Why Are Indonesians Being Erased from Indonesian Literature?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

When I entered the world of Indonesian literary translation several years ago, I was blissfully unaware of how dysfunctional it was. (Nor did I suspect that I would eventually become so troubled by its colonialistic aspects that I would write a controversial and impassioned Tweet thread on the subject.) What I’ve found, though, is that unequal power dynamics are determining how literature from Indonesia is being curated for consumption by the English-speaking world. The problem is systemic, evident in the condescending attitudes of Anglophone publishers and advocates of Indonesian fiction and poetry—and also which authors get to regularly represent Indonesia on the international stage.

A bit about myself: I am of Chinese-Indonesian descent, but only lived in Indonesia from the age of 9 to 15 (the rest of my childhood was spent in Singapore although I was born in the U.S.). I grew up hearing Indonesian spoken around me and though I occasionally used it myself, I only began making concerted efforts to improve my language abilities during graduate school by taking classes and reading Indonesian fiction.

I was driven by a desire to connect with a part of my heritage that my family, for their own reasons, had discouraged me from cultivating. I moved from being a reader of Indonesian literature to researching it as an academic before becoming a full-time writer and translator. Ever since, I have become increasingly horrified at the multiple layers of gatekeeping that distort the Western world’s impression of Indonesian writing. I attempt a partial exposure here to help with efforts to solve the problem—not only in the context of Indonesia, but also other countries that may be facing the same issues.

“Publishers Aren’t Looking For You.”

Does this book travel well? This question is maddeningly familiar to those operating in international writing and publishing networks. The variations of this question include: Can this story cross cultures? Will readers be able to relate? Is there too much historical and cultural detail for the reader to process? Publishers don’t mean that they are looking for “un-foreign” foreign work. Rather, foreign work needs to be foreign in familiar ways—exotic enough to give the reader satisfaction about foraying into another country or culture without overwhelming or alienating them. It’s like crafting the perfect tourist experience. Unfamiliar yet comfortable. Orientalizing, not disorienting. This is why once a few authors from a particular country win over the English-speaking market, other authors may follow suit: their subject matter has become more known and therefore more palatable.

If prodded, individuals in the publishing industry may be apologetic. They may acknowledge it’s unfair that Western readers get to be so finicky when the rest of the world (including Indonesia) readily consumes whatever books are taking the English-speaking world by storm. Nevertheless the expectation that the rest of the world cater to Anglophone tastes remains in place, informing the assessments of even those who earnestly profess to be seeking content from other countries. As a recent Guardian article has observed, English is colonizing the planet, which is also why getting the attention of the English-speaking market is key to global literary success.

Indonesia’s literature is no exception to the rule, subject to the same concerns about works “traveling well” even as they remain recognizably foreign. I was once asked to recommend a work to a publisher—something “classic” and “universal” was the stated preference. These terms are code for the question, Can the Western reader relate? I’ve also been asked to assess whether a novel “would speak across cultures” and whether its cultural and historical details would prove too challenging for readers.

Conversely, works have to be sufficiently “Indonesian” to excite interest. I found out from two friends who co-translated a short-story collection that a UK press rejected it for not engaging deeply enough with Indonesian political and social issues. As one longtime publisher and translator has baldly stated in a Jakarta Post interview: “Publishers aren’t looking for you, they’re looking for Indonesia.”

The parochialism of the Anglophone publishing industry also means that it is unwilling to trust the judgment of Indonesians concerning their own writers. While a positive reception back home may certainly earn an author’s work a closer look, they won’t ultimately compel an editor to accept a work for publication. This effectively means that Indonesian authors have to pass through two stages of screening to find a publisher abroad: one on its home turf, followed by another in which any accolades or rave reviews garnered may be discounted, or worse, contradicted.

I’ve received rejections from editors at anthologies and literary magazines, some of them supposedly eager to receive Indonesian submissions, who have dismissed short stories using language that suggests the works fall short of some objective non-culturally-specific literary standard—despite the fact that the same stories, among Indonesian readers, have garnered recognition and praise. For example, one journal expressed “concerns about the structure of the story”; another piece was deemed well-translated but “a bit muddled” with regards to its handling of time. The same two friends I mention above received in their rejection letter the remark that the writing “wasn’t arresting enough,” despite the fact that the author in question is widely considered one of the nation’s greatest revolutionary-era writers.

In short, Indonesian literature undergoes a transformation when it moves beyond its country’s borders. Beloved, acclaimed, or influential at home, the same literary text may be dismissed, even denigrated, by Western arbiters of taste abroad. One would hope, then, that those responsible for bringing these texts to the attention of the western world would do their best to counter such disdain. Unfortunately, by and large, those who advocate on Indonesian literature’s behalf are often guilty of perpetuating the problem.

“Limited at Best”

Anyone remotely familiar with Indonesian literature in translation will have heard of John McGlynn. Born in Wisconsin, McGlynn moved to Indonesia in his late twenties and is now the most prominent and powerful individual on the Indonesian-literature-in-translation scene. In addition to being a translator and chairman of the Lontar Foundation (which promotes and publishes Indonesian literature in translation), he sits on the National Book Committee as supervisor of its translation and literature funding programs. McGlynn was also responsible for coordinating Indonesia’s literary programming at both the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair and last month’s London Book Fair, where Indonesia was, respectively, the guest of honor and market focus. I would hazard to say that he is regarded internationally as the foremost expert on Indonesian literature in translation, and the overwhelming majority of Indonesian literature showcases featured in literary magazines—at least within the past several years, have been curated or co-curated by him, including those featured in Words Without Borders’ 2015 and 2019 issues, Asia Literary Review, AAWW’s The Margins, Cordite Poetry Review, and Stand.

Given McGlynn’s power and visibility, he inevitably sets the tone for how to perceive and treat Indonesian writers. Therefore, it is somewhat concerning when he writes in Issue 52 of the translation journal In Other Words that the Lontar Foundation has resorted to publishing Indonesia’s most revered authors because their “chance for commercial success outside Indonesia’s borders is limited at best.” (The text of the journal article itself, originally made public on the National Centre for Writing website, was taken down due to some controversy caused by the thread I wrote and a Jakarta Globe article by an Indonesian writer published soon after.)  

It is also alarming when he observes disparagingly in an interview that “a lot of stuff that Indonesians write in English tends to be flat.” (Of course Jhumpa Lahiri now writes in Italian, but everyone seems to think it’s a smashing idea.)

The statement I mention earlier in this essay—“Publishers aren’t looking for you, they’re looking for Indonesia”—hails from the same interview. McGlynn’s other remarks about “Indonesians” include their helpfulness in soliciting funds for Lontar: “donors look askance at giving money to an old white man, even if it is for a good cause. But a beautiful Indonesian woman, that’s another story.”

McGlynn is certainly entitled to his opinions, which come from more than forty years of experience as a translator and publisher. The real question is: does such experience give someone who is meant to champion the merits of Indonesia’s literature the right to speak so dismissively and pessimistically about its literary canon? Or the decisions its authors have made about what language to write in? Or their attractiveness to foreign publishers, which appears to reside solely in their Indonesianness? Or Indonesians’ pretty faces?

But McGlynn is not the only Western advocate of Indonesian writers who is guilty of condescension. We find patronization even in what is meant to pass as praise. For example, Benedict Anderson’s foreword to Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, in which the late Indonesian studies scholar takes the liberty of remarking how much the author’s craft has improved. In Man Tiger, Anderson asserts, we find “a growing discipline in the use of the supernatural….a better grasp on chronology. In Beauty Is a Wound there are a great number of time-shifts but they often seem arbitrary and needlessly confusing…”.

Even dedicated Western translators of Indonesian literature may assume this attitude of superiority, regardless of good intentions, and whether they are aware of it or not.

For instance, in an essay appearing in the aforementioned issue of In Other Words, the respected and prolific literary translator Harry Aveling writes, “there was often a lot of opposition to my translations, particularly from critics who knew Indonesian well but had little appreciation of the subtleties of English.” I find it interesting that Aveling, who himself is a non-native speaker of Indonesian, assumes that his critics are wrong about the quality of his translations, not that his translations may indeed be flawed due to his inability to fully appreciate the subtleties of the language he translates from.

More recently, Words Without Borders published an essay in which seasoned translator Toni Pollard reflects on the challenges of translating gender fluidity in Clara Ng’s “Meteors.” Despite consulting Ng and the various non-binary options that Ng provided for translating the gender-neutral third-person pronouns of the story, including the grammatically acceptable gender-neutral singular “they/them,” Pollard appears to have chosen the option that Ng was least comfortable with. “As all translators must ultimately do,” she reflects, “I had to make a decision myself.” (Numerous people on Twitter expressed frustration at this outcome, including the author herself.)

Like it or not, the globe still reels from colonization’s effects. The resulting power imbalances—political, economic, and cultural—have enabled those from Western countries and backgrounds to occupy positions of authority over Indonesian writers with relative ease. (To test the truth of this assertion: imagine the likelihood of the reverse scenario occurring, where the foremost experts on American, British, or Australian literature are mostly Indonesian, or simply non-white.)

But lest we forget, Empire has historically relied on the complicity of the native ruling elite, and this is no less true of neo-colonialism today. A simplistic “West versus rest” opposition elides the power dynamics operating among Indonesian writers themselves. For example, a disproportionate number of the authors chosen to represent Indonesia at international events like festivals and book fairs tend to be affiliated with Komunitas Salihara—an arts centre founded by the journalist and writer Goenawan Mohamad that has been criticized within Indonesia for the undue influence they exert over the arts scene. (For a glimpse into the situation, see the section on Salihara in this article by Indonesian writer Wayan Jengki Sunarta).

It’s Broken. Let’s Fix It.

I have no doubt that Western translators and others who speak with authority about Indonesian literature act with the best of intentions—if not, why would they expend so much time and energy trying to further its cause? I also do not think that the Anglophone publishing industry is purposely attempting to shut out Indonesian authors’ voices. But I do believe both parties need to recognize that their roles as publishers, promoters, and translators do not give them license to disrespect the autonomy that Indonesians themselves should have when it comes to appraising the worth of their writing, having a say in translations of their writing, and deciding how “Indonesian” their written work should be and what language they want to use.

Additionally:

1. Anglophone publishers might think twice about whether their reasons for rejecting a manuscript rest on Eurocentric assumptions about what constitutes “good” writing. They might try to be open to the genuinely unfamiliar, especially when it comes to countries that are more underrepresented in the Anglophone literary world than others. (By daring to do this they’ll nudge readers in the same direction).

They might even consider seeking permission from relevant parties to publish (and publicize!) new translations of a work already available in English but that has gone out of print or been translated poorly. If multiple English editions of Kafka’s Metamorphosis exist and can be appreciated alongside each other, then why not multiple English editions of Indonesian literary texts?

2. The Anglophone world in general should also avoid relying too much on certain individuals or groups (including me) for their knowledge and experience of Indonesian writing. As with any literary scene, there are people that have more power and visibility than others. It is certainly easier to rely on ready-made connections, but it will come at the expense of doing justice to the diverse world of Indonesian writing.

3. Promoters of Indonesian literature in translation, like the Lontar Foundation, should have more faith in the marketability of the texts and authors they represent. And they should be willing to publicize other initiatives and individuals who have chosen to work independently rather than ignoring their activities or giving them minimal attention.

4. Translators should work closely with their authors if the latter are willing and able. They should do their best to respect their authors’ wishes, dialoguing until an agreement truly satisfactory to both parties is reached. I’ve learned from experience that even if a writer isn’t a native English speaker, their feedback can be invaluable and improve a translation dramatically, taking it in different directions and to new heights you wouldn’t feel comfortable with if you were acting alone.

