I’m a writer in Denver. I’ve freelanced a little bit for Westword and covered coffee and booze for a publication called Sprudge, but really I’d like to write books.
I’m working through a draft of something right now but am unsure if working on it on my own and then taking it somewhere is the correct approach, or if there even is a correct approach. Do you have any thoughts? I don’t even know how to approach a publisher, and am unsure of when the best time to do it would be.
Ben
Note: This month, the Blunt Instrument welcomes a guest columnist, the novelist, essayist, editor, and instructor John Cotter.
Dear Ben,
Congratulations on the publications (Denver loves its drugs) and on commencing the Great Work of summoning a book from thin air. What’s next depends on what kind of book you’re writing. Sit back, pour some booze in your coffee, and let’s figure it out.
If you’re writing a novel, you won’t want to approach a publisher until the book is finished and polished to a blinding shine. If you’re still in the drafting stage, don’t worry about approaching publishers now. Same goes for agents: because most agents are so swamped with manuscripts they can barely find time to panic, you’ll want to avoid bugging them until your own manuscript is as unimpeachable as it can be. If that sounds like a long time from now, rest assured that, yes, it is but a) it’ll go by fast, especially if b) you’re spending the time on a project that excites you. Make sure this is the novel you really want to spend at least two to five years writing, then write it, reading a ton of other novels in the genre as you go and studying how they’re constructed with care.
Make sure this is the novel you really want to spend at least two to five years writing, then write it.
If you’re writing a collection of either essays, stories, or poems, you’ll want to sharpen up the best of them and start submitting to magazines. Publication can attract notice — an agent may contact you, though you shouldn’t sit around waiting for it — but either way, publication makes you seem more professional, more in-demand, the sort of person worth taking a risk on. If your book is a collection of essays, this will require writing pitch letters, which you can learn more about here, here, or here.
If you’re writing a nonfiction book, like, say, another much-needed history of craft cocktails or the weed boom, you’ll want to start with a rough outline, and gradually work that into a formal proposal to send along to an agent. Formal proposals can run from 50 to 70 pages in more-or-less five parts: an introduction, market details, biography, a chapter outline, and a couple of sample chapters. Your introduction hooks your reader (your prospective agent, who wants to be hooked both for their own sake and for the sake of future readers) and makes the subject of your book seem important; show that you command the field, know what’s been thought and said on the subject, and that your own perspective is unique. Market details make clear that people will buy your book because it’s the kind of book that people buy — accordingly, if there are recent bestsellers in the same vein, mention them here. If you have literary connections, drop those names. Your biography is a list of accomplishments and qualifications. If you’re good-looking, include a picture. There’s some more advice on writing a proposal here.
Those are the broad strokes. It’s tricky to do this alone. Community is important — if often fraught — for writers at every stage. There are a few ways to hack it, which I’ll abruptly gloss herewith:
Writing guides. The most useful and most fun writing guides I’ve read are Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman’s How Not to Write a Novel, which will teach you to follow the rules (“giving the reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten” — half a kitten is not better than no kitten), and Lance Olsen’s Architectures of Possibility, which will teach you to break those rules.
A writing group. If you know a couple of sharp and thoughtful readers, why not start a writing group? It gives you someone to share your work with and talk shop. Writing is an act of communication — readers are necessary to complete the circuit. Meet once a month or so and share. Be kind to one another.
Note: do not start a group with any old yahoos who happen to write — if they’re not also very good readers they won’t help you. If you know good readers but those readers aren’t writers, consider a favor exchange: repair the siding on their cabin or make them dinner or critique their podcast in exchange for feedback. This actually works. I helped a friend with grad school applications and in exchange she built me a desk.
Do not start a writing group with any old yahoos who happen to write — if they’re not also very good readers they won’t help you.
Classes. An MFA is a good way to make connections. But most MFAs are morbidly expensive and that debt can dog good writers to their graves. If you already have a great deal of debt then it’s not a realistic option — some of us didn’t get an MFA and write fine. Further, the last twenty years have witnessed an uncanny rise in the number of writing centers around the country: Grub Street in Boston, Lighthouse in Denver, Hugo House in Seattle … the quality of instructors at such places is often identical with what you’d find in MFA programs, and writing centers are cheaper. There, you can order classes or consultations à la carte.
You’ll notice there’s one thing I haven’t talked about so far, and that’s actually writingyour book. This is the part of the business that happens alone, in the quiet of your home or the library or a coffee shop. You don’t have to work on your book every day, but if you never work on your book, then your book will never be written. About this part of the process I’ll give you one piece of advice: writing is like dreaming. What I mean is you don’t fall asleep the moment your head touches the pillow each night, and even if you do you don’t start dreaming right away. Give yourself twenty minutes or whatever to dally, strike out with false starts, read a little poetry, play a Cat Power song or two while you stare at the tree outside. It takes time. Just as you find trouble sleeping some nights, especially when anxious, so your creative mind needs some time to find its preferred orientation: relaxed but attentive. Take the time you need to find that space. Then begin.
The English People were a performing troupe from a high school in Bournemouth, a city in England. They were only fifteen and sixteen themselves, which was why the Sophomores had been granted the particular honor of hosting them. The previous September, when Mr. Kingsley had gathered them in the rehearsal room, he’d reversed his chair and leaned at them confidingly. “They’re touring with what’s supposed to be an absolutely terrific adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide,” Mr. Kingsley had explained, “and as you’ll learn in European Theatre History, Voltaire was France’s most famous playwright. Now, who’s been to England?” Involuntarily Sarah looked at David, and as quickly looked away. For her, until now, England only existed in David’s postcards. Now those Big Bens and Piccadilly Circuses and Carnaby Streets with their punks seemed like jokes played upon her alone.
David’s hand, and only David’s, raised up. The elbow remained bent, denoting his reluctance to answer this question. Sarah remembered the first time she caught sight of his house, freshman year, from the kid-crammed back seat of Senior Jeff Tillson’s car. Jeff driving some five or six nondrivers home after one of the mainstage rehearsals, the lengthy and confused overlapping directions, debating who lived nearest to school and each other, David repeatedly telling Jeff Tillson to take the other kids home until it came out that David’s house was the closest to school, in its historic neighborhood of enormous old live oaks hiding tall stately homes behind veils of discreet Spanish moss. David wound up being dropped off first, and the car had erupted with cries of “That’s your house?” while David, his face crimson, uprooted himself from the overpacked car.
The chief feature of David’s house was that it was two houses: the gracious two-story in front and a luxurious garage apartment, just built, in back. Apart from the bathroom, the garage apartment was a single enormous rec room, with David’s bed at one end and his younger brother Chris’s at the other, and a pinball machine and sofa and stereo and TV in between. David’s mother, in preparation for the English People, added a set of bunk beds, a dorm-size mini-fridge, and a microwave oven, whether to encourage total exile from the house or apologize for it, no one bothered to wonder. Eight hosts had been originally asked for, but only six had been needed, because David’s family would house two of the boys, and Joelle’s family two of the girls. The other two boys would stay with William and Colin, and the other two girls with Karen Wurtzel and Pammie. Julietta had ardently wanted to host but for reasons that went unexplained Mr. Kingsley chose Karen Wurtzel instead and Julietta fervently smiled her approval. There were also two adults, both men, both of whom would be hosted by Mr. Kingsley and Tim in their beautiful home.
Long ago in September, Sarah was still enough part of her class to laugh with everyone else when Mr. Kingsley said the English People were arriving over spring break to get accustomed to their hosts and temporary homes “before tackling CAPA, which — how shall I say? — can be intimidating to the uninitiated.” Sarah was still enough part of her class to relish the smugly held knowledge that for all its feuds and sectarian fissures, their school as a whole was a clique, unwelcoming to the outsider. Sarah was still enough part of her class to anticipate the pleasure of pitying these eager, inferior English, of surprising them with kindness, and receiving their gratitude. But now Sarah was so far outside of her class that she might have been English herself. She was so far outside of her class that when spring break ended, and school resumed, she was at first unaware that there had been a revolution, for she had missed all the contributing events: William’s guest, Simon, deserting the unpredictable austerity of William’s home for the dependable luxury of David’s garage apartment; Colin’s guest, Miles, in protest of the other three leaving him out following Simon, and being followed by Colin; David’s original guests, Julian and Rafe, mocking Colin’s Irish heritage in a manner that Colin mistook for a special distinction; David’s brother, Chris, deserting the apartment for points undisclosed, leaving Simon and Miles to nightly fight over who got Chris’s bed versus who got the sofa, while Colin uncomplainingly slept on the floor.
Meanwhile, among the girls, surprisingly it had not been Joelle’s house but Karen Wurtzel’s that became the headquarters. Karen’s English guest, Lara, had in no time at all learned and broadcast what facts about Karen nearly two years of Trust Exercising had not excavated: that Karen’s mother, Elli, unlike Karen, was pretty and fun and would stay up till all hours drinking Bartles & Jaymes and watching telly and talking and laughing while Karen stayed locked in her room and only came out to ask her own mother to please make less noise. Joelle and her two guests, Theodosia and Lilly, having hit it off like the proverbial house afire and spending the late hours after rehearsal driving Joelle’s Mazda everywhere but the forty-five minutes to Joelle’s inconveniently located home, started sleeping at Karen’s; after which, as had happened with the boys, the fourth English girl, Pammie’s guest, Cora, protested at being left out and migrated to Karen’s, Pammie trying to follow, but finding herself not invited.
After these domestic rearrangements, which took less than a week, the clique hardened its form.
Their first day at CAPA, the English People debuted as a leadership class. Though in many ways they looked physically younger than their American peers, the boys — Simon, Miles, Julian, and Rafe — being slender and smooth, their faces and chests still entirely hairless, and the girls — Lara and Cora, Theodosia and Lilly — being girlishly skinny, with no hips or breasts, the English People nevertheless separately, and even more so en masse, seemed older, their wits sharper, their knowledge more extensive and at the back of it somehow impenetrable. Perhaps cultural difference explained this. Perhaps it was all a mirage they induced with their accents, poor imitations of which became a widespread affliction of the sophomore class. The impression of power they gave seemed not wrought, but inevitable. That David or William or Joelle or Sarah or any of them had imagined impressing the English was now so unimaginable as to best be forgotten.
