freeing, and it really raised the quality of my writing.

That was in 2013. While I was going through that internal process, I was also taking part in FLUP’s weekly meetings. Each of those meetings happened in a different favela across the city. Moving through those different neighborhoods, connecting with residents and their stories, and meeting other writers who were thinking and writing about their own territories—all of that was absolutely key to the kind of writer I’ve become over the years.

WM: Your first two books have both been translated into almost a dozen languages. Does the fact of being a writer who gets translated change your perspective now when you begin writing a new project? Has it impacted the way you think of your audience? 

GM: Yes, after The Sun On My Head, I started thinking about how my stories were reaching an international audience, how my language might be translated, and things like that. But those thoughts don’t influence the decision about what my next project will be. I always choose a project based on a need to speak about a specific topic or issue. I believe it’s that sense of truth that allows me to be an author who’s recognized and translated in different countries.

Within the world’s globalization, where everything tends to get pushed toward uniformity and artificiality, working from your own truth, from the intimacy of your questions and thoughts, carries real strength and has the potential to reach readers who are genuinely interested.

When it comes to the readers who follow my work, I feel like there are two main forces that bring this group together. There are the readers who connect with my books through identification, and those who are drawn in by a sense of unfamiliarity. Personally, I think that’s one of the most powerful things about literature—that the same text can reach and engage such different people, for entirely different reasons.

Divorce Made Me Into A One-Armed Scissor

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje

Sometimes I stalk my ex-husband.

I open his socials and sift through his photos. I know their sequence like I know the palm of my hand. Better even, because I can never memorize what my palm looks like, how the life line twirls into the love line, how it begins tight and uniform, but then turns ropey. It scares me to look at it, to trace the lines, to see where they might lead me in years to come. But I know Vlaho’s photos by heart. They start with the most recent ones, his son, who turns six in a week, frowning at a drawing of imaginary monsters; and his daughter, an angelic creature just short of four, with the kind of wispy hair that slips through your hands like corn silk. His lovely wife, a blonde with an oversized nose but gorgeously high cheekbones, laughing into the air on their sailboat.

Once upon a time, he told me he didn’t like blondes. He whispered it in my ear, brushing his fingers through my then long, lush hair. We’d been together for maybe a few months, and I’d asked him what would happen when we broke up. If he would find someone like me, or someone exactly the opposite. “That will never happen,” he said. “Besides, I don’t like blondes.”

Lie.

Lie.

I always get stuck on a single photo. It’s not a photo of their wedding day, or the birth of their first child. In fact, it’s probably the least spectacular photo in the album. They’re not even the main subject—whoever took it aimed for their daughter, in focus in the foreground. But behind, her mother is looking up as my ex-husband is passing her a glass of juice, and they share the look. The one I used to be on the receiving end of. The one that had long ago made me feel like I was a pink diamond carved straight out of a rock. And it’s for her.

I remind myself that this was my decision. I let him go, willingly. But despite reason, the image spreads through me like ink in cold water.

The first thing I hear in the morning is the clanks of a spoon hitting the side of the džezva, the same coffeepot that’s been in our family since I can remember, and then some. Always the same six clanks, in even succession, as my father prepares his Turkish coffee. The sound invades my sleep, and I want to scream, Could we not do this for one fucking day?

Six clanks, and then it takes a couple of minutes for the smell of coffee to crawl under my bedroom door. Despite my earlier grumbling, when the aroma reaches me, I’m grateful for it.

Lying sideways, I stare at the shelves and dressers lining the opposite wall. Every morning I tell myself I’ll pack the rag dolls, the snow globe, the bright red-and-yellow babuška, and other knickknacks, and store them in the attic. They have no business cluttering a grown woman’s room. But they’ve been there since my childhood, and on some level, I’m afraid that if I remove them something bad will happen. As if more bad things could happen to me. I’m thirty-eight, single, barely employed, and living with my dad. Sleeping in the same room I’ve been sleeping in since the day I was born, save for the ten years I shared a room with the love of my life.

Vlaho.

Of course I think of him, imagine where he is, what he’s doing. It’s a compulsion, like being unable to look away from a car wreck. If I still had a therapist, which I probably should, I’m sure she’d tell me I’m slightly obsessed, but I can’t help it, filling my days with thoughts of him the same way I used to fill them with his presence. It’s a source of pain that’s somehow become pleasurable. The kind that reminds me I’m still alive.

I see him lying on his back, in his boxer shorts because he never wears pajamas, Marina’s hand resting on his chest, caressing the place over the heart that once beat for me. Then Tena and Maro jump onto the covers like a baby avalanche, their chubby arms and legs flying every which way until they land in their parents’ embrace, the smell of family rising as they lift the covers to tuck themselves in.

In that moment, despite everything, I’m happy for Vlaho. I am.

I focus on the babuška that my grandmother gave me a long time ago, its plump wooden figure, its bright reds and yellows, the typical Slavic ornamentations. In the eighties, before the Homeland War, almost every household in Croatia had one. Now, it’s just a relic of old times, a forgotten little figurine on a shelf. It’s just a doll, within a doll, within a doll, but there should be two more dolls inside her. I lost them, somewhere, sometime. Now, it’s as hollow as I am, and we stare at each other in mutual understanding.

When I make my way into the living room, Dad is already watching the news. “You won’t believe this, Ivona. Our finance minister wants to raise taxes again. The parasite.”

“Good morning, Dad.” I reach for the džezva and pour coffee into my cup, then add a few drops of almond milk. Bogus milk, my father calls it.

“Seriously, how much do they think we can take? We’re the country with the highest tax rates in the world by now.”

I sit at the dining room table instead of next to him on the couch. His ability to get worked up over events he has no control over can be strangling. Mom was different. She couldn’t care less about politics. Instead, she obsessed over things on a smaller scale. A tear in the couch upholstery, a mark on the hardwood floor. She and Dad canceled each other out beautifully. She couldn’t understand his fuming over state affairs any more than he could understand her boiling over household ones, their respective fires eventually dwindling to embers. Now that she’s gone, there’s nothing to stop him from rambling.

Dad turns the TV off, throws the remote on the couch. “Screw the lot of them. They’re ruining this country, one tax at a time.”

I focus on the garden outside, the bare branches of the hibiscus, and the always green, leafy top of an olive tree swaying in the salty bura wind.

Dad limps around the kitchen counter and pours himself another cup of coffee. It must be his third by now. Per his neurologist, he shouldn’t be drinking more than two cups after his stroke, but I’ve stopped warning him. It falls on deaf ears.

“Where are you off to this morning?” he asks, taking stock of my outfit.

“The bank.”

“Because of Lovorun?”

“Yeah, Lovorun.” Funny how the taste of a word can change with circumstances. Lovorun used to melt on my tongue like honey, a magical place from my childhood where I spent school holidays with Baba—my maternal grandmother—eating grapes and blackberries straight from vines and brambles. A place where things grew, beautiful and strong. For a while after, it turned salty, like grief. Now it tastes like curdled milk.

A few years after Mom died, Dad made a unilateral decision to turn Baba’s old estate into a heritage hotel. “This place has a soul. Tradition and history seep from it,” he said, “and tourists will eat that right up.” Never mind that the renovation ended up chipping away at the very soul of the place, no matter how careful Dad was to preserve it. Turning a humble peasant abode into a luxurious villa will do that to a place.

“I have a meeting with the personal banker. I’ll try to get another extension on our loan,” I say, even though I know the effort will be futile. Vlaho told me as much when we talked the other day, and he should know. He works at the bank and knows its policies inside and out.

Dad nods, his right hand trembling as he raises the cup to his mouth. He steadies it with his left. I avert my gaze, because I know it bothers him when I see all the ways his body is failing him.

Dad used to be a presence one couldn’t ignore. One of those people who would change the energy in the room as soon as they entered. It wasn’t his physical appearance that made people take notice of him, though he is tall. It was his confidence, the way he took up space, claimed it as his own. When he spoke, people listened with gazes of hypnotized cobras.

I didn’t like that aspect of him, the attention he garnered, the opinions he bestowed with little consideration for those opposing ones, but there’s always a subtle pang when I notice the absence of that power in him, when I see how his illness has reduced him to a man who can’t even control his own shaking.

“Did I ever tell you how rampant insolvency was back in the nineties?” he asks.

Of course, he’s told me, not once but so many times we could recite the story in unison. It’s such an old people’s trait, regurgitating past events to the same unfortunate listener over and over again, and he’s not that old.

He launches into the familiar tale of how those banking leeches asked him to declare bankruptcy when he himself was owed money, how they had a bureaucratic, backward way of looking at business because Croatia had just emerged from communism, and many people and companies were struggling with switching to free market. Not Dad, though. He’d been made for capitalism, and when it finally came to Croatia, he took to it like a lung to breath.

Outside, a single ray of sunlight cuts through a cloud and falls on my hands, folded around the cup in front of me. My father’s words blur into the background, and that distinct sense overcomes me, when I’m both inside my body and not there at all, like my skin is a mere husk and I am absent from where I should be inside it. And the thought that always follows: How did I end up here?

All those years ago, I blew out into the world like a dandelion seed looking for a place to take root, the horizon ahead immense and unlimited. And then, somehow, cruelly, I landed right back here, being preached to the same way I used to be preached to when I was eight.

Cruelly, I landed right back here, being preached to the same way I used to be preached to when I was eight.

“I went in for the meeting at the bank with an Excel sheet on a floppy disk.” Dad’s words sharpen in my ear. “None of them used a computer regularly and had no clue how to use Excel. I tossed the floppy onto the table and demanded they check out the numbers. It took them half an hour to find a person who could even open the damn document.” He chuckles, and drones on about how he persuaded the bankers to give him time until he managed to pocket some money from his own debtors, how he convinced them that great things awaited his company, and how they were swayed, partly because of his imposing personality, and partly because of his, then unparalleled, computer skills.

He puts his cup in the sink. “Have you done your prep work?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I run my finger around the rim of my cup, not meeting his eye. Any amount of prep work wouldn’t help us now. Times have changed, I want to say. There are policies and structures in place that weren’t there in the early years of capitalism. But I know better than to voice this. Everything was the hardest, toughest, the most difficult when my father had done it.

Which is not without merit, I guess. Dad kept his construction company alive through the war, when no one in their right mind was building anything. He kept it alive through all manner of financial crises that swell like tsunamis here in Croatia, huge waves sent from elsewhere that leave our economy floundering years after all the other countries have recovered. If he hadn’t had a stroke, I’m sure he would’ve found a way to finish the Lovorun project too. Instead, the task of converting my baba’s old estate into a hotel fell on me. Then the prices ballooned and the project stalled, and now we owe money, and simultaneously need money to finish the project so we can make money to return what we owe.

Dad walks by me on his way back to the living room where a new bout of television-watching is about to commence. He kisses the top of my head. “You’re a smart girl. You’ll do fine.”

Only I’m not. And I won’t.

Potential, people used to say to my parents—teachers, friends, strangers on the street. The girl has so much potential. I used to believe that great things awaited me. I was reading before I’d turned four. I could calculate before I was five. I recall this vividly because my brother paid me to do his math homework when he was in first grade. I would do the adding and subtracting in his workbook and he would pay me in small coins, gum, and Snoopy stickers. I’ll never forget the day my mother found out about our ploy. Before she started yelling and sent me to my room, there was a moment when she looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

I understood then that knowledge bore power. It made people take notice.

The story became a part of the family lore, something my mother complain-bragged about to the three neighbors she always had coffee with. And I became ravenous, hoarding words and their meanings, facts, and trivia. I wanted more of that power, more of that sense of self. Striving became a hook in my chest, always lurching me upward.