I’m guessing that these observations and suggestions may also apply to literature in translation from other countries. I hope that they will be of some help in those situations as well. By working collectively and respectfully, we’ll hear the voices of those we translate, advocate, and publish. And we’ll also do a better job of making them heard.

The author would like to thank Intan Paramaditha for her feedback on an earlier version of this article. For more on decolonizing Indonesian translation, see Khairani Barokka’s article in Modern Poetry in Translation, published in parallel with this one.

When Your Childhood Hero Becomes a Sad Clown

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

An Excerpt from the novel Stay Up with Hugo Best

By Erin Somers

The house lay behind a solid gray gate on a long arm. A winding driveway carried us deeper onto the property. It sat in a clear field, a boxy structure of glass and pale concrete. Instantly I could imagine the way it would take on the color of the seasons. White in winter, green in summer. Tonight with the lights off it looked nearly invisible in places, a suggestion of angular geometry against the night. It was an esoteric design object you could live in. It belonged on a plinth.

“The architect chose everything. The furnishings, the art,” Hugo was saying. “Unity being the idea. Blurring the line between indoors and outdoors. The dimensions of the recessed living room are the same as the pool. All of the materials are local. The granite. The wood. Every few years the state tries to make it a landmark.”

We climbed out of the car. Hugo insisted on carrying my tote. The straps were filthy, I noticed, and his arm was touch- ing a bottle of store-brand face wash I had crammed on top.

“Why not let them?”

“It’s a house,” he said. “Not a museum.”

He led me through the downstairs, turning on lights as we went. Through the windows: acres of moonlit field in every direction. The kitchen was white and stainless, opening seam-lessly into the living room. Beyond the sliding glass door the flat of the patio gave way to a dark, wobbly presence. The pool. I sat down at the marble slab of island to unpack our grocery bags. I took out high-concept crackers and pricey Côtes du Rhône, while Hugo busied himself retrieving silverware.

He had a whole drawer of tiny, specific knives and he looked down into it thoughtfully for a long time before giving up.

“So what’s your story?” he asked.

I was struggling with a wine opener evidently from the future. “Me? Nothing. I’m just over here trying to figure out how much manchego is acceptable to eat in this scenario. We should all get together as a species and nail down some cheese protocols.”

Hugo nodded. “A Geneva convention for dairy. I like it. But what I meant was what’s your story more generally. Your upbringing, et cetera. Are you from New York?”

“South Carolina,” I said. “Outside of Charleston.”

“You don’t seem southern.”

People always said this to me. I had lived in New York since college and didn’t have an accent. I was never sure how people expected southerners to act. The place I had grown up was a lot like this place. The Upscale Anywhere. Only the wealth was not as great and the worst of its ruthless villains were already dead.

“The South isn’t all that different. Except for the trees.”

“So why leave then?”

“Hope. Ambition. Belief in myself. You know, kid stuff.”

Hugo crossed his arms. He was tall and broad in an appealing way. His paunch seemed solid rather than flabby. What wrinkles he had appeared calculated, left intact so he’d look like a reasonable facsimile of a gently aged human being. Leaning against the sink in his shirtsleeves, he was just this side of too orange to be my thesis advisor, or my rumpled editor in chief, or—I didn’t want to think it but there it was—my father.

“What fucked you up enough to want to become a stand-up?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “Not a stand-up, not really. No stage presence, you see.”

“Then why do it?” he said.

“It’s that or a Web series, right? Or improv.”

“Improv. Ick.”

He took the wine opener from me, negotiated its stainless steel levers. He poured us each a glass and held his up in a shy toast.

“Thank you for coming on short notice. I think you’re going to have fun. While you’re here you can treat this place as your own. That’s it. You can drink now.”

I clinked his glass and we both sipped.

“Mm,” I said, “tannins,” though I didn’t know what that meant.

He swirled his glass. “I like my wine like I like my women.”

I groaned. “For real?”

“Humor me.”

“Abundant? Great legs? Available for purchase?”

He looked pleased. “I was going to say dry.”

He handed me a plate and I laid out crackers.

“Your childhood,” he said.

“I wasn’t abused, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s not always abuse. Sometimes it’s a stutter. Sometimes it’s childhood obesity. Sometimes, it’s, I don’t know, a back brace.”

“I didn’t have a back brace,” I said.

“You’re being literal. You were an outsider.”

“You mean because I’m Jewish.”

“There couldn’t have been many.”

“None. None that weren’t eighty years old. So few that people didn’t know. The possibility of a Jew didn’t even occur to them. My brother and I more or less passed. Kids at school would ask us where we went to church.”

“And what would you say?”

“Episcopalian was a safe bet. Evangelicals were too intense and Catholics could sniff you out. You had to know stuff to be a Catholic. When I got older I would tell the truth. People didn’t know what to do with that.”

“Well, there you go,” said Hugo. “That must have been isolating.”

“But everyone feels isolated as a teenager, don’t they? The reason is almost beside the point.”

“So nothing causes anything. That’s your thesis?”

“I don’t have a thesis,” I said. “I’ve got my woes like anyone. No one’s unscathed. My grandparents are dead. Three of four, anyway. I was only intermittently popular in my small town. Not, you know, full-on popular. Um what else? I don’t know . . . I’ve had an abortion?”

“Are you asking me?”

“No, I definitely had the abortion. And I’m not trying to be flip about it either. In case that kind of joke makes you uncomfortable. What I’m asking is, is that enough?”

He chewed a cracker, half smiling. There was a poppy seed stuck to his lower lip, and I thought of Gil. On Thursday afternoons Gil printed out bingo cards and the writers all played while we watched a live feed of the taping: B-plus ad-lib was a square. Glance at guest’s tits was a square. Spittle on lower lip was a square. Winner gets a raise, Gil always joked. I never knew what Hugo thought about these games, if he found them funny or insulting. If he saw them as a way for the staff to let off steam, if he knew about them at all.

“Is that enough what?” asked Hugo.

“Enough bad stuff. To convince you that I’m miserable or lonely or whatever it is you think qualifies me to be a comedian.”

“I never said you had to be miserable. I’m just saying that’s usually the case. I know a lot of comedians, too many, and they’re a pretty desolate bunch. It’s not always something in their past; sometimes it’s clinical. Is it clinical for you?”

I took a gulp of wine to conceal my surprise. “You’re asking if I’m depressed? I thought this was supposed to be a date. Or a datelike hang-out.” I blushed. “Maybe I misread it. Can we just eat these crackers? Damn.”

I shoved a handful into my mouth and coughed. They tasted earthy, like rosemary and dirt, and absorbed all my spit. I had to drink a lot of wine to get it all down.

“Nothing fucked me up,” I said, when I could speak again. “Nothing in particular.”

It was true. I hadn’t had a difficult life. My father was a dentist and my mother ran the practice. We had health care, school clothes, summer camp. We had an extra room just for the computer. A Honda Civic that my brother and I took turns backing into street signs, telephone poles, other cars. I could get a twenty from my dad on the way out the door anytime if I was willing to needle him for it.

And it wasn’t just money either. I hadn’t been beaten  up or neglected. I hadn’t ever been mugged. I’d done well in school, well in college. I’d had a couple of iffy sexual experiences that I’d thankfully been able to shut down before things went too far. The worst I had suffered was nonsuccess. I was twenty-nine with an entry-level job and unable to pay my bills. I had been provided for. I hadn’t been harmed or held back, I hadn’t been scarred, but I had quietly failed anyway.

I said, “I don’t hold with sad clown theory. It’s facile, superficial. The idea that something horrible has to happen in a comedian’s past. Like all comics had shitty dads or dead mothers. Like that’s the only reason you could have for wanting to be funny.”

Hugo said, “Maybe that’s what you need. Something big to hurt you. Maybe it would make you funnier.”

“Is this a preamble to sexual assault?” I craned my neck and looked down the hall off the kitchen. “Does this place have a designated rape room?”

I knew my tone was nasty; he’d gotten under my skin.

Hugo shook his head. “Come on. I just mean that you probably need to have some more experiences.”

I said, “Maybe I just want to be funny because the world is funny. Maybe it’s the only way I can see of telling the truth.”

I looked at him, daring him to laugh at this preposterous statement.

When he didn’t I put down my wineglass, pushed back from the countertop. “Where’s the bathroom?”

It was cleverly hidden under the staircase, a cubbyhole with a smooth, black-tiled floor. I peed looking at the copper bowl of the sink and considered leaving. I pictured walking down the long drive and waiting outside the spooky gray gate for a car service. There was nothing actually spooky about the gate. I was drunk. I wondered if Hugo would follow me out. Come on, June. June, come on. He would use my name a lot like that, I was sure. Possibly, it would work.

Or if it didn’t I’d what? Call my own bluff? Get on the train? Ride back to the city, back to Brooklyn? Go to the roof party and drink a warm PBR? Pick up the mail on the floor of the vestibule?

It was too logistically difficult, I concluded. I had come this far and I was still curious. The experience hadn’t even amounted to a story I could bring back to Audrey yet. I washed my hands, reapplied lipstick, studied my reflection for signs of credulity. There was no medicine cabinet to check for pills. Better that way, because I’d have looked if there was. I’d have been unable to resist confirming for myself the things I suspected: his sadness and erectile dysfunction, his growing prostate and failing heart.

The kitchen was empty when I got back. Maybe he left, I thought, and the house belonged to me now. I picked up the cheese knife and held it in my hand. A pleasing silver heft.

“This is mine,” I said experimentally.

I got up and looked in the refrigerator. It was empty except for Diet Coke, pickles, and condiments. Even the condiments were sparse. The mustard lids looked crusted on. I opened a low cabinet and saw nothing. I opened another and saw a SodaStream still in its box. I didn’t want to get caught gazing at an unopened SodaStream, so I sat back down.

He returned from a door off the kitchen, brushing the dust from a bottle of wine. He held it up so I could inspect the label.

He said, “No offense, but the wine you picked out was garbage compared to this.”

“I read something awhile ago that said if wine tastes good then it is good.”

“Hm,” he said. “Not really.”

“But if it tastes good . . . it is . . . good.”

“You just said that. Are Hostess cupcakes good just because they taste good?”

“Yes. The theory holds.”

He poured me a glass. “Here. Try this.”

It tasted woody, like someone had dragged some grapes along the deck of an old boat. I told him that and he laughed. “You’re not actually wrong.”

We both sipped. He opened his mouth a couple of times to say something and closed it again. Finally he said, “I had the shitty father you mentioned.”

He was trying to apologize, I realized. The special wine was an apology. His sudden openness about his childhood was an apology, too.

“Shitty how?” I said.

I already knew the answer. I knew all about his upbringing. Years before I’d found his memoir on the one-dollar rack outside the Strand and stood skimming it while smoke from the halal cart on the corner stung my eyes. It had a purple cover with raised silver lettering and brittle yellow pages that kept falling onto the sidewalk. Finally I fished out a single and took it home.

“You name it,” he said. “Distant. Ragey. The type of person who would hit a kid with a closed fist.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah. He waited until I was ten, though. Double digits. That was his bizarre boundary. I probably weighed eighty pounds.”

“And your mother . . .”

“Did nothing. I could never really get a handle on her. She was this soft, creative person, but she let him do what he did. Maybe she didn’t like it, but she didn’t stop it either. She had boundary issues of her own, my mother. She was a dancer. She’d been a Rockette for about an hour when she was young, and she used to put on her costume and perform the whole Christmas extravaganza in our living room for fun. Oil up her legs.”

