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.
Purchase the book
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.
Purchase the book
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.
I grew up in a loud and busy home, where more people were considered kin than just my blood-relations. I have two sisters, but when I was a kid my parents had a sort of open-door policy, and we often had cousins or family friends or my parents’ colleagues staying with us — sometimes for months at a time. Although I frequently had to share a bed in order to make room for the extra people, I loved the raucous nature of the household, and I came to view many of our long-term visitors as family members whose exact relationship to me was difficult to describe.
Purchase the novel
My novel, Baby of the Family, was partially inspired by the question of how families function and thrive when they are not comprised of two straight married parents with two children close in age. The book centers on three half-siblings from three (out of four!) separate marriages that their father had. These characters struggle to form relationships with one another that feel meaningful, while also endeavoring to come to terms with how their atypical family structure affects their adult decisions.
I firmly believe that all families carry with them rich histories and myths, but the stories from blended, bifurcated, and atypical families contain a layer of complexity that can be utterly fascinating. Here are some books that illuminate the highs and lows of these types of families:
This is, to my mind, the prime American blended family novel. The dad from one family gets wasted at a daytime suburban house party, kisses the mother from another family, and then, several years later, the step-siblings spend their summers together in one wild crew, creating memories and secrets that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. The story is expansive, and by the end of it the reader has passed through several decades and gets to view those children as adults, witnessing where the events of their childhoods have brought them.
This novel is based at a hippie commune, named Arcadia, and paints a vivid picture of the life of Bit, who was the first child born at the commune. While five-year-old Bit struggles to understand the relationship his two parents share in the midst of the larger group, he also lives amongst the other children and adults of Arcadia as if they were one giant family. The reader follows Bit as he grows up, with sections dedicated to him as a teenager and then as an adult, all illuminating how the relationships he formed at the commune both haunt him and bring him love for the rest of his life.
Doctorow constructs an unforgettable story told from the perspective of Daniel, the oldest son of a family (called the Isaacsons in the book) who are based on real-life Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the married couple who were executed by the US government for being spies from the Soviet Union. In the novel, Daniel is adopted by a couple named the Lewins, and spends various stretches of his life trying to sort out how his family history affected him as a child and an adult, while simultaneously struggling to take care of his younger biological sister who suffers from severe depression.
This fascinating novel set in 19th century Ghana illuminates the social class status that surrounded the slave trade in the region, and how families were both destroyed and reconstructed in light of this evil business. The story is about Wurche, the privileged daughter of a noble family, and Aminah, the daughter of a once-happy middle class family that was subject to a brutal raid and then pushed into the slave trade. Wurche purchases Aminah, and they come together with other relatives to form a disturbing, vicious, type of atypical family.
The Girls offers a scary and fantastic look into what can happen when an alternative family arrangement is not a healthy one. The central character of this book, Evie, is swept into a cult that is based on the real-life Manson family cult, but manages to stay on the periphery of the action throughout, and acts as a somewhat objective observer of the cult’s interpersonal relationships. Of course, the girls of the cult are all brainwashed by the Manson-like male leader, but they also become like corrupting sisters, occasionally protecting each other but more often manipulating each other out of ill-will. Even the children these girls bear are supposed to be shared amongst the cult members as communal family members.
Krauss’ astonishingly good second novel is a complex, weaving tale about familial love, loss, and the sentimental — almost holy — nature of literature. In one of two central storylines, a young man named Leo impregnates his wife Alma before he goes into hiding during the holocaust. Years after the war, he searches and finds Alma, only to discover that she had assumed him dead, married another man, and given birth to another son with her new husband. In the other, parallel, storyline, the father of a young girl (also named Alma) dies and as the teenage daughter struggles to deal with her deeply sad mother, her biological brother becomes convinced that they in fact have different fathers.
While this magnificent novel is certainly about the atrocities that WWII brought upon Europe and its citizens, the relationship between a young French girl named Marie-Laure and her father, as well as the bond between a young orphaned German boy named Werner and his sister, also make this novel a study of how familial relationships endure and change when other family members have passed away. All the Light We Cannot See illuminates the particular kind of love that the members of very small families hold for one another.
Relationships are hard. Whether they are with romantic partners or friends, it’s no easy feat navigating the dance of differing opinions that comes with introducing a new and potentially important person into your life. What is your political affiliation? Do you want kids? And probably the most controversial question — what’s your favorite book?
Sometimes, you get lucky and you find yourself in a decade-long friendship with someone who can discuss the feminist undertones of Jane Austen. Sometimes, you’ve already given your boyfriend keys to your apartment before finding out that he’s read Atlas Shrugged seven times…and loved it each and every time. Aware of this conundrum, writer Laura Relyea took to Twitter and asked her fellow bibliophiles, “What books are automatic red flags for you with people?”
What books are automatic red flags for you with people? I’ll start: I once called off a date when a dude told me his fave book was Lolita.
@laura_relyea@mashpotassium Once I said to a prospective date, jeez, how could a person ever call their daughter Lolita after reading that? My daughter is called Lolita, he said. Aaaaaaaargh.