But I’ve learned the hard way that book smarts mean nothing here. Neither would street smarts, if I had any. It’s a special blend that works here, the bureaucratic smarts, paired with a talent for wielding connections and bending rules. Better yet if it comes with a penis.

I can’t remember the last time someone said I had potential. But the thing about potential is that it doesn’t go away. If you fail to realize it, you don’t simply lose it. Instead, it sediments inside you, like tar or asbestos, slowly releasing its poison.

Zagreb was at its coldest when Vlaho and I met, on a sleety January night, five months after I’d moved there to study biology. The millennium was still so young that its turn felt like a stake in the ground, a moment that would stabilize the world I’d so often seen slip off its axis.

I was only nineteen, yet the country I had been born in had dissolved, the state I was born in had fought its way back to independence through a bloody war. The currency had changed three times before I turned eleven: Yugoslav dinar to Croatian dinar to Croatian kuna. I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

On top of that had been the broader changes, those of the world in general. Phones having longer and longer cords, until they had no cords at all; computers being contraptions out of sci-fi movies, until they became cubes perched on our desks, getting thinner and sleeker over the years.

And then, of course, the constant changes at home. My parents operating between their three standard settings: togetherness, indifference, and vile fighting. I never knew when I walked through the door after school if I’d find them threatening divorce or laughing over coffee. Me too, morphing over time, from the dutiful daughter always trying to appease them to a rebellious one, until, after the yellow boot incident, I turned into a clammed shell, waiting out the last two years I had to live with them.

Those first months after I moved to Zagreb marked a new start. Everything smelled of freedom and possibility, my lungs stretching out for full inhales, my shoulders relaxing.

I went to classes, met new friends, and partied with the few old ones I had. I ate in student cafeterias redolent of fried chicken, kale, and pasta Bolognese, the smells alone making the space feel overcrowded. In these first months it was easy to believe that I could be a different person, one unaffected by my life back home.

But as the winter tightened its cold grip, the newness of Zagreb started to wear off, and I found myself longing for the stone-built walls of the hometown I’d been so eager to leave, for its blue skies and sea, for its familiar pulse and rhythm. The hole I thought I’d left back in Zadar revealed itself again, and between all the coffee dates and loud student parties and crowded college classes, I couldn’t find a way to weld it shut.

That night in January, my best friend Tara talked me into going out. It was her birthday, and she was throwing a party in a bar in Zagreb’s center. The bar was small and packed with students, Red Hot Chili Peppers pumping through the speakers as we poured cheap beer down our throats. My boyfriend was there, if that’s what I could call him. He was someone I’d been seeing for a month, but I could already tell we weren’t going anywhere. I sat next to him with eyes glazed over as he and his friend droned on about some video game.

Suddenly, “One-Armed Scissor” cut straight through “Californication.”

The room jolted to a halt. Everyone stopped talking and looked toward the stereo behind the counter, where a tall guy with dirty blond hair wearing a gray hoodie was pushing buttons, grinning at his own ingeniousness.

The familiar angry voice yelled the staccato verses through the speakers, reigniting the rebellious spirit of my high school days, and before I could control myself, I was on my feet pushing closer to the stereo. It was instinctual. I wasn’t moving with a plan. There was just this need to come closer to the music, to be in the middle of it. Or perhaps to pull it inside me, to fill myself with it.

When I reached the bar, he was still there, the tall guy in the gray hoodie, his back turned to me. I lifted my voice at the refrain. His voice joined mine as he turned to face me.

The moment condensed.

His face was incandescent, as though it were lit from the inside. The room was otherwise dim and filled with cigarette smoke, and of course people don’t glow, but that’s how he looked to me. There was something in his eyes that offered itself to me. It was so immediate, so intense, it felt almost like voyeurism.

Of course people don’t glow, but that’s how he looked to me.

Like I could see more than I was supposed to, looking into his eyes.

Like I was allowing him to see more than he should, as he looked back into mine.

Time snapped back into place, and we were back in the room, at the party, people and music pulsing around us.

“You know At the Drive-In?” he leaned in to say in my ear over the loud riffs.

“Do I know them? I fucking love them,” I said, the alcohol making me bolder than I was, the profane word moving something in me, him being so close.

“You may have just become my favorite girl,” he said, his words dragging in a singsong accent. I couldn’t pinpoint if it was from Herzegovina, or Neretva Valley, or Dubrovnik. All I could tell was that he was from the south, where tangerines and watermelons grow, where beaches are pebbled, and the sea is turquoise blue. “Vlaho.” He offered me his hand.

Dubrovnik then, I thought, the name of its patron saint typically given only to boys from that region. We shook hands. Skin against skin, the grip lasting too long but not long enough. “Ivona.”

“Do you want to get a beer or something?” he asked, a patch of red igniting his left cheek. I’d never seen someone blush in this particular way.

The song ended. A man, presumably the manager, because he had a pissed-off expression and was mumbling expletives, pushed his way behind Vlaho and turned Red Hot Chili Peppers back on.

“I’d love to,” I said, glancing behind my back to the guy I was dating, who was draining his beer in dull light, and I regretted the words before I even spoke them, “But my boyfriend’s waiting for me.”

Vlaho’s lips turned into a lopsided smile, the electricity of the moment frizzing away with my admission. I turned and walked over to my seat, Vlaho’s stare trailing me like an echo following a sound.

That mistake would haunt me for days. I should’ve gone straight back to my boyfriend and told him we were over. But I waited until we were alone, later that night, to do it properly. To be considerate, polite. It was still in me, then, that need to appease, to not cause commotion or harm. Not that he cared. He just shrugged at my “I don’t think this is working,” and said, “Yeah, I agree.”

That small courtesy might’ve cost me my only chance with Vlaho, and that’s all I could think about a week later, as I was mustering the courage to send him a text. I deleted the fifteenth version of “hi, this is ivona, the at the drive-in girl from last friday,” and before I could challenge myself, I wrote, “send transmission from the one-armed scissor,” and hit send.

The same lyrics we’d sung together that night.

I envisioned the text traveling over Zagreb’s rooftops, through its grimy smog, and into his dorm room. He lived in Cvjetno, Tara had told me when she’d gotten me his number; he was twenty, and studying economics. That was all the intel she’d had, given that he’d been a friend of her friend, not hers.

The minutes passed. I got up, circled my studio like a frantic cockroach in sudden light. I turned the TV on. The Mexican soap opera that always rolled after the noon news filled the room with heated words that made me feel less alone.

I picked up my Cellular and Molecular Biology textbook, but the words were too fuzzy to read. I checked my phone every twenty seconds even though I’d made sure I’d turned the sound on.

Minutes distended into hours.

I got creative, coming up with excuses for why he hadn’t replied. Maybe I had the wrong number. Maybe he didn’t have any money on his phone card. Maybe he was in class and he’d left his phone at the dorm. Maybe someone had stolen his phone.

And then the more agonizing reasons. Maybe he didn’t remember me. Or maybe he did, and he was choosing not to respond. Maybe he read the text and laughed at my audacity, at the thought of the two of us together.

I went back to that night, dissecting it in detail. That moment, when it had all stilled between us, was it real?

I couldn’t tell. I had no idea how that was supposed to feel.

Just a year before, in my senior year in high school, our Croatian teacher had tasked the class with writing an essay on the topic of Shakespeare’s quote “To thine own self be true.” The quote dug into the pain that had lain dormant throughout my teen years, that duality of life I had embraced—the armor offered up to the world, and the gentle essence it was meant to shield. How I’d learned to hide the soft parts of myself, like a crustacean. Writing that essay, I didn’t censor myself. I couldn’t bother to; it was our last high school essay, and the teacher only proofread them anyway. It was not like she would dwell on the meaning behind the words. But when she returned the notebooks to us, there was a note inside mine, right under the grade:

Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly­ intelligent people.

I laid the notebook on my thighs under the desk, ripped the page with her note off, and folded it in a small square to store in my wallet. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, holding my breath as my legs carried me down the corridor. After locking myself in a stall, I pressed my forehead against the cold tiles and struggled not to cry.

I had been hiding for so long I didn’t believe it possible that someone could see me. But someone had. And that felt even worse.

But this had been a coincidental sighting. There was an intentionality to how Vlaho looked at me that night. A curiosity. So much of seeing is in that willingness to look. And, more importantly, it came paired with a feeling that under the careless, messy hair, and tattered Nirvana T-shirt, and love of angry music, he too was someone surprised, maybe even eager, to be seen.

But maybe he’d only been buzzed, and that’s what had glinted in his eyes. Only now I couldn’t unknow how much I wanted it, to find someone like him.

Three hours after hitting send, the hope grew so oppressive, so overwrought in my chest, that I let it out in low, humming sobs. I didn’t cry for Vlaho, not really. I didn’t know him yet. I cried because I was only nineteen and I was already so tired of carrying around that jagged grain of loneliness on the inside that always threatened to cut me if I made a wrong turn. I cried because I had all this love inside me, and it had nowhere to go.

The text sounded. “what do you think it even means?”

Then, another one. “i mean, to send a transmission from a one-armed scissor. what is a one-armed scissor anyway? how does it differ from a two-armed scissor?”

I stared at the message through wet eyes. Then I typed, fingers still trembling, “i don’t think even at the drive in know what it means. but still, in a weird way, it makes sense, right?”

“i like the part about dissecting a trillion sighs,” he wrote.

“and writing to remember,” I wrote back.

The phone started ringing then, his name filling the screen. I turned the TV off, cleared my throat. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he said, and I could see him smiling, pulling fingers through his hair, the way he’d done that night. “I thought this would be easier. Given that each text costs twenty lipa and there are a lot of lines in that song.”

“Smart thinking. True economist talking.”

He laughed. “You’ve done your research, I see. I’m at a disadvantage.”

“That’s a bummer,” I said. “That you didn’t ask about me.”

“Not because I didn’t want to know. But I have this policy of not messing with girls who are . . . spoken for.”

“Well . . . not anymore.”

A beat of electrifying silence. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?” he asked, his words swaying in his southern accent. Relief coursed through me, the first layer of nacre coating that grain of loneliness inside me, smoothing its barbed edges.

7 Books About Women Doing Dirty Jobs

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I went on submission with what would become Wildfire Days, a memoir of my time fighting wildfires in California, a message I received more than once was: “Sorry, books about women in ‘military-like’ professions just don’t sell. People don’t want to read about that.” The implication seemed to be that women’s books should stay more “girlish” to have wide appeal. I am determined to prove that stories about women doing the most technical, filthy, physically arduous, dangerous, and male-dominated jobs are exactly what we should be reading. In a time of backsliding progressive policy, when Roe v. Wade has been repealed and women’s rights and bodies are under attack, it’s more urgent than ever to uplift stories about female diversity and strength. 

Perhaps readers and literary gatekeepers fear such stories will become little more than a litany of woes, the feral moan of the oppressed woman-among-monsters. To be sure, a number of the books on this list detail harassment, exclusion, and even rape. It’s vital that these stories be shared and discussed, because women (and nonbinary and trans people) continue to be subjected to misogyny and mistreatment in many, if not most, male-dominated spaces.

But the dark side of these professions isn’t the whole story. These are books about women finding joy, coming into their prowess, and discovering their place in the world through the toughest jobs. In hard labor, they reclaim their animal selves and find satisfaction, camaraderie, and belonging—even within male dominated groups. Often, the protagonists also grapple with a changing world as global warming, economic instability, and ever-widening inequities make low-paying, weather-dependent jobs increasingly precarious.

These women’s stories, then, are beautifully complex. They’re about ladies who work hard in mysterious, misunderstood industries. They suffer and struggle and can’t find anywhere to pee. Sometimes they’re victimized. And yet, in each of these stories, the women grow stronger than they ever imagined. Their books are about finding strength, resilience, joy, belonging, and so much more in the grittiest, most “masculine” workplaces. 

Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach

I have to admit straightaway that, before reading Thick Skin, I didn’t know exactly what a boilermaker was, but I knew it sounded tough as hell. A boilermaker is a construction welder, which, as Peach’s book humbly demonstrates, is an entirely badass and rather terrifying job (picture being lowered in a basket with a crane to weld a plate onto the side of a massive cruise ship). In this memoir of episodic stories, Peach tracks her many assignments and the progression of her skills as a welder in Canada—where she was based—and on assignment in the U.S. While misogyny is rampant in the male-dominated field of boilermaking, Peach’s approach is even-handed: she shows villains who tell her to “go home” alongside lovable mentors, allowing her male colleagues to be as human as herself. Peach, also a poet, writes beautifully (and humorously too!). I love this one and it deserves more attention than it has thus far received.

Hotshot: A Life on Fire by River Selby

This is the story of Selby’s years as a wildland firefighter on elite hotshot crews throughout the American West. While Selby now identifies as nonbinary, they identified as a woman and were treated as such during their time firefighting, suffering discrimination, sexual harassment, and outright bullying (trigger warnings abound, but it’s important that writers like Selby tell their stories in full). This is far more than a tale of female struggle against adversity; Selby also weaves in a deeply-researched account of fire history, indigenous ecological knowledge, land management and beautiful, affecting scenes that follow their relationship with a cruel, unstable mother. The combination of firefighting action, personal memoir, and rich scientific context makes this a powerful read.

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

This is the tale of a woman who leaves her quintessential Manhattan writer’s life (Lower East Side apartment, heels, and at least four casual non-boyfriends) to start a farm with a man she’s fallen in love with. This book diverges from the others in that Kimball didn’t exactly enter a male-dominated profession; rather, she entered a partnership. But in every other way, Kimball and her beau face the fight of their lives, trying to feed not just themselves but a community of 100 people–members of a subscription program who pick up weekly farm-share boxes year-round. Struggles abound, from endless labor to blizzards to rat infestations. Food itself plays a central role, and Kimball’s descriptions of her meals made my mouth water. The writing is deft and lovely, not a word out of place. I couldn’t put this one down.

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North by Blair Braverman

I had heard of Braverman in the ambient way that anyone into outdoor adventure will know about the token “women in the wild” books. I was prompted to grab a copy because I loved Braverman’s social media presence, in which she chronicles the antics of her sled dogs. The book’s tone is different, less playful, the narrative voice sometimes as severe as the landscapes she inhabits. Braverman returns to Norway—where she studied abroad as a teenager—to run sled dogs and search for herself, “trying to answer private questions about violence and belonging and cold.” Her story is full of danger, action, dogs, and ice, but it’s primarily a tale about the vulnerability of living in a female body, being constantly scrutinized and threatened by men, and living in mostly-male communities. Braverman’s true battle is to feel safe in her own skin.

Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front by Mary Jennings Hegar

“Many don’t think that there are women serving in combat roles. Others think that the women who do serve in combat shrink in fear when the bullets fly. I know differently, and I wanted you to know, too.” Hegar could be writing a manifesto on behalf of all the women on this list. Her memoir tracks heroism on two fronts: first, as an Air Force pilot who, despite sustaining an injury during a medevac mission, saves the lives of her patients and crew; second, as an activist in the battle to end a policy that excluded women from ground combat. I love all the little moments I can identify with, like when Hegar wonders how she’ll pee while flying a helicopter, noting that the men around her can pee in a bottle anytime. But more than that, I love that she puts a name to the invisibility of women in male-dominated fields and the rampant underestimation of their strengths.

My Fishing Life: A Story of the Sea by Ashley Mullenger with Lynne Barrett-Lee

A memoir from one of the few female commercial “fishermen” in the UK, this book follows Mullenger’s struggle to learn the trade under the tutelage of her benevolent skipper, Nigel. I knew fishing was filthy, smelly work because I almost married into an oyster farming family, but I hadn’t considered just how dangerous the profession could be. Mullenger illustrates how a line of pots dragged off the end of the boat can snag your ankle, pull you into the ocean, and drown you—not to mention weather, underwater hazards, and all the other ways the sea can take a life. Her story is full of action, helpful explication of the mechanics of the work, vivid landscapes (waterscapes?), and endearing characters. My fellow Yanks may be as charmed as I was by the Britishness of the prose, complete with crab bait that’s “a bit whiffy” and a town named Wells-next-the-Sea. Color me fascinated and inspired. I mean, sorry, colour.

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press

Press is our honorary man here; I decided I would allow about as many men on this list, percentage-wise, as there are women on the average wildland firefighting crew. But with any luck, we won’t make Press feel tokenized. His book is a smart, deeply-reported study of “essential” jobs in America, so many of which fall to women, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. Press defines “dirty work” in terms of morally-ambiguous, underappreciated tasks like animal slaughter. The financial precarity and physical toll of such jobs can leave scars seen and unseen, including PTSD and the invisible “moral injury” of having done something, out of necessity, that doesn’t align with one’s ethics. 

Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I was nine, I wanted to be Harriet the Spy. I stalked my neighbors with the same misplaced confidence Harriet brought to her rounds on the Upper East Side, clutching a Mead composition book and scribbling down whether Mrs. Pine smoked in the house (she did) and if the mailman liked cats (he didn’t). I told myself I was practicing observation and discipline, preparing myself for the writer’s life, or whatever my understanding was of it at the time.

I didn’t yet understand that this was the central act of writing, especially for girls. That the journal—often dismissed as “just a diary”—wasn’t merely a space for confessional wallowing, but a scaffolding for becoming, a place to contain a life in progress. I didn’t know that this habit I began in childhood—one that I’ve continued through adolescence, motherhood, grief, addiction, and recovery—was part of a lineage. To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.

To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.


Lately, it feels like the world has finally caught up to the journal girl. There’s a resurgence of interest in diaries and notebooks as both literary practice and cultural force, particularly among women, queer writers, and others who’ve long been dismissed as “too personal.” There is also a distinct shift from the oversharing of the early-2010s blogosphere toward something more distilled: emotional depth endures, but it’s no longer being performed. It arrives gently, having been lived through first.

Originally launched as a pandemic-era online project, “The Isolation Journals” is one such example. It began as a daily journaling initiative created by Suleika Jaouad to help people find meaning through writing during uncertain times and has since grown into a creative community of more than a quarter of a million people. In the spring of 2025, the project expanded into print with The Book of Alchemy, a hybrid of memoir and creative prompts that weaves together Jaouad’s reflections on journaling and creativity with contributions from the vibrant community she helped cultivate.

Journals offer different portraits of the creative self depending on how (and why) they’re made public. Some, like Jaouad’s, emerge accidentally or posthumously, revealing a rawness the writer never intended to share.

Joan Didion’s Notes to John, published posthumously, is of the latter variety. The book pulls from her private notebooks where she recorded detailed conversations with her psychiatrist. It gives us a Didion voice stripped of its signature detachment—unguarded, repetitive, almost childlike in its grief as she describes difficulties with her daughter and struggles around her work.

In yet another iteration, Kelly McMasters’ Substack series, Show Me Your Diary, creates a living, intentional conversation about the role of diaries in creative life. Each installment invites a writer to reflect on their personal journaling habits and history through a set of thoughtful questions, paired with photographs of their actual notebooks. The series showcases journals as windows into the mess and method of each writer’s mind, revealing an unfiltered backdrop to their creative world.

Even pop culture has caught the scent. Chappell Roan, following both her VMA and Grammy wins, read her acceptance speeches from her diary, indicating that she’d written them ahead of time—just in case. It felt historic to watch her place her Grammy on the floor so she could hold her butter-yellow notebook with both hands. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the journal girl ethos: hope, ambition, and an almost ceremonial belief in the power of the page.

This sensibility is reverberating in music as well, where intimacy and raw vulnerability are making a quieter, more interior return. Take Sophie Hunter—a rising artist whose lo-fi, lyrically driven pop evokes the texture of diary entries. Her songs ache with lines that feel written first for herself, only later offered to an audience.

What’s remarkable about this moment is not just that people are journaling, but the journal is moving beyond its traditional role as a warm-up for “real” writing or a quirky affectation. It’s finally getting the spotlight as a site of art and inquiry unto itself. Notebooks are being published with less polish, less shame. Readers seem hungry for texture, and for the granular mess of a consciousness unfolding in real time.

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. It comes at a time when self-expression has been flattened into brand. On social media, every caption, image, and story carries the pressure to be aesthetic, monetized, and shareable. We’re encouraged to perform authenticity rather than live it. Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy. And paradoxically, that privacy is what makes it feel more honest—and more valuable—when shared.

Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy.

I recently participated in a journaling workshop led by Amy Shearn through the Writing Co-Lab. Each week as a group we read excerpts of the diaries of other writers, not for their prose, but for their patterns. We delved into selections from the notebooks of Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Octavia Butler. We read them not as drafts but as documents of self-construction. Woolf tracked her daily rhythms with obsessive precision, toggling between household minutiae and metaphysical despair. Ernaux wrote in bursts, urgently trying to pin time to the page. Butler filled her notebooks with affirmations and imperatives: “I write bestselling novels. My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!”

The magic isn’t in the polish of these writers’ journaling, but in the persistence. Each writer, in her way, was narrating herself into being.

Of course, there is a long tradition of belittling this kind of narration. The journal girl has always been culturally suspect. She’s been framed as too sensitive, too self-absorbed, too inconsistent. Her subject—herself—considered too boring, too indulgent, too much. We’ve long internalized the idea that the personal is frivolous unless made universal, and even then, only if filtered through irony or male detachment. But what happens when we refuse to filter? What if we take the journal girl seriously?

Didion wrote with surgical detachment in her famously reserved essays. But in the 46 diary entries that comprise Notes to John, each of which are addressed to her husband after his sudden death, her voice frays. “I sat down and immediately began to cry,” she writes. “‘What’s on your mind,’ Dr. MacKinnon asked. I said I didn’t know. I rarely cried. In fact I never cried in crises. I just found it very difficult to sit down facing somebody and talk.” This is not just recording. It’s raw admittance. The journal, here, is not a mere routine, it’s a refuge.

When my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, I didn’t begin processing the trauma by writing an essay. In the early days of her treatment, I wrote in my journal. I catalogued medications, smells, beeping machines, nurses I liked, nurses I suspected were judging me. I wrote about how my daughter’s face changed shape during pulses of steroids, and about the baby in the room next door whose parents I never saw. I wasn’t trying to be profound—my notebook was a place to pour out what I didn’t know how to speak aloud. It was a place without an audience, without polish, and most importantly, without the pressure to be fine.

As I’ve been working on a book about our cancer years, I’ve gone back and read those early entries spread across physical journals and, as we spent more time in the hospital, my phone’s notes app. The writings are disjointed, repetitive, ugly in places—fragmented lists, pages blotched with tears—but they hold a feral truth I couldn’t fake. They don’t just remind me of what happened—they reveal what I didn’t then understand. I can trace the path of my thinking during that crisis, peek through the window into that past version of myself. That’s the other function of the journal: it doesn’t just record your thoughts; it gives them room to form.

Of course, there’s risk in opening that private space to others. Publishing a journal, or even quoting from one, means forfeiting some of its power. Vulnerability becomes commodity. You’re no longer writing in the dark, you’re curating. McMasters touches on this through her interview series. By asking writers to share their diaries, she is also asking them to decide what gets left in and what gets cut in the curation of their most private thoughts. These are especially sharp questions for women, who’ve long been expected to share their pain (and just as often punished for it.) We valorize the brave confessor until her honesty becomes inconvenient.