He fell silent. All of this, I remembered, took place in Woodside, Queens, in the crisscrossing shadow of the LIRR. They had a grim little row house, brown on beige, loose banister, silverfish in the tub. His room was divided from his sister’s with a particleboard partition that wobbled when one of them rolled over in bed. The mailbox said Bechkowiak.

“Is that why you changed your name? To distance yourself from them?”

“I changed my name because you can’t be Bechkowiak in Hollywood. Or you couldn’t back then.”

But yeah, he went on, he picked Best because it sounded good, was empty of association, and also because he was nineteen and pretty dumb. He picked Best because it said nothing except that he was the best, which made him laugh to this day.

“It wasn’t all bad,” he said. “My childhood. My dad was a mechanic and he taught me about cars. He had an incredible breadth of knowledge. He’d flown planes in World War II. Probably he should have been an engineer. He was smart enough. And we watched Carson together almost every night. That we did do. My father didn’t really like it, but I could tell he thought it was a bonding thing. I can’t remember if he ever laughed. I’m guessing not. I would have enjoyed it more on my own. But instead it was this weird solemn ritual. Glumly making popcorn, sitting down on the couch.”

“But you loved your sister,” I said. “Vivian.”

There was a photo insert in the middle of the book that included some family pictures. Hugo with a terrifying Easter bunny; Hugo and Vivian on roller skates in front of the house; the whole family posed for a frowning department store portrait. Hugo and Vivian looked alike. Tall, fair, and miserable.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You read my book.”

“I might have. Does it have a purple cover?”

“I was against that cover. It was silly. It misrepresented the content of the book. People picked it up thinking it was this light, gossipy thing, and were surprised to find out it was really about a kid clawing his way out of an abusive home. It fell out of print.”

He ate the last sliver of manchego, tossed in a jagged shard of cracker after it. That was something you didn’t consider when you wrote a book, he said. That one day it would be out of print, and sooner than you’d like. Not thinking about endings didn’t stop them from happening. It only made the endings sneak up on you.

He stood to clear the plate, tilted the crumbs into the sink. He pressed buttons on the dishwasher, trying to get it open, but it seemed to be locked.

“Eco wash in progress,” he mumbled. “What does that mean? No it isn’t.”

He looked up at me and smiled abashedly. I went over and took the plate from him. “Let me.”

I punched a few buttons and opened the dishwasher, set the plate on the empty rack. As I was closing it again he grabbed my wrist. His hands were aging faster than the rest of him. They were lean, tanned to spotting, and the tendons stood out. His grip was urgent, but not painful, and the warmth, the give of his skin, startled me.

He said, “You’re not a sad clown, okay? It was wrong to assume that we’re the same, you and me. That you’re a mess just because I am.”

We stayed like that for a moment, not speaking. I thought he’d do something else, pull me closer to him, kiss me, but he didn’t. The dishwasher started to whoosh—all that water for one plate. I hadn’t meant to run it. I hadn’t meant to come to this beautiful house and needlessly run the dishwasher. It was the last thing I ever meant to do.

He let go and told me a joke, the classic Catskills one-liner about two old Jewish women in a restaurant. The joke went like this: two old Jewish women are sitting in a restaurant eating their food. Waiter walks up to them and says, “Is anything all right?”

I didn’t know exactly what he was trying to tell me, but because the joke was funny, and because he was a professional with perfect delivery, I laughed.

At midnight, we tuned in and caught the end of Hugo’s lead-in. We had finished the bottle of wine and I sent Hugo down to the cellar to retrieve an even nicer bottle. He came back with one that tasted like a Hershey bar and we sat drinking it on the hard charcoal couch in the recessed living room. I kept getting distracted by the room’s functional twenty-first-century objects, its flat-screen TV and sliding Jenga tower of remotes. It was as if a set dresser had let a few anachronisms slip through to see if anyone was paying attention.

On TV, a different middle-aged white man presided in a different signature suit. He had an America’s sweetheart of his own on, this one newly minted. Her dress zipped all the way up the front and Hugo wondered aloud whether some part of her felt tempted to unzip it in a single deranged swoop and continue telling her anecdote in her underwear.

“They’d burn her like a witch,” I said.

“She’d deserve it,” said Hugo.

I expected the host to acknowledge the end of Hugo’s show, pay tribute in some way. But he only said, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay Up is next.” The credits rolled and were interrupted immediately by a commercial for bleach.

Hugo’s intro music began, dominated by jazzy, dated sax. When Bony’s tenor boomed through the speakers announcing the night’s guests, a bad feeling crept into my chest.

I said, “Hey, let’s put on a movie instead.”

Hugo didn’t respond. His own face, his own body, had appeared on TV. He stood delivering his opening monologue.

Behind him, the purple curtain caught the light and shimmered like stardust.

“I, Hugo Best, being of sound mind and body,” he said, “declare this to be my last will and testament. I appoint my bandleader, Bony Saurez, as my personal representative to administer this will, and to make sure that there are no, you know . . .” He paused, rubbing his palms together. “Shenanigans.”

The audience laughed. Hugo said to Bony, standing off to one side behind an old radio mike, “That cool with you? You prepared to administer?”

Bony nodded. “On it, boss.”

“To the incoming host,” Hugo continued, “I devise, bequeath, and give all my hackiest material.” He paused. “And man, there have been some turkeys over the years, am I right?”

“Some clunkers,” agreed Bony. “Some whiffs. Some real, uh, what do you call it? Comedic misfires.”

“All right, Bony,” said Hugo. “We get it.”

“And that’s the best stuff. You guys should see what doesn’t make the show. Woof.”

“All right, Bony,” said Hugo again. He addressed the audience. “This guy’s a media expert all of a sudden. A bold and incisive critic of TV’s new golden age.”

Next to me, Hugo chuckled softly. I turned to look at him. The real version of the man sat with one leg crossed over the other, wineglass resting on his knee. But it was the version on the screen that caused a clenching in my chest. When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I lived for Hugo’s show.

It had seemed like such an act of largess on my parents’ part to allow me to watch him, even though it made me tired at school the next day. Hugo was younger then, cool, something of an iconoclast. My crush had been a mini-collision of forces, a science fair Krakatau. The double whammy of loving him and also wanting to be him. Here, for the first time, was a way of living. You could move to New York, be urbane, wry, ironic. You could be a wit and hover above the whole sad, grasping fracas.

Tonight he was up there for the last time, on the same set, in the same clothes, trying for the same vitality. His face was older. His body was heavier. He was carrying around the knowledge that it was all over. Even so he was almost pulling it off. Something was the same. His self. His Hugo-ness.

The Hugo on the couch reached over and put his hand on my knee.

The Hugo on the screen said, “I’m so happy you’re here with me. We have a great show planned for you tonight.”


The Myth of the Consistently Great Writer

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Usually it’s a confession made over a two-person dinner. Occasionally it’s a hedged statement to a larger group, the words tethered to my mouth like a cartoon dialogue balloon, ready to be sucked back in at the first sign of resistance.  I didn’t like that new book from Literary Bigwig. Why does such a statement feel provocative, a little heretical? Why all the secrecy and self-doubt? It’s because publishing suffers from Paul Varjak syndrome, and it’s worth asking what’s at stake.

For those who didn’t watch Breakfast At Tiffany’s a thousand times during high school as I did, Paul Varjak is the handsome, lazy writer who falls in love with Holly Golightly. In the past, Paul wrote one best-selling book of short stories and, despite having written nothing else for half a decade, it’s understood whatever he writes next will be a whopping success because he’s already been established as a rare literary talent. That’s exactly what happens, even though Paul’s next stab at writing is a short story titled “My Friend” and doesn’t exactly indicate a work of towering genius: “There was once a very lonely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.” In short, Paul Varjak is the embodiment of the publishing phenomenon whereby writers who achieve a certain level of success with one book are always viewed positively afterwards, regardless of the work they produce.

It would take a combination of rare talent, extreme self-editing, and a trust fund for someone to only publish truly brilliant books.

The problem with Paul Varjak syndrome, of course, is that humans are inconsistent. It would take a combination of rare talent, extreme self-editing, and a trust fund for someone to only publish truly brilliant books. (And they’d probably still produce some mediocre stuff—they would just have the option not to sell it.) Yet while reading book coverage, browsing bookstores, and having conversations with friends, it becomes clear that there is a halo around certain faces. Why?

Publishing houses, for one, definitely stand to benefit from the myth of the flawless writer. If you were Hemingway’s publisher and he wrote something new, you’d publish it and call it the next great novel even if it was the worst thing you’d ever seen. It doesn’t make sense for publishers to publicly acknowledge that their established authors have written a dud; they’d only lose money. This may seem harmless, but because publishers inevitably benefit from the writers who gain that halo, they throw the weight of their marketing machines behind those same writers, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of favorable publicity that all but ensures certain writers’ success, regardless of the quality of the individual work.

In other words, to become a certain kind of literary star is to receive the benefit of the doubt, and not just from publishing houses, but from the media. Book reviews and profiles of established figures are more likely to be complementary rather than critical or nuanced.

Part of the reason for this is the loss of professional book reviewers. As broadsheets shrink and platforms like Goodreads rise, it’s hard for publications to pay for a dedicated reviewer. Instead, they employ freelancers to write the occasional review, which means reviews are often pitched only by the writers who are moved to do so—either because they’re excited to praise a big-name author or pan an enemy.  This has led to a critical landscape that is overwhelmingly either positive or (more rarely) scathing. It’s not easy in any field to take a contradictory stand against an established figure, but the literary community can be particularly harsh to detractors. The irregular book reviewer stands to lose from writing a negative review; they risk insulting someone they know personally or professionally, and their taste could be questioned in a way that impedes their chance of getting employed again. Staff reviewers, on the other hand, are used to ignoring the noise, both around a particular author and from the masses, and if they give a negative review, it’s framed by their expertise.

You can tell just how rare it is to read a critical review of an established author because of how infamous it made the former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. As a rule, Kakutani graded each book she read on its own merits, no matter who wrote it, and as a result she’d occasionally negatively review everyone from Philip Roth to Martin Amis. Though impartiality seems, to me, the first qualification required for being a book critic, Kakutani became newsworthy for hers, and tales of authors she’d critiqued headlined all the career recaps which proliferated the Internet upon her retirement in 2017. (The great authors themselves clearly weren’t used to such treatment; Jonathan Franzen called her “the stupidest person in New York City,” and Norman Mailer, “a one-woman kamikaze [who] disdains white male authors.”)

I’m not trying to minimize how hard it is to write even one truly great book, nor do I want to suggest that most people who are considered to be at the top of the field haven’t earned their status. But I think we should all be concerned about the tendency to reward the same writers and ignore their unevenness—to create literary gods— because it reinforces the stratified world of publishing.

More than ever, only a small percentage of writers can sustain themselves on the money made from publishing their books. The decline in author incomes is a complicated issue, but one factor is that the big publishing houses, who can typically offer more money than the independents, are taking less risks on the unknown in favor of promoting “sure” bets. This obviously feels unfair to debut writers, and it’s also unfair to career writers who write good books but don’t achieve this special level of fame that comes with a publicity support system, and instead have to prove themselves every time.