Others added their own personal dealbreakers. Warnings against Catcher in the Rye, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Atlas Shrugged (plus really anything by Ayn Rand) dominated.
Honestly I can't believe no one has said Ginsberg or Kerouac yet? That's like a gigantic fuck boi red flag to me. Only acceptable the first two years of college.
Some used the thread as an opportunity to recall non-romantic but still equally horrific experiences.
And there were those that took a hopeful approach, advising that maybe you are the book angel someone’s library deserves.
One writer, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self author Danielle Evans responded with a post on her own personal Twitter.
And Twitter delivered love stories that would make any literature-lover weep with joy,
@daniellevalore The first book my man & I ever talked about was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I fell in love- with him; a decade later I found out his first true love was Superman.
@daniellevalore My not yet husband was reading Four Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula Le Guin (which had just come out) the first time I went to his house.
@daniellevalore One time, I took a friend to a bookstore (and I had a crush on him and I thought he liked me but never ever happened) and I mentioned that Of Mice and Men is my favorite book but I gave my only copy away, so then we were in line and he bought me a copy to surprise me and ❤️
@daniellevalore any Markus Zusak (Book Thief/Bridge of Clay are best), Eduardo Galeano (The Book of Embraces), Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping). Tocqueville! also one time a guy I dated asked who Walt Whitman would've been as a rapper (I said Nas, but open for debate) & I kinda lost my mind.
@daniellevalore Hands down - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. A) it's amazing b) you have to commit to reading it c) you also probably enjoy snarky footnotes
Red flag books are all well and good—it’s important to be on your guard in this bad world—but white flag books can get you a beer with Mary Roach, and in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?
This piece is excerpted from Daily Rituals: Women at Work, a collection of the daily routines of 143 women artists.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton described her life as divided into two “equally real yet totally unrelated worlds,” which went along “side by side, equally absorbing, but wholly isolated from each other.” On the one hand, there was the real world of her marriage, her home, her friends and neighbors; on the other, the fictional world she created each morning in bed, writing longhand on sheets of paper that she dropped onto the floor for her secretary to retrieve and type up. Wharton always worked in the morning, and houseguests who stayed at the Mount — the 113-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton penned several novels, including The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome — were expected to entertain themselves until 11:00 a.m. or noon, when their hostess would emerge from her private quarters, ready to go for a walk or work in the garden. If guests needed to speak to the author during the morning, however, Wharton was willing to receive them in her bedroom. The historian Gaillard Lapsley was one such visitor, and he later wrote a memorable description of Wharton in bed, “flanked by night tables charged with telephone, travelling clock, reading light.” She would be wearing, he continued,
a thin silk sacque with loose sleeves, open at the neck and trimmed with lace and on her head a cap of the same material also trimmed with lace which fell about her brow and ears like the edging of a lamp shade . . . Edith’s mask stood out sculpturally beneath it. She would have her writing-board perilously furnished with an inkpot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow on the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books.
The “dog of the moment” referred to one of the numerous canines Wharton owned over her lifetime, which included Spitzes, Papillons, a poodle, a Pekinese, and a pair of long-haired Chihuahuas named Mimi and Miza. Dogs had been a tremendous comfort to Wharton since her earliest childhood; and when, in her last years, Wharton made a list of the “ruling passions” of her life, dogs ranked second only to “Justice and Order,” and were followed by books, flowers, architecture, travel, and “a good joke.”
Evenings at the Mount, Wharton would read to her guests from the novel she was writing, or from the work of one of her favorite authors. Although she was happy to share her writing in progress, she never had much to say about the writing process itself. A guest at The Mount recalled that “very little allusion was made to it, and none at all to the infinite pains that she put into her work or her inexhaustible patience in searching for the material necessary to perfect it.” One unspoken requirement was that she follow the same schedule each day, with as little variation as possible. As Wharton wrote in a 1905 letter, “The slightest interruption in the household routine completely de-rails me.”
Zadie Smith (b. 1975)
In interviews over the years, the London-born novelist has said that she doesn’t write every day — and although she sometimes wishes she had that compulsion, Smith also recognizes the value of writing only when it feels necessary to her. “I think you need to feel an urgency about the acts,” she said in 2009, “otherwise when you read it, you feel no urgency either. So, I don’t write unless I really feel I need to.” Even when Smith does feel that urgency, she writes “very slowly,” she said in 2012, “and I rewrite continually, every day, over and over and over. . . . Every day, I read from the beginning up to where I’d got to and just edit it all, and then I move on. It’s incredibly laborious, and toward the end of a long novel it’s intolerable actually.”
Smith has also been vocal about the difficulty of writing in a world of infinite digital distractions, and in the acknowledgements section of her 2012 novel NW she thanked two pieces of Internet-blocking software, called Freedom and Self Control, for “creating the time.” She does not use social media, and as of late 2016 she did not own a smartphone, and had no plans to acquire one. “I still have a laptop, it’s not like I’m a nun,” Smith said, “I just don’t check my email every moment of the day in my pocket.”