There’s power, too, in reclaiming the journal as literature—not as spectacle, but as form. In a 2021 interview with NPR, Suleika Jaouad shared, “Journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.” What would it mean to believe in the journal as the work, and by extension, to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?

What would it mean to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?

Substack has become a sort of public diary, a digital throwback to the messy vitality of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writers post dispatches that read like letters, lists, fragments. There’s an appetite for first-person writing that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, something between the tweet and the essay—something more raw and alive.

At the same time, younger creators are rejecting the pressure for constant polish. On TikTok and YouTube, lo-fi video diaries abound. You’ll find soft-spoken narrations, overhead shots of annotated pages, and girls whispering aloud lines they’ve just written. A new visual grammar of the diary is forming—one that prizes immediacy over perfection. The journal girl, once derided, is now an aesthetic. You can buy pre-distressed notebooks and faux-vintage pens. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to bullet journaling, “aesthetic routines,” and stationery hauls. This commodification is both frustrating and fascinating. On the one hand, it risks flattening something deeply personal into a lifestyle accessory. On the other, it’s a sign that something about the journal girl—her mess, her earnestness—has struck a nerve.

Maybe it’s because she offers an alternative to the endless performance of the internet. Maybe it’s because she reminds us that we’re allowed to write things we’ll never publish. Maybe it’s because she believes, so radically, that her life is worth documenting.

I see this in my own daughter, now 13. She keeps a blue-covered journal in the drawer of her nightstand, the metal spiral of its binding stretched and unraveling. When I go into her room to say goodnight, I often find her propped against her headboard, her face a mask of concentration. I feel the ache of recognition, and I wonder what she’s discovering in those pages—what truths she’s unearthing about herself, what small wounds she’s tending. I imagine she’s building a map of her inner world, one line at a time. In a world that will expect her to perform or edit herself into palatability, I hope her journal is a place where she can be whole.

When I look back at the journals I kept as a girl, I’m struck by how little I held back. There’s something embarrassing about the openness, but also enviable. I hadn’t yet learned to second-guess every sentence. I wrote because I wanted to understand something, not because I wanted to be understood. That’s what I see in the journals of Didion, Woolf, Butler. Their journals are not just the seeds of books to come, but whole selves in process: the page as confidante, as experiment, and as mirror.

In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.

15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Readers, we are living in unprecedented times. Funding for the arts and education is being slashed, ICE agents infiltrate our communities, and our rights are constantly under attack. It is a dark time in America, but literature has always been a beacon of hope: Even in telling tragic stories, writers resist. We resist the impulse of complacency. We resist the idea that our stories don’t matter. 

In the following fifteen books from small press, resistance is a theme, whether against capitalism, toxic family structures, being overtaken by grief, or repressive regimes. Some of these books carry a lightness, and some are tragic. Each one reminds us of why it matters to create. 

Running Wild Press: Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld

Zoe Rasmussen is the wife of a powerful energy executive, and even though she has misgivings about what her husband does for a living, she stays with him for the economic stability he provides to her and their daughter. Her friend Justine is a journalist who has suffered the terrible loss of her own daughter, and the women also bond over their feelings about climate justice. When Justine is ensnared by Project Nemesis, an all-female group of eco-terrorists, she and Zoe are exposed to a violent, high stakes world where homemade bombs and targeted kidnappings are part of the norm. As Rasmussen Energy seeks to break ground on a nuclear power plant, and the Nemesis collective ramps up, both women collide with elements of their past that haunt them. A powerful page-turner.

Hub City Press: Plum by Andy Anderegg

J and her older brother M grow up together in an abusive household, and they are bonded by the betrayal of their parents. They make plans to leave as soon as M gets his driver’s license, but nothing goes to plan, and J is left on her own. She was a child who had grown-up responsibilities like making dinner, a tween who learned to play along to fit in at school, a teenager who became an influencer with her own money, and as she enters young-adulthood, gains control over her destiny. Yet, J does not forget her brother, and works through complicated feelings about their separation. Plum is an intimate novel that speaks to generational trauma, the way children are failed by adults, and the power of a girl who dares to survive.

Autumn House Press: I Have Not Considered Consequences by Sherrie Flick

A bear holds its heart in its paws, offering it to a hiker; a bear takes vitamin D supplements that messes with its sleep; a third-grade classroom sees a bear outside their window and they, including the teacher, solemnly do not breathe a word out of their collective fear and awe; a woman admits she is, actually, something of the bear: it is her heart she is trying to give. In this collection of short, flash, and micro-fictions, the world turns on both the small pedestrian and large absurd moments, and the people—whether children or lovers or a woman who just wanted a kitten but is instead pregnant and soaking in the bathtub—are all infused with a sense of longing. Flick’s characters know they need something, but aren’t always sure what it is. A case study of the emotional impact possible in the short form.

New Door Books: The Blue Door by Janice Deal

Flo is a social worker by training who now works in an upscale grocery store in the American southwest. Her daughter, Teddy, was sentenced to a juvenile detention facility for a violent crime when they were living in northern Illinois; slowly, they are mending the rift that opened between them. Flo feels parental guilt. Teddy is distant. In the meantime, Flo’s dog has escaped her apartment, and she is on a day-long journey to find him. As she walks, she is flooded by memory of Teddy as a child, retells (and amends) the fairy-tale her own mother used to tell to her, and tries to reckon with the recent death of a dear friend who was one of the only people who supported them when Teddy was convicted. Written with emotional depth, The Blue Door is infused with empathy.

West Virginia University Press: north by north/west by Chris Campanioni

The seminal 1959 Hitchcock film North by Northwest centers on a case of mistaken identity; Campanioni’s hybrid work of the same name (with different punctuation) also focuses on identity, though Campanioni’s is not mistaken: he is seeking to understand. At the core of this hybrid non-fiction work is the concept of exile; as the son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, his very life is shaped by the impacts of the Cold War. Here is a book where discourse around Wittgenstein, selfies, and Google Maps can appear on the same page and track perfectly; here is a book that can dive into historical events, with dates and documentation, and still feel very personal. In north by north/west, Campanioni offers readers a new kind of origin story.

Tin House Books: Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh

In Foreign Fruit, Katie Goh maps her personal history alongside that of the orange. Originating in Asia, which is also Goh’s ancestral homeland, the orange fruit has a complex history of cultivation, migration, and multi-cultural significance. Goh’s deep research into the citrus that traces back to the Himalayan foothills works in tandem with her inquiry into her own Chinese and Malaysian heritage—and her own family tree is just as branched. Goh’s prose is lyrical and deft as she draws parallels from the plagues carried along the Silk Roads to the Covid pandemic, and as she links the oranges we have in supermarkets today with her own story. As a text, Foreign Fruit is smart and satisfying. As a memoir, it is breathtaking. 

SFWP: After Pearl by Stephen G. Eoannou

Nicholas Bishop is a private detective living out of a hotel, and his success is deeply hampered by his alcoholism. As Nazism sweeps across Europe, and in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, anti-Semitism surfaces in Buffalo, New York. The office of one of Bishop’s associates—a Jewish attorney—is repeatedly vandalized. All the while, local nightclub singer Pearl DeGaye has gone missing, and Bishop is a suspect. He is also struggling desperately with the need to drink, and is only holding it together with the help of his assistant, Gia. Packed with made men, corrupt politicians, and philandering husbands with socialite wives, After Pearl is a throw-back noir with a literary twist. While Eoannou’s Bishop is a deeply flawed man, we root for him anyway.  

Buckrider Books: Drinking the Ocean by Saad Omar Khan

Murad and Sofi are university students when they meet, and both are trying to figure out who they will be in the world. Sofi is haunted by the death of her brother, and Murad is beginning to wrestle with what Islam means to him. While Murad has romantic feelings toward Sofi, she does not reciprocate, and they take a break. Drinking the Ocean follows their stories, both before and after their split, including a chance encounter in Toronto, as their paths run both parallel and diverge, and they both must understand what it means, personally, to be Muslim in modern London and Toronto. An artfully meditative novel, Khan captures highly personal matters of faith, complex relationship dynamics, and a deep sense of longing in this beautifully written debut. 

Dzanc Books: Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm

When Louise is diagnosed with the same terminal neurological disease her mother died from, she is determined to spare her immediate family from watching a slow decline. Louise has built a life with her husband of twenty years, Leon, and has a close relationship with their daughter Lydia. In an attempt to protect them both from the pain Louise experienced as her own mother was physically ravaged by disease, she moves to a kibbutz in Israel where she has kin. Yet, instead of saving her husband and daughter, who is just a teen when Louise leaves, from the trauma of extended illness and caregiving, she creates a gaping emotional hole. This novel explores the complicated choices we make when trying to protect the people we love—and ourselves. 

Betty Books: The Boat Not Taken by Joanna Choi Kalbus

Part of the land-owning gentry, the Choi family fled Korea as it was partitioned between north and south, a 1945 Cold War borderline drawn under the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union—and they had already fled once before, to China, when Korea was under Japanese occupation. Caught in the aftermaths of multiple wars, Kalbus lived in tenuous housing and refugee camps, until she and her mother made their way to Los Angeles. This memoir details both the struggles and the joys Kalbus and her mother experience in LA, and how they make their way. At times disarmingly funny, there remains the fact that as someone from what is now North Korea, even decades later, she cannot go home. With notes of unspoken violence and a chorus of resilience, The Boat Not Taken shines with Kalbus’s voice. 

Regal House: Duet for One by Martha Anne Toll

When Adele Pearl—half of the renowned piano duet Pearl and Pearl—dies from cancer, her son Adam is left dealing with the loss as he watches his father—the other half of the duet—keening with the absence of both a wife and professional collaborator. As Adam works through his grief, he examines both his relationship with his mother and the romantic relationships with other women in his life, all of which are suffused with a kind of emptiness. A talented violin player in his own right, Adam starts to question how the musical ambitions of his parents impacted him. When a woman he used to care deeply for resurfaces in his life, his feelings are further complicated. A thoughtfully crafted and deftly layered novel that offers a nuanced look at encores, and at love.

Rejection Letters Press: Freelance by Kevin M. Kearney

After Simon barely graduates from his elite private school in Philadelphia, he starts driving for HYPR, a ride-sharing app. Because his most meaningful romantic relationship to date is with a cam girl, he already knows how the internet infiltrates real-life. And, already, the HYPR app seems to know too much about him. Yet, as his roommates, other drivers, and a city council-person begin agitating against HYPR’s labor practices, Simon doubles down. He takes a financial incentive and drives even more to keep up with the terms of his payout—even when it’s starting to become clear that certain passenger matches are absolutely not coincidences. A novel that grapples with the ramifications of the gig economy in late-stage capitalism and the ever-growing tension between a life lived and a life lived via a screen, Freelance is an astute cautionary tale. 

Book*hug Press: Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber

Somewhere in Toronto, a high school counselor has a new job, having fled her last posting in Colorado, after having left her home state of California. The counselor, Iris, takes a special interest in the speaker of this hybrid novel, who is technically an adult at eighteen, but also clearly a child in terms of power dynamics. The speaker believes she is in love, and the novel unfolds in fragments of longing, confusion, and journal entries. In addressing questions of consent and abuse, Schreiber unpacks the very complicated experiences of a young woman’s sexuality in the wake of a mental health crisis deeply exacerbated by being groomed. Iris and the Dead is uncomfortable in the way it feels so true, and perfect in the way its speaker finds her own voice.