The two English grown-ups — Martin the teacher/director and Liam the star — first appeared after lunch, given that they were grown-ups, not visiting students, and so didn’t take classes. When everyone had assembled in the Black Box, Martin and Liam sat onstage with Mr. Kingsley, like Mr. Kingsley backward on their chairs, while Theodosia and Lilly and Lara and Cora, Rafe and Julian and Simon and Miles, sat anonymously in the risers with the rest of the students. Bantering back and forth with Mr. Kingsley about the Touring Life, One Hotel Seeming Just Like Another, and the Pleasures of Home, Martin and Liam seemed cut of that same kingly cloth as the aptly named teacher. Martin and Liam were capable of the same ostentatious air of relaxation: that manner of behaving as if unobserved, to broadcast the serene consciousness of being closely observed. Martin and Liam and Mr. Kingsley, entirely ignoring their students, trading theatrical badinage between their improperly utilized chairs, formed not a clique, grown-ups being understood not to form cliques, but another sort of unit, perhaps best called a club. To Sarah, the existence of the club registered just below thought, as a sensation of hopeless exclusion. To David the existence of the club registered as an angering challenge he wished to reject — but in such a way that Mr. Kingsley and Martin and Liam would be abashed, and desirous of winning his favor. To Joelle it was merely three men, two of whom she’d not before assessed. Joelle quickly found Martin too old and dismissed him to the same inert heap where lay gay Mr. Kingsley. Liam, by contrast, was in range. As if her eyes were a stethoscope, Joelle measured his blood: high temperature, swift tempo. Energy zigzagged unpredictably through him like the charge through a poorly wired lamp. He had arrestingly unique, ice-blue eyes such as you read about in fairy tales, but they transmitted to Joelle some sort of muffled desperation. This was a good-looking guy who would never be sexy, due to what sort of deficit or obstacle it didn’t interest Joelle to discover. Dismissing Liam as well, Joelle returned to passing notes with Theodosia and Lilly about the packet of cocaine in Joelle’s makeup bag, and with whom they should share it at lunch.
Liam had been Martin’s star student some handful of years before this, and Martin had staged Candide specifically for him, which Martin’s current students seemed to accept with no trace of resentment. Liam was twenty-four, six years out of high school. Of Martin’s age no one was sure. Sarah would not learn Liam’s story, including his age, until Liam told her himself, later on in this Month of the English. Mrs. Laytner had been unusually visible since the English arrival, intersecting as it did with ambitions she had for the school. Their multimillion-dollar theatre, with its two hundred feet of flyspace, its four hundred red velvet seats, its twenty-four-thousand- dollar lightboard, would host touring dance companies, orchestras, and whatever else one found in such beacons as Los Angeles and New York. While the Bournemouth Candide marked the American debut of its director and precocious young actors, its greater importance was as CAPA’s debut as a venue on the stage of its city. A first performance of Candide during the regular school day was reserved for CAPA students and teachers, but this was only to keep them from taking up space at the two weekends of public performances, all of which had sold out in advance, after a photo-filled feature in the city newspaper, more evidence of Mrs. Laytner’s exertions.
By the day of the first performance, the CAPA “sneak preview,” the English People are almost halfway through their stay. They seem both familiar and foreign, as if they have always been here and as if they have just now arrived. Familiar are their faces and voices, their postures, their gaits — any one of the CAPA students can pick out any one of the English from the ocean of heads in the hall, across the width of the lot ducking into Joelle’s Mazda or vaulting into David’s convertible Mustang. Foreign is almost everything else. Well as the Sophomores know one another’s private lives, which Mr. Kingsley has made them yield up like paying dues into a fund, they’ve learned so little about their English peers they do not even notice how little they know. They don’t know if Rafe lives in a large house or in squalid government housing, if Cora is a knowing virgin or a discreet libertine. They can’t crack the code of their clothes, if there is such a code, or of their accents, which to them all sound the same. They don’t know what roles any of the English people, apart from Liam, are playing in Candide, nor what roles there are, nor even what the title role is, if “Candide” is a name or a thing. Busy as they are with this quarter’s Costume History and Shakespearean Monologue and American Songbook, not one of them has read Candide. They may imagine that its title has an exclamation point. They have never seen a rehearsal because it goes without saying that the English People have no need to rehearse. They have never seen sets, props, or costumes because these don’t exist. The English People travel light.
Sarah sits alone in the full house, hidden amid instrumental musicians. She is doubly exiled from Theatre now, persona non grata among the Juniors also. Somehow the year-old secret of her one night with Brett has become current news. They hadn’t even had sex; in her memory Sarah sees Brett’s narrow, hairless body and his abashed and drooping penis, pallid and cold to the touch. But these details do nothing to lessen her crime, just as her self-isolation, her cold-shouldering of loyal Julietta and Pammie, her funereal clothes, sullen curtain of hair, and dragon’s tail of cigarette smoke have done nothing to prepare her for being an actual outcast. She’s ablaze with fresh humiliation and can no more see beyond its nimbus of heat than could anyone being burnt at a stake.
The house lights go down. Greg Veltin has a list of lighting cues he’s been given by Martin. A lightboard operator being the only technician Candide requires, Greg Veltin is the only person at CAPA, indeed in the entire United States, who’s seen a rehearsal, as rehearsals in fact there have been. Greg Veltin is looking forward to the performance. Greg’s own paradoxes, of personality and persona, of social status and historical experience, perhaps uniquely equip him to look forward to it.
Greg Veltin brings up the first cue and out saunters Liam, in generically olden-times baggy white blouse and knee breeches. The stage is otherwise perfectly bare. At CAPA, elaborate sets, props, and costumes are always required to keep busy the students who will never be cast — or who once were but are not any longer. For example, Greg Veltin, once the next Fred Astaire, now anonymous lighting cues guy. Greg Veltin appreciates the blunt lack of bullshit in this English production. Apart from the lighting cues list that Greg holds, the production consists entirely of the actor who plays the hero, and eight other actors who play, variously, the other human roles, a couple of animals, and some items of furniture, roles that aren’t really performed but denoted, with a startling carelessness Greg Veltin knows is not actually careless. He has seen it repeated with flawless precision, the tossed-off gesture again tossed, with just the same strength to just the same distance, again and again, the definite vagueness maintained so you’re never quite sure if the gesture denotes an object or an action or even the set, as for example when actors get onto all fours, as they do frequently, to play at being tables, or sheep, or South American mountains, or something else altogether.
Once Liam sauntered onstage Greg’s concentration on his cues became complete; regretfully he couldn’t spare attention to the audience reaction for fear he’d mess up. Pools of light bloomed and faded to indicate scene changes that otherwise might go unnoticed — despite, or perhaps because of, the incessant and bellowed narration. “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE LIVED A BARON IN A GREAT FANCY HOUSE,” bellowed Cora, as the rest of them, the girls dressed like Cora in knee-length ruffled skirts and snug blouses, the boys dressed like Liam in loose blouses and snug breeches, charged onstage like attacking commandos, enacting a house, a baron, fine furnishings, servants, and many abuses of servants, while Liam, as Candide, wandered this frenetic landscape of events in such a haze of charismatic idiocy Greg couldn’t decide whether Liam was doing absolutely nothing onstage or whether he was a genius. Sarah, alone in her row of musicians, saw expressionless Miles standing arms akimbo, to indicate being a wall, over which Theodosia, on tiptoes, mimed peeking. Behind the “wall” were Lilly and Rafe, Lilly flat on her back with her legs scissored open, Rafe on all fours energetically thrusting. “OH!” shrieked Lilly with gusto. “OH! OH! OH!”
“ONE DAY,” competingly bellowed Simon, taking over for Cora as narrator, “WHILST SHE WALKED IN THE GARDEN, SHE SPIED MASTER PANGLOSS INSTRUCTING THE MAID IN SCIENCE. SHE THOUGHT SHE AND CANDIDE SHOULD LEARN SCIENCE TOO!” Theodosia determinedly yanked her skirts up to her waist and leaped onto Liam, whose expression of idiocy grew so much more idiotic that Greg Veltin concluded he must actually be performing, although with unique subtlety as compared with the rest of the cast. Sarah saw, without seeing, the thrusting of groins, heard without hearing the squeals and moans. No part of this pantomime struck her as sexual; she stared as if at animals or children, organisms beneath her interest. An indeterminate sound that was equally titter and murmur had spread through the house, like an erratic wind on water. Mrs. Laytner, who had been sitting in the front row with Mr. Kingsley, rose abruptly and stalked up the aisle. The doors at the rear of the theatre swung in her wake.
Was the performance cut short, or was it simply short at its full length? Even with such headlong swiftness — the English People raced through Candide as if in reasonable expectation that large hooks would yank them offstage — it was possible for audience members to grow more discerning. This was their first real experience of double entendre, and they were starting to get it, the joke of the mismatch between words and acts; they could catch it before it flashed past. There was another mismatch, between the actors’ acts and their blithe, even dopey expressions. Stupidly grinning, the English People — Rafe and Julian and Simon and Miles, Lara and Cora and Theodosia and Lilly, and, of course, Liam — energetically pantomimed killing each other and being killed by each other, by means of guillotine, gun, bonfire, dagger, and noose; they pantomimed natural deaths via drowning and sexually transmitted dis- ease; they pantomimed raping and being raped and consensual fucking; and above all, it seemed, instances of both forced and consensual ass-fucking. In the audience the uncertain titters and murmurs and utter confusion gave way to real, emboldened laughter flaring up here and there threatening to ignite the whole house, then turning inside out and resurfacing weirdly as shame. Things were very funny and without warning weren’t funny at all, they were deeply embarrassing, and just as quickly that was funny, that ridiculous seriousness — or was it? Were you an asshole for thinking it was? And why had you thought the word “asshole”? How incredibly funny! — or not.