Hilary Mantel (b. 1952)
The Booker-prize winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, as well as several other novels and a memoir, Mantel finds fiction-writing an all-consuming and thoroughly unpredictable activity. “Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day,” the English author wrote in 2016.
They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves.
This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews — any kind of non-fiction — seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.
Mantel writes every morning as soon as she opens her eyes, seizing the remnants of her dream state before it dissipates. (Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and writes for several hours before going back to sleep.) Her writing days tend to fall into one of two categories: “days of easy flow,” which “generate thousands of words across half a dozen projects,” and “stop-start days,” which are “self-conscious and anxiety ridden, and later turned out to have been productive and useful.” She writes by hand or on the computer, and considers herself “a long thinker and a fast writer,” which means that a lot of her writing day is spent away from her desk, on the thinking part. When she does sit down at the computer, Mantel will sometimes “tense up till my body locks into a struggling knot,” she wrote in 2016. “I have to go and stand in a hot shower to unfreeze. I also stand in the shower if I get stuck. I am the cleanest person I know.”
To other writers who get stuck, Mantel advises getting away from the desk: “Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just sit there scowling at the problem,” she has written. “But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.” Over the course of her career, Mantel has learned extraordinary patience: She first began considering a series of novels based on the life of Thomas Cromwell in her twenties but didn’t begin writing the first of them, Wolf Hall, until thirty years later. (When she finally began writing it, however, she worked with tremendous speed, cranking out the 400-page book in five months, working 8 to 12 hours a day.) “Sometimes people ask, does writing make you happy?” Mantel told a visiting reporter in 2012.
But I think that’s beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you’re off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. You’re like the person in the fairy tale The Red Shoes; you’ve just got to dance and dance, you’re never in equilibrium. I don’t think writing makes you happy . . . . I think it makes for a life that by its very nature has to be unstable, and if it ever became stable, you’d be finished.
Norman Erikson Pasaribu was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia but his roots lie in the ethnic Christian Batak community of Sumatra; his family represents the many strands of internal immigration from the country’s regions to its capital.
Though he writes in Indonesian, Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus (translated by Tiffany Tsao) carries the inflections, songs, and stories of diaspora. His works offer the joys and isolations of queer life in a conservative landscape, a minority existence (less visible in the Javanese-dominated mainstream), and the influences of Christianity.
Pasaribu and Tsao won the English PEN Translates Award in 2018 for the collection. Pasaribu has also published a book of short stories and received the Young Author Award from the Southeast Asia Literary Council in 2017.
I spoke to Norman Erikson Pasaribu about being a multiple outsider, Batak culture, LGBTQ+ life in Indonesia, and translating gender pronouns.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: What is the significance of the title of your book?
Norman Erikson Pasaribu: Sergius Mencari Bacchus [Sergius Seeks Bacchus]’s first working title is Seperti Pohon (Like Trees), but the day I sent it to the Jakarta Arts Council’s competition, I changed it. I abruptly remembered a paragraph from my first book, where I played with the sound tinggal, which can mean “stay” and “leave,” or even “die,” depending on the prefix or suffix used. It then seemed to me that my life and fellow queer Indonesians’ unconsciously revolved around the word’s multiple meanings: Stay/Leave/Die. We are always in the state of moving as if we are endlessly searching for something. I think that “waiting” is the core component of Christian faith, that you wait because/therefore you are certain it exists. It is the same with the title of this book. We seek queerness and its liberation not because we hope we might encounter this one day, but because we are sure it is already there — printed in our lost history. What we have to do now is seek and reclaim it.
In Sergius Seeks Bacchus, I use a lot of Christian saints’ writings and juxtapose it with queerness and my ideas of love. I wrote about this for English PEN’s PEN Transmissions. Sergius and Bacchus are two of the many Christian saints that have been long adopted by queer communities. They are discreet Christians who went to the underground to pray. They both also worked for Galerius’ army. Eventually, their Christianity was uncovered and they were executed. However, Sergius and Bacchus are more mythical than historical figures. I found a lot about them from John Boswell’s work on early and medieval Christianity, which some considered as too queerly speculative.
When we were first dating, my boyfriend and I met in his car at a mall’s basement car park. We would kiss with eyes opened to look around just in case a janitor passed by and caught us. And once it seemed to me so clearly that we were exactly like those early Christians. We are Sergius and Bacchus. And some people here can bluntly associate being gay and queer with evil spirit possession or Biblical and Quranic apocalypse. I feel that if I use their faces, without subscribing to saints’ assumed perfection, it is a way to resist those associations.
My life and fellow queer Indonesians’ unconsciously revolved around the multiple meanings of the word “tinggal”: Stay/Leave/Die.
JRR: Your poems brim with Christianity. How long has your family been Christian? Do you still practice?
NEP: My mom has always been a devout Protestant. She grew up poor and Christianity gave her hope, as it did for many working-class Indonesians. My father came from a Muslim farming family, but he was orphaned when he was very young. He desperately wanted a family, a normal life. He met my mom in Jakarta and converted.