Autofocus: Out There in the Dark by Katharine Coldiron

In this collection of braided essays that employ classic films like Apocalypse Now and The Sound of Music as a foundation, Katharine Coldiron looks at her own life with a cinematic scope. She works on a horse farm with a difficult but loveable steed named Borges, she undergoes complex dental work because of a childhood illness, she wonders what her father is not telling her about his time in Vietnam. All the while, Last Tango in Paris plays in the background, and the image of an older Marlon Brando is juxtaposed against him as a young man in A Streetcar Named Desire. Neither a memoir nor a book of film criticism, Coldiron succeeds in pulling together the moments that make our own life feel as if we are in a movie—and in this case, it’s an exceptionally interesting one. 

Columbia University Press: The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup, translated by Christopher Peacock

In 1950s Tibet, Alak Drong is the reincarnate lama, and even he is not above informing on other inmates in the labor camp. Such is the culture of fear, surveillance, and violence imposed by the Chinese occupation. The novel details the horrors of the camps many Tibetans were sent to after a failed uprising in 1958, and it also shows that in the face of so much cultural, familial, and environmental destruction, life outside the camps was often not much better. The Red Wind Howls excavates a period of particular cruelty in the Mao regime—Tibetans sentenced to hard labor, ethnic Chinese experiencing famine. It is so desperate, even holy Alak Drong is fallible. Banned in China, The Red Wind Howls was long only available on the black market. Tsering Döndrup deserves to be read.

A Miscarriage Is a Labyrinth with a Monster at Its Heart

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The Deer by Nandi Rose

We make the slow crawl up the Taconic. It’s a late December evening at the tail end of 2021, and a fog has rolled in, wet and white. Z grips the wheel and steers us through it with grace, the skin pulled taut over the broken bones that never set properly in his right hand. Inside the car, the hot air blasts my feet. Some comedian is talking on a podcast, but I’m only half-listening, the jokes landing like snow, immediately dissolving inside the warmth we’ve made.

We are alone on the road, and then we are not.

I see him first. From the wooded median between the lanes comes a floating chandelier, a deer lighting the world with his antlers. He emerges from the fog like a myth. The comedian is laughing and the animal is running and all I can say is Z’s name—one short syllable—before he sees the deer too. He turns the wheel, but it’s unavoidable. We collide, bumper on bone. The impact—dull and furred and sudden—is what I will remember the most.

The collision happens on our way home from Christmas in New Jersey. Sitting in the passenger seat, I can feel that I’m still bleeding. It’s been three weeks since the miscarriage. A mauve-brown pulp, menacing as a hex, looms up at me each time I check my underwear. Fittingly, the weather has been strange all month, prone to sudden belches of pea soup fog, swirling like a cauldron with something foul. Sometimes the sun’s rays try to push out from behind so the fog seems lit from within. Like it has some spirit trapped inside, struggling to be released.

As it turns out, holidays don’t stop happening when you’re grieving. The festive cheer carries on. The bright lights mock and twinkle. I spent Christmas on the couch sipping champagne cocktails I didn’t want to be sipping, talking to anyone who would listen about my grief. I always seem to want to share my underworld, to ferry others there—not because I’m morbid but because I find it is the most honest place we can meet. It’s as if we all assume our actual forms when flattened by loss, and there is a sense of relief when we can finally recognize each other’s true faces. 

The deer appears everywhere in mythology and fantasy, from the Greek myth of Actaeon—transformed into a stag as punishment by the goddess Artemis—to Miyazaki’s Deer God in Princess Mononoke. It is often a symbol of both reverential beauty and extreme vulnerability, susceptible to violence: Actaeon torn to shreds by his own hounds, the Deer God shot by a power-hungry politician. In many of these stories, the deer shows up like a divine missive, capable of bestowing blessings and ushering in extraordinary transformations. To kill it, then, is not only a grave transgression but an act of self-sabotage.

I have felt drawn to deer all my life. Wide-eyed, fragile, unwittingly struck by their fate, they feel like kin. All of us just passing through, hoping not to get hit. Once in college, I dressed as a stag for Halloween, with a fringed leather vest and elaborate pipe-cleaner antlers that kept getting tangled in the dorm’s string lights. Later, once I’d moved to New York and started marking my life on my limbs, I nearly inked a stag head on my bicep. I kept reapplying a fake tattoo from a book of deer silhouettes, testing out the impact. Part of me thinks that even though I never got it permanently done, the image imprinted somehow, shadowing my skin.

These days, there’s one family of deer that grazes our backyard year-round. They paw at fallen birdseed in spring and snap at the citrus of hemlock needles come winter. Of course, I can’t be sure it’s the same family each time, but I like to think they return, that our home is theirs too. They come down from the train tracks, clacking at the rocks with cloven hooves, or up the slope from the river.

But tonight there is only one stag, and he runs toward us with a force I cannot stop. I am just a passenger in the drive toward his death.

I am just a passenger in the drive toward his death.

My body has always been more than my body. As a singer, my body is my instrument. Air funnels up from the diaphragm, ripples across the vocal chords like the wind that rakes the salt flats, and out pours a new form: sound, tone, melody. 

It requires attention and fine-tuning. It requires a sensitivity that sometimes drives me crazy—the sprays and lozenges and warm-up exercises, the steams, teas, and trills. And still, far too often, I’ve gotten sick right before a show. 

At least you can still play the drums when you have a head cold, I’ve often said sullenly to Z. He and I have been playing music together for years. It’s how we met, the summer after college, playing in an indie rock band. I had just graduated with a major in music, specializing in classical singing, but decided not to go the choral route like some of my classmates. I craved the hot lights of a rock club, the spit and fire of a microphone grate shoved right against my mouth. So instead, I spent that first sweaty summer practicing in a New Jersey basement with the band, empty cans of Natty Ice rattling with the resonance of every snare hit, before we moved to Brooklyn to try to make it big.

Z broke his hand once just before the start of a tour and still managed to perform, dazzling audiences of young punks with his one-handed maneuvers. And yet, as a singer, a single cold could flatten me. Every time my body buckles just before a big moment, it feels like a betrayal.

But never have I felt so betrayed by my own body as when it was tricked by death.

Sometimes it just happens: the chromosomes don’t line up, the hormones don’t rise. You get an infection, you get high blood pressure, you get unlucky. This can happen a few weeks into gestation or five months or nine. The tiniest misalignment means the life is not viable. It means pulling out the weft of the dream you’ve been weaving, watching it drain from your body in dark threads. It is miraculous, then, that any of us are here. The word “miracle” shares a root with the word “mirror”—the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder or admire—conjuring up that astonishing feeling of seeing yourself reflected back at you and thinking, face, self, alive. 

In the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, there is a poignant allegory for the miracle of human conception. The story goes, a one-eyed turtle lives deep in the ocean and only comes up for air once every one hundred years. Floating on the surface of the water, tossed by the waves, is a piece of driftwood with a hole in it. The sutra asks, what is the likelihood that the half-blind turtle, in its infrequent surfacing, in all that ocean, will emerge inside the hole? The answer: even likelier than the possibility of being born in this human form.

One spring morning a couple of years ago, a doe and her fawn entered the yard. I was sitting on the patio in my pajamas drinking coffee. There were clumps of stinging nettles coming up at the edge of our property line, a lone daffodil beside the compost. The deer stepped around them, moving unhurriedly through the grass, their bodies soft with a sense of privacy. They didn’t know I was there. But the second I reached for my mug, awareness poured into their forms like cement. They tensed, grew rigid as statues. Instinctively, I put a hand to my heart and bowed my head. You are safe, I thought. I will do you no harm.

After a moment, the mother seemed to understand, relaxed, and went back to her snack of mulch. But the fawn became curious. She took a step toward me and bowed her head in response. I held her black gaze, barely breathing, and bowed back. Again, she lowered her head and shortened the distance between us. 

Step, bow. 

Step, bow. 

It went on like this until the fawn was mere feet from me. My fingers began to tremble, imagining stroking the silk between her eyes—but just then, a truck roared past, and the spell was broken. The baby spooked. White tails wagging like the heart of a flame, the two deer jumped in tandem into the brush and were gone.

When we talk about miracles, what we’re really talking about is chance. Through some serendipitous conjunction of elements, we are here, and we could so easily not have been. Chance hums in the background like a live wire, full of potential charge. 

Death, like life, also deals in chance. It was chance that led us to cross paths with the stag in the moment he veered out from the median. It felt like a miracle we didn’t die. What wild odds, that it was us who hit that one wild animal, that it was that one animal that was meant to die on the hood of our car.

This is what I try to remember when I find it unbearable, in the aftermath of the miscarriage, to get through another day. I remind myself how extraordinary and precious life is, how I should just be grateful to be here, living in this miraculous moment. But there are times in my grief when the moment is like a house on fire. Or like a black door, shut. It’s hard to live in it when the moment is so inhospitable.

There are times in my grief when the moment is like a house on fire.

Just after we started trying for a baby, I went out with friends one night. It was a mild autumn evening, the hours still long, streaks of lemon light persisting in the darkening sky. I knew it wasn’t likely I was pregnant that cycle—I had only just gotten off birth control and was told the hormones needed time to resettle—so I had a few drinks, then a few more. Later, I sat crying in the bathroom, worried about what I’d done on the off chance that I was carrying the barest beginnings of a child. Please don’t come yet, I begged the unborn soul, imagining them circling, looking for a way in. I’m not hospitable.

There was no child that month, but the next month there was. Two months after that, there was nothing at all but fistfuls of thread, leaving me, leaving me.

Later, I learn that Hades, Greek god of the Underworld, was known as The Hospitable One. When the dead arrived at his gates, he welcomed them and made them feel at home. An immaculate host, a loving caretaker, preparing the eternal resting place for their lost souls.

Two weeks into lockdown, in March 2020, I released an album called The Caretaker under my artist name, Half Waif. To celebrate, Z and I decorated our living room with blinking string lights and battery-powered candles, mounted an external USB camera, and invited the world into our home for a live-streamed set. Z played the drums, and I sang and hammered away on the baby grand piano that sat in the corner like a fat black widow.

Despite the fact that for months, we had watched the virus spread on the news, overtaking countries across Asia and Europe, it felt like everything unraveled so fast. One minute, we were rehearsing in a Brooklyn basement for a big release show in New York, and the next we were fleeing the city, driving fast up the Taconic, pausing only to hit the 24-hour Price Chopper at 11pm, where the shelves of toilet paper had already been ransacked. We were scared and numb, and like so many others, we were out of a job. The tours we’d booked in the US and Europe were canceled. Everything was shut down. 

But there was a part of me that wasn’t sad about it. It was a time of tangled emotions that took on a complexity of flavor: notes of disappointment sat on the tongue alongside the saffron-sharp taste of relief. I’d always had a lot of anxiety about touring, and the older I got, the less sustainable it felt. Z and I often said that it wasn’t the shows we got paid for when we went on tour—it was the other 23 hours of every day, when we’d haul heavy gear in and out of the back of the van, Tetrising the shapes to fit, and wolf down meals of sad vegetarian sandwiches or gut-bomb burritos during pit stops. Waking on the scratchy, hair-ridden sheets of cheap motels and not remembering where we were. Killing time in random towns, another coffeeshop, another bookstore. Driving and driving and driving through all hours, all weather conditions, all states, passing days in cramped, crumb-filled seats, lonely as an island.

Late one night after a show in Denver, we were winding through the icy outer reaches of the Rocky Mountains, trying to make some progress on the long drive to Salt Lake City. I was sitting in the backseat scrolling on my phone when suddenly, I felt the 15-passenger van swerve so hard, I swear it went up on two wheels. Coming around a bend, our headlights had illuminated a struck elk lying in the middle of the road, still alive and heaving with labored breath.

We weren’t the first to encounter the elk on that dark road. We missed it by inches, a hair’s breadth from death.