Greg Veltin performed his last cue and turned his attention to Mr. Kingsley, still in the front row showing the rest of the house the expressionless back of his head. To his disappointment, Greg couldn’t derive any clues about the state of Jim’s, or rather, Mr. Kingsley’s, face, from the back of his head. Greg was no longer sure what he’d expected, or what he had hoped for. The show was over — had they taken their bows? Not having started with raising a curtain, they couldn’t end with lowering one, so just walked off the stage. As throughout, the audience, once released from the spectacle, could not reach consensus on how to react. Some stampeded for the doors. Some remained as if roped to their seats. Even these motionless ones, like Pammie, appeared torn between opposing impulses, in Pammie’s case the passive immobility of shock, and the active immobility of rage. Pammie’s seatmate, Julietta, didn’t stay to find out. For Julietta, the only thing worse than watching the show would be talking about it.
When I began writing my novel,American Spy, I didn’t have a particular affinity for the spy genre. I’ve since come to love it — especially some of the classics, like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré and The Quiet American by Graham Greene — but this appreciation came well after the book was already underway.
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My novel started with an image that popped into my mind: it was of a black female protagonist who is a typical suburban mother — or so it seems until someone tries to assassinate her. At first, I had no idea why someone would want to kill her; eventually I asked myself what if it’s because she was once a spy? And the book took off from there. Set during the Cold War in the 80s, American Spy follows Marie Mitchell, a special agent who is approached by the CIA and asked to help destabilize Thomas Sankara’s Marxist revolutionary government.
Answering that initial question, and in so doing figuring out that Marie was once a spy, I created dozens more questions for myself. Most I had no idea how to answer, so to generate ideas I’d read spy novels. My favorites tended to be the ones that resisted the conventions of a genre that has historically been dominated by straight white male authors. Most (although not all) of the books on this list do so in some way.
Part spy novel, part coming-of-age story, Vera works for the CIA — she’s an electronics expert undercover in Buenos Aires during the political tumult of the 60s. The book also details a complex backstory: Vera’s relationship with her abusive mother, and the formative relationships and experiences she has in New York as she comes to terms with her sexuality.
In this Pulitzer prize winner, the Captain, a half-Vietnamese, half-French Communist operative, escapes the fall of Saigon. He heads to California with the General, the South Vietnamese military official that he’s been spying on. I enjoyed this book because of how resistant it is to narrating the Vietnam War entirely from the American perspective.
Okay, so this one isn’t strictly a spy novel, but I’ve included it because of what the narrator’s father is told by his grandfather when he’s on his death bed. He says “…our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.” The protagonist puzzles over what his grandfather meant and how his words should affect his own conduct, and this motivates him throughout the novel.
Henry Park, a Korean American undercover agent working for a private intelligence agency, is grieving the death of his young son and estrangement from his wife. When his agency assigns him to go undercover to disrupt the mayoral campaign of a high-profile member of the Korean American community, he experiences a crisis of identity. I’m especially fond of spy novels that detail the spy’s family life as well as their work, so this book really resonated with me.
Set in the 1970s, this story introduces Ruth, a British ESL teacher with a young son. While visiting her mother, Sally, the older woman reveals that she’s actually of Russian origin, and that in her youth she worked as a British spy during World War II.
In the first novel in the Game, Set andMatch trilogy, Bernard Samson is an MI6 agent who’s tasked with ushering Brahms Four, a highly valuable asset, out of East Germany. Meanwhile, he’s also trying to figure out who the double agent in his office is, and why his wife has been acting so strange lately. While this book does very little to resist the conventions of the genre, Samson, like almost all of the intelligence agents who resonate most with me, is burnt out and cynical about his work. I loaned my main character Samson’s defensive cynicism but gave hers an origin that’s different than burn out.
The first in the James Bond series, this novel details 007’s famous (and entirely implausible) assignment to bankrupt SMERSH agent Le Chiffre at a French casino. It’s a fun book, and also one of the most relentlessly sexist things I’ve ever read. I think of Marie as an anti-Bond because it’s her female relationships that have the most enduring effect on her. They define her character. So, I’ve included Fleming on this list because he managed to inspire me quite profoundly despite himself.
The first time I crossed paths with Halle Butler’s work, it took the form of an unassuming bound galley amid dozens of other bound galleys. Back then I was a jaded book editor desperate for something to rouse me from the never-ending drawl of contemporary fiction. The galley was Jillian, a book that would become a favorite of the year for countless literary publications.
Jillian captured the complexities of anger and jealousy, disgruntlement and disgust so pristinely, you can’t help but be rapt, laughing along as Butler described social situations and conflicts so familiar can’t help but feel seen. At times, it’s cringe-inducing, at other times, you can’t help but hug the book and cry. She’s that good.
Her latest book, The New Me, increases the volume, ratcheting the drama and feels to max capacity. Thirty-year-old Millie works a temp job and is languishing until the prospect of full-time employment becomes a reality and with it the terrors of a life becoming built and defined by your job.
I spoke with Halle Butler about temping, office politics, the nuances of self-identification, the end of the world, and more.
Michael J Seidlinger:The New Me is such a well-rendered novel, I can’t help but open with craft question: Did you go into the novel with a clear idea or was it vague, growing into it over time?
Halle Butler: I feel like it was pretty clear. I knew it would be about someone getting all worked up about a potential job offer for a job they didn’t want. I think I googled “dramatic irony” and was like “ah yes, and the audience will know it’s not going to work” and then nodded slowly and felt like a genius for a few days. But then, of course, the smaller stuff, the details, grew over time, as usual. The narrator felt pretty clear from the top, but also changed slightly over time.
MJS: The novel is a testament to the countless ways we adapt to our current life situation, leading to wondering about the variations of self, or personas, we create in order to navigate society. Do you think we really need personas in order to survive (and, gulp, thrive) in society?
HB: On a really practical level, I can’t really “be myself” as a secretary, so I have to construct a false self, a kind of “Yeah, I can do that! Thanks, no problem!” self just so I don’t get into any trouble. “You’ve reached the investment bank; how may I direct your call?” self. A “Oh, I’d love to collate these files!” self. The “real me” is sitting inside, watching and criticizing everything. This can lead to what one might call “snapping” — which might be why offices are so passive-aggressive.
I can’t really ‘be myself’ as a secretary, so I have to construct a false self, a kind of ‘Yeah, I can do that! Thanks, no problem!’ self.
But on the other hand, I’m in a situation where I’m really supposed to be myself — at a party, or at a reading, or when I’m meeting someone new in a non-professional context — I catch myself doing a performance of myself based on what self-characteristics I value, and what behaviors have amused or impressed people before, basically “who I would like to be,” and when I catch myself doing that, it feels super weird. It’s me, but it’s also not. It is and isn’t conscious, is and isn’t in my control.
I’m a different person in the morning than I am at night, when I’m hungry and when I’m not, when I feel rejected and when I feel included, etc. These things might be boiled down to “mood,” but it’s important to understand mood and personality can be the same thing.
MJS: How many personas do you think it takes to be a functional person?
HB: Hundreds.
MJS: Really wish we could just be ourselves all the time. If that were true, how long do you think it would take before society would crumble?
HB: I feel like there’s no “one me.” If I could have been myself at the office (or if I could have been relaxed, maybe), I would have been so much happier. If I hadn’t been afraid of getting fired, I would have been able to joke around and make some work-friends. I wouldn’t have felt so tense and isolated and paranoid. Yeah, I wish people could be themselves all the time, too. I think society would be fine.
If I could have been myself at the office, I would have been so much happier. I wish people could be themselves all the time.
MJS: Early on in the novel, our narrator recreates an artist, Tom Jordan, in her mind, envisioning in vivid detail various menial details like buying underwear. It’s an intricate and utterly real act of debasing the very person and/or thing that caused us irritation and harm. Everyone does it and it’s such a release — why do you think it’s so therapeutic to play up a fantasy of someone’s failing?
HB: It’s very “I know you are, but what am I?” It restores the balance. When people used to tailgate me or cut me off in traffic, I’d get really mad (like everyone) and shout like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??” and call them assholes or whatever came to mind, but it didn’t make me feel better. But then one day I just shrugged and said in a weird crazy baby voice “I guess he just has to poop!” It came out of nowhere, but it was really funny to me to try to humiliate this person for my own amusement. You can deflect when people are being mean to you. And, also, I’ve heard that you get the same kinds of chemical sensations when you’re thinking about something as when you’re experiencing it, so maybe fantasizing about someone’s inadequacy is a healthy(ish? healthyish?) outlet for anger. There are a ton of different answers for this question. I picked this one randomly.
MJS: Let’s talk routines — they’re made to keep people productive but sometimes they restrict people. Do you feel routines become their own restriction?
HB: I think structure is important. When you have structure for your day, you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do. You can just do what you’re doing. But, of course, it depends on what you’re doing. When I was temping, I would have this really creepy feeling every morning where I was really aware of my mortality — like, “okie dokie, here we go again until I die!” That was awful. But when I think about my best, happiest times, many of them involve the routine of morning coffee, reading at night, making dinner, spending a few hours on a project, those kinds of routines.
When I was temping, I would have this really creepy feeling every morning where I was really aware of my mortality — like, ‘okie dokie, here we go again until I die!’
MJS: Real talk: The very existence of temp agencies is insane right? It’s become so convoluted that we need agencies to promote the very existence of a job opportunity.
HB: Temp agencies are totally nuts. You can’t get sick! If you stop responding to the temp agency even for a week, they stop contacting you because you’re unreliable. I had to work a conference on crutches once, it was wonderfully debasing.
MJS: Do you think we’re becoming robots — conditioned to be autonomous, performing tasks that pay us enough to continue doing those tasks?
HB: Yes. No. I don’t know. I have this paranoia about school — like K-12 — that it trains you to crave approval for being “right” more than it teaches you how to think deeply. You get the A, you get the dopamine, everybody tells you you’re doing the right thing, you continue to do what you think people want you to do, etc, so even smart people get addicted to conforming. What a waste! But this is just a guess/paranoia. I’m sure there’s tons of cultural conditioning going on almost everywhere, but I’m no sociologist, so I’d have to google stuff to back this up.
MJS: If Hell were the end of the world, what would your end of the world look like?