My parents sent me to a Catholic school because they associated it with a better education. I was easily awed by Catholicism’s imagery: the sad and solemn Mary, the halo in her head, her shining and burning heart. Batak-Protestantism, which stemmed from the Lutheranism, is flat and emotionless. In our church, you wouldn’t find a statue or even a picture, just a metal cross behind the podium.
I don’t go to church anymore. In 2016, after my book won a prize from the Jakarta Arts Council, I got severely depressed after online bullying. In April that year, I attended my old office’s Easter mass, and the priest, who was a Toba-Batak man, threw homophobic slurs during his sermon. I ended up excusing myself and cried outside the hall. After that, the desire to go to church gradually diminished.
My relationship with Jesus now is like with a cousin’s new boyfriend that everybody likes and praises, but you actually never meet. I want to know him, but perhaps it’s better if this cousin’s new boyfriend stays a story. I also think I can’t fully divest from Christianity more because it is a shared experience that I have with my mom, who means everything to me. It will always affect my writing and how I feel about this world. But for now, I want it to stay dormant.
My relationship with Jesus now is like with a cousin’s new boyfriend that everybody likes and praises, but you actually never meet.
JRR: You have an epigraph from Gregory Pardlo — “You are home now, outsider, for what that’s worth.” Those commas embracing “outsider” are everything! You occupy this place in multiple ways. Would you talk about “Erratum,” which is about falling in love and coming out?
NEP: I used to fight a lot with my dad, and used to hate him so much. When I got older, I felt the urgent need to look at my parents with a more intersectional lens. It’s possibly the kindest thing a queer child may offer to their parents: zoom out and another zoom out until you get the whole story. I wouldn’t ask this from anyone, but this gave me my peace.
Also, I want to admit first that I dislike it when people read my poems as memoir. It’s true I played a lot with the idea of nonfiction, but being read as a memoirist-poet also made me vulnerable. If things in the poems are not 100% what happened, I have manipulated my readers. One example is the kissing scene in “Erratum,” which never happened, even though I did fall in love with the boy who sat beside me at school.
What actually happened was the rain. In my junior year in high school, my father kicked me out of the house. It was nighttime, and I only had around Rp20.000 (around $2) in my pocket. Out of the blue, it started to rain. I was on the street in short trousers and flip flops. I was so scared and decided to go to an aunt’s house. I silently cried during the whole trip, pondering over water tails on the window. It’s one of the moments where I felt so unloved, and all I wanted at that time was death.
Whenever this memory returned, I would get sad. I invented the kiss as a poetic intervention and because I root for the boy in the poem. I want him to also have something beautiful and alive to remember. I want — as the great Mary Szybist wrote in one of her poems — the emptiness in his stomach to stop gnawing.
JRR: Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia but intimidation and hostility of the community seems common with anti-LGBTQ+ marches and other acts. How do you view the state of things at present?
NEP: “Not illegal” gives a radically different idea from what my friends and I currently experience. It’s not easy to speak about this without minimizing Indonesia. As a postcolonial nation, Indonesia has been through a lot. My instinct is always to always look at Indonesia intersectionally as I don’t want to reduce Indonesians into a bunch of evil-minded people.
Indonesia is communitarian. When a loved one dies, it’s common for people to collect money and give that to you as “uang duka” (mourning money). On public transportation, it was not unusual for people to start talking to you and ask about your height and weight, job, and whether you are married and have kids. This communitarian mind translated into my parents telling me, “Apa kata tetangga nanti?” (What will the neighbors say?), making social acceptance gravely important. Even to be eccentric, to be a loner, to be a reader is to be seen differently here.
All this has been heightened with social media. It has greatly affected queer bodies, who are visibly defiant of the typical “rejeki anak sholeh” (pious people’s good fortune) faces. Now more visible, queer Indonesians are ready to be put under fire — that is my bitter take about this.
With social media, it’s easier to imagine a queer liberation, now that the world is just a touch screen away. Sometimes I wonder if this terrifies the fragile hetero community, when they see the very people they’ve always dismissed are now people with more platform and agency. When the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, the outrage here was severe. Not long after that, AILA (Family Love Alliance) proposed a judicial review to criminalize LGBTQ+. The proposal was rejected by a dissenting opinion of 5 to 4! We all feel very relieved but now, there is another proposal going on, to revise the penal code.
Some say we need to abandon the penal code since it is a legacy of the Dutch. But pre-colonial Indonesia was more inclusive in terms of gender and sexuality! And the homophobia we now have is the legacy of European colonization. Why do we want to abandon the colonial penal code, but not also the colonial mind?
Pre-colonial Indonesia was more inclusive in terms of gender and sexuality. The homophobia we now have is the legacy of European colonization.
JRR: Your book is resistance to these forces. How do you find and hang on to the courage to stand in this place?