Has this come to punish me, or has it come to awaken me? 

The question rises in my mind like an echo in the seconds after Z and I collide with the flying chandelier, extinguishing its light. I had asked the same one three weeks earlier while I lay on a towel, bleeding out like an animal.

I knew our chances. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. My own mother had two before she had me, and Z’s mother had one before him. It is tragically common, people are quick to tell you. But what struck me the night it happened to me—the tang of blood souring the air—was how horrific it was. How gory. How could something so common be so brutal? 

“Miscarriage” is too clinical a term for it. It’s a closed-door, a private ward of a word. I wanted a word for Z’s red basketball shorts that I wore over a thick maxi pad that night, the red on red when the blood soaked through. I wanted a word for the feeling of his body against mine in the minutes after we understood what was happening, a word for my need as I fell into the solidity of him, disbelieving, dissolving, destroyed. I wanted a word for the false cheer in the texts we sent out to everyone we’d told: we’re so grateful we got to be this soul’s parents, even for a brief time! “Miscarriage” is a single-room word, finite, enclosed. The reality was a labyrinth with a monster at its heart.

How could something so common be so brutal?

Like so many others, Z and I got into birdwatching during lockdown. We put up feeders and downloaded Cornell’s Merlin app to identify the visitors to our yard. When we learned to recognize and name all those, we started venturing out in search of new birds. We were addicted to finding these “lifers,” the term given to a bird when you see it for the first time in your life.

One day, we came up with a silly phrase while looking for lifers on our walk. A woodcock, perhaps, doing its spiral spring mating dance, or one of the many outrageous migrating warblers—the Blackburnian with its punk-rock streaks of orange and black, the banana-bright Magnolia with its drizzle of dark neck feathers. You gotta squeeze the juice out of chance, we’d say, training our binoculars on the trees. What we meant was, we might not see any life at all, but still it’s worth a shot. As if chance was a lemon. As if we could make something out of it even if we never got what we wanted.

When you’re trying to make it as a musician, you become familiar with chance. You understand that not everyone will break through. You receive the requisite advice from the adults around you to “get a real job.” You roll the dice. You move to Brooklyn after graduation. You work random jobs—a bookkeeper, a cheesemonger, a Park Slope nanny. You eat lettuce for dinner, eat peanut butter for dinner, cry when the father of the girl you nanny forgets to hand you forty dollars when he comes home, because you were planning to use it to buy a real meal. You play shows in fire hazard basements, in flower shops, in coffee shops, in skate parks, in bars, in any town that will have you: Watertown, Muncie, Bar Harbor, Kalamazoo. You pay your dues. You cut your teeth. And like the first baby teeth cutting through the gums, it is a painful process of becoming. Teeth for chewing, teeth for baring, teeth for sharpening and tearing into the heart of the world. You want it so much. You watch other bands around the city excel and get signed, you wonder if it will ever be your turn. You keep playing the slots: another show, another album, another song. Will this be the one? Your number does not get called. You crank the handle again. You want it so much. Will this be the one? You crank the handle again. Another show. Another song. A lemon, a lemon, a heart.

We leave the stag dying on the side of the road and drive on in silence. I worry that somehow the deer family that visits us will know what we’ve done, that they’ll sense the shift in our allegiance and we’ll no longer be a safe clearing in which to graze. I wonder if the fawn will ever draw near me with her liquid eyes again.

When we get home, Z examines the damage to the car while I go inside, the thud still echoing in my ears. In the mirror, I catch sight of my tired eyes, my graying hair. There’s a clarity there, the skin blanched as parchment, all of it rendered brightly in grief’s neat penmanship. Face, self, alive.

The next morning, we wake to snow. It has fallen heavy overnight. The fog is gone, leaving the sun free to reflect off the snow in a blinding blaze. I open the curtains at the back door as I do every morning, wondering who and what I’ll see. The yard is empty, but just beyond the glass—so close I could reach out and touch it—is a set of small yet unmistakable hoof prints.

Sarah Chihaya’s Relationship With Books Is Complicated

Posted on by EL Assistant2

When I think about reading, I think about a kind of hunger that only exists in my memory. As a child, I did not think about time or food or my physical body or even where I was, really, while reading. I devoured books in a way that now seems almost mythical, with a fullness of attention I find difficult to summon for anything these days. 

I used to think of this hunger as love––until I read Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia, in which she describes the titular condition as occurring “when someone has, crudely stated, loved books to a dangerous degree.” In her memoir, Chihaya artfully unpacks the different ways our consumption of books can nourish or poison us, offer a refuge, a mirror, or fundamentally change who we are. Some books even ask us to revise the narratives of ourselves and our lives with an intensity that can feel almost like violence. 

Chihaya pairs moments of deep personal upheaval, like a nervous breakdown that leaves her unable to read for a time, with an examination of books that she terms “Life Ruiners,” demonstrating the ways that books are inextricably linked to her life, self-perception, and the ways she learns to read others. In incisive and lively prose, Chihaya makes space to ask questions about the ways that reading can provoke questions about the wider world: Where is the line between loving something and losing yourself in it? What separates creation from destruction, and is there really ever a way to disentangle the two? What nourishes and what poisons? And what happens when we are drawn to consume a text that nurtures and harms us at the same time?

I had the opportunity to speak with Sarah Chihaya about the relationship between reading and academia, the way disruptive forces can lead to creation, and how she sees herself as a reader now. 

Jacqueline Alnes: In addition to all the reasons we love books, I love how you write about the way they can be a disruptive force and encourage us to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Books can be something we avoid, at times, because there is something in them we don’t want to engage with. What was it like to unpack these different ways that books are in our lives?

Sarah Chihaya: Books are not always black or white––they are always in a grey zone, and that is something we should celebrate about them. If we knew what they were supposed to tell us or how we were supposed to unpack them, it would be a dull enterprise to read. Getting into that middle, that in-between space, was very hard. It’s still hard to think back on childhood reading, this magical experience of encountering books, and separate that from this more complicated feeling. I thought a lot about teaching while I was writing this book because so much of teaching is helping students put words to that feeling of not knowing how to respond to a book. 

The books that stay with me the longest are the ones that have made me the most uncomfortable. It’s not just discomfort, it’s this kind of excitement. It’s being uncomfortable with that fact of confrontation, of having to look at the thing and ask yourself why this makes me unsettled or stressed or whatever it does to you. It’s being uncomfortable with yourself. It’s both the thing itself and the act of looking that is hard. My hope for this book is that it encourages  readers to do this on their own and come away interrogating their own reading habits and thinking about why certain books stay with them, why they are troubled by certain books, and why they can’t finish certain books. 

JA: The way you bring up the relationship between academia and reading, the way that it feels like a double-edged sword, is interesting. At first, in your memoir, reading is a space where you find confidence and validation. Later, it becomes a stressor, a pressure to participate in a way that no longer feels like that ravenous, childhood form of reading—it’s more of a “Where is your conference paper?” then “Where is your chapter?” form of engagement. I wondered if you could talk about that relationship. 

SC: I think every academic has some version of this, where there is a sense that there was a real kind of reading you did that grows less and less accessible and grows less and less rewarded by the academy. There is a line in A.S. Byatt’s Possession where the two main characters talk about why they study what they study—they say something about how it’s what survived their education. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s kind of a funny line, to think you go back to the things that survived this process of being formed, but it’s also very sad. There is something tragic about education being this war that you have to survive in order to come out the other end and work on something and be productive. 

I reached this point where I did not read novels any more because I thought, if I read this, I’ll have to write about it.

When I was a scholar, I worked on Contemporary Literature and I reached this point where I just did not read novels any more because I thought, if I read this, I’ll have to write about it. That feeling of dread that you would be responsible is an unfair burden to put on the text because you are saying if I read you, book, you have to do something for me because it will be professionally expedient. It’s a pressure on yourself to make something. You can’t just let a book be itself. You are always privileging the self over the book because you have to make something that will contribute to your career. So often, in the academy, we are told who you are is what you make and productivity equals your personality. Even if it’s a book you love, a book you have really felt passionately about, you still feel the need to make it your own, in a way. It was hard to disentangle from that mode of reading and I’m still working on it. It’s a work in process, but I’ve found it very rewarding to try to be less productive, if that makes sense.

JA: Your book made me think about that moment when my students come into class just excited to talk about a reading. It made me wonder: Do you think our relationship to reading necessarily has to evolve because we all get older and become part of, as you say in your memoir, a world where microplastics are in everything and many of us are part of different insidious systems? Do you feel like it’s possible to retain that initial pleasure while reading or is it something we are just bound to look back at with some level of nostalgia? 

SC: That’s a good question. I taught fiction and the first question I always asked was, “Did you like it? How did you feel about it?” Before we start talking about it, how do you feel? They are always shocked. We are not asked in academia, how do you feel, but we are asked if something was interesting. What interests you about it? What makes you think you should write about it or talk about it? I think reading changes for those of us who go to grad school. You have to report something. There is also some of that for everyone else. Maybe you’re right, that “takeaway” mentality does sort of seep into us, especially the way things are now. 

Books have to be useful, in some way. They are asked to be useful politically or personally. We like to champion books that tell us how to do things. The books that tell us how to do things are often wrong and so often, oversimplified because they think they have all the answers. We should be championing books that don’t have answers and that make us question and make us uncertain. Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful. 

To take it back to students, part of the reason that they feel that excitement on the first day is that they are not yet writing papers. They don’t have to make anything yet. They can just come in and say, I felt this. They don’t yet have to say what the point was. They can just respond very immediately. That moment of response is one we are not asked to take very often. We are asked to skip ahead to identifying what is valuable about this thing.

JA: I try to teach my students (and remind myself) that you don’t have to come away from a book knowing it. You can come away just knowing you experienced it and have permission not to be an expert. I was reminded of this in your memoir, when you write about how the first reading of a book can be so different than later encounters, and how being asked to know a book—and yourself—on a first read is a really big ask. 

There is a lot of pressure to be able to account for whatever we encounter—whether reading or viewing or the news—to be able to give what is essentially a book report.

SC: Totally. I think there is a lot of pressure to be able to account for whatever we encounter—whether reading or viewing or the news—to be able to give what is essentially a book report. I have comprehended this event or I can account for this thing that I’ve read. But actually, education should be for the sort of not-knowing and figuring out what you do think about things, instead of being pushed into a major or a thesis or an explanation of a thing. 

I’m trying very hard, as you can tell from the end of the book, to sit with uncertainty and not knowing. There will always be a thing that you can explain or think you understand, and there will always be things that are incomprehensible or too hard to look at. That process of trying to render them encounterable is a work in progress. I’m trying to be more open to that sense of ongoing revision.

JA: I love the line in your book: “The word was not the world and it never had been.” Your book made me think about the relationship between our history as readers, our lives as writers, our lives reading other people, our lives trying to figure out our own lives, revising the truths of our childhoods depending on our own healing. 

SC: Until now, my life has been this series of four-year increments of college and grad school and being a junior faculty member and writing this book. I’m always waiting for a decision that’s deferred until a later date, like waiting for the reviews to come in for the book and after that’s done I’ll be waiting to see how my next project is received and what my agent thinks. The error that I have made, that I am probably still making, is thinking that all will be done someday. 

In the academy, I thought when I got tenure, I would be done. Number one, that didn’t happen, but also, all the senior people I talked to were like, you’re never done. Now that I’m out, I never have to be done which means I can let go of the idea that completion would be imminent, if I was good enough. I don’t even know what it would mean to be done now. My career is different. I no longer have this very concrete goal. That might be a good thing.

JA: You write about a mental health crisis and hospital stay that prompted a break in reading. What did that interruption in regard to reading or to life mean to you?