HB: I don’t really have grand apocalyptic fantasies — I never really went to church, maybe that’s part of it. You’re not the first person to ask me this, but I just don’t know. I’m just picturing these kitschy dinosaur ViewMaster things I used to look at as a kid. It’s too campy to be really scary. I’m afraid of confinement.
Do you remember, back in 2017, when reversing your books for aesthetic appeal was briefly a thing? Apartment Therapy posted a photo to Instagram of a bookshelf with the spines facing inward, and the dramatic response — dozens of users denouncing the trend as anti-intellectual, even comparing it to book-burning — felt, at the time, like the ultimate example of the bookish Internet’s capacity for outrage. Then Marie Kondo came for our books, and the bookish Internet proved me wrong.
Marie Kondo, for the uninitiated, is a Japanese organization expert who was catapulted to fame in 2011 when her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, became an international bestseller. The book advocates for the KonMari method, in which people declutter their homes by piling all of their worldly possessions together and asking of each one whether it “sparks joy.” (We’re going to talk about joy in a minute, hold on.) In 2019 Kondo was further elevated from book-famous to Netflix-famous with the release of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, an eight-episode reality series in which Kondo walks clients through KonMari-ing their homes. As a result, your local thrift shop was quickly saturated with other people’s un-joy-sparking possessions, and the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter.
In particular, a number of white women came to the defense of clutter in general, and books in particular, in language that was, frankly, pretty racist. Feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich tweeted (and then deleted) a claim that Kondo’s accented English signaled the fall of American dominance, and then followed up with a tweet that is not much better: “I confess: I hate Marie Kondo because, aesthetically speaking, I’m on the side of clutter. As for her language: It’s OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.”
Ehrenreich’s focus on the aesthetics of clutter seemed to be a dog-whistle, prompting similarly racializing and xenophobic comments from American poet Katha Pollitt, who referred to Kondo’s “fairy-like delicacy and charm,” and Elaine Showalter, who in a now-deleted tweet claimed that “She is certainly a pretty little pixie … but I am immune to Tinkerbell teaching me how to fold my socks.” But if there was one thing about Kondo that really got the collective bookish internet’s goat, it was her suggestion, in episode 5, that people should get rid of books that do not spark joy.
She might as well have suggested that people shelve their books backwards for the haste with which her tidying suggestions were equated with book burning. The point of books, readers raged, was not joy. As Canadian author Anakana Schofield wrote in The Guardian: “The metric of objects only ‘sparking joy’ is deeply problematic when applied to books… Literature does not exist only to provoke feelings of happiness or to placate us with its pleasure; art should also challenge and perturb us.”
If there was one thing about Kondo that really got the collective bookish internet’s goat, it was her suggestion that people should get rid of books that do not spark joy. The point of books, readers raged, was not joy.
The racialized language in Ehrenreich and Pollitt and Showalter’s defenses of clutter carries through in Schofield’s defense of the unedited personal library. She refers to Kondo tapping books “with fairy finger motions” as part of “the woo-woo, nonsense territory we are in.” The heart of Schofield’s critique appears to be a fundamental misinterpretation of what Kondo means by joy, a misinterpretation that Ellen Oh, founder of We Need Diverse Books, calls deliberate:
There is an overemphasis on the words ‘spark joy’ without understanding what [Kondo] really means by it. Tokimeki doesn’t actually mean joy. It means throb, excitement, palpitation. Just this basic understanding annihilates Schofield’s argument that books should not only spark joy but challenge and perturb us. Tokimeki would imply that if a book that challenges and perturbs us also gives us a positive reaction, then why wouldn’t you keep it?
What about Kondo’s advice — that people should consider getting rid of some of their books, if those books have become stress-inducing clutter — is so profoundly threatening that white feminists across social media have been led to produce such very bad takes? It has something to do with the special status that self-identified book lovers attribute to books, and the corresponding outrage they feel when someone like Kondo suggests that they might be objects on par with underwear and coasters. To return to Schofield’s anger, the issue isn’t that Kondo has entered “woo-woo, nonsense territory,” but that her nonsense takes a different shape than Schofield’s own: Kondo awakens books by tapping them with her fingers, whereas, writes Schofield, “Surely the way to wake up any book is to open it up and read it aloud.” Why is it nonsense to tap books, but not nonsense to treat them like grimoires waiting to be activated?
We could pull apart the xenophobia, racism, orientalism, and classism at work in these critiques all day, but I want to focus on how self-identified bookish people reacted to the association of books with clutter, the demotion of these objects from sacred to banal — or, maybe more accurately, the insistence that they are no more sacred than any other objects. Here’s an exchange that I would characterize as both typical and illuminating:
In addition to marveling at the Twitter-beef-defusing skills of popular culture scholar Brenna Clarke Gray, let’s think about what it means to call a book an “experience.” The status of the book as object is at once denied and overburdened: the physical codex is both a stand-in for the act of reading and a trophy to demonstrate that you have the correct emotional and intellectual relationship to that act. Mere book-owners may see books as things that can be repurposed as decor or given away when they’re no longer needed, but readers know that books contain other worlds — and their book collections become status symbols, signs of their heightened sensitivity.
There is nothing new in this link between loving books and conspicuously consuming them. There is a long, classed history of book consumption as social posturing. As American culture scholar Lisa Nakamura points out, displaying books for others to view has long been “a form of public consumption that produces and publicizes a reading self.” But contemporary bookish culture extends conspicuous consumption beyond books themselves, to a range of lifestyle goods that have, in fact, played a significant role in the recent revival of independent bookstores (and in the expansion of Canadian book retailer Indigo into the U.S.). It is also more complex than a simple display of cultural or institutional capital, rooted as this culture is in a deep emotional investment in books that consumers have been taught to express through consumption. And we can see it playing out through the history of book-buying, from early bibliophilia to the midcentury Book-of-the-Month Club’s offer to help you build a personal library to millennial-aimed blogs that turn bookishness into consumer behavior. Understanding something more about the evolution of bookishness, I think, helps us understand what happened when Marie Kondo came for our bookish clutter.
There is a long, classed history of book consumption as social posturing.
In Loving Literature: A Cultural History, Deirdre Lynch traces the long history of book obsession, or bibliomania, back to the Stoic philosophers’ anxieties about unseemly attachments to books. In the late 18th century, however, the industrialization of paper production and then print created a newly robust book market that was actively invested in anthropomorphizing books, making them part of “the living world” so that people could love them (by buying them). Stoic arguments against the luxurious over-consumption of books were, as Lynch writes, “patently trickier to sustain in a culture that was … figuring out ways to vindicate consumerist passions.” Alongside these consumerist passions for books came the transformation of the domestic sphere, with “the previously commercial, quasi-public space of the house [becoming] a personal sanctuary” — and reading becoming an increasingly private activity, one that the middle-class gentleman performed in the comfort of his own home, drawing on the reserves of his own library.
Note the specificity of gender here. The bibliophile was a man, and he collected books not indiscriminately but with great attention to their status, their value, and their collectibility. But, as Lynch points out, women were still engaging with book culture, just not via consumer decisions. (Women would become increasingly responsible for domestic consumption decisions in the 20th century, which is when the book market begins to swing decisively towards the female readers). So what form did women’s bibliomania take? Lynch describes a kind of literary scrapbooking effort that bears a striking resemblance to contemporary fan fiction and fan art worlds:
The homemade manuscript anthology — a compilation of original poetry and prose mixed with hand-copies extracts from published sources sometimes augmented with clippings from newspapers and periodicals; amateur watercolor landscapes (sometimes souvenirs of travels); imaginary portraits of characters from novels or poems (especially Walter Scott’s); pastel pictures on rice paper achieving a tremendous level of zoological/botanical accuracy of sea shells, butterflies, and/or flowers; various other specimens of fashionable feminine accomplishments, decoupage and flower and fern pressing included; locks of hair; memorial cards paying homage to the recently deceased.
Hold onto this contrast between a highly discriminating form of curated library collection and a highly personalized, almost fannish, engagement with books. The latter, I think, more accurately predicts the direction that bookish culture has gone in the 21st century, perhaps because book buying has become a predominantly feminized activity. (We also see the ongoing gendering of modes of engagement in the distinction between curative and transformative fandom.) But I don’t want to skip ahead.I
Nineteenth-century bibliomania paved the way for the 20th century middle class’s fixation on acquiring a proper library, as Janice Radway outlines in A Feeling For Books. Radway explains how the Book-of-the-Month Club (founded in 1926) became a prototype for the marrying of commerce and culture in American book culture. The organization took advantage of the expanding consumer power of Americans post-World War II, as well as the growth of the professional-managerial class, which she describes as “professionals and knowledge workers [who] were necessary to circulate the huge quantities of information so essential to an integrated consumer economy.” The children of the professional-managerial class were “taught to value books and to aspire to some form of intellectual work,” but the way they were taught to value books was oriented a little differently than the canon-conscious bibliophilia of the previous century. The Book-of-the-Month Club, Radway asserts, was invested in the idea of the “intelligent, general reader,” a readerly identity that she links to the increasing focus of the book market on marketing subcategories. Here’s Radway on how reading was understood by the Club:
An implicit theory of the practice of reading served as the foundation for the business of day-to-day evaluation at the Book-of-the-Month Club. Reading was not conceived as a unitary practice, nor were books evaluated according to a single set of criteria. Rather, reading was conceptualized as elaborated and wholly context-specific. Sometimes people read to be entertained; sometimes they read to be put to sleep; sometimes they read to find out how to eat; and sometimes they read to live other lives, to think other thoughts, and to feel more intensely. … To measure the success of any given book, the Book-of-the-Month Club editors evaluated not the features of the text alone but, rather, the precise nature of the fit between what the book offered and what its likely reader would demand of it.
This non-unity of reading makes sense as a marketing strategy, and is evident in the way the Book-of-the-Month Club framed its selections, bringing together classics, weighty nonfiction tomes, and light romantic fiction under the umbrella of a generally “improving” reading practice. The figure of the “intelligent, general reader” as free to read across categories is vital to the development of contemporary bookish culture; it lets the book market moralize reading and books in general while refusing genre- or book-specific snobbery. To be a reader is better than to not be a reader, but one kind of reading or book is not better than another. This kind of reading is what Radway defines as the middlebrow, and it has a lot to do with how books make us feel.