Publishing has become the kind of system that reinforces its own prophesies in order to make money. By promoting the belief that certain writers are capable of writing amazing books every time, you are encouraging people to spend their increasingly limited book money on a smaller circle of writers, thus limiting the opportunities for new and unproven works to enter the world. This also has the effect of enforcing a certain view of what “good literature” is, and sets unrealistic expectations about how art is created. We see this superhero franchise mentality—put your money in what’s worked once– in many creative industries, and it ultimately detracts from the quality and diversity of art.

We can praise great talent without forcing the narrative that certain people represent the ideal writer.

What’s the answer? I don’t think it’s aggressively negative book reviews—those certainly exist, and are their own click-bait phenomenon— nor is it to go after the old masters wielding pitchforks and red pens. I also understand that it’s unrealistic to expect publishing houses to openly critique their own clients. What is needed is for the media to judge every book on its own merits. Book reviewers should honestly review the work at hand, allowing for the natural spectrum of success. We can praise great talent without forcing the narrative that certain people represent the ideal writer. (And media presentation matters.) In turn, the public will feel more confident that great writing exists in many forms and may come from unexpected places, and will spend their money on a wider array of books. A more open public will enable editors to publish debut authors without worrying if they are going to be a superstar, and will encourage them to keep an open mind about established writers they already know.

We’re in a strange time, both for publishing and the American arts in general. Some of the best work is coming from unproven talent, but fear about declining sales means more money than ever is going to remakes and well-known names. There is nothing wrong with supporting artists you love, and I would totally preorder Paul Varjak’s second book if he were real. But I shouldn’t assume it would be perfect, or be afraid to voice my opinion if it wasn’t.   

There Were Women on Noah’s Ark

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Sarah Blake and I met last year at the AWP Writing Conference in Tampa, where we bonded not over writing, but rewriting. The Bible, to be exact. I’d recently finished a version of The Book of Genesis for my nine-year-old son, stripping away the dogmatic aspects and giving the whole thing a secular-humanist, feminist spin. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was far more focused and ambitious: a novel entitled Naamah (Riverhead Books) that imagines the Great Flood from the perspective of Noah’s wife, Naamah.

The Biblical tale is a familiar one. Seeing that the world is wicked, God makes it rain for forty days and forty nights, flooding the earth and killing all its inhabitants. Well, almost all of them. Having second thoughts, God speaks to the virtuous Noah, detailing plans for a large boat, an ark. God tells him that once built, Noah is to take to the ark with his family and seven pairs of all the animals of earth. Once the flood waters recede, God essentially reboots his creation, promising never to punish humankind with such destruction again. Within that very short text, wherein the men — Noah and his three sons — are named while the women are referred to only as the wives, Blake’s wonderful novel takes place.

Naamah by Sarah Blake
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While attending to the many duties of maintaining a floating menagerie, Naamah experiences a wide range of emotions. She grieves for her deceased lover, a woman named Bethel, and deals with the trauma that comes with surviving the apocalypse. She struggles with isolation, and the pressures of being the family matriarch, in charge of birthing animals and humans, doling advice to her sons and daughters-in-law, and helping to bolster spirits as days aboard the ark become months. Seeking a relief from monotony, she takes to the water in long swims and discovers a whole world beneath the waves, replete with an angel and ghosts. Meanwhile, at night, in dreams, she communicates with the birds, puzzling over the nature of God’s plan — should God even have one — and her place within it.

With prose as luminous and heady as it is grounded in Naamah’s strong physicality, Blake creates a complex woman in a complicated yet terrifyingly simple situation. It’s these juxtapositions — how Naamah is both human and mythic — that makes the book such a powerhouse of a debut. Blake spoke with me about it, unpacking some of the work that went into writing Naamah, and how her poetry background (her previous collections include Mr. West and Let’s Not Live on Earth) contributed to how she constructed her debut novel.

Brian Gresko: Though the legend of the Great Flood looms large in our culture, in the actual text of The Book of Genesis it’s a very short story. Of all the tales of The Bible, what drew you to this one?

Sarah Blake: I think it was when I got to this part of Genesis: “7:24 And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days. 8:1 Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.” I thought of Naamah on that ark, adrift, with no sign for five months that the waters would ever go down. And with this implication that God had forgotten them, if he had to come to remember them. It was horrifying to me — the idea of the ark, the floating, the animals, the noises, the smells, the impossibility of it all. I became obsessed with the woman put in that position.

BG: The name Naamah isn’t one of your own choosing, it comes from a very old midrash, a Biblical exegesis written by Judaic scholars. Did you do a lot of research about Naamah in particular that informed her character? Or about the other women aboard the ark?

SB: All of the women’s names are taken from the ancient Jewish text the Book of Jubilees, or Leptogenesis. Sadie from Sedeqetelebab, Neela from Ne’elatama’uk, and Adata from Adataneses. But while the Book of Jubilees expands on their family, it doesn’t offer too much more information about the story of the ark. Mostly it’s more specifics about the timeline, the moons and months when particular things happened. There are some other stories that say that Naamah was in charge of the seeds and plants, and I brought that into my book. There are others that say she sang, but I gave that characteristic to Sadie instead. I never saw Naamah as much of a singer. I imagined her growing to detest the animals too much to sing to them.

BG: Naamah’s relationship with the animals is fascinating. At the book’s start, she’s literally become blind to them — her vision is unimpaired except for when it comes to the beasts, which she can’t see. I’d love to know more about that decision, which is so central to the book, and so surprising.

The ark is something we’re all somewhat familiar with, so as quickly as I could, I wanted to make the ark unfamiliar.

SB: I wanted the ark to be magical straight off — or if not the ark, the reality of the ark — or if not the reality of the ark, the reality of Naamah — or perhaps just Naamah herself. I imagined all the difficulties that the animals created, but the idea of not seeing them not only made them more dangerous but magnified their sounds, their smells. The ark is something we’re all somewhat familiar with, so as quickly as I could, I wanted to make the ark unfamiliar. I also needed a physical manifestation of Naamah’s discomfort in and distrustfulness of her position.

BG: Did Naamah come to you from the start as a character full of anger?

SB: Not anger — certainly frustration. But whenever she feels anger or doubt or frustration, it’s always balanced by the gratefulness she feels to be alive, to have been saved, chosen. And that constant tug, away from anger, is one that I think she resents. Greatly. So yes, she came to me right away with all of these layers to her feelings about surviving, survivor’s guilt, and all the implications that entails for her relationship with God. Getting to write into all of that — until I understood how she felt and how she would speak to those things and how that would affect her relationships and choices — that was one of my favorite parts of writing this book.

BG: That complex layering of emotions seems to play out directly in her sexual relationships. One of the most engaging aspects of this novel is that Naamah is both powerfully and centrally a maternal figure on the ark, a true matriarch, while also being alive to her sexuality as an individual. Some of my favorite scenes were of her with her former lover, a widow named Bethel. How did that aspect of Naamah’s character develop?

SB: Yes! That seems pretty inherent to the experience of parenting. I feel pretty asexual as a mother. I try to be shameless and direct about my body around my son. But of course I’m a sexual person. And my body is how I experience both sex and sexiness. So there’s this very strange duality to not just how I spend my time (when I’m being sexual or not) but also in my relationship to my own body, my very understanding of it. I guess it existed before motherhood, but, boy, did motherhood draw it out to its extremes. So I knew that same sort of thing would be happening for Naamah, mother of three adult sons and three adult daughters-in-law, wife of Noah, potentially, for centuries, and also the lover of many people as they came through her life. I’m so glad I captured that for her.

BG: The memories that Naamah has of caring for her sons as infants resonated with me as a stay-at-home father. It seems that at no other time is a human more god-like than when caring for a very young child; you create their entire reality for them, you are their world. I wondered if her experiences as a mother amplifies the crisis of faith she experiences on the ark. She has no assurance that God won’t destroy them again. For all she knows, God may continue to be a harsh and uncompromising father who scorches the Earth whenever He’s displeased. That’s a terrifying prospect to consider.

I think Naamah’s crisis of faith is most amplified by being put into a position of godliness for the very first time.

SB: I hadn’t thought about it like that — that she might have experienced a version of godliness and, because of it, been more thrown by her perilous position. I found raising my son led and leads me to more helpless feelings than god-like ones. I think I carried that into the book for Naamah as well. I think Naamah’s crisis of faith is most amplified by being put into a position of godliness for the very first time, something she’d never experienced, never imagined. And from that position, yes, I think she’s all the more certain that God might punish them all again. Until she gets to talk to Him later in the book.

BG: Pretty early on in the novel, Naamah begins a practice of taking long swims from the ark. Beneath the water she finds an angel, and later, the spirits of the dead. This, along with her dreams, is such a wonderful and surprising aspect of the book, and one that adds real tension as the story progresses. How did this element of Naamah’s story come about? Was this entirely of your own invention, or was there any precedent for it in the research that you did?

SB: Before I wrote prose about Naamah, I’d written poems about her, and even a short screenplay. The first thing I knew about the book, all the way back to that screenplay, was that Naamah was going to take up swimming. That seemed like the most logical response to this feeling of being trapped, which I imagined overwhelmed Naamah on the ark. But once she was in the water, what an opportunity! It felt like a space where anything could happen. In the short, Naamah sees a woman, but the screenplay is just about over at that point. I was so excited to figure out the mystery woman when I went forward with prose. Would she be only a vision? Or would it be God? A dead woman? Bethel even? Or an angel? I’ve always been curious about angels, fascinated by their characterizations and how they’ve been carried through into contemporary fiction/media. So once I thought that it could be an angel, that was all I could think about.

The angel and her village of dead are completely of my own invention, though it has been pointed out to me, since finishing, that she could be read as an origin story for the devil and hell.

BG: To me, this book perfectly sits in-between a kind of narrative realism — Naamah as a character has a familiar and specific psychology grounded in her body — and a fable in which she’s enacting a complex drama about a woman’s role in a patriarchal world, and an individual’s relationship to the divine, among other possible interpretations. From a process perspective, what was it like to walk that line?

SB: Perhaps this is where my being a poet helped me the most. I always try to stick as closely as I can to the truth of whatever narrative I’m telling, the truth of the character and their world, and I trust that any parallels that are developing will be fitting and, in their own way, true. Those parallels are not entirely my business; they’re the reader’s. I must only watch for ways I definitely don’t want the text to translate. But it was more of a concern for this book being a retelling of a tale from Genesis. I knew it was more of a concern for a novel than, say, a one-page narrative poem, where you can track the fable, the metaphor, and it never gets too unwieldy (if it goes astray in a poem, you can lead it back). Writing this book required more faith. I had to commit to all of the truths of Naamah and believe that the other side, the murkier depths, the reflections, would read over in a way that made sense to me. Of course, I got to revise, but I found that I was happy with the ways the story dipped into parable, the ways Naamah stands also as symbol.

“Group” Therapy

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that changed your mind?

I was always skeptical of The Group, Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel about the Vassar Class of ’33. Frankly, I figured it would bore me. I doubted that I’d relate to the struggles of eight women graduating from college in the aftermath of the Great Depression; these days, I’m barely interested in books that take place before the advent of the internet.

But it was free, and easily available, sitting on a community bookshelf outside a coffee shop in my neighborhood in New York. The cover was crumbling, but the pages were intact. Whenever I’m looking for a new book, my test is to read the first paragraph, and if I don’t find the opening lines compelling, I leave it on the stacks. With The Group, I accidentally missed the first paragraph and thumbed a few pages in, my eyes landing on the phrase “copious menstruation.” I laughed out loud, took the book home, and crammed it above a row on my own overflowing bookshelf.