SC: When it happened, it felt like the end of everything. I could not conceive of what was next. But now, years after, and having written this book and having left the professional stuff, I do feel like it was necessary. I think it’s too positive to say it was an awakening, but it was a jarring moment, an abandonment, as though I had been abandoned by all the things that had carried me along until that point, whether they were the pressure from my family or from my university or from myself. 

I had suspicions that I was headed for a crisis, but I just thought if I could make it through…You know, a lot of people collapse after tenure or after all these things have happened. I was kind of always betting against that and hoping I would wait until after to have my collapse. But it came when it had to; it wasn’t up to me. In a weird way, I’m glad it happened then, before rather than after. If I continued writing the academic book and I continued with this career I was unhappy with and life I was unhappy with, I might have produced more or produced the thing I was supposed to produce, or I might not have. 

I have to stop thinking about things in regard to success and failure, but I might have failed to do the thing undramatically, without ever having had this chance to reevaluate. I might have just not done it and been like well, why didn’t I do it? I might have failed without having a chance to learn from it. I am grateful to the collapse now for having shocked me into looking at myself and all the things I was hoping to sweep under the rug for long enough. It’s hard to say it was good or bad, but it was a necessary thing.

JA: Who do you see yourself as a reader right now? 

I’m trying to reclaim some of the feeling we see in students, a sense of surprise.

SC: I’m trying to not be an expert anymore. I was just thinking last night about why it’s been an ongoing struggle for me to read. I read in fits and starts. I think it’s because I’m always trying to remind myself that I am only accountable to myself right now, when reading, except for when I’m accountable to someone for work. Because my work is being a book critic now, there still is some of that, that you owe things about a certain topic by a certain deadline. But, it’s a different kind of owing. 

The only thing I owe right now is my opinion. It’s very different from being accountable as a scholar writing something peer-reviewed, where you sit down and ask, “Have I read every scholarly source about this? Have I read everything this author has written and have I read everything that everyone else has written about this author?” I will have a momentary impulse where I think that I can’t read something until I read everything that has ever been said about it.

I’m trying to reclaim some of the feeling we see in students, a sense of surprise. It’s work to undo the things that we have spent so long learning. It’s very privileged to say that I’m trying to enjoy reading—it is a privilege. I remember people outside the academy saying, “You’re so lucky, you must love just reading all day, teaching your favorite books,” and I was like no, I’m always working, always trying to make something. I felt very reluctant to admit how much fun it should be to teach and do all that we are allowed to do in the profession. It should be really fun. Those people should be right. I’m trying to embrace that it is a different kind of privilege to just have my own thoughts. I’m working on reading for only one person, for myself, rather than for everyone. 

This Coworking Space Runs on Sisterhood and Toxic Conformity

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

The Parlor

Every cell of the building’s interior oozes with pink. Shades of bubblegum. Rouge. Peach so ripe, you can feel its sun-beamed juice roll sloppily down your cheek. Millennial reminiscent of every Y2K-style skirt in your hometown H&M that you couldn’t afford to buy in high school.

You enter the lobby. Scents of jasmine, honeysuckle, and white generational wealth gust towards you in a perfumed bubble. Your Doc Martens make a muted thump as you traipse across the marble floors. You know they’re itching for the clacks of pumps and heeled booties and are sighing disappointedly at your rubber soles.

“May I help you?” A young woman greets you with a confused smile. Her badge reads “Ashleigh.”

“I would like to learn about your coworking membership.”

She looks even more confused.

“Here’s our pamphlet.” A crisp booklet skids across the counter. She retracts her fingers with such speed, you almost miss them completely.

The sharp folds of the pamphlet prick your skin. Your first thought is teeth. Teeth are everywhere. On smiling women reading. Smiling women lecturing. Smiling women cheersing, their manicured nails clutching champagne flutes. The background fades away, and you are left with teeth glowing in the dark.

“Excuse me? The rates aren’t listed.”

The woman no longer looks confused. “The prices are listed on the back.” So they are. In letters almost too small to see. Prices so obscene that your eyes can’t help but bulge. You remind yourself that the few friends you’ve made have all moved away, and you don’t really know anyone in this city.

“I’d like to become a member.”

The woman’s face shifts into a toothless smile. “You can’t just become a member. You need to do an intake. And then we review your application.”

“Fine,” you say, your jaw set.

She sighs and turns her back to you, walking behind the flamingo pink curtains. Your fingers drum intricate patterns on the counter. 

Finally, she returns with a stack of papers, unwieldy and as high as her shoulders. “Just a bit of paperwork.” She drops it onto the counter with a loud thud and places a pastel pink pen on top with, “The Parlor” displayed in white cursive. She gestures to a seating area in the center of the room.

You make your way back across the marble. You place the papers on the pearly white coffee table and settle into a chair patterned with bows and sailboats. You are displeased to discover that it’s comfortable. Really comfortable.

The pages are as thin as tissue-paper, so you lick your fingers to pluck the one on top. It’s a questionnaire.

First Name

Last Name

Pronouns

Email Address

Phone Number

Emergency Contact

What is your profession?

Your pen scratches gently across the paper until it settles on the next question.

What is your net worth?

Your pen freezes. You look up from the paper. The woman is gone. You look back down.

What is your deepest insecurity?

What is your clothing size?

What is your body mass index?

How old are you? Explain.

How long have you been a member of Equinox?

What did you do the evening of the 2016 election?

“Excuse me?” You rise out of your chair, striding across the floor to the empty counter. You ring the bell on the desk.

A different woman, who looks eerily like the first one, appears. Her badge reads “Baileigh.” 

“May I help you?”

“Uh, yeah, I was filling out this intake form and noticed these questions.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been asked about my net worth, BMI, and political affiliation in an intake form before.”

“They’re our standard questions. I suppose if you want to leave a few answers blank, that’s fine, but it will impact your final score.”

“Score?”

“Yes, your compatibility score.” She also looks visibly annoyed. “We screen and only admit the finest women. Perhaps you would be more comfortable with the WeWork across the street?”

You grumble something about WeWork’s cold brew and find your seat again. The next pages have multiple choice questions.

You work in an office. A coworker brings her son’s leftover birthday cake and leaves it in the kitchen. She messages the staff that it is available. Do you . . . 

  1. Bolt into the kitchen. You are disgusting and have no self-control.
  2. Say no. It doesn’t fit into your calorie tracker app.
  3. Sneak in there at 3pm, and while “cleaning the coffee maker,” you stuff a piece into your big, dumb mouth.
  4. Transfer to the Wichita office at the first chance you get.

Your mouth hangs open.

You and your Parlor sisters are having a friendly game night competition. What weapon do you use?

  1. Words and insults, duh. They’re always the sharpest knives.
  2. Broken shards of your sisters’ sauv blanc bottles. It’s their fault they brought the wine.
  3. You yell, “That cheese is regular fat, Tina!” over and over until Tina crumples into a ball on the floor.
  4. You transfer to the Wichita office.

You’re back at the counter. You ring the bell once, and then a second and third and fourth time. “Hello? Hello?!”

A third woman finally appears, eerily similar to the first two women. Her badge reads “Kaileigh.”

“I can’t fill out this form. I’m sorry, but this place just isn’t for me.” You start to retreat, your feet resolute in their decision.

“Are you sure? You’ve reached the final part of your intake.”

“I have?”

“Yes, the mental and physical exam.”

You hesitate. You just can’t stomach one more glass of sticky wine at a speed dating event, another debt-inducing pottery class, or god help you, a pickleball match. “What does the exam entail?” 

“The first challenge is called Human Rolodex. Please list everyone you have ever met in your life in chronological order.”

Your mouth dries. Your mind goes blank.

“Um, I believe I have a mother—”

“Name?” Kaileigh looks up expectantly, her hand poised with a pen over what looks like an oversized guest book.

“Elizabeth.” She writes.

“Title?”

“Associate Professor of English.” She crosses out the name. 

“Next.”

You rattle off every single person you can think of from your small town. Your father, your sister, your childhood best friend who moved away in the third grade, your rabbi (can you tell them you had a rabbi?), your first crush, your favorite history teacher, your math teacher who gave you a complex about your math abilities throughout high school. With every name, Kaileigh’s eyebrows lift ever so slightly, but then fall as she crosses the name off the list.

You’re trying to recollect all your previous specialists and dental hygienists when Kaileigh’s pen halts.

“Dr. Porter is a high-level donor for women in STEM.”

Your breath quickens. “Huh, I didn’t know.”

“We’ve been trying to get her to speak at our center for quite some time. Shall you invite her for a space tour?”

“I think I have an appointment with her on the 28th—”

“Perfect.” She places a smooth hand on top of yours and gives it a squeeze. Your throat warms. “Please ask her if she has any dietary restrictions for egg salad sandwiches.” She removes her hand. “Now, we move onto part two.”

Kaileigh exits behind the curtains. She returns with a plate piled high with miniature frosted cakes and French pastries, and a glass of champagne between her chrome nails. She places them in your hands.

“For this next challenge, we will be sourcing volunteers from some of our most valued members. For the Buffet Social, please speak with each sister for exactly four minutes, and tell them about yourself. You may not offer support, connection, or mentorship to any of them. Similarly, you are prohibited to accept any help, no matter how sincere they may sound. Do you understand?”

Your mouth moves before you realize. “Yes.”

“Come on out, girls!”

The ballet slipper pink wall next to the reception desk rolls open to reveal smiling women standing with their hands pressed together. Their mouths are open wide, their teeth starch-white. Their eyes are the only part of their faces not smiling. They stare at you expectantly, their jet-black pupils taking you in as your Doc Martens inch closer and closer.

Harris Lahti on Ripping From the Headlines of His Life

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Foreclosure Gothic, Harris Lahti’s debut novel, is a chilling, absorbing, searingly memorable work of gothic fiction. Portents loom around every corner—vultures, scythes, unattributable screams—and nature is a “witch’s brew of mistrust” where hulking garbagemen roam alongside necrophiliac raccoons. While such spooky surrealism may occasionally skew the picture, don’t be fooled—Foreclosure Gothic is a deeply human, and deeply personal, story about intergenerational cycles and the financial reality of creative ambition. Read it once for the sinewy poetry and evocative imagery. Read it twice to unveil the sly plotting and subtly intricate architecture. Like a foreclosed property, there is a “house behind the house.” Lahti’s debut rewards repeat readings.

The novel centers on Vic Greener, an aspiring actor who abandons Hollywood with zero film credits to his name—just a guest spot as a coke-addicted doctor on a daytime soap. He follows the enchanting Heather, pregnant with their child, to her hometown in New York’s Hudson Valley, a few highway exits from where Vic’s own father continues to make his living restoring foreclosed homes. Vic always believed himself fated to follow his father’s career path, and the birth of Junior Greener expedites the process: Hollywood dreams don’t pay bills, especially when LA’s a few thousand miles away. Decades later, in this simultaneously sweeping and compact family saga, Junior may be sucked up by the Greener fate as well.

Harris Lahti is an editor at Fence, a co-founder of the indie press Cash 4 Gold Books, a prolific short story writer, and a painter/house renovator. I spoke with him over Zoom about his haunting debut. In this wide-ranging conversation, we touch on gothic fiction, alternative literature, and some of the real stories behind his fictional creations.

Michael Knapp: Parts of your novel appeared previously as short stories. Did you always have a larger project in mind for the Greener characters, or did you stumble into a novel?

Harris Lahti: I stumbled into a novel. The undertaking of a novel is so immense that sometimes you have to trick yourself into writing one. I wrote “Sugar Bath,” one of the earlier chapters, and then I wrote “House Ceremony,” one of the later chapters, and then I space docked them together. It’s an interesting way to write, because once you have those two elements you can synthesize them. You’re using raw materials that exist instead of constantly inventing.