You can see the word sliding into an identity label, one in which ‘liking books a lot’ can become one’s entire identity.
In The New Literary Middlebrow, Beth Driscoll demonstrates that feelings are still the point for contemporary middlebrow readers. Driscoll attributes eight characteristics to the literary middlebrow: it is middle-class, reverential, commercial, mediated, feminized, recreational, earnest, and emotional. We can see, in this list, traces of how 18th- and 19th-century bibliophilia transformed into the middlebrow literary culture of the present day — the link between reading and middle-class domesticity, the attempt to rationalize a reverent relationship to commercial objects — and I think we can also see how the middlebrow picked up on those homemade manuscript anthologies, encouraging an emotional, feminized, and highly mediated relationship to books. All of these forces — class-consciousness, hyper-mediation, the link between reverence and commerce, the feminization of book consumption, and especially the figure of the general, or recreational, reader — come together in the figure of the 21st-century “bookish” individual.
So let’s talk about bookishness. The OED tells us that the word can be dated back to the 16th century, when it meant, unsurprisingly, “serious about reading books” or “studious.” Alongside those neutral definitions, though, there’s also a history of the term being somewhat pejorative, suggesting people who are unhealthily invested in books and thus divorced from the real world. The way bookishness gets used in contemporary book culture resembles nothing so much as a triumphant reclamation of the term, an insistence that over-investment in books could only ever be a good thing. BookRiot, an American new media company founded in 2011 as a lifestyle destination for book lovers, is a case study in the semantic slide of the term (though it’s only one example among many). To get a sense of how the word is being used, let’s look at a few posts.
The May 30, 2018 post “‘By Age 35’: Bookish Edition,” a play on the “by age 35” meme that was circulating at the time, tells us a lot about BookRiot’s idea of bookishness. The post is both self-consciously irreverent and illustrative. It focuses on conspicuous consumption — “you should have your spouse seriously look into shoring up the foundation under whatever room in which the majority of your books reside” — as well as the elevation of quantity over quality, suggesting you should have re-bought your childhood favorites, and filled your shelves with romance novels, “doorstopper history books,” and “an entire shelf of books you know for a fact you’ll never read, but you want people visiting your house to see that you own them.” The intermingling of romance, history, and classics on the same (over-burdened) bookshelf is reminiscent of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s intelligent general reader, who knows that it doesn’t matter what you read so long as you’re reading (or at least buying) a lot of books. A January 9, 2019 BookRiot post offers challenges for a “bookish bucket list,” including traveling to a bookish destination, meeting a favorite author, and spreading bookishness through your community “by helping someone else learn to love reading.” You can see the word sliding, from “really into books” into a kind of lifestyle or identity label, one in which “liking books a lot” (any kind of books!) can become one’s entire identity.
The most interesting manifestation of the bookish identity, for me, comes through in the feature “Book Fetish,” which is, as of my writing this, on its 343rd installment. Book Fetish is a testimony to the nigh-complete expansion of bookishness into a consumer category. It is, to be clear, not about books, but about book-proximate accessories likely to appeal to people (particularly women) who identify as bookish. A scan of a few recent columns gives a sense of the range of things: pencils, notepads, and bookmarks, sure, but also cross stitch patterns, enamel pins, tea pots, dish towels, t-shirts, mugs, jewelry, planters, art, and more and more and more.
And a major theme of these collected “fetishes” is that books are more than mere belongings — which brings us back to Marie Kondo and the belligerent rejection of her premise that books are just things. We might call it ironic that this column advertises non-book consumer items that themselves advertise the non-consumer-item status of books. Let me try to break that down: the special status of books, which we can link back to that 18th-century desire to anthropomorphize books in order to support a powerful new book market, is stamped all over Book Fetish. But the column itself testifies to the deep investment of bookish culture in the book market: it celebrates the conspicuous consumption not just of books, but of accessories that advertise your conspicuous consumption of books.
Nakamura, writing about the important role Goodreads plays in contemporary book culture, points out that the platform expands the commodification of books and readers:
Goodreads shows us how social networking about books has become a commodity, a business that lays claim to all user content, admits no liability, and reserves the right to terminate user profiles and data for any reason or no reason. Our carefully maintained Goodreads bookshelves, some of which contain thousands of books, can be abruptly disappeared.
The movement of book culture online — from buying books on Amazon to reading them on a Kindle and reviewing them on Goodreads — has far from curbed the commodification of the book world: instead, it has heightened to a degree those 18th-century bibliophiles could never have imagined. The incorporation of Goodreads into the Amazon megalith further exacerbates this situation, the special status of books somehow serving as a smokescreen for whatever Amazon is really up to (fun fact: googling “what is Amazon REALLY up to” yields 1.4 billion hits!). At the same time, this leakage of book fetishism beyond books themselves into the lifestyle accessories associated with bookishness has been a major factor behind both the survival of Canada’s bookstore chain Indigo — which recently expanded into the U.S. while rebranding as “the world’s first cultural department store” — and the resurgence of independent bookstores. Is it overkill to imagine the niche indie bookstore, with its combination of carefully curated books, quality scented candles, and ironic enamel pins, as a modern-day version of the homemade manuscript anthology — a curated space in which bibliophilia might flourish beyond the limits of books themselves?
Let’s end by bringing this full circle, back to the outrage so many (white) people directed toward Marie Kondo’s suggestion that books might be things like any others. The intensity with which self-identified book lovers love books is far from “natural”: it is instead the culmination of a complex set of cultural and economic transformations over the past 300 years that anthropomorphized books while simultaneously valorizing their consumption, that made book-loving into a consumer identity so well-defined that it has birthed a thousand cross stitch patterns. So well-defined that when threatened with a competing cultural understanding of what kinds of things books are, and how you might want to relate to them, many “bookish” folks completely lost their shit.
Some years after I began writing fiction, I hit a wall. What was I up to, writing these stories? One night, while crossing the campus where I worked, ironically, as a teacher of writing, I began to doubt that a writer like me could fit in anywhere. Then a voice of reason came to me, or maybe it was a voice of grace. All you can do is be yourself. No one in the world has your exact experiences to draw on, so just write who you are.
But who was I? A southern white woman with an intact family and deep Presbyterian roots. A kid whose sixth-grade teacher recited the Bible each day and made the girls rub her neck with cold cream. A Girl Scout whose mother sent her to primitive camp at fourteen. A girl who shed tears of devotion during communion while fighting the urge to rebel. Who saw a church retreat as an opportunity to visit a biker bar. Who spent her first real paycheck on a pet raccoon.
We all have our stories, and what we write, and how we write, springs from who we are: our memories, experiences, preoccupations, and obsessions. Now that I have a collection of stories, Let Me Out Here, I can see at least one strong theme emerge, and it’s based on who I am and what is mine to tell. A few of my stories are ridiculous, and a few touch on matters of the spirit, or belief. Things don’t often turn out well. So this theme might be called meaning and menace. Or let’s call it the sacred and the strange.
There’s no “church” in Lucia Berlin’s stories, although the worlds she creates, which for the most part are worlds she herself inhabited, are suffused with Catholic tradition. In “El Tim,” a lay teacher in a school run by nuns is assigned a pupil fresh out of detention. He needs to be “encouraged and challenged,” reports the detention center, so it’s up to Mrs. Lawrence, the lay teacher, to encourage and challenge him. Tim is pure menace, and in his presence the other pupils, and even the school principal, cower. When the boy refuses to button his shirt, his gold crucifix gleaming on his bare chest, Sister Lourdes, the principal, fumbles with the buttons and does it for him. After this, she buttons him everyday, she’s so intimidated by him. Here we have a standard set-up: the terrible boy, the trembling students and principal, and the lay teacher who will be the hero. Surely, redemption is on the way. But not in the hands of Lucia Berlin. Mrs. Lawrence hits El Tim across the mouth, stunning him. When she leads him back to class, she avoids “the beat of his walk.”
It’s the frankness in Lucia Berlin’s stories that gets to me. Everybody’s flawed, everybody’s just trying to live an OK life. But life can be brutal. Take, for instance, this passage from “Panteon de Dolores,” a story I especially admire:
Ofrendas are fun to make. Offerings to the dead. You make them as pretty as you can…On the ofrendas you place everything the dead person might be wishing for. Tobacco, pictures of the family, mangos, lottery tickets, tequila, postcards from Rome. Swords and candles and coffee. Skulls with friends’ names on them. Candy skeletons to eat. On our mother’s ofrenda my sister’s children had put dozens of Ku Klux Klan figures. She hated them for being the children of a Mexican. Her ofrenda had Hershey bars, Jack Daniel’s, mystery books, and many, many dollar bills. Sleeping pills and guns and knives, since she was always killing herself.
This wonderful collection of stories was created by Nick Hornby as a fundraiser for TreeHouse, a school for autistic children that his son attended at the time. The book was published in 2000, and it is, thank goodness, still in print. I say thank goodness because it contains one of the funniest and wisest short stories I know: “Nipplejesus.” In this story, Hornby gives us Dave, a hulking former nightclub bouncer (“six foot two and fifteen stone”) who lands a job as a guard in an art gallery. Because he’s such a big man, he’s assigned the room containing “Nipplejesus,” a painting composed of hundreds of cut-outs of nipples. In other words, it’s his duty to watch over Jesus, in nipple form. This is another story I could never omit from my syllabus.
Ted Chiang possesses the wild imagination of a pure science fiction writer, so it’s thrilling to see him use key theological problems as the basis of a short story, “Hell Is the Absence of God.” Is suffering redemptive, or is suffering merely suffering? Does God cause pain, or is pain merely pain? And what about hell? In Chiang’s hands, a character named Neil Fisk learns to “love God.” But not in the way one would expect. Born with a congenital defect, Neil always wonders whether he’s been punished by God. Then the angel Nathaneal makes a fiery appearance downtown, actuating miracle cures. Yet eight people also die, thanks to the angel, including Neil’s wife. Says the narrator, “Scores of people became devout worshipers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror. Alas, Neil Fisk wasn’t one of them.”