I’d moved to New York from Boston in September to be closer to a man with whom I’d been in a long-distance relationship for two years. We moved into a gorgeous one-bedroom, my first, in his favorite part of Inwood. It was nice at first. We merged the art and cookbooks we’d been buying for each other; we brought in furniture his father had built many years ago, that we’d restored together. We were both finishing graduate school – I study literature at Harvard, he does physics at NYU – and confronting the pressures of the dissertation year and the job market.

Our romance had been something of a fairy tale. We’d met on the street one summer day when he was visiting a friend in Boston. Our one night-stand stand turned into a fling, which became a full-fledged relationship. On our fight night together, he identified his favorite spot on my body: the curve of waist, ribcage to hip, that is exaggerated when I lie on my side. Two years later, he still liked to put his hand there with a feeling somewhere between reverence and ownership.

Even his alcoholism didn’t ding the armor of perfection I thought he wore.

He had a drinking problem, but in our two years together, I’d helped him confront it, and steadied him on his path to sobriety. In solidarity, I never drank around him. We visited each other every three weeks, then every two weeks. When not together, spoke every night, including during the months I’d spent in Europe on a research trip. We were passionately in love and it made all the sense in the world that, as soon as I was able to leave Cambridge, we’d move in together. Even his alcoholism didn’t ding the armor of perfection I thought he wore. It only gave the armor a lovely patina.

In December, three months after we moved in, he relapsed. I knew about a couple incidents in which he’d gotten drunk—isolated ones, I thought. By January, we were fighting constantly and I kept catching him exchanging flirtatious texts with a colleague. I never found evidence that he had slept with her, but I kept feeling compelled to unlock his phone and read the messages they exchanged. And Dan Savage is right, snoopers always find what they’re looking for. Sometimes it made me so angry, I became violent, throwing wooden spoons while I stood at the stove or grabbing his neck, my manicured fingernails long enough to leave a mark. In early February, I decided to leave for two weeks, not the city but the apartment. I’d stay with friends, drinking in their sympathy and more wine than I had consumed in, well, two years. On my way out the door, I grabbed that stray copy of The Group and threw it in my backpack. I started reading it that night, on a friend’s couch in Crown Heights.

The Group by Mary McCarthy
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The eponymous group is eight women: Kay Strong, Elinor “Lakey” Eastlake, Dottie Renfrew, Polly Andrews, Priss Hartshorn, Pokey Prothero, Libby MacAusland and, my favorite, Helena Davison. They were all best friends in college which means, then as now, they all relate to each other with varying levels of envy, resentment, and condescension. The book begins soon after their graduation when they’ve mostly all moved to New York.

They’re all different, well-developed, three-dimensional (except Pokey, who basically provides comic relief, with her pilot’s license and puddle jumper that she uses to fly to agricultural courses at Cornell). They all have their conflicts, but the question they all struggle with is this: what kind of woman do I want to be? What kind of marriage do I want, if, they think, decades before Lisa Simpson, I choose to get married? Each one fancies herself modern, nothing at all like Mother and Daddy, but they have to face the realities of New York, the job market, sex and relationships to figure out what it means to be modern women.

I related to every single character; each one of them had problems that seemed an aspect of my own. Helena, who narrates events in her head even as they occur to her, preparing how she’ll later write them down or, more likely, relate them to her mom back in Cleveland. Polly who, when a relationship with a more experienced man ends, admits she never belonged among the built-in furniture he had in his beautiful office. “I’m a knickknack,” she tells him. And poor Priss, a victim of mansplaining avant la lettre.

But most of all, Kay, who had lately been the most devil-may-care member of the group. Outspoken to the point of coarseness, untamable, her move to New York was the most natural thing in the world, especially after all those steamy weekends she spent in the city with the romantic and impressive Harald Petersen. The book begins at their wedding; on the first page, Kay becomes Kay (Strong) Petersen.

Harald has a drinking problem, and a responsibility problem. When he gets fired from the theater he’s been working at, Kay wonders if he hadn’t been drunk on the job, but he claims it was because he refused to give in to the director’s advances:

“It was an uninviting prospect. The old fruit must be forty.” For a second, Kay was relieved and, at the same time (wasn’t that queer?), almost let down; then a fresh suspicion attacked her. “Harald! Do you mean you would have done it with someone younger? A chorus boy?” She felt sick thinking of the nights had had worked late, and yet there was this funny itch to know. “I can’t answer hypothetical questions,” Harald said, rather impatiently.

Kay suspects that Harald is unfaithful, but she doesn’t know for sure. The reader does, though, because Helena walks in on him in full canoodle with another woman. But Kay has no evidence, and she becomes trapped by the combination of distrust and a disinclination to express it. She’s also terrified of becoming an old-fashioned nag – she’s a modern woman, after all – even as she sees Harald yield to an increasingly dangerous drinking habit.

Harald had gone to the kitchen and fixed himself a gin and bitters; this was a bad sign – he knew Kay hated the taste of straight liquor and did not like to see him drink it. Now he put tobacco in his pipe, lit it, and poured a second. “What can I fix you?” he said. “A silver fizz?” Kay frowned; she was wounded by the mocking courtesy of his manner. “I don’t think I’ll have anything,” she replied thoughtfully. Harald’s dark, wiry eyebrows shot up. “Why this departure?” he said. Kay had suddenly determined to turn over a new leaf, but she felt this was not quite the right moment to announce it; you never knew how Harald would take things when he had been drinking. “I just don’t feel like it,” she said. “I’m going to start dinner.” She rose from her chair. Harald stared at her, with his hands on his hips and pursed lips. “My God!” he said. “You are the most tactless, blundering fool that ever lived.” “But what have I said?” cried Kay, too astonished, even, to be hurt. “’I don’t think I’ll have anything,’” he quoted, imitating her voice and adding a smug note that she could swear had not been there when she spoke. If only he knew, she was dying for a silver fizz.

I didn’t know what a silver fizz was (now I do: it’s gin, egg white, sugar, and lemon, all fizzed up), but I was becoming intimately familiar with the fear of saying the wrong thing to stop someone drinking. And I was learning about how name-calling works in the context of a relationship. It’s a seemingly powerless thing that completely disarms you, harms you. It’s a speech-act that turns you into the thing you’re accused of being. Harald weaponizes Kay’s outspokenness, even when she’s trying to rein it in. When my partner called me an asshole, a dick, an egotistical prick, the most hypocritical person he knows, he convinced me that I was.

During the two weeks my partner and I spent apart, I tore through the book, literally and figuratively. The paperback edition I had was the perfect size to fit in my purse, so I read it on long subway rides between the tippy-top of Manhattan where I lived, and the navel of Brooklyn, where I had gone to recover. But this copy had been printed in 1964, and had been left out on a community bookshelf by god knows who for god knows how long. It was crumbling in my hands. Every time I turned a page, I ripped the brittle paper. Its yellowed pages left ticker tape in my purse, on my lap, on the subway floor. I knew I’d be this copy’s final reader. Both covers loosed themselves, I taped them back on. The corners of the front cover and the first twenty or so pages were falling off too, until it looked like a limestone quarry. It was beautiful, but vulnerable.

Each chapter of the book switches perspective. Now you’re with Libby, who expects a marriage proposal from her new beau, and is subjected to his rape attempt instead. Now you’re with Dottie, who parts with her virginity cavalierly but is humiliated when her deflowerer rejects her offer of occasional NSA sex. It’s enough to drive her out of New York, but even after she becomes engaged to a kind Arizona widower, she still longs for good old Dick (McCarthy here anticipating Chris Kraus).

Each chapter was shocking, and shockingly familiar. Reading it on the train, I would gasp audibly. I would weep silently, reaching into the pocket of my old-fashioned cowl-necked wool coat for a handkerchief. I felt so in sync with these women that a group experience of “copious menstruation” couldn’t be far off.

I didn’t manage to stay away from my partner for the full two weeks. He had a crisis at work, and so I went back, wanting to be there for him, and also sick of cooking thank-you dinners and sleeping on couches. But he kept drinking, even more than I realized, more nights than not. He’d fall asleep and I’d go through his phone, looking for evidence of his infidelity. And I kept finding it. It was worse than I had suspected. His flirtation with his colleague had persisted, and there were other women, women with whom he was sexual and explicit. It didn’t seem like he had slept with any of them. No plans to meet were ever made, no details about encounters, even when he and I had been apart. Unless it had been arranged over the phone? Kay was right: “You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.”

This is Kay’s revelation when she wakes up in the Payne Whitney Clinic, a psychiatric hospital. Harald had come home the previous day at seven in the morning; Kay knew he was drunk, and suspected he’d been unfaithful. He became violent, she threatened him with a kitchen knife, the police were called. Eventually he convinces her to check into a hospital, they could have some space from each other. She could rest, recover. But she’d been tricked; he’d had her committed. Until he shows up and signs her release papers, the doctors will assume that her black eye was self-inflicted.

When she realizes this, she doesn’t feel hurt or angry, but heartbroken. “She was grieving, she decided, for a Harald-That-Never-Was, not for the real Harald. But if she lost the real Harald, who was not such a muchness, she lost her only link with the Harald-That-Never-Was. Then it was really finished, her dream.”

I read that scene on my way back to Brooklyn. The night before, I’d found more messages with yet another woman. I also found the largest bottle of whiskey I’d ever seen—although “found” may be the wrong word. It wasn’t even hidden this time. It was on the floor in a black plastic bag, surrounded by the laundry he’d needed to borrow money to have cleaned. Every other time I’d found incriminating messages and woken him up, he’d first deny it, claiming I was reading into these texts. Then he’d admit it, and beg me not to leave him.

This time had been different. This time, I’d woken him up by pouring liquor all over him, shouting “You want your life soaked in whiskey?” This time, he’d become violent. This time, the police were called. How many times did I need this to happen?

I felt like a caricature of myself, so outlandish, a character from a 1930’s melodrama.

I felt like a caricature of myself, so outlandish, a character from a 1930’s melodrama. How could I love someone who was always playing hide-and-seek with me?

This time, there was no begging in the morning. Just an acknowledgment that it was really finished, our dream.

Two days later, riding the Manhattan-bound A to collect my things, I reached the end of the book. It ends seven years after it began, at Kay’s funeral. The 1930s are over, and she has died falling out a window, in what is almost certainly a suicide.

The Group is a collective coming-of-age story. The women are college graduates, and they think they’ve stepped fully into adulthood. But adulthood isn’t an age; it’s a stage you earn, through suffering, I suppose, and disappointment. By the end of the book, they have, collectively, dealt with: miscarriage, divorce, infidelity, assault, and the death of a peer. (And a lot of communism. Practically the only aspect of the book that’s dated is the debate between communists and Trotskyites.)

For most of my adult life, I’ve felt like I was only playing at adulthood. Even moving in with my partner felt like playing house. Now I’m subletting a room in an apartment with two women who are five years my junior. In some ways, it feels like a step backwards to be returning to a shared bathroom and a refrigerator full of redundant dairy products, bought because we don’t share. But in another way, I’ve never felt more mature. Alcoholism ages you, even if you’re not the alcoholic. I can’t tell if it’s the lighting in this new shared bathroom or the fact that the mirror hasn’t been cleaned since the lease was last signed, but my hair looks 20% grayer than it did two months ago. Moving out of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. But I couldn’t stay and wait for my life to deteriorate further.

When I finished the book, I thought about getting a tattoo of the disintegrated cover and the striations of the first few pages. I’d remove the title, the author’s name, and the daisy chain illustration (the Daisy Chain, capitalized thusly, is a symbol throughout the book of I don’t know what). It would be what was left of the book: an almost-rectangle, now a palimpsest. It would be a break-up tattoo, and I’d put it on that curve of my waist, where my now-ex liked to put his hand.