NEP: I am not even sure if I am courageous or brave. I get terrified a lot now. What I know is I am furious with my country, I’m angry with the writers who’ve bullied me; I despise the so-called progressive heteros who conveniently went silent whenever queer Indonesians were under fire. I’m tired so I want a real change. And liberation is never a gift. We have to snatch it from the fuckers’ hands. So that’s what I’m trying to do now, as with all the queer artists and activists before me. I am just a person in a long queer history, after all.
JRR: In “Scenes from a Beautiful Life,” you mention waria, the trans community, which has perhaps historically occupied spaces differently in the region than elsewhere. I am thinking of the five genders in Bugis culture. I also remember when I was young in Malaysia, my family was friends with another family whose members included a trans person. It was regular seeing transpeople at gatherings of friends of my family. It was a tolerated — if not exactly embraced — part of reality. Public same-sex relationships, however, were abhorrent. More recently and very depressingly, there have been horrifying violence towards trans people there. I don’t know if it is the same in Indonesia? Perhaps you can tell us about the place of the waria in Indonesian society (or societies) as you see it?
NEP: I also have thought the same. In the past, it was easier for people to look and accept trans identity perhaps because there were more efforts and a clearer political stance to emancipate waria. Ali Sadikin, a former governor of Jakarta, famously said in 1968, ‘Trans people are human, and they are also Jakartans. So I have to take care of them.” But trans communities have always been the most vulnerable part of our society. They are outsiders in all levels of life. They are even hated by some gay people (who are relatively more privileged!) because they “make us all look bad.” But, imagine, you can find so many gays in offices and banks in Sudirman, but would you find a single openly trans person there, or perhaps even as a server in a nearby junk-food chain restaurant? Even the pseudo-progressive capitalists dismiss them. If you want to understand more about the complexity and beauty of Indonesian trans identity, please see Anggun Pradesha and Rikky M. Fajar’s Emak Dari Jambi (“Mommy Is Visiting from Jambi”).
Liberation is never a gift. We have to snatch it from the fuckers’ hands.
JRR: Pronouns in Bahasa Indonesia are not gendered. Was this a challenge during the translation process? Do you feel like the meaning has changed in any way with the explicit gendering in English?
NEP: It was a bit comical because Tiffany at first thought the use of English would kinda make the poems “come out” more, while I felt from the beginning the poems are so visibly queer since the gender-ignoring pronouns effortlessly give room for nonbinary experiences. It then became harder in the translation process as we started to feel that even they/them pronouns feel different from Indonesian pronouns. Anyway, Tiffany wrote a lengthy note about our collaboration and I encourage everyone to hear directly from her.
JRR: Who are Indonesian writers you are excited about right now so that we may check them out?
NEP: I want to send a shout out to Is Mujiarso/Mumu Aloha who edited the queer-themed anthology Rahasia Bulan. It is groundbreaking for its time of publication (2006) and I love Mumu’s short story in there. And then: Saut Situmorang, who is one of the best Indonesian and Batak poets working today. His collected poems Otobiografi explores the complexity of being in-between as a Batak person in terms of the geographical, the emotional, and also the poetic. And this Tupelo interview with Saut is a bliss.
I also want to share my admiration for Erni Aladjai and Dicky Senda, whose works offer understanding about life in Eastern Indonesia. Erni’s short story about a woman asking for fish for her sick daughter from her fishermen neighbors still haunts me. And to Hanna Fransisca and Cyntha Hariadi who have spoken about Chinese Indonesian identities with such depth. I feel that we are so lucky we have Aprilia Wayar keep writing against all odds as a Papuan woman journalist and novelist. I also can’t wait for the English publication of Intan Paramaditha’s novel The Wandering (trans. by Stephen Epstein).
JRR: Would you introduce the Batak community to those who are unfamiliar with it?
NEP: “Batak” is the name we use today to call the indigenous people of Tapanuli land (in northern Sumatra). Pre-colonial Batak people lived in small communities and very differently to one to another. We had different cultures and languages. Batak also used to be an evasive identity, coined by the Melayu people who lived mostly on the shore and interacted with foreign traders. So it’s one of the outside ideas, which often can be very monolithic and misleading, and got spread by travelers like Marco Polo.
And then the Dutch colonial establishment intervened. To colonize us better, the Dutch needed a name, a collective identity, something simple. They subscribed to this idea and sent people like Franz Junghuhn to research. And, at that time, who would question a white man’s research findings? That’s how the outsider’s view became the norm. While, today there are some Tapanuli people — like some Mandailing people who live in the south Tapanuli — who dislike to be called “Batak.”
From the 1900s, Batak people began migrating to Jakarta. And today, the Batak identity is a sign of brotherhood, of sisterhood. It gives you instant intimacy with a stranger. Halak kita (Our people) is how we refer to another Batak person.
JRR: I enjoyed the Batak pop lyric — “In places I wander, my heart weeps…” — in “Poetry.” How has the Batak language informed your poetry and writing in Indonesian?