Neil does go on a kind of quest, though, looking to make sense of it all. Along the way, he meets a woman named Janice who has flipper-like legs, a deformity caused by the visitation of the angel Bardiel. Unlike Neil, Janice is grateful for her affliction, her “special assignment” that gives her the power to speak to audiences and inspire them. But when yet another angel comes along, and she is given two strong legs, she loses her ability to inspire. Her gain is her loss. “Clearly,” says the narrator, “God had made her task more difficult than it was before….” You have to love this audacious irony. Is hell the absence of God?
It’s rare to feel left in awe. But these final stories by Denis Johnson do it to me, leaving me feeling breathless, like you just can’t believe someone could write with such fierce empathy. “Nobody wrote with more brutality and mercy, more hilarity and grace,” wrote Elizabeth McCracken in her blurb for the book. Brutality and mercy: what a perfect pair. I’m left wanting to quote passages from every story, but instead I’ll just offer two.
From the title story: “This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life — the distance I’ve traveled from my own youth, the persistence of old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms — that I almost crashed the car.”
And then this, from “The Starlight On Idaho”:
“What do they feed you when you’re the Pope? Try the stuff around here sometime. For lunch they give you a marshmaller and a coffee bean. It’s a salvage yard for people who totaled their souls called the Starlight Recovery Center in Ukiah, California on Idaho Avenue. Ah hell what’s wrong with me? I won’t be sending no letter to the Pope.”
In this fine collection of seven stories, two stand out for me. The first, “Nirvana,” comes straight out of Silicon Valley, where a talented A.I. developer brings the president, recently assassinated, back to life on a screen. The president can talk, respond, and reassure, if only in two dimensions. Disembodied, he’s still able to inspire. And while he inspires thousands of people, the one he inspires most is his creator, who speaks to him out of his loneliness. His wife, a victim of Guillaine-Barre Syndrome, is confined to bed, paralyzed from the shoulders down. In her despair, she has asked her husband to promise that when she can take it no more, he’ll help her commit suicide. To ease her pain, she listens constantly to Nirvana — to Kurt Cobain, who took his own life. She can relate.
God comes in this story in the weirdest ways. I doubt Adam Johnson would agree. God? But there’s a drone in this story, and it enables Charlotte, the paralyzed wife, to visit her garden remotely. Wearing a headset, she can smell her roses. And then there’s hope for a baby: she reasons that if she can’t live, maybe she can give life. And finally there’s Kurt Cobain. “I only appreciate things when they’re gone,” he sings. He appears on a screen.
The other story in this collection I can’t forget, “Dark Meadow,” doesn’t offer anything really spiritual or redemptive, although the story does open a reader to feel deep empathy. Told in the point of view of a shaky and self-aware child molester, the story reveals the sordid business of child pornography. Imagine the risk Johnson took, conceiving such a story. Yet he manages to bring to life the pain of a man who was molested as a boy and whose memories won’t give him rest. There are sizzling moments in this story, and there are sweet, tenuous moments as well. This isn’t a story that lingers in your mind. It stays.
Fourteen years ago, on assignment for GQ, John Jeremiah Sullivan rented an enormous RV and headed out to Creation, a Christian rock festival in “ruralmost Pennsylvania…a veritable Godstock.” The result is a stunning piece of journalism titled “Upon This Rock,” which opens his collection of essays. Sullivan can be very funny (“Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself”), but his best gift is his openness. He observes everything openly, with a clear eye and a deft ear. He’s so open, in fact, that he ends up hanging out with five guys from West Virginia who take him in as one of them. One night, they even pile inside Sullivan’s RV for hours, talking, playing the guitar, and listening for the mountain lion that they’re sure is lurking outside.
Midway into the essay, Sullivan digresses and tells his own story: how he, a kid who grew up in the Episcopal church, got drawn into an evangelical crowd when he was in high school, how he was so drawn in that he became a leader, good at witnessing. And then how (he doesn’t go deep into this), he backed off. This part of Sullivan’s essay has the effect of validating him and making him trustworthy. Whatever he observes at the festival, he observes from a place of understanding, which leaves him open to a final moment of self-discovery. At the end of the essay, he confesses that he came to love the little gang who became his friends. “It may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God — and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I was never capable of.”
Here we have twenty-five stories “about” God, published in 1998. Conceived by C. Michael Curtis, editor of fiction at The Atlantic, this collection gives us stories that “encounter spirituality in its human dimensions,” as Curtis writes in his introduction. All manner of encounters, as it happens. Included are James Baldwin’s painful and complicated “Exodus,” Louise Erdrich’s sexy “Satan: Hijacker of the Planet,” and Andre Dubus’s classic “A Father’s Story.” To me, this collection is notable for its inclusion of “Parker’s Back,” which might just be the most brutal and vivid “Christian” story Flannery O’Connor wrote. As a teacher, I could never leave this story off my syllabus.
My final recommendation is not a plug; it’s not like I’m saying, “You’ve gotta watch this show!” Rather, if I have to be honest about the work that influences me — that inspires me and makes me want to create something even half as good — I must mention Pete Holmes, the stand-up comedian who writes and stars in this comedy series about: himself. Holmes came from what people used to call “a good Christian home,” and he spent his early youth in an evangelical church. He married his sweetheart. He had a talent for comedy. He started doing stand-up, and then his wife left him. He crashed.
Bereft, doubting himself and everything, he leaned on his friends. And this is the basic premise of Crashing, a comedy series he created four years ago and that’s now finishing its third season. A comedian abruptly goes from married to single, so he crashes on different couches, which happen to be the couches of fellow comedians. He keeps doing stand-up, and he keeps trying to figure out his life. There’s a darkness that keeps haunting him.
Every episode of Crashing teaches me something. Often it’s just that it’s boldly sexy. Often it’s funny, of course. Most often, it’s filled with paradox. Pete Holmes (whose show, by the way, is produced by Judd Apatow), demonstrates that faith and art can dance together, that the mystery of why things are as they are warrants our attention as writers, comedians, and artists of all genres.
This month, retired basketball player Kobe Bryant adds new lines to his resume — publisher and author — with the first volume of a children’s fantasy book series, The Wizenards, published through his multimedia content company Granity Studios. When Granity’s film Dear Basketball won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018, I watched in disgust as an audience that had been applauding presenters and winners for their open acknowledgement of the #MeToo movement paused to give an award to Mr. Bryant.
I grew up one township away from Lower Merion, PA, where Mr. Bryant’s athletic career began. He was two years ahead of me in high school, and even I, not a basketball fan then or now, couldn’t escape the excitement and hype generated by such a talented player. When he was put on trial for allegedly raping a hotel worker in Colorado, in 2003, I followed the case in the news. The woman who brought the suit was subjected to the usual reputation tarnishing by his lawyers. She ultimately refused to testify in the criminal trial, which I interpreted to be a result of the intimidation tactics used by his representation and fans. A civil trial was settled for an unknown sum of money and a public “apology” from Mr. Bryant, in which he never admitted wrongdoing but expressed a vague understanding that she viewed their encounter differently than he did (i.e. as nonconsensual).
In January of this year, I attended an annual conference for booksellers at which Mr. Bryant was allotted a spot to pitch The Wizenards and his entry into our industry. The applause as he took his place at the podium was shocking to me, and felt very similar to the experience of watching him win an Oscar. My career has been spent in various areas of the book industry, a field generally understood to be a liberal stronghold and a place where women can rise through the ranks as quickly as men. But here I was, surrounded by female and male colleagues alike who were cheering a man who had settled that lengthy, nasty, highly publicized rape trial. Speaking with a number of booksellers throughout the day I was surprised to hear how many of them had forgotten about the case, or had never heard about it in the first place.
My industry is not unfamiliar with allegations of assault and misconduct against popular and critically acclaimed authors. These claims are particularly troubling when they are against authors who write for children and young adults. In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how, and whether, I should give space to these authors’ work within my limited square footage when accusations surface. As the buyer for a small store, part of my responsibility is deciding which voices get placement. The selection of books I carry is carefully curated with the dual goals of serving my specific community of customers and turning a profit, but there is a third goal I try to keep in mind as well: ensuring that I can stand behind the books that pay my bills. Is it my responsibility as a business owner to cater to customers who may want books like Mr. Bryant’s (“Harry Potter meets the Olympics” was his pitch in that Albuquerque ballroom), or is it to disseminate books by authors who meet my own moral criteria? I have chosen the latter as my approach, inasmuch as it can be. “Ethical capitalism” might not be fully possible, but it’s a goal that informs my decisions as a business owner every day.
As the buyer for a small store, part of my responsibility is deciding which voices get placement.
Of course, committing to thoughtful use of my power as a bookseller means that I’ll constantly be asking myself that question — what is my responsibility here? — and not every case is clear-cut. In the past few years, bestselling authors like Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), James Dashner (The Maze Runner), and Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why) have all been accused of misconduct. Unlike in Mr. Bryant’s case, the accusations have not yet led to criminal charges. If I make room for their titles on my shelves, am I implicitly denying the claims of the women who say they have been mistreated? If I choose not to carry bestselling books, will I lose sales, jeopardizing the health of my small business? Is it my responsibility as a cultural gatekeeper to educate my customers about my decision-making process and to let them know why they might not find certain authors in our Children’s and Young Adult section?
I take these questions very seriously. But how far back in the catalog should I go with this line of thought, and does it apply to books published for adults, as well? The late David Foster Wallace allegedly assaulted Mary Karr. Should I decline to carry Infinite Jest? I genuinely loved Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and my customers still buy it regularly. Is it enough to have removed the shelf-talker for that title, calling attention to the book and offering a positive review from one of our booksellers? Or should I take it off the shelves altogether in light of allegations against Mr. Diaz? If there are no criminal charges, am I off the hook for continuing to profit from these authors’ books? (And continuing to put money in their pockets in the form of royalties?)