But a tattoo, like they say about suicide, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I didn’t want those months, that night, that pain etched permanently into my body. I can let the book disintegrate, and the relationship too. Kay dropped the Strong from her name. I’m just finding mine.

7 Novels About Dreams that Reveal Hidden Desires or Dark Fears

Posted on by Jo Lou

When I started working on what is now my debut novel, The Dream Peddler, I never gave much thought to how a book riddled with dream sequences might be received. I had no idea how many readers are turned off by dreams in fiction, although I can’t blame them if they don’t respond well to a long passage or chapter ending abruptly with the trick of “and then I woke up.” Dishonesty aside, though, I’ve always found that when used carefully, dream sequences can be a fascinating way to enrich a story, and I certainly loved incorporating them into my own book.

The Dream Peddler by Martine Fournier Watson
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The Victorians, for instance, were fascinated by dreams, and Victorian authors instinctively understood that while dreams are often a jumble of things we experience during the day, they may also reveal our deepest fears or hidden desires. As such, they can provide a useful tool for an author to reveal more about their characters to the reader, and often a way to reveal things to us that the characters themselves don’t yet consciously realize.

I’ve done a little research on the long tradition of using dreams in literature, and I’m delighted to present this list of books whose authors have used the dreamworld ingeniously to mirror and explore the waking lives of their characters.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is one of my all-time favorite Victorian novels, and one from which I even drew an epigraph for my own book. Brontë uses dreams sparingly in her classic tale of lost love, but the ones she does employ pack a punch. Frightening or foreboding dreams are the perfect device for Gothic literature, with its haunted mansions and lowering skies.

Very near the start of Wuthering Heights, our narrator, Mr. Lockwood, experiences a harrowing dream when he is forced to spend the night in the room that once belonged to the now long-dead Catherine. Towards the dream’s end, the child Catherine tries to get in at his window, and he is violent in his attempts to keep her out. Lockwood later describes the encounter to Heathcliff as a dream, yet Heathcliff’s fearful reaction makes us wonder if, in fact, Catherine’s ghost might be more than just a figment of Lockwood’s imagination.

The novel’s second dream comes from Catherine herself, as she describes it to Nelly in the kitchen shortly after accepting Linton’s proposal of marriage. In her dream, she chooses to be cast out of heaven and lands on the moor where she and Heathcliff spent so much of their childhood together. Her joy at being tossed back to earth by the angels speaks to her of her heart’s preference for Heathcliff over Linton. What is most interesting about this dream, however, is its timing, as her description of it sets off the biggest turning point in the book: Heathcliff, hiding in the shadows, only overhears Catherine saying that it would degrade her to marry him, and runs away before she goes on to describe the depth of her love for him.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Emily Brontë’s equally famous sister, Charlotte, uses dreams freely in Jane Eyre. One of the overarching themes of this book is Jane’s ability, despite a difficult childhood during which she she was prone to tempestuousness and outbursts of feeling, to become the ideal Victorian woman—outwardly calm, strong feelings always suppressed or hidden. Because of this, dreams offer the reader a valuable glimpse beyond Jane’s guarded demeanor and into the fears and longings she keeps hidden.

In keeping with common superstitions of the day, dreams in Jane Eyre are also instruments of foreboding. Whenever one of the characters dreams about children, for instance, they receive news of a death in the family soon afterward. When Jane dreams of children, which she does repeatedly over the course of a week, it also points the reader to her secret wish to marry Rochester and become a mother.

Jane’s dreams almost always center on this relationship and its doom, as she dreams of Rochester walking so far ahead of her that she can’t catch up, or, on another occasion, that she is climbing among the ruins of Thornfield (another apt premonition) while Rochester remains only a tiny speck in the distance. She also dreams that Blanche Ingram, the woman she believes for a time has Rochester’s heart, has shut the gates of Thornfield against her.

Even after her wedding is ruined and she runs away, Jane is still plagued by dreams of being in Rochester’s arms. Despite her outward resolve to cast him off forever, she can’t stop loving him and can’t forget him.

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Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Since Du Maurier’s masterpiece is in many ways a retelling of Jane Eyre, it seems fitting that it, too, should open with an ominous dream and that famous line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The dream, to which nearly the entire first chapter is devoted, does a fabulous job of setting the novel’s dark mood, of forecasting the narrator’s troubled journey as the drive to the house in the dream is choked with forest encroaching upon it.

Dreams are used sparingly in this book, but to great effect. The first time Maxim leaves his wife alone overnight, for instance, her dreams are troubled. Just as Jane Eyre dreamt of Rochester, Mrs. de Winter dreams that she is walking with Maxim in the woods but can’t keep up, his face always turned away from her.

Her dreams are also an effective device in revealing to us how impossible it is for the narrator to escape Rebecca’s haunting. As she puts it, “Even in my thoughts, my dreams, I met Rebecca.”

And the book ends with a series of dreams, as it began. Pages before the climax, Mrs. De Winter spends a long drive toward Manderley swimming in and out of consciousness, and in these dreams her connection to Rebecca is further tightened to a stranglehold. In one, she looks down to see that her own tiny handwriting has been replaced with Rebecca’s long, slanted letters. She looks in the mirror and sees that she looks like Rebecca, too.

This final series of dreams serves to recall the long dream of the opening, and reminds us that Mrs. De Winter will never truly be able to leave this ghost behind—she is still dreaming of Manderley after the events of the book are long past.

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

In Rhys’s brilliant postcolonial retelling of Jane Eyre from Bertha’s (Antoinette’s) point of view, each of the book’s three parts contains one important dream. Antionette’s first dream is short, consisting simply of walking in a forest, followed by the heavy footsteps of someone who hates her. It serves not merely to reflect her childish understanding that the recently emancipated black people of Jamaica harbor ill-will for Antoinette and her white Creole family, but also to hint at her future unfortunate relationship with Rochester.

Later on, when her stepfather informs her that a suitor is coming to visit her, she dreams of the forest again. This time, the dream is more complex, and her premonition of her marriage is no longer veiled: led through the forest by a strange, hateful man, Antionette is frightened yet feels she has no choice but to follow him.

By the time Antionette has her third and final dream in the attic at Thornfield, a dream of running through the house knocking lighted candles to the ground and setting curtains ablaze, we know her descent into madness—whether predestined or forced upon her by circumstance—is complete.

1984 by George Orwell

1984 by George Orwell

In the Victorian and Gothic traditions, dreams allow the subconscious of a narrator who is caged by her time and circumstances to run free, and they can be used to the same effect within the similar constraints of dystopian literature. In Winston Smith’s world of Oceania, history is constantly rewritten in order to meet the needs of the present, and any sort of dissent is known as thoughtcrime against The Party. In this environment, Winston’s dreams offer him an occasional chance for freedom.

For instance, they often serve as the place in which some form of his repressed memories manages to surface. In one, he dreams of watching his mother and sister on a sinking ship; from another, he wakes with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips but without any memory of what it means. Eventually, this dream freedom triggers a conscious memory, and he wakes from a dream of his mother to remember hiding with her and his sister in underground shelters during the war.

Many of Winston’s dreams are also prophetic. He dreams of his love interest, Julia, casting off her clothes in a sunlit field that he thinks of as The Golden Country, and when he finally meets with her, that dream comes true in every detail. Seven years before the events of the novel, he dreams of a voice telling him they will meet in the place where there is no darkness, and over time he becomes convinced the voice belongs to O’Brien, the man he believes is part of an underground resistance. Unfortunately, this dream becomes reality in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is tortured. Even here, however, his dreams give evidence of the tenaciousness of hope within him: his continued dreams of being with his mother and Julia in The Golden Country offer him respite and help him heal.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s famous handmaid, Offred, dreams not of the future, but the past. Her life, of course, is even more repressive than Winston Smith’s, and because of this she actively tries to avoid remembering the family and friends she once had. Naturally, her former life still sometimes haunts her in her sleep. She dreams of being in the old apartment she once shared with her husband, but all the furniture is gone and none of the clothes in the closet fit her. She is also plagued by a recurring nightmare that recalls her attempt to flee with her daughter, dragging her through the bracken of a forest, pulling her down and trying to shield her, then watching her carried away, still holding her arms out toward her mother.

Offred is an openly unreliable narrator, trying to construct a life that is bearable out of one that is not. She sometimes recounts an event and then starts over, admitting the lies she has told us even as she continues to spin more of them. And this tendency, too, is reflected in dream sequences. In one instance, she has a lucid dream of waking in the morning and hugging her daughter, but is overcome with sadness because she knows it’s not real. Then, she dreams of waking from that dream to her own mother carrying a tray of food into her room. Eventually, she wakes a final time into her real life, but even then, she wonders if everything she experiences might be a delusion.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

The Manual of Detection by Jebediah Berry

In this exceedingly clever, Kafkaesque detective novel, Berry leads us into a world where spies have learned to sleuth through people’s dreams. In fact, this entire book operates with a dream-like logic (it’s always raining, buildings are full of secret passages and tunnels), and it’s not always certain when one is asleep or awake.

When clerk Charles Unwin is mysteriously promoted to detective at The Agency where he works, he’s certain a mistake has been made, but in order to correct it he’ll have to hunt down his own missing boss, detective Travis T. Sivart. Eventually, it becomes apparent that Sivart may have become trapped in a dream he entered to catch a thief, and Unwin is forced to go in after him.

I don’t think there has ever been a book that uses dreaming as cleverly as this one. Lucid dreams, dreams from which one believes one has woken even as they continue, and shared dreams all play a role. In this world, dreams can even be recorded and played back to the mind of another. A most unusual take on the gumshoe detective genre!

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

In Thompson Walker’s latest gorgeous book, a small university town is hit with a mysterious sleeping sickness that appears to cause unusually vivid dreams in the infected. It begins with one student, then quickly spreads through the school and eventually, the town, with no experts able to determine how it originated, how to cure it, or how long it might last.

Thompson Walker uses many, many dreams to explore the lives of these characters alongside their waking hours, but in an interesting twist, most of the dreams we read about belong to those who are still healthy. Mei, the college student who happened to be roommates with the very first girl to fall ill, dreams of being in church with her family because she feels guilty about her behavior away from home. Ben, the young professor and new father, has nightmare after nightmare about his wife leaving him, his daughter dying. And a much older professor, Nathaniel, dreams of his partner, Henry, who no longer lives with him due to dementia.

Eventually, we do become privy to some of the dreams of the sick, and this is when things really get interesting. Thompson Walker plays with the idea of precognitive dreams and even the notion that a whole life might be lived in a dream, more real to the dreamer upon waking than the one left behind.

Susan Orlean’s Love Letter to Libraries Is Also a Look at Their Prejudiced Past

Posted on by Jo Lou

I survived growing up in Mississippi by reading. The Greenwood-Leflore Public Library was only three blocks from my house. At the time I didn’t understand how libraries were arranged and would spend long afternoons wandering the shelves at random, filling my arms with books. I’d read on the second floor benches overlooking West Washington, going on trial with Jeanne d’Arc for the heresy of cross-dressing, stomach clenching at Alexandra Feodorovna’s growing obsession with Rasputin, travelling from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen during Anne Frank’s last days.