NEP: The intimacy with Batak language is one of the things I’m reclaiming at the moment. When I was a kid and felt inferior to our Javanese neighbors, I would say, “I don’t even speak the language” to signify I was not so different from them. Many younger Batak people in Bekasi, like my sister and brothers, speak English better than Batak language! We have Batak-inflected Indonesian, and I use that in my writing, though I don’t think many Indonesian readers notice it.
I grew up listening to Batak pop songs. The song in “Poetry” is “Mardalan Ahu,” written by Tilhang Gultom, and is about someone who travels far and misses home and their mother. It’s the soundtrack of my parents’ generation, the Batak who migrated to Greater Jakarta. And I don’t want the sound of their footsteps drowned in the sea of time. I want it to be the foundation of my writing, the state of mind.
JRR: Your name reminds me of a line from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: “Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” She is referring to the novel’s immigrants’ offspring, who have names like Danny Rahman, Quang O’Rourke, and Irie Jones.
NEP: In the tarombo, the Batak family tree, we can see how names evolved over the centuries, from Raja Habeahan, to Patarnabolon, to Mangambit, to Nanggar, to Philipus, to Wilhelmina, to Johanna, and now to William, Maria, Astuti, Elizabeth, James, Sandra and so on.
My mother took “Erikson” from a Swedish brand she found in the newspapers she read excessively when she conceived me. “Son” is also a heavily-used sound for contemporary male Batak names such as Johnson, Tyson, Bison, Robinson, Jekson. These western names are, yes, rooted in the Christianization of Batak people, which took place from late 1800s until the mid-1900s. But I think, the preference for the sound of “son” came from Batak cosmology, where the names of the divinities and ancestors were full of the “on” sound. For example, Mulajadi Na Bolon (in the beginning something so big happens) who is the highest god in Batak myth.
Pasaribu is a marga (way or road), similar to a family name. When I was little, kids teased me because when they read it as a phrase in Indonesian my name might mean “pasar ibu” (market for mothers) and asked if they could buy my mother there, while I think it just means ‘The Thousandth.”
My first language was one of transcendence. I was raised by a single, nomadic mother on a relentless spiritual journey, and my childhood was laced with chatter of ascended masters and astral traveling. When I was seven, Mom moved us from a gritty SRO in San Francisco’s Tenderloin to Mount Shasta City, California, a forested nowhere land five hours north of SF because someone told her it was a “cosmic vortex.”
Mount Shasta City and its namesake mountain, a 14,180-foot dormant volcano halfway between Portland and San Francisco, attracted people like my mother from all over the world. People seeking spiritual truths via seminars on the “Ascended Masters” and stores full of “charged” crystals the size of small children. People eager to spot a Lemurian, the rumored descendants of Lemuria, a fabled sunken continent located between current-day North America and Australia. The remaining Lemurians, by all accounts, lived underneath the volcano in a secret crystal-city named Telos.
In his California novels, Vineland, Inherent Vice, and The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon touches on key aspects of my metaphysical NorCal upbringing, characterizing a culture that encompasses pot farmers, chemtrails, and Lemuria. In Inherent Vice, Sortilège, a psychic in L.A., has recurring visions of Lemuria rising up again from the sea, a double-edged sword of a metaphor for both a sunken city and a nostalgic never-was:
He thought about Sortilège’s sunken continent, returning, surfacing this way in the lost heart of L.A., and wondered who’d notice if it did… What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they’d been exiled from too long ago to remember.
Lemuria was pure hypothesis, a 19th-century paleontologist’s explanation for how lemurs crossed from Madagascar into India. The discovery of modern plate tectonics put the theory to bed, but Lemuria’s legend has persisted for almost 200 years. After a brief period of reclamation by Tamil nationalists, who called the hypothetical continent Kumari Kandam, the charge of Lemuria as a peak civilization lost to sea was taken up by occultists and theosophists.
Like a game of telephone, authors built on the story of Lemuria. Madame Blavatsky’s esoteric cosmology posited the Lemurians as a “root race” in human evolution. Australian professor Robert Dixon theorized that Lemuria was a stand in for post-colonial British malaise. Finally, and this is what interested Pynchon, Lemuria was a continent sunken at vague coordinates in the Pacific Ocean. And then the Lemurians came to California.
In the 1880s, Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote the novel A Dweller on Two Planets, which mentioned Lemuria in passing, but also described in detail a hidden city inside of Mount Shasta populated by a mystic brotherhood, which were later conflated to be one and the same:
A long tunnel stretches away, far into the interior of majestic Shasta. Wholly unthought is it that there lie at the tunnel’s far end vast apartments, the home of a mystic brotherhood, whose occult arts hollowed that tunnel and mysterious dwelling.