One response I’ve considered is to donate a portion of proceeds from these authors’ books to RAINN. But who are “these authors” and what are the criteria for deciding that? Is an anonymous comment on a message board sufficient to add them to my own Bad Man list? And what of the cases I don’t know about, either because I missed a headline or because the people involved have remained silent? I’ve asked myself if seeing an accused author’s book on our shelves will be triggering to visitors to my store who might themselves be survivors of assault, possibly from the author in question. New York is a city with an active literary community and we host authors for events regularly (in addition to serving them as customers), so it is certainly possible that someone on my shelves did something terrible to someone who might come to my store. It is important to me that people feel safe in my store at the bare minimum, but I simply cannot know every bad deed committed by each of the authors we carry. And so if I take on this curatorial responsibility (which I have by default in my position as the buyer for a bookstore), where does my complicity begin and end? For now, I continue to consider each case on its own as new rounds of allegations surface and make the most informed decisions I can with input from my staff and other colleagues.
With that in mind, for me it’s an easy decision not to carry the Wizenard series. There are enough men on my shelves already — whether currently writing, retired, or deceased — whose personal misconduct has caused me to reevaluate my carrying their titles. We, as a community of book professionals, all curators of literature at various stages in the creative process, must find strategies to address these difficult issues before we invite yet another accused man into our ranks whose behavior raises similar questions. Especially in the case of authors who write for children, we must look more closely at the person as a whole, and not just the work product that we sell and profit from.
We, as a community of book professionals, all curators of literature at various stages in the creative process, must find strategies to address these difficult issues before we invite yet another accused man into our ranks.
No one gets into books to get rich; we work in this field because we love books and literature and sharing stories and introducing readers to new authors and vice versa. If I wanted to make lots of money and didn’t care about the people involved, I could work in finance. Instead I chose a low-margin, labor-intensive field where the impact I have is small and very personal. The wages I pay myself are not enough to compensate for the moral dilemma of putting a book written by a potential rapist into the hands of a 10-year-old child.
1. The speaker — let’s call him Brian — is documenting the shift, à la Buber, from I-It to I-Thou relations, from subject-object to intersubjectivity. Confronted with his lover’s fast machine and clean motor, Brian can no longer maintain his stance as autonomous male subject gazing upon the Other. He and his lover merge; he is shaken.
Was I not a sufficiently fast machine? Did I not keep my motor clean? I cleansed assiduously for you, removed hairs, performed ablutions. True: over time I relaxed a little, cleansed and removed less of myself, slowed down. But is love not a sagging into each other, a softening of edges, an ooze? Was my dirt and languor not yours too?
2. The woman to whom Brian refers in the verse differs from the woman (or man or nonbinary individual) he addresses in the chorus. He uses talk of the woman in the verse to seduce, via titillation, jealousy, aspiration, etc., the choral “you.” If I speak to you of a woman’s ability to knock me out with her American thighs, Brian reasons, you will then want to knock me out with yours. His reasoning bears out: he is shaken.
You often spoke of how dumb she was. You didn’t use that word, but you implied and I inferred. A groupie, you’d called her. A wannabe who imposed upon your time with toady tributes to your poetry. I’d seen her at parties: assertively busty, cosmetically lacquered, flagrantly blonde. After said parties, I’d follow your lead and mock her. After said parties, I’d follow your lead and fuck you hard.
3. After losing his lover, Brian can’t bring himself to address her, and much remains unsaid. He recounts their time together until, overcome by memories of their all-night shaking, he calls to her across the ether. If he reminds her of their shaking, crows it over the roar of guitars, will she hear? Will she tell him to come even though, in a sense, he was already there?
Only later did I realize how much she resembled your ex. Later still I realized my once-careful grooming may have been a response to a photo I’d seen of your ex, who’d managed, in her appearance, to blend purity and smut, her perfection an invitation to blemish, to ravage and raid. Did you still love your ex? I called across the ether. Did you now love the groupie? Had you ever loved me?
4. Brian is masturbating. The woman is a product of his mind and “you” is himself. Her truth telling, her double-time on the seduction line, her meal making: these are all Brian’s fabrications, his creation of an ideal woman who is fast, mechanical, immaculate, superlative, unseeing, authentic, strong, greedy, domineering, hard-working, inimitable, faithful, humble, ravenous, calming, violent. She doesn’t exist, and Brian, unable to compromise his ideal, is left to shake himself.
Once I awoke and you weren’t in bed. I found you in the living room, pleasuring yourself. How hard you’d shut your eyes, as if trapping whatever fantasy girl you’d formed in your brain. If I’d been working double-time on the seduction line, I would have shimmied over and joined in. But I’d been depressed. I didn’t know why, but I knew it was my fault. How devoted you’d recently been. Yet I’d failed to satisfy you. What’s more, I’d forgotten to shower. I stank of myself.
5. Brian is anxious because he has to fill the shoes of AC/DC’s previous singer, Bon, who died of alcohol poisoning. A product of his anxiety and his cowriters’ grief, the point-of-view shift is an oversight, a mistake that betrays subconscious feelings for Bon. Why did he leave them? If he returned, they would shake him all night long, each for their own reasons. Unable to acknowledge their pain, they cloak their urges in boasts of heterosexual intercourse, projecting their need to shake a dead man onto a feminized Other.
One day you disappeared. Ghosted, they call it: a misnomer. A ghost is a presence where there should be an absence. You were gone when you were supposed to be here. The morning you vanished, I flitted birdlike from room to room, my head jerking at strange angles, searching for you. When I understood what you’d done, I wanted to shake you until answers flew from your throat. Instead, I rammed myself against a wall, which gently shuddered, and left, on my shoulder, a chlorine-blue bruise.
6. Brian is documenting, per the Song of Songs, an encounter with the divine. Unable to evoke his sacred love with mundane language, he turns to the sensual, celebrating God’s feminine aspects. However, Brian understands the vocabulary of masculine and feminine can be only metaphor. As the ultimate You, God transcends material forms and their signifiers. Yet God also inhabits them. Brian’s confrontation with this paradox unites him with the supreme mystery: he is shaken; he is shaker.
If you were my god, then whom did you worship? All poetry, you’d once said, entreats the divine. When you knelt before me and made me scream, was my pleasure a poem, a song to yourself? My idol, you smashed me. Yet I thank thee. I thank thee! Alone with the mess of me, I’m shaken and shaking. Shaking and shaken, I’m god of myself.
These words open T Kira Madden’s debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. They seem innocuous at first, nothing more than the descriptive facts of the cosmetic surgery commercial that played on loop during Madden’s early years. She recounts the details of the commercial: the women, the droplets of sandy beach water and sweat that drip down their bodies, and the man who sings to them. Their beauty is his work, his pride, his joy. In her they spark envy, curiosity, desire. As Madden then transports you years into the future, planting you in the hours and days following her father’s death, you are immediately imbued with the knowledge that here — in this world, and in this story — the women are the anchor. The women are safety. The women are home.
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In essays written with raw and fearless prose, Madden asks the questions to which we all seek answers. In so doing, she honors fathers and mothers and families; the ways they love, and the ways they fail. What makes Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls so exceptional is the compassion Madden brings to the page. She writes in search of answers because that is what we, as humans and writers, do. But she does this all the while knowing that even in death, we are never really finished. The answers can never really be answers. And yet, we must find the semblance of them somewhere. Why not the women?
Dennis Norris II: I want to start by asking you about the beginning. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls covers so much ground in your life, so many important, intimate, intense moments. I’m wondering if there’s a particular moment that you see as the germ for this book? Whether it’s in the book or not, I’m curious about a moment, a memory, a conversation, or an incident that planted the seed?
T Kira Madden: I began writing this book in the thick haze of grief just after my father died, though I didn’t know I was writing it. I was on assignment, asked to write about a Valentine, and, instead of a more traditional route, I wrote about my first love: a full-bodied mannequin I’d named Uncle Nuke. He lived with me growing up, and we were so inseparable I began popping his joints apart, carrying his hand around in my lunchbox. It took me months to realize that that mannequin was a way into my father. My father’s hands before he died, his bulging knees; I watched life leave my father’s body in a hospital bed, and grief came to me in those flashes of body parts. Uncle Nuke was my way of writing about it before I was ready to write about it.
DN: Did writing this book complicate your relationship to, and thinking of, your father? Did it simplify it?
TKM: My father was and always will be the giant of my heart. Same goes for my mother. My hope in writing this book was to render them as full as possible. As human beings packed with complications and contradictions and fury and nobility. My father was, at times, a monstrous and abusive drug addict who threatened to kill me with a baseball bat. He was also gentle, and funny as hell, and cried in the movie theater. He liked to Facetime me whenever I went to BLM or LGBTQ protests so he could feel like he was there (he was too sick to physically make it); he was brilliant and generous. Jo Ann Beard taught me this: you can’t create shadow without casting a light. Writing into my understanding of my father will never bring him back, will never come close to the person he was, but I’ve learned to honor that failure and appreciate both how much I know about him and all the ways in which I will never know him at all.
My father was, at times, a monstrous and abusive drug addict who threatened to kill me with a baseball bat. He was also gentle, and funny as hell, and cried in the movie theater.
DN: I feel as though the experience of reading this book is a lot like consuming a montage of secrets, of memories, of conjuring details from the memories of others, and questions — so many questions! I’m reminded of the five W’s of writing we learn about as kids: who, what, when, where, why. Only in this book these are like the questions of life: (Who is my father?) (What did my mother do?) (When did this happen?) (Where was I?) (Why — so many why’s?). How did you begin to make sense of all of this, both in life, and in the writing process?
TKM: What I loved about writing this book is how much the process you’re describing plays into the final section. We all have the stories we’re told about our lives, and the stories we tell ourselves. We narrativize our personalities and create our own story arcs because life is so messy and bat shit and mostly incomplete and unsatisfactory that we need to tidy it, to story it, to make it feel full and circular and interesting. I learned through writing this book that there is no getting your own story right; forget about anyone else’s. When you’re trying to wrangle every version of yourself and harness every refraction of light and shadow from lived experiences — experiences that change color with every subsequent recall — what you get is a mess. I hope this book is as true to telling the story as it is to the story itself.