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I loved libraries so much that I became a public school librarian. Library lover Susan Orlean did one better, writing The Library Book. Orlean combines her love of libraries and of literature into a fascinating exploration of the devastating arson which nearly destroyed the Los Angeles Library, chronicling the broader history of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

I spoke with Orlean over Skype about the history of libraries, access and gender discrimination, the actress Parker Posey’s influence on the profession, and the continuing relevance of libraries in the digital age.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: You have so many incredible details in this book, from the color of fire to the temperature when books burn, to sprinkler guidelines in the library, how did you research this book?

Susan Orlean: Very carefully. I interviewed a huge number of people–anyone from firefighters who were there, to a huge number of librarians both retired and current—and I went through a huge amount of archival material as well. The fire department had its log from the fire that I had access to, and it detailed minute to minute what was going on with the fire. But it really was tracking through archives, talking to tons of people, and reading old newspaper accounts—everything I could get my hands on.

DS: You spoke to and wrote about so many incredible librarians. Did you have a favorite?

SO: I did have a favorite. I probably shouldn’t say I had a favorite but I did, or rather two favorites. The most fun to write about was Charles Lummis because he is such an incredible figure, a fascinating, maddening, interesting genius. But my real favorite was Althea Warren, who led the library through the depression and through some very interesting times.

Warren was a strong interesting woman who was a great advocate of reading. She was really passionate about reading in a way that really defined her. Her goal was just to inspire people to read, not only patrons but the librarians as well; she wanted them to be as passionate about reading as she was. There was something very effecting about her story. She was an incredibly good head librarian. I think she probably didn’t get as much credit because it was during her time when the library had a lot of financial difficulties, and she had to lay staff off and make cuts. I think she was unfortunately stuck with some circumstances that weren’t ideal but there was something about her that really inspired me and moved me. and she seemed like a really valiant figure.

DS: Speaking of Charles Lummis, he basically helped force out his female predecessor, Mary Jones. You chronicle gender discrimination against librarians in the past. Would you care to expand on that?

We think of librarianship as being a feminized profession but it was not for a long time.

SO: We now think of librarianship as being a feminized profession but it was not for a long time.  It was a very male profession and women entering it, particularly at the level of management, was a big change in the profession. And at the time Mary Jones was running the library, it was a little bit unusual to have a woman be the head of the library system. It’s always been a very gendered profession and it’s a very interesting one in the sense that it began as being so male dominated and then switched very quickly actually when it switched being a much more feminine profession. The change was very quick and dramatic. It really made for a huge change in the whole profession.

Now we are seeing a switch back into having many more young men going to library school. It’s just drawn more young people who were interested in it for the information management aspect of it but also a kind of the mission for social good. That I think has attracted a wider range of people, particularly young people. It’s a really interesting thing to observe from a gender perspective. You know women first were brought into the profession because there was a huge need for a lot of librarians as libraries were being built by the dozens around the country and the idea was that women would work for less money. It was a horrible way to staff all these new libraries so it really comes with some background that’s not very savory.

DS: You speaking of the influx of female librarians leads to the importance of the Carnegie Foundation and libraries in America.

SO: I don’t want to overstate my knowledge but the development of Carnegie libraries was such a significant stimulus for the huge expansion of libraries in this country. What happened was it was a little like cities who were competing for the Amazon headquarters. Cities were competing for these Carnegie libraries, and in some cases where they didn’t get the grant they went ahead and built the library anyway, but Carnegie triggered the idea of this great expansion of libraries and establishing many more libraries, particularly these branch libraries, and democratizing even more access to libraries. That really triggered an enormous growth of libraries in this country and I suspect in other countries where they were building libraries.

DS: You talk about access changing in libraries. Now we think of libraries being open for everyone, but in the beginning they were fee-based. Can you talk about how access has changed in libraries?

When the L.A library was founded, women were not permitted the use of the general library, and children were not allowed at all.

SO: If you look at the L.A. Library as an example, when it was founded women were not permitted the use of the general library, and children were not allowed the use at all.

Initially there was a membership fee that doesn’t sound like a lot of money to us [now], but actually represented a considerable amount of money to people [then]. A week’s wages. The first thing that some of the early head librarians did was lower the fee so it became a pretty insignificant amount of money.

Secondly they expanded women’s access to the library general. Children were allowed from a certain age. There were always all of these complicated restrictions. They had to have a certain grade average, be a certain age, be able to sign their name. There were all sorts of rules, which is funny when we go now and see a storytime with infants and toddlers running around. So these went from being, even though they were public institutions initially they weren’t truly public, to having the mission stated very clearly now that access for everyone is fundamental to the whole meaning of a library. That’s a huge change in considering the pace of history it hasn’t been that long of a time.

DS: I’m from the South where library use was restricted for people of color. They would have bookmobiles or no access. Librarian Althea Warren promoted African American librarians like Miriam Matthews in certain neighborhoods. I couldn’t tell from your book if people of color were ever prohibited from the L.A. library.

SO: Not that I know of. They weren’t segregated. What was sort of notable about Warren’s promotion of African American librarians was that she encouraged them to develop collections of books by African American authors, or about black history, and that was a very unusual thing to be collecting those books at that time, but as far as I know there was no segregation in the libraries in California.

DS: I think your book is the first time I’ve ever seen the Parker Posey movie Party Girl recognized as catalyst for the new wave of librarianship. That movie totally inspired me to become a librarian! Was that just something you observed, or did someone else talk to you about this?

Women first were brought into librarianship because of the idea that women would work for less money.

SO: That’s so funny! I had begun to wonder why becoming a librarian went from being something that seemed very nerdy and uncool to suddenly seeming very groovy and appealing to people.

I was trying to figure out was there some cultural touchstone that changed the perception of this profession when I was talking to the library about the launching of their teen department, and they said they had someone from Buffy the Vampire Slayer who was a librarian. I thought “Oh, I wonder if there was another librarian figure in a movie.” Because believe it or not that can be very influential to decisions that people make or just the perception that people have can be really influenced by a movie. I don’t remember now who pointed out Parker Posey but I thought “Oh my God that definitely would have had an impact.” And I believe that it did.

DS: Oh 100%! So you just wrote this incredible love letter to libraries. How has your interaction with them changed as a result of writing this?

SO: I think that it really made me fall deeply in love with libraries. Obviously that was a huge motivation in doing the book. Rather than having my fantasies about libraries be disproved, I came away feeling even more amazed and awed by what libraries do and what they can do. A lot of times you write a book and you come away a little bit cynical about what you’ve written about, but this had a very different effect in that it’s really made me value and savor the role that libraries have.

DS: You talk about as recently as 1979 when the Rand corporation was declaring libraries irrelevant. In the digital era there has been pushback against libraries. Can you talk about how important they are in this era?

We see libraries now as community centers for knowledge and information, rather than museums of books. That’s why they thrive.

SO: I think that the Rand corporation analysis now looks pretty silly and to put that into perspective I think that if libraries hadn’t evolved then maybe they would be irrelevant.

If libraries had decided their only mission was to be basically a depository for books, then maybe their relevance would be growing smaller and smaller. But instead the Rand analysis came out just about the time when many libraries were acknowledging that change in the way we get information, and rather than resisting, they were embracing it. They began programming everything from storytimes, to book clubs, to lecture series, to tax preparation workshops. They became a center for where you could use computers as opposed to resisting the idea of computers. They began lending e-media instead of being scared by the idea of e-media.

So in all fairness Rand was probably looking at the old model of libraries and simply didn’t realize that libraries were very aware of how things were changing and were willing and pretty eager I think to embrace and become central to it.

I think that we see libraries now as community centers for knowledge and information, rather than museums of books. That’s why they thrived and will continue to thrive and maybe even exceed where they are now in their importance to communities.

In “Women Talking,” Mennonite Women Grapple with Faith and Justice

Posted on by Jo Lou

What can I say about Miriam Toews’ Women Talking? Ostensibly it’s a novel, but it reads like a play. Substantially it’s a #MeToo story, but it takes place in a world far removed from our own. Aesthetically it’s spare—not one character is described, in physical detail—but, visually and emotionally, it is one of the most evocative pieces of writing I’ve encountered, in recent memory. Overall, it is a remarkable book.

In Toews’ introductory note, she explains that the book is based on real-life events:

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia named the Manitoba Colony, after the province in Canada, many girls and women would wake in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, having been attacked in the night. The attacks were attributed to ghosts and demons. Some members of the community felt the women were being made to suffer by God or Satan as punishment for their sins; many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery; still others believed everything was the result of wild female imagination.

Eventually, it was revealed that eight men from the colony had been using an animal anesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them.

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Women Talking is both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.

The novel opens when eight Mennonite women in the fictional Molotschka colony, whose ages span 3 generations, have come together to discuss their options after the men who attacked them were thrown in jail. The options, as they’ve outlined them: do nothing; stay and fight; or leave. As the men will be bailed out, and return to the colony shortly, the women’s deliberations are hurried. They last exactly two days: from June 6 to June 7.

I talked to Miriam Toews about how historically women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men.

Rachel Lyon: Though the characters are Mennonites, illiterate and foreign—they speak Plautdietsch, or low German; they are believers in a strict, patriarchal faith—they feel utterly contemporary. Though their attackers use Belladonna spray to render them unconscious and not quaaludes, ketamine, or flunitrazepam, crimes against women as heinous as those committed by the men of Molotschka are common everywhere. There were likely at least half a dozen high-profile rape and sexual assault trials going on, presumably while you were writing this book (Steubenville, Vanderbilt, Baylor, Brock Turner, Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby).

The distance of Molotschka, physically and psychically, from our “first world” society; the Petri dish isolation of these women, their lack of outside influences and references; and the simplicity of the premise (do nothing; stay and fight; or leave); all these elements seem to strip down and purify the problem. Was setting the book in this particular cultural context an attempt to filter out some of that noise?

Miriam Toews: No, not on any conscious level. It didn’t even occur to me to set the book in any other cultural context. I think all of my books are, however indirectly, set within some aspect of the Mennonite community. In the same way that all my main characters, in my mind, are Mennonites, which isn’t necessarily always evident in the text. But the hope is, I guess, that the story transcends its specific setting.

RL: The conceit of the narrative is that the women, who are illiterate, have asked an unthreatening man named August, whose job in the colony is to teach young (male) children, to take the minutes of their meeting, although they will not be able to read them. August is a great character: smart, awkward, humble, and hopelessly in love with one of the women, Ona. He is also a big fan of ducks (and has suffered badly for his enthusiasm: “Talking about semi-aquatic birds in jail, even the smallest detail, can trigger a severe beating, I told Ona, and she agreed I should have kept it to myself.”)  It strikes me as a playful treatment for such dark material, but I wonder if there is something deeper going on with August. Given a recurring theme in the women’s dialogue about life flourishing under the sea, under intense pressure, in the unlikeliest of conditions, it strikes me as sweet that this character is both able to live on land, in the light, as a man, and visit the watery and mysterious world of the women.

How do you see August’s role in the narrative? Is he more than comic relief? What did it mean to you, as the author, to retain him as the reader’s filter for these women’s discussion?

It’s time for men to sit with women, to listen and to learn.

MT: Ona senses that August is suffering, profoundly, that he is suicidal. Out of compassion and love and concern, she quickly makes up a task for August—to take the minutes of their meetings, because she knows he is literate—to make him feel necessary and needed, but also safe. For as long as he is in the loft with the women, at least, he’ll continue to live. At the end of the book he asks himself, “How will I live without these women?” But in fact the “minutes” of the meetings are irrelevant, at least to the women. They can’t read them anyway and they have far more urgent things to worry about.