Though it was explicitly fiction and Oliver claimed he channeled the book from an entity named Phylos, the novel laid the groundwork for many of the legends still surrounding Mount Shasta. In 1913, astronomer and Hearst science writer Edgar Larkin wrote a review of A Dweller on Two Planets; a reader who went by Selvius misunderstood, and reported in a piece for Mystic Triangle that Larkin had actually viewed a Lemurian village on the side of Mount Shasta via telescope. This error was repeated by Wishar S. Cerve in his 1931 text, Lemuria — The Lost Continent of the Pacific, who wrote of the Lemurians:
Various members of the community, garbed, as was their official representative, in pure white, gray-haired, barefoot and very tall, have been seen on the highways and in the streets near Shasta. One of these oddly dressed individuals would come to one of the smaller towns and trade nuggets and gold dust for some modern commodities.
Cerve’s piece captured the popular attention of a growing number of Americans interested in mysticism and solidified the legend of Lemuria as a hidden city inside of Mount Shasta. The next year, in 1932, the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine published a piece by Edward Lanser on the Lemurian village on Mount Shasta, titled: “A People of Mystery: Are They Remnants of a Lost Race? Do They Posses a Fabulous Gold Treasure?”
During a train ride on the Shasta Limited, Lanser wrote, he glimpsed a reddish-green glow on the side of the mountain and the conductor told him it was a Lemurian ceremony. “That these Lemurians who live in California are cognizant of the disaster that befell their ancestors,” Lanser wrote, “is revealed in the fact that each night at midnight throughout the entire year, they perform a ritual of thanksgiving and adoration to ‘Gautama’ which is the Lemurian name for America.” The lineage of the Lemuria legend, just like the language used to describe it, was slippery as hell.
The lineage of the Lemuria legend, just like the language used to describe it, was slippery as hell.
During high school, I’d sneak out the roof to smoke and watch as the lenticular clouds ringing Mount Shasta slipped from amethyst to tangerine, their neon colors heightening the otherworldliness of their shape, which locals insisted were a cover for UFOs. After a decade surrounded by white ladies who’d renamed themselves things like Sita Ram and Laughing Brook, I’d shut down New Age concepts and tethered myself to the earthly, mostly by dating a string of local redneck boys. Puffing on my Marlboro Red, I’d wonder what the fuck these people were really talking about.
Maybe that’s why I became a writer in the first place, subconsciously driven to locate tangible meaning in the gauze of cosmic diction. If I could strip away the fluffy outer layers, maybe I could determine what in my upbringing had been of spiritual value and what should be tossed for good.
By the time I finally read Pynchon about five years ago, I’d begun to write about my New Age upbringing in earnest and was deep in the futile exercise of trying to root out the material value of experiences like astral travel and channeling — searches that led me to an endless landscape of web pages with inexplicably capped text and flashing angel GIFs. Since Pynchon’s work encapsulates this particular nook of the West, I’d always assumed reading him would be like coming home. I’d avoided it the way I sometimes avoid the things I know will change me for good, things that burn so close I need to be ready to handle all their epiphany.
If I could strip away the fluffy outer layers, maybe I could determine what in my upbringing had been of spiritual value and what should be tossed for good.
So it was with great pomp and circumstance that I finally cracked the Crying of Lot 49. I was ready to dive back into the esoterica of my childhood, and I figured Pynchon, both a notorious hermit and brilliant stylist, might illuminate my murky personal history with his incisive language.
My aversion was immediate and visceral. Flooded by the frenetic language and names used as caricature and metaphor, I felt myself spinning into a nonsensical world I’d worked so hard to escape. Next, I tried Vineland, but my anxiety grew at Pynchon’s accumulation of language, which doesn’t so much create meaning but badger you into an altered state of mind. Which, for me, was too much like the hypnotic effect of New-Age diction as a whole. From Vineland:
If patterns of ones and zeroes were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world.
Still, l didn’t give up. After the film came out and seemed almost a bright, almost pop-y thing, I tried to read Inherent Vice. It was the book concerned with Lemuria and most accessible of the three, but the cadence and nonsensicalness of the prose both mirrored and made farcical firecrackers of the rhetoric I was bred on. Pynchon’s layering of symbolism was so rapid-fire as to render the banal obtuse, to write the overripe absurdity of New Age prose sharper and faster and hipper than it really is, or honestly, even wants to be. This master of my domain, a writer I’d been saving for last, was, for me, unreadable.
Throughout the nineteenth century, theories of lost cities and land bridges stood as explanations for things we couldn’t explain about human history. Lemuria, like fellow sunken legends Mu and Atlantis, was mythologized as a utopian civilization — enlightened and artistic.
“Human beings fall easily into despair,” Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth. “From the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.”
Maybe for my mother and Laughing Brook and all the Lemurian hunters and crystal kids, it was not Lemuria they sought, but a place where New Age gods and angels governed. Maybe for them a lost city existed to fill in the gaps — a sunken Rorschach onto which they could project their need for merger with the divine.
Maybe it was not Lemuria they sought, but a place where New-Age gods and angels governed. Maybe for them a lost city existed to fill in the gaps.