DN: One of the words that came to mind early in my reading, and remained throughout, was the word yearning. There’s a really palpable sense of yearning from the outset, and as the reader moves through the book, it seems to transform from a trickle into a crescendo. Yearning for safety, for protection, at times to be seen. Has the process of writing this book, and the essays that make up portions of it, satisfied some of that yearning? Do you think that writing in general can help us find the things we search for?
TKM: Yes, the writing is the answer. I don’t write for myself. I write because I need dialogue. I write because I need people, or even one person, to hear me. To see me. To say “I see you.” I write for the chorus. This book is about all the places one reaches for love and compassion, and all the ways in which we fail in that reach. I’ve always found the deepest love and recognition and balm and even divinity in books and in art. So I’m here to nourish that act of connection.
DN: Do you find yourself wanting to control the narrative that people take from the book, about your life, your father, your family? Is there, in any way, a sense of “I’ve gotten it right or wrong,” and is that in any way related to reactions you’ve gotten from readers?
TKM: I do hope people close the book feeling like they’ve spent time with real people, people who have failed tremendously while doing the best they could. I don’t like the hero/villain narrative. I don’t like the clichés of thought that draw us towards binaries. I’m after the in-betweens, the nuances and complications behind human beings making the wrong choices. If I got to control one thing: I’d like readers who may not (think they) know any addicts to leave this book knowing them.
I do hope people close the book feeling like they’ve spent time with real people, people who have failed tremendously while doing the best they could.
DN: I would imagine that much of what you’ve written about in this book are things that continue to haunt you, right? We don’t just create something, and then put it in a box in the attic. There are new relationships, and there are new understandings of life-long relationships. Is there, anywhere in the process, a sense of completion, whether it be about the work, or about the lives that are intertwined with yours? Is that something you’ve sought at any point in your writing? An arrival of sorts?
TKM: I think a book has three lives: the first life is when it occupies a space in the writer’s mind before it’s destroyed by being put to paper. The second — the life that’s just ended for me — is the working, writing, editing, tormented love affair between writer and manuscript (and, if you’re lucky, great editors, too). After that final edit is made when it’s time to print, the book moves onto its third life, that is, the life my book will (I hope) share with readers. It’s no longer mine. It’s no longer alive, or breathing, or something to which I can return. I am grieving that but celebrating it, too.
Regarding the events of the book, the people in it, the moving parts — no, those will never be complete. What is completion? We’re not complete when we’re dead. Not even long after we’re dead, and mythologized, and spoken about, and half-remembered. My book does not capture or complete even a moment of time; time is a narrative construct.
DN: I know you primarily as a fiction writer because we studied together at Sarah Lawrence. How has it been different, venturing into nonfiction? Did it in any way inform your craft, or your approach to the page? Or is that something you’ve not given thought to?
TKM: I actually feel extremely fortunate to have studied and written fiction before writing or teaching nonfiction. The elements of fiction and story are often disassociated from nonfiction — basic toolbox skills like character building, story arcs, tragic and comic form, setting, dialogue, etc. In my nonfiction class at Sarah Lawrence, we read across genres in order to exercise those individual skills. Our job, regardless of “genre,” is to make a work of art and to make that art feel alive and true. We need these tools to do that; we are architects, building the scaffolding upon which our language and stories are hung. Experience doesn’t “bleed out of the typewriter” as some (mostly non-writers) may suggest. It doesn’t even flop onto the page like a dead fish. It’s built both mysteriously and scientifically.
Our job, regardless of “genre,” is to make a work of art and to make that art feel alive and true.
DN: Writing about family without calling the book a novel must have presented some challenges. Were you ever asked to alter the work because it’s about, and in some ways, reflects real people?
TKM: I think something we don’t talk about enough, something that shouldn’t be so mysterious, is the fact that nonfiction writers are usually required — legally — to edit our characters in order to protect their privacy. I’m not talking about changing their names; I mean changing major details and defining characteristics — appearance, family, race, occupation — edits that seemed impossible to me when I went through this process. This is both to protect the character but also, often, to protect the writer. (I don’t blame a writer for making these changes even if they’re not instructed by a legal team. Writing about real people can be incredibly scary; consider, for example, writing about an abuser.) Finding new characteristics to describe someone, characteristics that feel as true as possible without revealing who they are, is a whole separate skill set.
DN: I began to wonder about how you define family, how you see and feel and love and honor and critique your own family, particularly when you started writing about your brothers, and then your mother’s life prior to your own birth. Can I ask, simply, what does family mean to you?
TKM: I look forward to spending the rest of my life writing into this question. It’s the question that always brings me back to the page.
When someone asks me what they should see when they come to visit my home state, I usually stare blankly, then offer the most useless of replies: “It depends on what you’re looking for.” But this is the truth, however paltry. There is no singular Alaska. A village on the frozen Chukchi Sea where trees exist solely in one’s imagination shares little in common with the state’s capital, a small city in the heart of the world’s largest temperate rainforest accessed only by water or air. Sleeping in a tent on the tundra is the antithesis of wandering the gritty, pseudo-cosmopolitan streets of downtown Anchorage where tuxedos brush shoulders with Carhartts, furs with fleece. And yet, there is a commonality: we are Alaskans, and it is the land that defines us most of all.
Like every place worth loving, Alaska has many different faces. They are not unified, and not all of them are beautiful. Caribou that trace ancient footsteps like arteries across the landscape. Oil wells that burn brightly against a moonless Arctic night. A history of exploration — of glacier-capped peaks, whale-rich fjords, uncharted territory on a scale that is difficult for most of us to fathom. A history of exploitation — of native lands, native people, and the natural resources that make this state both vulnerable and mighty. Alaska is as large in character as it is in size. It’s one of the rare places left on earth where a person can truly get lost. And yet, for all of its wildness, it’s the fragility of this land I love most. Watch a shorebird sit on its nest through a July snowstorm, defend its chicks against a grizzly nosing in the grass, then gather the courage to launch, yet again, on a journey across the globe.
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My memoir, The Sun is a Compass, is a modern day adventure story about finding my way home through 4,000 miles of wild country. As a biologist and lifelong Alaskan, I take many of my cues from birds and other animals. They teach me things about myself, and the world, that I never knew I needed. When I found myself questioning my commitment to research, balking at the impending realities of adulthood, and recoiling from the fact of my father’s degenerative illness, Alaska’s wilderness took me under her wing. And what a magnificent wing it is. For six months, I traveled with my husband from Washington State to the Arctic Ocean and beyond. Along the way, we faced a predatory bear, felt the breath of caribou as they swallowed us in their folds, and learned that humility can be synonymous with joy. Perhaps the greatest gift Alaska offers is the reminder that each of us is insignificant and infinite at once.
Voices from Alaska reflect the diversity of our landscapes and our experiences within them. Here is a selection of books written about Alaska by Alaskans that explore connections to culture, place, and wilderness in the far north.
From the first pages of this book, Ford takes us to the enchanted Aleutian Islands, where seabirds nest in the thousands, mummies rest in sea caves, and the ocean rules all. The book follows the dramatic voyage of Vitus Bering, including the shipwreck that leaves them stranded for nearly a year, but it is the party’s medical officer, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who steals the show. His ten hours in Alaska provided some of the most important reports of the local flora and fauna and his journal entries reveal a marvelous writer; the book is a treat for anyone interested in adventure, exploration, and natural history.
This novel, modeled after the author’s own experience growing up in a remote Alaskan cabin, explores the challenges of crossing boundaries — between bush life and city life, white and Alaska Native culture, idealism and reality. His Alaska is one of fresh caribou hides and dirty city streets, dog sledding on a frozen Arctic river and waiting in line at McDonald’s drive-thrus. Kanter has pulled off that rarest of feats, to write a book about Alaskans that Alaskans love.
Blond Indian tells a story of both heartbreak and triumph in the coastal rainforests of southeast Alaska. The systematic cultural abuse and degradation of Alaska Natives that Hayes describes in her own family and community is a defining historical feature of our state, though its influence is too often overlooked by Alaskans and non-Alaskans alike. But don’t read this book because you should. Read it because it is a beautiful tribute to the messy, complicated, and essential relationships between place and our human condition.
One of the most surprising and nefarious legacies of the Nuclear Age was almost realized on a small patch of tundra in northwestern Alaska. With the makings of a sci-fi novel, this meticulously researched work of nonfiction tells a tale of disaster narrowly averted, thanks to the efforts of Inupiat residents, scientists, and conservationists. O’Neill not only shares a riveting story, but reveals his talent as a science and nature writer.
Through characters as evocative as the land they explore, Ivey tells a story so rich in history and geographic detail that it’s easy to forget it’s a novel. The book’s unique structure — consisting of letters, journal entries, drawings, and artifacts — fluidly bridges time and space, carrying us from the early 1800s to contemporary society with occasional forays into the supernatural. This tale of adventure, love, and suspense captures much of Alaska’s inherent drama.
In this fascinating journey through frigid landscapes and the animals and people who reside in them, Streever explores the science, history, and culture of cold. As an Alaskan biologist, Streever offers unique perspectives and lively anecdotes from his own life. From avalanches to hibernation, permafrost cellars to pack ice, readers are transported vicariously to the planet’s chilliest locales, shivering along the way.
This moving memoir is as much a part of the forests, fjords, and glaciers of southeast Alaska as Schooler himself is. After losing a dear friend who showed him how to live, and to love, Schooler’s quest to photograph the elusive glacier bear takes on a greater urgency. Throughout his personal journey, Schooler guides us skillfully through a world of towering bears and rushing salmon, breaching whales and foraging gulls. It’s a portrait of Alaska you won’t want to miss.
A lyrical poetry collection from a clear, stark voice with roots in Inupiaq villages of Northwestern Alaska. She writes of places and people in transition, and the reshaping of narratives required when new ways cannot replace the old. Her poems resonate with the Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes of her home.
For fans of adventure tales and endurance feats, this book will not disappoint. But expect to find more than thrills as Fredston deftly guides readers through the risks, rewards, and companionship she’s discovered in a small rowboat in some of the world’s most remote locations. The book travels from the author’s childhood to her expeditions in Alaska and beyond; the sum is a rich and satisfying narrative about how time spent in the wilderness can be a homecoming rather than an escape.
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