Those two sections generated a lot of curiosity for me, and it proliferated until the book felt fully formed. There are more chapters I wish I could write now; the book’s characters live on in their own way. But once I started adding pictures I knew it was done.

MK: Foreclosure Gothic spans 50 years and three generations of Greener men. It’s a compact book with a sprawling scope—a new chapter might mean another decade gone. What were the challenges with scaffolding such an expansive novel?

HL: I initially wrote each chapter outside of time, then I inserted little timestamps about, say, Venice Beach in the eighties to ground it on a timeline. But to tell you the truth, what I really focused on was sentence level tension. Readers will give you slack if you’re entertaining them—they’ll glance past questions the idle mind might ponder.

I wrote a third person novel, but I think of it as first because the psychic distance is about as close as you can get, and then it’s also written in present tense. It’s all working to hold the reader’s attention; it insulates itself from the problems of tackling such a vast swath of time.

The undertaking of a novel is so immense that sometimes you have to trick yourself into writing one.

MK: I appreciate the timestamps—whether it’s a cell phone or the financial crisis. But I also like how you respect the reader’s ability to catch up to the present without bogging things down in exposition.

HL: People are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. I think big publishers often condescend to the reader. Anytime you’re supplying space for the reader to mull something over you’re engaging them; you’re allowing the words to fall away, and the reader enters the dream of fiction. It’s something I’m very aware of with both the fiction I publish and the fiction I write.

MK: As the title suggests, your novel belongs somewhere in the gothic tradition. It’s filled with haunted homes, necrophiliac raccoons, gargantuan garbagemen. That said, it never slips fully into genre, and I think protagonist Vic would endorse the novel’s real-world grounding: he turns “his nose up at genre,” believing the real world to be “strange enough.” Are you consciously playing with, or against, horror tropes? Do you agree with Vic’s thoughts on genre?

HL: I find portents much more interesting than horror itself—it’s a “why show the shark” kind of thinking. The horror I’m more interested in is grounded in the uncanny, in a Lynchian or Bolaño-esque sense. It’s a feeling of uncertainty—a psychological fear charged by ambiguity.

I have my father-in-law’s HBO Max account, and I’ll watch the first twenty minutes of horror movies endlessly. I always wonder what he thinks I’m doing: “Why are you watching the first twenty minutes of Microwave Massacre and Blood Hook on repeat?” I love the beginnings of horror movies—they’re ripe with portents. Once the horror starts to reveal itself, it’s rarely as interesting, because you have to fall back on tropes.

I like the metaphor of deer after a thunderstorm. They come out into the meadow and dance, because the storm has put something inside of them. Each chapter in my novel is trying to do something similar: I’m getting right up to the point where the horror will be introduced, and then, by taking an unexpected exit, it continues to accrete.

MK: A lot of the horror is also alleviated by a jump in time, which feels true to life. In the moment you might feel tortured by some terrifying, life-altering force. Then ten years later you don’t remember it.

HL: A hundred percent. That’s how memory works. It’s a big deal in the moment, and then you move along. You’re eating brunch somewhere and you’re not thinking about the seven-foot-tall garbage man; the next new horror you’ll live through approaches.

MK: I actually am still thinking about the seven-foot-tall garbageman. But in addition to gothic fiction, your novel might belong to a more contemporary tradition: alternative literature (alt-lit). You’ve published in a lot of the movement’s preeminent journals—New York Tyrant, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Forever—and you edit fiction at Fence, another alt-lit stalwart. I know this kind of question dominates literary discourse these days, but what does alt-lit represent to you? Do you consider your work—Foreclosure Gothic in particular—part of it?

HL: I think Foreclosure Gothic is more stylized, but I do often file myself in the alt-lit world. I like that it’s scrappier, and there’s less gatekeeping than at larger college-run journals.

The best thing about alt-lit is that it’s run by tyrants, like Giancarlo [DiTrapano], Tao [Lin], Madeline [Cash] and Anika [Levy], Derek White, Elizabeth Ellen. They’re tastemakers; they put the work out there and say, “This is what I like.” I think the auteur theory of directing applies to editing here; these people have their own vision.

I’m a skateboarder, and everybody who does it or watches it gets along and encourages each other. Why isn’t writing like that?

MK: Speaking of editorial vision, you and Jon Lindsey just co-founded an indie press: Cash for Gold Books (C4G). You released your first two books last year: Sillyboy by Peter Vack and The Champ is Here by Nathan Dragon. What are your goals for the press, beyond “finding the freaks,” which I’ve seen you talk about in other interviews? What’s C4G up to now?

HL: I said that? I like that.

We just had the launch party for Elizabeth Hall’s Season of the Rat. The crowd was so good—it was getting a lot of support. Then we have another book coming, a collection of short stories by David Ryan.

Basically, we’re putting out books that need to be put out. The path to publication is so difficult, and people who deserve books often don’t get the opportunity. Like, I’m a skateboarder, and everybody who does it or watches it gets along and encourages each other. Nobody’s trying to get anything out of skating except the enjoyment of the act. Why isn’t writing like that?

Jon and Nathan and I want to make the scene better; we want to improve the culture. Our way of doing that is to not take ourselves too seriously, but to take the work deathly seriously. We want to make it fun and interesting and flip the finger at those people that said no to the writers we’re publishing. Maybe we’ll change some hearts and minds along the way.

MK: I notice a kind of editorial sensibility in your novel, in terms of both the events you choose to include and, more so, the ones you choose not to include. The intentionality of your choices clarifies as the novel progresses, but why, for example, feature a farmer’s market and skip the birth of a child?

HL: You have to be curious about what you’re writing, and a lot of conventional stuff just didn’t interest me. If you’re not creating narrative friction that is uncanny or unexpected just do away with it. Don’t bother. That’s why it’s exciting to write a compact novel that’s so expansive. I can pick and choose my points. Otherwise, you get bogged down in the furniture moving of narrative fiction.

I’ve been an editor for a long time, and I’ve always felt the mark of a mature writer is what they choose to leave out more than what they put in.

MK: In the book, Junior himself is a writer. His father, Vic, is an actor, and Heather’s a serial storyteller. Later in their marriage, Vic feels the well of conversation running dry. He worries they’ve run out of stories to share. A lot of these characters try to make a living as storytellers, but I’m interested in how storytelling is so integral to these characters even divorced from moneymaking. What is it about stories that’s so important to them?

HL: My knee-jerk impulse is to relate it to evolution, and how we build myths around ourselves to maintain a sense of self. In a way, it’s counterintuitive. We construct imaginary worlds to help understand reality. That’s what I think religion is, and that’s what literature has become for me.

I was talking to a writer working on a historical novel. He said he needs to do all this research because people will kick the tires on the real thing he’s fictionalizing. I want nothing to do with that; I’m more interested in the world that’s strained through fiction because, in a weird way, the more you understand about the reality of the world, the more confusing it becomes.

For me personally, my father was an actor. He walked away from it after he had kids because it wasn’t paying the bills. Now I’m a writer, and I’m trying to justify it. Not many make the cut solely as a writer. I’m always thinking about that and working through it, and writing these stories is me trying to understand that. It’s something I struggled with subconsciously, and I didn’t fully understand it until showing my dad the novel.

You’re making sense of uncertainty through fiction. I think you do it more truthfully with a novel as opposed to something like a memoir.

MK: A young Junior wants to be a novelist, and he contemplates a disconnect between his writing and the work his dad does restoring homes: “Creativity is the residue of rest,” he says. Later on, his attitude changes: he works “piece by piece, sentence by sentence”; an “idle itchiness” descends if he’s “not painting a house or working on a novel.” You yourself renovate houses, and I wonder what you make of this connection between physical work and a writing practice?

HL: Writing is work. You have to show up and make it happen. There is this other element where you have to live in order to write, but then at some point you need to step outside the world of the living and make space to create.

One feeds the other, and it’s why I’ll never run out of stories. Every house I do, I meet new people; I see new things. Just the other day I was on a roof, and this guy starts talking to me. He’s wobbling, I can tell he’s drunk, and when I come down this dog wanders up the road. When it gets closer, I see it’s hairless, and it’s blue. It’s a blue dog, only it doesn’t really look like a dog. Not exactly. Then I see a pointy nose and come to realize it’s a mangy fox. Possibly rabid. The drunk guy starts walking up to it, clapping his hands, saying, “Here, doggy doggy! Here, doggy doggy!”

It’s the kind of moment that’s endlessly interesting to me, and I try to understand it and contextualize it with fiction. Whether you work in a kitchen or a school, the stories propagate through your experiences. 

But maybe most aren’t as strange as that.

MK: The opening chapter’s titled “This Only Ends One Way,” and there’s a feeling of preordainment pervading the book; The Greeners’ past pulls them forward into an eerily familiar, and seemingly inevitable, future, restoring foreclosed homes in the Hudson Valley. Did you ever envision Foreclosure Gothic wandering off in a different direction? Can these characters—can anyone—escape their past?

HL: Especially if you’re doing what your parents do, it’s hard to extricate yourself. I could get some shitty job, but this is the way I make money, and when you have two kids and a wife you can’t really justify something other than the best option. Or maybe I’m not inventive enough to think of another path forward.

I think we’re all stuck. Free will is a funny thing. Maybe this is too lofty, but…

MK: Let’s get lofty.

HL: Let’s do it. Personally, I never really surprise myself. It’s hard to free yourself from patterns. Those neural pathways get ground down and you become complacent.

I’ve always respected people who burn their lives down and start again. A lot of us try to make that leap, and then we keep adjusting our expectations until we’re right back where in our heart of hearts we thought we’d end up all along.

MK: This feeling of predestination is amplified by a sense of foreboding: vultures portend doom, janky ceiling fans evoke our cyclical lives, and the scythe Junior wields to trim overgrown grass speaks to foreclosure as the grim reaper—financial death for one family, and the endless chain of renovations linking the Greeners to their end. How deliberate are the various symbols here—do they connote something specific? Or are they more ornamentation?

HL: Both, I guess, but to tell you the truth, so much is ripped from the headlines of my life. My earliest memories are playing in old houses that really freaked me out.

The scythe, for example. That’s something that happened. I was taming an unruly lawn full of shotgun shells and beer cans, and the lawnmower broke. What do you do? You go into one of the barns and, lo and behold, there’s a scythe.

It’s true and it’s real. And there were vultures, and the house was full of belongings from a family that seemed to have disappeared, and I couldn’t figure out why that would happen to a family. I was sixteen; I grew up in a loving home—a nice house, a big property—and it was confusing to me. Where’d they go?

So your mind jumps to death. The vultures are there suggesting what vultures suggest, and you have a scythe in your hand. It all coheres in a way that seems intentional, but I’m not inventing it.

MK: To close, I’m curious about creative influences. You mentioned Bolaño, David Lynch, and the first twenty minutes of horror movies; who or what else has influenced your work?

HL: The first 20 minutes of all horror movies. That’s definitely up there.

There’s also Fleur Jaeggy—her clipped sentences and sinister tone. I would put Elfriede Jelinek in that category. The Piano Teacher was a big novel for me when I was writing Foreclosure Gothic. I think the filmmaker Lars Von Trier struggles with his subject matter in very personal ways I’ve tried to adopt. Then I love the collected works of Breece D’J Pancake. Cormac McCarthy is a big one. I’ve read everything he’s written a bunch of times. Oh and William Gay wrote this fucked up story called “The Paperhanger” that I reread about a thousand times. If you’ve never read it you have to read it. It’s completely insane. Graves will be robbed.