Once, a therapist told me I was raised in a world with no edges. That made sense. On her brown floral couch, I envisioned myself trying to box up concepts like cosmic consciousness, grand unifying theory, goddess, god, all the names for an unseeable force, into tidy takeout containers. Like those who sought Lemuria, maybe I’d hoped Pynchon would distill numinous language into artistic, intellectual terms that would help me reconcile my own seeking. If I could encapsulate the nebulous beliefs of my community into something tangible, then maybe I could extract what had value and scrap the rest. And maybe, I thought, as long as Pynchon remained unread, the answers I needed to distill my history into usable guidance were still afloat. There was still hope that I could make sense of it all.
But reading him simply reiterated that nothing mystic is truly explained. That the further we move from a tangible object or experience, the more language has to stretch to encapsulate it. And in that gap language can function as a veil, a rhetorical cover for anyone who wants to manipulate its meaning — because that gap requires us to rely on faith. I wanted language to be an anecdote for the ambiguous. I wanted there to be subjects and objects. I wanted someone to be held accountable.
I’ve been saying them about those who chased Lemuria, but maybe I should say us. Maybe Pynchon was my Lemuria, my land bridge, my lost city that would somehow fill in the gaps. I’d fashioned myself a cynic, but by virtue of my desire to believe there existed an answer somewhere — in books or science or the dissection of language — I, too, was a reluctant mystic. While the Laughing Brooks of the world sought psychic or corporeal proof that humans could become enlightened — that in other places and times, they already had — I sought to understand what exactly “goddess” or “utopia” or “divinity” meant. Not because I wanted to be subsumed by the transcendent, but because I needed to know how much I should invest in the earthly. Did a 401(k) matter? How could I “stay present” if my future might be sinking to the bottom of a dark sea?
In Inherent Vice, Pynchon writes:
There is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have that claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire.
But Pynchon doesn’t want Lemuria to rise again, and we don’t want to find lost cities. They only serve us when they’re lost. Myths may connect truncated narratives that have morphed over time. Myths may save and teach us. But lost cities let us believe that the best has already existed. That we once knew more, lived better, touched transcendence — and by clinging to that, we have some hope that it will happen again. If we found Lemuria, we’d see that they, too, were flawed; that there never was or will be a time that we were above the glorious slop and muck of being human. As Thomas Jones writes in The London Review of Books, “Utopias are what the paranoid imagine when they’re on a good trip.”
Lost cities let us believe that the best has already existed.
After all the anticipation and waiting, Pynchon did nothing but spin smarter words into the myth-making of my mother and her peers. And just like finding Lemuria to be true and not legend, dissecting the lexicon of epiphany renders it fairy dust. There is nothing there, really. Maybe the simple truth is that I can’t read Pynchon because I, too, want to keep believing. I want to believe that someone, somewhere, can explain in concrete terms the seekers of lost cities, the not-of-this-earth, those leaving behind broken histories and families, searching for a way to disappear and, in turn, find themselves.
As the co-founder of sci-fi and fantasy website io9—not to mention a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author—Charlie Jane Anders knows her stuff when it comes to genre fiction. But for her Read More Women picks, the author of The City in the Middle of the Night is showing her range. Her list of recommended books by non-male authors ranges from magical alternate histories to feminist friendship epics to literary fiction from Nobel laureate.
Read More Women is Electric Literature’s series, presented in collaboration with MCD Books, in which we feature prominent authors, of any gender, recommending their favorite books by women and non-binary writers. Twice a month, you’ll hear about the five non-male authors who most delight, inspire, and influence your favorite writers.
All of Doris Lessing’s work is a huge touchstone for me, and I borrow from her shamelessly in my own writing. The Golden Notebook is the first book of hers I ever read, when I was a teenager, and it stuck with me, and it’s probably the best introduction to her work. Her sentences are so gorgeous and she had an amazing knack for capturing small details of interpersonal relations and people’s foibles with just a few well-chosen words. She’s indispensable.
This book rocked my world when I read it last year. The story of two girls in a small town in India who form a unique bond and then are separated by thousands of miles, this book kept me turning pages and obsessing about Poornima and Savitha. Rao doesn’t hold back on showing the brutality and misery of the global exploitation of poor women, but there are also moments of tenderness and joy throughout this epic but personal story.
Rachel Pollack is a unique visionary talent, and this bizarre story set in an alternate America full of prophets and visions will stick with you. I’ve never read a book quite like this one, although it reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace and Daniel Ortberg. In a world full of mysticism and weird miracles, an inexplicable pregnancy turns out to be the strangest and most surprising event of all. The texture of Pollack’s world is amazing and full of brilliance.
This is another book that feels totally unique. A fantasy novel set in a post-apocalyptic world, this book follows a monster-fighter living in a Reservation that’s one of the few places left standing. The combination of a fallen United States and figures from Indigenous American folklore is so fresh and fascinating, and this book is both thrilling and astounding.
I just recently read this book and was blown away. Chokshi creates a gang of thieves in a Gilded Age Paris with magic, and throws them into a story of politics and ancient evil and battles against impossible odds. But it’s the relationships and chemistry among the main characters that will keep you following Chokshi’s characters through to the end.
Read More Women is presented in collaboration with MCD Books.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