There are other reasons for August being the filter, as you say. He inhabits that liminal space between the closed world of the colony and the outside world, as do the women in the loft in their way inhabit such a space as well—the loft is a space between earth and heaven, as it allows the women to discuss their practical, pragmatic options and their faith and fundamental concepts of spirituality and theology. Something has to give. The women need to decide what they will do, how they will keep their faith and remain safe and August also has to decide what he will do: end his own life, or work towards a better world, which means educating or re-educating the boys on the basis of all he’s heard and learned from the women in the loft. In this sense, August takes on a symbolic value as well, as a man: it’s time for men to sit with women, to listen and to learn.

Historically, women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men. The women in my book will go on to write their own stories, to organize their own lives according to their own ideas, hopefully, or their daughters will, after they’ve decided, collectively, what action to take. And, I should add, the world these women will “organize” isn’t one without men, it’s one with men who see the women as equals.

RL: Any book, but perhaps particularly if it’s written in the first person, requires to some degree a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. If the book is in the past tense, the reader might ask, “How is it possible that the narrator remembers these conversations verbatim?” If it’s in the present tense, the reader might ask, “How does the narrator have the time, between all this action, to describe these scenes to me?”

In Women Talking the suspension of disbelief is a little different in quality; here and there, August editorializes, adds a “translator’s note,” or admits that all the women are talking at once and he can’t keep up. The facade is never dropped; the reader is never immersed; the conceit remains an essential part of the work of art throughout. There is a kind of brilliant Brechtian obstinance about this, I think. The reader is never really allowed to fall into “the fictional dream,” and yet I found myself utterly immersed. Is there a connection between this artistic choice you made, and the content of the book?

MT: Yes. I spent a long time trying to figure out how I would tell the story and when the idea of the “minutes” came to me, I knew—or at least I felt—that that was the only way for me to do it, or at least the only way that made sense to me.

It’s hard for me to explain but I’ve always felt self-conscious about writing a novel, any novel, without there being some kind of necessity, even a fictional necessity, to the book itself. For instance, with A Complicated Kindness, the whole book was an assignment, really, that Nomi Nickel had to complete in order to graduate from high school. In Irma Voth, the film director character gives Irma a notebook and suggests she fill it with her thoughts and observations. So then, for me, it made sense to write the book, because there was a type of imperative for it. Otherwise, I find I get bogged down in the idea that what I’m doing, as a writer, with words, is ridiculous somehow, I think there are more important or useful things I could do with my time and energy than write books. There are allusions to that thinking in almost all of my books—the futility of words. And yet, the utter necessity of them, of language, of connection through language and story.

RL: Speaking of Brecht, I read this novel in just a couple of days, and found the experience of reading it very much like the experience of watching a play. (In the margins somewhere I wrote, “12 Angry Men, but 8 of them, and they’re women!”)

Like a play, the novel is primarily dialogue. Like a play, nearly all of it takes place on one, static set: the hayloft where the women are talking. I often felt, when I put the book down to go do something else, as if I was closing a book and more as if I was pressing the pause button on the proceedings. Do you think of this novel as a kind of theater, yourself—or did you ever think of it that way, during the writing process?

Historically, women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men.

MT: Wait, what? You put the book down to do something else? Haha, just kidding. Well, yes, absolutely I did sometimes think of this novel as a type of theatre (that’s how we spell that word up here in Canada). The women’s conversations are urgent, they have practical decisions to make, but it instantly becomes apparent to them that what is “practical” arises wholly out of their principles and their beliefs—everything is at stake for them, and so their talking propels them, at every moment, toward the decisive action they are about to take. There’s no time to waste. I think there is inherent drama and tension in that, and hopefully the reader feels it too. The great thing about a play or a movie is that you can watch the whole thing in one sitting, which I think is so essential to the experience.

RL: I read All My Puny Sorrowswhen it came out and loved it so, so much, I recommended it to everyone I knew. It really made such a deep and lasting impression on me. It is also completely different from Women Talking. I’d like to ask you about how different this piece is, tonally, from your other work. What is the relationship like, for you, between the essence of a story and the way it is told? I’m curious, from a process perspective, how you come to the tone of a novel, and from a product perspective, how tone informs story, and vice versa.

MT: I think that the tone of a novel is created by the characters, by who they are, where they come from, what they’re in conflict with and by what is motivating them. I guess I’m saying that I think story informs tone. Or that being true to the character of your narrator will naturally create the tone. Yoli, the narrator in All My Puny Sorrows, is such a different type of character than August, the narrator in Women Talking, in spite of the fact that both stories have a type of urgency in the telling and a serious subject matter. Yoli is a person very much like myself and the character of August is inspired by my father.

8 Novels That Blur the Line Between Memoir and Fiction

Posted on by Jo Lou

A month after I finished the first draft of my novel, The Risk of Us, I took the full manuscript to one of my most trusted early readers. She and I have divergent tastes, but she has a sharp eye and a sharply honest tongue. We met at her mother’s house to discuss her reactions, sharing a pot of tea while her mother, entering the last months of her life, dozed in the corner. My friend, a novelist and memoirist herself, held the pages hesitantly, gave me that blunt look I cherished, and said, “I found it totally compelling. But you know you can’t do this. The protagonist’s father was murdered when she was a little girl. Your father was murdered when you were a little girl. You can’t make that fiction.”

Book Jacket

I respected her reaction, but to me it was immaterial. The book I had written was fiction. I intended it, from the start, to create its own imagined internal reality. That my own father had been murdered was a coincidence that a reader did not need to know to enter the world of the novel. And, many details in the novel did not (do not) align with the facts of my own life. What corresponded to fact or didn’t was not a consideration as I wrote it. Might the fact that I had previously published a memoir about my father’s murder create some curiosity in the reader’s mind about how much I had drawn on my life? Realistically, yes. But I didn’t see that as a problem in fiction, since so many writers I was drawn to also tolerated—or experimented with—that ambiguity.

A few days after our meeting, my friend asked for a reading list, since the idea of such intentionally ambiguous work was new to her. I didn’t mention to her the term “autofiction,” now so popular for describing works with this kind of ambiguity. Though I like a lot of what is being published as autofiction, I don’t use the term myself. I didn’t mention Proust, and I didn’t bring up Karl Ove Knausgaard. Confession: I’m probably a terrible critical commentator on what’s now being called autofiction, because though I may become aware that a writer’s factual life overlaps with what they have used in their fictional work, and may even in fact be drawn in by suspicions of this, I don’t tend to further investigate the real-life background to determine how much the writer has mined personal experience; unless a work has billed itself as memoir, I’m happy to stay inside the book’s wholly self-sufficient world. That said, this is a list of books that fortified my own choices because I was aware, while reading each of these books, that the writer was reimagining material from “real life”—and I found this freeing and thrilling.

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys moved from the Carribean to England as a teenager after her father died—just like the protagonist, Anna, of this exquisitely spare novel. Though all of Rhys’ five novels feature a difficult-to-love, embittered woman who sees the world’s misogyny all too clearly, and can’t decide whether to manipulate men or say to hell with them, Voyage in the Dark does so more successfully than the others, to my mind. The Rhys figure, a traveling chorus girl named Anna, is only twenty, and still wants desperately to love. This is my favorite novel of all time.

The Doorby Magda Szabo

The narrator of this novel is, like Szabo, a Hungarian author trying to recover from a political retaliations against her work. She takes in a mysterious and Valkyrian housekeeper, Emerence, then struggles to understand her simultaneous need, disgust, and fear towards the woman—and ultimately betrays her.

Sylvia by Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels poured much of himself into a clearly fictional vessel, the mathematician Raphael Nachman of the beloved Nachman Stories. But he also wrote this slim novel, expanded from a short memoir, about his early marriage to a woman who committed suicide. It is a stark, unsparingly direct novel of a man reassessing his guilt in his wife’s decline.

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz

In 1934, the often sickly and reclusive Schulz makes his drab Polish town Drohobycz into a mythical land dominated by a family maid who obsesses the boy with erotic longing, and a father who in one story turns into a cockroach, and in another gathers an aviary of exotic birds in the attic. “After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water—and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams,” reads a typical sentence in Celina Wieniewska’s translation.

The Love Object by Edna O’Brien

I like to imagine the main character of this collection’s title story as O’Brien herself: sensual beyond bridling, too intelligent to live her life within the confines society expects for women and mothers, bravely alone, but ultimately deeply vulnerable. The character of the story, who works in broadcasting rather than writing, becomes enthralled by a married lover whose forseeable abandonment of her drives her nearly to suicide. The sudden reappearance of her children, home from boarding school, pulls her out of the spell.

Image result for lover marguerite duras

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Brian Mastroianni writes in the Paris Review, “When Duras claimed that the novel was entirely autobiographical, it became something of an international sensation. But, as the New York Times noted, ‘truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity’; Duras also went on to say ‘that the story of her life did not exist.’” Debate endures over whether the effect of the novel is too contingent on knowing its autobiographical basis. This was not an issue for me when I read, completely unaware of Duras’s or the book’s history. I was simply transfixed by the way she circles around the central, haunting image of the narrator’s 15-year-old self, crossing a ferry on the Mekong River, about to meet the much older man whose lust she would embrace and whose love she would reject.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Like Heti’s third novel Motherhood, How Should a Person Be? is narrated by a woman named Sheila, whose Toronto artist friends share the real Sheila Heti’s friends’ names. But to think that every event in the novel happened factually would be a mistake, as Heti has revealed that she used chance procedures to combine scenes.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

The narrator of this look-between-the-lines novel is unnamed, but like the real-life Jenny Offill who wrote it, she has published one acclaimed book and is struggling with the demands of mothering and the relative poverty of adjunct teaching to stay true to her “art monster” self and follow up with a second. I did not care how much of this was faithful to Offill’s life as I read it. I read it six more times purely to study the technique.

Crying on the Floor and Other Ways to Get Through It

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Sitting on the Floor with Your Back Against an Interior Door Frame, Sobbing






The trick is to not stand up, grab the molding on each side with both hands
And drive the top of your head into the door frame as hard as you can
Like the time in the kitchen of that two-bedroom apartment in Iowa
When you staggered and saw cobalt blobs floating when you blinked your eyes.






It also helps if you arrange the eggs in the large carton from Costco
Into shifting symmetrical chevrons as you remove them to
Crack and fry for breakfasts or hard-boil for the children’s lunches
Because by ordering the small things you can the larger pain expunge.





The carrion smell and the laundry room full of fat blowflies crowding the window
Make you wish the buzzing in the wall was like the time you were pregnant with the twins
And you kept saying, “Do you hear it? Can’t you hear it? The wall is alive.”
And no one believed you, but with your ear to the wall you could hear the thrumming hive. 





This knife isn’t sharp enough. It skids off the onion 
And rasps along your thumbnail, making notches but not drawing blood.












A Little Song of Mini-Golf





Grandpa is taking his time, reading the break
On the dull AstroTurf of Hole 8, The Treasure Chest,
At the rain-soaked Pirate’s Cove Putt-Putt. Barely awake,
I pause at the light and watch as he squats, squints, and does his best
To show he’s having fun with his grandkids 
And not show that he really wants to birdie this hole.

We landed last night in this spring break town in winter amid
A storm surge that forced seawater from manholes
And wind that whipped and stung our faces with sand.
Now, in strained morning light, the boardwalk, the sky, 
The beach, and the ocean converge and vanish. 
Cold rain pelts the shore again. Everyone scatters but I stay
To watch a lone wetsuited surfer way beyond the waves
Paddling out into the gray and pulsing blankness.